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Transformative Political Leadership
Making a Difference in the Developing World
By ROBERT I. ROTBERG
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-72899-5
Chapter One
Political Leadership, Governance, Political Culture, and Political Institutions
Outcomes for the citizens of the developing world depend greatly on the actions and determinations of leaders and on critical political leadership decisions. This appraisal tends to fly in the face of conventional wisdom—and to tilt against traditional emphases on the primary salience of structures and institutions. It also appears to contradict older research suggesting that little variance in corporate performance could be attributed to individuals and individual differences. It may even unwittingly differ from those who prefer to emphasize structure and contingency rather than the importance of individual agency in the conduct of human affairs. Yet, after a long acquaintance with politics and political development in the developing world, especially Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, the conclusion is persuasive and powerful that leaders matter as much as do many external influences, internal structures, and institutional constraints in shaping nation-state policy and in influencing the ways in which beneficial results are pursued across diverse national and continental cultures.
Fortunately, recent corporate and empirical psychological studies support such conclusions. Those studies show that leaders do "have a substantial impact on performance." Those who have examined the role of leadership particularly in the foreign policy realm conclude that individual agency matters. Leaders (not necessarily situations or structures by themselves) largely create peace and war. Leaders even help signally to guide their people into or out of poverty. For example, Jones and Olken established in a path-breaking econometric study with robust evidence that national political leaders, irrespective of institutions and context, influence economic growth attainments. Leaders help to overcome geographical, climatic, and resource limitations. As close attention to the political history of independent Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean will show, human agency has the capacity to strengthen or to fail nation-states, to uplift or to oppress citizens, and to unleash or to stifle the talents and aspirations of all manner of followers.
Admittedly, such a conclusion allows the element of chance into the direction of human affairs. To be more precise, accidents of birth seem unusually apposite when we examine the critical early years of successful nations in the developing world. Studies of twins, identical versus fraternal, indicate that there indeed could be a genetic basis for leadership. Research shows a predisposition for and against taking up the leadership baton. Some were born to lead—born with "an innate set of skills that makes us good candidates for directing a group of people toward a goal...." Moreover, research reveals that genes predispose not only to leadership but also to whether the ambition to lead is achieved, and sometimes at what level.
National founders or rebuilders (after revolutions or dramatic societal breaks) have almost everywhere in the developing world helped to set a dramatic course. The influence of human agency appears at least suggestive. If Lee Kuan Yew had not been born to a Singaporean elite family, coming of age during the Japanese occupation, would Singapore have been led effectively and have developed so extraordinarily after 1959? If Kemal Ataturk had not been a radical-thinking Turkish officer under the Ottomans at the time of the empire's collapse, would there today be a powerful, modern Turkey? If a Govan Mbeki, a Walter Sisulu, or an Oliver Tambo—not Nelson Mandela—had grasped the leadership of South Africa after the demise of apartheid, would South Africa have avoided a revanchist race war or have been so peacefully, even magisterially, developed? Ambitious left-leaning nationalists could even have substituted themselves for Seretse Khama in Botswana and have ignored some of the traditional and religious foundations of what became democratic rule under Khama and his successors. If Khama had been born a Tanzanian and had risen there to political prominence, would Tanzanians now be much wealthier per capita, and much less corrupt? Paul Kagame has vigorously altered the trajectory of postgenocidal Rwandan development. So, for good or ill, have and did Evo Morales in Bolivia, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and Robert Mugabe (not Joshua Nkomo) in Zimbabwe channeled follower energies and placed an undeniable personal stamp on the remaking of their peoples and nations.
What, it is also important to ask, accounts for the different outcomes in India and Pakistan after partition? Obviously, size and resources were important. So was religion, and how religion was employed to mobilize electors, a critical factor. But how the first postpartition leaders responded to the different hands that they were dealt mattered massively, too. Arguably, today's India owes its messy but secure democratic political culture and strong institutions as much to Jawaharlal Nehru's formative guidance as it does to the British Raj and the long decades of prepartition Indian Congress Party socialization to democratic norms. As Huntington concludes sensibly, "Economic development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real."
The colonial experience, like the Raj in India and Pakistan, conceivably conditioned the growth of developing world leadership. Yet, comparisons show that whether the imperial example was Belgian, British, Dutch, French, Italian, or Spanish, in modern times it has mattered little which metropole tutored and controlled. Every metropole oppressed, conditioned, discriminated, and withheld opportunity and full human advancement until compelled by the rise of nationalism and changing times to respond positively. British rule, sometimes thought more benign than the others, nevertheless spawned Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, a series of Nigerian tyrants, and many others. It also gave us excellent leaders such as Seretse Khama and his successors, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam of Mauritius and those who followed him, and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, among others. French rule brought Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the Central African emperor; Omar Bongo of Gabon; Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo; and many other autocratic rulers. The more positive French postcolonial examples are all in the Caribbean or in Oceania. Belgian rule, abetted by the United States, prepared Congolese for Mobutu Sese Seko's long tyranny. Portuguese colonialism preceded both the superb modern governance experience of Cape Verde and the corrupt authoritarianism of Angola. Italian colonial rule was a precursor to Siad Barre's hegemony in Somalia and what has since occurred there, and to the rise of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Spain's legacy is Teodoro Obiang Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, one of the worst despots in the developing world.
Idiosyncratic behaviors of individual leaders have arguably mattered more, whether in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, or Côte d'Ivoire, than whatever were those countries' received colonial legacies. Despite more representative and participatory institutions at independence in ex-British colonies than in the former dependencies of the other colonial powers, their subjects fared no better on average during the independence period than the citizens of ex-Belgian, ex-Dutch, ex-French, ex-Italian, and ex-Spanish territories. Whether a colonial experience was more or less consultative mattered little in terms of leadership and governance results. Unconscionable tyrants flourished then and now equally in common law and Napoleonic systems. Greed, and a preference for preying upon and looting, depended and depend more on the designs and integrities of a new state's first leader (or a later leader coming to power after a major crisis) than it does on any precise colonial inheritance. Likewise, excellent and reasonably good governance in Asia and Africa has flowed from leadership action, not from adherence to a colonial model or the existence or absence of ethnic plurality, geographical constraints, arbitrary borders, navigable rivers, tropical diseases, allocations of natural resources, or foreign assistance levels. Compare the two postcolonial wealthy British colonies—Uganda and Ghana—and such French outposts as Côte d'Ivoire and, say, Mali. In times of plenty and in times of scarcity, in times of ample rainfall and in times of drought, leaders help to shape the lives of their citizens and help a country to respond poorly or well to the crises and needs of their parlous states, whatever the colonial legacy.
Likewise, the quality of the political institutions that have been inherited or that exist within a given polity, its literacy and educational levels, the quality of its health care, and its overall standards of living have had and have less influence on national outcomes and leadership results than such underlying motivators as individual and group senses of what is right and wrong and what is responsible, avarice, the gaining and keeping of power, and formidable senses of entitlement.
But inadequate leadership also responds in part to the absence, especially in Africa (less so in Asia), of a large and cohesive hegemonic bourgeoisie. Most corporate leaders in Africa feed at the trough of the political class. The clashes of the Cold War may have played a role in diminishing leadership attainments, too, and high commodity prices during and after the Korean War doubtless persuaded the post–World War II leaders, few of whom were experienced, mistakenly to be optimistic about the results of what was considered very formidable Socialist instrumentalities.
Political Leadership
Political leadership is a "social construction" that acts within a particular historical and social context, as a multidimensional activation that is a peculiar mixture of contingent situation and personal intervention, and as the impact of individual style and creativity on political challenges and opportunities. Equally, "too great a focus on ... context robs the notion of leadership of its core...."
In recent years the study of the leadership variable has been neglected. However, the relevance of human agency to the direction of the affairs of nations, particularly in emerging nations, is old news that nonetheless deserves to be highlighted. Such important theorists as Weber, Merriam, Shannon, Seligman, Pye, Easton, Rustow, Burns, Paige, and many others sought over earlier decades to persuade students of politics and political transformation that leadership was a central variable in the study of politics; they tried in diverse ways to emphasize its primordial centrality—to stress the significance of leadership for an understanding of how politics really worked. For Seligman, leadership was essential to the creation and maintenance of democracy. For Rustow, leadership expressed itself as the interplay between private personality and public performance. He advocated the "systematic rediscovery of leadership as a central political process." Paige suggested a reasonable all-encompassing definition: "Political leadership is the behavior of persons in positions of authority...." Political leaders influence everything around them and, Paige reminded us, even external and exogenous influences come through them, being mediated by leadership decisions and determinations. In politics, leaders can often change not only the rules of the game but also how people play. "The choices they make or fail to make seemingly affect everything." The average African, Asian, or Latin American worker, farmer, or voter likely would consider such insights obvious.
They would also be familiar with Burns' important but controversial distinction between power wielders and leaders. The former (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mugabe) treat people as things, the latter "may not." Naked power overrides competition and conflict, whereas leadership always is exercised amid conflict and competition—leaders appeal to the "motive bases" of potential followers. Burns' full articulation, very helpful in the context of this book, is "Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers." The last phrase is critical because, Burns insists rightly, that leadership is the employment largely of informal means to induce followers and citizens together with the leader to achieve mutual goals and joint purposes. Leaders do not make people do what they do not want to do. They persuade them. They cajole them. They allow them to maximize their own interests by believing in and endorsing the policies and articulated goals expressed by their leaders. The genius of political leadership melds leadership drives and followership aspirations and beliefs.
Stated simply, leaders cannot exist without followers. Kellerman reminds us that there are as many kinds of followers—primarily isolates, bystanders, activists, and diehards—as there are varieties of leaders. Each type of follower plays a role in the unfolding drama of political engagement and nation-building. Followers have power because should they stop following, the leader cannot achieve his or her goals, including the basic one of maintaining his or her position, unless they turn to the naked use of coercive power to eliminate competition. It is the modern political leader's task to interact effectively and successfully, preferably responsibly, with the changing cast of citizens and followers. She wins their trust. She gains legitimacy. They follow her and sometimes exert meaningful influence. The tension between leader and led, follower and ruler, remains critical to outcomes, especially and obviously in democracies, but also in autocracies.
The actions of political leaders in at least the developing world are therefore determined more by their creative interaction with (and sometimes their manipulation of) their followers than they are narrowly inhibited by socioeconomic circumstance, global trends, resource constraints, and so on. Political leaders, especially but not exclusively in the developing world, are able more than others to override structural constraints and to act largely autonomously. Sometimes, bolstered by a core of dedicated followers, they go so far as to disregard economic or global realities, big power or world order strictures, and internal public opinion. These leaders focus on the deployment both of noncoercive power (the usual mechanisms of informal power) and various kinds of co-optive and occasionally coercive power (components of formal power that many developing-world leaders use to buttress their personal power and authority).
In the developing world, at least, the syllogism is straightforward: leadership begets governance, governance in turn begets political culture and, in time, begets institutions. President Obama said in Ghana that Africa "needed strong institutions," not strong men. The sentiment and the intent were correct. But the analysis was incomplete. After independence, or after traumatic postconflict transitions, leaders fashion the ways in which the nation-state and its residents respond to external and internal challenges. They, either alone or together with a cohort of senior officials—and in tension with their followers—help to determine the direction of the nation-state. They govern, and the methods of governing that are chosen early create precedents and practices that shape the nature and course of a nation-state's governance. Indeed, personally influential, even inspirational leaders, or innovative leaders with transformational impulses, flourish more readily in new countries before there are institutions, in periods of extreme crisis, or before institutional safeguards have been developed and have matured except on paper.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transformative Political Leadership by ROBERT I. ROTBERG Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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