Hacker News Reader

Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Hard to see how this could be solved, outside of Haiti being "lucky" enough to get one gang leader who defeats the others and tries to establish a stable government.

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).

View on HN

Western countries are fundamentally confused about how democracy works, and they actively harm developing countries in their ignorance. Democracy in modern Europe was preceded by centuries of "the divine right of kings." European countries had functional states long before they had democracies.

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 wonder if there's a cultural element to it: do people support democratic processes in their families, neighborhoods, companies, etc? If not, I imagine it might be hard to top-down enforce democracy.

Support for democratic institutions and the rule of law has gone down in USA thanks to the MAGA movement. Is that cultural?

> I wonder if there's a cultural element to it: do people support democratic processes in their families, neighborhoods, companies, etc?

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)

While I agree that many organizations, families, and communities don't have strict direct, one-person-one-vote democracies, I do think countries that have more democratic governance tend to have behaviors that are more involved and participatory and not strictly top-down command-and-control hierarchies.

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.

There's definitely a cultural element to it! Many of my family members--college educated people from Bangladesh, many of them living for decades in Canada and Australia--have been celebrating the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Bangladesh. The result of that was replacing a somewhat authoritarian, but legitimately elected and quite popular,[1] government with a military-backed government nobody elected,[2].

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...

Democracy in its current form of universal suffrage has only existed for a relatively short period of time and has a very different character to the long histories of democracies which had restricted suffrage.

You have to admit, the track record for international intervention is extremely spotty. When was the last time that a rich country went into a poor country, for non-self-serving motivations, and fixed most big issues? I freely admit that I'm not a good student of history, but I can't actually think of one.

Aus intervention in East Timor.

Australia had oil interests in the region.

UK intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000.

You’ve made the requirements impossible to satisfy when you added “non-self-serving motivations”. The world is relatively small and disasters have ripple effects. Almost any action a country takes will either help or hurt them. Since the people in charge will mostly try to take actions that help their country, they look self serving now.

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.

> for non-self-serving motivations

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.

Germany and Japan had highly functional states for centuries--in the case of Japan, over a millennium--before the allies installed democracy. Not only that, those places had cultures that had long internalized administration and rule of law even if people couldn't vote on those systems.

Germany as a single state emerged only at the second half of XIX. You may argue that those multitude of German states which existed before still count, but how more functional each of them were compared to e.g. Khmer Kingdom is an open question. What is 'functional' to begin with? I probably would agree that there should be some sort of pre-requisite for a working democracy, but your theory of a 'functional state' (at least as I can derive it from your commentaries) feels a bit too raw so far

Functional means it has some form of bureaucracy that can collect taxes from the population and use that to do state things, usually provide for the defense of that population against internal and external threats. The actual system of government is irrelevant and in many cases the state itself survives even radical political change. What matters is whether it has the resources to actually exert authority.

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).

The question is not that we need some system of gov't before coming to democracy. It's just that we can't explain multiple failures of building/exporting democracy by this thing alone. There are way more functional bureaucracies than there are democratic governments. The question is what is the secret ingredient.

The bureaucracy is the secret ingredient and it’s orthogonal to the system of government. Throughout history the bureaucrats have survived regimes and adapted to the demands of their new rulers, whether that be kings or constituents. Successful conquerors and revolutionaries both tend to repurpose that bureaucracy rather than rebuilding it from scratch (which tends to end very badly, see Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo).

I don't think so. China shows us an example of exceptionally developed bureaucracy, having long historical roots, even entrenched in culture - and no democracy. I really don't think governing system in the US had the same at its birth, and look how it went. I'd rather suggest some features of judicial system is the key

Unified Germany was a direct outgrowth of the Prussian state, which was an efficient, centralized modern state. Most of Germany was also within the holy roman empire, which had a sophisticated government with an elective monarchy (though the electors were a handful of princes).

Of course German elements of democracy goes back to pre-Christian times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)

Thanks for the answer, but we haven't moved anywhere. Prussian state became a 'modern' (to its time) state not long before. HRE wasn't a state at all, and I'm not sure one can really call an assembly of princes 'a sophisticated government'. It didn't have direct power over anything for the most time of its existence, and to tbomk never had functional executive bureaucracy. Pre-Christian Germanic 'ting' is as irrelevant to the problem of modern representative democracy as qurultay (which existed arguably for longer periods, but most Turkic countries are not democracies). Practically all significant tribes had a period when heads of clans had their gatherings to reduce amount of internal violence. Long story short there's a tradition (starting from Marx, if I'm not mistaken) to call it 'military democracy', but once you look at it closer, it's a clear case of misnomer. In addition, I dare to say, centralization doesn't really correlate with democracy.

What? This is totally ahistorical. The Meiji era (the beginnings of what we might call a modern Japanese state) didn't start until 1868. Before that, Japan was feudal with wars happening all the time. Quoting from Wikipedia about the infamously-chaotic Sengoku period in the 1400s [1], which was just one of many turbulent times prior to the Meiji period:

> 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/Sengoku_period

Rayiner is using the word “state” in a subtly different manner than you are. You’re talking about concrete polities, but he’s talking about the state apparatus which generally survives between republics, dynasties, and even empires. It’s the bureaucracy (in a broad sense) used by the feudal lords to collect taxes, raise retinues, etc. that was transformed into the modern state. Tax collectors that are familiar with how much everyone owns in an area, agronomists who are familiar with farming and irrigation techniques suited for the area, judges or local chiefs that have the trust and authority to settle disputes, recordkeepers and their records, that kind of thing. After a revolution or conquest, any of these people that survive are usually recruited to help run the new state, just under new instructions from up top.

On the contrary, there ended up being not much continuity between pre-Meiji Japan and Meiji Japan--the daimyo's domains were replaced with prefectures and the daimyo themselves were largely forcibly retired. This was intentional on the part of the Meiji oligarchy, in order to prevent the daimyo from retaining enough power to be able to rebel [1]. The Meiji Restoration was an enormous change in Japan's government, really from top to bottom.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system

The abolition of the han system is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The majority of daimyos first became government employees, eventually becoming the governors of the prefectures, responsible for their administration with funding from the central state. The Meiji government even paid stipends so that the daimyos could pay their former samurais to disarm. The subsequent reforms (which took years) did transform the state away from the hereditary system but there was a continuity in the administrative apparatus. Likewise when the US occupied Japan after WWII it kept much of that apparatus and slowly reformed it further.

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.

I didn’t say it was an orderly, harmonious society. I said it had a highly functional centralized state. Which it did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period.

Feudalism is the literal opposite of a highly functional centralized state! And you said 1,000 years, which extends well before the Edo period, even if you consider the Edo period a centralized state (which I would not--the establishment of a centralized state is what characterized the Meiji Restoration).

I think that Edo was centralized to a similar degree as medieval England - not that it necessarily had a central bureaucracy that we'd associate with a modern state (although I believe in actuality that the samurai-staffed bureaucracy in Edo was on a similar level to contemporary states in Europe, if not as sophisticated as China), but that it was never under any serious doubt that one government had legitimacy to rule over the entire country. There were no daimyo, as far as I know, that ruled territories that the Edo government struggled to control, after the foundation of the Tokugawa Shogunate. By contrast, France had powerful independent duchies until at least the 1500s.

Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying. Building a state/civic society is extremely hard and generally takes a long time to sink in. In contrast, taking an existing evil state and making it less-evil seems a lot easier, as you can see with Japan and Germany.

Japan had a limited democracy where only tax-paying males could vote until their prime minister got assassinated. Way before WWII.

Big issues are by nature hard to fix, but perhaps major UN peacekeeping efforts count, like Rwanda or Kosovo?

Taiwan, Philippines, Egypt, South Korea. Arguably India, but there was so much bad mixed with the good.

The Caribbean is a special case though where there are lots of miraculous turnarounds because tourism is so lucrative.

What are these examples? Taiwan and South Korea could be argued that Japanese colonialism and authoritarian states are the reason they are successful today. Philippines was an important Spanish trade colony for a few hundred years. None of these were non self serving. As for Egypt are you talking about the Ptolmaics?

> South Korea

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.

> 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.

In the logic of empire, the overlord just needs to pick someone and eliminate the competitors. It's best if they have some popular support but not necessary. I am sure there are some networks with titular heads that can be utilized.

You have to have some self-serving motivation to make it worthwhile.

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.

Arguably some self-serving motivations can be good. Again, look at Japan and West Germany. It was very self-serving for the US/West, but in a good way: they wanted strong states as allies, so they made sure to fund, protect, and rebuild those societies, even though they had recently finished an extremely terrible war with those countries. This is different from the blatant colonialism/exploitation that was more typical in earlier decades and centuries.

> A serious international intervention is basically a non-starter.

Yes because Haiti already has plenty of examples of the United States and other first world countries intervening, and it made things worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Duvalier

Reply on news.ycombinator.com