I just returned from the first of Calvin’s January Series talks. You can find more information on the January series here. Andy and I will be attending these throughout the month and writing up our experiences. Anybody else attending these?
Today’s talk was given by Michael Mandelbaum the author of a book called Democracy’s Good Name. His presentation focused on the political preconditions that Democracy requires.
I know, it sounds crazy boring. Really, it wasn’t.
Here’s an action shot of the good Dr. Mandelbaum while he was answering questions after his talk:
I took three solid pages of notes, very little of which you’ll want to read. Here are a few probably befuddled ideas though:
In his mind there are two main political ideas that make up democracy (with subpoints, subsubpoints, and subsubsubpoints): popular sovereignty (people voting for their leaders) and liberty (commonly known as freedom in the United States). It’s extremely important to note that not too long ago (like 18th century) these two ideas were often considered contradictory to each other.
One thing that necessitates liberty in this day and age is a free market economy. Free-market economies are driven on greed and selfishness (feel free to debate that one).
A free-market is necessary because it makes other things possible like:
-Private property
-Wealth/Affluence, which gives people time to run the democracy.
A few interesting statistics:
In 1975 there were only about 30 democracies worldwide
In 2005 that number was 119.
Thoughts? Anything to add?
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January 3, 2008 at 19:03
I read the following very interesting article today: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=ZNALDQH0MTU2NQFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0?xml=/opinion/2008/01/03/do0302.xml
In it the writer makes one particularly salient point: a leader accepts that he or she can be voted out of office and doesn’t need to hang on at any cost. Although you could apply that to France (Chirac – who is alleged to have commmitted fraud while Mayor of Paris and was immune while head of state), Russia (Putin – although the people really do love him) and the USA (Bill and Hillary Clinton – I jest! I jest!) as much as Kenya or Zimbabwe. I also commented on that article about the importance of the concept of a loyal opposition, something many countries just don’t seem to get. Either the leaders get paranoid that everyone is out to get them or the opposition really is out to get them, with guns. The politicians need to accept a normal electoral cycle and not have personal militias.
The other thing I think the west gets really wrong is insisting on governments of national unity in developing nations. Northern Ireland’s isn’t the worst, but power sharing is a terrible arrangement that only exacerbates tribalism in the long run. I accept maybe 10 years at most to bed in the institutions of democracy and a peaceful culture, but the danger is that power sharing or coalitions become the norm. A democracy really needs two parties that can viably form a government on their own and maybe a third to keep the main ones on their toes along with a couple of more fringe ones that might be useful some day. You never know, the Conservative party in the UK may just implode and we’ll need the UK Independence party for real to be the right wing voice of sense against Labour. On the subject of the UK Independence Party we come to Europe, first, Belgium is almost totally split along tribal lines (Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters never spoke to each other growing up because they didn’t know each others’ language) and is only held together because of the unusual status of Brussels as a French-speaking part of the Flemish region, and the relative civility of the people. The really interesting thing is that they haven’t had a government for about 6 months now because the main parties can’t agree on forming a coalition, though some observers (possibly fans of Reagan) in other countries are openly jealous of this lack of government. The second point regarding Europe is one that caused the USA to declare independence from the UK. Not so much the tyrrany, but the taxation without representation. The EU does not levy taxes directly (yet), but collects massive dues from the member states and it is an extremely undemocratic institution. It could well collapse under the weight of the new constitutional treaty, which further erodes representative democracy.
Now from the Greek, democracy literally means people power, but that could equally mean something like what happened in Rwanda, where one group of people demonstrated power over another in quite appalling fashion (though as a Northern Irish man I know the difference between them and us is only one of degree). A quite peculiar set of circumstances happened across Europe and spread to the USA to get us where we are today that can be traced back beyond 1215 and Magna Carta (and its little known sister document the Forest Charter, which was actually more important for the citizenry as a whole than the Magna Charter). So when we look at Kenya and Pakistan let us not forget that the US as a democracy has been functioning much longer than most of the countries in Europe that we often think of as bastions of democracy. Though the best way is not to have a written constitution at all (double bonus points for spotting the theological reference).
It’s getting late, so I’ll have to skip over the pacifist influence of western Christianity, the independent judiciary, independent police force and independent armed forces, free speech, democratic local government and a strong private sector economy.
Democracy as a modern concept certainly covers a lot of ground when you think about it and reminds me how glad I am that the socialist Eric Blair wrote one of the most important books next to the Bible: Animal Farm. When it gets banned you know you’re in trouble.