The looming succession of Ilam Aliyev to replace his dying father, Haider Aliyev, as Azerbaijan's ruler marks a triumph of nepotism on a scale other postcommunist leaders can only dream about.
But Azerbaijan's dynastic politics are hardly exceptional. One Bush has practically succeeded another as America's president, and the son of Singapore's founder, Lee Kwan Yew, is to become the country's premier. Indeed, democratic leaders with dynastic dreams have bedeviled India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and many other countries.
Despite Communists' self-proclaimed "divine right" to a monopoly on power, other systems have proven far more vulnerable to monarchist seizures. Until the Aliyevs came along, only North Korea's utterly loony Kim Il-sung managed to anoint his son atop a red throne. Otherwise, communist patriarchs -- and their often scarcely more democratic postcommunist successors -- have not seen fit to pitch their bloodlines against the sprawling institutional bureaucracy left behind by Leninism. Why?
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
By its nature communism -- whose bureaucracy still exists in almost unadulterated form in the countries of the former Soviet Union -- spawned lobbies and clans with a combined might that even the closest-knit family can scarcely expect to overcome. As a result, postcommunists prefer to place their offspring in lucrative commercial jobs where they can pile up foreign-currency fortunes. (Even President Aliyev groomed his son for power by installing him as vice-president of SOCAR, the vastly lucrative state oil monopoly.)
Kim Jong-il's father similarly ensured a smooth succession a decade ago by appointing family members to positions of power for 40 years, clearing the way by sending the incumbents to concentration camps. But another reason behind North Korea's dynastic succession was that Kim Il-sung created a national ideology, Juche, that mixed communism with a heavy dose of Confucian values.
Confucianism exalts an idealized bond between father and son as the model for all human relations. As sons must revere fathers, so subjects must revere their rulers. Perhaps this "Confucian factor" is playing some part in Singapore's succession.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels dismissed the family as the product and protector of private gain. Such ideas were hardly new. In Plato's ideal republic, children would be separated from their parents at birth, so that "no mother shall know her own child." In the brave new world of postrevolutionary Russia, Anatoli Lunacharski looked forward to freedom from the mutual relations of husbands, wives, fathers and children, so you could not tell who was related to whom and how closely.
A glimpse of what it meant to be the child of a very top leader can be found in Svetlana Stalin's account of her brother, Vasily: "He lived in a big government dacha with an enormous staff, a stable and kennels, all of course at government expense ... They gave him medals, higher and higher ranks, horses, automobiles, privileges, everything." An alcoholic, Vasily was a lieutenant-general before 30 and air commander of the Moscow military district.
For all the theorizing of Plato and Marx, the family seems to prevail unless other social institutions counteract or supersede it. Nepotism, patronage within the family circle, is thus a natural way for anybody in power, or aspiring to it, to strengthen his support in societies where other institutions are weak or non-existent, or where the destruction of existing institutions forms part of the power-grabber's intentions.
Nepotism as a means of security is readily seen in the successful revolutionary's habit of appointing a brother or cousin to run the army: President Fidel Castro did so in Cuba, as well as former presidents Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Hafez Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It is also a way of "banking" the spoils of power with a view to living off the interest later. Relatives can work at jobs which it would be improper or inconvenient for the family's head to be seen doing himself.
For example, most modern societies, including postcommunist ones, favor a division between the makers of big money and the holders of high office because of the conflicts between public and private interest. (Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a big exception here.) If the jobs of ruling and moneymaking are shared across generations, or among brothers or cousins or in-laws, criticism is more easily deflected.
Nepotism of this type is practically the organizing principle of big business in China, where most lucrative deals involve the "princelings," the offspring of the communist leaders, who number perhaps 3,000-4,000. If and when communism collapses in China, the piling up of fortunes within leading families will probably have played a crucial role by persuading those leaders that life can offer pursuits even more rewarding than the struggle for socialism.
All of this is fine for those who practice nepotism. The problem is that the public's loss is usually far greater than the family's gain. This is not necessarily because ruling families appropriate so much that they impoverish everybody else. Far more damaging is the simple fact that when a closed group monopolizes much of society's power and wealth, initiative and enterprise are stifled in the wider population.
Queues of astrologers now reportedly camp outside the young Aliyev's home in Baku. However, the true danger to all would-be 21st century dynasts lies not in their stars, but in themselves.
Nina Khrushcheva is a senior fellow at the New School University. Copyright: Project Syndicate.
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