One of my best friends who I am committed to meet fortnightly for our mutual discussions and conversations on national and international matters asked me an interesting question during our last meeting: how to define aristocracy? My friend didn’t know that I had just finished the complete works of Oscar Wilde and I read a lot on what aristocracy meant. In The Importance of Being Earnest, the famous drama of Oscar Wilde, ‘What do you do for living?’ is a question that a member of the privileged class asks one of the people attending a social gathering and educates him by saying, ‘you cannot belong to the world of aristocracy if you work, because an aristocrat never works as he lives a privileged life blessed to him by his ancestors who built a huge fortune for him.’ This question has prompted me to address the art of aristocracy in Pakistan and that is what I am writing about today.
For any country to progress and become a modern welfare state its institutions play a huge role. They have to be based on impersonal bureaucratic set-up so that they can function freely, justly and without interference. The problem with aristocracy in Pakistan is that it is not earnest in being aristocratic. Instead of not do anything for living and enjoying their lives. they have ensured that they eroded all the institutions of their independence so that they can secure places for themselves in the government. What this has done is deprived the majority of people of Pakistan of the benefits they could secure though independent and free institutions and today the society looks up to itself to solve its problems more than it looks up to the almost dysfunctional and rent-seeking institutions in Pakistan.
What aristocracy has done to Pakistan after joining politics is something phenomenal. It created and now holds a veto over any reform that might ever take place. Many Pakistanis are now convinced that nothing in this country will innovate anymore institutionally. So, what is it that society can do to displace stakeholders, the great aristocracy of Pakistan that blocks institutional change? There is not a right answer but a historic answer to this question. I give two examples to explain how stakeholders or aristocracy was replaced to create modern welfare states.
First, the American civil war in which the aristocratic south wanted to defend the institution of slavery. These were the over 30 Union states and their stakeholders who were pitched against the 7 Confederate States led by Abraham Lincoln. The institutional rules under the constitution of the time permitted the Union States to retain slavery so the conflict could never have been resolved under the constitution. What it necessitated was a civil war that consumed the lives of over 600,000 Americans. Aristocrats of the south were deprived of an outdated norm through the use of force and violence.
The second example is of South Korea. General Park Chung Hee came to power in South Korea in 1961. He implemented a policy of industrialisation and transformed the country from an agrarian backwater into a major industrial power in space of a generation. What General Park did was not only industrialise South Korea but also allow the emerging new groups – of university students, churches, trade unions, etc – to mobilise socially. The unintended consequence of this policy was that the new social groups began agitating for the military to step down from power. This finally happened in 1987 and the first presidential elections were held in South Korea. The general contributed to the industrialised growth of South Korea but unintentionally contributed to its transition as well to democracy. Today South Korea showcases a legitimate democratic regime and is the 12th biggest economic power in the world. Today the population of South Korea is 59 million and its workforce is made up of 45 million people aged 15 and older who are all employed or are seeking employment. South Korea no longer has an aristocracy. After the installation of the constitution which adopted the republic system, the concept of nobility was abolished.
The South Korean example is a typical example of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that suggests that political decay in a society occurs when economic and social modernisation outruns political development. General Park’s focus and contribution was one dimensional, based on improving the economy, but South Korea could not have become a great political and economic power unless it had liberated socially and politically.
The American example that I quoted earlier also leaves us with a lesson – that the many revolutions that the world witnessed, including the American revolution, were seeking to resolve problems in society, but the only way these problems could be resolved was to resort to violence. There was just no other way. All these modern democratic welfare states or states that form the core of the world experienced violence, conflicts and wars before they discovered themselves, and their true identity. They shackled their states with a social contract that makes the state accountable to people. Recently, South Korea tried to engineer a military government but could not do that under the public pressure.
People in Pakistan must understand that the world not only experienced revolt and people’s revolutions, but it has also experienced industrial, technological and informational revolutions. Today, de-seating the entrenched aristocracy in any political system is not easy, but it does not either mean that people should stop trying.
Millions of people in Pakistan suffer from poverty, hunger and disease on daily basis. Millions more will continue to suffer if we do not experience the kind of political transitions that took place in the United States or in South Korea. The social mobilisation in Pakistan has already turned the table and the youth of this country is aspiring to make it great – something that our generation failed to do. The political puppetry i.e. the art of manipulating political puppets is now a dying political art in the world. Through puppetry one can only create theatrical performances but not a government that can properly function and deliver. What Pakistan needs is an end to aristocracy and a start of real democracy.
