Liberty as infrastructure, not luxury

The Hill argues a pointed proposition: that sixty years of Botswana's independence have refuted the authoritarian development myth — the belief that poor societies cannot afford the 'luxury' of liberal institutions and must therefore tolerate concentrated power as the price of growth. I find this framing exactly right, and the evidence, as described, exactly what sound political philosophy would have anticipated.

The argument against free institutions in developing nations has always rested on a false premise — that rights and the rule of law are decorative, appended to prosperity once it is secured, rather than constitutive of the conditions under which prosperity becomes possible at all. I would put it plainly: contracts cannot be enforced where courts cannot be trusted; commerce cannot flourish where the sovereign's word is unreliable; investment will not take root where property may be seized without remedy. Liberty is not the reward for development. It is among its principal engines.

Botswana's record, as The Hill presents it, offers what diplomats call a natural experiment — a case sufficiently sustained over time, and sufficiently distinct from its neighbors, to carry evidential weight. I will mark as inference, not recollection, any specific claim about Botswana's particular constitutional arrangements or economic statistics, since those details lie beyond the dossier before me. But the shape of the argument I can address directly: where institutions protect the rule of law, where courts function independently, where the public faith of the government is honored in its dealings with citizens and foreign partners alike, sustained development is more likely, not less.

The authoritarian-growth thesis has long attracted those impatient with the slowness of deliberation and the friction of accountability. I knew that impatience in another form — the temptation, in treaty negotiations, to settle a question quickly and badly rather than carefully and well. Speed purchased at the price of durability is no economy at all. The same holds for governance: a government that suppresses its people's voice to accelerate a development metric is trading a compounding asset for a depreciating one.

What Botswana's example should prompt, as a matter of foreign policy, is a reexamination of the condescension embedded in the authoritarian-development argument. That condescension — the suggestion that certain peoples are not yet ready for the full dignity of self-government — is both empirically weak and morally corrosive. It was the argument made, in various forms, against every people who have ever sought liberty, including the people of this republic in its founding years. History has not been kind to that argument. Botswana's sixty years make it less defensible still.

The practical lesson for those who shape foreign assistance, treaty frameworks, and multilateral development policy is straightforward: support for independent judiciaries, transparent governance, and enforceable rule-of-law structures is not idealism imposed on pragmatism. It is pragmatism, properly understood. Nations that invest in those institutions — however imperfectly, however gradually — are building the infrastructure on which durable growth depends. To suggest otherwise is, as The Hill puts it, not merely false but potentially fatal.