[thechat] "Democracy can be bad for you"

[Marlene Bruce]

This is a bit heavy, but also thought provoking.

Marlene

From:
<http://www.consider.net/forum_new.php3?newTemplate=OpenObject&newTop=200103
050016&newDisplayURN=200103050016>

 
Cover story - The New Statesman Essay - Democracy can be bad for you


Cover story
Eric Hobsbawm	Monday 5th March 2001 
All regimes pay lip-service to representative government. But can the
"people's will" provide the solutions for the 21st century? By Eric Hobsbawm

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

There are words nobody likes to be associated with in public, such as racism
and imperialism. There are others for which everyone is anxious to
demonstrate enthusiasm, such as mothers and the environment. Democracy is
one of these. In the days of "really existing socialism", even the most
implausible regimes laid claim to it in their official titles, as in North
Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and Yemen. Today, it is impossible, outside a few
Islamic theocracies and Middle Eastern hereditary kingdoms and sheikhdoms,
to find any regime that does not pay tribute to the idea of competitively
elected assemblies or presidents. Irrespective of history and culture, the
constitutional features common to Sweden, Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone
(when elected presidents can be found there) officially put them into one
class, Pakistan and Cuba in the other. This is why rational public
discussion of democracy is both necessary and unusually difficult.

There is no necessary or logical connection between the various components
of the conglomerate that make up what we call "liberal democracy".
Non-democratic states may be built on the principle of the Rechtstaat, or
rule of law, as Prussia and imperial Germany undoubtedly were. We have
known, since de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, that freedom and
toleration for minorities are often more threatened than protected by
democracy. We have also known, since Napoleon III, that regimes that come to
power by a coup d'etat can continue winning genuine majorities by successive
appeals to universal (male) suffrage. And neither South Korea nor Chile in
the 1970s and 1980s suggests an organic connection between capitalism and
democracy.

However, the case for free voting is not that it guarantees rights, but that
it enables the people (in theory) to get rid of unpopular governments. And
here three critical observations should be made.

First, liberal democracy, like any other form of political regime, requires
a political unit within which it can be exercised, normally a "nation
state". It is not applicable where no such unit exists. The politics of the
United Nations cannot be fitted into the framework of liberal democracy,
except as a figure of speech. Whether those of the European Union as a whole
can, remains to be seen.

The second throws doubt on the proposition that liberal- democratic
government is always superior or at least preferable to non-democratic
government. No doubt this is true, other things being equal, but other
things sometimes are not. Ukraine has acquired democratic politics (more or
less), but at the price of losing two-thirds of the modest gross national
product it had in Soviet times. Colombia has never been under the rule of
the military or of populist caudillos for more than brief moments; it has
had virtually continuous constitutional, representative, democratic
government, with two rival electoral parties, the Liberals and the
Conservatives, in competition, as the theory requires. Yet the number
killed, maimed and driven from their homes in Colombia over the past
half-century runs into millions and is far larger than in any of the Latin
American countries plagued with military dictatorships.

The third observation was expressed in Winston Churchill's phrase:
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms
that have been tried from time to time." The case for democracy is
essentially negative. Even as an alternative to other systems, it can be
defended only with a sigh. This did not matter too much during most of the
20th century, as the political systems that challenged it were so patently
awful. Until it faced these challenges, the built-in defects of liberal
representative democracy as a system of government were evident to most
serious thinkers as well as to satirists. Indeed, they were widely and
frankly discussed even among politicians, until it became inadvisable to say
in public what they really thought of the mass of voters on whom their
election depended.

Yet "the people" is today the foundation and common point of reference of
all state governments except the theocratic. This is not only unavoidable,
but right: if government has any purpose, it must be to speak in the name of
and care for the well-being of all citizens. In the age of the common man,
all government is government of the people and for the people, though it
cannot in any operational sense be government by the people. This was common
ground to liberal democrats, communists, fascists and nationalists, even
though their ideas differed on how to formulate, express and influence "the
people's will". Mass propaganda was an essential element even of those
regimes ready to apply unlimited coercion. Even dictatorships cannot long
outlast the loss of their subjects' willingness to accept the regime. That
is why, when it came to the point, the "totalitarian" regimes of eastern
Europe, their state apparatus loyal, their machinery of repression in good
working order, went quickly and quietly.



The governments of modern territorial or nation states rest on three
presumptions: first, that they have more power than other units operating on
their territory; second, that the inhabitants of their territories accept
their authority more or less willingly; and third, that governments can
provide services for them that could not otherwise be provided equally
effectively or at all - services such as, in the proverbial phrase, "law and
order". In the past 30 or 40 years, these presumptions have increasingly
ceased to be valid.

First, as Northern Ireland shows, even the strongest, most stable and most
effective states have lost the monopoly of coercive force, not least thanks
to the flood of new, small, portable instruments of destruction and the
extreme vulnerability of modern life to sudden disruption, however slight.

Second, people are no longer so willing either to give voluntary loyalty and
service to a popularly legitimate government or to obey the overwhelming and
established power of an illegitimate one.

The third presumption has been undermined not only by the weakening of state
power but, since the 1970s, by a return among politicians and ideologists to
an ultra-radical, laissez-faire critique of the state. It is argued, with
more theological conviction than historical evidence, that any services our
public authorities can provide are either undesirable or better supplied by
"the market". Post offices, prisons, schools, water supplies and even
welfare services have been handed to or transformed into business
enterprises, while public employees have been transferred to independent
agencies or replaced by commercial subcontractors. Even parts of warfare
have been subcontracted. The modus operandi of the profit-maximising private
firm has become the model to which even government aspires. Thus, the state
tends to rely on private economic mechanisms to replace the active and
passive mobilisation of its citizens.

Market sovereignty is not a complement to liberal democracy: it is an
alternative to it. Indeed, it is an alternative to any kind of politics, as
it denies the need for political decisions, which are precisely decisions
about common or group interests as distinct from the sum of choices,
rational or otherwise, of individuals pursuing private preferences.
Participation in the market replaces participation in politics. The consumer
takes the place of the citizen.



Two things compensate for the decline in citizen participation, and in the
effectiveness of the traditional process of representative government.
Headlines (or irresistible television images) are the immediate objective of
all political campaigns, because they are far more effective (and much
easier) than mobilising tens of thousands of people. The days are long gone
when all work in a minister's office was put aside to answer an impending
critical parliamentary question. It is the prospect of publication by an
investigative journalist that brings even No 10 up short. And it is neither
parliamentary debates nor even editorial policies that bring about the
expressions of public discontent so patent that even governments with the
safest majorities have to take notice of them between elections: as over the
poll tax, taxes on petrol and the dislike of genetically modified foods.
When they happen, it is quite pointless to dismiss them as the work of
small, unelected and untypical minorities, although they usually are.

Thanks to the mass media, public opinion is more powerful than ever, which
explains the uninterrupted rise of the professions that specialise in
influencing it. What is less understood is the crucial link between media
politics and direct action - action from below that influences the top
decision-makers directly, bypassing the intermediate mechanisms of official
representative governments. This is most obvious in transnational affairs,
where no such intermediate mechanisms exist. We are all familiar with the
so-called CNN effect - the politically powerful, but totally unstructured
feeling that "something must be done" about Kurdistan, East Timor or
wherever. More recently, the demonstrations in Seattle and Prague have shown
the effectiveness of well-targeted direct action by camera-conscious small
groups, even against organisations constructed to be immune to democratic
political processes, such as the IMF and the World Bank.

All this confronts liberal democracy with perhaps its most immediate and
serious problem. In an increasingly globalised, transnational world,
national governments coexist with forces that have at least as much impact
on the everyday lives of their citizens as they have, but are to a varying
extent beyond their control. Yet they do not have the political option of
abdicating before such forces outside their control. When, say, oil prices
rise, it is the conviction of citizens, including business executives, that
government can and should do something about it, even in countries such as
Italy, where little or nothing is expected from the state, or in the US,
where many people do not believe in the state.

But what can and should governments do? More than in the past, they are
under unceasing pressure from a continuously monitored mass opinion. This
constrains their choices. Nevertheless, governments cannot stop governing.
Indeed, they are urged by their PR experts that they must constantly be seen
to be governing, and this, as we know from late 20th-century British
history, multiplies gestures, announcements and sometimes unnecessary
legislation. And public authorities today are constantly faced with
decisions about common interests which are technical as well as political.
Here, democratic votes (or consumers' choices in the market) are no guide at
all. The environmental consequences of the unlimited growth of motor traffic
and the best ways of dealing with them cannot be discovered simply by
referenda. Moreover, these ways may prove to be unpopular, and in a
democracy, it is unwise to tell the electorate what it does not want to
hear. How can state finances be rationally organised, if governments have
convinced themselves that any proposals to raise taxes amount to electoral
suicide, when election campaigns are therefore contests in fiscal perjury,
and government budgets exercises in fiscal obfuscation?

In short, the "will of the people", however expressed, cannot determine the
specific tasks of government. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb observed apropos
trade unions, the people's will cannot judge projects, but only results. It
is immeasurably better at voting against than for. When it achieves one of
its major negative triumphs, such as toppling the 50 years of corrupt
postwar regimes in Italy and Japan, it is unable by itself to supply an
alternative. We shall see whether it can do so in Serbia.

And yet, government is for the people. Its effects are to be judged by what
it does to people. However uninformed, ignorant or even stupid the "will of
the people" is, however inadequate the methods for discovering it, it is
indispensable. How else can we assess the way that techno-political
solutions, however expert and technically satisfactory in other respects,
affect the lives of real human beings? Soviet systems failed because there
was no two-way traffic between those who took decisions "in the interests of
the people" and those on whom these decisions were imposed. The
laissez-faire globalisation of the past 20 years has made the same mistake.



The ideal solution is now hardly ever available to governments. It is one on
which doctors and air pilots relied in the past, and still try to rely on in
an increasingly suspicious world: the popular conviction that we and they
shared the same interests. We did not tell them how to serve us - since, as
non-experts, we could not - but until something had gone wrong we gave them
our confidence. Few governments (as distinct from political regimes) today
enjoy this fundamental a priori confidence. In liberal democracies, they
rarely represent a majority of votes, let alone of the electorate. The mass
parties and organisations, which once provided "their" governments with just
such confidence and steady support, have crumbled. In the omnipresent media,
backseat drivers, claiming a rival expertise to government, comment
constantly on its performance.

So the most convenient, sometimes the only, solution for democratic
governments is to keep as much decision-making as possible outside the range
of publicity and politics, or at least to sidestep the process of
representative government. In Britain, the centralisation of an already
strong decision-making power has gone hand in hand with a demotion of the
Commons and a transfer of functions to unelected institutions, public or
private. A good deal of politics will be negotiated and decided behind the
scenes. This will increase the citizens' distrust of government and lower
the public opinion of politicians.

So what is the future of liberal democracy in this situation? Except for
Islamic theocracy, no powerful political movements challenge this form of
government in principle. The second half of the 20th century was the golden
age of military dictatorships. The 21st century does not look so favourable
to them - none of the ex- communist states has chosen to follow this road -
and almost all such regimes lack the full courage of anti-democratic
conviction, and claim only to be the saviours of the constitution until the
(unspecified) date of a return to civilian rule.

Again, whatever it looked like before the economic earthquakes of 1997-98,
it is now clear that the utopia of a stateless, global laissez-faire market
will not arrive. Most of the world's population, and certainly those under
liberal-democratic regimes deserving of the name, will continue to live in
operationally effective states, even though in some unhappy regions state
power and administration have virtually disintegrated. Politics will
therefore continue. Democratic elections will go on.

In short, we shall face the problems of the 21st century with a collection
of political mechanisms dramatically ill-suited to dealing with them. They
are, in effect, confined within the borders of nation states, whose numbers
are growing, and confront a global world that lies beyond their range of
operations. It is not even clear how far they can apply within a vast and
heterogeneous territory that does possess a common political framework, such
as the European Union. They face and compete with a world economy, operating
through quite different units to which considerations of political
legitimacy and common interest do not apply - transnational firms. Above
all, they face an age when the impact of human action on nature and the
globe has become a force of geological proportions. Their solution, or
mitigation, will require measures for which, almost certainly, no support
will be found by counting votes or measuring consumer preferences. This is
not encouraging for the long-term prospects of either democracy or the
globe.

In short, we face the third millennium like the apocryphal Irishman who,
asked for the way to Ballynahinch, pondered and said: "If I were you, I
wouldn't start from here." 

But here is where we are starting from.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Eric Hobsbawm is emeritus professor of economic and social history at London
University. This is an edited version of his recent Athenaeum lecture; the
full text is available from The Athenaeum, 107 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5ER
(£5.65, inc p&p) 
© The Author © New Statesman Ltd. 2000. All rights reserved. Please contact
the publisher. 
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