https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-modernizing-dictator-is-no-myth-1542153977
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi has led to justified misgivings about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s declared effort to modernize Saudi society. Critics argue that the killing disproves what Robert Kagan calls “the myth of the modernizing dictator”: the notion that repressive strongmen sometimes pave the way for socioeconomic development, which eventually may also lead to democratization.
Curiously, the most spectacular modernizers since World War II—South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore—have been absent from the debunking. South Korea alternated between authoritarian elected presidents and sheer dictatorships until 1987. Taiwan was under martial law until the 1990s. Under such regimes, both countries went from being among the world’s poorest to the most advanced within a generation, while laying the ground for subsequent democratization. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew led a similarly meteoric process of modernization in a semiauthoritarian system he created.
The main secrets of success in all these cases were market-friendly policies and a concerted investment in modern education. Less spectacular examples, such as Francisco Franco’s Spain and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile—abhorrent as both regimes were—also enabled economic modernization and eventual democratization.
It is historically rare for a country to become a fully liberal democracy before modernizing—the U.S. and now India are prominent exceptions. The first modernizer, Britain, became democratic—rather than merely parliamentary and increasingly liberal—only around 1900, after it had industrialized. Its modernization had involved uprooting the peasants, the vast majority of the population, from the countryside and turning them into an urban proletariat. Their hardship was immense and the long-term benefits to their children and grandchildren were far from obvious. They wouldn’t have consented if they had the vote. Similar problems plague modernization attempts in today’s developing societies.
To be sure, many dictators in developing societies fail to modernize: some because they adopt the wrong policies, some because of intractable cultural obstacles. That may turn out to be the case for Crown Prince Mohammed. But democracies in such countries also face daunting obstacles to modernization—and are highly susceptible to collapse. Moreover, the main hazard in such countries isn’t modernizing dictatorships but regressive populist regimes, reactionary dictatorships and authoritarian socialism. CONTINUE AT SITE
