The End of Leadership by Kellerman Barbara

Author:Kellerman, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Worldwide Momentum—upgrading followers

Whatever the changes at home—the slow but certain deterioration in the status of leaders—they have been superseded by changes abroad. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of the differences between what many, if not most, countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America were only three or four decades ago, and what they are in the present. Across large swaths of the globe there have been seismic shifts in relations between leaders and followers, with most, though not all, leaving the first weaker and the second stronger. However, unlike the American experience, in which the balance shifted on account of the diminished leader, the balance worldwide shifted on account of the enhanced, and in many cases, the emboldened, follower.

Closing the Black Book of Communism—Russia and China

One of the defining geopolitical trends of the last twenty-five years has been the spread of democracy. In 1975, 30 nations of the world had governments that were popularly elected. By 2005 that number had climbed to 119.1 Since then, the growth of democracy has slowed or stopped in some countries, including Bangladesh, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Philippines. And in others, such as Egypt and Tunisia, it is not so far robust (though in 2011 Tunisia had peaceful free elections).2 Still, conditions conducive to democracy—modernization, for example—are nearly everywhere in evidence, which is why political participation by ordinary people has grown to levels previously inconceivable.3

In some cases, the once powerless wanted equity above all—in South Africa, for example, which in the early 1990s transitioned, finally, from apartheid to majority rule. In other cases, the change from old order to new centered on the disappearing communist dictator. Dictators still exist, of course, but their realm has shrunk in recent years and is shrinking still. Additionally, in place of the dictator in countries such as Russia and China is a leadership cadre that is obliged to consider in its calculations characters that include, among others, the people themselves.

Though estimates vary, under the rule of Joseph Stalin, because of the rule of Joseph Stalin, some 20 million people in the Soviet Union died. And, though estimates vary, the number of Chinese deaths attributed to Mao Zedong during the Great Leap Forward alone, from 1958 to 1962, is generally thought to have been about 45 million, all worked, starved, or beaten to death.4 These sorts of numbers repeat themselves in other former communist countries, which is a testament not only to man’s inhumanity toward man, but to our own vulnerability to being debased or even destroyed by those more powerful than we.5

How did the collapse of communism, the demise of the dictator, come to pass? At the macro level it was a combination of repressed political aspirations, depressed economic conditions, and growing dissent—Participants, Activists, and some brave Diehards, unwilling any longer meekly to follow.6 And, at the micro level, it was a series of events that began with the death of the tyrant (Stalin died in 1953 and Mao in 1976) and extended, first in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, then later in China, to gradual, moderate, systemic relaxation.

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