The Nobel committee has a problem. They keep giving the peace prize to people to war criminals.
In their most recent debacle, they have the 2019 prize to Abey Ahmed of Ethiopia for making peace with Eritrea. It seemed sensible, a popular young presidents buried the hatchet with their former territory to focus on development. Ahmed seemed like a good man, a great candidate.
Unfortunately, being a good man is easily faked. We now know Ahmed’s real motivation for peace was expanding his coalition relative to internal rivals that might stop his rise to dictatorship. Shortly after the peace deal Ahmed canceled federal elections to destroy subnational rivals. The Tigrayans resisted, and now Ethiopian and Eritrean troops together are busily destroying Tigray.
The problem is that politicians can and do pretend to be “good” to get power. If you are a potential ally, then whatever you define as good can easily be impersonated; committed democrat, liberal, communist, developmental state. After all, any politician that can’t pretend to care never reaches the national stage. The Nobel Peace prize is one more feather in their cap, which only requires a bit more pretending. But in weak democracies the charade only lasts as long as the leader is vulnerable. Once the leader gets enough mercenaries, expectation and appointees, eliminating rivals is worth more than Norwegian admiration.
What are the Norwegian bigwigs to do? They want to give prizes to high-status people that further peace. Sure, they can give grants to NGO’s and activists, but these political lightweights are lower-status.
How about constitutional designers? The real problem of politics is not finding someone who isn’t a sociopath, it’s designing a system that makes the sociopaths serve the people. Thomas Jefferson sold pardons after he lost re-election, but for decades before that he worked hard for the people to build his career.
The lawyers and politicians who write them are lower status than presidents, but they are higher status than NGO leaders or street activists. And they are not in power, so they can’t commit atrocities later.
More importantly, the institutional design, coalition building and negotiating that produces peace and democracy don’t get enough publicity. It’s a long hard slog, slow boring of hard beams. The us didn’t protect democracy by picking good people, they distributed violence capacity between 13 governors and restricted the president from appointing West Point students.
I live in DC with a large Ethiopian community, who are acrimoniously split over Abey Ahmed. The Amharans argue that Ahmed is “good” and the Tigrayan leaders are “bad”(from crimes in the 90s) so the violence is “good”. I try to explain that when Ahmed has the only remaining army, democracy will hinge on his patronage networks need.
Maybe giving a Nobel peace prize to a Hamilton instead of a Washington will teach people that peace needs thought-out institutions not “good” people.
I totally agree that "autocracy is always and everywhere an expectation phenomenon". My favorite piece of evidence is how quickly regimes collapse when the leader is terminally ill. Nothing has changed but you found out the Shah has cancer so you immediately throw down your arms. Because "Hello prince, i killed people for your dad now rob the people to pay me" doesn't work. Clearly, repression is motivated by the expectation the incumbent will win and pay you back in the future.
Yes, if people expect democracy to fail it probably will. But the inverse is not true. People expecting democracy to succeed is not nearly a sufficient condition for its success, and such expectations are more common than successful democratizations. The Russians really expected to democratize in 1992, and their experiment failed. The French really expected to democratize in 1789 and didn't. The Ethiopians I talk to today really expect Ethiopia to stay democratic and it obviously won't.
The US didn't just believe in themselves and win the gun game. They denied coercive capacity to the president and distributed it among state governors. They then constrained the governors with the threat of tariffs to prevent secession or shirking. The governors are specialized leader-restraining elites with coordination capacity, the ability to punish each other for shirking, and they are competitively selected.
The Chilean regime had strong expectations of democratic continuity but a terrible constitution that gave Allende the presidency with 35% of the popular vote, leading to collapse into autocracy.
On the other hand, society wide expectation flips are surprsingly common. I agree that it's weird, but it's true. Autocratic regimes (not leaders) are very shot lived. The oldest autocratic regime today is Saudi Arabia, which became a state around 1920. Even Saudi is currently in a massive consolidation crisis. The CCP is ancient at ~80 years old, and also in a consolidation crisis. Consolidation means the leader is systematically removing competent elites to cement control. When a consolidated leader dies regimes often collapse. Most autocratic states have not had a regime last 30 years. So it seems like the autocats expectation equilibrium would be very stable, but empirically it is quite unstable.
One could argue that the expectation that any regime will keep power is weaker than the expectation that "democracy will backslide into autocracy". I think that's a stretch, but this post is already too long.