Western
democracy fails
in too many ways
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 13, 2006
LONDON - The Western democracies,
so keen on exporting their political model to the rest of
the world, seem to be perfecting the art of shooting
themselves in the foot, and I'm not even going to mention
the war in Iraq.
The cartoon affair which showed up
Danish democracy as religiously illiterate at the onset
and by last week's end defensively bigoted was preceded
only two weeks earlier by President Jacques Chirac of
France boldly announcing that any (presumably Islamic)
nation that supported groups that tried to use terrorism
and weapons of mass destruction against France should
expect a nuclear riposte.
In an age when a terrorist group
could at best detonate a so-called "dirty bomb",
conventional explosives wrapped around some stolen
nuclear waste and kill at most a thousand people, or
biological weapons like the anthrax letters that killed
all of half a dozen people in the U.S. four years' ago,
this was showing a European democracy at its most
tendentious not to say callous and barbaric.
Democracies seem presently so
intent on revealing an ugly side that, unless one
absorbed it with one's mother's milk as most westerners
have, present practice might dissuade one for all
time.
All that democracy appears capable
of at the moment, to quote Professor John Dunn of
Cambridge University in his magisterial new study of the
subject, is to make "Europe's bigotries and parochialisms
a global world-historical force, instead of a mere local
deformity or a continental stigma."
Alas, for all its failing the world
has no better idea, as Winston Churchill famously
declared. The twentieth century saw all sorts of
experiments from fascism to national socialism, to
anarchism, to monarchism, to Marxism, to theocracy and
all came undone. Out of the ferocious competition between
political ideas democracy came out well on top. But
today, as Dunn writes, "the term democracy has become (as
the Freudians put it) too highly cathected: saturated
with emotion, irradiated by passion, tugged to and fro
and ever more overwhelmed by accumulated confusion. To
rescue it as an aid in understanding politics, we need to
think our way past a mass of history and block our ears
to many pressing importunities."
We need to know far more about it
than we do. President Bush, for example, has declared
that, "the reason I'm so strong on democracy is
democracies don't go to war with each other." Indeed,
much academic research has proved his point and it is an
important and good one. But democracies have a terrible
record of going to war against non-democracies, often on
the flimsiest excuse. Look at America's nineteenth
century war against Spain. Britain, a recent study has
revealed, has gone to war more times in the last hundred
years than any other country in the world.
Perhaps we should not be surprised
that Plato was against the democracy of his homeland,
Athens. Plato believed that in the best form of
government philosophers would rule. Historians have
wondered why he was so against democracy. Was it because
he was from a rich landed family and Athenian democracy
seemed to be in favour of more equal income distribution?
Or was it because a democratic state had sentenced to
death his teacher, Socrates, falsely accusing him of
impiety and treading on Greeks' religious sensibilities?
But it was also because Plato saw democracy as the rule
of the foolish, vicious and always potentially
brutal.
Athenian democracy flourished but
then the idea faded away for the best part of 2000 years.
The Romans had little time for it. It returned, called
something else, in the struggle for American independence
and a few years later, under its own name, it became the
central rallying cry of the French Revolution. Only after
1789 did people start to speak of democratising societies
and it was the French spirit not the American one that
was its potent exporter. Every soldier in Napoleon's
ranks, as his armies tore across Europe, carried a copy
of "The Rights of Man" in his rucksack. But we must never
forget that democracy would never have achieved the
promise it did without the vision of Robespierre, this
figure of "reptilian fascination", who organised the mass
executions of those thought to oppose the path of the
Revolution.
Over the next 150 years the cause
of democracy gradually edged forward but it only
triumphed after 1945.
Today some of us like to think, as
Pericles did in his great oration on the subject, that
democracy gives society its sobriety of judgement and
respect for wisdom, the pride necessary for its economic
energy and generosity and even its respect for taste and
responsiveness to beauty. But we are engaged in a
perpetual fight against its worst elements.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Get
free articles &
updates
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Här kan
du läsa om - och köpa - Jonathan Powers bok
på svenska
"Som
Droppen Urholkar
Stenen"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|