This is a printer-friendly version of this month's companion essay. Return to this month's introduction.
[EDITOR'S NOTE]. In order to justify the critical stance we take on the current state of modern "democracies", it is necessary to discuss that ubiquitous term in certain ways. Few terms are so abused, having been put to the service of almost all political ideologies at some point in history. Simultaneously, no political idea is so powerful when boiled down to its essential point: self-rule (the literal translation of the Greek autonomia, or autonomy). In this essay, Ricardo Blaug explores the deeper meaning of "democracy", asking why the term retains its potential to be used critically, despite so many attempts to subvert it to the service of established elites.
The key points to take from this essay in relation to the feature essay are: the importance of deliberation and debate to a truly active democratic sphere; the very real threat posed by considerations of "efficiency" and/or "technical fixes" for such practices; but also that these threats are not unopposable. Finally that "democracy" can mean many things, and some are occasionally in direct opposition to one another.
Nowadays, everyone's a democrat. Everyone believes that authority rests on the consent of the governed. Even Saddam Hussein held referenda, and claimed he represented the will of the people. What democracy boasts, though, is not just a claim to be right. It also claims a unique performance. As the safest, most decent and most efficient political form, democracy has at last triumphed over its enemies, and is now touted as the only legitimate and viable form of government.
This has been a remarkable rehabilitation. For most of its history, democracy was seen as a degenerate political form, much feared for its reliance on a populace seen as foolish and volatile. Yet since the adoption and justification of representation in the Eighteenth Century, we have laid to rest those dangerous images of noisy and volatile mobs, constant mass assemblies and endless inefficient talk. With the people being ruled by proxy, and periodically consenting in elections, we have found a way to combine legitimacy with decency and viability. Now, in its modern representative form, what's so clever about democracy is that it provides enough participatory input to be legitimate, yet not so much as to damage its viability. As such, it's easy to see why the democratic club is one that everyone wants to join.
Yet those who have recently joined this club, such as the peoples of South Africa, Chile, the Czech Republic etc., while having made significant improvements on their previous regimes, now sense a growing disappointment. This disappointment is not only due to the increasingly apparent costs of a free market. It is also caused by the realisation that the transition from mass action against authoritarianism to the settled structures of elections and parties involves a significant reduction in political activity. In rising against their masters, such people participated in noisy debate and spontaneous action. Now, though, their politics is conducted by proxy, and they have become mere spectators of a corrupt and elitist game. Having won the ultimate prize, they feel that something has been lost. In 1994, the Zapatistas appealed to them in the following way: "Why is it so quiet here?" they asked. "Is this the democracy you wanted?" (See http://www.ezln.org/documentos/1994/19940131b.en.htm)
There is trouble also within the established democracies. For here we struggle with the inescapable fact that participation is a sham. Our elected representatives are self-serving and self-obsessed, and we all know they lie and favour their corporate friends. Elected by a small percentage of the vote, and even this won by bribery and the distortion of information, they unfailingly pursue their corrupt ways. Though they say they act with the consent of the people, whole sections of the populace have become superfluous. Not only is their participation no longer required, but they are also denied work, resources, public services and even protection.
The defining image of the established democracies is, therefore, the fence. Increasingly, the power of the state, its police and judicial system, becomes dedicated to maintaining this barrier, which separates one half of the nation from the other. For many, democracy now appears too clever. For it is a political form which at once claims to represent the will of the people, and at the same time, works to systematically exclude them from politics. Indeed, liberal democracy seems quite happy to operate without, and even in spite of, the people.
Yet behind the fence, new forms of political activity are mushrooming. In small groups, associations and new social movements, people are learning. They are trying out new ways of taking decisions which use real participation, which involve fair debate and which bypass the traditional political system. Indeed, our understanding of what it means to really consent is growing so fast that such experimentation is now occurring in the voluntary sector, in public administration and in business management itself.
At the same time, an extraordinary rush of new political theory is currently seeking ways to deepen democracy. Communitarians, Habermasians, Feminists and Postmodernists all draw our attention to the nature of consent required if an authority is to claim that it is morally right. According to these accounts, meaningful participation is not just a question of occasionally placing a cross in a box beside a person's name. Rather, what becomes of central importance is the process of forming and informing that act of choice. In this way, they draw our attention to the openness of debate which precedes the act of consent and the quality of information actually available to political participants.
What emerges from this work is a new understanding of the basic building block of democracy. Only when people have engaged in fair face-to-face deliberation can their consent be seen to confer legitimacy. Only by piling up such blocks, first to the associations and voluntary groups of civil society, and then to parliamentary structures themselves, might democratic states claim to be legitimate.
Many theorists have concentrated on trying to counter the traditional charge against a more deliberative account of democracy: that it is utopian, that it has "no place", that it is unrealistic. They therefore offer a variety of institutional reforms which would allow fair deliberation to be fed more meaningfully into the decision-making processes of the state, so preserving the efficiency of its central representational structure. By giving deliberative democracy a "place", they hope to combine its increased legitimacy with political viability. In this way, a deeper democracy might realistically walk upon the earth.
Yet there is one important way in which such theory remains profoundly utopian. For while they all seek an increase in deliberation at the periphery of the state, none address the problems encountered by participants in such deliberations. Democratic theorists have always plied their trade as designers of entire political orders. They have always sought to show how states could be both legitimate and efficient. The theorist, gazing out over the entire institutional landscape, diagnoses ills, and designs institutional treatments. From this elevated perspective, trying to deepen democracy becomes a problem of design, of finding forms which will allow for meaningful and fair participation.
But most of us do not practice state craft. We do not, in fact, face the problem of reforming an entire political order. Instead, we live everyday lives, in our families and communities. We work, when we can, we belong to civic associations and occasionally, when we can overcome our pessimism, we engage in political activism. From the perspective of a participant in an everyday collective decision, democracy presents quite different problems. Here and now, democracy means fairness and efficiency in the decision-making process of an actual group.
For all their calls for more deliberation, if you ask democratic theorists questions like: How can we do fair deliberation? How can we have more democracy, say, in our place of work? How can our decisions be both fair and efficient? you will be greeted by a loud silence. This is because they are busy elsewhere. Anxious not to be seen as utopian, they want to show democratic states how to run. Participants would be more impressed if we could learn, first, how to walk.
What then can we say about democracy as it appears in the "participant's perspective?" We might start with Sheldon Wolin's suggestion ("Fugitive Democracy", Constellations 1/1, 1994, pp. 11-25). "Democracy," he states, "is not about where the political is located, but how it is experienced." According to Wolin, what's so clever about democracy is that it is something that happens to participants in a particular discussion, something immediate, something characterised not by a form for participation, nor by an institutional design, but precisely by a loss of form, and by a breach of design. If we push this insight, we can say that from the "participant's perspective", democracy is something that occasionally breaks out among particular people in particular situations. Suddenly we find we have risen above the power-saturated ways in which we normally interact, and that something quite different is taking place between us.
Such a view draws us to inspect the characteristics of a break-out of democracy, to inspect the kind of assistance its participants might require and to sketch its history. In doing so, we begin to see that democratic breakouts confront recurrent problems, and may even have a discernible life-cycle.
Historically, we can identify examples of their occurrence in the political clubs of revolutionary France, in the workers' societies of the 19th century, and during the Paris Commune. More recently, such breakouts have taken place in the women's movement, in the resistance to war in Vietnam and to nuclear power, in user groups challenging psychiatric service planning, and among striking miners' wives. There are many more examples that occur in everyday life, or are so shortlived as to never attract the attention of the media. The social psychologists, Moscovici and Doise, go so far as to suggest that almost all of us have had some experience of a breakout of democracy. (Conflict and Consensus: A General Theory of Collective Decisions, London, Sage, 1994.)
The primary characteristic of this kind of democracy must be that of noise. Upon the discovery of a common preoccupation, all accounts note that speech becomes animated, and debate heated. Now, people are keen to be heard, they listen to others with interest, and concern is expressed to elicit all views. In so pooling its resources, the group now confronts the matter at hand in its full complexity. Because more heads are better than one, such deliberation increases the quality of decisions.
As the breakout begins, all forms of existing authority are directly challenged. Indeed, a common starting point is the ejection of a leader widely seen to be working against the collective interest. But suspicions do not end here. As the women's movement found, the search for ways to deliberate fairly also reveals more subtle exclusionary practices, and leads people to greater awareness of the ways in which they are oppressed. In effect, during open discussion, people become politicised. In deliberation, participants broaden their tight focus on individual interests, first to seeing things from the point of view of others, and then to those interests the group has in common. As the group continues to meet, friendship, vitality and rapid learning all draw people in. Now, to use Rousseau's phrase, they "fly to the assemblies". (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.)
Against those who see controversy as threatening to democracy, what seems to drive these processes, and to give them their extraordinary energy, is that in a breakout of democracy, conflict works. It generates cohesion, it causes people to re-evaluate their preferences and needs, and it makes agreement possible. So there are disagreements, and these are often acted out in highly dramatic ways. Livy's history of early Rome has many good examples of such political drama, and it was precisely this energising conflice to which Machiavelli (in The Discourses) attributed the vitality of that republic.
In a democratic breakout, leadership is no longer based on social roles, but becomes more fluid: its functions divided and shared. Accounts stress that where it does accrue to particular individuals, it is because the group benefits from that individual's abilities. And weighing the benefits of leadership against its dangers becomes a constant topic of discussion for the group.
As the forum continues to meet, activity remains frenetic, celebratory, fun. People make extraordinary sacrifices and act in uncharacteristic ways. They can't sleep, they fall in love, and what they are able to achieve surprises both others and themselves. Gradually, habitual alliances emerge, and adversarial postures are adopted towards the institutions of power. The group develops in-jokes, stereotypes its opponents, and cements its cohesion with ritual and symbols. But nevertheless, a characteristic of fairness is openness and informality of membership.
Such moments of fairness enjoy some successes: power is challenged, its ways are revealed and decisions are made which are both fair and efficient. If breakouts become extended in time and networked together, new rights can be won, democratic judgment is learned, practised, and made available to other groups, and sometimes even governments fall.
But mostly there is failure. The demise has multiple causes, both external and internal. Externally, one of the most significant difficulties to be faced by any genuinely democratic forum is the unbridled hostility of the state and other institutions of power. Usually, breakouts can be safely ignored, ridiculed, denied resources and allowed to peter out. Should they managed to survive and network together so as to present a threat to existing structures of power and property distribution, other strategies, such as informants, payoffs and dirty tricks will be used. Finally, if these prove ineffective, the liberal democratic state will deploy direct and violent repression in order to restrict the growth of democracy.
A further source of difficulties is that as the group tries to do things in the world, not only must it act efficiently, but it must also learn to manage its increasingly frequent contacts with the institutions of power. Such pressures require the selection (and control) of representatives and spokespersons, and tempt the group into formalising their decision-making procedures.
Gradually, a new level of structure begins to emerge, and this serves to erode the face-to-face quality of the initial breakout. It is, to use Habermas's phrase, increasingly "colonised" by instrumental forms. [Editor's Note: See page 2 of this month's feature essay.] Now, what was once done discursively is rendered invisible by experts and taken over by bureaucratic procedure. In these ways, the breakout is co-opted and institutionalised.
So, one of the causes of failure is success. For if they are not very careful, a democratic movement can find itself subject to death by liberal democracy. Where domesticated by parties and representative structures, the breakout of democracy finds its slogans aped hypocritically by politicians and used to advertise clothing to teenagers. Deliberation now returns to its more common, power-saturated form, and participants find themselves mere spectators of a process that was once their own.
Internal causes of failure are not hard to identify. Stress, exhaustion, fear of repression, frustration and repeatedly hurt feelings are among them. Often, these result in the emergence of a faction or leader whose methods undermine fair communication. As old power differentials reappear, the more confident members, now doing almost all the talking, start to complain about the level of participation of the less active. Riven by conflict that is now destructive, or which is simply foced underground, the noise at last begins to abate. As the costs of participation rise, people no longer attend with the same frequency. When the democratic moment is over, apathy returns, as does the exclusive concern with self-interest.
Now the recriminations begin. People tend to pathologise those who hold views different from their own. Difference comes to be seen as sabotage and then as warranting ejection. Gradually, the ideology of the group hardens further still, and in a kind of micro-Thermidor, leaders and sub-groups begin to force cohesion and agreement. Now, in a parody of self-rule, the group takes on the task of oppressing itself.
And always, the eclipse of fairness is greeted with gleeful shouts of "I told you so!" from all those who felt threatened by the breakout. Direct democracy, they assert, is itself oppressive, and involves a loss of individual freedom. Deliberation is inefficient, and utopian, for people are too foolish to rule themselves. But those who were present know that something of real importance occurred there. Their disappointment is therefore acute, as is their need to search for reasons for their failure.
Whatever the combination of causes, genuinely democratic groups seem to have a discernible life-cycle. They burn brightly, then either fizzle, are repressed, become profoundly unfair, or are co-opted and institutionalised. They can last for moments, or for months. But eventually, they come to an end.
Whether something so transitory has any value is a difficult question. But it is one that might also be asked of an individual human life. Whether our lives are worth living, given that they will one day come to an end, is not only a difficult question, but perhaps also one that reason cannot answer. One function that democratic breakouts clearly do not perform, however, is to provide a stable supply of deliberative input into a state. Simply, democracy from the participant's perspective may not be the kind of thing that can be accommodated in institutional design.
To see why this is so, we must combine our characterisation of democracy from the participant's perspective, which we noted was missing in the new theories of deliberative democracy, with something they do provide, this being an assertion that the basic building block of democratic legitimacy is fair face-to-face deliberation. In so doing, we begin to see that what makes a democratic breakout fair, and more importantly, what keeps it fair, is precisely the ceaseless energy with which its members are suspicious of unfairness. Only by talking, arguing, celebrating, can participants be sufficiently vigilant to extend the duration of their moment of fairness.
As we saw, democratic breakouts are subject to significant pressures on their time and resources. Their survival turns on their ability to make gains in efficiency, and these can necessitate the restriction of fairness. Democratic fora therefore, often face the need to compromise their fairness in order to make gains in efficiency.
A good example of such a trade-off is presented by Livy in his account of the reaction of the Roman populace to an invasion by a barbarian tribe. After a lengthy debate, they decide that they will only survive the invasion if they limit their own participation and focus their energies behind a dictator. Their choice is Cincinnatus, an elderly General, who is tired of public life and has no interest in power. That night, they go, in their thousands, and in the driving rain, to Cincinnatus' farm outside the city. There they plead with him as he works in his field. Eventually he agrees to be their dictator. The office of dictator, though often used by the Roman Republic in times of crisis, was limited in law to a duration of six months. Cincinnatus was successful in his leadership, and under him, the army expelled the invaders. After the six months, he returned to his farm.
What this example shows is that participants require extraordinarily good judgment if they are to survive as a democratic entity. They must be able to recognise the need for a gain in efficiency, agree to a reduction in their own participation and remain vigilant so as to ensure that the resulting trade-off does not become permanent. A democratic breakout, having won fairness, faces a bewildering array of such trade-offs. They will need to agree, in advance, to methods of decision-making which do not involve the whole group, to temporary hierarchies, to reliance on a particular person's skills and generally, to a number of practices which are, in fact, unfair.
What we are considering with such trade-offs is the addition of a second block, an additional level of structure, a minimal increase in formalised procedure. While fairness is difficult enough to maintain even without the need for efficiency gains, it becomes even more so when we try to manage and control this second block. As we saw, even minimal reliance on proxies and bureaucratic procedures can be hard to reverse, and they always threaten to permanently damage the deliberative capacities of the group.
Nevertheless, where trade-offs for efficiency are fully and fairly deliberated, where they are kept under constant scrutiny, where their effects upon the ongoing deliberative capacities of the group are carefully monitored, they can be both legitimate and effectively managed. Now we can see the wisdom of the ancient Athenian belief that good collective judgments were those which preserved the capacity to make good collective judgments. Provided their effect on the deliberative capacities of the group is kepy clearly in view then, it is conceivable that the basic block of a democratic breakout might, via a trade-off for efficiency, receive a second block of structure, and still retain its fairness.
Beyond this, however, the preservation of fairness becomes inconceivable. You simply cannot, as the designing theorists would suggest, stack blocks on top of one another all the way up to the level of the state. For above the second block, the texture of deliberation is completely changed. Here, face-to-face interaction is replaced by the politics of proxy, by bureaucratisation and ossification of procedure, by institutionalised mechanisms geared solely to efficiency. Above the second block, and sometimes even within it, fairness is not only lost, it is also forgotten.
How, then, could there ever be such a thing as a democratic state? In the liberal democracies, we live with significant trade-offs of participation for efficiency. But, again, it is not the presence of unfair practices that signals illegitimacy. It is the lack of deliberative agreement to such trade-offs. Where no serious effort is made by the state, or even by a major political party, to seek meaningful deliberative input into the making of collective decisions, then such trade-offs must be seen as illegitimate. And, of course, even if a state did seek such input it could only do so by attempting to provide institutional forms which, as we have seen, are not conducive to fairness as it is experienced by participants.
We must conclude, therefore, that newly democratic states have joined a club which is not democratic. It is for this reason that they are disappointed, it is for this reason that they find themselves in (our) brave new world of political silence and sparkling fences. States cannot claim any contact with the basic building block of democratic legitimacy and, as a description of a state, democracy is an idea that does not, and cannot, walk upon the earth.
This, though, is not to remove all possibility for a deepening of democracy. Historically, participatory rights are not given by decent states. They are taken by emerging oppressed groups. Only as groups learn to operate their own procedure with fairness and efficiency, only as they find ways to network with other such groups while retaining their democratic core, can they begin to challenge the existing structures of power.
Yet it is precisely when we begin to consider the possibility of such a challenge that we reveal the extraordinary lack of knowledge we have accumulated over our history regarding what it actually means to rule ourselves. We know so little about how to behave fairly in groups, how we might nurture and network democratic breakouts and thus begin a genuinely democratic movement. When suitably humbled by this lack of knowledge, the question of how we might deepen democracy escapes from the hands of the designing theorist and becomes one that participants can only ask themselves. Do we want to be autonomous citizens? Do we want to have fun, to make noise, to act on our growing mistrust? Or do we merely want to watch as those forces which work against democracy increasingly colonise our lives and perhaps even destroy us completely?
At present, we have few citizens. Liberal democracy does not produce them. For the most part there is apathy, cynicism, extraordinary hardship and also, possibly, impending infrastructural breakdown. Yet, where a political system relies for its stability on systematic depoliticisation and on the exhaustion of utopian energies, it is always vulnerable. There is much dry wood. And there are many breakouts of democracy. The idea that any authority's claim to being morally right is, and can only ever be, based on consent, has always been an idea that has threatened to grow out of control. There is little question that citizens are learning. They may even be learning too fast. Deepening our democarcy could, therefore, become something mroe than an unlikely possibility. Rousseau understood this. "Once you have citizens," he said, "you have all you need." That's what's so clever about democracy.