I take it that development and democratization are the two crucial themes that warrant policy practices in Ghana like in many developing countries. I have already shown how development came up to be the main business of the state in the constitution of the nation-state. By democratization, I mean the facilitation of citizens’ participation in the public and private affairs of the nation-state irrespective of the part of the national community they are located.
This definition is in keeping with that of the MacBride Commission (UNESCO 1980, 166) which defined democratization as “the process whereby (a) the individual becomes an active partner and not a mere object of communication; (b) the variety of messages exchanged increases; and (c) the extent and quality of social representation or participation in communication are augmented.” Tehranian (1990a, 4), going along the grain of the MacBride report, defines democratization as a “process of increased political participation that allows for considerable autonomy, diversity, and freedom while providing a supportive environment for critical public discourse, consensus building, and democratic will formation.”
Participation here suggests being reserved the option to take part. Being a derivative of democracy, democratization calls for an attempt at reaching the ideals of democratic practice that all nation-states profess to try to construct. Obviously due the rhetorical and conceptual purchase of “participation” (or its adjectival form, “participatory”) the concept has been used and abused by both intellectuals and politicians alike. Often it is used to give credit to attempts at showing how certain epistemologies are grounded from real life experiences.
Example is Servaes and Arnst (1999, 108) claim, “Participatory research was conceived in reaction to elitist research bias. It is ideological by intent; it is the research by involvement.
It is not only research with people – it is people’s research. As such it largely rejects both the development policies of states and the ‘objectivity’ and ‘universal validity claims’ of many methodologies in the social sciences.” Aside of its show of nihilism by disregarding the developmentalist state, all the reasons they have mustered to prove the uniqueness of participatory research is not exclusive to their methodology. Ethnographers have been doing most of that. And which research or epistemological exercise is not ideological by the way?
In addition, most qualitative approaches like ethnography have long since abandoned universal validity claims. So that Servaes and Arnst here cited is an example of a deployment of the concept more for its rhetorical and political purchase than its conceptual value.
Participation is unarguably central to democratic theory. Carole Pateman (1989) is one theorist who has tried to resurrect the arguments of the classical theorists to discuss contemporary relevance of its application. Starting from Rousseau, Stuart Mill and G.D.H.
Cole, Pateman reveals how the classical idea of maximum political participation in social organizations was subverted later with a concern for stability and the endorsement with the maxim that the elite must rule in a democracy. The participation of the rest should be limited to taking part periodically in electing leaders. Widening the realm of participation beyond voting would lead to mobocracy. The revision of participation from being a tenet of democracy to a specter of totalitarianism, she points out, was partly due to the European experience of the collapse of the “Weimer Republic with its high rates of mass participation, into fascism,
and the post-war establishment of totalitarian regimes based on mass participation” (Pateman 1989, 2). This backdrop, added to the instability of regimes based on mass mobilization in newly independent postcolonial regimes provided for a good reception of the Schumpeterian definition of democracy as one of institutional arrangements for making political decisions through a competitive struggle for people’s vote. Participation then was restricted to voting and the freedom and right to contest for leadership. “The electoral mass is incapable of action other than a stampede” (Schumpeter quoted in Pateman 1989, 5). Thus when liberal democrats such as Al Gore talk of ICTs and political participation, they mean this limited version of participation. The discursive transformation of participation in democratic theory and practice should be seen as articulation in practice. That is articulation as a practice of making connections and disconnections. The elite dominance of the discourse of democracy and the elite wish to maintain a stable order secured the dominance of the discourse of anti-participation as the new truth with Schumpeter as a key ideologue. The meaning of participation both in theory and in practice depends on the conjuncture in which it is evoked and the character of the elements that constitute the moment.
Robert Dahl, another influential theorist of democracy who put forward the idea that a democratic political arrangement is a polyarchy, had argued along the lines of Schumpeter that opening up participation posed a threat to the democratic system. Dahl’s theory of polyarchy principally says that democracy is a rule of multiple minorities and that the system strives towards increased participation. But he cautions that the lower groups of society which are in the majority are barred from benefiting from the equality of participation that democracy offers because they are generally inactive, have high authoritarian instincts and have limited wherewithal (Dahl 1956, 81). As Pateman (1989, 14) notes, in most cases of contemporary theories of democracy, participation is restricted to choice of decision makers and there is always the fear that increased participation beyond this level will result in chaos and authoritarianism. The classical theorists such as Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and Bentham, from whom these contemporary theorists draw never argued for the limitation of participation. “For Bentham and Mill, participation thus had a purely protective function, it ensured that the private interest of each citizen were protected (the universal interest being merely the sum of individual interests)” (Pateman 1989, 20). Thus, so to speak, the unfinished business of democracy is how to increase participation. If restricted participation helps to stabilize the polity, it stands to reason that participation is the engine of development and social transformation: development here being synonymous to change and progress.
It is this understanding of the participatory deficit of liberalism that led Benjamin Barber to argue that the anti-participatory posture of liberal democracy has resulted into a “thin democracy” that is at best a politics of self-interest, bargaining and exchange and never one of transformation, invention and creation. For Barber liberal democracy by being anti-participatory is also anti-community and this is because it has a zookeeping mentality of politics. “Like captured leopards, men are to be admired for their proud individuality and for their unshackled freedom, but they must be caged for their untrustworthiness and anti-social orneriness all the same” (1989, 21). He puts forward an ambitious program of revitalizing participation. Under strong democracy (the opposite of thin democracy), the possibility of
transforming conflict into cooperation, dependency into interdependency, need into love, bondage into citizenship “are all placed within a context of participation” (Barber 1989, 120). But his emphasis on community should not be mistaken for communitarian idealism.
The basis of democracy is first and foremost community and it is in participation that we realize the community and not a zookeeping mentality of government. It is for this reason that Andrew Moemeka (1997, 174) makes interesting reading when he shows that within African philosophical thought, the Cartesian logic is subverted to “I am because we are.” The primacy of the community is here emphasized and justified on the grounds of the provisions it affords the individual. But such a worldview has consistently come under attack since modernization was inaugurated. The community here was always a small one with members having personal relationships and similar to Tönnies’ (1955) Gemeinschaft. Thus within the modernizing nation-state under discussion, such a community is simply impracticable. But it is the spirit of such a community, the part of access and participation that is sought for in the contemporary larger community of citizens.
In his contribution on the role of research in the movement for the democratization of communication, Robert White notes that much of the existing communication theory lack adequate explanation for the factors of social change that lead to democratization. However, it does argue for a need to go beyond the liberal social ideals to fashion a new public philosophy of communication. The existing critiques also point out the relevance of access channels that allow for not just an informed docile labor force for a stable democracy, but the recognition that access is a basic social right (White 1999, 233).
So far the discussion has been limited to the political sphere, more so because of the link between democratic governance and participation. Pateman’s discussion of the concept was precisely to extend the debate to include other social organizations. That is to expand the political to include “spheres outside national government” (1989, 106). Focusing on case studies in the former Yugoslavia, she proves that contrary to the view that ordinary people are incapable of participation in complex structures, they actually learn to do so and improve upon their activeness. “The argument of the participatory theory of democracy is that participation in the alternative areas would enable the individual better to appreciate the connection between the public and the private spheres (Pateman 1989, 110). Pateman’s critique is centered on the Anglo-American experience of and theory of democracy. One of the noted theories on the relation between participation and development from the perspectives of the experience of the developing countries is Paulo Freire (1974). The idea of participation should not just be limited to its political dimension. If participation means the ability to take part in the life of one’s polity, then participation should be expanded to include economic participation. I am not just referring to the wherewithal to facilitate political participation.
The economic and material foundation to allow for members of a specific geographic community (a region of the nation-state) to participate in national affairs should also be considered significant. I have read the history of the postcolonial nation-state as an imagined political community in the process of becoming which includes the extension of civil society of the colony to the world of traditional authority and subjects. This process of turning subjects into citizens demands that the state take responsibility for providing the foundations
(which are mainly economic and material) for the members of the hitherto protectorates to participate in the new political community that is replacing the previous community of chief and subject. This task is not the business of market forces.
Dieter Senghaas (1985, 6) who critiques development theory from the perspectives of the European experience has pointed out that the history of Western capitalism has very few examples of countries that have pursued free market policies from the scratch as a means to becoming developed. “While over the past two decades, the Third World has been constantly advised to integrate into an ‘unrestricted world economy’ on the basis of free trade, it has hardly ever been questioned whether, during the initial development stages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe itself had developed in such a way.” Senghaas points out that with the exception of Switzerland and Netherlands, none of the presently highly industrialized countries developed through free trade policy. In England, free trade gained ascendancy as a policy prescription because of her dominance of the total global industrial output (Senghaas 1985, 23).
The best example in defense of this thesis of uncompleted project of turning subjects into citizens is the recent revelations that coffee and cocoa plantations in West Africa are operated with slave labor. Actually, what goes on is a form of indentured labor and not slavery in the classical sense. But nonetheless, the global media blitz on the “slave ship” that allegedly carried some 250 children for work in plantations may have been embarrassing for these countries. The story made headlines for several days on the world media, including CNN and BBC World between April 13 and 17, 2001. If the story had appeared on April Fools day, some would have been tempted to dismiss it as a big joke. But that is if you are unfamiliar with the realities of deprivations going on in the hinterlands of these countries. The state, so to speak, has not yet penetrated some parts of its jurisdiction to invite residents in these areas to take part in the civil life that it has promised as part of the modernization project. So even if indentured labor is illegal and a prosecutable offence, the state is not able to enforce the law because it cannot access these places where they are practiced. But curiously, it is ready to export the produce that comes out of this illegal enterprise and expect the confectionery industry in the metropolis, which relies on this “slave economy” for its raw materials to help it stop the practice. This is a vindication of Mamdani’s thesis that the postcolony is burdened with the legacy of the bifurcated world of citizen and subject that colonialism introduced. The postcolonial state still depends on uncivil economic production relations for its survival. This is also the reason why Hyden (1983, 8ff) argues that the state still needs these uncivil economic relations in what he describes as “economy of affection” as against a rationalized system of production and formalized structures.
As already stated, in accomplishing the task of building a nation out of the postcolony, modernization becomes the doctrine of the state in its claim to build a political community, which invariably allows for participation. Modernization is understood as an appropriation of modernity. An appropriation that take economic modernization to mean industrialization, political modernization as democratization, social modernization as individualism and cultural modernization as rationalization (Youichi 1997, 52). But is this appropriation of modernity unproblematic? In his critique of the modernization project, Habermas defines
modernization as a “bundle of processes that are communicative and mutually reinforcing”(1996, 338) and include the formation of capital, the mobilization of resources, the development of the forces of production, the increase in the productivity of labor; the establishment of centralized political power, the formation of national identities; the proliferation or rights of political participation, urbanization as well as the secularization of values and norms. He argues that the theory of modernization springs from Weber’s problem of modernity, but then elaborates it with tools of social-scientific functionalism.
The theory of modernization performs two abstractions on Weber’s concept of modernity.
It dissolves ‘modernity’ from its modern European origins and stylizes it into spatio-temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general. Furthermore, it breaks the internal connections between modernity and the historical context of Western rationalism, so that processes of modernization can no longer be conceived of as rationalization, as the historical objectification of rational structures (Habermas 1996, 338).
But incidentally, this is exactly the opposite of what those who are appropriating Weber’s modernity are clamoring for; rationalization as the main agenda for modernization. If the postcolonial project of development through modernization is to find an accommodating theoretical home, it may well have to part company with Habermas and look at Charles Taylor.
Habermas, the European, seem to be jealously restricting modernity away from its non-European variants, while Charles Taylor from postcolonial Quebec will welcome the appropriation of modernity and even talk of “alternative modernities.” Charles Taylor argues that nationalism as a product of modernity and experienced differently at various places suggests that modernity is not a single wave that happened to only one particular region of the world. Some of the defining features of modernity, including the emergence of market-industrial economy and an established bureaucracy which combine to threaten traditional culture require that people re-articulate new forms of engagement to ensure successful transition:
a successful transition involves a people finding resources in their traditional culture to take on the new practices. In this sense, modernity is not a single wave. It would be better to speak of alternative modernities, as the cultures that emerged in the world to carry the institutional changes turn out to differ in important ways from each other. Thus a Japanese modernity, an Indian modernity and various modulations of Islamic modernity will probably enter alongside the gamut of Western societies, which are also far from being totally uniform” (Taylor 1999, 233).
Thus Charles Taylor makes us comfortable to talk of the modernizing process as one of appropriation.
A universalist modernist discourse has been criticized by African scholars as an untenable articulation. The universalization of modernist discourse, which masquerades as development for Africa, according to Nyamnjoh (1997, 196) “entails denial, self-evacuation, or self-devaluation, and the glorification of everything western.” Such an outlook
tends to mistake the globalization of capitalism for development. When such a discourse informs policy, it results in large chunk of the populace being circled out and marginalized leading to their disillusionment about the role of the state, the meaning of nation-building, and the illusive idea called development. Rather a more reflexive approach to modernity is what is required.
African Philosopher Kwame Gyekye (1997) puts it quite simply and rightly that postcoloniality is not a project aimed at abandoning the entire corpus of colonial heritage because some features and elements of the colonial heritage are, by the colonized own reckoning, worthwhile for their cultural and intellectual development. The postcolonial condition therefore allows the voluntary adoption or perpetration of some aspects of the colonial heritage, including the nation-state as a social formation. But the main point of his argument is for the adoption of rationalist epistemology and practice (technology) from the West. That is appropriating Weber’s modernity. Gyekye (1997, 28) points out that while Africans were not without an empirically epistemic outlook (a pre-condition for modernism) their allegedly incurably religious nature soon became dominant. “Empirical causality, which asks what- and how- questions, too quickly gave way to agentive causation, which asks who-and why- questions.” Obviously one gets hesitant who-and apprehensive about Gyekye’s framing of Africans along colonial stereotypes. But the main thrust of his argument still makes sense in partly accounting for the justification for the adoption of rationalist epistemology.
If a child’s blood is full of malaria parasites and records an abnormally high temperature and the mother decides to seek spiritual support and not medical/herbal remedies, then something must be wrong with the mother. The prevalence of this Ghanaian condition has been admitted in official development planning thinking where major constraints to the low level of technology in the country has been attributed to local culture. According to the national planners, inadequate and low patronage of the scientific and technological method (read rationality) is because “superstitious beliefs and practices abound in Ghana” (Ghana-Vision 2020 1997, 234). Gyekye (1997, 28) will therefore push forward his argument: “It is the lack of distinction between the purely material (natural) and the immaterial (supernatural, spiritual) that led to the postulation of agentive causation in all matters.” Indigenous African culture did not have a commitment to empirical scientific knowledge, which is the basis for Western technology. Where they have local scientific inventions or discoveries, no attempts
If a child’s blood is full of malaria parasites and records an abnormally high temperature and the mother decides to seek spiritual support and not medical/herbal remedies, then something must be wrong with the mother. The prevalence of this Ghanaian condition has been admitted in official development planning thinking where major constraints to the low level of technology in the country has been attributed to local culture. According to the national planners, inadequate and low patronage of the scientific and technological method (read rationality) is because “superstitious beliefs and practices abound in Ghana” (Ghana-Vision 2020 1997, 234). Gyekye (1997, 28) will therefore push forward his argument: “It is the lack of distinction between the purely material (natural) and the immaterial (supernatural, spiritual) that led to the postulation of agentive causation in all matters.” Indigenous African culture did not have a commitment to empirical scientific knowledge, which is the basis for Western technology. Where they have local scientific inventions or discoveries, no attempts