Early in 2014 in a South African journal,The Thinker (Q1, 2014),
Thabo Mbeki laid out his vision for the future of the progressive movement in
Africa. The core of this agenda, was “establishing
genuinely democratic systems of government, including accountable State systems”.
He is harsh about the reality of democracy in many African countries in which “State systems have been reduced to a
patrimony of a predatory elite, controlled by its self-serving ‘professional
political class’” “Thus”, he
continues, “does the putative democratic
state become a social institution which serves the interests of a
‘rent-seeking’ elite whose goals amount to no more than preserving its
political power and using this power to extract the ‘rent’ which ensures its
enrichment”
Harsh words indeed, though ones which have
become almost a cliché with respect to the governance of many African states.
Yet, by an odd coincidence, at around same time, The Economist, august journal of the western business elite, had a
front-page splash “What’s gone wrong with
democracy?”,[i]
the title of a long essay inside which opened by suggesting “that democracy is going through a difficult
time. Where autocrats have been driven from office, their opponents have mostly
failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies,
flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with
politics is rife. Yet a few years ago democracy looked as though it would
dominate the world.” The piece ends with the quotation from a past US President
often found in The Economist that “democracy never lasts long. It wastes,
exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not
commit suicide” John Adams wrote this in 1814 and it is unclear as to
precisely what he was referring. There had been a brief flourishing of
democratic intent in France a few years before, quickly snuffed out, and there
had been the original ‘democracy’ in Athens copied by a few other Greek
city-states around the fourth century BC in which, it is believed, around 15% of
the population took part. There was, of course, the Roman Republic which we
know ended badly on the Ides of March and also the Republic of Geneva about
which the less said the better. Adams in fact had precious little evidence on
which to base his assertion and, of course, it would not have occurred to him
that a country whose franchise excluded all women and those males held in
servitude could not be seen as a democracy. Even so, recent history suggests
that he had a point given that in 2014 alone, three elected governments were
overthrown and replaced by self-appointed cliques.
Doubts about the state of democracy are not
confined to right-wing journals. The eminent left historian, Perry Anderson,
recently published a coruscating essay mainly about the corruption of Italian
democracy but which opened with a lament for European democracy in general.[ii]
Europe is ill. How seriously, and why,
are matters not always easy to judge. But among the symptoms three are
conspicuous and inter-related. The first, and most familiar, is the
degenerative drift of democracy across the continent, ... Referendums are
regularly overturned, if they cross the will of the rulers. Voters whose views
are scorned by elites shun the assembly that nominally represents them, turnout
falling with each successive election... executives domesticate or manipulate
legislatures with greater ease; parties lose members; voters lose belief that
they count, as political choices narrow and promises of difference on the
hustings dwindle or vanish in office.
He
continues with a roll-call of distinguished European politicians who have been
implicated in various ways in huge corruption scandals amongst them Helmut
Kohl, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, Horst Köhler (former head of the IMF), Christine
Lagarde (current head of the IMF), Bertie Ahern, (past Irish prime-minister),
Mariano Rajoy (current Spanish prime-minister) and on through Greece, Turkey
and the U.K. The sums involved are not small: Helmut Kohl was found to have
amassed some two million Deutschmarks from donors whose names he refused to
reveal. Not one of this illustrious roll-call has so far been called to account
though Lagarde is currently under criminal investigation, something which seems
not to impede her job ruling the global financial system.
Nor
is the problem of dynastic political elites any preserve of Africa. Arguably
the most important democracy in the world, certainly the largest, is India in
which 814 million people went to the polls in May, 2014. These elections were
widely publicised as resulting in the overthrow of the Gandhi family which had
ruled India for four generations and bringing the Bharatiya Janata Party to
power led by a man of humble origins with no family connections to assist him.
However, as Patrick French has shown in a recent book,
India: a Portrait,
[iii]
nearly 30% of members of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha, were connected
directly by family to their political posts whilst, startlingly, all members
under 30 were the children of former politicians. There is little sign of voter
disillusion with electoral democracy in India with the 2014 election showing
the highest ever turnout at 66.4%, a respectably high figure for a country with
such a huge, poor rural sector. However, the importance of dynastic connections
suggests that even in this vibrant democracy there are some problems.
In
the USA, the democratic problem is, as always, money and its connections with
power. Efforts to limit the amount of money which individuals or corporations
could spend supporting political candidates have been regularly ruled as
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. According to the respected journalist,
Gary Younge:
In a system
where money is considered speech, and corporations are people, this trend is
inevitable. Elections become not a system of participatory engagement
determining how the country is run, but the best democratic charade that money
can buy. People get a vote; but only once money has decided whom they can
vote for and what the agenda should be. The result is a plutocracy that
operates according to the golden rule: that those who have the gold make the
rules.[iv]
Once,
powerful unions were able provide some counterbalancing finance to that of
corporate interests. However, the decline of unions and the almost exponential
growth in the scale of expenditure on elections have greatly reduced this
influence. Even so, American democracy has always been a bit rough-and-ready
and tinged with corruption, though the scale of this may be increasing, whilst
the very decentralised nature of US politics does provide scope for some
genuine democratic initiative. The real
centre of the democratic ‘crisis’ lies in Europe.
It
is sometimes forgotten just how recent democracy is in much of Europe and how
fractured has been its history. Only Sweden and the UK can really claim to have
enjoyed unbroken democratic governance since the late nineteenth century with
the gradual extension of the franchise to include women as well as the working
class less than a hundred years ago. Even so, the disappearance of fascism from
southern Europe in the 1970s followed by the emergence of parliamentary
democracy in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe in the 1990s seemed to
suggest that this form of governance was inevitable and immutable, so much so
that in 1992, Francis Fukuyama was able to pronounce that:
What we may be witnessing is
not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war
history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's
ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[v]
Fukuyama
has in recent years rather backtracked from this position but only at the
margins despite the conspicuous failure of the efforts of the USA to impose
liberal democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan. Why then the sense of a democratic
crisis particularly in Europe? In a number of ways it is the culmination of two
trends which have been developing for years, indeed decades.
The
first is the gradual decline of public involvement and interest in the
processes of electoral democracy. The most obvious of these is participation in
elections, something which appeared to have stabilised in Europe in a period
from the 1950s through to the 1980s at around 80-85%.
After this decade there was a slow but
steady decline throughout Europe, something which seems to have accelerated
into this century. In 2001, the UK had the lowest turnout since the advent of
mass democracy whilst France fell to a record low of 60.4% in 2007. A raft of
other countries, including Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Finland, have
also recorded record lows. A second indicator of decline in involvement is increasing
voting volatility, which is the number of voters who shift their party preferences
around from election to election. This lack of stability in voting preference
suggests disillusion with the democratic process. A third and in some ways the
most significant, has been a major decline in the membership of political
parties. The U.K. is the most extreme example with an aggregate loss in party
membership over 1.1 million between 1980 and 2009, a drop of 68% but most other
European countries have seen falls of 30-50%. There does not seem to be any
left/right bias in this fall; just a uniform decline in participation.
This
fall in membership has been accompanied and may be partly caused by the gradual
hollowing out of the meaning of ‘membership’ which has occurred in most
European parties. Outside of small-town direct democracy, political parties are
the key agency of modern participatory democracy, acting as they do to
formulate policies and to promote leaders. They provide the collective
participation necessary to provide elected governments with some kind of
bedrock in the popular will.
Essentially,
this hollowing-out process involves a transformation of ‘members’ into ‘active
supporters’, that is people who are willing to assist with campaigning at
elections by delivering leaflets and so on but who have little or no influence
in the formation of party policy or the development of its leadership. This
loss is mirrored by exactly the same phenomenon which was noted by Mbeki, the
growth of a self-serving
‘professional political class’ composed of people who have made politics
their career from an early age and have been promoted up the party ladder,
often by becoming advisers to established politicians or, initially, by using
family contacts. This ‘political class’ has become enmeshed with business
interests, particularly in the financial sector, and with state agencies to
form a circulating but sealed elite group who have largely gone to the same
schools and universities. So for many voters all main parties ‘are the same’
thus making a mockery of multi-party democracy.
The
other side of the collapse of the membership-based party has been the growth of
‘wild’ parties, that is parties with no historical base but which suddenly
achieve electoral success based on popular discontent with the established
parties. Syriza in Greece which polled only 4%
of the national vote in 2009, became the main opposition only in 2012, received
27% of the vote in the European elections and has now won a stunning electoral victory in national elections with the rightwing governing party
down to 23%, is the prime example of this phenomenon
together with the U.K. Independence Party which topped the vote in the European
elections also with 27%.
In Italy, the Five Star Party founded by the comedian,
Beppo Grillo, astonished the establishment by obtaining over 25% of the popular
vote in 2013 national elections and over 21% in the 2014 European elections even
though the party has been racked by rows over the alleged autocratic control of
its founder. Both Syriza and the Five Star Party can be seen as left-radical
but the more dominant trend in the growth of ‘wild’ parties has been that of
the far-right anti-immigration groups such as UKIP. In the 2014 European
election, far-right parties topped the poll in Denmark (the People’s Party with
26.6%) and France (National Front, 25.0%) whilst for the first time,
more or less
openly neo-Nazi parties – the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and
the Greek Golden Dawn (XA) – for the first time entered the European
Parliament. This movement to the right is far from uniform over Europe though
as a perceptive analysis is the Washington Post noted, “the abysmal performance of radical right
parties in Eastern Europe is that mainstream right-wing parties in the region
leave little space for the far right, given their authoritarian, nativist and
populist discourse.”[vii]
The common feature of all the right-wing parties is their vituperative hatred
of immigrants, the most disturbing of all the political portents in Europe.
The
second trend which mirrors the first has been the growth in importance of
supranational bodies, notably the European Commission but including such as the
IMF, which have little or no democratic basis but which exert power within
countries comparable to or exceeding national government. Added to these are
the other array of supranational bodies, the international corporations in
particular financial ones which answer to no democratic authority at all. A
prime example of the combination of these two power-bases is the pending
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an exceedingly complex treaty
to be struck between the EU and the US government which amongst other things
will enable transnational corporations to sue national governments inside the
EU for any unilateral regulatory process which damages the interests of the
corporation. National legislatures will have no say in agreeing in this package
and although the European Parliament will vote on the whole deal, it will have
no power to amend it.
A
consequence of this bipartite congruence is that increasingly, national
governments are seen as lacking many elements of real power. The failure to
control the international financial markets even though their collapse in 2008
required bailouts by nation states is a prime example of this. The result is a
further decline in interest in electing these supine governments.
The
‘democratic deficit’ of the EU has long been a topic of continual if
ineffective debate. Essentially, the problem has always been that closer
national ties have always had a political objectives but ones disguised as
economic matters. Initially these could be seen as the benign hope that closer
trade links would extinguish any possibility of the wars between European
states which had effectively blighted the first half of the twentieth century.
However, the changes in the name of this economic system, the Coal and Steel
Community (1950), the European Economic Community (1957), the European
Community (1993), and, finally, the European Union (2007) precisely mapped the
gradual, if still largely implicit, shift towards political unity as well as
the enlargement of the community which now includes 27 countries, quadrupling
its original size, all without much in the way of democratic agreement by the
electorate of the member countries.
The
gradual evolution of the EU into a blatantly political body made a step jump in
1993 with the Maastricht Treaty which set up the euro as a common currency and
established the so-called ‘three pillars of economics, foreign and military
cooperation and home and judicial affairs, all largely undefined in the usual way
of using generalised phrases which could later be turned into specific policy
actions without any democratic basis. Maastricht was remodelled and refined by
a series of further treaties (Amsterdam, 1997, Nice 2001, Lisbon 2007), all
complex and all pushed through with almost no popular democratic approval.
Nearly all attempts to put these treaties to popular vote have resulted in
debacle. In 1992, the Danes rejected Maastricht and the French very nearly did
so. In 2007, the only country to risk a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty,
Ireland, had it rejected and was forced
to run another vote in which every screw was put on the electorate to vote Yes
or, allegedly, risk oblivion. In fact real oblivion came in 2008 when the
financial crisis resulted in the European Commission, backed by the European
Central Bank and the IMF, stepping in to dictate economic policy in Greece,
Ireland and most of southern Europe, insisting that elected governments be
replaced by appointed technocratic leaders if they failed in their duty apply
the financial austerity necessary to save the European banking system,
something which actually happened in Greece and Italy.
It
is a an odd irony that the problem of the democratic legitimacy of the EU is
widely recognised even within the autocratic corridors of the European
Commission just as they are being filled with the appointed new Commissioners
who epitomise the problem. Even more ironic is that any move to alter the
current position would almost certainly require a treaty change, something
which is very unlikely to get past popular opinion in several EU members whose
populations are itching to slap down Brussels if not to actually leave. It
seems likely that the U.K., always the most eurosceptic member, will have some
form of referendum on membership in the next three years which could easily
result in the U.K.’s departure and precipitate further disorder. Meanwhile, the
imposed austerity programmes in southern Europe which have led to economic
stagnation continue to fester.
The
root causes of the decline in democratic participation throughout Europe are
hard to uncover. However it is striking that the moment in which decline really
begins is also that in which neoliberal individualism bit back against the
collectivism which had characterised Europe throughout the last century up the
1980s. As a recent book by Peter Weir puts it puts it when discussing the decline of the mass party:
A
tendency to dissipation and fragmentation also marks the
broader organisational environment within which the classic mass parties used
to nest. As workers’ parties, or as religious parties, the mass organisations
in Europe rarely stood on their own but constituted just the core element
within a wider and more complex organizational network of trade unions,
churches and so on. Beyond the socialist and religious parties, additional
networks ... combined with political organisations to create a generalized
pattern of social and political segmentation that helped root the parties in
the society and to stabilize and distinguish their electorates. Over the past
thirty years, however, these broader networks have been breaking up ... With
the increasing individualization of society, traditional collective identities
and organizational affiliations count for less, including those that once
formed part of party-centred networks.[viii]
It
is a depressing but undeniably plausible conjecture to link decline in the most
fundamental aspect of progressive advance in the twentieth century, mass
electoral democracy, with the resurgence of the most regressive, neo-liberal
markets. It does suggest that reversing the decline in electoral democracy will
need more than some simple turnaround in party policy. Speculation as to just
where this dual crisis of democratic legitimacy is going would double the size
of this essay and lead precisely no-where.
There are some dark forces gathering and it is almost inevitable that
several countries are going to face serious political challenges from
anti-immigration groups. There are some vibrant progressive forces which
emerged, notably Syriza in Greece, but they are internationally isolated and
have so-far failed to find a coherent strategic policy.
In
the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, there is currently a temporary
exhibition celebrating the shared cultural history of Greece and Italy. One
exhibit is a small relief of a “Mourning Athena”. The accompanying description
of this concludes by suggesting that “the contemplative expression of Athena
reflects the sceptical way in which we should view the current political
situation in Europe” When doubts about Europe’s political future appear
inscribed in archaeological analysis we
know that we are in trouble.
(First published in The Thinker, December, 2014)
[i] The Economist, 1 March 2014
[ii] London Review of Books, 22 May 2014, London
[iii] Patrick French,
India: a Portrait, Penguin, 2012, ISBN
0141041579
[vi] Most of the
quantitative measures in this section have been taken without further
attribution from Peter Weir,
Ruling the
Void, Verso, London, 2013 ISBN
1844673243
