In democracies there is quite broad agreement that a ‘strong leader’ is a good thing.1 Although the term is open to more than one interpretation, it is generally taken to mean a leader who concentrates a lot of power in his or her hands, dominates both a wide swath of public policy and the political party to which he or she belongs, and takes the big decisions. The idea that the more power one individual leader wields, the more we should be impressed by that leader is, I shall argue, an illusion, whether we are talking about democracies, authoritarian regimes or the hybrid regimes which fall in between. Effective government is necessary everywhere. But process matters. When corners are cut because one leader is sure he knows best, problems follow, and they can be on a disastrous scale. Due process means involving all the senior politicians with relevant departmental responsibilities in the decision-making process. It also naturally means that the government’s actions should be in conformity with the rule of law, and the government democratically accountable to parliament and the people.
No one ever says, ‘What we need is a weak leader.’ Strength is to be admired, weakness to be deplored or pitied. Yet the facile weak–strong dichotomy is a very limited and unhelpful way of assessing individual leaders. There are many qualities desirable in a political leader that should matter more than the criterion of strength, one better suited to judging weightlifters or long-distance runners. These include integrity, intelligence, articulateness, collegiality, shrewd judgement, a questioning mind, willingness to seek disparate views, ability to absorb information, flexibility, good memory, courage, vision, empathy and boundless energy. Although incomplete, that is already a formidable list. We should hardly expect most leaders to embody all of those qualities. They are not supermen or superwomen – and they should never forget it, even though it would be a requirement too far to add modesty to this inventory of leadership desiderata.
Yet, for all its limitations, the strong–weak theme has become a constant in discussions of leadership in democracies, not least in Great Britain. When he was Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair liked to portray the British prime minister, John Major, who had inherited a divided parliamentary party, as ‘weak’. Contrasting himself with Major, Blair said: ‘I lead my party. He follows his.’2 David Cameron, as prime minister, adopted similar tactics with Ed Miliband from the outset of his Labour leadership, hoping to make the ‘weak’ epithet stick.3 Miliband was able to retaliate when a large rebellion of Conservative backbenchers in July 2012 blocked an attempt to make the House of Lords a mainly elected, rather than appointed, legislative chamber. He said that Cameron had ‘lost control of his party’ and that the backbenchers’ defiance of the party whips showed that the prime minister was ‘weak’.4 Since then efforts of the one leader to depict the other as weak and himself as strong have resurfaced with boring regularity. Such attempts to portray the person who heads a rival party as a ‘weak leader’ have become common in a number of countries. In Canada, for example, shortly after Stéphane Dion was elected Leader of the Liberal Party in 2006, the Conservatives launched a sustained campaign to define him as weak.5 (Among Commonwealth countries which have adopted the ‘Westminster model’, including Great Britain where it originated, it is Canadian prime ministers who appear to be the most dominant over their parties, even though they tend to be ‘pragmatic, non-charismatic and even dull’.6) It is evident that politicians believe that if they can pin the ‘weak’ label on their principal opponent, this will work to their advantage with voters. How leaders are perceived is, indeed, of some electoral significance, but it is a great exaggeration to suggest that this is the basis on which ‘elections are now won and lost’.7
Far more desirable than the model of political leader as master is collective leadership. Placing great power in the hands of one person is inappropriate in a democracy, and it would be an unusually lacklustre government in which just one individual was best qualified, as distinct from sometimes feeling entitled, to have the last word on everything. In the case of authoritarian regimes, oligarchic leadership is usually a lesser evil when compared with the dictatorship of one man. Moreover, strong individual leadership means different things in different contexts. It is not only less appropriate than is widely believed, it is often very different from what it claims to be. Leaders are also followers, and while they may take pride in standing up to one group, even (in some cases especially) their own political party, they may be kowtowing to another. In other words, there can be a wide gulf between the image of the strong leader which many politicians have liked to project and the more complex reality. If one element of the myth of the strong leader is the use of strength as the criterion of desirable leadership, another is that – in a democracy – the leader’s advertised strength is often an artifice or illusion.
In countries making a transition from highly authoritarian rule either to democracy or to a variety of intermediate hybrid regimes, the idea of the strong leader can take a still more dangerous form than in a fully fledged democracy. A survey conducted in thirteen countries of post-Communist Europe in 2007 investigated reactions to the statement that ‘it would be worthwhile to support a leader who could solve the problems facing [that particular country] today even if he overthrew democracy’.8 In eight of the countries more than a third of respondents supported these ‘strong leader’ and anti-democratic sentiments. Agreement with the statement was above 40 per cent in Hungary, Russia and Latvia and reached over 50 per cent in Bulgaria and Ukraine. Acceptance of the proposition was lowest – in other words, support for democracy was highest and scepticism about the strong leader as saviour most widespread – in the Czech Republic (16 per cent) and Slovakia (15.3 per cent). It is probably not accidental that, as Czechoslovakia, these countries had rather more experience of genuine democracy in the twentieth century, especially between the two World Wars, than any of the other countries surveyed. However, one of the few other states in which less than a quarter of the population preferred the strong leader to democracy was Belarus (24.6 per cent), which, as part of the Soviet Union, had scarcely any experience of democracy. Moreover, in its post-Soviet existence, it has been the most authoritarian country in Europe. In this particular case, it may be the actual, continuing and unpleasant experience of autocracy – that of Alexander Lukashenka who has ruled the country increasingly dictatorially since 1994 – which has inoculated citizens against the idea that the answer to their problems was a strong leader.*
There are occasions – in war and crises – when inspirational leadership is needed. It is sometimes pined for even in periods when a more prosaic leader would suffice. More often than not, inspirational leadership is described, loosely, as charismatic. Originally, charisma meant a god-given talent. As the concept was developed by Max Weber, the charismatic was a ‘natural leader’, one with special, even supernatural, gifts whose leadership did not depend in any way on institutions or on holding office. The charismatic leader was seen as a prophet and hero and he was followed as an act of faith. For Weber the concept of charisma was ‘value-neutral’.9 Charismatic leaders may, indeed, do either appalling harm or great good. If we take two examples from later in the twentieth century than Weber’s lifetime (the great German social theorist died in 1920), they can be an Adolf Hitler or a Martin Luther King. While a wariness of charismatic leadership is justified, for followers should not suspend their critical faculties, how such leaders are ultimately assessed depends, in large part, on how we judge the causes that their inspirational speeches and example serve.
Moreover, the idea that charisma is a special quality a leader is born with needs to be severely qualified. To a large extent, it is followers who bestow charisma on leaders, when that person seems to embody the qualities they are looking for.10 During a good deal of his political career Winston Churchill was as much derided as he was admired. In the 1930s he was widely considered to be a failure who had not lived up to early promise. His inspirational presence and memorable speeches during the Second World War would appear to qualify him for the status of charismatic leader. More important than whether or not he fitted the hazy criteria of ‘charismatic’, though, was the fact that he was the right leader in the right place at the right time. Yet his success between 1940 and 1945 was heavily dependent on the specific political context – a grim and global war in which Churchill embodied the spirit of resistance to which a majority of British citizens aspired. No sooner was the war over than the party which Churchill led was comprehensively defeated in the 1945 general election. That illustrates the important point that democratic parliamentary elections are not primarily contests between leaders. We do not have survey data on the comparative popularity of Churchill and the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee at that time, but it is likely that in the immediate aftermath of the war Churchill would have been ahead in such a personality contest. Nevertheless, his ‘charisma’ was insecure. From being supremely ‘one of us’ during the war, Churchill was becoming again, in the eyes of at least half the nation, ‘one of them’.
Charismatic leadership can be won and lost, and is not generally a lifetime endowment. It is often dangerous, and frequently overrated. More useful categories of leadership, I suggest, are the redefining and the transformational. Each of them is the subject of a chapter in this book. Redefining leadership, as I use the term, means stretching the limits of the possible in politics and radically altering the political agenda. It can be exercised by the leadership of political parties, collectively as well as individually. Parties which aspire to win elections generally feel a need to seek the ‘centre ground’. However, redefining leaders, whether as individuals or collectively, seek to move the centre in their direction. They aim to alter people’s thinking on what is feasible and desirable. They redefine what is the political centre, rather than simply accept the conventional view of the middle ground at any particular time, then placing themselves squarely within it. Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the New Deal, and Lyndon B. Johnson with his ‘Great Society’ reforms and civil rights legislation, provided twentieth-century American examples of redefining administrations. In Britain Margaret Thatcher ranks as a redefining leader. She cited her mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, complaining that ‘post-war politics had become a “socialist ratchet”’, with successive Labour governments ‘moving the country a little further left’. Even if ‘the Tories stood pat’, their ‘accommodationist politics’ meant that they had connived in moving the centre of political gravity leftwards.11 The Labour governments headed by Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007 and Gordon Brown from 2007 to 2010 occupied the new centre (as redefined by Thatcher) in a comparable way to that in which the Conservative governments of Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath (so Thatcher complained) had occupied the previous middle ground which had been shifted leftwards by the redefining Labour government of 1945–1951, headed by Clement Attlee.
Transformational leaders are the rare people who make a still bigger difference. By a transformational leader I mean one who plays a decisive role in changing the economic system or political system of his or her country or who, even more remarkably, plays a crucial part in changing the international system. That is setting the bar high, but it enables us to make a distinction between even seriously reforming and redefining leaders, on the one hand, and those who play an indispensable role in effecting systemic transformation, on the other. The political context is all important. A transformational leader is extremely rare in a democracy for the simple reason that democracies do not normally undergo sudden transformations. Change tends to be sufficiently gradual that no one leader can be seen to have played a definitive part in systemic change. Fundamental change – for better or worse – tends to occur more rapidly within authoritarian regimes. It can be seen most clearly in the course of transition to or from authoritarian rule. When, however, we speak of transformational leaders, the focus is on systemic change that is for the better.
There is, then, a normative element in the use of the term. Transformational leaders are distinguished in this book from revolutionary leaders (the subject of Chapter 5), even though they, too, change the system after attaining power. They do so, however, relying on duress. Vladimir Lenin in Russia, Josef Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, Mao Zedong in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam played decisive roles in the achievement of fundamental change of both the economic and the political systems of their countries. So, in that sense, they were also transformational leaders, but revolution, as commonly understood, involves the violent overthrow of state structures and more often than not inaugurates new forms of authoritarian rule. Revolutionary leaders are, therefore, to be distinguished from those who play a decisive role in transforming the political or economic system of their country without resort either to violent seizure of power or to the physical coercion of their opponents.
The notion that there is, or should be, one leader who stands head and shoulders above his or her colleagues and dominates the political process is common enough in democracies. As a description of the reality of the leader’s power, it is often misleading, and as an aspiration it is misguided. As British prime minister from 1997 to 2007, Tony Blair aspired to dominance of the policy process and undoubtedly set the tone of the government. However, his lasting impact is easy to exaggerate. A number of the major policy decisions taken by the government had little to do with the prime minister. Its most significant legacy was constitutional reform, much of which resulted from policies Blair inherited and for which he lacked enthusiasm. This package included Scottish and Welsh devolution, power-sharing in Northern Ireland, House of Lords reform, Human Rights legislation and a Freedom of Information Act.12 In his memoirs, Blair describes the last-named legislation as ‘imbecility’, adding: ‘Where was Sir Humphrey when I needed him?’13 Of the constitutional change, only the negotiated sharing of power in Northern Ireland was an area in which Blair played a leading role – although others, too, were decisively important there – and the Northern Ireland settlement may be regarded as his most signal achievement.
That Blair’s dominance as prime minister was less than he wished was borne out by the nature of his uneasy – and often far from peaceful – co-existence with an authoritative and assertive Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was that minister, Gordon Brown, who was the dominant figure in the crucially important area of economic policy. Blair and those closest to him were eager to promote British membership of the common European currency, but Brown prevented this by insisting upon five tests which had to be successfully met before Britain could sign up to the euro. They were deliberately designed either not to be met or, at least, to give the chancellor the sole right to determine whether they had been.14 Alistair Darling, a Cabinet minister throughout the years of Labour government between 1997 and 2010 (and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government headed by Gordon Brown during the last three of those years) has confirmed that economic policy during the Blair premiership was largely in the hands of Brown, and that the one economic issue on which Blair ‘expended a great deal of energy, including exceptional Cabinet consultation’ was that of the single currency, ‘trying to get us to join’.15 In this endeavour, of course, Blair failed. Darling is not alone in expressing relief that the Chancellor prevailed in that contest with the Prime Minister.
Relations between Blair and Brown deteriorated to the point at which the prime minister and his closest advisers had great difficulty in finding out what the chancellor was going to put in the annual Budget. Blair’s principal aide, Jonathan Powell, notes that Brown ‘saw off’ two 10 Downing Street economic advisers ‘by starving them of information and forbidding Treasury officials to meet them’.16 In key areas of economic policy Blair, ever eager to project the image of the strong leader, actually had less influence than had many of his predecessors in their time. Foreign policy was another matter. Here Blair was much more dominant, especially on relations with the United States and on Middle Eastern policy. Time and again in his memoirs, Blair emphasizes that the decision to take Britain into war in Iraq in 2003 was his, that as prime minister he was entitled to take it, and that, even if people disagreed with the military intervention, they ‘sympathised with the fact that the leader had to take the decision’ (italics added).17
The push for one leader as ultimate decision-maker is still more prevalent, and more frequently pernicious in its consequences, within authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. They, of course, place far more power in the hands of leaders than is politically possible in a democracy. There may be some checks from within the executive on what the authoritarian leader can do, but legislatures provide, at best, a façade, judges are subservient to the political leadership, and the mass media are controlled and censored with varying degrees of severity. It goes without saying that there is no accountability of the top leadership of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime to the citizenry as a whole. Even in these cases, though, it makes a difference (as will be argued in Chapter 6) whether authoritarian power is wielded individually or collectively. In a totalitarian system, one man (and all such systems have been male-dominated) holds preponderant, and frequently overwhelming, power. Authoritarian regimes, in contrast, can be either autocracies or oligarchies. Some, in other words, are ruled by a single dictator and others have a more collective leadership. The more collective it is, the more points of access there are for privileged groups to lobby members of the top leadership team. The freer the deliberation and argument in a collective leadership, the less likely are the worst extremes of policy. Even in an authoritarian regime with a collective leadership, such as the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s, the personality and values of the top leader can make a vast difference, as Mikhail Gorbachev did in the Soviet case. The potential impact of the leader is greater than that of his counterpart in a democracy, in light of the more numerous constraints on the ability of a democratic leader to impose his or her will.
INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP
‘Strong’ leadership is, then, generally taken to signify an individual concentrating power in his or her own hands and wielding it decisively. Yet the more power and authority is accumulated in just one leader’s hands, the more that leader comes to believe in his or her unrivalled judgement and indispensability. The more decisions are taken by one individual leader, the less time that person has for thinking about the policy and weighing up the evidence in each case. Since there are only twenty-four hours in the day of even the strongest leader, that person’s aides find themselves (often to their great satisfaction) taking decisions in the name of the leader. That is just one reason why the allure of ‘strong leadership’ being exercised by a single person at the top of the political hierarchy should be resisted.
In democracies collective leadership is exercised by political parties. Although parties often get a bad name, and their membership has greatly declined in most countries over the past half-century, they remain indispensable to the working of democracy, offering some policy coherence, significant political choice and a measure of accountability.18 If, as is widely believed, electorates vote primarily for a particular leader rather than for a political party or policies, then there may be nothing so very wrong with the top leader’s aides exercising greater influence than senior members of the governing party. However, as has already been touched upon and will be demonstrated in Chapter 2, it is at best a huge oversimplification and usually misleading to see votes in a democratic general election as being mainly for or against an individual leader.
When a leader of a democratic party, knowing full well that it will be politically embarrassing to remove him or her, says, in effect, ‘either back me or sack me’, that leader is normally asserting a claim to superior judgement.19 Yet, the idea that one and the same person should be best equipped to adjudicate in all areas of policy is an odd belief to hold in a democracy. The former British prime minister Tony Blair has written that ‘a strong leader needs loyal supporters’ and added: ‘If you think the leadership is wrong or fundamentally misguided, then change leaders, but don’t have a leader and not support their leadership.’20 Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell has devoted an entire book to elaborating the ways in which a political leader can and should maximize his power in relation to his colleagues and his political party.21 The more the leader is set apart from other elected politicians, the greater the independent influence of his or her non-elected advisers – such as Powell. Indeed, the latter’s personal role in the making of ministerial appointments emerges from his memoir-cum-handbook as remarkably extensive, although he is committed to the idea of the ‘strong leader’ and at pains to portray Blair in that light. Viewing Machiavelli’s maxims for a prince operating within an authoritarian political system as no less applicable, with suitable updating, to a democracy, Powell writes: ‘Each time weak prime ministers succeed strong ones they invariably announce they are reintroducing Cabinet government, but all they really mean is that they do not have the power to lead their government effectively by themselves.’22
Few people today would admit to agreeing with Thomas Carlyle that ‘the history of what man has accomplished in this world’ is ‘at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’.23 And that is not only because Carlyle forgot about the great women. Yet, the eagerness of politicians and journalists to focus their hopes and expectations on just one person within a government has echoes of Carlyle’s deeply flawed conception of history. The extent to which both the ‘political class’ and broader public opinion in many countries accept the idea of the elevation of one leader far above others within a democratic government is puzzling. The expectations they generate thereby mean that heads of government may acquire still greater political authority than that already granted by the powers of the office they hold. Changing perceptions of what is acceptable behaviour by a president or prime minister can redefine the powers of the office in the absence of any overt constitutional change.
This has occurred even in the United States where the Constitution is venerated to a unique degree. Article 1 of that Constitution gives the American Congress the power to declare war. The president, as commander-in-chief, can respond with force if and when the United States is invaded, but otherwise, if the Constitution is strictly adhered to, he has the power to conduct war only after it has been authorized by Congress.24 Louis Fisher, who worked for Congress for four decades as a senior specialist on the separation of powers, has been the most notable and consistent critic of the drift of war-waging powers from Congress to the presidency.* He sees Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as presidents who exceeded their constitutional powers by waging war before they had congressional approval. The Vietnam War, from 1964 to 1975, and the twenty-first-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are among the cases in point. Congress, Fisher contends, has been far too supine in ceding an extra-constitutional power to the president, in failing to assert its own prerogatives, and in critical scrutiny of operations involving the US military. He argues that both Republicans and Democrats ‘need to rethink the merits of presidential wars’ and that legislators ‘must be prepared, and willing, to use the ample powers at their disposal’.25
However, foreign policy, including major issues of war and peace, is an area in which heads of government generally – not only in the United States – have played an enhanced role from the middle decades of the twentieth century onwards. One development which greatly contributed to this, and had a big impact on political leadership, has been the unprecedented increase in the speed of communications. Of huge importance was the establishment of international telephone links. The first transatlantic telephone conversation did not take place until 1915 and it was the late 1920s before a regular intercontinental service was established. Air transport has impinged even more strongly on the conduct of foreign policy. When British prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich for his ill-fated meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1938, such travel for the specific purpose of one head of government meeting another was still a fairly unusual undertaking. Chamberlain’s predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, never once boarded a plane. Baldwin was, though, the last UK prime minister to eschew air transport. During the Second World War there were important meetings of the leaders of the Allied opposition to Hitler in Casablanca, Tehran and Yalta, and just after victory over Nazi Germany had been secured, at Potsdam. In the post-war era ‘summit talks’ between potential adversaries and face-to-face meetings with foreign allies have become commonplace. Once it was technically easier for heads of government to meet more often in person, an increase in diplomacy conducted at the highest political level meant that not only parliaments but also ambassadors and even foreign ministers found their own international policy roles somewhat downgraded.
Technological developments that made possible instant communication between top leaders have, then, profoundly affected the way business is conducted between governments internationally. The internet has added a vast new dimension to the stream of instant information being thrust at national politicians, and especially their leaders. Cumulatively, these developments have tended to reduce the role of legislatures in war-related policy and have also meant that even a head of government who might wish to leave diplomacy almost entirely to the foreign ministry is not able to do so. Nevertheless, the increase in the speed of communication is an inadequate reason for focusing diplomacy and especially decisions involving war or peace in the person of the head of government, whether the president of the United States or the premier in a European country. It takes time to assemble a military force and there is a strong element of special pleading on the part of chief executives when the argument is made that the peculiar dangers of the contemporary world, together with the need for speedy action, mean that they are uniquely entitled to decide on military action. In the American context, Fisher has argued, too much emphasis has been placed on speed and too much trust in the judgement of the president. If, he has written, ‘the current risk to national security is great, so is the risk of presidential miscalculation and aggrandizement – all the more reason for insisting that military decisions be thoroughly examined and approved by Congress. Contemporary presidential judgements need more, not less, scrutiny’.26
Most unusually, President Barack Obama sought congressional approval in September 2013 for an attack on selected Syrian targets following the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in its civil war. This had little, however, to do with interpretations of the American constitution and more with a concern to seek domestic legitimacy and shared responsibility for a military intervention about which there was widespread public scepticism, following the embroilments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The precedent of seeking the legislature’s approval had already been set by British Prime Minister David Cameron. The House of Commons, in an almost unheard-of rebuff of the government on a major foreign policy issue, refused to back military action, thus ruling out British participation in any military strike against Syrian targets. The referral of the decision to Congress stimulated wider debate on the issue in the United States and it became far from clear that the White House would prevail. Apart from members of both houses, and from both parties (but especially the Democrats), who feared that US military strikes on Syria might make a bad situation even worse, there were Republicans eager to inflict a defeat on Obama, whatever the issue.
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at a press conference in London on 9 September, said that the only way President Bashar al-Assad could avoid military strikes, was to turn over his entire stock of chemical weapons within the next week (‘But he isn’t going to do it. And it can’t be done obviously’). The remarks were, however, seized upon by Kerry’s Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who promptly announced an initiative to persuade Assad to give up all his chemical weapons. Russia was the country with the greatest influence over Syria and President Vladimir Putin had been in the forefront of opponents of the proposed American military action. Obama responded willingly, suspending the proposed missile strike and, accordingly, the congressional vote. Inaugurating a process of disarming Syria of its chemical weapons under international supervision, following agreements hammered out between Kerry and Lavrov, had two beneficial effects for the US president (in addition to being something of a diplomatic coup for Russia). It meant avoiding a potentially damaging rejection by Congress of a big presidential foreign policy decision and, more importantly, raised the possibility of attaining the limited goal of removing Syria’s chemical weapons without the wholly unpredictable consequences of unilateral military intervention. This outcome was in itself an unintended result of the referral of the issue to Congress, but that decision provided more time for reflection and, ultimately, negotiation. It did not end the civil war in which the overwhelming majority of people who perished had been killed by non-chemical weapons. By leading, however, to US–Russian cooperation on the issue, it brought the prospect of a negotiated end to the conflict at least somewhat closer than military strikes, with inevitable civilian casualties, was likely to have done.27
The Truman Example
Harry Truman is among the presidents criticized for sending troops into battle without congressional approval, and of being, indeed, the president who set in motion the executive power’s claim to be the initiator of war with the decision in 1950 to deploy troops in Korea.28 Crucially, however, this was not unilateralism on the part of the United States. Truman had clear United Nations authorization for the military action. American troops were the main contingent within a broader UN force sent to defend non-Communist South Korea from attack by the Communist North in a mission that benefited from its international legitimacy.29 Truman was, moreover, the kind of leader very ready to draw upon the collective wisdom within the broader leadership. It goes without saying that most politicians who attain high office, especially the highest, are ambitious and enjoy wielding power and authority. Yet some of the partial exceptions to that generalization are among the most effective heads of government. Truman was one of them. He was neither a redefining nor, still less, a transformational leader, but he was a successful one. If the desire for ‘strong leadership’ on the part of one individual is the pursuit of a false god, that is not to decry the need for leadership. It can, and often must, come from the chief executive, but it can and should come also from other members of a democratically elected government.
Truman was a reluctant vice-president of the United States and subsequently a reluctant president. Brought to the highest office by the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, he is a president whose reputation has grown over the years, and he headed an administration that laid solid foundations for the post-war order in both America and Europe.30 Being far from overbearing, Truman was prepared to cede great authority in foreign policy to his successive secretaries of state, General George Marshall and Dean Acheson. He had begun his presidency distrusting the department they headed, observing in his diary that ‘the striped-pants boys’ or ‘smart boys’ in ‘the State Department, as usual, are against the best interests of the US’.31 In this respect, Truman was like Margaret Thatcher who – as her foreign policy adviser, Sir Percy Cradock, remarked – saw the British Foreign Office as ‘defeatists, even collaborators’, sharing the view Cradock attributed to her close Cabinet ally Norman Tebbit that they were ‘the ministry that looked after foreigners, in the same way that the Ministry of Agriculture looked after farmers’.32 Truman’s view changed, however, in a way in which Mrs Thatcher’s did not. While the American president’s right to determine foreign policy (war powers apart) is much more constitutionally entrenched than that of a prime minister in a parliamentary system, Truman treated Marshall and Acheson with great respect, doing nothing to detract from their authority.
In his famous study of presidential power, Richard E. Neustadt began by stressing the limits on the power of an American president, and it was Truman’s perception of this on which he especially drew. Truman said: ‘I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them . . . That’s all the powers of the President amount to.’33 Speaking in 1952 just before General Eisenhower was elected to the presidency, Truman observed that Eisenhower would be sitting at his desk, saying: ‘Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army.’34 (Italics in original.)* While collegial in his style, Truman was, nonetheless, prepared to exert his authority when senior subordinates became intractable. He was not afraid to dismiss popular figures, even when their removal was liable to damage him in the eyes of public opinion. When in 1946 Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace began to pursue what amounted to an independent foreign policy – less critical of the Soviet Union and more critical of Britain – Truman fired him, albeit after some initial vacillation between supporting Wallace or his secretary of state at the time, James F. Byrnes. In a letter to his mother and sister, Truman wrote: ‘Charlie Ross [the President’s press secretary] said I’d shown I’d rather be right than President and I told him I’d rather be anything than President.’35 Truman was equally undaunted in 1951 when he recalled General Douglas MacArthur from his command in Asia for airing his discordant views on foreign policy in a manner which the president regarded as ‘rank insubordination’. MacArthur had been speaking in increasingly apocalyptical terms in 1950 and early 1951 about how the Korean War could only be won by taking the fight into China and with the possible use of nuclear weapons. He insisted that ‘if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable’.36
The dismissal of MacArthur, Truman recorded in his diary, produced ‘quite an explosion’; and ‘telegrams and letters of abuse by the dozens’.37 The mailbag soon contained not ‘dozens’, but some eighty thousand communications on the subject of MacArthur’s firing, with a substantial majority in favour of the general. Telegrams to Congress were ten to one on the side of MacArthur. Even the (far more representative) Gallup Poll showed 69 per cent support for MacArthur against 29 per cent who approved of Truman’s decision.38 The attacks on Truman in the Senate were venomous. Senator William Jenner of Indiana declared that secret Soviet agents were running the government of the United States, and Richard Nixon – at that time also a senator – interpreted MacArthur’s dismissal as appeasement of Communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy – whose attempts to find Communists in every governmental closet, not to mention within the military and Hollywood, gave rise to the term ‘McCarthyism’ – said that Truman must have been drunk when he made the decision and that ‘the son of a bitch ought to be impeached’.39
The political system of the United States is such that choosing and, on occasion, changing Cabinet members; taking responsibility for the most senior military appointments, and making foreign policy rank as the president’s areas of greatest power. But it was characteristic of Truman’s style that the most outstanding foreign policy achievement of his presidency is known as the Marshall Plan, not the Truman Plan.40 The countries of Western Europe, both those on the side of the victors in the Second World War and those that were defeated, had been devastated economically by the conflict. There was a fear that democratic government would be undermined by economic collapse at a time when the Soviet Union had overseen the creation of a number of client states in the Eastern half of the continent. The policy of economic bolstering of democracy, put together by Secretary of State Marshall, with the strong backing of Truman and the help of Acheson (at that time Marshall’s right-hand man in the State Department), was decisively important for European recuperation and revival. In the words of the British foreign secretary at the time, Ernest Bevin, it was ‘like a lifeline to sinking men’.41
LEADERSHIP AND POWER
It is said that all political careers end in failure – an exaggeration but one containing a grain of truth. Many hitherto successful political lives end with electoral defeat, but for a leader to lose an election, after some years in government, is normal in a democracy. Having led a party to defeat at the polls, a politician will often voluntarily relinquish its leadership. In the UK, for example, Sir Alec Douglas-Home resigned after the Conservatives lost the British general election of 1964. Neil Kinnock did so, having never held governmental office and after leading the Labour Party to defeat both in 1987 and in 1992. Gordon Brown resigned following the election of 2010 when no party won an overall majority but the Conservatives did much better than Labour. Failure of a more profound kind is when a leader is forced out by his or her governmental or party colleagues. It tends to be the fate of overweening leaders who try to concentrate power in their hands and treat colleagues high-handedly. Among British prime ministers, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair all left office, in their own view prematurely, through failure to retain sufficient support from their own side in parliament.
There remains, nevertheless, a widespread assumption that placing greater power and authority in the hands of one individual leader is worth doing in a democracy.42 That is despite the evidence (some of which will be found in Chapters 2 and 7 of this book) that both their countries and such leaders themselves pay a price for it in the end. This is not for a moment to deny that in political reality some individual leaders – and in a democracy, not only the top leader – can make an enormous difference, either for better or for worse. Even if eventually ousted by her or his own party colleagues, such a leader may have a big impact on public policy and her country while in office. Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership in Britain from 1979 until 1990 is an obvious example. Thatcher may be regarded as one of a minority of party leaders and prime ministers within democracies who radically redefined the terms of the political debate, but whose style of leadership, nevertheless, led to hubris and her downfall.
There is no need, then, to endorse the ‘Great Man’ or ‘Great Woman’ conception of history to be aware that some leaders matter greatly. Economists and economic historians are often to be found among those who go to the opposite extreme from the ‘Great Man’ notion and embrace the view that history is made by impersonal forces. It would be foolish to deny the importance of fundamental shifts in the way human beings acquire the means of subsistence, of technological change, or of the significance of a series of international economic crises in recent years which came as a surprise to leaders – and, for that matter, to most economists. Political leaders have also appeared comparatively helpless in the face of globalization as industry has moved from one country and continent to another and left some of the world’s most advanced economies needing major structural adaptation. Yet, it would be absurd to claim that the policies of governments or of international institutions can make no difference to the way technological change is managed or financial turmoil dealt with. These phenomena do require leadership, but collegial and collective leadership. However, when economic depression occurs, this has often merely strengthened the myth of the strong leader – a belief that a strong, and preferably charismatic, individual will provide the answer to these and other serious problems. The rule of Benito Mussolini in inter-war Italy and, still more, the rise in popularity of Adolf Hitler in the Great Depression election in Germany of 1930, and his subsequent ascent to power, are sombre illustrations of this tendency.43
Most of the leaders I write about in this book have wielded governmental power. When the term ‘strong leader’ is used of politicians, it is a party leader, premier or president who is being talked about. The image projected is of a head of government surrounded by advisers who will provide information and make suggestions, but who will ultimately defer to the top leader. Too much deference, however, makes for bad policy. A leader needs colleagues of political stature who will stand their ground and not hesitate to disagree with the judgement of the person who formally or informally presides over their deliberations. This will seldom amount to a leader being overtly overruled by the cabinet or shadow cabinet, for a democratic leader, aware that his or her colleagues remain unconvinced, will generally draw appropriate conclusions. Only leaders of autocratic temperament, too sure of the superiority of their own judgement, will attempt to railroad a policy through against the wishes of a majority of their colleagues. Since heads of government usually have some discretion in deciding whether to promote or demote cabinet colleagues, they can, however, more often than not rely on the compliance of many of the latter who hope to earn points for conformity with the leader’s wishes. That is a significant instrument of power, but it has its limits. A leader who loses the confidence of a large proportion of senior colleagues can hardly survive within a democratic political party.
The difference between accountable or despotic, honest or corrupt, effective or inefficient government has a huge impact on the lives and well-being of ordinary people. So what the politicians who head these governments do – and how they are held responsible for their actions and style of rule – is clearly worth our close attention. Institutional power adds enormously to the potential impact of a leader. Yet it is worth keeping in mind that having your hands on levers of power is not the same as leadership in its purest form. The most authentic political leadership is to be seen when large numbers of people are inspired by someone who has neither power nor patronage to dispose of, but whose message strikes a chord with them. Such leadership can be provided by an emergent or rising political party, by a group, or by an individual. It is the readiness of others to embrace the message and take part in a movement that defines the effectiveness of such political leadership. The leader of the Indian struggle for independence from British imperial rule, Mahatma Gandhi, and the American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, were outstanding twentieth-century examples. Both chose the path of non-violence (King himself was influenced by Gandhi) and showed the world that it was not to be confused with non-resistance.
The twenty-first century has seen no more remarkable example of leadership – or of courage – than that offered by Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl from the Swat valley of Pakistan who became an internationally renowned campaigner for girls’ education. She was shot in the head by the Taliban in October 2012 in an attempt to kill her which came very close to succeeding. This was intended not only to put an end to her personal campaign but also to frighten off other female pupils from daring to attend school. From the age of eleven, Malala Yousafzai was championing education for girls. She wrote a blog for the BBC Urdu service which described her struggle to attend classes in the face of Taliban obscurantism and its hostility to female education. Aged fifteen when she was shot (injuries which led to multiple operations, first in Pakistan and then in Britain, to save her life), she became the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.44 On her sixteenth birthday, 12 July 2013, she addressed the United Nations in New York, with the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, presiding.45 By this time more than four million people had signed a ‘stand with Malala’ petition that called for education for the fifty-seven million children around the world (girls a high proportion of them) who are not able to go to school.46 This, it is worth reiterating, is leadership of a purer form than that exercised by heads of government with jobs and favours to dispense.
Not all leadership that attracts spontaneous followers is, needless to say, of comparable moral worth. That provided by Benito Mussolini in Italy immediately after the First World War and by Adolf Hitler in Germany from the 1920s to the early 1930s was effective enough in attracting disciples. These were years when Mussolini and Hitler did not yet have instruments of state power at their disposal. This was, therefore, leadership in a more unalloyed sense than their subsequent rule, however morally reprehensible in the eyes of posterity. Mussolini and Hitler are among those who have been widely, and understandably, regarded as charismatic leaders on the strength of their oratory and ability to attract a spontaneous following. They also made the transition from one form of leadership to the other – from that which people were inspired to follow when they still had a choice to leadership backed by coercive state power.
There are many other examples of individuals who moved on from being leaders who had to rely on force of argument and example to establish their leadership to positions of state power. Nelson Mandela’s journey from leading opponent of white minority rule in apartheid South Africa, via a scarcely imaginable twenty-seven years of imprisonment, to the South African presidency was among the most inspiring examples of leadership of the twentieth century. Lech Wał
sa’s trajectory from strike leader in the Gdansk shipyards to leader of a massive unofficial trade union, Solidarity, in Communist Poland to the presidency in post-Communist Poland is another notable instance of spontaneous political leadership turning, in due course, into the formal authority and accoutrements of the highest office of state.
Choosing Leaders in Democracies
Many heads of government, however, have not attracted vast followings before becoming a leader of a party and subsequently a government – sometimes hardly any at all outside their immediate entourage. They have been selected for a variety of reasons and by a variety of means. In non-democratic regimes, they have quite often chosen themselves, as in the case of a military coup. Within parliamentary democracies – including, until recently, Australia – the choice may be restricted to a selectorate consisting only of members of the party who have seats in the legislature. In many countries, the choice is made by wider constituencies, including the party membership as a whole. (This may, as in the UK, involve parliamentarians’ votes being weighted much more heavily than that of the individual party member, since the MPs will generally have a more intimate knowledge of the rival candidates.) The leaders chosen should not assume that they have been picked because of qualities so special that colleagues and party members have delegated responsibility to them for taking the big decisions. Yet, from the way some of them, a number of their colleagues, and the mass media alike discuss politics, it often seems as if just such an assumption has been made.
The idea that leaders of a political party or heads of a government have been chosen because they have already demonstrated such remarkable leadership that people are eager to follow them is, with few exceptions, far-fetched. Within a party which is sharply divided on policy, the choice may alight on someone who is seen as a unifier or, alternatively, as a representative of the majority standpoint in the battle of ideas. Often, the vote goes to the person who is viewed as the most articulate and persuasive advocate of the party’s line. Sometimes, but far from always, the party members vote for the person who, opinion polls suggest, is most popular with the wider electorate. A leader may also be chosen because he or she is deemed to be inclusive in political style and good at coalition-building, whether within his or her political party (for serious parties are never homogeneous) or within the legislature. If we take the example of two especially notable women leaders, the last point has been as clearly true of the German chancellor Angela Merkel as it was spectacularly untrue of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In a parliamentary system, it is a major plus for a leadership candidate to be an effective performer on the floor of the legislature. This strengthens the morale of the parliamentary party and feeds through to the electorate in media reports. In all democracies it has become increasingly important over the past half-century for a leader to come over well on television. None of that means that such politicians are, or need be, charismatic.
Most prime ministers in parliamentary systems come to that office, having previously held ministerial posts. They have already, therefore, some experience of governing at the national level. Tony Blair in 1997 and David Cameron in 2010 were two British exceptions to that general rule, as a result of their relative youth and the lengthy periods their parties had been out of power. American presidents, much more often, have not previously held office in the federal government before being thrust into the highest post of all within the executive. A seat in the Senate provides very limited experience of coordinating policy and none of controlling a vast bureaucracy. A state governorship is a poor apprenticeship for the foreign policy role that an American president is expected to play. Presidential candidates do, though, test some of their leadership skills on the campaign trail. Their ability to communicate effectively and to make an emotional connection with a wider public comes under scrutiny in the drawn-out system of primary elections and then in the presidential campaign itself. The entire process is extremely long in comparison with other countries. Both the extraordinary length of time candidates have to spend traversing the country and the cost of running, which is greater than in any other democracy, puts off many able potential candidates. Large-scale personal wealth or good connections to corporate and rich individual donors have been in danger of becoming prerequisites of entering the race as a serious contender, thus depriving the country of leaders from outside a charmed circle.
Nevertheless, the two most recent Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, did not come from privileged family backgrounds. They both went to elite universities, but through scholarships and loans and as a result of their own abilities and endeavours. While striving for the party nomination and as presidential candidates, they still had to raise vast sums of money. Obama, in particular, succeeded in attracting a wide array of small and moderate donations, as well as large ones from wealthy individuals of liberal views, thus reducing his dependence on corporate interests. The long and arduous process of gaining, first, the party nomination and then the presidency is also, in significant ways, a school of leadership. As Obama put it in an interview during his first term as president:
I do think that two years of campaigning under some pretty high-pressure situations in a perverse way does prepare you for the pressures involved in the office, because you’re used to being on the high-wire, you’re used to people scrutinizing you, you’re used to – in some ways – a lot of folks depending on you. This is just at a different level. It’s not politics, its governance, so there’s an added weight there. But . . . there was not a moment when I suddenly said, Whoa, what have I gotten myself into?47
*
Too frequently all leadership is reduced to a dichotomy, although the pairs themselves come in many variants.48 ‘Charismatic leaders’ are set against ‘mere office-holders’, ‘innovators’ compared with ‘bureaucrats’, ‘real leaders’ contrasted with ‘managers’, while ‘transforming leaders’ are distinguished from ‘transactional leaders’.49 Then there are ‘great leaders’ and ‘ordinary leaders’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and, of course, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ leaders. Such an either-or distinction invariably entails vast oversimplification. In this book I focus on the inadequacy of the ‘strong’–‘weak’ dichotomy in particular and highlight the dangers of believing that strength and domination are what we should look for, and expect to find, in a paragon of a leader. There are a lot of different ways of exercising effective political leadership as well as different ways of failing. Many of the failures of leaders who are confident they know best, and brook no disagreement, have been monumental.
In paying particular attention to redefining, transformational, revolutionary, authoritarian and totalitarian leaders, I am focusing on categories of leadership and exercise of power which have had an especially significant impact on people’s lives. Yet they are far from occupying the entire spectrum of political leadership. There are, as we have seen, remarkable leaders who never held governmental office. And there are presidents, of whom Truman was one, as well as prime ministers (some of whom figure in the chapters that follow) who were effective enough heads of government, although they did not introduce radical change. And sometimes, as has already been touched upon and will be further explored, the most significant of a government’s achievements have less to do with the person at its head than with other members of the top leadership team. Too much is expected of the individuals at the top of the hierarchy and too much attributed to them. That is especially so in a democracy where there are, quite properly, many constraints on the top leader, even though an excessive focus on the person occupying the highest rung of the ladder has become all too common. Political leadership is multifaceted. It must be seen in different contexts and from different perspectives. That is what the chapter that follows sets out to do.
* At the other end of the scale, the very high proportion of people ready in Bulgaria and Ukraine to embrace a strong leader, even if that person were to overthrow democracy, may reflect extreme dissatisfaction with the quality of what has passed for democracy in these countries. In the Bulgarian case it is likely to be associated with the manifest public anger (including sit-ins in parliament) about the level of corruption.
* Against the Fisher viewpoint, two general objections may be made. The first is that Congress as a whole remains one of the most powerful legislatures in the world. As a result of the separation of powers, it can frustrate the executive – admittedly, especially in domestic policy – more than can the great majority of its counterparts elsewhere. The second objection is that the presidency has a greater democratic legitimacy than has the Senate (as distinct from the House of Representatives). Among powerful second chambers, the Senate is exceptionally unrepresentative of the population of the country as a whole. (The British House of Lords, formerly a hereditary chamber and now a predominantly appointed body, clearly has still less popular legitimacy. However, it is a revising and advisory chamber, no longer possessing the power of veto.) Equal representation of every state in the US Senate means that a vote for a senator in Wyoming has almost seventy times more weight than that for a senator in the vastly more populous California. See Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2011, pp. 841-856, esp. 844 and 846. Moreover, the Senate has great influence on federal appointments (much more than has the House of Representatives), and more impact on the filling of government posts than have most legislatures elsewhere. This includes federal appointments to senior foreign and defence policy positions.
* Eisenhower was, however, better prepared for government by consent than another military man-turned-politician, the Duke of Wellington. Following his first Cabinet meeting as British prime minister in 1828, he said: ‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’ Peter Hennessy, Cabinet (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986), p. 121, notes that the story was told in after-lunch speeches by Peter Walker, Secretary of State for Energy in the government headed at that time by Margaret Thatcher. After a pause, Walker would add: ‘I’m so glad that we don’t have Prime Ministers like that today.’