Is Democracy Really
Inevitable?
Hugh Graham
It’s wonderful what happened in Libya
and what’s happening in Syria. Or is it? While the West congratulates Libyan moderate and liberal Mahmoud Jibril on
his landmark electoral victory over the Islamists, it wonders uneasily what
“liberal” means in Libya and whether it includes a measure of Islamic law or if
the defeated Islamists will even respect a liberal victory.
Whatever happens to Democracy in
Libya, free and fair elections remain the last sacred shibboleth for the West. And
yet the more Democracy spreads across the globe, the more uncertain its future
has become. Not just abroad, but at home. Most in the West take Democracy for
granted, few have a passion for it, many do not even feel its effects. This is
partly because of the relentless growth of executive power in places like Canada
and the United States; in fact there is some apprehension that society is
becoming too complex to be fully democratic, especially in the case of
conglomerates like the European Union and behemoths like China.
And then there’s decline: our
political parties, like enemies under a dictatorship, are beginning to indulge
the sort of rank hatred in which the other side is compared to the Nazis or
simply dismissed as evil, suggesting that it has to be stopped by fair means or
foul. The 2000 election of the conservative George W. Bush was turned into a
coronation by a conservative supreme court on the pretext of technicalities.
Money in US electoral politics is more powerful than ever. Here in Canada, robocalls have been used in an
attempt to distort election results and we have a government which tries to
cripple the opposition by withholding information, hiding controversial
legislation in omnibus bills and proroguing parliament: small but ironic
similarities to Vladimir Putin’s “managed democracy” in Russia.
Confusing perhaps, but nowhere near as
confusing as the Arab Spring which has, Libya notwithstanding, turned out to be
something less than the tidal wave of Democracy
everyone had hoped for. In the West, democracy is supposed to be an end in
itself. In the Middle East, that is by no means clear. Tunisia and Egypt have
elected Islamist governments and it’s entirely uncertain whether either one would
step aside if it lost the next election. It may indeed be Bad Faith: using
democratic means for undemocratic ends.
Secular incumbents are no more likely to
budge. If the Egyptian military decides it has to keep the Islamist government
in check, it’s unlikely that democracy in Egypt will survive. If the Islamists
prevail, things will be no better. This sort of standoff has already been seen at
its worst: when Algeria elected an Islamist government in the 1990s, a
secularist military voided the elections and wiped out the Islamists in a
bloody civil war.
The secular Assad regime in Syria has forestalled
the Algerian dilemma by cracking down even before the Islamists have a chance
at a vote. And the western media, once again, is turning a blind eye to the
growing number of Islamists among the ranks of a reputedly heroic democratic
opposition. For Democracy to prevail, at
the very least, such democrats, if elected, would, like the Islamists in
Tunisia and Egypt, have to be willing to concede electoral defeat.
If Democracy is stalled or declining, one can
only ask how it will fare if autocratic China becomes the next world power. Though
Democracy has been around for more than two thousand years, it’s been but one
system among many and only recently the preferred one. Could the past return? To
the Greeks Democracy wasn’t even the virtuous
Athenian discovery that we imagine: monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy were
often considered preferable. The Democracy of the Roman Republic was thought to
favour the Senatorial class while the dictatorship of Caesar and those that followed
were seen to reflect the popular will (China would agree). There were small,
short-lived democratic republics throughout the Middle Ages but it was feared
they would lead to tyranny. American democracy, since its founding, has
required a broad middle class; a class which is now in sharp decline.
Finally,
to ask the forbidden questions: will Democracy survive? And will it always be
the best system for everyone? It’s doubtful that the election in Libya, even of
a moderate, will provide much of an answer.
