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Book Review: AfterWar: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy

After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy Christopher J. Coyne Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006, 238 pp. Christopher Coyne's book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the "precise mechanisms and contexts that contribute to or prevent" successful efforts to "export liberal democracy" by means of "military occupation and reconstruction" (p. 7). Even if this were the only accomplishment of this fine book, it would represent one of the most important contributions to the field of political economy in recent decades. However, Coyne does more. He draws from economics to produce a full-fledged framework for analyzing the economic, political, and social effects of all reconstruction efforts. He also questions the long-standing view that reconstruction requires, or even benefits from, a suspension of the principles of liberty, free association, and free markets. Coyne, an Assistant Professor of Economics at West Virginia University, begins by reviewing American nation-building efforts over the past century. He finds that military intervention and occupation has a poor record in exporting democratic institutions. Apart from the post-WWII administrations of the Axis powers by the Allies, few of the two dozen U.S.-led occupations have resulted in stable democratic institutions being established within 10 years following a U.S. withdrawal. The only exceptions are the 50-year occupation of the Philippines and the short interventions into Panama and Grenada in the 1980s. Why have U.S.-led reconstruction efforts produced such a catalogue of failure in their primary goal of turning conflict-ridden, formerly authoritarian states into prosperous democracies based on "liberal" values? Coyne brings to bear various schools of economics, political science, and sociology to answer this question. He arrives at four conclusions that "can be generalized and applied to all reconstruction efforts across time and place" (p. 20): 1. Policymakers may know what a successful reconstruction looks like, but know very little as to how to bring it about. 2. Uncontrollable parameters ("variables") of the reconstruction process serve as important constraints on controllable ones. 3. Reconstruction efforts often suffer from the tendency to compare the current condition of weak, failed states to an idealized condition of prosperity that the efforts of the reconstructing (i.e., occupying) states may or may not achieve or even be capable of achieving. 4. Sustainable movement toward establishing liberal democratic institutions requires a modification of the underlying preferences, incentives, and opportunities available to those whose support is necessary for those institutions to prosper. In other words, "the challenge of reconstruction is to work with citizens' broader goals and find incentives such that the pursuit of those goals will produce behaviors that align with the desired liberal institutions" (p. 31). Coyne uses the well-known prisoner's dilemma to illuminate the issues of conflict and cooperation inherent in a reconstruction effort. He depicts the "coordination game" of reconstruction as one in which individual players' likelihood of choosing to converge toward the "good conjectures" necessary for the development of liberal institutions--such as fair dealing, transparency, honesty, lawfulness, empathy, equality, and choosing the rule of law over systems of patronage-depends at least partially on their conceptions of whether other players will also converge toward those same conjectures. In other words, accepting the pattern of "beliefs, opinions, and expectations that support activities that contribute to ... the liberal democratic order" is in part a product of believing that others are "buying in" to the same (or similar) beliefs, opinions, and expectations (p. 36). Of course, players may also converge toward "bad" conjectures that are unsuitable for a liberal democracy (for example, in Stalin's East Germany). …