In
an address last year to UC Berkeley political science graduates of the
university, California Governor
Jerry Brown remarked on the term “fugitive democracy” to refer to the episodic
nature of “the power of a people—democracy”.
That power, he said, ebbs and flows, “but at key moments, bureaucratic
and corporate power gives way to an aroused citizenry”.
That
certainly seems to be the case. And it
is helpful to think about Democracy as a construct in this way, as something
that has to be built and maintained, and which is represented not just by
elections (which, we are learning, can be bought, manipulated, and influenced
by money), but by the engagement and commitment of a citizenry.
It
might also be helpful to think about Democracy—and I’m not going to try to
define the term carefully—in historical terms.
It’s a pretty recent phenomenon in the world. The Greeks, of course, had a version of it, but
like the early American variety, it was subverted by the existence of massive
slave classes. If we look at the
attributes of a modern democracy—a nation state with power ostensibly in the
hands of its citizens, wielded for the common good, its institutions accessible
to all of its inhabitants—we will see that it is a form which is a blip on an
historical timeline.
The
U.S. declared its independence in 1776, but did not abolish slavery until the
Civil War. It was not until 1920 that
all women were permitted to vote, and while the franchise is certainly not the
only metric of democracy, it is a very basic and foundational one, a
precondition of sorts. In 1964, nearly
two centuries after the U.S. won its independence from colonial rule, the
country finally abolished discrimination in voting rules, and one year later it
ended segregation in schools and workplaces.
In
other countries, the experience has been roughly similar. In many European nations, women won the right
to vote after the First or Second World War, when their work became more
recognisable to the highly-patriarchal societies in which they had long
laboured. In most former colonies, women
won the vote as those countries became independent. There are some dramatic outliers—in the
Pacific, the Middle East, and Switzerland—where women’s rights came later, and
in Saudi Arabia, Brunei, and the UAE where they are still largely absent.
By
this count, the U.S. and much of the world has had around fifty years of basic
democracy if we take that to mean nothing more than the right to participate in
the most elementary expression of preference for political candidates,
irrespective of whether people can actually have a hand in governing their
countries. Perhaps less, if we consider
that a few years ago, our Supreme Court decided to accord rights normally
restricted to living, breathing human beings, to corporate interests.
Today,
voting rights, public scrutiny of state institutions, rights to demonstrate and
make demands of our leaders, and democratic control over the business sphere
are all being eroded. Not just in the
United States where many states are passing laws designed to restrict certain
groups from voting, where our national security apparatus takes an adversarial
approach to the citizenry, and where corporate power is taking increasing
control over our political process and our political leaders.
A
quick glance at the front page of the BBC news site reveals that this might
very well be a global phenomenon.
Ukrainians
just lost their right to protest.
Syria’s murderous president is refusing to
step down even though he has violated the rights of his citizens and plunged
his country into a bloodbath.
Following
a coup, the Central African Republic is preparing to find an interim
leader.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin equated sexual preference with paedophilia, as his
government rolls back their rights.
President
Obama is dealing with a rogue intelligence agency which claims that the demands
of security are more important than people’s democratic rights to know what
their government is doing in their name.
Skim
a little deeper and you’ll see more.
U.S.
courts are trying to rein in efforts to enact voting laws which violate the
Constitution.
Mexico’s
government, long in hoc to or downright intimidated by drug cartels, is being
supplanted as the guarantor of basic law and order in many parts of the country
by vigilante groups.
Brazil
is ramping up spending on a sporting event at a time when many of its citizens
are feeling an economic crunch.
Egypt’s
former president, deposed by the military, is facing a trial in uncertain
circumstances.
Uganda’s
president is weighing whether to continue blocking a bill which would make same
sex relationships subject to imprisonment.
A
Nigerian was subjected to brutal corporal punishment for his relationship with
another man.
Chinese
workers, labouring in unsafe and unregulated conditions, died in a factory
fire.
Israel
defended its right to practise colonialism against its critics in the European
Union.
Employees
of HSBC, a bank known for its money laundering and deals with drug cartels, are
accused of manipulating currency markets.
This,
of course, is all simply the news of a single day. There are common threads in these diverse
events across the world. The power of
those with a great deal of money—whether banks, cartels, or generals with
substantial corporate links—are increasingly circumscribing what our economies,
workforces, and social relationships should look like. As a result, states are shifting their
priorities in a way that favours profiteering on behalf of those who are
already wealthy, and the loss of economic security and political rights by
those who are struggling. People are
losing their civil rights, simultaneously to the demands of “security” and to
the demands of corporate power. In
unsettled times, governments are increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of
dissent—effective democratic dissent in particular.
Most
of these stories concern events in discrete nation states—although also the
extent to which corporate power transcends national boundaries. Nation states are the form of political
organisation most associated with modern democracies, and it is equally worth
considering how fleeting has been the dominance of nation states in the world.
Prior
to the eighteenth century, most states were organised as kingdoms or religious
principalities, or else smaller, regional formations. The first nation-states made participation in
public life a highly-exclusive affair, and often operated in concert with what
we would today refer to as multinationals—the British and Dutch East India
Companies, to name but two examples, operated like sophisticated nations,
possessed their own armies, and often exercised more of the functions we
associate with “governments” than did their counterparts in the actual state! Until Europe withdrew from control over Asia
and Africa, most of the world’s peoples lived as colonial subjects rather than
as democratic citizens. And today
increasing numbers of nations are being absorbed by supra-national economic
groupings which are largely undemocratic and easily manipulated by financial
and corporate interests to the detriment of the citizens whose voices are
drowned out by the demands of neoliberal economic orthodoxy.
We
tend to think of “history” as something on a track towards some better
place. But the “unfolding” of history is
of course actually dependent on what we do now.
There is no “moral arc of the universe”...there is only what we have the
ability and courage to demand of our society and our institutions. It is frightening to contemplate, but it is
not difficult to see how, perhaps many years from now, the period in which
people elected their leaders and even participated in government in
self-determined nation states will look like an anomaly. The idea of workers setting the terms of
their labour and being served by the state might look like a quaint notion from
a bygone era. In temporal terms, “democracy”
barely registers on an historical scale, and if we are not careful, in the
future it might seem like a very tragically fleeting phenomenon.
