2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY

5096 DEMOCRATIC ALTERNATIVES

Most interesting of all, in terms of my experience with the attempts at defining democracy in the context of Ethiopia, was the fact that most of the Western governments involved apparently failed to even recognise that what they were promoting was just one possible approach to democracy. In particular, they were unwilling to recognise that, in practice, it might be less than perfect. They certainly failed to recognise that the Ethiopian version, being written by one of my friends there, was even a valid attempt at defining another approach to the problem.

Absolute government, by an effectively closed elite, might have been justifiable - in practice if not in theory - when most of the population were ill-educated and even worse informed; and might not have been expected to cope with the complex issues to hand. Now, however, the mass of the population - in most countries throughout the world - is relatively well-educated; to a better standard than the leaders in earlier times. A hundred years ago fewer than 2% of Americans went to university, where now more than a quarter do. As well - through the almost universally available medium of television - they are remarkably well informed (on many issues better informed, indeed, than their leaders - locked in their elitist ivory towers!). The ground has not merely moved, it has been destroyed by a political earthquake of monumental proportions. The only thing which has so far allowed the politicians to continue their comfortable lives - oblivious, as I indicated above, to the looming problems - has been that the great mass of the population - in this case very poorly informed by the media in general - have not previously been in a position to recognise the nature of the changed circumstances. They have been willing to suspend disbelief, even as their emperor's clothes progressively disappeared, quietly accepting (the legitimation) that their leaders knew what was good for them.

In the Western context, the most important lesson from the fall of communism (but one which went largely unreported) was that it very clearly demonstrated that - in the absence of the cloak of ideological confrontation - at least some emperors might indeed be naked. Thus, only now, when more and more voices around the world are pointing out the nakedness of their own particular governments, are the masses - at long last - awakening to the true situation, and reacting to it.

For the record, therefore, Western democracy - and, in fact, most forms of government around the world - at best only offers a limited check on what government does; and even then only by seeming to offer the opportunity to reject existing political power at intervals of five years or so.

It will become increasingly difficult to persuade electorates that their only involvement in government is in terms - at relatively long intervals - of being able to enact - very inefficiently - checks on its grossest excesses through the ballot box.

Robert Cooper puts the position into a much wider context when he describes the ‘balance of power’, which in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years War’, replaced Christendom as the key concept in international affairs. He explains its virtues when "...the European state system was threatened by hegemonic ambitions from Spain, France, or Germany, coalitions were put together to thwart those ambitions. The system also had a certain legitimacy; statesmen were conscious of the desirability of balance." He also documents the dangers "It was a system in which war was always waiting to happen." This balance of power was, in turn, destroyed by what he sees as the ‘New Thirty Years War’ (of 1914 to 1945) which led to the ‘Cold War’; although he suggests that was "...not so much a radically new system as the concentration and culmination of the old one. The empires became spheres of influence of the superpowers." He continues "For the most part it was fought with propaganda, bribery and subversion as much as in military combat [and] Many of the actual battles of the Cold War took place in civil wars." But he adds, perhaps with the benefit of the hindsight which we all now share, "And yet the Cold War order was not built to last. Although it was stable on a military level it lacked legitimacy as a system...since the ideologies of both sides rejected the division of the world into two camps...Moreover both sides, within certain limits, were always ready to undermine it. " All of this leads up to the important statement, in the context of the book you are now reading, that "...what came to an end in 1989 was not just the Cold War, nor in a formal sense the Second World War...[but] the political system of three centuries: the balance of power and the imperial urge." I suspect he is correct in thinking that the fall of the Berlin Wall was an even more momentous event than most of us thought! The Group of Lisbon focuses on the more recent past, however, when it claims "A new era of competition has emerged in the last twenty years. Competition no longer describes a mode of functioning in a particular market configuration (a competitive market) as distinct from oligopolistic or monopolistic markets. To be competitive has ceased to be a means to an end; competitiveness has acquired the status of a universal credo, an ideology." They add, later in their report, "Competition is clearly an inadequate response to the new form of coexistence and codevelopment required by a finite world and an increasingly interdependent and interactive global system."

According to Michael Walzer - professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton - "These [political parties] aimed at seizing power, which meant that they had (or had to pretend that they had) a position on every issue, a complete political programme."

 15 May 2003

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