Political Leadership Between Democracy and Authoritarianism

Front matter

Jerzy J.Wiatr

Political Leadership Between Democracy and Authoritarianism

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Contents

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Foreword

My interest in political leadership has long history. When I was born, Poland was ruled by Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, former socialist, one of the founders of independent Polish Republic and victorious commander-in-chief in the Polish-Russian war of 1919-1920. Two members of my family were Pilsudski’s soldiers during the first world war and the cult of his personality was part of the political climate of my childhood. His death is the first political event I remember, being not yet four at this time.

During the second world war I lived in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and followed political events with keen interest, which grew as I was getting older. Names of Hitler and Stalin, but also Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle were points of reference for the political information, received mostly from underground press which I helped to distribute.

This encounter with history made me a passionate student of biographies of great leaders, convinced that one cannot understand history without accounting for the role played by them — even if the official Marxist interpretation of history tended to marginalize their role and focused on socio-economic conditioning of political events.

Soon after I had started my academic carrier at the University of Warsaw, I became an assistant to Julian Hochfeld (1911-1966), former socialist theoretician and member of Parliament from whom, more than from anybody else, I learned the unorthodox interpretation of Marxism, part of which was a reinterpretation of historical necessity and of the role of great leaders. In later years, I had many opportunities to meet and work together with some of the political scientists whose contribution to the understanding of political leadership greatly influenced my thinking: David E, Apter (1924-2010), Zbigniew K. Brzezinski (1928-2017), Mattei Dogan (1920-2010), Samuel E. Finer (1915- 1993), Carl J. Friedrich (1901-1984), Glenn Paige (1924-2017) and Robert C. Tucker (1918-2010).

In the nineteen-sixties, I collaborated closely with Philip E Jacob (1912- 1985) as head of the Polish part of the comparative study of values and local leadership in India, Poland, United States and Yugoslavia (Jacob 1971) and in the following thirty years I continued this type of research. As Adjunct Professor at the Michigan University in Ann Arbor in the years 1973/74 I conducted the seminar on political leadership with a very interesting group of American and foreign graduate students. Interested in the political role of the military, I wrote a study on three Polish military leaders, whose political role was crucial for Poland’s modern history: Joseph Pilsudski, Władysław Sikorski and Wojciech Jaruzelski (Wiatr 1988)

In my political activities, both before and after Poland’s democratic transformation, I had intense contacts with several Polish and foreign leaders and this experience enriched my understanding of the role of leadership in the way which would not be possible had I remained only an academic. I am particularly grateful to President Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923-2014), with whom I had many long conversations on dilemmas of political leadership.

I am grateful to my teachers, colleagues and students working with whom helped me to clarify my thinking about political leadership. I am especially grateful to my friends professors Grzegorz Kolodko, Krzysztof Ostrowski, Ergun Ozbudun, Jacek Raciborski and Janusz Reykowski for reading the draft and offering me very helpful advice. My very special thanks go to Barbara Budrich and her collaborators for many years of common work and four books which I had the honor to publish with Barbara Budrich Verlag.

And, last but not least, I wish to express my gratitude to my wife Ewa without whose continuous encouragement and help this book would not have been written.

Introduction

Political leadership has been studied from various perspectives by historians, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists. Since antiquity, the study of politics has focused on the role of men (rarely also women) who have ruled and led others: monarchs, military commanders, and prophets. Historians took their inspiration from Plutarch, whose biographies of famous rulers served as a moral guide for future princes. Theologians, from St. Augustine on, attempted to distinguish between legitimate rulers and tyrants. Political writers have sought to portrait the perfect ruler and to define the moral criteria of good governance. Since Niccolo Machiavelli’s “Prince”, they have added a new dimension to the old criteria — that of effectiveness. Philosophers of history differed in their assessment of the role of great individuals: from Georg Hegel’s determinism to Thomas Carlyle’s romantic view of human history as a product of the action of selected few — the heroes. When sociology emerged as a new academic discipline, it strongly emphasized social processes and institutions at the expense of the role of individuals. Soon, however, mostly under the influence of the Italian scholars Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), attention shifted to the study of political elites, seen as the principal actors in history (Mosca 1939, Albertoni 1982). Some psychologists, notably Gustav Le Bon, critical of and hostile to the “masses”, saw great leaders as the only alternative to the chaotic rule of the crowd (Le Bon 1912). Pioneers of the biological approach to the study of politics suggested that “natural selection has endowed homo sapiens, as it did other social primates, with an innate ‘bias’ toward hierarchical social and political structures” and concluded that “this innate tendency is a major — but not the only —reason why the overwhelming majority of political societies have been and continue to be authoritarian in nature” (Peterson and Somit 2001:186).

When political science emerged as an independent discipline, for a time it continued the traditional interest focusing on the role of great men in politics, as illustrated by the themes of doctoral dissertation at American university between 1925 and 1950 (Paige 1977: 237-240). With the passing of time, however, the traditional interest was overshadowed by new lines of inquiry into the function of institutions, the behavior of anonymous people, and the social forces that shape such behavior. In due time, calls were made to reintroduce political leaders as legitimate objects of investigation. Empirically oriented study of leadership was seen as the solution which, as Dankwart Rustow put it, “may enable us to rest the continuing controversy between those who see leadership.. primarily as an individual attribute or trait and those who prefer to see it as being determined by the situation — as well, as the even older debate over the historic influence of great individuals“(Rustow 1968: 691). Such studies tended, however, to focus more on collective entities defined as political elites than on political leaders as individuals. Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) played crucial role in switching the attention of students of political elites from ideologically oriented generalizations to the comparative analysis based on empirical data (Lasswell 1936). After the Second World War his call for comparative empirical research was answered by several studies on elites in Western democracies (Bauman 1972, Bottomore 1954, Edinger 1965, Keller 1967, Kirkpatrick 1976), Putnam 1973, Putnam 1976, Suleiman 1978, Welsch 1979) as well as in the then Communist states (Barton, Denitch and Kadushin 1973, Baylis 1974, Beck 1973, Farrell 1970, Ludz 1968, Scalapino 1972). In 1973, I have suggested a distinction between concepts of “elites” and of “leadership” arguing that not all groups of leaders have the characteristics of elites, only those which are socially cohesive and recruited mostly from among members of the same stratum (Wiatr 1973). There have been also numerous studies written by social scientists on contemporary political leaders (for example: Auty 1970, Bethell 1969, Caro 1982 and 1990, Deutcher 1949, Dik6tter 2019, Halperin 1958, Kavanagh 1974, Kearns 1976, Kersaudy 1982, Schram 1966, Wolfe 1948). The fall of Richard Nixon produced — among numerous other studies -an excellent socio-political analysis of the background and history of so-called “Watergate affair” (White 1975). A few years later President Nixon himself contributed to the studies on leadership with a book based on his personal knowledge of and contacts with a large group of foreign leaders (Nixon 1982).

Leaders become most important at the critical junctions of history. It is their good or bad luck that some of them are confronted with situation in which decisions made by them change the course of history. Without the turmoil of revolutionary wars which followed the French Revolution of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte would not have had the opportunity to become France’s most celebrated military hero and at the peak of his career the almost absolute ruler of most of Europe. Without the culmination of conflict over the future of slavery in the United States Abraham Lincoln would not have become one of the greatest American presidents, the one who is credited with the decisions which saved the Union from dissolution and put an end to the infamous institution of slavery. Two world wars and the revolutions of the twentieth century made possible the emergence of leaders whose decisions shaped history: Georges Clemenceau and Charles de Gaulle in France, Winston Churchill in Great Britain, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States, but also Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Russia, as well as Mao Zedong in China. Adolf Hitler belongs to a special category of leaders whose impact on history, while undoubtedly significant, was purely negative because of their failure to achieve their goals and because they brought their nations to catastrophic defeats.

Following the two world wars, and largely because of the invention of weapons of mass destruction which made the total war improbable (Aron 1962), the international situation changed in a fundamental way. Avoiding a new total war called for responsible and courageous leadership, such as the one offered by Harry Truman and the other founders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sometimes it took the courage to respond militarily to the unexpected turn of events, as in the case of President Truman’s decision to use American military might in defense of South Korea in 1950 (Paige 1968) or by President Kennedy’s decision to impose naval blockade on Cuba during the missile crisis of 1962 (Allison 1971). With the passing of time, the moral and political evaluation of these decisions changed. Glenn Paige, who had served in the US army in the Korean war and in his book had accepted the logic of the military response to the North Korean aggression, changed his assessment of the war and strongly criticized the decision to intervene from the position of non-violence. “From a nonviolent perspective, — he wrote — the best “lesson” to be learned from the Korean decision is that the American policy makers should be encouraged to experiment with the assumption that American violence will not be applied in international politics, that American military supplies will not be provided to support the violence of others, and that policy makers should work positively toward nonviolent resolution of grave domestic and international conflicts that threaten human dignity, economic decency, physical survival, and world peace“(Paige 1977: 1609). In a similar way, another decision of American presidents — this time on the military intervention in Vietnam — was criticized as politically mistaken and morally wrong by left-wing intellectuals, particularly by Noam Chomsky and Carl Boggs as morally wrong and politically disastrous (Boggs 2005: 106-107). The obvious difference between the decision to intervene in Korea and the decision to get involved in the conflict between two parts of divided Vietnam, is that while the first prevented the communist conquest of South Korea, the latter ended in total failure — the first military defeat of the United States in its history. The recent collapse of the American-sponsored regime in Afghanistan (in August 2021, after twenty years of military involvement of the United States and her NATO allies) demonstrated the failure of American leaders to learn from the Vietnam fiasco.

Not all critical decisions are related to war and peace. European integration would not have been possible without such leaders as Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer. Finally the peaceful dissolution of the Communism empire in Europe was to a very great degree the result of the visionary leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev (Brown 1966).

The new century began in the atmosphere of optimism which reflected the belief that after having won the “cold war“the commonwealth of democratic states, under the leadership of the United States, would be able to gradually and peacefully change the world in the way consistent with the basic values of liberal democracy. Thirty years later such optimism sounds naive. Confronted with new challenges, such as international terrorism and global inequality, the world needs mature political leadership as much as it had needed it in the past century.

Political scientists, sociologists and psychologists study political leadership largely because they understand its relevance. They do it in various ways, using different research tools. The specific nature of political leadership calls for the choice of research approaches adequate to the specific nature of this phenomenon.

The very nature of political leadership calls for different research strategies than the ones usually employed by social sciences. Quantitative data are useful but only for the study of large categories of leaders, such as the local leaders selected as targets for the Values in Politics project (Jacob 1971) or for the computerized data bank of communist elites created in Pittsburgh by Carl Beck (Beck 1973). Neither of such studies targeted top political leaders.

For the study of top leaders we have to rely mostly on the accounts offered by themselves in their autobiographies and on the analysis of documents. Autobiographies of top political leaders have to be treated with some reserve since the authors tend to present their accounts in the subjective way, particularly in respect to their most controversial decisions. Additionally, some scholars are able to use data from the autobiographies or other accounts written by leaders’ close collaborators, as illustrated by the innovative study of interactions between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Dallek 2007). Very rarely can a student of leadership base his or her analysis on prolonged interviews with a politician, as in the book on Lyndon Johnson written by his former ghost writer Derris Kearns and completed after his unexpected death (Kearns 1976). The nature of political system constitutes the crucial condition for this type of research. Autobiographies of leaders come mostly from democratic states, where open political debate is an indispensable element of political life. Most of American presidents after having left the White House published their memoirs. There are, however, almost no autobiographies of totalitarian leaders , with the interesting exception of those who lost power. Lev Trotsky’s autobiography (“My Life”) has been skillfully used in Issac Deutscher’s study of the Soviet fallen leader (Deutscher 1954). Sometimes valuable historical accounts come from autobiographies of lower rank Communist functionaries, written after their break with the party (Leonhard 1956). To the very few exceptions belong the ten-volumes diary of Poland’s former Prime Minister (1988-89) and party leader (1989-91) Mieczysław F. Rakowski, published years after the change of regime in Poland (Rakowski 1998-2005).

Unable to use the traditional methods of social sciences, students of political leadership have to rely on comparative analysis (Edinger (1964). It is probably the most important difference between typical biographies written by historians and analyses presented by political scientists. Among most interesting comparative biographies written by political scientists one can list Charles Merriam’s biography of four American leaders (Merriam (1926) and Bertram Wolfe comparative biography of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin (Wolfe 1948). More recent such studies include Mattei Dogan’s comparison of the Turkish and French national leaders (Dogan 1984) and Ladipo Adanolekun’s study of African political leaders (Adanolekun 1988).

In 1964, the American political scientists Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington published a comparative study of two super-powers (USA and USSR), in which they combined the analysis of the institutional framework with the study of the performance of top leaders (Brzezinski and Huntington 1964). The most important conclusion of their study was that while leaders are important, it is the institutional system that best explains the policies of the great powers.

There are several reasons why leaders and leadership should be studied from a comparative perspective., that is across countries and periods of time. While each leader is unique, patterns of leadership can be observed and explained in comparative terms. We are all interested in what makes some leaders more successful than others, as well as in that what makes them act as they do. By comparing what remains essentially unique, we may be able to reduce the scope of the unknown, to better understand the forces that move leaders and to gain insight into the reasons of their success or failure.

Studying political leadership not only satisfies our curiosity; it can also affect the way in which politics is being conducted. Educated leaders and well informed followers are important for the quality of politics — now even more than in the past. Democracy cannot function well without the engagement of citizens — interested in and informed about public affairs. In modern democracies citizens decide by electing their representatives, whose leadership is crucial for the stability of democratic institutions and for direction of public policies. In the times when politics engages millions of people, it is important to understand who and how leads them to the unknown future.

“Politics — wrote the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) — is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth — that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with the steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his points of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all’ has the calling for politics (Weber 1946:128).

The Weberian concept of leadership emphasizes the moral and political obligations of those who choose politics as their vocation. One of the founders of modern Israel, two-times prime minister and the ninth president Shimon Peres (1923- 2016) in his autobiography added another dimension of true leadership: the ability to dream and to make successful politics out of the ambitious dreams (Peres 2017). Visionary leadership demands the ability to formulate ambitious goals with the determination and talent necessary to make such dreams come true.

Leadership is a mission on the quality of which depends the wellbeing and security of the people. It is by far more than simple act of winning power. In its true sense, leadership is a service, in which the leader is motivated not by his (or her) personal ambition but by the devotion to the common good — whatever way they understand it. This is why studying leadership is crucial for understanding and for conducting politics worthy of its name.

Chapter One: The essence of leadership

The concept of leadership has two connotations. In “Webster’s New World Dictionary of American Language” it is defined as “the ability to lead”. It is also used to denote a group of people distinguished by their ability to lead — the leaders. The ability to lead is not only a psychological trait. It also refers to the situation in which one person is able to lead others. Crucial for the concept of leadership is the relation “leaders-followers”, as there are no leaders without those who are ready to accept their leadership — the followers.

There are three main kinds of leadership: religious, moral and political. Religious leaders appeal to the beliefs in god (or gods) and are seen by their followers as prophets speaking in the god’s name. Some religious leaders become political leaders as well, particularly when political conditions impose on them such role. In some then communist states, religious leaders functioned as political authorities with strong popular legitimacy. Such was in particular the role of Poland Primate cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and of the Polish Pope John Paul the Second (KarolWojtyta). In a different political context, the Iranian revolution of 1979 brought to power the religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Michael Keren’s study on the role of Moses as a religious leader (Keren 1988) demonstrates the political impact of religious leadership. The same may be said about moral leadership, the best known example of which is the role played by Mohandas Gandhi in the struggle for independence of India and in initiating the strategy of non-violence (Erickson 1968).

Political leadership focuses on state power as the main means of achieving the desired goals. Political leaders are those who, successfully or not, attempt to realize their objectives by capturing and executing power in a state. While they may use religious and/or moral arguments, their main strategy focuses on political power.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between politicians for whom winning and keeping power is the main goal, and leaders who are motivated by an idea — broader and more ambitious than power itself. True leadership requires commitment to an idea — a vision of future and identification with a goal more important than power itself. Great leaders achieved greatness by formulating ambitious goals and by the ability to mobilize others in the efforts to achieve these goals. Sometimes, such visions and goals are results of the unexpected historic events: as it was the case when the outbreak of the second world war and the Nazi victories in 1940 endangered the very survival of France and Great Britain. Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill became the greatest leaders of their nations in the twentieth century because both of them had a clear vision of what had to be done to avoid the final calamity and were able to formulate the goals around which they mobilized the will of their nations. Sometimes, the vision and the goal are results of the rejection of unjust social reality — as it was the case in Gandhi’s peaceful revolt against the British tule in India and in the case of Martin Luther King’s protest against race discrimination in the United States. Sometimes, the vision and the goal reflect leader’s understanding of the necessity to fundamentally change international relations, as it was the case with the fathers of European integration after the second world war. In all these cases — and in many other — the commitment to a vision broader and more important than power itself became the essence of truly great leadership.

Power sometimes becomes the aim in itself, sought for variety of advantages it offers to power-holders — not only material but also those which allow them to satisfy their desire to control others. It would be naive to ignore the fact that for very many individuals active in politics power is nothing but the way to achieve these advantages. It is, however, power treated not as the goal per se but as the means to make an impact on history, that makes true political leaders. If the quality of political leadership depends on the impact a leader makes on history, the key question is: how important are human actions for the course of history?

1. Philosophy of history: determinism versus activism

For many centuries, the dominant understanding of history placed great individuals — rulers, leaders — in the center of analysis. From the Egyptian belief in the divine nature of the pharaohs and the ancient Greek mythology of heroes to the historians of early modern era the dominant historical narration focused on the role played by great individuals, particularly those who ruled. The monarchical character of state power was one of the reasons why historians tended to treat great individual as history-makers.

This has changed in the nineteenth century with new trends in philosophy, historiography, social sciences and ideologies. The romantic view of history was still present, particularly in the writings of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), who in 1840 published the comprehensive treatise on the role of heroes in history. Carlyle interpreted history as shaped by great men, considered by him the greatest gift given by God (Carlyle 1907:59). “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world — wrote Carlyle — is at bottom the History of Great Men who have worked here” (ibidem:1). He distinguished between five categories of heroes: (1) prophets (Mahomet), (2) poets (Shakspeare), 3) priests (Luther, Knox), (4) men of letters (Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Burns), (5) kings. In the last category — the only one which can be identified with political leadership — Carlyle listed Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte, both of whom he called “modern revolutionaries”. It is the role of political leaders (“kings“as Carlyle choose to call them) that constitutes the highest form of heroism. “The Commander over Men; — wrote Carlyle — he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men‘(ibidem: 272).

Carlyle’s lectures were closer to literary works than to academic treatises. His poetic style allowed him to make strong argument for his general thesis, that history is made by great men, without getting to the most complex question of the conditioning and limits of their role in history. In spite of his popularity Carlyle did not represent the dominant intellectual currents of his era. Challenges to the romantic view of history came from three main sources.

The first was a new school of historians which emerged during the period of French Restauration (1815-1830), whose most famous representative was Francois Guizot (1787-1874) — historian and influential politician of the restored French monarchy. It was Guizot who introduced the concept of class struggle and who pointed to the new way of interpreting history — as result of mass movements rather than of great individuals.

In the second half of the nineteenth century with the emergence of sociology such view received strong support from representatives of this new discipline, particularly the British sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), whose “The Study of Sociology“(1873) and monumental, ten-volumes “System of Synthetic Philosophy” (1862-1896) became the foundation for evolutionary sociology, patterned after the natural sciences and committed to the idea that human life is subject to the objective laws.

The third, and most important contribution to the deterministic interpretation of history came from the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) whose three-volumes study “Lecture on the History of Philosophy”, published in 1840-1844, was the most comprehensive version of philosophical determinism (Hegel 1995). Hegel believed that the course of history is determined by the Spirit of History (Weltgeist, Zeitgeist), which manifests itself though great men. “That the history of the World, with all the changing scenes which its annals present — wrote Hegel — is this process of development and the realization of Spirit — this is true Theodicy, the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world — that what has happened, and the happening every day, is not only not ‘without God’ but is essentially His work” (Hegel 1974: 15). Great men never operate in a historical vacuum but in conditions created by past generations. Consequently, great men are nothing more than instruments and symbols of the existing social forces. Their actions bring lasting effects only if and when they are consistent with the demands of their time.

Hegelian determinism influenced many intellectuals, including the greatest, in my opinion, Russian writer of the nineteenth century Lev Tolstoy (1828- 1910) whose monumental novel “War and Peace“contains the philosophical part, in which he expressed the fatalistic interpretation of history. Contrary to popular views, argued Tolstoy, great men are nothing more than labels behind which there is the divine will, the determining force which shapes the course of history.

The impact of Hegelian philosophy of history is crucial for understanding the Marxist ideology and its impact on the political developments in the twentieth century.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) began his intellectual journeys as member of the group of “young Hegelians”, a radical faction of German intellectuals in the years preceding the 1848 revolution. He fundamentally revised Hegel’s philosophy by substituting material factors for the spiritual. Learning from French historians, he saw history as predominantly shaped by social classes and their conflicts, culminating in the proletarian revolution which ultimately would lead to the total liberation of mankind from the chains of economic determination (Walicki 1995). Marx himself did not elaborate on the role of great men in history. His only writing touching on this subject is his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte“(written soon after Louis Bonaparte’s coup of 1851) which contains the often quoted sentence: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (Tucker 1978:595). This common sense statement does not allow to interpret Marxian approach to history as fatalistic. In the course of later development , the Marxist interpretation of history took however a clearly deterministic direction, mostly under the influence of his friend and continuator Frederick Engels (1820-1895).

Engels expressed his interpretation of history mostly in letters to the German socialists Joseph Bloch and Heinz Starkenburg. In the letter to Bloch (21- 22 September 1890) Engels expressed the view, that “we make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive” (Tucker 1978: 761). He went further in the direction of historical fatalism in the letter to Heinz Starkenburg (January 25,1894), in which Engels wrote the following: