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March 18, 2006
Uses of Terms: the Case of Democracy
It appears that at some point in our history we felt compelled to make a new rhetorical use of the term ‛democracy’. Shifting the meaning of the word from a previous neutral description of one possible version of political order, from a working designation, as it were, of a particular arrangement of the political process, the notion of democracy came to imply something close to an absolute normative standard. In other words, at some point we obviously felt the need to make democracy into something worth fighting and dying for; into an ideal capable of mobilising imaginations and loyalties.
It may be tricky to point out exactly where in history this transformation occurred, but certainly one important moment in the shift must have been the making of defence of democracy into a rallying cry of western allied nations in their struggle of the World War Two. Again, throughout the Cold War years, and especially so among the dissent pro-democratic movements defending civic freedoms under the authoritarian regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, many relied more or less explicitly upon such strong notion of democracy as a normative ideal with a potential of becoming a receptacle of high hopes and providing moral grounds for an often self-sacrificial struggle.
Presumably, nowadays, too, we — meaning at least we in the self-appointed free and developed world — stand in need of such strong notion of democracy serving often as something of a transcendental anchor to many values invoked in our public discourse. We probably need to be able to justify certain political decisions and courses of action by appeal to an ideal of democratic freedom which is assumed to resonate with something essential in the very human nature. However, it remains uncertain that even such prominent theorists of democratic government as a relatively recent Rousseau or even younger Mill would understand what we mean when we resort to justifying in the name of democracy some controversial public decisions. Not to mention those countless classic statements on the nature of polity which, while notably concerned with liberty as a paramount political value, have nevertheless little to say about democracy. Machiavelli or Montesquieu or Hume, just like Tocqueville or Constant, are all arguably — albeit each in a different way — committed to liberty as an utmost goal for a political community, but none of them seems to consider this ideal to be in any way inseparably connected with a democratic form of governance. From the point of view of our current common way of using the terms it somewhat comes as a surprise that it was possible at all to employ the two notions of freedom and democracy separately and in no way as the near-synonyms they have often become in our public parlance.
As nice things tend to flock together in the public arena, as our speakers and other public users of language inevitably invoke all the goodies in a package, democracy becomes all but indistinguishable from other legitimating concepts, like freedom, or that relatively recently established but ideologically potent notion of human rights. As a consequence, however, the reference implied in such public uses of the term tends to solidify into something close to a natural entity, a pre-established destination of development of every society and each political body. The current use of the term of democracy forces public speakers to implicitly assume that every imaginable form of human community must inevitably be on its way toward democracy, which is the true destination of its evolution. However, such assumption may be completely misplaced, at least so to the extent that most current usage of the term democracy vaguely fails to distinguish between its reference to a normative ideal on the one hand and, on the other hand, to the particular form of elective representative constitutional governance which arose from the specific developments in the course of western history.
One only needs to look as far as the latest State of the Union presidential address — to pick just one conspicuous example without being tendentious in any way — to remark how the term democracy gets loaded with normative meanings in a lot of standard current usage and with what implication.
The imaginative structure behind the speech is roughly as follows: the world is divided into two groups of nations, the already democratic ones and the ones still to become so.
"… more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half - in places like Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Iran - because the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as well."
This structure tacitly assumes that there exists a reasonably clear standard which allows for all conceivable cases of arrangements of political communities to be classified under either of the two possible headings: the free and democratic ones and those other. Whatever the merits of such pattern as a descriptive statement, it appears to invite the listener to share the assumption that the sole significant task in the sphere of international relations is that of helping the remaining half of humankind achieve their true purpose by gaining their democratic freedom. This assumption, further, can only hold as long as the audience accept the premise that the cases of all the named countries (and probably the unnamed, too, because easy arithmetic reveals that China alone must account for major proportion of thus identified half) represent at some fundamental level only variations — and insignificant at that — of a single category of unfreedom/ undemocracy. The only thing left to do for countries in this category is to shuffle in the end into the previously known and pre-established forms of social order and political process implied under this extraordinarily fatalistic definition of democracy.
Such strong notion of democracy as a converging point of a unidirectional evolutionary movement of respective histories needs to rest on very firm moral and indeed eschatological grounds. These are commonly provided by the exalted category of "the people", vaguely assumed to be the ultimate locus of good intentions and overwhelming desire for peace and freedom. Thus it is "the great people of Egypt" who have voted in a multi-party presidential election, but it is "the government of Iran" who defy international community in insisting on pursuing the nuclear programme. On this premise it cannot conceivably be a "nation" or a "people" who belong to the wrong camp, only their corrupt governments or regimes. This postulates another crucial dualistic distinction between, on the one hand, the good and innocent "nations/ peoples" of the world—of which some are unfortunate enough to be as yet "held hostage" by totalitarian regimes—and, on the other hand, those "regimes" (vaguely implying isolated handfuls of unscrupulous power-thirsty thugs). Thus "Iran, a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people," is set against that "regime" which harbours illegal nuclear designs and sponsors terrorism, against that "Iranian government" which "defies the world".
While such formulaic scheme may have reasonably good explanatory value for understanding, for example, the experience of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe under regimes sustained by regional Soviet hegemony, it remains less than clear that the rhetoric and descriptive categories adapted to the conditions in those Soviet totalitarian satellite states can be successfully applied to such widely diverging circumstances as those of today's China, Iran or Zimbabwe. It is an established truism today that if the great people of Egypt, or Saudi Arabia for that matter, were entirely free to choose a political representation of their liking, the outcome would very likely be the rule of someone akin to the Muslim Brotherhood, another "regime" less than enthusiastic for the self-appointed western democratic ideal and less than friendly to the "people" of North American states, repeating the pattern of the recent elections in the Palestinian autonomy. The concession the presidential speech makes to that fact—admitting that "democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens"—if carried to its implications, would undermine the dualistic structure on which its logic stands.
This logic is remotely resonant of the Kantian hope that liberal democracies do not wage wars against each other. However, pushed to above described extremes, this logic all but conceptually rules out the possibility of genuine conflicts between autonomous and self-determined ethnic and political communities, which, though, stubbornly refuse to quit the stage of history. Such logic therefore leaves us conceptually with no clue to comprehending violence between Hutu a Tutzi tribes of Rwanda, or between Bosnian nationalities and religions, and helps little with understanding today's Iraq and its "insurgency". Conflicts between freely self-determined communities, between well-meaning peoples are not on these terms meant to occur, but the reality is unlikely to comply.
The source of current high tensions in the area of Far East lies not in a dichotomy between free and democratic governments of, say, Japan and South Korea, and the non-democratic ones of China and North Korea. Rather, we see a series of controversies between political representations on every side carried by as well as in turn manipulating popular emotions, where the parties to any particular conflict are not necessarily aligned along border lines demarcating free and democratic countries and the un-free and un-democratic ones. A democratic Korea may find common cause with an un-democratic China in a common grudge against a democratic Japan; and everyone in the region, regardless of their form of government, ultimately perceives the eerily incomprehensible North Korean rule as a positive liability. The material feeding the respective tensions consists in unresolved issues of history, problems of energy supplies, of regional hegemony, but hardly at all in presence or absence of democratic governance or in different levels of freedom of political participation. The sharp rhetorical juxtaposition of democratic and un-democratic political arrangements arguably contributes little to understanding the happenings in this area at this point in its history and if insisted upon too rigidly, it probably blurs vision.
The purpose of the above remarks is not to subject to shattering criticism the phrasing of a particular speech of a particular western political representative. After all, as long as a speech of this sort seeks to lay out a persuasive vision, it can only be written and delivered while relying on a number of shared tacit assumptions about the nature of man and our polities which we find natural or at least acceptable enough to understand what the talk is about. On the contrary, it is to render such premises explicit and non-self-evident again what requires the sort of clumsy and contorted verbal effort of the preceding lines. However, the hunch is that we may need finer and non-dualist scales with more precise conceptual distinctions in order to ultimately cope better with the situations arising in contemporary world. Part of such fine-tuning might be relieving the term of democracy of at least part of its awesome normative load. The term might be again applied more usefully and practicably if it were not burdened with excessively high expectations.
[mid-air over Yekaterinburg midway between Seoul and Prague]
Posted by david at March 18, 2006 02:40 AM