I was taken aback when Enrique Razon Jr., chairman and president of International Container Terminal Services Inc., stated at the sidelines of the Asean Business and Investment Summit that “infrastructure development and democracy cannot go hand in hand,” even hinting that “there may be benefit in [a country] being ran by a dictator.”
Regardless of whether he was misquoted or his words were taken out of context, I find it absurd that such a statement would come from the Forbes Magazine-ranked seventh-richest man in the country. I had held him in high esteem as one of the Philippines’s best business leaders whose enterprises grew and flourished under a vibrant democratic system. Although reports said that he clarified his statement by saying he is not “endorsing” one form of political system over another, he followed it up with another shocker: “If you really look at it, those that have the most advanced infrastructure are the ones that are not democratic. The countries with the best infrastructure in the world are dictatorships.”
With all due respect, Mr. Razon, I beg to disagree. Such notion of yours is simply not backed up by empirical or even historical evidence.
Often, a dictator grabs political power with cunningly high motivations. In Pakistan, for instance, General Musharraf saw the opportunity when his country’s democratically elected politicians muddled governance. He summarily eliminated the roadblocks to his ascension and, yes, he delivered. He cut corruption and inefficiency, which democrats had absolutely failed to do. But as in any dictatorship, distress twitches in the long run. Instability and uncertainty would unfailingly crop up, and any fleeting prosperities from a despotic regime would summarily vanish. I believe that dictatorship simply lays a country’s problems in suspended animation, but it will not solve them in the long run.
Razon’s statement makes me remember some of the world’s iconic infrastructure developments, such as the Eiffel Tower, built on January 28, 1887, long after Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France. What about Germany’s Autobahn? The creation of the first segment (Cologne-Bonn) commenced in 1929. When dictator Adolph Hitler took supremacy as chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933, he claimed it as his own. There are so many beautifully engineered infrastructures built in the free world, but I cannot say the same for countries under a despot’s tight grip.
Let us just refer to the top 27 countries with the best infrastructure, according to the 2017 World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index, listed here in chronological order: Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, France, South Korea, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Qatar, Austria, China, Taiwan, Canada, Luxembourg, Portugal, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Malaysia, New Zealand, Belgium, Israel and Finland. They are the top 20 percent of 137 countries surveyed. Almost all their contemporary substructures—highways, mass transit, modern airports, power plants—were erected after 1945. You may notice that there are nine constitutional monarchies in the list.
Seven are from Europe (the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium) and, of course, Canada and Japan. But monarchs, unlike dictators, do not run the state. They are at most symbolic figures and are revered as their country’s mediating voice.
Many equate a one-party system to a dictatorship. Not true. In a nutshell, a dictator or despot rules the country without regard to the people’s right to have a say on how they want their country to be run, which is the exact opposite of what happens in a democracy.
There is an ill-defined situation or field not readily conforming to a category or to an existing set of rules when we talk about countries like Singapore and China. The role of dictatorship when applied to them is quite ambiguous. For instance, economists still debate whether the success of Singapore is mainly due to its dominant party system, which some label a dictatorship, or because of the liberalization of its economic system.
During its early stages, China’s growth was dismal. It was only during Deng Xiao Ping’s rule that its economy surged upward. Deng’s famous quote, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice,” implies that democratic or not, what matters is the country should move forward. Even if I try to put myself in Razon’s shoes—and for the sake of argument go along with his belief—the big question remains: Is it really a dictatorship which catapulted China’s ascent to economic power?
I believe that Deng, to ensure growth and development, severed his commanding power and gave it back to the free market. China’s recipe of success under Deng had nothing to do with dictatorship.
On the other hand, China’s success should not be confused with that of India’s. While India was politically democratic, it was, likewise, economically Leninist. It was only in the 1990s that it shed its Leninist leaning, while China did it as early as 1978. The reference that labels China as “evolutionary, democratic, and stagnant” confuses what is elucidated by considering India as a political democracy with a chiefly Leninist economy.
India’s economy is a confluence of logic of monopolization with its all-embracing state regulation—control of inputs, financial resources and key prices—making it one of the world’s largest employers. Nehru-Gandhi’s socialist economic policy was what drove India to virtual bankruptcy in 1999. It was only after a long uphill campaign that India got its economic bearings back.
Dictatorship is not a panacea for economic development. Although I fully respect Razon’s view, he could have been ill-advised in promoting such an idea. Espousing a country to accept dictatorship as a shortcut to progress is analogous to the deceits wielded by Adolf Hitler.
For comments and suggestions, e-mail me at mvala.v@gmail.com