Stepping Back: Around the Round Table
Gay W. Seidman
As we move into the twenty-first century, it is sometimes hard to remember just how much the Cold War dominated our political imaginations for most of the last fifty years. From 1945 to 1989, few policy-makers around the world would have taken seriously suggestions that Eastern European communism was on the verge of collapse, or that the Soviet Union would soon disintegrate. Within the Round Table discussions, as we can see from the comments of participants at the Michigan conference, participants on both sides overestimated the Polish government's strength: while government participants apparently thought they were creating a more legitimate basis for continued control, Polish opposition members thought they were maneuvering for political space. But at the first elections, the government discovered it had lost all control, while the opposition discovered it had somehow won power. How could they have all been so mistaken?
 As we now know, the Round Table was simultaneously a portent of, and an important episode in, the end of the Cold War. But at the time, no one could have really understood that a war, which had gone on so long that no one questioned its underlying dynamics, was already over. Indeed, international policy analysts probably took as long to absorb the intellectual shock as the Soviet Union took to disintegrate, but by the early 1990's, they had to accept a new vision: in our global political imagination, the world was no longer divided between two superpowers, each willing to intervene in the areas they claimed as their sphere of influence. While Poland's step into self-determination marked a crucial moment, it was hardly the only one; the Round Table marked a new era, but neither initiated it, nor defined it. As a new political reality took hold, new political possibilities opened up everywhere. From Vietnam to South Africa, Ethiopia to Chile, Albania to Yemen, old alliances collapsed, old lines of conflict blurred, new fault-lines revealed themselves. By the early 1990's, "globalization" and a new emphasis on electoral processes had reduced the range of options available to governments: from Nicaragua, where a former leftwing government gave up power through elections, to El Salvador, where rightwing paramilitary forces accepted a negotiated settlement with former guerrillas, consensus was framed by two basic assumptions.1 First, all parties began to accept as a starting point that they would live within the constraints of neo-liberal economic strategies; by the late 1980's, the famous phrase, "There is no alternative," had become an ideological reality. Second, all parties to negotiations began to accept the definition of "democracy" as elections; political groups which rejected electoral processes found themselves isolated on the international stage, and increasingly losing support at home.
In these comments, I want to step back from the negotiating table, to look at the broader global context in which the Round Table talks took place, at the general processes that opened up discussions, borders and economies throughout the 1980's and early 1990's. After briefly reviewing the different approaches in the literature on "democratic transitions"—beginning with Western Europe and Latin America, and then moving on to Eastern Europe, South Africa and elsewhere—I want to discuss some of the global changes that produced a climate in which negotiated transitions began to seem possible. Above all, I want to insist that we cannot understand any single case of transition at the end of the Cold War in isolation: there were too many dramatic changes, in too many different parts of the world, to view the Round Table as entirely the product of a local balance of power, or even, the product of local actors' strategies. As the participants in the Michigan conference repeatedly recognized, external factors played an enormous role in pushing Poles to the table: international sanctions, American political pressure, changing policies within the Soviet Union, a pressing sense on all sides that economic reforms were inescapable, are all mentioned in the conference transcripts. To what extent are these external pressures specific to Poland, and to what extent had the bipolar dynamics of the Cold War already given way to new forces, provoking political and economic change across the globe, by the late 1980's?
Democratic Transitions
As the Polish participants in the Michigan conference reflect on their experience at the Round Table, the internal dynamics of Poland in 1989 clearly stand out in their minds; but the external pressures, from the diminished threat of Soviet invasion to the impact of economic sanctions from the West, stand as an evident backdrop to the more local events they describe. This kind of shift—away from focusing entirely the strategies brought to local negotiating tables by individuals, or even social movement representatives, to considering the impact of the global context in which negotiations were breaking out in the late 1980's and early 1990's—parallels a shift in theoretical discussions of what is often called "democratization," or "democratic transitions" through the 1990's. In the mid-1980's, many intellectuals, especially in Latin America, found themselves confronted by a shocking new phenomenon: after some fifteen years of explaining the prevalence of authoritarian rule in Latin America,2 they found themselves trying to explain instead a series of sudden transitions to democracy. First in Spain and Portugal, then in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and eventually even Chile, military governments began to negotiate their way back to the barracks.
These transitions were often slow and controlled, as authoritarian governments gradually allowed changes in rules that permitted unexpected outcomes—instead of the strictly controlled electoral processes that mark authoritarian regimes. Former military officers often demanded restraints on the newly-formed governments, such as general amnesties for human rights violations, special privileges for military budgets, or even control over the choice of candidates for new "democratic" elections. But by the mid-1980's, many of the theorists that had previously linked Latin America's dependent capitalism with authoritarianism found themselves struggling to explain what appeared to be a new democratic impulse.
At first, most theoretical discussions of democratization focused on the negotiating strategies of the opposition. Often using metaphors drawn from game theory, intellectuals talked about what kind of strategies might support the "reformers" against the hard-liners in authoritarian regimes, or how best to widen the space for democratic activism.3 Many of these theoreticians were themselves participants in specific opposition movements, and their academic debates paralleled real political discussions taking place among and within their countries' democratic oppositions. Often pointing to lessons based on the recent experiences of other countries undergoing similar transitions, these discussions frequently underscored the importance of creating new rules for the political game, in which everyone would learn to abide by electoral outcomes, accepting uncertainty and the possibility of losing power as a key aspect to building sustainable democracies—even if the negotiated rules required that the opposition abandon some of its demands, and restrained its followers from asking for redistribution of wealth and power as well as for democratic political space.4
The parallels between many of these theoretical discussions and the language used by participants in the Polish Round Table in the Michigan conference—the language of contingency, of mutual weakness and compromise, of commitment to a national project and to non-violence—are hardly accidental: they reflect the immediate concerns of activists engaged in a delicate effort to move beyond stalemate, towards defining new rules for the political process.
But over time, the tone of academic discussions of democratization began to change, as academic studies moved beyond the immediate negotiating strategies of players. As academics, who were not themselves players in negotiations, began to study the new "democratic transitions," more studies began to explore how specific social actors found themselves sitting at the table at all. While in the case of Poland this question does not appear to have been salient—apparently because Solidarity and the Catholic Church dominated the opposition so thoroughly5—throughout Latin America and elsewhere, sociologists and political scientists began to ask who were the organized democratic opposition, how they emerged in the interstices of authoritarian rule, and how social movements began to provide a broad constituency for democratic political activists.6
But even these studies tend to restrict their vision to a local focus: the dynamics of social movements tend to reflect local conditions, local contingencies and opportunities. Thus, for example, the specific character of urban growth in Brazil, or the daily needs of women and their families in Chile's poblaciones, help explain where and how social movements begin to emerge at the margins of authoritarian rule. Social movements take advantage of unintended contradictions in the rhetoric of authoritarian regimes, of moments of political opportunity, of divisions within the regime's leaders; but almost by definition, they must draw on local political culture, local symbols and local loyalties, to develop a popular base. Thus, while the social-movement perspective provides a different perspective on negotiations than the game-theoretical approach, it cannot explain the global surge of democratic transitions. For that, we need to look beyond any single case, to get a sense of whether and how larger global processes altered the pressures on authoritarians and democrats alike in the 1980's and 1990's, in a wide variety of places, but with similar effects.
Global Shift
Discussions of global change in the late twentieth century often take on a slightly ad hoc character: there is as yet no coherent theoretical matrix for understanding the kinds of global changes that led to democratization in authoritarian capitalist regimes as well as in the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Debates persist about what globalization includes, about which aspects, if any, are new in the late twentieth century, about whether the uneven quality of its processes makes it so indistinct as to be virtually meaningless. Most discussions of what is frequently called "globalization" lump together dynamics as varied as the spread of new technologies and production processes, the spread of new consumption patterns, or changes in the rules governing international finance; yet in fact, most analysts acknowledge that each of these processes had its own dynamics, its own set of social actors, and each process looks slightly different from the perspective of different regions.
Yet while the peculiar concatenation of global processes from the mid-1980's may be highly path-dependent, and differs from place to place, the coincidence between the upsurge in democratic transitions and the end of the Cold War is hardly accidental: the pressures that pushed authoritarian regimes and democratic oppositions to negotiate in Latin America are, I would argue, closely related to those which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In this section, I will describe some of these changes; while this picture will of necessity be simplistic and caricatured, it may help provide some of the context in which discussions like the Round Table became possible.
By the mid-1980's, it was no longer possible to ignore dramatic changes in the international economy. From the early 1960's, there had been a significant shift in the character of international investments by companies from America and Western Europe: for the first time, multinational corporations began to move overseas, building industrial plants in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.7 Today, it is easy to forget how relatively new this development is: before 1960, foreign investors in developing countries tended to restrict their vision to raw materials and agricultural goods, leaving industrial investment to local states and entrepreneurs. But as developing countries around the world became independent of their former colonial rulers, they followed the prescriptions of both modernization and Keynesian economists, seeking to attract capital into industrial production by providing infrastructural support, subsidies, and tariff protection—often with explicit support from American and European government agencies, who viewed this kind of subsidized, protected industrial expansion as the best recipe for the economic development they hoped would block the spread of communism into developing countries' impoverished urban populations.8 From the 1950's to the mid-1970's, import-substitution industrialization (ISI)dovetailed easily with the goals of multinational corporations, who viewed the cheap labor and new markets of developing economies with eager eyes; through direct investment and through joint ventures, multinational corporations headquartered in the United States or in Europe found they could ally with local capital to begin industrial production in far flung corners of the world.9
But by the mid-1980's, ISI policies had begun to fall into disfavor among policy-makers and theoreticians alike: the protectionism inherent in ISI packages was considered to create inefficient companies, dependent on state subsidies and protection, preventing local consumers from buying goods that would be competitive on the world market. Particularly after the world realized the depth of the disaster of autarchy in Pol Pot's Cambodia, it became virtually impossible for development theorists to argue that industrialization required a complete break with the exploitative capitalist system. Instead, the emergence of "newly-industrialized countries" in East Asia suggested to many observers that rather than inevitable stagnation, involvement in the capitalist world offered new opportunities for trade and for growth.10 By the mid-1980's, most developing countries sought greater integration into the world economy, rather than less.
This changing perspective was clearly strengthened by intellectual shifts and supported by powerful institutional actors, who from the late 1970's insisted that developing countries should open their economies along neo-liberal lines. By the mid-1980's, academic economists had generally become convinced that economic growth was directly linked to expanding trade: based largely on the experiences of East Asian NIC's like South Korea, the inward-looking vision of import substitution proponents was replaced by the view that export-oriented expansion would ultimately produce a more sustainable kind of growth.11
This intellectual shift coincided with major changes in the international financial world, both in terms of private banks and public institutions. From 1971, when the United States quietly took its currency off the gold standard, the fixed relationships between international currencies that had been in place since the Bretton Woods meetings of 1946 began to come apart; the "floating exchange rates" that began to dominate by the mid-1970's transformed the world of finance, creating new possibilities for international financial speculation. Recognizing the implications of these changes, in the late 1970's and early 1980's the British and American governments began to deregulate international financial dealings: the City of London and Wall Street re-emerged as centers of finance, in a world where tiny changes in the relative value of currencies could serve as a basis for vast new fortunes.12
At the same time, however, the International Monetary Fund shifted its role internationally13: the IMF moved away from serving simply as a source of short-term international trade credits, to an institution oriented toward bailing out indebted developing countries. Concomitantly with this shift, the IMF began to view its debtors with a different eye, relaxing its earlier restraints on interfering with borrowers' sovereignty. By 1979, the IMF was beginning to shift its stance in relation to borrowers: instead of simply assessing creditworthiness, the IMF began to attach conditions to loans, requiring that would-be borrowers agree to first economic, and later, political restructuring as a condition of new loans. Through the 1980's, governments which turned to the IMF for loans knew they would have to negotiate not only the rates of interest and the repayment schedule, but also the terms of future economic policy: broadly, economic growth was redefined in terms of trade expansion, and the IMF's commitment to reducing state expenditures and expanding export revenues became the guiding principle for developing countries across the globe. "Structural adjustment," as it was called, involved reducing state expenditures, dropping protective tariffs and subsidies, and promoting export-oriented production; across Latin America and Africa, governments were required to slash budgets—cutting both civil service positions and social services to their citizens—and to open markets to imported goods, with the twin goals of reducing inflation and increasing trade.
By the mid-1980's, developing countries were clearly aware that a new international context constrained their options for development strategies14; the neo-liberal policies required by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, backed by conservative administrations in London and Washington, required privatization of public enterprises and production for export. The ideological shift was dramatic: whereas in the 1970's, developing countries had talked about human development as well as economic growth, by the mid-1980's, most third world governments no longer saw any viable alternative to neo-liberalism. Two decades earlier, when the Cold War was at its height, developing countries had often been able to manipulate Cold War rivalries, either by persuading superpowers to bid against each other in offers of economic and military aid, or by building a special relationship with a single superpower.
But by the 1980's, the Eastern European bloc could offer neither economic or strategic protection for countries that hoped to avoid the "savage capitalism" that marked so many developing economies. In the early 1960's, Cuba was able to use its relationship with the Soviet Union to sustain its economy despite the US boycott; in contrast, by 1980, the Soviet Union could no longer offer any such arrangements, even to governments that seemed completely willing to throw themselves into the Soviet camp, like the Sandinista government that took power in Nicaragua. The complete inability of the Soviet Union to provide real development aid to its allies had become undeniable. In the mid-1970's, the Soviet Union's acknowledgment of a serious grain shortage inevitably revealed its internal economic problems, while its drawn-out, disastrous engagement in Afghanistan underscored a lack of military capacity; in the early 1980's, its inability to provide more than rhetorical support for would-be socialist allies, from Nicaragua to Mozambique, underscored the weakness of its reach.
General awareness of these external weaknesses was, of course, paralleled by an increasing recognition of internal failure. Experts on Soviet history will no doubt continue to debate for decades to come the extent to which the Soviet Union's weaknesses in the mid-1980's were internally generated, or the result of pressure from the outside, as the Reagan administration engaged the Soviet union and its allies in a series of proxy battles around the edges of what Reagan considered the "evil empire." But from the perspective of global change, the crucial point here is that by the mid-1980's, even citizens of Russia itself were beginning to recognize that the Soviet Union's promises were wearing thin. As the rest of the world moved into a new technological era—as personal computers, VCR's, and other new technologies of daily life became easily accessible to the global middle class—even privileged residents of the Soviet bloc must have begun to make uncomfortable comparisons with the standard of living in global cities like New York, London, even Sao Paulo, and the standard of living in places like Moscow or Warsaw.15
Most of these shifts are directly related to the balance of power in the Cold War: they constrained the economic and political options of developing countries, putting pressure on governments to adopt export-oriented development strategies, staying firmly within the western camp. But there were also important changes within the western halls of power that provided a new impetus for democratization within the capitalist world. Many authoritarian regimes might have been able to respond to these pressures by restructuring their economies, shifting to a greater emphasis on private investment and ownership, without undergoing a simultaneous democratic transition.
But through the 1970's and 1980's, there was also another development, which might be said to be located outside the Cold War's dynamics: the emergence of an international human rights movement, which challenged authoritarian governments' treatment of their citizens, insisting on subjecting even allied governments to careful scrutiny. Just as the IMF decision to attach political and economic conditions to loans involved a recasting of the IMF's relation to sovereign states, the human rights movement's insistence that governments could be held accountable to a broader international community for their treatment of dissidents involved a subtle recasting of sovereignty, where states were no longer automatically treated as the legitimate representatives of their citizens.
This new emphasis on democratization and human rights owed as much to the work of activists and popular movements within developing countries—and, of course, to movements like Solidarity in places like Poland—as it does to the work of Western activists in organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, of course. When middle-class mothers whose children had been kidnapped by security forces in the middle of the night began to hold weekly demonstrations in a central plaza in Buenos Aires, challenging a repressive military regime to produce their children, the impact of their silent demonstrations—as bereaved mothers held up photos of their disappeared relatives—was felt far beyond Argentina. When lawyers in Brazil's Bar Association began to assert that the military regime no longer conformed to the "rule of law," because it ignored rights of habeas corpus in its treatment of political prisoners, support for the military government began to erode even among the elite that had benefited from authoritarian economic growth strategies.
This new discourse of democratization spanned the political spectrum—or perhaps changed the character of that spectrum, redefining previously clearer, bipolar categories of "left" and "right." Authoritarianism in capitalist countries certainly eroded support for right-wing regimes, but from the perspective of left-wing groups around the world, the Soviet clampdown on Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the imposition of military rule in Poland in 1981, led to growing disillusionment with Soviet-style authoritarianism, and a growing reassessment of the "success" of the Soviet model. The growing influence of a more democratically-oriented, humanist "western Marxism" on left-leaning democratic parties around the world undermined Leninist vanguardism, with increasing emphasis being placed on democracy as a goal in itself rather than as a road to power, combined with a new concern for self-determination in a post-colonial world. In the mid-1970's, the Italian Communist Party opened a new path, declaring itself independent of the Soviet line and speaking of an "historic compromise" with democratic processes. With armed struggle receding as an acceptable or viable option for anti-authoritarian groups, and with a growing acceptance of the constraints imposed by the international context on development strategies, it became easier for even left-leaning opposition activists to view the state as an "arena of struggle" as well as an instrument of class domination—a view that underscored the importance of accepting the rules of the political process on all sides, even when it meant accepting defeat at the polls.
Historically, international policy-makers generally pretended that the internal affairs of their allies were none of their business: the assumption of sovereignty, on which the international institutions of the modern state system rest, required that policy-makers stay out of internal affairs. In reality, of course, powerful states have often meddled in the internal affairs of their weaker neighbors, not least through direct mechanisms such as colonialism; but the veneer of sovereignty long provided a convenient excuse for dubious alliances. From the early 1970's, however, an increasingly vocal international debate about the importance of democracy and human rights placed western governments under new pressure—especially as domestic constituencies became increasingly uncomfortable with the military and economic aid offered by their governments to repressive dictatorships. Even in the United States—where international policy had long been predicated on discussions of "national interest" and Cold War strategy, rather than on any considerations of morality—Congress decided to make human rights records a consideration in discussions about whether to provide economic or military aid; from the early 1970's, even close allies' human rights records became an official component of American international policy-making process. Although, in reality, many American politicians manipulated human rights issues—tending to find more human rights violations in countries they disliked than in countries with whom they hoped to build stronger alliances—the terms of the discussion changed dramatically in a very short time, as more and more politicians and voters became convinced that human rights issues were legitimate grounds for concern in foreign policy, moving away from the sole focus on security issues that had marked most foreign policy debates during the Cold War's height.
The incorporation of human rights concerns into international policy debates was a complicated process, involving choices by specific individual policy makers as well as the mobilization of a new transnational social movement—or, at least, the mobilization of new networks of transnational activists, who viewed the human rights movement as something morally outside the limits of Cold War politics.16 But it should not be underestimated as a powerful force in late twentieth century politics: by strengthening the position of those who stressed the construction of democratic institutions, it helped to add a democratic dimension to the transitions away from authoritarian rule.
Consolidating Democracy?
What did all these changes at the global level mean for internal discussions, and why should they have prompted a rise of negotiated transitions away from authoritarianism in contexts as disparate as Poland, South Africa, Chile or Yemen? There are, I think, several ways in which the new global context created the basis for discussion across seemingly wide gaps.
First, the new context reduced the scope for disagreement about economic policies: in a context where neo-liberal economic orthodoxies had become so dominant, few policy-makers were willing to continue to promote radically different options. It is telling, for example, that the Polish government representatives at the Round Table do not seem to have been any less concerned about economic reform than their opposition: both sides seem to have agreed that economic reform, including privatization, was desperately needed, especially in the face of the economic sanctions imposed in the early 1980's. In South Africa, government officials believed that the collapse of the Eastern European model undermined the strength of anti-apartheid activists' demands for redistribution of wealth; in the early 1990's, they believed they could insist on protections for private property as a basic starting point for negotiations. At first, anti-apartheid activists attempted to challenge that protection; but even leading anti-apartheid activists backed away from dramatic redistribution. Moreover, since the neo-liberal economic package requires private investment, governments and reformers alike became concerned about retaining the confidence of the business classes—which requires political stability and economic predictability. Without a viable alternative economic proposal—and with international institutions reinforcing the neo-liberal model, insisting that international loans would be tied to specific kinds of economic strategy—the economic proposals of governments and reformers everywhere began to come closer together, making negotiation around political processes easier everywhere.
Second, the new context limited the ability of both authoritarians and oppositions to imagine that they could continue to sustain political repression as a strategy for rule. Facing western concerns about human rights, and lacking any chance of support from Eastern Europe, authoritarian regimes recognized there were real consequences for taking a repressive path: not only would economic and military aid be cut off, but local elites were increasingly likely to reject a government that was too repressive. At the same time, oppositional movements became increasingly skilled at seeking international attention and support. Throughout the 1990's, country after country moved toward elections that were open to outside supervision, seeking to demonstrate through electoral results their governments' popular legitimation.
To say that global dynamics pushed local social actors towards compromise on two key issues of contention is not, of course, to deny the local specificity of each democratization process in the 1990's. Even the two basic starting points—neo-liberal economic policies and democratic elections—were open to broad reinterpretation in specific instances. Inevitably, the local balance of power between different forces was crucial to how these global pressures were interpreted and defined. The term "neo-liberal" can be applied to a range of economic packages, ranging from strict privatization and unregulated markets to policies that provide degrees of freedom within strict regulatory frameworks. Similarly, the label "democratic" has been applied to elections ranging from truly open political processes to processes where voters who made the wrong choice at the polls faced the real threat of paramilitary repression. Nevertheless, without taking account of the shift in global forces, it would be impossible to explain why so many countries seemed to move toward negotiations in the late twentieth century, or to understand the common patterns that seem to emerge in those negotiations within wildly different settings.
Ten years after the Round Table, discussions of "democratic transitions" in Latin America, Africa, Asia and even Eastern Europe have moved away from asking about the basis of consensus and compromise, to questions about the way forward. What do we mean by "democracy" and "citizenship," and how can we consolidate the institutions best able to sustain them? What are the best policies to promote economic growth in specific settings? What kind of political institutions best protect and expand citizenship? How can states simultaneously promote the private entrepreneurship required for neo-liberal growth, and provide its weaker citizens with the social services they need? How can we ensure that people in marginalized industries, countries, regions—people who lost their jobs when industries collapsed in the face of global competitions, countries which have been unable to find an economic niche in the new global economy, regions which collapsed into persistent and brutal warfare when superpowers dropped Cold War alliances—are not completely overlooked in the new global context? As several participants in the Michigan conference noted, processes like the Round Table may mark the end of one kind of conflict; but instead of seeing democratization as the end, perhaps we should see it as the beginning. The new regimes that emerged in the post-Cold War moment face new challenges, new questions, as they seek to consolidate new democracies in the context of continuing globalization.
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Negotiating Radical Change
Understanding and Extending the Lessons of the Polish Round Table Talks
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