The End of Power (19 page)

Britain is not alone. In Spain, the two main parties, Partido Popular (PP) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), have alternated power since the onset of democracy in 1978. But, like Britain, Spain also has important regional parties, and the Provincial governments (Catalonia and the Basque country, among others) have been very successful in gaining more autonomy at the expense of the power of the national government in Madrid. In Italy, the same is true with the Lega del Nord and other regional political groups.

The EU parliament has opened avenues of participation for small parties in all twenty-seven member-states. Whether the parliament has real powers does not matter as much as the path that it offers to legitimacy and viability at home. Meanwhile, devolution is an international trend. Italy set up elected regional councils as early as 1970. France followed suit with regional assemblies in 1982. Belgium turned itself into a federal system with regional assemblies in 1993. Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, and Norway all introduced some kind of new elected body at the subnational level between the 1970s and the 1990s. In some countries, the number of municipalities with elected officials has increased: Bolivia doubled its municipalities in 1994 and increased the scope of their authority.

Here again, the increasingly established democracies of Latin America are contributing to the growing pace of decentralization. The number of countries in Latin America in which the local government executive authorities (mayors) are directly elected by the population, as opposed to appointed by the central authorities, increased from three in 1980 to seventeen in 1995.
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A study by the Interamerican Development Bank found that
subnational governments in the region went from handling 8 percent to 15 percent of public expenditure in a fifteen-year period that began in 1990. In the most decentralized countries, the proportion was much higher: around 40 percent of expenditure in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Major decentralization programs are also under way in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Estonia.
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Meanwhile, several federal systems have divided existing states into two, creating new local executive and legislative bodies. Since 2000, India has added the states of Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand and proposed another, Telangan. Nigeria has nearly doubled its number of states, from nineteen in 1976 to thirty-six today. Even Canada has divided its Northwest Territories, creating the province of Nunavut.

New forums mean new opportunities. Across Europe, an array of left-wing, right-wing, ecologist, regionalist, single-issue, and, in some cases, downright eccentric parties like the Pirate Party International have taken advantage of new arenas to gain respectability and take votes away from the traditional players. A vote for them is no longer wasted; their small sizes or outlier stances are no longer an obstacle to relevance. These “fringe” parties can spoil, distract, retard, and even veto the decisions of the larger parties and their coalitions. The small “pirate” parties have always existed, but nowadays there are more of them and their ability to limit the choices of the megaplayers is felt in most of the world's democracies.

More power for local and regional authorities has also changed the prospects and public profiles of mayors and regional governors, sometimes boosting their national political careers and sometimes creating alternatives that bypass the capital altogether. The de facto foreign policy that some cities and regions now carry out goes well beyond the conventional trade promotion delegations and sister-city ceremonies.

Some scholars argue that many cities and regions are now so successfully unmoored from central governments that a modern version of the medieval order of city-states is coming into being.
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The pattern and the players were familiar. For more than seventy years, a civilian and military elite held sway in Thailand, first through military rule and then, after 1970, in a fragile electoral framework upended periodically by coups and military transition governments of various durations. Despite the instability, Thailand achieved fast economic growth in the 1980s
and 1990s. Military-owned banks and manufacturers and civilian businessmen prospered through coups and constitutions. Billionaire and former policeman Thaksin Shinawatra became prime minister in 2001 on a populist platform, and won reelection in 2005. Soon accusations of malfeasance and corruption began to swirl. A two-year political crisis ensued. It featured botched elections, a coup, and elections again in 2007, with the eventual result that Thaksin's sister became prime minister.

Amid this turbulence, a new political player was asserting itself: the judiciary. Beginning in 2006, rulings by Thailand's top courts increasingly set the direction for national politics. The courts dissolved Thaksin's party and several others, banned various leaders from politics, and at one point disqualified a prime minister for taking payments to appear on a television cooking show. In December 2008, the Constitutional Court dissolved the ruling party for the rather more serious cause of electoral fraud, ending three months of popular unrest and opening the way for a new coalition government.

The Thai courts had cover. The original 2006 intervention came from a tribunal originally set up by the Thai military. And not long before that, the king of Thailand—a figure with considerable moral authority—had made a speech in which he urged the courts to act wisely. Still, the emergence of the courts in political life altered long-established traditions and gave protesters and activists a new forum to make their case. In India, the Supreme Court has stepped into the vacuum created by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's unwieldy and ineffective coalition, investigating illegal mining, overturning appointments, even determining the retirement age of the army's chief. As one Indian commentator was quoted as saying, “India has become a banana republic in which the banana is peeled by the supreme court.”
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A functioning judiciary is one thing. Courts that solve political disputes or step in to remove governments are another thing altogether. Even in countries with respected judicial systems, the precedents are few. But those that exist are spectacular. One was the litigation in the Florida and US Supreme Courts in 2000 that resulted in George W. Bush's winning the US presidency on a legal ruling. Another was the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigation by a panel of Italian judges, led by Antonio di Pietro, beginning in 1992. It revealed a system of corruption so extensive that it became known as
tangentopoli
, or “bribesville.” In a few months the investigation ensnared party heads, former ministers, and regional officials along with many industrialists.

Eventually, the probe implicated so many figures in Italy's traditionally dominant parties, including the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, that in subsequent elections these parties faded into irrelevance. In 1994 the Christian Democrats, who had supplied Italy with most of its prime ministers since World War II, disbanded altogether, splintering into other parties. The same year, the Socialist Party—whose leader, Bettino Craxi, had been prime minister in the 1980s but became a principal target of the investigation—dissolved itself as well after 102 years in existence. Mani Pulite did not rid Italy of corruption. But it completely transformed the Italian political landscape, exploding the old party system and setting the stage for new groups on the right (Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia), left (the Democrats), and regional and other parties. Judges again became important protagonists during the long reign of Silvio Berlusconi over Italian politics, as he became entangled in one scandal after another. These made him a frequent target of judicial inquiries until his final fall from power in 2011.

Such investigations have turned celebrity judges into new players in political life. Antonio di Pietro, the judge at the center of the probe, eventually resigned from the bench and went into politics himself at the helm of a small party. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who has led numerous high-profile investigations at home and overseas, has targeted Spanish politicians, bankers, and the Basque militant organization ETA as well as US officials, Al Qaeda, and former Argentine military rulers. His most famous case was his demand for extradition of Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet, resulting in Pinochet's lengthy detainment in Britain in 1998–1999. (Garzon would himself be indicted and then suspended for exceeding his authority with an aggressive investigation into atrocities committed by the regime of Francisco Franco.) The formation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the establishment of international tribunals on war crimes have made international public figures of magistrates like South Africa's Richard Goldstone and Canada's Louise Arbour. Their level of prominence and power on the world stage easily outstrips that attained by some of their predecessors during the two Allied war crimes tribunals following World War II.

In the landscape of domestic politics, the increasing power of judges varies enormously from one country to another, but in general terms it has imposed new constraints on the exercise of power by government leaders and political parties. True, with many judicial systems only dubiously independent, the increased frequency of legal rulings in politics is
no guarantee of wise oversight. In Pakistan, for example, many suspect that the country's military has used the Supreme Court to keep its civilian government in check. It is not necessarily a democratic development—the accountability of judges varies greatly—but it is nonetheless a real part of the decay of political power.

Who are our leaders? There was a time when leaders were inextricably entwined with the apparatus of governments and parties. Even revolutionaries aspired to high office. Lately, however, many of our heroes have arrived at their fame via the digital world—using technology to spread messages and influence outcomes in ways that would previously have required the infrastructure of parties, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or the traditional press. The Beijing writer and activist Liu Xiaobo spearheaded the online manifesto Charter 08 calling for China to incorporate universal democratic and human rights values into its modernizations and reforms—and he was summarily arrested and imprisoned, winning the Nobel Peace Prize the following year while in jail for his “subversive” activities.

Egypt's Wael Ghonim, finding the local opposition parties weak and unreliable, organized a movement through Facebook to demand government accountability. In Colombia, an engineer named Oscar Morales started a Facebook group called “One Million Voices Against FARC” to protest the rebel group's widespread attacks on civilians, leading to massive rallies and pressure that resulted in the release of hostages. The Twitter activists of Moldova helped spark that country's political transition. Kenyan lawyer Ory Okolloh and a blogger called “M” launched a watchdog site in 2006 on Kenya's corrupt political scene.
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Iranian-American Kelly Golnoush Niknejad started
TehranBureau.com
to gather and spread news directly from fellow Iranians during the popular uprising after the 2009 presidential elections, with foreign journalists banned from the country.
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Sami Ben Gharbia, a blogger and civil society activist, helped incite anti-regime demonstrations in Tunisia by using his group blog to spread devastating tales of corruption contained in the US diplomatic cables released through WikiLeaks.

These new actors are enriching the scope of political discourse around the world. They operate outside the channels and beyond the control of traditional political organizations, both government- and party-related. They are ubiquitous and, when facing repression, they can also be highly
elusive. But technology is simply the tool. The bigger picture is a cascading diffusion of power that has put individuals in an unprecedented position not only to bypass political institutions developed over decades but also to influence, persuade, or constrain “real” politicians more directly and more effectively than any classical political theorist could have imagined.

Left in a room together, John Paulson and Julian Assange might soon be at each other's throats. Paulson runs Paulson & Co, one of the world's largest hedge funds. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the Web-based organization that specializes in divulging the secret information of governments and corporations. And yet they have one very significant thing in common: both symbolize a new breed of actors who are transforming national politics by limiting the power of governments.

With their ability to move billions of dollars at the speed of light away from a country whose economic policies they distrust, hedge funds are just one of the many financial institutions whose decisions constrain the power of governments.
New York Times
columnist and author Thomas Friedman calls the constraints imposed by these players “the Golden Straitjacket”: