In the late 1980s, at Cold War’s end, many believed that democracy, as
obvious political best practice and key driver of strategic success, would
without doubt spread and ultimately become universal. A prominent advocate of
this prediction, Francis Fukuyama, stated his view in more careful and
conditional terms than the many who did not read his fine print, but nuance
aside, the coming global triumph of democracy was in those days a widespread
expectation that many prominent observers, not least Samuel Huntington with his
earlier “third wave” analysis, played a part in bringing about. It is no longer
so widespread a view. The ostensible reasons are many, but let us note the
three most common themes.
First, many hold that Western democracy was not the only or the main reason for the West’s victory in the Cold War. To the extent that conclusion is believed, democracy benefits less from association with victory. The weaknesses of the Soviet system, not the strengths of the West, doomed the Soviet Union, many came to believe, and subsequent developments seem to support that verdict. After all, while Soviet authoritarianism collapsed, other forms have prospered, leading to notions like the “Beijing Consensus”, a hybrid arrangement combining expanded market incentives without political liberalization. Democracy, then, is not the only winner’s game in town.
Second, the record shows that in fact
liberal democracy did not spread fast or far after the Cold War. Its triumphs
were limited largely to the old Soviet sphere in Eastern and Central Europe.
Additionally, the fact that Russia itself never found the path to genuine
liberal democracy is one of enormous global consequence. In some less
influential cases, too, largely in Latin America, populist movements displaced
older authoritarianisms using democratic forms and rhetoric, but in most cases
avoided genuine liberal democratic reform. Thus there arose the specter of
“illiberal” or “imitation” democracy.”1 Even
the “color revolutions” of the 1990s, which briefly vied to revive optimism
about democracy’s future, did not live up to expectations, neither in Georgia,
Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan nor Lebanon. Most authoritarian regimes in developing
countries, too, proved effective at maintaining control. Even in the Arab
world, where that control has recently been contested, it is far from clear
that democratic forces will prevail over populist and neo-authoritarian ones.
Thus many observers have speculated about the “return of history”, with the
spotlight trained on the stubborn recrudescence of nationalist and sectarian
enthusiasms, and have posited a reconfiguring of the global political map to
put non-democratic China into the “First World” as a true leader of the new millennium.2
Third, liberal democracy has acquired
obvious problems of its own. After the Cold War ended, Western economies were
buoyant and extra-parliamentary protest was scarce to the point of nonexistent.
Now economic dislocation reigns from Los Angeles to Latvia, the European Union
faces an existential crisis, and the United States appears to have run out of
arrows in its economic policy quiver. Protestors populate the streets and
parks. The patina of best-practice democracy is not what it was two decades
ago.
Very much related, and in reprise of
the relationship between democracy and global power, there is a widespread
perception that the United States is in general geopolitical retreat, whether
because of fiscal austerity or for other reasons. If democracy’s most powerful
protector and advocate is losing its taste for global activism on behalf of its
ideals, can dark days for democratic outposts in fragile places be far behind?
The prevailing optic, then, is that today’s world is more hostile to liberal
democracy than it was twenty years ago, and that tomorrow’s is likely to be
more hostile still unless the Western democracies can rebound in a big
way.
These analyses are not wrong so much
as peripheral, or, to say it more specifically, derivative of more fundamental
causes. The consensus seems to be that the challenge to democratic countries
arises from external forces. Little to nothing is said about whether democracy
fits the contemporary conditions and internal makeup of Western societies today
as well as it fit them twenty, forty or sixty years ago. The truth is that
changes within Western societies pose the deepest
challenges to liberal democracy, changes so intimate to the lives of Westerners
that they disappear mostly unnoticed into the flow of everyday experience. If a
fish is really the last to discover water, then perhaps the citizens of liberal
democratic countries are the least mindful of the conditions that nourish
democratic governance, and the least likely to notice when those conditions change.
Indeed, while we recognize readily that some social histories conduce to
democracy more than others at any give time, we sometimes forget that changes
through time can stress political institutions, democratic ones and others
alike.
The democratic political institutions
of Western countries arose and matured as industrial capitalism matured. It was
a time of historically unprecedented economic growth and the concomitant
development of new social groupings and relationships. They arose in elite political
cultures that were in the main ethnically homogeneous, even if, notably in the
American case, the society at large was considerably less so. They arose at a
time when the legitimacy of empire was waning and that of the nation-state was
waxing. They arose when the normative environment was calling traditional
hierarchical structures into question but was still far from embracing radical
forms of egalitarianism or any form of anti-foundationalism. Not just
since the Cold War, but decades before it, the seeds of change had been planted
for the rise of the post-industrial economy, the emergence of multiethnic and
multicultural societies, and the erosion of the legitimating bonds of the
nation-state. The question, therefore, is not whether democracy as it exists
today is best practice for those parts of world that have not known it, but
whether it is still best practice for those parts of the world that have known
it.
What Is Democracy?
Let us continue by trying to define what we are talking about. In the
beginning of the 21st century the term “democracy” is used
primarily to indicate a society governed by officials elected and in some form
controlled by the people. Typically it is assumed that in such a society
citizens enjoy equality under the law, which presupposes a certain degree of
informal social trust; that they possess several crucial civil liberties, such
as freedom of speech and assembly; that basic human rights are observed and
protected; and that outside the political domain proper there is a supportive
civil society represented by numerous voluntary, “intermediating” associations.
All these assumptions are based on the historical experience of building
democratic regimes, since the progress of democracy aligned for centuries with
the expansion of civil liberties and concepts of human rights. This is what the
“liberal” in liberal democracy has come to mean, despite the fact that this use
of the word is somewhat alienated from its etymology.
But this begs an important question:
Was the rise of democracy the main driving force behind the development of
contemporary liberal Western societies, or were long gestating developments in
Western societies that fixed concepts of liberties and individual rights
instead the drivers of democracy? The default assumption among most Westerners
is the former, but the truth is the latter. American society, observed Gordon
Wood, the reigning dean of early American history, did not become liberally
minded because it was democratic, it became democratic because it was liberally
minded. And thus the late Daniel Bell:
I am not a democrat. I don’t believe in democracy. I believe in liberty and rights. . . in certain elements which you can’t take away from people. Rule of law, the right of assembly, . . . hearings in open courtrooms—these are rights which guarantee the liberties of people. I basically prefer to deal with liberty rather than democracy.3
The system of civil liberties that
exists today in all truly democratic countries comes from historical traditions
nurtured by certain religious cultures turned outward into the temporal realm,
and from the somewhat accidental felicities of good governance in key cases.
They have nothing to do with the introduction of universal suffrage. No society
can host a true liberal democracy that has not first become free and
liberal-minded, and only people who have lost touch with their own histories
can suppose otherwise.
This account of causality, once
understood, raises three questions. First, if the establishment of basic
liberties and rights precedes democracy, and if those liberties and rights are
now firmly established and well secured in law, then why do we need democracy?
What, and who, is it good for?
Second, is democracy likely to be
stable or effective in a country divided into ethnic or religious communities,
especially in a situation where one stable majority and many minorities
coexist? Protection for minority rights is all well and good, but can
majorities be expected to respect limits on their own power and minorities to
tolerate subordination in perpetuity? In other words, isn’t democracy in such
circumstances a formula for civil strife and state collapse? And with people
moving around the planet in unprecedented numbers, are not such circumstances
likely to proliferate? Put a little differently, does stable liberal democracy
presuppose a demos comfortable in its own social skin?
Third, is it still true (if it was
ever true) that choosing leaders through democratic processes ensures at least
minimally competent public policy decision-making? The Western democracies are
not plebiscitary or direct democracies, of course, but representative ones with
firebreaks against the passions of the mob built into them. But it has been
generally taken for granted among democratic publics and theorists alike that
elected leadership was at least no more distant from wisdom than the unelected
or falsely elected kind. The prerogatives of democratic executive authority
allowed for expert counsel on esoteric issues no less than did other kinds of
leadership, and, even better, democracies were arguably superior to other forms
of government because leaders with unimpressive records could be sent packing
far more easily, and at much less cost in blood and treasure, than could kings
and dictators. But today we may question whether this system still works, given
that so many public policy issues, many of them generated by democratic demand,
have become so technical. Unelected technocrats now govern in Athens and Rome,
thanks to a policy crisis that democratic methods failed to master. Is this a
harbinger of a less democratic future?
All three of these questions raise
the possibility that, like capitalism, the practice of democracy in changed
conditions may be capable of unwittingly undermining its own foundations.
Democracy has helped to ratify and stabilize the liberties and rights of
Western societies, so who needs it anymore? Democracy promotes a right of
migration as a part of the package of universal rights it espouses, leading to
political communities whose lack of social trust may in turn undermine first
democratic principles. Too many entrants to the policy process in a democracy
may paralyze decision-making, not only exposing it to the passions of the mob
but also making it easier, ironically, for special interests to manipulate
it.
For these reasons one might suppose
that democracy as we understand it today is a transient political form whose
sources of decay are to be found not on the global periphery but inside the
most democratic countries of the world. We might one day be faced with a choice
that at first blush seems impossible: What if “too much” democracy should become
an enemy of “enough” liberty and human rights? What if democracy becomes so
misaligned with a changing social order that it comes to represent a threat to
the Enlightenment ideals that still undergird Western political culture? What
will we do then? These questions take on more definite shape as we examine the
matter more deeply.
Democracy and Law
The history of democracy is inseparable from the battle against the
tyranny of the state. In earlier times the nobility represented the most common
check on centralized power, as even a casual understanding of the history of Magna Carta illustrates.
But all over Europe the drafting of charters and constitutions was a
progressive form of limiting centralized royal power. Early modern capitalism,
by differentiating and transcending the estates of medieval times, ultimately
extended that balancing power to the gentry and, eventually, new merchant
middle classes. In the process the state sometimes became the ally of the new
classes against the nobility. However circuitous the route, democracy became a
guarantor of expanding rights and freedoms that ultimately took institutional
shape in the form of constitutionalism, the division of powers, secularization
and consolidation of the rule of law.
It is a mistake, however, to think
that the history of democracy is the preeminent history of these developments.
That honor belongs to the history of the judiciary. Rule of law preceded
universal suffrage everywhere in the West. Democratic action both in Europe and
America became more profound and consequential when large groups of people
realized its utility for promoting their own interests. Only after what
sociologists call “mass society” developed did the demand for democracy
(reflected, among other things, in voting
activity) expand dramatically. That expansion came most vividly in the 1960s
and 1970s. That is when Bismarck’s original noblesse oblige foil of public employment for surplus
labor blossomed into the European social welfare system, and when civil rights
movements unfolded in the United States, starting on a racial basis but quickly
growing beyond.
The expansion of democracy found
institutional validation in the judiciary. The remarkable progress in and
popularity of social welfare schemes made governments less sensitive to
collective action in general and to democratic involvement in particular. When
that happened, the judiciary took over. In recent decades the most significant
decisions ensuring compliance with and expansion of human rights have been made
not through democratic actions but via court decisions: Note the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case in the United States, and Donato Casagrande v. Landeshauptstadt München in the European Court of Justice in
1974.
At the same time, however, the sense
of integral community that enables the egalitarian ethos associated with
democracy weakened. Postmodern individualism undermined the salience of social
linkages as people began to look, in Robert Putnam’s words, for “biographical
solutions to systemic contradictions.”4 The
courts protected, interpreted and expanded certain rights in some cases that
went beyond the general consensus. Busing schoolchildren to achieve racial
integration in the United States, and widening immigration and asylum rights in
the European Union are examples of this.
The point is that a citizen’s basic
rights in Western democracies are secured more by laws and norms duly observed
than they are by democratic action. In such circumstances voting becomes less freighted
and consequential an act. It becomes something to do with spoils, not
principles. Democracy becomes less important as the gains it once helped to
secure become firmly institutionalized. Participation in politics gradually
declines as people perceive the political system to be marginal to what matters
most to them: a stable state, protected rights, basic welfare and social
fairness.
Democracy
and Liberalism
One of the major
principles of electoral democracies is the notion that the majority and
minority both consist of individuals who are divided not so much by their
wealth, faith or primordial features but by their attitude to key public policy
issues. As Henry Kissinger noted not long ago,
"Western democracy is based on versions of majority rule, but this presupposes that the majority can fluctuate and the minority of the moment has a prospect of becoming a majority in due course. When the divisions are along tribal, ethnic, or religious lines, however, this equation does not hold.5"
It was therefore no coincidence that
democracy developed in national contexts defined by, as noted already, a demos comfortable in its social skin. It is
even the case, to take an obviously unsettling example that American democracy
might not have developed as it did had it not been
for slavery and acute racial prejudice. Only by separating out of the
democratic process those considered at the time not to be a part of the demos could
American democracy unfold. That is the other side, so to speak, of the
Jacksonian-era expansion of the franchise.
This point was of little practical
importance either in Europe or the United States until the 1960s. That is when
reinterpreted democratic principles pried open the acceptable definition of the demos. As the proportion of the foreign-born
population now exceeds 10 percent in many European countries, immigrants and
their descendants have begun to claim not just equal rights but some kind of
special collective dispensation. These “claims of culture” have become ever
more economic and political in their nature.6 This
is the distinction in the American context between equal rights for African
Americans and subsequent demands for affirmative action of various sorts.7
Two principal problems for democratic
practice arise from this development. First, multiethnic pleading contradicts
the essence of the democratic worldview. If citizens identify less with the
society as a whole than with a particular ethnic or national group, and if
those groups have special legal privileges or rights, we end up with some
people having what amounts to two “votes”: one universal within the newly
constructed demos, and one
particularistic.
Second, the same principle applies to
the special treatment of immigrants. The greatest declaration of liberties in
Europe, adopted in 1789 by the National Assembly in Paris, bore the title “The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” (Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen).
In those days there was little to no blue sky between a man, understood to be a
Frenchman, and a citizen. To become a Frenchman, a member of a minority group
had to foreswear any other primary group allegiance. This is the essence of the
republican message to the Jews at the time: full rights to Jews as individuals,
no rights for Jews as a group. Now the distance between a man and a citizen has
grown much wider. The rights of men understood as human rights are universal in
nature, but the rights of citizens arise from their incorporation into a
society. To the extent that immigrants claim rights but resist becoming part of
the demos that
nurtured and sheltered a country’s democracy from its cradle, they do not
deserve citizenship. (Of course, it is true that sometimes it is the majority
group that causes the resistance in the first place.)
These are not questions of mere
theoretical interest. If democracies do not restore the “one person/one vote”
principle in societies with multiple group identities and do not find a way to
distinguish between those newcomers entitled to citizenship rights and those
who are just free-riding economic residents, they will in the end destroy the
Western societies that birthed democracy itself.
Democracy,
Competence and Mores
Today democracy is
equated with universal suffrage, but as I’ve said, this is historically
mistaken. Voting rights were “exclusive” long before they were “universal”,
both in Europe and the United States. The current understanding and practice of
democracy, now applied to women and 18-year-olds, is barely forty years old.
Why was progress toward universal
suffrage so slow? A reading of the American Founders makes vividly clear one
reason: Those without property were considered insufficiently vested in the commonweal
to have the right to make decisions about it. The other, related reason is that
the fathers of Western democracy, more or less following the counsel of
Socrates, believed in an implicit competence test: The illiterate, uneducated
and ignorant did not know enough to make considered decisions. It is noteworthy
in this regard that the advent of universal suffrage in the Western world
dovetailed with the expansion of universal secondary education for both men and
women.
Around two centuries later, alas,
things have changed again. Economic and social life are much more complicated
owing to the distinctions and specializations mandated by technological
innovation. Marx spoke of an individual’s and a class’s relation to the means
of production; now it is more appropriate to speak of relations between people
and the means of consumption as well as production. Life is permeated by the
downstream effects of technology, and it is the very uneven relationship of
people within and among countries to the science behind, production of, and
competence with technology that defines the boundaries of postmodern “class.”
Public policy is more complex for an additional reason: Today’s technology
sires a level of social interdependence that requires more oversight than was
even remotely the case two centuries, or even a half a century, ago. Democratic
government presumes to do more than it did at the time of its birth and
maturation, so that citizens have far more to understand and judge about
government than ever. The burden is often overwhelming even for the fairly well
educated.
The implication is that even
universal secondary education can no longer reliably produce a responsible
citizen. Liberal democracy born in the Republic of
Letters has to survive in the
Empire of Television, where information flows in one direction and need
not involve direct response.8 The civic dialogue that was once the
very foundation of democratic decision-making has become a one-way process of
convincing voters. The political dialogue of liberal democracies is not just
degraded, as is widely acknowledged; it is qualitatively different.
Moreover, as the capacity of citizens
to grasp policy issues has eroded from one side, the percentage of citizens
expected to grasp them has risen from the other. In Western countries today
there is far more inequality within electorates than ever, simply because, as
was not the case during the 19th century,
everyone above age 18 can vote. At the same time, the cult of money that is so
widespread in contemporary consumer society tends to narrow the spectrum of
voter interest even as the real spectrum of public policy challenges widens.
This produces voters ready to support anyone who promises more prosperity, and
voters who, when they get the chance (as in California’s referendum democracy)
will vote for getting more while paying less. Impossible? Of course. And they
do it anyway? Of course.
Democracy was the optimal form of
government when voters were capable of making rational choices through an
understanding of what was at stake, when they were ready to bear the
responsibility for the consequences of their choices, and when the right to
vote was understood to be a privilege, or the result of a struggle still
remembered. Nowadays it is difficult to shake the impression that democratic
societies are rapidly turning into ochlocracies, where the vast majority of
citizens, seeing their rights as given and their responsibilities not at all,
are easily addled by propaganda, distracted by spectacle and either unable or unwilling
to invest the time and energy required to be a responsible democratic actor.
As we have seen, for
historical reasons the development of democracy paralleled the expansion of
liberty, social trust and the rule of law in Western societies. Democracy was
thus an element, though not the only or the most important element, in the
maturation of contemporary liberal society. When the U.S. Constitution began
with words, “We the people” it essentially proclaimed the identity of the
essential democracy principle—popular sovereignty—with the other elements of
the liberal ethos.
The result was that democracy seemed,
and became, inseparable from the rule of law and the accountability of those in
power. During the 20th century, no one could mistake a
democracy from an undemocratic country because the alignment between democratic
procedure and liberal institutions was nearly perfect. In time, as we have
seen, the achievements of democratic action were institutionalized in law and
social mores, so that in a sense democracy dissolved within the liberal brew.
Then something strange happened: New electoral democracies arose that were
unaligned with liberal institutions. Last year, Freedom House named 115
countries as electoral democracies, but only 87 evinced Western standards of
rights and freedoms.9 This would have been unthinkable half
a century ago. We now have electoral democracies that are not liberal and we
have liberal societies, like Singapore, that are not electoral democracies.
Some would call this a paradox.
The result is the spreading belief
that being democratic no longer equates to or can guarantee liberal outcomes,
and generating liberal outcomes no longer so clearly requires being a
democracy. At the dawn of the 21stcentury, democracy has lost much of its
quantitative character and with it a huge part of its importance. Electoral
democracy doesn’t determine a society’s identity anymore; something different
does.
That is not all. As we have already
suggested, more people are voting than ever even as actual political
participation declines. They are voting with less consequence than ever as
well. This, too, may be considered paradoxical. Democracy presumes, or it ought
to presume, civic participation in the creation of institutions; that is what
justifies a citizen’s acquiring benefits from those institutions. Instead, the
contemporary meaning of democratic equality has acquired a sense it never
possessed before. It has ceased to be tethered to any sense of obligation and,
especially in the social welfare democracies of Europe, has become a foundation
for a categorical demand for the redistribution of material and social
benefits. In many cases these demands, when satisfied, advantage
disproportionately those who have made no contribution to the prosperity of any
given society. It is no surprise, then, that core majorities resent these
free-riders, because it rubs against their sense of basic fairness. As a
Russian citizen, I have witnessed these phenomena in a profound and clear form
over the past twenty years. Electoral democracy has not brought liberal
institutions, has not generated real political participation, and has not
satisfied the average person’s sense that fairness reigns.
What Is to
Be Done?
Were it possible, democracy would benefit from the restoration of
certain conditions original to its successful and socially progressive
development. The franchise should be pared back (a development that would not,
by the way, seriously jeopardize the rights of the people, since these are now
secured by social and judicial norms). We could, in short, benefit from more
elitism. If those who seek elected office must go through a competitive
selection process, proving their competence as they compete with respected
adversaries, why shouldn’t voters have to prove themselves as well? This does
not require revisiting any of the principles of the democratic process, only
the actors participating in it. There is perhaps a model for this beyond
classical meritocracy as described by Plato, Confucius and even Thomas
Jefferson, where a person’s position in the hierarchy of power is determined by
his intellect and virtue. Perhaps a new, more multi-tiered version of democracy
can be produced wherein certain citizens earn the right to participate in
certain more difficult and complex decisions.
No one supposes this would be easy to
do, or that the solution would look precisely as I describe. It might be easier
to pull off in new democracies than in more established ones. Regardless,
unless we somehow address the accumulating contradictions of democracy,
democracy will continue to suffer from its own universality. The Enlightenment
ideas of freedom and equality are as worthy and critical to genuine
civilization as they ever were, and democracy once inspired and enabled people
to fight for a just society based on the rule of law and political guarantees
and freedoms. But these goals have been achieved in the developed countries,
and the democratic means that helped achieve them are dissolving into a mere
instrument of “intercultural dialogue”, or else drifting into an inchoate
ochlocracy, ironically subordinate to the interests of oligarchs. As such, it
does not offer a very attractive model for developing societies anymore, whose
elites today see as many illiberal and imitation democracies as they do the
real thing.
It would be ideal to preserve all the
achievements of the democratic form of governance with which it is properly
associated: liberty, the rule of law, prosperity and fairness. But to do so the
essential liberal foundations of democracy must be preserved in the face of the
current threat posed by runaway multiculturalism, populism and autonomy of the
bureaucracy in the face of technology-driven social interdependence. These
threats can only be managed if democracy is reinvented as an elite (in the
positive sense of the word) project, which is of course what it was until
recently. Democracy has gotten too far ahead of itself at the turn of the 21st century, both on a global scale and at
home. If its ambitious reinvention succeeds, then it could be said with good
reason that history has indeed returned—a new and perhaps better history. If
not, that could be a problem.
2 See Robert Kagan, The Return
of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf, 2008), and Parag Khanna, The Second
World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (Allen Lane, 2008).
3 The Age of Disjunctions:
Reflections of the 21st Century World, conversations between Daniel Bell and
Vladislav Inozemtsev, conducted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2006 and
published in Russian by the Centre for Post-Industrial Studies in 2007.
4 See Putnam, Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster,
2000) or Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Polity, 2001).
5 Kissinger, Does America
Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (Simon &
Schuster, 2001), p. 203.
6 I use here the title of
Seila Benhabib’s book, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the
Global Era (Princeton University Press, 2002).
7 See, for example, Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural
Society (W. W. Norton, 1998).
8 See Al Gore, The Assault
on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise
Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World
(Bloomsbury Publishers, 2007).
9 See Freedom in the World
2011: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, www.freedomhouse.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment