One Thing We Can't Build Alone in Iraq

Putnam found in a study of Italy that places with high social capital a thousand years ago have high social capital today, an outcome that he said ought to be deeply worrisome for U.S. planners in Iraq.

It is social capital, he added, that seems to create the right soil for democracy, not the other way around.

This is why Putnam predicted many years ago that democracy was unlikely to flourish in Russia: Social capital levels were extremely low.

Michael Woolcock, a sociologist at the University of Manchester in England who worked for years at the World Bank, said one development project in Indonesia suggested that external agents might be able to help build social capital.

The trick, he said, was to make no centralized decisions at all, whether in Jakarta or, even worse, Washington. The Kecamatan Development Project has aimed more than $1.3 billion at more than 40,000 villages, but every decision about how to use the money has come from democratic decisions at the village level, where funds are released only if diverse groups can show they are willing to work together. It has sometimes been described as a democracy project disguised as a development project.

Sadly for the situation in Iraq, numerous studies show that even if external agents have a tough time helping social capital grow, they can -- and regularly do -- cause social capital to decline. Both Saddam Hussein's divisive rule and the chaos following the U.S. invasion have increased the distrust ordinary Iraqis have for one another, said Joseph Kopser, a U.S. Army major now serving in Iraq who is interested in social capital ideas.

With the security situation grim and both Iraqis and Americans impatient for results, Kopser said, development decisions have become centralized, even though social capital theory suggests that ordinary Iraqis need to feel not only that they are the ones making decisions but that they are the ones who actually carry them out, even if projects take much longer to complete.

"We usually are only able to point to schools opened, or clinics refurbished, or businesses started," Kopser mused in an e-mail. "But is that really building social capital or just moving boxes?"