Travels in the Riel World

Does the look of your workplace or your living space reveal anything about your political ideology? According to this story in Live Science, it just might.

A person may hide their political ideology from others, including from pollsters, but the researchers were delighted to learn that a peek into subjects’ living quarters or even workspaces could give that away.

Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct “behavioral residue” that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers, according to the study.

What telltale clues, you might wonder, could possibly be found in one’s home or office? Here’s a sample:

Liberals’ offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives’ offices, Jost said…

“Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration.” …

Individuals who reported a more conservative ideology also had bedrooms that contained more organizational and cleaning supplies, including calendars, postage stamps, ironing boards and laundry baskets.

Liberals’ rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general.

So, conservatives are more organized and liberals are more diverse? In general that seems to be the case, at least according to this study.

The findings agreed with a link found by Jost’s team between two personality traits and political ideology. In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person’s need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.

There is a short but thoughtful article in The Atlantic about the current U.S. engagement with Afghanistan and the story contains some useful pieces of information about Afghan culture. Specifically, it speaks about the tremendous importance of tribes and clans in the nation’s social structure, while suggesting that the U.S. strategy is on the wrong track in that we’ve tried to rebuild the country from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

(T)he current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now…

National government has never much mattered in Afghanistan. Only once in its troubled history has the country had something like the system of strong central government that’s mandated by the current constitution. That was under the “Iron Emir,” Abdur Rehman, in the late 19th century, and Rehman famously maintained control by building towers of skulls from the heads of all who opposed him, a tactic unavailable to the current president, Hamid Karzai.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy…

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there…The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs.

The best designed governments are those that build upon the culture of a country, rather than those that try to impose foreign ideas and systems on a people. So I read with interest this recent story in the International Herald Tribune about a movement to re-design the government of Somalia in a way that would emphasize the traditional role of clans and elders.

Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia? After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent and lawless - and many say hopeless - as ever…

Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia’s curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based…

But there may be another answer: going local.

Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia’s fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government’s shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.

It is called the building block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.

“It’s the only way viable,” said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. “Local government is where the actual governance is. It’s more realistic, it’s more sustainable and it’s more secure.”

The country of Belgium is a remarkable success story considering the simmering tensions that have persisted for decades between the country’s Flemish-speaking north and its  French-speaking south. The International Herald Tribune has a fascinating article today that discusses the links between culture and country, while contemplating the difficulties of keeping two cultures happy within a single nation.

The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung a few days ago called Belgium the “most successful ‘failed state’ of all time.” The Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme offered to resign last month, saying that the “federal consensus model has reached its limits,” and that he couldn’t bring harmony to the country’s Flemish and French-speaking regions, raising the specter that this nation of 10.4 million might split up for good.

For the umpteenth time. Belgium’s perennial woes have been much reported upon. The country keeps muddling on, as it has for decades, with per capita income exceeding that of Germany, the world’s leading exporter, although maybe a tipping point has been reached…

It’s about culture in the end. In its escalating dysfunction Belgium demonstrates the inextricable link between culture and nationhood…

Els Witte is a Belgian historian. At her apartment, up the street from the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels, she pondered the bad marriage of French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders.

“A language is a culture,” she said. “In Belgium the two cultures know very little about each other because they speak different languages. There are singers known in one part, not in the other. Television is different, newspapers, books.” …

The other afternoon Francis Dannemark was at home in Brussels… “I don’t think it will, but for the first time I really believe Belgium could disappear,” he said… “A Flemish friend,” Dannemark said, “put it to me this way: ‘Flanders has nothing in common with Holland except language, and the Flemish and Walloons have everything in common except language.’ But there’s almost no communication between the two communities, except through rock music, which everybody sings in English, and sports, which transcend everything.”

Interesting story in the Christian Science Monitor about female leaders from 45 countries who met in India last week to mark International Women’s Day and to discuss a feminine style of leadership that they believe could help move the world beyond war.

She is one of several hundred prominent female leaders from 45 countries who have come to India this week to seek ways to raise women’s voices worldwide, hoping that their ideas – so often ignored – begin to move the world away from war.

It is a unique approach to International Women’s Day – and intentionally so, says Dena Merriam, who has organized “Making Way for the Feminine,” a five-day conference that began Thursday in Jaipur.

“This is not about empowering women,” says Ms. Merriam, who also co-chaired the United Nations’ Millennium World Peace Summit in 2000. “It is about how women can transform society to help us find new ways of addressing conflict.”

There are men here, too. The goal, participants say, is not to antagonize men. Yet each believes that women bring to the issue of conflict resolution a different perspective. Many liken it to that of a mother, stern but caring, and more open to finding alternatives to violence.

That perspective is sorely needed, they say, as the path of power and aggression has led only to more fighting and division. “The feminine gifts of compassion, empathy, and caring prepare women for the urgent role as leaders and reconcilers,” said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, chairwoman of the Global Peace Initiative for Women, at the opening press conference.

Thoughts?

A few weeks ago, I had some posts (here and here) about the Kenyan elections and the influence of tribalism in that country’s politics. Now, the Washington Post has an excellent article that explores that topic in more depth and examines the role of tribal identity in shaping the political and world views of many Kenyans. A key excerpt:

Tribe in Kenya is a matter of culture and tradition, a designation — often invisible to the casual observer — that defines social networks and political power and at times serves as the foundation for stereotypes used by politicians to manipulate and divide the electorate…

Of the dozens of tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu and to a lesser degree the Luo and the Kalenjin…have remained the primary political forces since independence. At the same time, there is a public consensus that tribalism undermines the founding idea of Kenya as one nation. Any politician hoping to appear as a statesman deplores tribalism in public, even though Kenyans tend to vote in tribal blocs. In certain circles, it is considered rude to ask someone’s tribe because it is not supposed to matter.

Though the Kikuyu and Luo have different ethnic roots, they are virtually indistinguishable physically — so much so that during recent election violence, rioting gangs often asked Kenyans for their national identity cards. It is possible to identify a person’s tribe by his or her name.

But neither ethnicity nor religion, which does not divide the groups, explains the sharply divergent perceptions that Kikuyus and Luos have of their place in Kenyan society. Tribe, woven as it is into day-to-day life, is the way many members of each group explain their successes and failures in a country that until the recent elections was considered the most stable in East Africa.

Staying with Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue (yesterday’s post was from the same magazine and covered a road trip through Russia), today’s topic looks at Time’s portrait of Chinese President Hu Jintao. Specifically, at the way Hu is trying to blend the ancient Chinese wisdom of Confucianism with modern economics and a Communist governing philosophy.

In reality, the way Hu has negotiated a difficult situation says much about him as a person and about his evolving and distinctive political philosophy…Hu has ended up as something of a closet traditionalist whose sense of a political true north derives as much from the Chinese classics, to which he has turned in search of models of concord, as it does from Mao and Marx.

In February 2005, for example, Hu quoted Confucius to party officials, declaring that “harmony is something to be cherished.” He and Premier Wen Jiabao regularly proclaim an aspiration to hexie shehui, or a harmonious society. And they often use another slogan, heping jueqi, or peaceful rise, a phrase designed to soothe foreigners worried about the double threat of China’s fireball economy and rapidly modernizing military.

Such traditional-sounding rhetoric about harmony and peace — the antithesis of Maoist phrases about class contradictions and anti-imperialist struggle — has been spilling from party propaganda organs…

Much of his political demeanor seems to suggest a yearning for leadership in the style of a Confucian junzi, or gentleman — one who governs by virtuous example and thus radiates benevolence throughout society…

(But) just beneath Hu’s exhortations about harmony, peaceful rise and benevolent leadership, old Maoist structures remain. Far from wanting to weaken party control, Hu would like to reinforce it, to inspire officials to live up to the old ideals of “serving the people.”

It’s been two weeks since Time magazine named Vladimir Putin its “Person of the Year.” Now that the holiday craziness has ended, I finally got around to reading that issue of the magazine. In it, there is a fascinating portrait of Putin, but also an intriguing article about Russia itself (”In Search of Russia’s Big Idea”), which is the result of a road trip that Nathan Thornburgh took between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russians have always fancied themselves as a special people, not unlike how Americans tend to think of their own nation, and Thornburgh tried to get a read on the soul of the country during his travels. Some excerpts from his report…

“Russia is now resurgent”

I had come to the Russian countryside, though, to get beyond proverbs — and beyond Moscow — in search of what Russians like to call the National Idea. It’s often said that Russia is truly in trouble when it can’t articulate what it stands for. The Soviet National Idea of exporting revolution, conquering space and winning Olympic medals was a strange mix, but at least it was steady. By 1995, the last time I lived there, Russia had disintegrated into a rudderless mess…

Russia is now resurgent…To find Russia’s current big idea, I traced the path of a long-dead St. Petersburg customs official named Alexander Radischev. In 1790, the 28th year of Catherine the Great’s reign, the middle-aged father of four wrote a book called A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow…

With plenty of detours, I visited hospitals, farmsteads, nightclubs and monasteries. At nearly every stop, I heard something that isn’t yet a fully formed National Idea but is perhaps more of a slogan: “Everything is coming back.” This meant a lot of things. Some were talking about rising salaries, others about how Russia had re-emerged as a counterweight to America. But more than anything, they were talking about a return to Russia’s prerevolutionary sense of itself, strong and traditionbound, rooted in religion and autocracy but with a full bank account and a sleek new weapon in oil.

“Do Russians really want to be free?”

Russians are turning inward at the very moment that the Kremlin is mounting a brazen power grab. Governors are no longer elected, just appointed by the President. Opposition leaders are harassed with new antiterrorism laws. Putin’s United Russia Party won a grossly uncompetitive election on Dec. 2. By and large, the Russian people offer little protest.

This raises an old question: Do Russians really want to be free? Russians are, after all, the people who actually begged Ivan the Terrible to return to rule them after he threatened to abdicate. As Radischev put it, Russians “come to love their bonds.”

These bonds — and their modern equivalent, Putin’s paper-thin democracy — are increasingly seen as not only tolerable but also intrinsically, uniquely, gloriously Russian. The Kremlin and its backers use new catchphrases like sovereign democracy to intone that they have their unique form of freedom. The West just wouldn’t understand…Russians are still looking for greatness, on their terms.

Kenya has erupted into violence after a disputed election. The Pakistani political party of Benazir Bhutto has named her 19-year-old son as the party’s new leader.  This post is not meant to judge the politics of other countries. After all, the U.S. faced some problems of its own with a hotly disputed election seven years ago and, as Andrew Sullivan notes, we’re also dealing with a few American political dynasties at the moment.

Rather, what is interesting about both of these stories is that it emphasizes the role of culture in the government and politics of every country. 

In Pakistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was named his mother’s successor at only 19 years of age, but in keeping with the dynastic traditions that are common across South Asia. His mother had herself taken over the reigns of the Pakistan Peoples Party from her father. As the New York Times writes:

The decision to place burden of blood and history on the son reflects … an abiding dynastic streak in South Asian politics — three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family have dominated politics in India, and hereditary politics pervade Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well.

In Kenya, meanwhile, the eruption of violence is not only over a disputed election result, but also over tribal grievances that have spilled into politics. The Washington Post reports:

But an undercurrent of tribalism ran through the campaign season, with Odinga accusing Kibaki of favoring his own ethnic group and raising suspicions that his inner circle would never relinquish power…

As the sun set Sunday, thousands of ardent Odinga supporters raged through the muddy, foot-worn paths of Nairobi’s biggest slum, Kibera, wielding nail-studded sticks, heavy rocks, hammers, machetes and flasks of alcohol, setting ablaze a market run mainly by Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, and continuing on…

The head of Kenya’s Red Cross Society, Abbas Gullet, told AP that the homes of many Kikuyu families had been attacked around the country and some of the residents were seeking refuge in police stations.

Two countries, two political systems, two sets of issues. But scratch the surface and you find cultural issues underpinning both stories.

Tribalism is an inescapable undercurrent of life throughout much of Africa and the Middle East. And, as this Washington Post article notes, one’s tribal loyalties have also played a significant role in democratic elections in Kenya, even though many voters deny it is an issue.

Although many issues are at stake in Kenya’s presidential election Thursday — by all accounts the most open and competitive since the country’s independence in 1963– one theme has pervaded the campaign season like no other: tribalism, considered the bane of African nation-building.

In some ways, Kenyans have adopted a political system in which leaders tend to trust and favor their own ethnic groups with appointments, contracts and other spoils of power in exchange for votes and, increasingly, campaign contributions.

Kenyans tend to deny being tribalist, though national voting patterns have often suggested otherwise.

In the current election, for example, the two main contenders are expected to draw 80 to 90 percent of the vote from their respective communities — among the largest in Kenya — and duke it out for dozens of smaller ethnic voting blocs in this country of 36 million. Yet in interviews around this politically important city in Kenya’s western Rift Valley region, Kikuyu and Luo voters explained their choices in terms other than tribal.

There was a fascinating article recently in Time Magazine, called China’s Me Generation.  It was about twentysomethings in China and how their lives have been transformed by a growing economy and China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse. Interestingly, while many of these young adults have more career choices and disposable income than ever before, they are also a largely apolitical generation to this point and are happy to let the Communist Party continue to rule the country so long as their lifestyles keep improving.

An excerpt from the story:

Six friends out on a Friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang–big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup–starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese, so you don’t have to worry about language.

Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight. While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding (”I must have fallen a hundred times”), the relative merits of various iPods (”Shuffle is no good”) and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China…The talk turns to China’s online-shopping business before it is interrupted by the arrival of razor clams, chili squid and deep-fried grouper.

The one subject that doesn’t come up–and almost never does when this tight-knit group of friends gets together–is politics. That sets them apart from previous generations of Chinese élites, whose lives were defined by the epic events that shaped China’s past half-century: the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression.

The conversation at Gang Ji Restaurant suggests today’s twentysomethings are tuning all that out. “There’s nothing we can do about politics,” says Chen. “So there’s no point in talking about it or getting involved.”

There are roughly 200 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that its becoming. China’s twentysomethings are the drivers and chief beneficiaries of the country’s current boom: according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse First Boston, the incomes of 20-to29-year-olds grew 34% in the past three years, by far the biggest increase of any age group.

And because of their self-interested, apolitical pragmatism, they could turn out to be the salvation of the ruling Communist Party–so long as it keeps delivering the economic goods. Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country’s Communist rulers. “On their wish list,” says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, “a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy.”

Something is definitely sitrring in Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s currently called). In a country known for a repressive military dictatorship that tolerates no dissent, thousands of Buddhist monks are suddenly taking to the streets to lead peaceful anti-government protests in what some are dubbing a “Saffron Revolution” in honor of the monks’ saffron-colored robes. According to a report in the U.K. Times:

Twenty thousand people, including nuns, monks and ordinary Burmese, marched through the streets of Rangoon yesterday demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, in a dramatic escalation of the country’s Buddhist-led “Saffron Revolution”.

Ten thousand monks, joined by about the same number of ordinary supporters, marched from the gold-covered Shwedagon Pagoda through the centre of Burma’s largest city in the biggest anti-government demonstration since the bloody suppression of the first democracy movement in 1988.

After heavy-handed efforts to put down demonstrations earlier in the month, the junta has recently been more restrained, even allowing a large group of monks to march past the house of the detained Ms Suu Kyi and pray with her on Saturday.

But the rapidly growing scale of the demonstrations — from a few thousand a week ago to tens of thousands over the weekend — inevitably raises fears of another crackdown by a dictatorship that usually tolerates no challenge whatsoever to its authority. Bystanders cheered the monks as they walked by yesterday, and presented them with flowers and drinking water and balm for their bare feet.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Sydney Herald notes:

By linking the biggest street protests in Burma in two decades to the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s barefoot monks have raised the stakes against the country’s military government…

After a week of marching by the monks, the protests have become explicitly political, though the clerics prefer to make their point indirectly through chants and prayers at key locations. Members of the public who have joined them have taken up chanting the slogans of the pro-democracy movement: national reconciliation - meaning dialogue between the Government and opposition parties - freedom for political prisoners, and pleas for adequate food and shelter…

Soe Aung, a spokesman for a coalition of exile groups based in Thailand, said: “The monks are the highest moral authority in the Burmese culture. If something happens to the monks, the situation will spread much faster than what happened to the students in 1988.”

It’s easy to dismiss ancient nomadic traditions as quaint relics of the past. But researchers are now discovering that these tribal traditions are not only the building blocks of Central Asian cultures but are also representative of values that continue to influence contemporary politics. Some of these insights were discussed in a recent article in the International Herald Tribune.

While the view that tribe and clan — the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies— influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policy makers have overlooked important “cultural intelligence,” like family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.

“Families, tribes these are the things that matter here,” said Oraz Jandosov, co-chairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. “Foreigners talk about these things, but it’s only talk. They don’t understand them.”

Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe.

“In and of itself you can’t graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that’s what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces,” Frachetti said. “By not exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naïve to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia.”

Sometimes a crisis really can be defused by a few wise elders. At least in cultures that have a tradition of respect for such individuals. That’s what happened in Ethiopia recently when a political crisis was solved through mediation by a newly formed Council of Elders. The Christian Science Monitor has the story:

As the gray-haired man of letters strode into the posh restaurant in Ethiopia’s capital recently, wearing his signature long, white yemiyakora tunic and black and white cap, patrons stood up and applauded.

Professor Ephraim Isaac, a retired Ethiopian Harvard scholar who lectures around the world on religion, peace, and conflict, had just helped resolve his country’s two-year political crisis using problem-solving methods as traditionally Ethiopian as his garb.

Just weeks ago, 35 opposition members were sentenced to life in prison for spurring election protests back in 2005. Despite widespread pressure from donors and human rights groups who accused Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of stifling dissent, the opposition leaders had been kept in jail for almost two years for attempting to overthrow the government.

It was a deadlock that no amount of outside pressure seemed able to loosen, and the life sentences threatened to escalate the crisis. So it was clear to Mr. Isaac that his people needed a strong dose of traditional peacemaking methods. He led a nonpartisan Ethiopian “council of elders” that quickly negotiated a deal acceptable to both sides: clemency in exchange for an admission of guilt and promise to respect the rule of law.

“In our tradition there is forgiveness and elders mediate and we do not believe in grudge and vengeance,” Mr. Isaac explains. “This is a very rich culture.”

In the most recent edition of Newsweek, there is a story about Ryan Crocker, the new U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. In the middle of the article are some excerpts which indicate that Crocker takes the role of culture seriously and that he goes out of his way to learn about the country he is working in.

“My checkered past has taught me a few things,” he says. “One of them is respect for other people’s reality. Iraq has its own reality, its own institutions, its own way of doing things, certainly its own problems that will have to be solved in Iraqi terms. Understanding why they approach things as they do is pretty important.”

He knows Iraq intimately. In the late 1970s, when foreign diplomats were kept under strict surveillance by young Saddam Hussein’s regime, Crocker somehow wangled permission to travel the length of the Euphrates River valley. He drove off in a Toyota Land Cruiser, giving lifts to hitchhiking (and talkative) Iraqi soldiers along the way for 10 days until he reached Qaim, on the Syrian border, where horrified authorities detained him for several hours before sending him back down the river.

“Ryan takes the trouble to get out and really understand the country he’s working in,” says one of Crocker’s former colleagues, Ambassador David Mack.

The article even provides a glimpse of some of the cultural insights Crocker has gained through his in-country experiences, such as how Arab Bedouins view time:

As a young Foreign Service officer studying intensive Arabic, Crocker spent a month with a family of Bedouin shepherds in Jordan’s fabled Wadi Rum. “I learned 27 different words for camel,” he says. More important, he also learned how the region’s tribesmen recall events as vividly as if they happened last week “when actually they date back 300 or 400 years, through the mists of time.”

It’s easy in the West for us to assume the democracy is a natural state of government, or at least something that people in every country long for. That’s why I was intrigued by an article about Bhutan in the International Herald Tribune. It seems that the king of Bhutan has decided his Himalayan country is ready for more democracy, but the people are embracing it warily -  in some cases only because it has been ordered by the king!

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who recently announced his plan to abdicate, has ordered parliamentary elections for next year. In preparation for the real thing, more than 125,000 Bhutanese citizens participated Saturday in what the government called “mock elections” …

The Bhutanese monarchy turns 100 this year, and Jigme apparently decided this was an auspicious time to further reduce its power. The national elections next year are part of a process that began nearly a decade ago, when the king introduced party-less elections to choose members of Parliament. Next, day-to-day governance was handed over to the Council of Ministers. The proposed Constitution would remove the king as head of the government, set a mandatory retirement age for the monarch at 65, and empower an elected Parliament to oust the king altogether with a two-thirds majority vote…

The prospect of self-governance seemed to send shivers down many spines here. Why have politicians? people wanted to know. Wasn’t the king always supposed to know what is best for his people and guide them accordingly? Couldn’t they see what democracy had wrought on neighboring countries?

“I’m a little bit skeptical,” Sonam Wangmo said as she waited in line Saturday to cast her vote in a neighborhood school with calla lilies blooming in the garden. “I’m not sure whether it will work, or whether it will be better for our country.”

Many Bhutanese seem cautious about embracing democracy, if only because they believe things are already going well in their country and they don’t feel a need to embrace change.

“The going is good,” said Tshering Tobgay, 42, a retired civil servant who is working with a former cabinet minister to start the People’s Democratic Party. “We want more of the same.”

This is one reason, he said, that even would-be politicians like himself find it hard to sell their message to the citizenry. “We are not starting a party because we have an ideology. We’re not starting a party because we have a vision for a better Bhutan. We are starting a party because the king has ordered us.”

He sat on the patio of a bar, cupping his beer can in a napkin, because this was Friday and alcohol sales were prohibited on the day before the election. “It’s a big compliment to the king that no one’s very enthusiastic.”

Another patron in the bar, Kesang Dorji, 36, said he was puzzled by the royal order to vote, but intended to obey. “We have to stand fast to the wisdom of our monarch,” Dorji said. “He knows what’s best for us. Any normal person would think, ‘Why this, when everything is okay?”‘

There is a fascinating article in yesterday’s NY Times about the differences between Somalia and Somaliland, which shows some of the ways in which culture and history can influence societies.

If you’ve never heard of Somaliland, don’t worry. It’s likely that many people have never heard of the place, since no one recognizes it a country even though it declared its independence in 1991, holds democratic elections and produces its own money and passports. The story is particularly interesting because Somaliland today is a functioning society with little of the violence or lawlessness that pervades Somalia.

Both regions are dominated by a tribal culture and populated by a series of clans and subclans. 

In a sparsely populated nomadic society, where many people live far from government services, clan elders are traditionally the ones to reconcile differences and maintain social order.  

In Somalia, these groups have spent years fighting each other for power or pledging allegiance to different warlords.  In Somaliland, though, the government has been limited to just three political parties in “an attempt to create parties based on ideology, not tribe.”  Moreover:

The Somali National Movement … set up the guurti, a council of wise men from every clan. … The leaders also turned the guurti, whose 82 elders are appointed by their respective clans, into the upper house of Parliament, “Somaliland’s senators,” as people here like to say.

The guurti in Somaliland can strike down laws passed by the elected House of Representatives, though the representatives can override the guurti with a two-thirds vote. It is a mix of tradition and modernity, Western-style democracy meets Somali-style politics.

So why the stark differences in how the two lands are now governed?

When