Timing.
It can be perfect, or completely wrong. It can create the ideal moment, or it
can ruin entire plans. This counts for
pretty much anything: storms, relationships, even the development of a
democracy.
It
seems like a simple fact that the outcomes of pretty much any event have
something to do with timing. If Lee
Harvey Oswald had shot his gun just a few seconds later, President Kennedy may
not have died. If the allied powers had
ended their appeasement policy toward Germany sooner, maybe the war would not
have ended so soon. There is a lot of
what ifs involved when speaking of timing, but what about when talking about
developing democracy?
Barrington
Moore believes that in order to create a democracy from another form of
government, there needs to be certain precursors. First, the old, feudalistic order needs to be
done away with. This will help the next
step immensely: industrialization.
Industrialization is important in establishing the potential for democracy,
because it provides grounds for free markets and for people to develop a
political and economical foothold in the government. But what would happen if industrialization
happened without destroying the feudal society?
Could the two coexist and still progress to a democracy? I think it would be much more difficult to
industrialize when most people were working in the country, under lords, with
little to no power to change their situation.
It would make the people unable to migrate to the cities (a trend of
industrialization) and work in factories and large-scale jobs.
There
are three parts of transforming to a democracy.
First, there’s social transformation, which is much of what I was just
talking about. The society usually
shifts from a feudal, agricultural society to an urban, industrialized
one. Next comes the political
transformation. In this case, the
government is turned in the direction of democracy, whether by a coup, an
elected change of party, or a change within the current regime. The third part is cultural transformation:
developing a national identity, desire for participation in the new government,
and working for the success of a new democracy.
Let’s
think for a moment of what would happen if the cultural and social transformations
were flip-flopped. Would it be
beneficial to develop support and nationalism before changing the governmental
style? I think that it would increase
the new governments chances of maintaining its power. However, the national identity could also be
developed against democracy, making it impossible to maintain it. I think there are many ways at looking at
situations like this, and it would probably work differently in each case.
In
thinking about timing, it is important to remember that not every group of
people will act the same way in every situation. Just because one country has followed the
order designed by Moore and had it succeed doesn’t mean it will work the same
way for a different country. It will
depend heavily on how receptive the people are to the changes that are being
implemented. The assumption that timing
is everything cannot possibly
encompass every country’s individual situation.
However, I think it is safe to say that paying attention to the timing
of any event and what leads up to it can help us to better understand the
situation.
