What's required for democracy?
Dominique Moisi, Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard and author, most recently, of The Geopolitics of Emotion, asks, "Do elections make democracy?"What issues would your students identify in this essay? And what position would they take on those issues?
The Democracy Paradox
Elections stolen in Iran, disputed in Afghanistan, and caricatured in Gabon: recent ballots in these and many other countries do not so much mark the global advance of democracy as demonstrate the absence of the rule of law...
In a noted essay in 2004, for example, the Indian-born author Fareed Zakaria described the danger of what he called “illiberal democracy.” For Zakaria, America had to support a moderate leader like General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, despite the fact that he had not come to power through an election. By contrast, Zakaria argued, Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chávez, who was legitimately elected, should be opposed...
So what lessons should we draw from the inevitably messy nature of electoral processes in countries where there is either no middle class or only a rudimentary one, and where a democratic culture is at best in its infancy?
The time has come for the West to reassess its policies in a fundamental way...
[T]he West must get both its ambitions and its methods right. Democracy is a legitimate objective, but it is a long-term one. In the medium term, the absence of the rule of law constitutes the most serious problem for the countries in question...
It is the West’s acceptance of corruption – either open or tacit – that makes it an accomplice to too many nefarious regimes, and makes its espousal of democratic principles appear either hypocritical or contradictory...
The distance that separates the West from countries that rely on sham elections is not only geographic, religious, or cultural; it is chronological. Their “time” is not, has never been, or is no longer the same as that of the West. How can they be understood without being judged, or helped without humiliating paternalism or, still worse, without an unacceptable “collateral damage,” as in Afghanistan?
The West’s status in tomorrow’s world will largely depend upon how it answers this question. It cannot afford to ignore the issue any longer.
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Labels: concepts, democratization, pedagogy
posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM
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