The Foreign Service Journal, January 2011

46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 To be sure, not all the book’s in- sights are original; William Pfaff and Peter Beinart, among others, have ex- pressed similar concerns. But what sets Matlock apart and raises him to the heights of a George Kennan is the fact that he is not just an external ob- server. His is the view of a practitioner who knew the players and was in the game. Alas, like Kennan, Matlock’s wis- dommay also be ignored or misunder- stood— the customary fate of Cassan- dras. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Reces- sional,” which similarly preached mod- esty and restraint to a world power and probably cost him the poet laureate- ship of England, comes to mind: “If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe — Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget. Ernest H. Latham Jr. is a retired For- eign Service officer who served in Beirut, Jeddah, Vienna, Nicosia, Ber- lin, Bucharest, Athens and Washing- ton. He lives in Washington, D.C. What Makes a Democracy? India, Pakistan and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths Philip Oldenburg, Routledge, 2010, $39.95, paperback, 273 pages. R EVIEWED BY P ATRICIA L EE S HARPE Looking for case studies to illustrate the complications of democracy-build- ing? The book you need is Philip Ol- denburg’s India, Pakistan and Demo- cracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths , a tightly-argued, richly-detailed, cool-headed and well-grounded study by a respected South Asia hand. Its bibliography alone is worth the price of admission. Modern India and a brand new, largely Muslim Pakistan were born when England terminated its shape- shifting, three-century-old mercan- tile/colonial/imperial enterprise in South Asia. The two countries shared much at independence. They still do, but their political trajectories have been dramatically different. Neither initially rejected the legal system, civil service or military traditions that evolved under British rule. Eng- lish continues to be the language of their governing elites, and both are af- flicted with caste or caste-like social di- visions, vast income disparities and culturally homogenous subdivisions, analogous to countries in other parts of the world. Indians and Pakistanis also share food, dress and gesture, plus genes, thanks tomillennia of interaction before the latest boundary-drawing. Neat as it would be to cite a Mus- lim-Hindu divide to account for diver- gent degrees of democratization, India contains the world’s third-largest Mus- lim population, and Islam as practiced in Pakistan is hardly homogenous. But a superficial contrast between the two societies masks a structural similarity: a seething diversity of religious inclina- tion in both countries. Probing on a more subtle level, Oldenburg speculates that Pakistan’s lag in democratization may reside, at least partly, in the fact that India could build on an existing bureaucracy and army, while Pakistan had to build insti- tutions almost from scratch. The na- tion did inherit civil service andmilitary B O O K S