There is a further problem with the argument that instability stems from
the plurality of political cultures found in many Third World societies and
the transformation of a set of relatively discrete communities, with their
own sets of values about how government should be conducted and, in par-
ticular, the legitimacy and trustworthiness of other actors in the system, into
a nation. This is that a good deal of the political instability which Third
World countries have experienced would seem to coincide with widely
shared values. The idea that the only way to protect one’s own interests is to
acquire and hold on to a monopoly of power to the complete exclusion
where possible of other groups, has characterized the behaviour of many
political movements in the post-independence era, as it did the behaviour of
some of the fragmented nationalist movements fighting for independence.
Because of the significance of the state in social and economic terms it has
been the object of attention of political groups seeking to monopolize
power, rather than share it in a spirit of trust with other groups. Such widely
disseminated attitudes towards power have been very destabilizing.
So if some shared values are conducive to stability and others are not, the
use of the concept of culture implying shared values as an explanation of
stability no longer works. At the very least it becomes a circular argument:
stability occurs if members of society share values conducive to stability. It
depends what those shared values are. It is not enough to say that a society
will be stable when a sufficiently large number of people share common
values about how to conduct political affairs.
This is quite apart from the problem of how many is enough. Writers on
political culture acknowledge that in any particular society one is likely to
find more than one set of beliefs about the role of government in society, the
way it should be conducted, and the proper political roles of different sec-
tions of the community. The question of what proportion of society there
must be supporting one view of how government should be conducted
before there can be said to be sufficient consensus to sustain a political sys-
tem that corresponds to those shared values, is left unanswered. How homo-
geneous does the culture have to be, and how widely shared?
Another difficulty arises if we assume that there is a crisis of legitimacy
when some proportion of society feels that the rules of government lack
moral authority and so dispute them, not seeing it as immoral to manipulate
the constitution for its own ends. It is not easy to predict, simply by knowing
that they believe some or all of those rules to lack moral worth, how far peo-
ple will deviate from the established norms. People might believe that the
rules do not deserve their moral approval without being prepared to break
them. This is a universal dilemma in politics. A system can lose moral
234 Understanding Third World Politics