Democracy in a world of inequality
The system we are exporting is wilting under under egoism's rule
Peter Preston Monday May 16, 2005 Guardian
Here's George Bush, playing the crowds from Riga to Tbilisi and waving his "beacon of liberty". It's a wonderful thing, this democracy. And here's Tony Blair, counting his 36% and trying to polish a few wan adjectives. It's a cruel, apathetic thing, this democracy.
We see the birth of freedom - in Bucharest or East Berlin - because it makes great TV. We watch misty-eyed as that statue of Saddam topples for the umpteenth time. And then the years of disillusion kick in. East Germans tell pollsters how they hanker for the past. Iraq grits its teeth as the carnage grows and the magic of the ballot fades.
Who's to blame? Helmut Kohl, Donald Rumsfeld, Osama bin Laden? In any case, someone's to blame. Someone let the flame go out. Let's look round for that somebody and give him a good kicking. Bend over, prime minister. Politicians are to blame because they let us down. We are not to blame because we - the people - are lions for freedom led by deceitful donkeys.
Sometimes, as today, there are variations on this theme. Democracy itself is pure, but its mechanisms arrive soiled by self-interest, a system too crude to bring Labour and Lib Dems together or too bent to keep the Tories in limbo. But it ain't broke, so fix it by PR or postal voting or a visit from the boundary commissioners. What isn't said much these days - a forbidden thought much akin to blaspheming in church - is that modern democracy, as a way of governance, has problems we're mutts not to recognise. Maybe it is broke, and maybe we can't fix it.
If that's the question, then it's the sort of question that John Dunn, professor of political theory at Cambridge, patented long ago. Dunn (as Paul Kennedy says) habitually "asks questions about politics that few other scholars have thought of asking, or dared to ask". His new book, Setting the People Free (Atlantic), is just about as daring as they come.
Take the Greek city state of 2,000 plus years ago and analyse what kind of baby was there at the birth of democracy and why that Athenian flame went out, never truly rekindled until the French and American revolutions. Ask what Robespierre and chums meant by the égalité bit of their slogan. And then consider what happened next.
I won't try to precis Dunn. It's a fool's task. But he sees how revolutions died as "partisans of the order of egoism" took over and champions of "the order of equality" quit the stage. He finds democracy itself assuming a quite different, rampant quality after the second world war as it became synonymous with militant definitions of "freedom" (cf Soviet tyranny). And he wonders what happens next to a formula we're spreading from state to state, so that it's the only way we choose to run our future world, a world where the interests of the egoists rule.
Dunn is never dogmatic, just philosophical and disturbing. "The (French) partisans of egoism saw national prosperity as lying in the multiplicity of needs, the ever-growing diversity of material enjoyment, in an immense industry, a limitless commerce - and in the anxious and insatiable cupidity of the citizens." So much for rampant citoyens , even last week. Hail to Blairism, Bushism, Howardism, Osborneism. And to some very real difficulties.
Dunn's difficulty remains rooted in equality. How do you run a world where every nation, great and small, conforms to the latest definition of democracy, when equality between nations and between their citizens is simply not a realistic part of the equation? Where there are winners and losers by design, one world of permanent inequality? That's a pretty feeble beacon - and some nasty supplementary questions spin out from behind it.
One is the way that the economic order that goes with democracy renders freedom to choose, to change course profoundly, an illusion. Success (or failure) is handing political power to a central bank. Make Alan Greenspan or Mervyn King monarchs of the market and your vote inevitably loses force, the parts it can influence shrunk to opaque pledges about tax and pleas to nurses to wash their hands.
There is, in short, less to vote about, egoism abetted by forces and capital flows that are bigger than any of us. Why opt for abortion or classroom discipline instead? Because these are little things, cheap things. Globalisation, even in a single democratic world, strips power away. "Parliament is degenerating into a subsidiary of the stock market," says Günter Grass. The German debate, like the French debate, is about despair and incomprehension, not lighting bonfires on Beacon Hill.
That's a draining effect. And, contrapuntally, the power for global action also drains away. What can democracy do about a planet warming and frizzling towards extinction? It can do nothing at election time, because building nuclear power stations or meeting Kyoto targets is all too difficult (and expensive). It can do nothing between elections, because other countries are in stasis, voting themselves. It will not confront a threat, a demand for concerted action from Beijing to Birmingham, Alabama, until the seas rise, the deltas flood and something (too late) has to be done.
The democracy we primp for global export may divide the spoils among egoists, as in Baghdad. But it doesn't answer the big questions of survival, equality, peace. It's a concept barely 60 years old, not a torch blazing irresistibly over millenniums, nor the bill of goods George sold Georgia.
Is it the best we can do? Dunn has no final answer, and neither have I. It's the best we have done so far. But remember; this is still a beginning, not an end.
-- "C'mon Mr. Krinkle, tell me why" [Primus]