Planting Democracy in the World – A Mantra for Freedom

[sibgakhan]

Planting Democracy in the World – A Mantra for Freedom

To be sure, democracy has made great strides over the past century and has spread to places and cultures once deemed impenetrable by it. Still, a glance at the world warrants a “half empty, half full” caution more than it does a strident optimism. Russia is no longer free and China, while making progress toward economic liberalism, remains a dictatorship and a severe human rights abuser. Democracy has made only scant inroads in Africa and has a fragile hold in Indonesia that is threatened by Islamic radicalism. (David Hornik, Ref. 2)

President Bush has made a mission of his administration to spread democracy in the non-democratic parts of the world, particularly the Muslim world. Democracy is practically one of the best forms of governance; in theory, it is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Not many people in the free world will have any quarrel with this mission; it is the method of the implementation, which is being disputed. The seeds of democracy cannot take roots overnight in the countries where it has not been practiced for any length of time, and start bearing fruit right away. Some societies may be completely unsuitable and unprepared at present for democracy. However, the mission is commendable and the people are forced by it to ponder on the feasibility of implementing democracy.

Gradually, it dawned on me that it is not democracy in itself, which provides a benign process of governance; it has to be coupled with some other appendages as well. For example, India is a democratic country yet it remains communal. In my normal day to day life in the west, nobody ever bothered which religion I belonged to. There was no religious discrimination, by and large, in the west. So there is a practical difference between the two democracies. The difference is that of secularism. India although is secular by its own proclamation, such a claim is nominal at present. With the passage of time, it might become more and more secular and less communal. In order to have a civil society and a just and fair government, there should be democracy and secularism coexisting for the benefit of the people. They should work together for the ‘common good.’

A democratic country doesn’t become secular by virtue of democracy, as noted above. This is a dilemma confronted in Iraq. The majority party, United Iraqi Alliance, desires to incorporate the Islamic Shariah in Iraq’s constitution. It is not able to do so because it needs two-thirds majority for inserting it into the constitution, which it does not have at present (it won only 48% of the popular vote). But if it succeeded by forming coalition with another party, the country might get a democratic government but the purpose of President Bush’s mission would be defeated, which desires fair and equitable form of government for all the people including the women.

Constitutional Liberty, Democracy, and Liberal Democracy

According to John Judis (1), Fareed Zakaria differentiates between constitutional liberty and democracy by defining “the former as the protection of individual rights of speech, property, and religion through a system of law not subject to arbitrary government manipulation… England gained rudimentary constitutional liberty after the Magna Carta in 1215, and the United States was founded as a system of constitutional liberty in 1788.” On the other hand, democracy is “a political system based on ‘open, free, and fair elections.’” Zakaria argues, “if electoral democracy is established in a society before it has achieved constitutional liberty, it is likely to either end up as an ‘illiberal democracy’ (like Russia) or degenerate into fascism or populist authoritarianism (as Germany and Italy between the world wars)…if elections were held now in many Middle Eastern (Zakaria’s book was published before Iraq’s elections) or North African countries, they would be won by fundamentalist parties that would proceed to destroy whatever modicum of liberty exists and probably eliminate future elections as well.”

This difference is important. Constitutional liberty empowers the legislature to legislate and interpret the law. If the executive, which is brought into power by a democratic process, tries to twist the constitution to suit its whimsical policies, it can be challenged in a court of law. Thus a democratic government by itself does not ensure that it would be a liberal and fair government if the constitution is not structured for it to be liberal and fair to everyone.

A combination of democracy and constitutional liberty yields liberal democracy.

The well-established democracies, such as in the U.S. and U.K., have sufficiently strong checks and balances in their operating machinery for them to be just and fair to the people. The new democracies are prone to manipulative machinations of the executive. Only over a period of time and maturation will they become effectively operational. Nonetheless, a start, howsoever slow and deficient, is very desirable. The budding democracies should have appropriate provisions in the constitution for protection against overthrow by means of army coup. This is a very tricky situation because it is not very clear what can prevent army from overthrowing a democratic government, suspend or abrogate the constitution and rule the people by the martial law ordnances and edicts. Pakistan is a classic example of such a debacle.

Another reason that helped the army to take over the government in Pakistan was a weak legal system. The ruling government could easily manipulate the constitution through a pliable legal system and indulge in illegal and corruptive activities with impunity. When the legal system was weak enough to let a corrupt democratic government have its way illegally (get away with murder, so to say), it wouldn’t have prevented the military to overthrow a legal government as well. For instance, when Zia overthrew Bhutto’s government, such an act was act of treachery according to the constitution, yet nobody challenged Zia and his takeover was justified by a twisted and meandering argument. The public welcomed his takeover.

Sharansky’s Case for Democracy

Natan Sharanski is a former Soviet refusenik (dissident) and political prisoner. At present, he is Israeli minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs. Based on his experience of discrimination and hostility in the Soviet Russia, he has written a book (Ron Dermer is the co-author) called “The Case for Democracy”. The book drew worldwide attention and publicity and has been widely reviewed and discussed by prominent analysts. President George W. Bush praised the book and also honored the author with a tete a tete in the White House. He is inspired by the central thesis of the book, which has helped forming the vision of his worldview.

Sharansky’s book is ranked with Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World View” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man”.

According to David Hornick (2), “Sharansky’s message centers on a distinction between ‘fear societies’ – dictatorships, and ‘free societies’ – democracies. Sharansky’s insistence that all societies, given the choice, will choose ‘freedom’ over ‘fear’, is the basis of his optimistic encouragement of the Bush administration’s ambition to spread democracy to the Arab world.” The Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, also took a leaf from Sharansky’s book (p. 40) and said, “If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won the freedom.” Sharansky calls this the town square test.

According to Roger Cohen (3), a reviewer of Sharansky’s book, Sharansky’s central argument is: “Freedom is attainable for every person on earth. It is the best guarantee of global security, because democratic societies are non- belligerent. Totalatarian or, as he puts it, fear societies are dangerous because they always seek external enemies as a means of self-preservation.”

This concept is somewhat ideological and oblivious of the religious and cultural realities in different parts of the world. At the same time, it is subjective also in as much as the author focuses on Israeli interests in Palestine and glosses over those of the Palestinians whom he considers nothing “more than a troublesome abstraction”.

Roger Cohen (3) wrote in his review, “..the book’s simplicity can also seem simplistic. The author shies away from hard questions. What, for example, should be done when one person’s freedom – say that of an Israeli settler – becomes another person’s prison?.. He (Sharansky) says he has no wish to rule over them. But he also argues that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s wall-cum-fence is not a land grab, even when it drives far into the West Bank, because ‘the West Bank is disputed territory’. He evinces deep sympathy for a few hundred settlers in the West Bank town of Hebron and little or none for the 150,000 Palestinians beside them. He dismisses Israeli killing of Palestinan civilians as the unintentional byproduct of military operations.”

The cultural attitudes in the Middle East to which Martin Kramer (4) has drawn attention are also relevant for the cultivation of democracy there. He wrote, “The late Elie Kedourie (see note at the end of the article) put it best. The Midlle Eastern … is very far from thinking that he has a right to have a say in politics. All he wants is to be left alone and not (to) be oppressed. Elsewhere he wrote of the Syrians, as archetypes of the Arabs, that ‘they have never been much accustomed to being asked their opinion about their rulers. For them the happy man has always been he who has a beautiful wife, a comfortable house, a lucrative occupation, who does not know government, and whom government does not know; in short, the private man.” Such an indifferent attitude is not germane for the propagation of democracy. People need to feel motivated to choose their government and go out to cast votes for that purpose. They should demand their right to choose the government.

There is a religious hurdle, which needs to be overcome, at least in the Muslim world. According to Islamic concept, the government belongs to Allah; the ruler on the earth is only nominal and Allah’s representative, khalifah, or vicegerent, if you will. For Allah’s government, Quran is the constitution and no other constitution is needed besides it. This concept is the backbone of Islamic theocracy. It was never very strong in Pakistan, which has a history of secular governments, although failed ones, not due to theological reasons, but this vision is firmly entrenched in the Middle East. Ayatollahs rule in Iran in the name of Allah. The victory of Shiite party in Iraq is glued to this vision and it wants to incorporate the Shariah in its constitution. If the ayatollahs had their way in Iraq, the emerging democracy would be a theocratic democracy in which women would continue to be marginalized and have only a secondary role. It is difficult to see a “change of wind” in these parts of the world without a strong dose of secular education, which seems to be a long-term effort. Democratization of the Middle East seems impossible on the watch of the President Bush’s administration although he has started the process.

Imposition of democracy by force will not have any lasting impact. A forcibly democratized country will, more likely than not, revert to its old ways when the force is removed. Democracy needs to emerge from the local culture. The reason why democracy seems to be working in Turkey is that Ataturk had introduced secular culture and secular education forcibly and simultaneous with the introduction of democratic government. Over a period of time, secular culture took roots and religion correspondingly lost its hold on many people. Ataturk succeeded in introducing these revolutionary reforms because he was a Muslim and belonged to the society, which he was reforming; he was not an outsider. His efforts also had encountered appreciable resistance. External imposition of democracy and secularism will not be readily acceptable to the Muslim masses. They will resist as long as they can.

Note

Elie Kedourie (1926-1992) was Professor of Politics and specialist in the History of the Middle East at the London School of Economics, the Founder and Editor of the journal Middle Eastern Studies, and the author and editor of many outstanding books on the Middle East.

References

1.John B. Judis, “Putting Liberty First: The Case Against Democracy,” review of “The Future of Freedom,” by Fareed Zakaria, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2003.
2.P. David Hornik, “Symposium: The Case for Democracy,” FrontPageMagazine.com/February 4, 2005. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=16898.
3.Roger Cohen, review of “The Case for Democracy,” by Natan Sharansky and Ron Dermer, International Herald Tribune. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/...s/bookmer.html.
4.Martin Kramer, “Mr. Sharansky, ease my doubts,” panel discussion of “The Case for Democracy.”
http://www.geocities.com/martinkramer/Sharansky.htm.