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Thursday March 28, 2024

Momentary mimicry addiction

By Mosharraf Zaidi
June 09, 2020

Can you really enhance the market when there is no market to enhance? This seems like a simple enough proposition. Of course, not. Yet stripped down to its bare essentials, the proposition of good governance, in the absence of the mechanisms, processes and institutions that enable such governance to exist, is that simple to understand.

Developing countries do not have good governance because they do not have the mix of social and economic norms or interactions matrix that enable what we have come to view as ‘good governance’.

These ideas have been debated over many years, but the most appealing political economist to write about this is Mushtaq Khan, a professor of economics at SOAS, University of London. In his words, “history as well as economic theory tells us that market access may not be of much use for a developing country if it does not have the competence and capability to produce goods and services of the right quality and price for the global marketplace or domestic markets. At the heart of development therefore is the challenge of developing broad-based productive capabilities in a society.”

When we think of these productive capabilities, we become concerned with issues like ease of doing business, or predictability and enforceability of contracts and property rights. And this is where, in the words of the nursery rhyme, “we all fall down”. Western institutions, understandably, are committed to a linear path in which good governance is a product of the creation of Khan’s “broad-based productive capabilities”. But the path that developed Western economies followed, to arrive at those capabilities was not one littered with consultants’ powerpoint presentations or heat maps that indicate degree of progress. The path that has enabled countries like the United States, or the United Kingdom, to arrive at their current governance capacities is defined by a brutal, inhuman, racist and unforgiving extraction of labour and surplus.

The George Floyd murder, therefore, is not merely the enactment of entitled white men throttling the life out of one black man. The George Floyd murder is the legacy of a system that has extracted the life out of many millions, over the last two centuries, to perpetuate the surplus rents that enable wealthy, developed nations to continue to sustain their military, economic and political dominance around the world – even though the colonies have all been decolonized, the slaves have all been freed, the civil rights have all been afforded, and London has a mayor born to people whose grandparents were colonial subjects, and the US had a president that looked like the millions of slaves that were brought forcibly to the Americas to work in the plantations.

Today, the vastly oversimplified debates about development in countries like Pakistan concern themselves with instituting the very “broad-based productive capabilities” that Khan warns, require a long, and often brutal historical process to arrive at.

A different way to think about this is by using two terms that I attribute to Harvard economist, Lant Pritchett (but which have been used by others before him). Pritchett and his colleagues ask the same questions so many of us ask each other in WhatsApp groups, on Facebook or Twitter, or in our living rooms: ‘how does a country like Pakistan keep failing to get better at being a decent place to be born, for the average citizen, over and over and over again?’

Pritchett says countries like Pakistan develop two kinds of techniques that allow for the entire conversation around development to continue ad infinitum, without very much changing, at least in the short and medium run.

In his words: “The first technique is isomorphic mimicry, which allows organizations (and states) to maintain legitimacy by adopting the forms of successful organizations and states even without their functions. Societal and institutional structures can create an ecosystem in which isomorphic mimicry is actually the optimal strategy for state organizations and, in consequence, their leaders and managers. The second technique is premature load bearing, which allows failure to exist while creating the illusion of implementing developmental policies and proves a robust technique of failure by providing many seemingly attractive options that allow failure to continue.”

As we watch the fallout of the George Floyd murder in the United States, hundreds of millions of people all around the world share a sense of solidarity with the marchers and protesters. Many millions of others in the developing world will experience an inescapable sense of schadenfreude. Regardless of how deeply moved we are by the spontaneous and emotionally riveting uprising of sentiment at this moment, or how bitterly we see the differential in calls for justice for wrongdoing, there are some lessons from other recent ‘George Floyd moments’ that should inform how we process and understand this current one.

Let’s take two seemingly substantial developments in the US as a result of the protests: the first is the Minneapolis city council’s decision to “dismantle the Minneapolis city police department”, and the second is James Bennet ‘resigning’ as the New York Times op-ed page editor.

On the one hand, these two events represent incredibly powerful and instructive moments, especially for a country like Pakistan.

The Minneapolis city police department may or may not end up being dismantled but the very idea that a local government, or city council can even discuss the notion to “dismantle” the police is so alien and so inconceivable, that it beggars belief. Pakistan does not have city councils, nor local governments. The only time it does is when a military dictator seeks to undermine and dismantle federalism, but ‘empowering’ ‘grassroots’ democracy.

Pakistan also does not have cities that have their own police departments. Police ‘officers’ are almost entirely drawn from a centralized, federal police force, even though law and order is a provincial subject. So when a man named Zeeshan is shot dead in broad daylight in Sahiwal, or a girl named Zainab is raped and murdered in Kasur, or a young man named Naqeebullah Mehsud is killed in Karachi or a Bramsh loses her mother to violence – it doesn’t matter.

James Bennet getting fired, essentially for publishing an op-ed by US Senator Tom Cotton, but more widely for expanding the political spectrum that the NY Times op-ed pages cover, is also a wild idea. Newspaper op-ed writers in Pakistan have suddenly lost their columns, lost their jobs, been picked up arbitrarily by unknown persons, and sometimes, chased down and shot at. The largest TV news and newspaper group owner is in jail, for months now, without charges. All this too doesn’t matter.

The bad news for followers of Mushtaq Khan and Lant Pritchett like me is that the mode of production for how societies operate has changed, rather suddenly. And it is no longer just the poor, developing nations that are struggling with productive capability, or isomorphic mimicry, or premature load bearing. The dismantling of the Minneapolis PD, while morally necessary, and important, also doesn't matter. Neither does the firing of James Bennet. We are now suffering from a global addiction to ‘momentary mimicry’. The belief that individual moments of voice escalation actually matter, and can help make change happen.

They cannot. They did not at Tahrir Square, they did not on the hashtag that we all trended that one time, they do not when a minister or a bureaucrat is transferred, and they will not because of the George Floyd protests.

Our foundational assumptions about how societies change, and how governments operate need a software update. They now run on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok APIs. Each moment of global or local outrage is like a long drawn out video. It lasts for however long it lasts. But as soon as it is over, you will watch the next one. And the people benefitting from a racist, or unjust, or unfair system, will keep laughing all the way to the bank.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.