One island, two worlds (Haiti vs. Dominican Republic)
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A serious international intervention is basically a non-starter. Rich countries would be accused of colonialism and sharply criticized for any mistake, other countries in the region don't have the money or force capability, and nobody has a real motivation to pursue such a thankless task. If I remember right, Haitians themselves are pretty iffy on even wanting security provided by foreigners (due to history).
A sibling comment mentioned the Australian intervention in East Timor. I can easily dismiss that by saying “well the Australians have a vested interest in a stable neighbourhood. They’re just self pricks looking out for themselves”. This statement would be technically correct but also pretty meaningless in this discussion.
That's a gotcha if I've ever seen one. Why would self serving motivations be a disqualifier? Not to mention, you can basically argue that it's always self serving motivations no matter what.
That said, yeah things are more likely to go badly than to go well. Nation building is hard; the allies were able to reform Japan and (West) Germany because while they had evil states, the states were at least functioning. It seems easier to improve governments morally than functionally.
Haiti lost its functional state when the French colonialists fled en masse after the 1804 massacre. Due to racism, they were the only ones allowed in administrative positions in the bureaucracy so when they left Haiti, it was left with no one qualified to run the state apparatus. Since the population were transplanted slaves, they had no tribal traditions to fall back on. Without a continuity of bureaucracy it was left hobbled to this day. Since the state can’t afford to police the population, these gangs fill the void because they can use force to collect taxes (in the broadest sense because usually this takes the form of business shakedowns and roadblocks that they use to extract money from the population).
Of course German elements of democracy goes back to pre-Christian times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)
> The period saw a breakdown in the traditional master-servant relationship between a lord and his vassals, with many instances of vassals rebelling against their lords, internal dynastic conflict over lordships within noble families (in which vassals would take sides), and the installation of figurehead lords by cadet branches of noble families.[3] The period was also marked by the loosening of samurai culture, with people born into other social strata sometimes making a name for themselves as warriors and thus becoming samurai.
> [W]eariness of war, socioeconomic unrest and poor treatment by aristocrats provoked the wrath of the peasant class. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants and even villages would organize uprisings (known as "ikki") against the ruling class. An extraordinary example is the Kaga Rebellion, in which the local ikki had staged a large-scale revolt with the support of the True Pure Land sect (thereby establishing the term ikkō ikki) and assumed control of the entire province of Kaga.
Whatever post-Heian, pre-Meiji Japan was, it was not an orderly, harmonious society.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system
Contrast that with Haiti where the vast majority of Haitians weren’t allowed to hold administrative positions in the colonial government so when the remnants of the French bureaucrats fled after the 1804 massacre, Haiti was left with very few people who knew how to run any part of the government. They were left with post offices but without anyone with the experience to actually run a postal system. No officers capable of training and disciplining a police force or military. And so on. They had to build up their bureaucracy entirely from scratch which is an incredibly hard thing to do and usually turns into situations like in Haiti, as opposed to outcomes like Japan where the state isn’t violently wiped clean. It’s hard to overstate how big a roll that continuity plays when a new polity forms in its success or failure.
The Caribbean is a special case though where there are lots of miraculous turnarounds because tourism is so lucrative.
The West supported an brutal military dictatorship in South Korea for decades. South Korean democracy is the result of internal struggle by the South Korean people.
I mean, the US was a huge supporter of Suharto in Indonesia as the "less bad" option to the thread of communism, and Mubarak in Egypt as an alternative to the worse option of a Islamic Brotherhood run state, or possibly something even more deeply Soviet aligned. I don't think there is any "lesser evil" warlord to pick in Haiti right now and prop up above any of the others.
If you're just intervening because you're charitable and nice, then things will be mismanaged and messed up.
Like the UN peacekeepers raping and spreading cholera in Haiti.
But the west today tries to build democracy in countries that lack any state to begin with (e.g. Afghanistan) or in countries where they have destroyed the state (Iraq, Syria). They hassle or intervene in developing countries with authoritarian governments (e.g. Bangladesh, Philippines, etc.) while overlooking their own histories.
I don’t think that’s right - although some on the left have advocated “industrial democracy” or “workplace democracy”, it has by and large failed to take off - many democratic countries it doesn’t really exist (beyond rare exceptions), and even those which have some semblance of it (e.g. works councils in the EU) it is in practice rather toothless, comparable to the powerless “advisory” legislatures established by some Middle Eastern monarchies
Families don’t function democratically-the parents negotiate things between themselves and the children don’t really have a choice in it until they get old enough to leave the family home and fend for themselves.
My neighbourhood isn’t a democracy - yes we have an elected local government but it covers a much larger population and territory than just our neighbourhood. Even if one’s neighbourhood has something like a “homeowners association”, that’s usually timocratic (government by property owners) not democratic (government by the people) since renters don’t get to vote, adult dependents of homeowners don’t get to vote, a couple may jointly own a home but they get only one vote not two, some wealthy person owns five homes so they get five votes, etc (and sometimes even weighted voting, so rather than one property one vote, more expensive properties may give you more votes than cheaper ones)
For example:
> Families don’t function democratically-the parents negotiate things between themselves and the children don’t really have a choice in it until they get old enough to leave the family home and fend for themselves.
Not all families operate this way. If a family is choosing where to go eat dinner, sometimes the father (or mother) always makes a decision and no one else gets to choose. Sometimes the father and mother negotiate. Sometimes the kids are the ones who almost always make the decision. Sometimes the parents consult the kids and have a group discussion and decision. Sometimes there's actually a vote amongst all family members and majority rules.
I believe a similar pattern happens in communities. Maybe a little less so in companies, as they tend to be the most top-down structures I think in even the most democratic societies, and yet even there, I think there are culturally varying levels of involvement in the decision making process.
Democracy doesn't come from reading books, it starts with what parents say to their small children. I'm a Bangladeshi married to a founding stock American. My wife was steeped in democracy from the beginning. As a kid, she attended mainline Protestant churches run by elected members of the congregation, and her dad participated in local government and civic organizations. This is so different from the relationship Bangladeshis have with their communities.
[1] About 70% approval according to one western organization's polling from 2023: https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-bangladesh-survey-hasina-remain....
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/05/bangladesh-interim-gove...
Yes because Haiti already has plenty of examples of the United States and other first world countries intervening, and it made things worse.
(even after adjusting for the incredible injustice of all the external actors, and nature itself).
If you are lucky enough to get such a stable system, it's a high priority to defend it. Don't weaken it for marginal improvements for your cause.
Turkey is much more stable than Haiti, but Erdogan managed to build an authoritarian system centered around him anyway, and a constitutional change towards presidential system was a crucial step.
Presidential system might work in France and the US, but especially in the US the near future of it is still uncertain. Trying it in countries that barely hold together doesn't seem wise.
France has a semipresidential system, not a presidential system - it has both a President directly elected by the voters, and a Prime Minister accountable to the legislature, with the two having a (somewhat complicated and uneasy) division of powers - essentially, the President controls foreign relations and the military, the Prime Minister controls most domestic policies. It works reasonably well when both President and Prime Minister are from the same party, it works with more acrimony when they are from opposed parties (cohabitation), the recent political upheavals in France have led more and more to question if it is still the right system, or whether France should return to the parliamentary system of its Third and Fourth republics - but, even at its worst, I think it still works better than the presidential system used by the US and much of Latin America. The presidential system concentrates too much power in a single individual, who is difficult to hold accountable, leading to the problem of strongmen (caudillos) which have been a plague upon Latin American history-and maybe now with Trump the US is starting to move in the same direction
So your point about whether "you are lucky enough to get such a stable system" is inaccurate. It's not luck. People created those systems. You can even see how that processed happened, deliberately, in recent history in places like Singapore.
The first half of Behind The Bastard's episode on Baby Doc has a pretty good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTEEokXizd8
Sure, the people have an outsized influence on the success of a nation, but the institutions also shape the people and empower some people over others. Can you imagine how much differently the US would look if it wasn’t founded on slavery and oppression? If women didnt have to wait 150 years to vote? If we didn’t institutionalize a gerrymanderable legislative system?
The institutions matter AND people matter, but bad institutions empower terrible people.
Where is there evidence of this?
I don’t think that is really fair on France - many of those failures were due to defeats in war - for example, the Third Republic didn’t “fail”, it was conquered by Nazi Germany - and when it was liberated, the French decided to take the opportunity to rewrite their constitution, but I think that was a choice rather than something they were forced into.
And the Fifth Republic was engineered by de Gaulle given the opportunity of the 1958 coup attempt. If de Gaulle had unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1957, the Fourth Republic might have survived. Probably the 1958 coup attempt would still have occurred even absent de Gaulle - but neither its success nor failure would have necessitated a rewrite of the constitution (as opposed to maybe just some tweaks), although certainly it could have resulted in one. Even de Gaulle didn’t have to rewrite the constitution, he decided he wanted to and was handed the opportunity to get what he wanted, but maybe in some alternative timeline he didn’t feel as strongly about that and so the constitutional rewrite never happened
Why didn’t the American Civil War result in a rewrite of the US constitution? Probably because the Union had a clear and convincing victory. If the Union had lost, or if the war had turned into a stalemate, much greater odds the US constitution would not have survived it - a less-defeated Confederacy might have negotiated reintegration into the Union subject to a constitutional rewrite; if the Confederacy had won and retained its independence, the Union might well have decided to write a new constitution in response.
The US constitutional system has arguably been reconstituted at least 3 times (in order of plausibility): US Civil War and Reconstruction amendments, FDR and New Deal, LBJ and Civil Rights Act of 1964. The latter two were not even primarily accomplished via formal Constitutional amendment, just a reinterpretation of what the Constitution allowed and compelled. What makes Trump different than those? Just the fact that, unlike the first three, it's more right-wing than progressive?
I’m not saying that whatever is happening now is necessarily good, but will it lead to the collapse of the US Constitution?
You need the benevolent dictator, then the stability, then the slow introduction of government by the people over decades.
After the slaves revolted and gained independence in 1804, the state was embargoed. Haiti's first president, Alexandre Pétion, offered paying the value of the lost land to the French government.
Simultaneously, they reached out to the British and offered favorable trade terms to them. But a slave revolt was seen as untenable at the time and the British agreed to allow France to pursue "whatever means possible, including that of arms, to recover Saint-Domingue and to subdue the inhabitants of that colony."
Around the same time, Haiti tried to ally itself with the US, offering its ports + favorable trade. The US also sided with the French against the former slave colony.
Facing military invasion, in 1825, they agreed to pay indemnity for the value of the slaves lost by the French government for a total of 150 million francs. As they couldn't pay the amount in lump sum, Haiti was forced to enter into unfavorable loans with the United States and France to pay the slavery debt. Around 80%+ of GDP was used to pay foreign debt
By the late 1800s, eighty percent of Haiti's wealth was being used to pay foreign debt; France was the highest collector, followed by the German Empire and the United States
Haiti didn't pay off its debts until 1947. For reference, Joe Biden was 5 years old when Haiti finally paid off this slavery debt.
As the overwhelming majority of the state's economic output was sapped by this debt, Haiti lacked the ability to invest in itself until the end of WW2.
Post-WW2, Haiti went through decades of political turmoil and never achieved political stability.
Haiti's present cannot be judged without the weight of this past. And it's future cannot be charted without accounting for it.
Of course, the place that was invaded at the drop of a hat and deprived of resources never learned to build civil institutions and non-corrupt governance. Fixing this probably requires a lot of close study to develop very specific interventions to change Haiti's culture and help it prosper.
The Haitian response to the circumstances would rightly be called a genocide today. Perhaps a bit more than simply “fighting back” led to the reaction.
Let's not shy away from the fact either. They killed 3,000 to 7,000 people excluding the Polish legionnaires (contrary to myth, they did not kill their allies).
If you asked them why they did it, their response was that in the century of French Haitian slavery, a 1,000,000+ slaves were killed by the French slavers. It was cheaper to buy a new slave than fix working conditions. So the sugar plantations had 6% to 10% annual mortality rate.
They responded to evil with evil.
Perhaps a bit more than simply “fighting back” led to the reaction.
In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election of 1860, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote "I remember the horrors of St. Domingo" and said that the election "will determine whether anything like this is to be visited upon our own southern countrymen."[14]
Abolitionists recognized the strength of this argument on public opinion in both the North and South. In correspondence to the New York Times in September 1861 (during the war), an abolitionist named J. B. Lyon addressed this as a prominent argument of his opponents:
> We don't know any better than to imagine that emancipation would result in the utter extinction of civilization in the South, because the slave-holders, and those in their interest, have persistently told us ... and they always instance the 'horrors of St. Domingo.'[48]
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
Absolute domination is the sweetest honey until its violent delights lead to violent ends.
I'm in the DR right now and some locals are worried about the violence in Constanza spreading but most are just going about their lives. The DR is the least stressful country int he world after all.