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Posted On 2021-03-15

The Channel Islands work goes on and on (and on). Some of the writing expectations were pretty hardcore- one prof in particular got easily over 70 pages between the three classes of hers that I took. The first two of those classes were in my first semester, which was a crash course in a new level of expectation. Balancing work and PCC had been pretty easy, but CSUCI didn’t have anywhere near the scheduling flexibility. I was working nights 40-50 hrs a week, with napping and classes during the day. As much as possible I tried to plan assignments for the weekends, because Mon-Thu I was just fried.

First here is 102, Comparative Politics. The final was a series of short essays, 12 pages in total so I’ve broken them into chunks; here are the first two. Technically these were assigned as “short answer” questions so we didn’t have to adhere to proper essay styling, but anyone who settled for mere paragraphs was just asking for trouble.

Final Exam, Pols 102

1. O’Neil et al. (2018) argue that modern governments try to balance their policies between equality and freedom. Explain why this is more problematic for countries of the Global South.

The countries of the global south tend to share a colonial history; they were founded in service to an external master. The manner in which each colonizing empire went about its business would leave lasting effects in each of their former territories. Among the “Global South” are those nations that have experienced greater challenges in overcoming the unfavorable aspects of their founding.

Economically, colonies offered profit through the gain of resources for cheap labor. That this labor was sometimes unpaid slavery was simply an opportunity for more savings. Sugar, tobacco, tea leaves, commodities that could be “bought” for cheap and sold at great profit, took up large amounts of farmland. Industrial development tended to occur away from these colonies; resources would be shipped to the center for refinement into goods, with the profits staying close to home. With the departure of their colonial founders, many of these nations were left economically stunted. In Brazil, a mercantile boom and import substitution policies have been weighed down by a poverty rate that reached above 40% in 1990 (O’Neil, Fields, & Share, 2018, p. 622). Protectionist trade practice offered similar benefit to South Africa, but the collapse of apartheid and its controls on black wages has completely reshaped the cost of doing business. (O’Neil, Fields, & Share, 2018, p. 654)

Socially, the imperial nations brought elements of their own cultures to colonial shores. These have not always been accepted favorably throughout the colonies involved. At a minimum, they have resulted in meaningful changes to the social structures in colonial territories. Britain’s presence in Nigeria created a space where Christianity could take a firm hold among the Igbo and Yoruba people (O’Neil, Fields, & Share, 2018, p. 667) which today places those states in conflict with aggressive Muslim factions among the nation’s Hausa Fulani state. Even amongst the nation’s Christian south, a bloody civil war was fought to distinguish a distinct Igbo nation. Who can say where Nigerian society would be today if the seeds of religious conflict hadn’t been planted? Speaking also to the formative influence of the colonial power, who’s to say where Nigerian society would be today if their strongest millions hadn’t been shackled and shipped elsewhere? 

The colonial powers of the world strove to be the masters of their own destinies. Their economies and societies were organized according to how the state needed them to be, and thrived enough on their own that colonial ventures could be afforded. The colonies themselves however were farmed for resources. Mineral or material wealth was claimed on behalf of distant thrones, leaving colony lands impoverished. Colonists were sometimes designated “property” and enslaved by the million, leaving local workforces and social fabric unable to make up for the loss. Colonial societies were engineered by their masters to accomplish what was needed of them, not to be capable of supplanting them. (That said, the persistence of democratic mechanisms in India, Nigeria, and the United States suggest some colonizers may have just had more skill at nation-building then others.)

In the Global North, greater financial security affords greater room to explore levels of social balance. Essentially, people can afford to be free and to make different choices based on the resources available to them. Wealth is so great that nations can implement entirely different levels of taxation according to social mores, putting social equality within reach. Even Marx’s equality-bearing revolution wasn’t supposed to happen until a threshold of development – a creation of wealth –  had been engineered, and there was to have been enough of it to fuel a global revolution. Collectively, the nations of the global south have evolved under substantially different conditions than those of the global north. Lacking is both the wealth and self-determination to play on the field of equality versus freedom; the south strives for any of either.

2. What is a nondemocratic regime? Explain and discuss the ways in which these regimes maintain their power. 

Nondemocratic regimes are those systems of governance that do not rely on democratic vote-collection processes to determine the course of policy or leadership. While democracies tend to fall into recognizable templates, nondemocratic regimes can take many forms- royal rule over Saudi Arabia, neo-communism in North Korea, the many military juntas that have existed across the history of less-developed nations, these are all valid examples.

Despite these differences in circumstance, there are some commonalities present within nondemocratic regimes. Power within these systems tends to be held within the hands of a select few, whether they be officers of a certain rank or members of a royal family. In the absence of democratic transitions, leadership changes can either be inherited as in the cases of Saudi Arabia and North Korea, transitioned willingly as from military rule over Brazil to democracy, or left to chaotic chance as followed the deposing of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

A wide range of tools are available for these regimes to maintain power. Order is sometimes enforced with mechanisms of fear and violence by state police forces. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea are all examples of regimes that use physical or social coercion to maintain standards of authority or society. The flow of information is sometimes heavily stemmed; North Korea blocks the network entirely, while China acts to moderate the internet by blocking out unwelcome content and replacing it with local flavor, or none at all (“The Tank Man”, 2006). An active collector of information tends to be the state itself, maintaining behavioral or ideological profiles of their citizens to stay ahead of possible dissent (O’Neil, Fields, & Share, 2018, p. 366). Because these nondemocratic regimes are more profitable when they are functional, and because you can’t kill everybody, these systems will often have structures or institutions paralleling those in democracies. Bureaucratic agencies completing administrative functions, unique cultures of art; to borrow from Marx, these are superstructures borrowed from other nations and made to work in-house. There are sometimes elections held in nondemocratic regimes, but their results are either so preordained or inconsequential that they serve little purpose but to mollify the concerns of the disenfranchised.

To maintain authority and discourage dissent amongst influential elites, their participation is frequently steered by those in power. “Corporatism” for example, is the practice of operating state-run civil institutions while outlawing non-governmental organizations (O’Neil, Fields, & Share, 2018, p. 367). The society is managed as a business, with state interests determining state structures, and the people as employees operating on its behalf. “Clientelism” is a system that makes use of recruited influencers amongst society (O’Neil, Fields, & Share, 2018, p. 368). In exchange for some reward, public shows of support are offered to the regime by figures that carry weight in society.

The variability of nondemocratic regimes makes it difficult to characterize them as “good” or “bad” simply because of their being nondemocratic. The effects of nondemocratic rule have frequently been detrimental to the citizens involved, but those have been at the behest of the frequently-corrupted few in actual power. The mechanisms and institutions are either neutral or optional (not every regime has a brutal secret police), leaving room for leadership ambitions beyond personal power. Since the fading of the European kingdoms however, benevolent princes have been in short supply.