Abstract
If allowing an individual to enjoy full powers may be necessary to prevent a democratic society from collapsing, it may also be required to do the same for the sake of creating a new state. However, in order to claim glory, such rulers must do everything in their power to create the necessary conditions that will allow their people to enjoy freedom.
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Notes
- 1.
Between 1928 and 1934, around 1.5 million Kazakhs died during the Holodomor. As if this genocidal policy was not sufficient, later policies, implemented mainly by Nikita Khrushchev, had the effect of marginalizing the Kazakhs in their homeland. More precisely, at the beginning of the 1960s, the Soviet authorities decided to resettle hundreds of thousands of Slavs in Kazakhstan to cultivate its “virgin lands”. As a result, the proportion of Kazakhs reached a historical low of 29%, which of course facilitated the Russification process in the region, and Russian became the lingua franca in the areas of administration, politics and economy, thus transforming Kazakh into a marginalized language. As a consequence, ethnic Russians became overrepresented in highly skilled, well-paid jobs, while Kazakhs experienced difficulties accessing quality education and high standards of living.
- 2.
Singapore reached the eighth position of the 2018 Global Peace Index.
- 3.
Achieving this objective was a significant challenge for Lee Kwan Yew. As he said: “Remember, when we started, we were not even one society, never mind a nation. We were several different separate societies brought together under the British, an accident of history. Our loyalties and roots were in different parts of China, India and the Malay archipelago” (Han et al., 1998, p. 133).
- 4.
Machiavelli himself was skeptical about the prospect of ever seeing such Princes. He writes in his Discourses that “One can draw this conclusion: (…) where [the citizens are not] corrupt, well-ordered laws do not help unless indeed they have been put in motion by one individual who with an extreme force ensures their observance so that the matter becomes good. I do not know whether this has ever occurred or whether it is possible; for it is seen, as I said a little above, that if a city that has fallen into decline through corruption of matter ever happens to rise, it happens through the virtue of one man who is alive then, not through the virtue of the collectivity that sustains good orders. As soon as such a one is dead, it returns to its early habit (…)” (Book 1, Section 17).
- 5.
As Machiavelli writes in his Discourses, there are two ways of governing that ought to be condemnable: those who are posing actions that will be harmful to the society’s peace and customs and those who are ruling only for their own benefit (Book 1, Section 9).
- 6.
For Machiavelli, establishing a new state where the proper customs necessary for the establishment of peace, order and good governance are lacking is the required pre-condition for achieving glory. As he writes in his Discourses: “And truly, a Prince seeking the glory of the world ought to desire to possess a corrupt City, not to spoil it entirely like Caesar, but to reorganize it like Romulus. And truly the heavens cannot give man a greater opportunity for glory, nor could man desire a better one” (Book 1, Section 10).
- 7.
Prince, Section 7.
- 8.
To quote Andrew Mango, Kemal’s biographer, this failure can be explained in the following way: “Parliamentary democracy requires agreement on essentials—on the nature of the state and of society, whose rulers are to be chosen by free ballot. In the absence of such agreement, party politics become a battleground for conflicting ethnic, religious and local groups, clans and tribes. There was no agreement on essentials in [Kemal’s ] day. (…) More could not be expected in his lifetime” (Mango, 1999, p. 536). As Machiavelli writes in his Discourses, his genuine unsuccessful attempt to establish a democracy ought to be recognized. For him, those who have tried but failed to give good laws to a new city merit some excuse (Book 1, Section 10).
- 9.
However, we must remain conscious that if Mandela can be praised for his capacity to deliver this miracle, he was nonetheless unable to deliver another one in the form of good government and of shared prosperity. Indeed, South Africa is plagued with serious corruption problems and by profound economic inequalities that traps the vast majority of Black South Africans into utter poverty up to a point where the country is now one of the most unequal in the world (even more than under the Apartheid regime).
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Caron, JF. (2019). The Necessity to Entrust Power to One Individual: To Create a New State. In: The Prince 2.0: Applying Machiavellian Strategy to Contemporary Political Life. The Steppe and Beyond: Studies on Central Asia. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0353-5_7
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