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11 Democratization in a Divided Urban Political Culture Guinea-Bissau Joshua B. Forrest The West African coastal nation of Guinea-Bissau, a proud lusophone mini-state wedged defiantly in between Francophone Senegal and the Republic of Guinea, shares with Mozambique and Angola the distinction within Africa of having fought a bloody nationalist war (1962–74) to wrest free from the colonial grip of Portugal ’s dying Salazarist empire. But Guinea-Bissau’s postcolonial prelude to democratic transition would prove unique in comparison with its more southerly lusophone cousins in that the country was politically stable for the first two decades after independence, while Angola and Mozambique became entrenched in civil war. To some extent, this relative political stability helped to provide a context that would eventually give rise to political institutions, which would seek to encourage political pluralism and democratization. By 1994, the inauguration of a new institutional framework—marked by competitive presidential elections, opposition political parties , and a multiparty parliament—appeared to outside observers to harbor considerable democratic promise. Bratton and Van de Walle, in fact, declared in 1997 that Guinea-Bissau had achieved a successful transition to electoral democratic status (Bratton and de Walle 1997, 120). However, closer analysis reveals a more complex, mixed scenario than can be depicted by a simple declaration of transitional success. To be sure, the inauguration of a multiparty system and electoral institutions represented an important change from the first two decades of independence, 1974 through 1994, when authoritarian regimes were in place. In the mid-1990s, a window of political mobilization and political expression had been created by pro-democracy activists— including the influential, educated urban elite—and was reflected in the creation of new political associations and the organization of political parties. Yet GuineaBissau ’s contemporary political order also reflects an older, entrenched set of divisions within the urban political milieu—the arena of operations for urban civil so246 ciety (already-established or newly activated social organizations) as well as government agencies and leaders. Within this arena, actors have historically approached politics with a determination to win at all costs and to promote one’s own personal or factional interests without being overly hindered by formal institutional rules. In VonDoepp and Villalón’s introduction to this book (see chapter 1), it is emphasized that elite members of civil society can play vital roles in the process of democratization. This is particularly the case when political party leaders, political activists, and government leaders form an “elite pact” oriented around consensus and rule-abidance (Harbeson, Rothchild, and Chazan 1994). However, in GuineaBissau ’s urban political milieu, the course of democratization reflected a struggle between authoritarian and liberal values more than the formation of a viable elite pact. Some urban elites—government leaders and city-based activists—sought to lobby for greater openness and pluralism, but others behaved in a way that did not promote the spirit of constitutional rule abidance. A dualistic urban political culture has characterized Guinea-Bissau’s experience—reflected in elites’ tendency to shift between zero-sum politics and liberal pluralism, between a culture predicated on constraint and bargaining and a culture oriented toward the type of individualized opportunism that trumps institutional boundary-adherence. This dualism between civic/democratic impulses, on the one hand, and zerosum political intolerance, on the other, is manifested in Guinea-Bissau by what Ekeh, writing more generally about Africa, refers to as the “two publics” (Ekeh 1975). In the case of Guinea-Bissau, one “public” is represented by a diverse set of urban activists struggling for a constitutional and pluralistic political order; the other “public ” reflects the older, inherited tendency toward unilateral politics that deprioritizes rule-oriented political behavior. As utilized in this chapter, the notion of the two publics calls attention to both institutional developments in urban areas and the historical, economic, and cultural setting in which political processes operate. Urban civil-society activists have struggled with a degree of success to establish a political structure within which voting, party mobilization, and parliamentary representation become institutionalized features of the political system. In turn, the institutions that have been established have played an important role in political life. Most evidently, political institutions and the formal structures and processes of democracy—electoral turnover, a national legislature, an elected president— have provided a degree of progress toward postwar reconciliation and reconstruction . At the same time, the colonial experience and history of fractionalized, combative behavior have conditioned the extent to...

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