Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, the past has weighed
heavily on current political practices. The country's historical
evolution, for example, has proved particularly inimical to
democratic development, deviating significantly from patterns
viewed as optimum for the development of democracy. Political
scientist Robert Dahl has argued that sequences in which
successful experiences with limited liberalization are followed
by gradually greater inclusiveness appear to favor democracy.
The analyst Eric Nordlinger has asserted that the pattern most
promising for the development of democracy is one in which
national identity emerges first, then legitimate and authoritative
state structures are institutionalized, and ultimately mass
parties and a mass electorate emerge with the extension of citizenship
rights to non-elite elements.
The pattern followed by the Dominican Republic was very
different. The country's colonial period was marked by the decimation
of the indigenous population, and then by poverty and
warfare. National integration was truncated, first by a Haitian
invasion and then by the attempts of some Dominican elites to
trade nascent Dominican sovereignty for security by having foreign
powers annex the country, while enriching themselves in
the process. State building also suffered under the dual impact
of international vulnerability and unstable, neopatrimonial,
authoritarian politics. Both integration and state building were
also impaired by bitter regional struggles based on different
economic interests and desires for power that accentuated the
politics of the country. In this context, the failure of early
efforts to extend liberal guarantees and citizenship rights to
vast sectors of the population served to reinforce past patterns
of behavior. Nonetheless, reform efforts continually
reemerged.
Indeed, a Dominican state arguably did not emerge until the
late nineteenth century or even the era of Rafael Leonidas
Trujillo Molina (1930-61). Trujillo's emergence, in turn, was
unquestionably facilitated by changes wrought by the eightyear
United States occupation of the Dominican Republic at
the beginning of the twentieth century. Trujillo's pattern of
rule could not have been more hostile to democratic governance.
His centralization of power, monopolization of the
economy, destruction or co-optation of enemies, and astonish-
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