Twenty-First Century Democracy 9780773566798

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: GLOBAL DEMOCRACY
1 Twenty-First Century Democracy, or Cleisthenes Revisited
2 Isonomía, Isegoría, Isomoiría, and Democracy at the Global Level
PART TWO: REALPOLITIK / NEO-CONSERVATISM
3 In the Shadow of Hobbes: The Challenge to Democratic Theory
4 Neo-conservatism and Beyond
PART THREE: PARTICIPATION / CIVIL SOCIETY
5 Can Direct Democracy Coexist with the Modern State?
6 Democratic Safety Valves: The Therapeutic Effects of Anti-Political Referendums
7 Whatever Happened to Civil Society?
PART FOUR: NATION, IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY
8 Democracy and Nationalism
9 Culture, Identity, and Globalization
10 In Search of the Lost Community: Charles Taylor and Modernity
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Twenty-First Century Democracy

It has been suggested that democracy has been only half achieved this century but should flower in the next. In preparation for new forms of democracy, well-known political theorist Philip Resnick addresses some of the fundamental questions surrounding the practice of democracy at the end of the twentieth century and the difficulties of governance in the twenty-first century, including issues of globalization, nationalism, and direct democracy. Topics in this collection of essays range from a utopian-style foray into possible structures for democratic governance at the global level to a Hobbesian analysis of the ongoing challenges that democratic theory faces; from a belief in the importance of social and economic equality to a recognition of the limits of solidarity in the real world of pluralistic and divided societies in which we live; from identification with the cosmopolitan and the international to a defence of the national and the local; from a predilection for direct democracy and the lost community of republican theory, past and present, to a recognition of the fairly circumscribed ways in which these can ultimately be expressed in our day. In spite of the challenges facing global democracy, Resnick looks to the future with renewed hope for the democratic project. PHILIP RESNICK is professor of political science, University of British Columbia.

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Twenty-First Century Democracy PHILIP RESNICK

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

C

McGill-Queen's University Press 1997 ISBN 0-7735-1658-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-7735-1&59-X (paper) Legal deposit third quarter 1997 Bibliotheque Rationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Canada Council's Block Grants program-

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Resnick, Philip 1944Twenty-first century democracy Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1658-1 (bound) ISBN o-7735-i659-x (pbk.) i. Democracy. 2 Twenty-first century, i. Title. 70423. R48 1997

32i.8'o9'o5

097-900376-8

Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction / 3 PART O N E : G L O B A L D E M O C R A C Y /

Twenty-First Century Democracy, or Cleisthenes Revisited / 13

2

Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy at the Global Level / 29 PART TWO: R E A L P O L I T I K / N E O - C O N S E R V A T I S M

3

In the Shadow of Hobbes: The Challenge to Democratic Theory / 47

4

Neo-conservatism and Beyond / 63 PART T H R E E : P A R T I C I P A T I O N / C I V I L S O C I E T Y

5

Can Direct Democracy Coexist with the Modern State? / 75

6

Democratic Safety Valves: The Therapeutic Effects of Anti-Political Referendums / 87

7

Whatever Happened to Civil Society? / 97

vi Contents PART FOUR: NATION, IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY

8

Democracy and Nationalism / 113

9

Culture, Identity, and Globalization / 123

10

In Search of the Lost Community: Charles Taylor and Modernity / 131 Bibliography / 147 Index / 165

Acknowledgments

Many of the articles in this volume were originally presented or published elsewhere. "Twenty-First Century Democracy, or Cleisthenes Revised" originated as a paper given at the Sixteenth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Berlin, 1994. "Isonomia, Isogoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy at the Global Level" was presented at the Fifteenth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Buenos Aires, 1991 and published in Praxis International 12, no. i (April 1992): 35-49. "Neoconservatism and Beyond" appeared in Andrew F. Johnson, Stephen McBride, and Patrick Smith, eds., Continuities and Discontinuities: The Political Economy of Social Welfare and Labour Market Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 25-35. "Can Direct Democracy Coexist with the Modern State?" was published in a slightly different version in Gerard Boismenu, Pierre Hamel, and Georges Labica, eds., Les formes modernes de la democratic (Montreal: Presses de 1'Universite de Montreal/Paris: I'Harmattan 1992), 245-61. "Democratic Safety Valves: The Therapeutic Effects of Anti-Political Referendums" was presented at the Vienna Dialogue on Democracy, July 1994 and later printed in the Political Science Memoranda Series of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, No. 16, 1994. "Whatever Happened to Civil Society?" was a paper given at the Canadian Political Science Association meetings at St Catharines, 1996. "Democracy and Nationalism" was prepared for the colloquium, "Identite et Modernite" at Laval University, Quebec, October 1993 and published in Mikhael Elbaz, Andree Fortin, and Guy Laforest,

viii Acknowledgments

eds., Les frontieres de I'identite (Sainte Foy: Les Presses de 1'Universite Laval 1996), 155-64. "Culture, Identity, and Globalization" was given at a conference sponsored by the Shastri Canada-India Foundation, New Delhi, January 1996. "In Search of the Lost Community: Charles Taylor and Modernity" was presented at the colloquium "L'lnterpretation de Fldentite Moderne: Autour de Charles Taylor" at Cerisy, France, in 1995. "In the Shadow of Hobbes: The Challenge to Democratic Theory" was specially written for this volume. My thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant between 1992 and 1995 which allowed me to pursue a good deal of the research and travel related to this collection; to the University of British Columbia for a sabbatical year, 1994-5; to numerous friends and colleagues, both in Canada and abroad, for helpful comments, suggestions, and feedback; to the two readers for McGill-Queen's University Press and to my copy-editor, Diane Mew; and to my family for putting up with the disruptions and inconveniences associated with the writing of this manuscript.

P.R. Vancouver

Twenty-First Century Democracy

This is the tree, the tree of the people, of all the peoples struggling for freedom - Pablo Neruda, Canto General

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Introduction

The overall premise of this book is that we need to prepare ourselves for new forms of democracy in the twenty-first century: at the spatial level, as we expand our horizons beyond the nation-state; at the normative level, as we recognize that the attainment of global democracy cannot be divorced from a concern with a measure of economic equality and social justice on the one hand, and with the political and cultural diversity of the peoples of the earth on the other; and finally, at the institutional level, as we seek to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable - state interests, class interests, religious identities, national identities, economic interests, ecological imperatives, and so on - in an era of globalization. I am too much of a realist to expect any easy transition to this final stage of global democracy or any overnight flowering of solidarities. Politicians and journalists may have celebrated democracy's triumph at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it may even have become a matter of faith for some in the West that before long all the inhabitants of the planet would live under some form of democratic regime (Fukuyama, 1992). There is room to debate whether such is, in fact, the case - whether, economically, for example, or institutionally, much of Africa will be able to make the transition to some form of functioning democracy; whether the Arab world is culturally equipped for such a transformation; whether East Asia with its Confucian past and top-down traditions is open to the messy and disruptive character of democracy, at least in its liberal democratic variant. There is room to debate whether democracy is itself the best

4 Introduction form of governance. Who can deny the fickleness of the demos, its vulnerability to the plea of powerful orators and demagogues, its pursuit of short-term rather than long-term interest, its support for imperial domination over weaker subordinates - all traits that Thucydides had mapped out in the fifth century BC in his History of the Peloponnesian War? How is it that for millennia democracy has had a bad press with political philosophers, from Plato to Augustine to Hobbes to Montesquieu to Nietzsche? Did they see deeper than we do? Did they better understand the vagaries and limitations of the human condition? Or did they simply have less reason to venerate what had not yet become a prevailing orthodoxy in the way that democracy defined as a form of rule by the people - in our age has become? How unified are those who make up the demos? How strong are the ties of solidarity across class, religion, language, and gender lines? How much attention are ordinary citizens prepared to give to public affairs, to the well-being of the res publica, in a period when private pursuits and economic achievement seem to dominate? These are difficult issues that any honest student of democracy needs to take seriously. And they become more taxing when we make the leap, as some are beginning to do, to issues of democracy beyond the level of the nation-state. What follows is a set of essays which have been written since the early 19903. They range from utopian-type forays into sketching possible structures for democratic governance at the global level to more sober analysis of the ongoing challenges that democratic theory faces; from a belief in the importance of a measure of social and economic equality to a recognition of the limits to solidarity in the real world of pluralistic and divided societies in which we live; from identification with the cosmopolitan and the international to a defence of the national and the local; from a predilection for direct democracy and the lost community of republican theory, past and present, to a recognition of the fairly circumscribed ways in which these can ultimately be expressed in our day. To ease the reader's task, the essays have been divided into four major clusters or groupings. In the first section, "Global Democracy," I recognize some hopeful signs in the political developments of recent years. Liberal democratic principles - freedom of speech and debate, multi-party and multiracial systems, reasonably free elections - have become common currency in areas of the world where they were unknown through most of the post-Second World War period. There has been increasing concern about issues such as environmental depletion and basic human rights, and a growing sense that we are inhabitants of a single planet. Moves towards economic

5 Introduction

integration across continents - for example, the European Union, NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN - growing internationalization of culture, research and development, and telecommunications, coincide with emerging values that seem to span the far-flung regions of the globe. Such developments make it possible for us to begin, in chapter i, to think about democracy for the first time beyond the rubric of the nation-state. A political construct whose origins go back to the small city-states of ancient Greece could not, without significant modifications, have taken hold in the nation-state structures of the modern world. The representative principle came to replace the face-to-face democracy of the Athenian polls; a separation of powers, organized political parties, and in some cases, federal arrangements became part and parcel of the practice of various liberal democracies; and a more universalistic conception of democracy came to prevail in place of the numerous restrictions on citizenship which had characterized the Greek model. We need to start addressing questions of governance at the global level. Democracy which began in Athens and two millennia later found expression in the nation-state may be about to undergo another transformation. We are only at the start of the process, all the more with dozens of countries enjoying their first real experience with democratic institutions today. And we should have no illusions about any simple leap from the nation-state level of identity to the international. Still, there may be encouraging lessons to be drawn from the experience of supranational entities such as the European Union. A European consciousness, toutes proportions gardees, has been growing side by side with the continued existence of its member states; economic integration, political regulation, and cultural exchanges have been growing apace; there has been the slow emergence of a Europeanwide democratic space. The European Parliament in Strasbourg, even with its limited powers, is one part of the equation; the Council of Ministers representing the member states directly another; the European Court of Justice yet a third. No one today can foresee just where the process of European integration, particularly once Central and Eastern Europe have been drawn in, will lead. But anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of intra-European rivalries which, twice in this century, triggered off world war cannot but be amazed where Europe finds itself at the end of the Short Twentieth Century.* *

This term refers to the period 1914-91 and originates with Ivan Berend, formerly president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In turn, Eric Hobsbawm has used it to frame his impressive recent study of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes.

6 Introduction

In much the same way, we must begin to prepare ourselves for more global forms of democracy in the coming century. Even as I write, this seems like a highly Utopian aspiration with countries such as China, Burma, Indonesia, Algeria, and Nigeria under authoritarian rule. But who, a few decades ago, would have anticipated the wave of democratization that has recently swept the world? And who, conscious of the limits to state sovereignty in what is more and more a world economy, can dismiss talk about global governance as entirely far-fetched? (Commission on Global Governance, 1995; Held, 1995; Falk, 1995). We are, of course, far from achieving any kind of level playing field, economically or politically speaking, at the international level. The contemporary equivalent of the serf/lord or worker/capitalist divide of an earlier era lies as much in the overall relationship between the countries of the South (the ex-third world) and those of the developed North as within our different societies. The share of world income going to the richest 20 per cent of the global population, overwhelmingly in the North, rose from 70 per cent to 85 per cent between 1960 and 1991; that going to the poorest 20 per cent, overwhelmingly in the South, declined from 2.3 per cent to 1.4 per cent (United Nations, 1994: 35). True, there have been some striking success stories in terms of economic development over recent decades; one has only to think of the four East Asian dragons, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. And the importance of middle classes in countries as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, and India is growing. But the gap between the North as a whole and the South as a whole remains overwhelming, and as such is an immense challenge to any would-be global democratic theory. The second section of the book, under the title of "Realpolitik/Neoconservatism," discusses perhaps the most serious challenge to any global democratic theory. I am referring to writers and political leaders who from ancient times to today regard political order rather than liberty or equality as dominant values, who use the power of the state in a far more instrumental and unsentimental fashion than many of the adherents of democratic theory, past and present, have been prone to do. Chapter 3 focuses on some of these arguments. There is at least as much reason for pessimism as optimism, when one weighs the strongly atomistic character of so much of contemporary life, and the deep cleavages within (and between) societies. Despite the adoption of democratic-type institutions in so many parts of the world at the end of the twentieth century, there is room to wonder whether democratic commitments may not be paper-thin. And there is cause to question just how important solidarity is to the

7 Introduction

human species. This is the Hobbesian challenge to democracy that we need to bear in mind. For the greatest mistake global democracy's dreamers could commit would be to adopt too angelic a view of human nature or of the real life workings of political institutions, including democratic ones. The shifting fortunes of right and left over recent decades should highlight something else: the need to avoid any simple-minded determinism in thinking about democratic institutions, past, present, or future. Claude Lefort argues that democracy is the historical society par excellence that accepts and maintains a degree of indeterminacy, and this in contrast to totalitarian-type regimes (Lefort, 1986: 25). Albert Hirschman has sketched the shifting involvements that characterize western societies, for example, between periods of greater and lesser public and private preoccupations (Hirschman, 1982). Within the western world, the post-Second World War consensus associated with Keynesianism and with the welfare state has fallen apart. Beginning with the fiscal crisis of the 19705, there has been a neo-conservative turn to politics and public policy, as I discuss in chapter 4. The result has been a fraying of the social safety net and the new mantra of global competition that weakens the basis for social and economic democracy at the national level. Any left-of-centre political thought that wishes to regain the moral and political high ground from the right over the coming decades has its work cut out for it. The case for a more egalitarian version of democracy will need to be painstakingly made against its more market-driven adherents. The section on "Participation/Civil Society" makes clear that my normative bias, perhaps a reflection of my tropism for the Greeks, perhaps because of a soft spot for Rousseau, has long lain in the direction of more participatory or direct forms of democracy. This is not an easy stance to defend in an age when representative institutions are dominant, and when the complexity of issues that bedevil democratic states - demographic, ecological, ethical, fiscal, technological - seem beyond the purview of even the most well-informed of elected officials. Still, democracy in its etymological sense refers to rule by the people. It follows that the spirit of direct democracy remains as something of a repressed memory - the unhappy consciousness, to use a Hegelian term - of the representative model that dominates today. This may help explain the wave of anti-political referendums, such as Maastricht and Charlottetown, that has recently swept western countries. The discussion in chapter 6 is meant to highlight the importance of such developments and the therapeutic role that referendums can play. For they are a reaction to political systems dominated by long-established political parties, and to the

8 Introduction

desire on the part of the electorate to have a direct input on key policy matters of the day. I do not believe that referendums by themselves represent some kind of return to the direct democracy of an earlier period. Nor am I a proponent of what is sometimes referred to as the California model: that is, referendums on matters of greater or lesser importance where money often plays a determining role. Nonetheless, it makes excellent democratic sense for the people to have the final say on major political matters touching on state sovereignty, constitutional arrangements, and the like. And it is also important from time to time to dilute the strait-jacket of party democracy by allowing citizens to vote along non-party lines. A significant current in recent theorizing about democracy has had to do with the term "civil society." The revival of a term with a long and honourable place in western thought had much to do with the dissident movements in Eastern Europe in the pre-1989 period. Yet, as I argue in chapter 7, we need to distinguish between civil society as an oppositional term in the context of authoritarian societies, and as a metaphor for the supposed unity of purpose of the myriad of non-governmental institutions and activities that characterize functioning democratic societies. It is striking that the popularity of the term has scarcely survived the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe, which gave it a new lease on life. We must, therefore, avoid the somewhat ritualistic invocation of civil society that has been the wont of a number of western political scientists and commentators (see, for example, Keane, i988b; Cohen and Arato, 1992). Nor should we see civil society as a substitute for the need to develop more appropriate mechanisms for democratic control in economic no less than political matters. Among the most important forces of our day are those linked to nationalism and cultural identity. Some might even argue that the greatest single obstacle to the type of global democracy sketched in chapter i lies in the cultural, religious, and ethnic cleavages of humankind. The final section, "Nation, Identity, and Community," seeks to address such concerns. Nationalism, which is discussed in chapter 8, has had a chequered relationship to democracy over the past couple of centuries. In its civic form, it originated with the same eighteenth-century revolutionary impulse that made the concept of popular sovereignty well-nigh irresistible; but it has also helped set the stage for anti-democratic forms of politics. This ambiguity does not mean that democracy and nationalism are necessarily antagonistic to one another. But it suggests the need for a good deal of care in charting their relation-

9 Introduction

ship. And it underlines the importance of acknowledging the possibility of multiple identities, from the sub-national to the national to the supranational, in our reflections upon global democracy. As I try to show in chapter 9, any version of globalization that seeks cavalierly to override the specificity of national cultures and identities is doomed to failure. The same current leading to an extension of economic ties and communications networks across borders is also reinforcing local identifications in many parts of the world. This may mean a strengthening of sub-state identities in federal or multinational-type states; it may mean a turn to religious fundamentalism in other instances; and it may entail various forms of identity politics based upon race, ethnicity, language, and the like. All this places limits on how far the process of integration into a single, market-driven global community can go. A respect for cultural diversity is the prerequisite of any global order. The book concludes with an exploration of the notion of political community, a concept whose origins, like those of democracy itself, go back to the ancients. The focus of my discussion in chapter 10 is Charles Taylor, one of the more important contemporary political philosophers, who in his writing over the past three decades has explored the complicated relationship between community and modernity. He has also shown himself to be remarkably sensitive to the challenges which nationalism and multiculturalism pose for democratic governance. At one level Taylor's philosophy seeks to revive something of that spirit of participation and republican virtue that has marked democratic discourse in the past; at another it points to a twenty-first century world where cultural diversity is very much the norm. This collection of essays, therefore, touches on a broad variety of themes connected to democratic theory. Like the seasons of the mind, the chapters reflect a sometimes optimistic, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes simply sceptical approach to the subject at hand. I prefer to end this introduction on a modestly optimistic note. Despite habits of the past which weigh us down and the antinomies of the world in which we live, we must look beyond this end of millennium with its widespread apocalyptical foreboding. And when we do so, it must be to renew the hope that has accompanied the democratic project through its many metamorphoses - namely the wish to give ordinary citizens a measure of control over their collective lives. To extend this promise to the planetary level, to incorporate into it an element of social justice and of cultural diversity, to devise political institutions that might actually work - these are among the great political challenges of the Long Twenty-First Century that has already begun.

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PART ONE

Global Democracy

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i Twenty-First Century Democracy, or Cleisthenes Revisited We must not underrate [hu]man capacity in similar circumstances to develop strikingly similar - but basically unrelated - institutions and ideals. Hansen, 1992: 27

We live in the age of globalization. Few terms have been more frequently invoked in recent years by journalists, politicians, and writers from across the political spectrum; few observers could deny that we live in a world where financial and economic links transcend national boundaries, as does communications technology and a good deal of popular culture as well. "What is new is not that international trade is an important component of the economy, but that the national economy now works as a unit at the world level in real time" (Castels, 1993: 19). While the nation-state (or more correctly the politically sovereign state) is still a key unit of the political order of the late twentieth century, in important respects it finds itself under attack. From within, by those who look to local or regional or sub-state authorities as the focus of their activities, or to political or social movements within civil society in contradistinction to the state; from without, by supranational forces such as transnational corporations, continental/hemispheric trade agreements, and much besides. Leaders of nation-states are losing much of the control over their own territory they once had. More and more they must conform to the demands of the outside world because the outsiders are already inside the gates. Business enterprises that routinely operate across borders are linking farflung pieces of territory into a new world economy ... National leaders no longer have the ability to comprehend, much less control, these giants. (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994: 19)

14 Global Democracy

In one respect, it seems that the marxian prophecy in the Communist Manifesto regarding the dynamism of capitalism and its revolutionary

character at the world level is now coming to fruition 150 years later.

The bourgeoisie has through the exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country ... All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed ... In place of the old local and national seclusion and selfsufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. (Marx and Engels, 1968: 38-9)

The collapse of Marxism-Leninism as a rival paradigm has given capitalism and markets a whole new lease on life, not only in the developed world of the North, but also in most of what used to be called the second and third worlds. The language of global competitiveness and trade liberalization, of privatization and flexible specialization has displaced that of the command economy of yore and even that of the Keynesian welfare state in many quarters. The triumph of capitalist society seems unassailable, leading its denizens to celebrate history's end (Fukuyama, 1992). One need but have one's eyes open to realize, however, that we do not live in the best of all global worlds. The outburst of ethnic conflict that has accompanied the break-up of one-time communist states such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union is one sobering reminder, along with the civil wars and tribal bloodshed that have wracked various parts of Africa. Robert Kaplan writes: "Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world; the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war" (Kaplan, 1994: 48). As parts of the erstwhile third world - the newly industrialized countries - become better integrated into the global economy, others languish in "a huge Fourth World of need, hunger and, above all, hopelessness" (Cardoso, 1993:159)- Urban slums, environmental disasters, waves of stateless refugees, are but part of the backdrop to an end of millennium which is three parts apocalypse to one part celebration. As for democracy, we are increasingly aware of limits to its supposed triumph, even as we tote up the Scoreboard of ostensibly democratic states. True, there has been a transition to democracy, defined as some version of non-authoritarian rule with at least a modicum of pluralism, two or more competing political parties, free elections, and the like, in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the ex-

15 Twenty-First Century Democracy

Soviet Union, and in parts of Africa and East Asia as well. It would be niggardly to deny these changes, despite a certain slipping back in some countries such as Nigeria, to name but one. Yet it is hard to join the chorus of democratization's academic boosters - Huntington, Di Palma, and Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, for example - when so much remains unresolved. Even before the January 1994 revolt in Chiapas, for example, could one really assume that Mexico, with its PRI in power ever since the 19205, had a functioning democratic system? As Andrew Reding notes, "Though in other countries rates of electoral participation rise with education and income, in Mexico the official statistics show the reverse ... The real face of authority in rural Mexico [is] that of PRI caciques (chieftains) elected through fraud ... and maintained in office through a mix of patronage and police and military repression" (Reding, 1994: 17). And what goes for Mexico goes for no small number of other countries in the South, both rich and poor. At a more general level, as Norberto Bobbio observed back in 1989: Do people really think that the end of historical communism has put an end to poverty and the thirst for justice? In our world the two-thirds society rules and prospers without having anything to fear from the third of poor devils. But it would be good to bear in mind that in the rest of the world, the twothirds (or four-fifths or nine-tenths) society is on the other side. (Bobbio, 1991: 5)

Or as Paul Cammack notes with respect to Latin America (but the same would hold good for much of Africa and Asia as well): Until conditions for the exercise of effective political citizenship exist, there is little chance that currently existing institutions will survive and as little justification for regarding them as democratic. Far from it being the case that social and economic advancement can be considered separable from and additional to the conditions of political democracy, the realization of citizenship which is essential if political democracy is to be a reality itself requires substantial social and economic reform. (Cammack, 1994: 189)

The question of social and economic equality, both within countries and internationally, has not simply vanished from the global agenda; rather, it is at the heart of what we could call the democratic deficit of the South. Even in the North, in the OECD world where liberal democracy has been largely consolidated since 1945 (and, in many cases, long before) there has been increasing talk about a democratic deficit. Some of

16 Global Democracy this, of course, has been linked to the economic downturn of the early 19905, with over thirty-five million unemployed within the OECD countries and double-digit unemployment rates the pattern in countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada (OECD, 1993: 6-7); to job displacement wreaked by new technologies and by the new international division of labour; to a more general sense of forces beyond the nation-state shrinking the importance of national governments; and to an increasing disenchantment with governing elites in societies as diverse as Italy, Japan, France, arid Canada. Some of this disillusionment found expression in high rates of negative voting in referendums, for example over the Maastricht Treaty in Denmark and France, over the nature of the Italian political system, over the Charlottetown constitutional accord in Canada (see chapter 6). Some of it surfaces in disillusionment with old-style party politics and, to some degree, with the party system more generally. And some of it takes the form of what Charles Taylor has called "the malaise of modernity" (Taylor, 1991), linked in part to the waning of any widely shared sense of community. Yet paradoxically, such discontent can also be linked to the fragmentation of political life which some associate with new social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, or with the post-modern condition more generally: "Radical democratic 'postmodern' politics is open, precarious and incomplete. There is no place for privileged agents of political struggle, or subjects with privileged access to 'the truth'" (Smart, 1992: 220). All this would not seem to constitute a promising backdrop for addressing issues of democracy at the global level. For here we are faced with what appear to be information overload and nation-state breakdown; with continuing problems of inequality, and of ethnic and religious conflict; with the questioning of the very nature of democratic politics - of representation, of identity, of citizenship, and of voice.1 Yet I am about to suggest the need to stretch our minds even more than has been our recent wont, as we begin to think about the question of democratic governance at a level far beyond the nation-state. Democracy in its original form was a product of the city-state, the polis with its face-to-face community. There may have been republican antecedents in Sumeria or Mesopotamia (Springborg, 1992); yet it is to the Greeks that we in the West turn first when we think about democratic models. And it is to the Greeks that even non-western societies are increasingly prone to turn:

17 Twenty-First Century Democracy On a recent visit to China, I found that the Beijing Academy of Sciences has instituted a major research project devoted to Athenian democracy. The project has been undertaken in the belief that ancient democracy was far closer to the traditional values of Chinese village life than to anything found in the Western world, because the basis of both lay in combining society with a sense of community; the faults of modern Chinese society, which were freely admitted, could only be corrected by studying ancient Athens. (Murray, 1994: 4)

Among the more telling features of Athenian democracy were the equality-based concepts of isonomia (equal political rights) and isegoria (equal right to address the assembly) (see Hansen, 1991: 81-5); the use of the lot for membership from the tribes in the council and most other state offices; monthly rotation among the ten tribes in the actual running of the council; and the right of every citizen to take part in meetings of the assembly.2 That Athenian democracy was deficient in crucial respects - the institution of slavery, the exclusion of women and of foreigners from citizenship - goes without saying; that it was limited to a territorially small area (some three thousand square kilometres) is a further strike against it; that the actual degree of participation, especially by the fourth century BC, was a good deal less than the lofty ideals that Pericles might have proclaimed yet another. Still, the practice of Athenian democracy through the almost two centuries separating the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508-7 BC and the fall of Athens to Macedonia in 322 BC bedazzles modern students of democracy, even as the artistic, philosophical, and scientific achievements of the Athenian (and Greek) world live on. However, it is necessary to remember that democracy as a political form was to go into a long sleep with the eclipse of the Athenian model. The Roman republic may have had democratic features in the institution of the tribunes and the activities of the plebs. It was, however, an aristocratically-dominated republic in a way that Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC was not. As for the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, medieval Europe, or the early modern period, suffice it to say that democracy was no longer a living force. It may have remained as an abstract form of government to which writers as diverse as Aquinas, Bodin, Hobbes, and Spinoza made allusion. But it enjoyed a bad press down to the latter part of the eighteenth century, save for religious millenarians or radical pamphleteers such as the seventeenth-century Levellers, confined by and large to the fringes of society. The revival of democracy had something to do with the writings

i8 Global Democracy

of Rousseau and Paine; but it had a lot more to do with the experience, first of the American, then of the French revolutions, and with the evolution of the British system of government in a more liberal democratic direction in the nineteenth century. There is no need for a long discussion of these developments, which are amply traced elsewhere.3 It is fair to say, however, that democracy, when it came to be revived, did so in an indirect or representative form, rather than in the version of direct democracy associated with the Greeks. It was closely tied to political liberalism and to a modern notion of individuality and rights, and came to be associated with the key political unit par excellence of the modern age, the nation-state. It is this last point that merits particular emphasis. Part of the criticism of democracy by such eminent liberal theorists as Locke and Madison was the claim that classical, Athenian democracy was inappropriate to the conditions of large-scale modern societies. It was the success, first of the Americans, then of the British, French, and others in showing that representative democracy could indeed flourish under modern conditions that helped give democracy a whole new lease on life. It is fair to say, therefore, that the theorization of democracy over the past two centuries has been associated with thinking about it at the level of the nation-state. True, there is a whole range of opinion as to what democracy is or is not. How elitist or participatory should it be? How important to its well-being are the roles of associations or an autonomous civil society? What is the place of class, gender, ethnicity, and much else in its operation? Similarly, there is an impressive literature in comparative politics, political economy, and related fields on the functioning of democracy in various western countries, and on the recent extension of democratic practices to various countries of the East and South. Here again, there is a diversity of positions, with some seeing liberal democracy western-style as the model for other societies, and others more sceptical in their approach.4 What has been sorely lacking, however, has been a willingness on the part of political scientists and philosophers to pay more serious attention to issues of democratic governance beyond the nation-state. The closest some have come in recent years is in addressing institutions of regional/continental integration such as the European Community, and some of the possible lessons that it holds. [A] pan-European movement, a loose form of "Pan" nationalism, has been attempting to guide the desire for greater economic cooperation and union in the direction of a broad "political community." ... Though individual

19 Twenty-First Century Democracy national cultures remain distinctive and vibrant, there are also broader European cultural patterns which transcend national cultural boundaries ... Democratic ideals and parliamentary institutions; civil rights and legal codes; Judeo-Christian traditions of ethics; the values of scientific enquiry; artistic traditions; humanism and individualism ... Some of these components have been institutionalized; others remain at the level of belief and values. (Smith, 1990: 187)

There has been a willingness, despite the significant reservations that the 1992 referendums on Maastricht brought to the surface, to accept some deepening of the European Union through the Single European Act, although primary political responsibility remains at the local and national level (the so-called principle of subsidiarity). The presidency of the Council of Ministers rotates among the different member states every six months, recalling, to those familiar with the Athenian model, the principle of monthly rotation among the ten tribes in exercising power in the Boule or Council. There is some openness in European public opinion to the idea of direct taxation at the European level, as long as it does not increase the overall tax burden.5 And there are persistent pressures to give the directly elected European Parliament greater weight in EU affairs visa-vis the Commission and Council, as one way of overcoming the democratic deficit at the European level. But these efforts have borne little fruit until now, and may well remain stillborn, unless the concept of a common European citizenship takes stronger hold. If we were to rank democratically elected assemblies by their power, there can be little doubt that the European Parliament would come near the bottom of the list... Since democracy and citizenship are bound together, the development of democratic government at the level of a supra-national European Community is hardly likely without the development of a system of European citizenship. (Parry and Moran, 1994: 270, 272)

If Europe, almost forty years after the Treaty of Rome, falls considerably short of offering a fully functioning model of a transnational democratic community, what, by comparison, can be said about the United Nations and its affiliated agencies other than that these essentially constitute a club of nation-states? Or about regional groupings such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Arab League, or the Organization for African Unity? One looks in vain for where the ordinary people fit into these.

2o Global Democracy Only when we turn to non-governmental organizations (NCOS) and movements do we see evidence of people trying to act internationally. The student movements of the 19605 were one example of crossnational interaction, albeit still bound by national frontiers. The international women's movement was more successful in getting gender issues put onto the agenda of international agencies such as the UN Development Program or the World Bank or at international conferences like that in Beijing in 1995. Amnesty International has enjoyed some success in raising human rights issues to a higher level internationally in recent years. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace have also done much to further environmental consciousness internationally. Some w ould see in these developments the emergence of a form of global civil society, encouraging in turn a human rights and democratic orientation towards global citizenship and towards a OneWorld Community (Falk, 1992). Others speak of a multiplicity of interpenetrating entities with overlapping boundaries, and of the bonding of thousands of virtual communities that span the globe irrespective of geographical divisions (Brecher, 1993: 3-16; Stefanik, 1993: 260). Yet before we sign on to any putative version of globalization from below, an element of scepticism seems to be in order. Where is the evidence of even a fledgling sense of global citizenship in a world wracked by profound political, economic, and cultural divisions? Compared to the power of transnational corporations or of existing (nation)-states, how much weight do NCOS really have? Is there any avoiding the issue of institutional structures - what the city-state and the nation-state, after all, were all about - as we address the issue of democratic governance at the global level? The need is clear enough. William Connolly writes: If democracy is not to become a political ghetto confined to the territorial state, the contemporary globalization of capital, labor, and contingency must be shadowed by a corollary globalization of politics ... The restriction of democratic idealism to territorial democracy helps to perpetuate results democratic idealists oppose ... Territorial democracy exudes its own aura of unreality in late-modern times. (Connolly, 1991: 215, 217, 219)

Michael Carnoy and his co-authors note: "Politics must be globalized and extended to include the have-nots and the illiterates - those without the new resources required to participate in the information revolution - and this will not occur unless politics North and South become 'inclusive' at the national and international level" (Carnoy et al., 1993: 12). And David Held speaks of the impetus to move from

21 Twenty-First Century Democracy the city-state level to a cosmopolitan order, characterized by multiple and overlapping networks of power (Held, 1993: 43). But what concretely might such a transformation entail? Let me be heretical and propose that we go back to the beginning - the Greek beginning - even as we set out to think about forms of democratic governance at the international level. We celebrate Pericles and Demosthenes as precursors of democracy without too much inhibition. The Chinese, as was noted above, have decided they have much to learn from the Greeks. So why not us? But it is not to the Greeks in general that I want to return so much as to Cleisthenes, the reformer who in the aftermath of the tyranny of the Peisistratidai made Athens a democracy in the years 508-7 BC. What we know about Cleisthenes comes from two principal sources, the fifth century BC historian Herodotus and the fourth century BC Constitution of Athens, attributed to the school of Aristotle. My focus here will be on Cleisthenes's territorial reorganization of Athens, but it is to him that Athens also owed its reformed council and assembly. Herodotus tells us that "Cleisthenes gained for his own faction the common people in Athens ... He distributed the Athenians into ten tribes instead of four ... and distributed the demes among the ten tribes." The Athenian Constitution notes: Cleisthenes divided the country into thirty parts - ten from the areas about the city, ten from the coastal district, and ten from the interior - each composed of one or more demes. These parts he called trittyes, and he assigned three trittyes by lot to each tribe in such a way that each tribe should have a share in all three regions (section 21). The purpose of this reorganization seems to have been threefold: to break the old aristocratic order of the phratries; to divide the whole of Attica (Athens) into small parishes or demes (some 139 in all), with their own assemblies, magistrates, administration and citizen registers; and to overcome the territorial rivalries within Attica - between the city, the interior, and the coast - by ensuring that each of the newly created tribes would contain a non-contiguous series of demes from all three regions. Gustave Glotz, the French classicist on whom I rely for much of my information, further notes that the decimal reorganization of the tribes was applied to the whole political and administrative organization of society. The Boule (or council) was composed of five hundred members, fifty from each tribe, chosen from the demes in rough proportion to their population. Each tribe in its turn constituted the permanent committee of the council for a tenth of the year (Glotz, 1929: 123).

22 Global Democracy For his part, the English classicist C. Hignett notes: In the allocation of the denies to tribes Cleisthenes endeavoured to make the new tribes equal not in area but in population ... The other characteristic features of the Cleisthenic tribe may have been intended to transcend local barriers by bringing together men from urban, coastal, and rural districts and to develop a sentiment of union and fellowship between its members ... Thus, the peculiar composition of the new tribes was the instrument devised by Cleisthenes to preserve and strengthen the unity [of] Attica and to preclude for the future any growth of regional interests to the detriment of the whole. (Hignett, 1952: 137, 141)

Cleisthenes was thus attempting to forge the basis for a whole new political system in Athens, one which, in the view of most modern historians, would make Athens safe for democracy. His reforms were, in fact, to endure for the two centuries that Athenian democracy survived. What possible lessons do Cleisthenes and his reforms hold for us as we gaze ahead to the twenty-first century? We know how much more difficult it will prove - Internet or no Internet - to forge bonds of solidarity across oceans and continents in any cosmopolis of the future when compared to the problems that Cleisthenes had to face within the relatively small territory of Attica. We will need to overcome the divide between North and South, perhaps the most serious one which faces the planet. "The 'new humanism/ the 'global village/ and 'spaceship earth' - all these finesounding phrases become cynical slogans when they do not include poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, in short, the problems of the old Third World, as matters to be discussed and faced at the global level" (Cardoso, 1993: 158). We will need to overcome the deep fault lines of religion, especially fundamentalist religion, if we are to forge some kind of global ethic. "By a global ethic we do not mean a global ideology or a single unified religion beyond all existing religions, and certainly not the domination of one religion over all others. By a global ethic we mean a fundamental consensus on binding values, irrevocable standards, and personal attitudes."6 We will need to overcome old territorial ways of thinking about the environment. "The age of the finite planet has arrived ... The environment of each and everyone of us is no longer a virgin space to be dominated. There can be no durable development for the biosphere without solidarity among all human beings ... Writing as a European, I see these as among the foremost challenges of the 2ist century" (Lipietz, 1992: 146-7).

23 Twenty-First Century Democracy

What if, using Cleisthenes's territorial division of Attica as a point of departure, we begin to think of the possible structures of a global democracy - a democracy in which the people of the world, not just their governments, were represented in planetary-level institutions that acted in their name? Such a global-level democracy would work best if it complemented functioning democratic systems of one form or another in all its member states, much as the European Community complements democratic arrangements among its members. A global democracy would further have to confine itself to those issues which best lent themselves to resolution at a global level, while leaving other issues to regional bodies such as the European Union, to nation-states, and to sub-state units. Emulating Cleisthenes, we might want to divide the world into something like ten global divisions. Each of these would contain a mixture of countries drawn from the OECD North, the intermediate states of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia with GNPS per capita of perhaps $2,000 to $10,000 in present-day figures, and the poorest states with GNPS per capita of under $2,000. There could be no perfect equality of population amongst these, if we stick to states, as I think we would have to, as the basic units of our system (equivalent to demes in the Athenian polis). The global divisions that included China or India would automatically have more than 10 per cent of the world's population. Conversely, divisions containing the wealthiest countries such as the United States, Japan, or Germany might end up with a significantly higher aggregate GNP per capita than others. A lottery system might be the best way to make any initial allocation of the membership among these global divisions. The purpose behind them would be to break the mould of geographical, economic, and national identification by establishing units with representation from the different groups of countries that make up the world. And the hope would be that, with time, some bonds of solidarity would be forged among the peoples making up the different global divisions. It would still be the case, to be sure, that the primary unit of identification would remain the nation-state; but for purposes of international governance, the global divisions to which that state was attached would become significant. Any world parliament should be made up of roughly equal representation from each of the global divisions. For example, we could envisage a world parliament with five hundred members, with fifty from each of the ten divisions. Within each of the divisions, significant weight would be attached to population. However, since it is countries and not only people that are being represented, it is

24 Global Democracy

essential that the most populous states do not totally overwhelm the others. It might be a good idea, for example, to limit any state, whatever its population, to no more than 40 per cent of the total representation from within its global division. Countries such as China, India, the United States, and Brazil would still do substantially better under such an arrangement than they do in the General Assembly of the United Nations, based upon one country, one vote. But a world parliament would not be entirely dominated by a few states, and the smaller countries making up a global division would also be ensured some representation at the world level. Perhaps the very smallest would have to pool their populations to achieve representation; countries with a minimum, say of five million, would be ensured at least one representative. As in Athens and in the European Union today, we might envisage a rotating global executive. Each global division would exercise executive power for a fixed period, perhaps six months, after which it would pass on to another. Ministers, during their division's term in office, would be drawn from the ranks of its fifty parliamentarians, and be broadly representative of the mix of countries within that division. The executive would be able to take administrative decisions on its own. Any substantial policy decisions, however, would need the approval of the full parliament with its five hundred members. There would need to be some kind of constitutional document - perhaps a Single Global Act! - setting out the exact powers of the global authority. And we would certainly need a strengthened world court, with the authority to adjudicate any conflicts regarding the provisions and powers of such an authority. Different states would be free to experiment with whatever form of franchise they preferred for representation at the global level. Where more than one representative was to be chosen, some might opt for a constituency system, others for one based on proportional representation and still others for one making use of gender quotas. The one stipulation that the global authority would impose is that free and open elections be conducted. As I have already suggested, the jurisdiction of any global authority would need to be carefully circumscribed from the start. Areas of potential jurisdiction might include peace and security, global environmental standards, provisions of developmental aid for infrastructure, education, and health services in the poorest countries, and possibly some international regulation of labour standards and of capital. A far-ranging debate on just what areas might be included would have to take place.

25 Twenty-First Century Democracy

Any global authority would need to have financial resources at its command. Ideally, it would have some taxation powers of its own. Martin Walker, for example, has suggested: The world has now spawned a huge global economy, a resource that is effectively untaxed. Why not bring the two together? The more than $900 billion traded on the world's currency exchanges every day is recorded ... A barely noticeable electronic deduction of o.ooi percent of each transaction would be nearly enough to pay the UN peacekeeping bill... Triple the tax to a still minuscule 0.003 percent of each transaction, and the resulting $8.4 billion would finance UN peacekeeping and almost all the [UN'S] other operations. The tax would be applied ... upon the velocity of the global market itself. (Walker, 1993: 8-9)

The Human Development Report for 1992, for its part, argued the case for a system of progressive income tax "to be collected automatically from the rich nations, and to be distributed to the poor nations according to their income and developmental needs" (UN Development Program, 1992:79). Again, there is the stuff here for much debate, since finance is an issue which any global authority would certainly have to face. The same would be true of military/peacekeeping forces. Nonetheless, I may be getting ahead of myself. Whatever structures I, or any one else, may summon up at the international level, a nagging question remains. Are such structures likely to take? There is no precedent for global citizenship to underwrite the type of institutions I have just sketched. Nor is there a natural affinity between the inhabitants, say, of Canada, Brazil, Zaire, and Sri Lanka who might be members of the same global division? Attica at the time of Cleisthenes did at least constitute a single geographical space. Can the same be said for our planet, even as we look ahead to the twenty-first century? There have been examples, in recent years, of solidarity that transcends geographical and economic divides. One thinks of rock concerts for famine relief in Africa; of multilateral organizations such as the Commonwealth or lafmncophonie, with members drawn from different groupings of countries; of the twinning of various cities around the world; of the visits of grass-roots delegations from one to the other,7 of student and youth programs, or international university exchanges. One can refer again to the activity of non-governmental organizations, whose members and activities span different parts of the world, and to a dawning consciousness of the cultural and political limits of the nation-state.

26 Global Democracy Young people are aware of possibilities where their elders are often fearful of change or inured by experience to cynicism and resignation. The young are also more concerned with the world as a whole. (Worsley, 1990: 94) There is a great deal of evidence from communication practices - films, mass media broadcasts, translation, etc. - to suggest that there is at least one dimension of human intellectual engagement that is more heavily invested in cross-border transactions than others: the fictional, literary, entertainment or otherwise imaginary domains. (Bamyeh, 1993, 63) The nation-state is on the one hand considered to be too far removed and rigid to be able to respond to an increasing heterogeneity ... within its own territory, while at the same time it is too small and confined to deal with the more important external ... events taking place within its borders. (Mlinar, 1991: 24)

If all this is true, then the stage may well be set for a major breakthrough towards democratic governance at the global level. Our thinking about these matters needs, however, to be multifaceted. There can be no illusions about a single global citizenship transcending and usurping lesser forms of identity. On the contrary, any global citizenship, as Derek Heater has argued, will have to be based on some version of "multiple citizenships" rather than one. The basic building block will remain the local or provincial one, followed by that of the nation-state; above these might come the regional or continental level, with the world level capping the whole (Heater, 1990: 319). We may well become world citizens for certain specific purposes; for many others we will not. Another way of getting at the question is by acknowledging the ambivalence that characterizes the postmodern condition. The same ambiguity that comes to characterize contemporary forms of identity and citizenship, especially in the western world, the different poles of allegiance - personal, associational, ethnic, cultural, political - that shape us may also be laying the groundwork for a more fluid sense of identity vis-a-vis the global system. The rigidities and loyalties of the old nation-state may, in part, be giving way to something more open in character. This greater openness may well go hand in hand with a greater tolerance for diversity. We have already seen something of this with the emergence of various forms of identity politics - gender, ethnic, sexual orientation - in recent years. These are perfectly legitimate forms of expression provided that they themselves do not become intolerant.

27 Twenty-First Century Democracy

There is also a greater openness to the diversity of culture, both within established societies and at the international level. Vaclav Havel writes: "If the world today is not to become hopelessly enmeshed in ever more terrifying conflicts, it has only one possibility. It must deliberately breathe the spirit of multicultural co-existence into the civilization that envelops it" (Havel, 1994: A2i). And Alain Touraine observes: "One world is not simply a call for solidarity: it is a basic fact... Democracy is the place for dialogue and communication ... It must be the instrument of a well-tempered multiculturalism" (Touraine, 1994, 33, 269, 276). Still, we must not, repeating the errors of the French student movement of May 1968, merely take our desires to be reality. There remain enormous barriers to the type of "one world community" that figures such as Havel or Touraine would invoke. There will be strong resistance - on national and ethnic grounds, on ideological, on religious, on economic grounds - to the creation of global democracy along the lines that I have outlined in this chapter. There will be strong resistance in the developed North to the sort of transfer of resources, even short of massive aid, required "to enable the poor nations to lift themselves to recognizable human equality" (Macpherson, 1965: 67). There will be many, North and South, who will resist serious attempts to head off demographic or environmental catastrophes, or to forge new political structures internationally. So the task of those who would take democracy beyond the level of the nation-state is daunting. Yet just as eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury theorists and practitioners revived democracy under conditions very different from those of the Greek city-states, so we could do worse than emulate their achievement as we prepare for the twenty-first century. And if Cleisthenes could succeed in giving Athens a whole new basis for citizenship through his tribal division and democratic reforms 2,500 years ago, we have a worthy model to invoke in our own quest for a form of global democracy. NOTES

1 Cf. Pateman (1989), Young (1990), and Phillips (1991) for three examples of the feminist challenge to malestream democratic theory, and Elshtain (1993) for an interesting counter-argument. See also Lechner, 1993. 2 Among the many useful treatments of Athenian democracy, one might mention Finley (1983, chapter 4), Sinclair (1988), and Hansen (1991). 3 See, for example, Bobbio (1990), the articles by Wood and Fontana in Dunn (1992), Macpherson (1977), and Roper (1989).

28 Global Democracy 4 The first group would include writers such as Huntington (1991), Di Palma (1990), and Diamond, Linz and Lipset (1989). The latter would include writers such as Said (1993), Galeano (1987), and Rueschemeyer et al. (1992). 5 Cf. Eurobarometer (1992), where 49 per cent of European respondents answered yes to direct taxation under these conditions, 36 per cent no, with 14 per cent unsure. 6 Kiing and Kuschel, 1993: 21. The declaration of the parliament of the world's religions goes on to list four basic commitments that its participants share: non-violence and respect for life; solidarity and a just economic order; tolerance and a life of truthfulness; and equal rights and partnership between men and women (pp. 24-34). 7 This example was first suggested to me in conversation by Frank Cunningham.

2 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy at the Global Level From ancient times to the present day, virtually all thoughtful advocates of democracy and republican government have strongly emphasized how democracy is threatened by inequalities in economic resources. Dahl, 1989: 333

One of the most striking developments of the late twentieth century is the trend to democracy at the global level. In Latin America, the transition from authoritarianism to democracy dominated politics in the 19803, and led to the restoration of democratic regimes throughout the Southern Cone and to greater democratization of political life in Central America and Mexico as well.1 Beginning in 1985 with the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, glasnost and perestroika became the hallmarks of a new, more democratic phase in the Soviet Union and, by extension, throughout Eastern Europe.2 The MarxistLeninist model of the vanguard party and a strongly centralized party-state system began to give way to something substantially more open, pluralistic, and decentralized in the Soviet Union itself, with a growing separation between state and party, centre and union republics, civil society and state becoming the norm. From Poland to Bulgaria in the late 19805 there was a speeding up of history, as the Marxist-Leninist model collapsed almost overnight. The victory of Solidarity in Poland, the breaching of the Berlin Wall and subsequent unification of the two Germanies, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, Hungary's embrace of the market system, the violent overthrow of Ceaucescu, the significant erosion of communist support in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and, irony of ironies, Stalinist Albania, spoke to the opening of a new chapter in that part of the world. In both South and Southeast Asia there have been important, if fragile, moves to democratization in countries such as South Korea,

3o Global Democracy

Taiwan, and the Philippines, as well as in Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh, accompanied, it is true, by dramatic steps backwards in China, Burma (Myanmar), and at times Thailand. Yet the impetus to democratization is very much alive as the 19908 unfold. So too in Africa, such important countries as South Africa have experienced democratization in recent years, and the one-party model has lost its hold in Mozambique, Angola, Congo, and Ethiopia, to speak of but four cases. We need to meditate upon these transformations, both in terms of larger forces - economic, ideological, and cultural - at work in our late twentieth century world, and in light of the negative lessons which the national security states of Latin America or the Marxist-Leninist regimes have to teach us. These changes have not occurred in a vacuum. If anything, the last two or three decades have seen the emergence of a new international division of labour, more global in character than anything that had come before. Multinational corporations and banks carry on their activities across the continents, even as consumer tastes and cultural forms of advanced capitalism show remarkable parallels, from Tokyo to Paris to San Francisco. Information technology, films and television in particular, have brought the lifestyles of the West, with their mass consumption and images of plenty, onto the TV screens of the second and third worlds, and in the process helped to create publics more receptive to western economic and political models. And the patent failures of centralized economic planning of the Soviet variety and the suppression of elementary freedoms under authoritarian regimes of both right and left have helped create constituencies among intellectuals, students, members of the middle class, the working class and peasantry for something more clearly democratic. There is, however, a good deal of ambiguity surrounding the meanings of the word democracy and the implications of the transformations we are witnessing. For many of those in ruling positions in western societies - and, by extension, in newly democratizing societies as well - democracy is of the multiple-party variety, with national elections held on a regular basis. National legislatures will have representation from major political parties, the executive branch of government will have a fair degree of manoeuvre between elections, a bureaucracy of some size and also the military will be subordinated to the executive, the judiciary will be independent, there will be a free press, and so on. Economic actors, for the most part, will be autonomous from political ones, with market principles, only modestly balanced by governmental intervention, providing the underpinnings for a free society.3 This is the model other less fortunate societies are to emulate, if the world is to be made "safe for democracy."

31 Isonomm, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

Beneath the triumphalism of western leaders and mass media spokesmen lauding the victory of "our" system over its rivals lies some curiously unfinished business. It was not so long ago that some of the self-same leaders of opinion were lamenting "the crisis of democracy" caused by an overloading of the political system through demands emanating from students, black activists, or the like (Crozier et al., 1975) Nor have arch-defenders of market principles over the past few decades proven themselves receptive to the communitarian or egalitarian dimensions of democracy that adherents of citizen participation or environmentalism or feminism have been putting to the fore. Indeed, it is not clear that if forced to choose between the overtly capitalist and the overtly democratic poles of contemporary society, Milton Friedman (1962), Friedrich Hayek (1960), and James Buchanan (1986) would not choose the former. Nineteenth-century liberal critics of democracy tended to argue against its egalitarian excesses (cf. Roper, 1989), and it seems no less a leitmotif for neo-conservative critics of social expenditure, state intervention, and fiscal irresponsibility. Conversely, much of the criticism that has been advanced in the West about the excessive power which large corporations enjoy, about media concentration, or about the influence of wealth on electoral competition and the party system, has been advanced in the name of democracy. From C. Wright Mills and his mid-1950s critique of a power elite in the United States, to theorists of participatory democracy from the 19603 on,4 to contemporary calls for community control over toxic waste disposal sites or nuclear reactors or for the empowerment of aboriginal peoples or women or ethnic and other minorities, the underlying rationale seems to be the same. Politics of the top-down variety, as we live it in western (or non-western) societies, is too exclusionary, too unresponsive to popular needs and demands, be these economic, cultural, or political, to merit the label democratic in the etymological sense of rule by the people. Ours are political systems, it can be argued, increasingly regulated by the logic of a global capitalism with liberal elements and representative principles as fig leaves with which to cover moral and political nakedness. One is not forced to reject liberal democracy root and branch or to deny its superior merits when compared with competing twentiethcentury models of government from fascism to Stalinism to recognize some truth to this criticism. The relationship between liberalism and democracy has always been problematic, as Norberto Bobbio reminds us: Liberalism amputates the individual from the organic body ... democracy joins him together once more with others like himself. Liberalism highlights

32 Global Democracy the individual's capacity for self-creation ... in conditions of maximum freedom from all externally and coercively imposed constraints; democracy holds in highest regard the individual's capacity to overcome isolation by ... allowing the institution of non-tyrannical common power. (Bobbio, 1990: 43)

Moreover, as the French liberal Benjamin Constant noted in the early nineteenth century, there was a very significant trade-off between the rights of the citizen to participate in the collective decision-making of the polls or res publica of the ancient world and the individual liberties and rights that, by comparison, have come to dominate in modern times. There must be some nagging doubts about the fullness of our democratic achievement when we think back to more participatory models of the past or when, removing our ideological blinkers, we contemplate the inequality of condition and, therefore, of power that capitalism by its very nature engenders. To further explore some of the tensions in contemporary democratic discourse between representative and participatory models, between the principle of liberty and that of equality, between the political and economic spheres, let me suggest a brief return to the Greeks. As the inventors of democracy, so to speak, and of the categories associated with it, the Greeks of the sixth to the fourth centuries BC still cast a long shadow on our own world. For all the shortcomings of the Athenian model with respect to slavery or the exclusion of women or of the non-native born from citizenship, it remains the prototype for much democratic experimentation since. The term demokratia, interestingly enough, was not the crucial one used in the sixth or early fifth centuries in referring to rule by the many. The most commonly used term was in fact isonomia,5 referring to the equality of all Athenian citizens before the law. Equality of citizenship rights could be contrasted with the situation in aristocracies or monarchies, where a few had privileges denied to all the others. In the aftermath of the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC and following the Persian Wars, Athens came to introduce this most basic and elementary of precepts. A second term used in the fifth century BC as synonymous with democracy also derived from the Greek stem ison, or equal. It is the term isegoria, referring to the right of Athenian citizens to take part in meetings of the assembly and, therefore, to speak and vote on matters of concern to the polis. This term captures the participatory element in Athenian democracy, which was, of course, a good deal more important than in the more indirect forms of democracy we know today. There is a third term, isomoiria, referring to equal division of the land, that can be taken as the demand of the more radical element of

33 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

the population of Athens or Attica.6 We encounter the term in a poem of Solon in the early sixth century, where the legendary lawgiver boasts that even while cancelling the debts, he did not give in to the demands of those calling for equal division of the land. While the term does not seem to have been in common use in the fifth or fourth centuries BC, it does speak to demands for economic, in addition to political, forms of democracy. And it is this more levelling sense where property is concerned which may well have allowed Aristotle, in a famous passage of his Politics, to define democracy less as rule by the many than as rule by the poor.* What I want to argue in this essay is that all three of these Greek terms, isonomia, isegoria, and isomoiria, have their place in contemporary democratic theory, especially one with aspirations to some universal appeal. I am not convinced that any one of them should have absolute precedence over the other two, but would argue the need for some reasonable balance among them. Isonomia may seem to be the most straightforward of these terms, though it has tended to be the most violated of democratic precepts in regimes of an authoritarian or one-party mould. Official equality of citizens before the law means nothing in a society of torturers and secret police, of a muzzled press and intellectual life, of a hierarchically centralized and totally controlled political process. Freedom of speech, of association, or of conscience are not the purely formal liberties that Marxist-Leninist ideology would have had us believe, disguising the reality of bourgeois domination and monopoly capitalism. Who can read passages like the following from the Brezhnev era, extolling the democratic character of real socialism, without guffawing? The socialist system has completely new criteria by which to judge democracy, criteria which are unknown to any exploitative society ... Participation by every citizen in managing common affairs is the essence of the MarxistLeninist conception of democracy ... Soviet citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly ... They have the right to associate in public organizations, the right to freedom of conscience ... to inviolability of person and home, to privacy of correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraphic communications. (Soviet Democracy, 1979: 12-17) "The real ground of the difference between oligarchy and democracy is poverty and riches. It is inevitable that any constitution should be an oligarchy if the rulers under it are rulers in virtue of riches, whether they are few or many; and it is equally inevitable that a constitution under which the poor rule should be a democracy." Aristotle, Politics, Book m: 134.

34 Global Democracy

The cult of the personality in a host of Marxist-Leninist regimes, the existence of a privileged stratum of officials or nomenklatura, the marginalization, incarceration, or suppression of political dissenters, the all-pervasive presence of the party, spoke to a society where isonomia was a hollow lie. As Tatyana Zaslavskaya, an eminent Soviet sociologist, observed: The whole life of society was permeated by hypocrisy ... Soviet society was characterized by the exceptionally unequal distribution of political power and the extremely low level of participation in government by the mass of working people ... Management of the cultural arena was just as bureaucratic as management of the economy. Powerful publishing firms saw it as their main aim in life to edit out everything that was lively, vivid or unusual. Free and unfettered thought aroused editors' indignation. (Zaslavskaya, 1990: 45-6, 115)

So too in fascist societies of the 19205 and 19305 and in their Latin American or Far Eastern offshoots of the post-Second World War period, there was little place for citizens' rights. Certain individuals and groups were prima fade designated as enemies of the people communists, socialists, trade unionists, free-thinking intellectuals, Jews, "subversives," as the case might be - and deprived of any civic standing. The higher interests of the state, the Reich, the doctrine of national security overrode any squeamish preoccupation with rights, themselves the fruits of a degenerate liberal democratic credo. Fascist leaders, military caudillos, ruling oligarchs were beyond any constitutional constraints, and like the tyrants of the past had turned the state into their own personal domain. The twentieth-century experience teaches us once again the great dangers of tyrannical power. It is a lesson which democratic theorists of the fifth and fourth centuries BC had digested, and which underlay the introduction of democracy in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Peisistratian tyrants (Stockton, 1990: 21-28). No citizenry could call itself free or exercise real power where one man or group had arrogated all power into his (its) hands. Isonomia came to spell citizens' control over the law courts and council, the assembly and all the civic offices of Athens. Rule in the name of the people, as any tyrant might profess to be practising, was no substitute for rule by the people.7 Isonomia also implicity begets the need for some effective degree of citizen participation. Isegoria, the second of our Greek terms, speaks to this participatory dimension, far more present in a face-to-face society like Athens than in our own. The participatory features of the

35 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

Athenian polls - rotating annual membership of five hundred in the Boule, or council, chosen by lot; thirty to forty annual meetings of the ecclesia or assembly, in which all Athenian citizens could take part; a large number of civic and judicial offices filled by lot - have been much discussed. There is no need to romanticize the workings of Athenian isegoria by assuming that the majority of citizens availed themselves of the right to attend each meeting of the assembly (even when a modest stipend of two obols came to be paid for attendance from the late fifth century on), let alone of actually speaking in the debates. Nor do we have to indulge in celebrating the Athenian model of democracy over our own by downplaying its very serious restrictions on citizenship or ignoring the quite different conditions of life in city-states as compared to the nation-states we live in. Yet I must confess to the haunting attraction that Athenian democracy, despite its manifold limitations, has for would-be theorists of democracy at the end of twentieth century. It is as though its very directness, as opposed to our own indirect model, nags at our collective conscience, its normative assumptions about civic virtue jag at our more privatistic, modern concerns, its very freshness a reproach to the more jaded and cynical reality of liberal democratic politics. As Marx observed in another context, "Why should the childhood of human society, where it had obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return?" We have, of course, been told by a host of theorists, from James Madison to the twentieth-century adherents of the competitive elite model, that democracy of the Athenian variety is at best an impossibility and at worst a dystopia, incompatible with the complexities of modern societies, the imperatives of governmental stability, or the verities of human nature (Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10; Schumpeter, 1950, part iv). Nor can there be any denying the existence of a palpable division of labour between governors and governed in all large-scale societies, or the limited interest which ordinary citizens show for political participation in the long intervals between elections. Political theorists can sketch their models of participatory democracy, base-level democracy, tele-democracy, unitary democracy, or economic democracy to their heart's content; full-blooded isegoria appears as a throw-back to an irredeemable past. But is it really? In certain guises, it is very much alive in contemporary societies. One obvious example is the referendum, whether with respect to constitutional matters (Australia, France), to questions of external sovereignty (the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, facing membership in the European Union), to federal

36 Global Democracy

arrangements (Quebec, Slovenia, Croatia, the Baltic republics), and to a whole range of social or political matters (Italy, Switzerland, various American states). Although referendums are often initiated by governments, this is not always the case.8 And while they are certainly subject to misuse or overuse (the California example comes to mind), they seem, as I suggest in chapter 6, a particularly appropriate instrument for deciding major matters of national policy that will have long-term implications for society (constitutional matters, questions of sovereignty, and the like). Moving beyond referendums, there is a further sphere of political activity, at the local or sub-national level, but equally at the national, which lends itself to direct participation. The most dramatic forms this can take are moments of protest or civil disobedience of the sort that rocked western societies in the 19605 (Japan, France, West Germany, the United States), or vast popular movements that have helped spark the transition from authoritarian to more democratic types of regime in Latin America (Brazil, Chile), Eastern Europe (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, various Baltic republics), Asia (South Korea, the Philippines, Bangladesh). While movements of popular mobilization and radicalization are, by definition, temporary, they can have a lasting and positive impact on a nation's democratic development. No less significant are social movements representing the selforganization of society with a view to democratizing broad areas of economic, social, or everyday life. One thinks of peasant movements in various parts of the third world, of newly formed trade unions in societies experiencing rapid industrialization (South Korea and Brazil in the late 19705 and early 19805). One thinks of feminism and the women's movement more generally, with its challenge to existing gender relations, social policies, and to the very boundary between public and private domains. Environmentalism - a movement increasingly global in character - also comes to mind, with its insistence on local, community, or indigenous control over resources and the rate of development, on conservation and long-term sustainability as opposed to the growth and profit-geared ethos of a highly concentrated and anything but democratic transnational capitalism. So too do various movements for human rights - from Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, to Charter 77 and Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, to the student dissidents in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 - to cite but three examples from the struggle for democratization in various parts of the world. To reduce democracy to a set of procedural arrangements involving the choice of elected representatives and officials to whom decision-

37 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

making power is surrendered for a specific term is a very serious abdication of its participatory underpinnings. It is to ignore the struggles that have had to be fought for the achievement of democracy, from those for the extension of the franchise in Great Britain, to the abolitionist and civil rights movements in the United States, to the various revolutions in France from 1789 on, and in many other parts of the world as well. It is to make light of the fact that democracy, as Pericles for one perfectly understood, entails the ongoing interest and commitment of the citizenry at large.9 A polity without isegoria is one in which the demos speaks with a muted voice. In stating this, however, I am also fully conscious of the dangers of pushing the participatory impulse too far. We have no choice in our densely populated societies, with their extensive division of labour and far-flung territorial base, but to accept the representative principle as the primary expression of democratic politics. We cannot re-create small-scale societies of the type that Rousseau, for example, pined for, though we may sometimes be able to introduce more faceto-face politics at the local or community level. There is, however, no turning the page back to some earlier stage of development before the nation-state; if anything, the move towards greater global democracy will entail a further extension of the representative principle to institutions. Furthermore, as Bobbio noted, there is a tension between the liberal and the democratic pole in liberal democratic theory. In contemporary philosophical discourse in the West, this is reflected in the debates between so-called liberals and communitarians as regards the locus of rights and the relative importance of the individual and collective dimensions of political behaviour (cf. Rosenblum, 1989; Mclntyre, 1981; Taylor, 1985^. Invoking the terms isonomia and isegoria one more time may allow us to trace this divide farther back. If one interprets isonomia as meaning equal rights under the law, then one is partly justified in giving these rights - to a fair trial, for example, or to free speech - an individualist gloss. These were not, to be sure, rights that could in any way be exercised outside the community of the polis, nor am I arguing that the Greeks fully shared our modern-day notion of individual liberty. Isonomia, at least, does not shut the door to such a conception. Isegoria, by contrast, with its emphasis on participation in the deliberations of the assembly, has a more collectivist touch to it. It is the means by which the demos, the collectively assembled citizenry, so to speak, exercises its power. While the clash of opinions is an inherent part of the deliberative process, the end result is collectively binding edicts or decrees from which individual dissent is not permitted.

38 Global Democracy

In its modern guise, isegoria, particularly in revolutionary periods, such as the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution or the Bolshevik phase of the Russian or the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid1960s, can lead to an extremely illiberal version of participation. Dissenters from the official line become stamped as traitors or counter-revolutionaries; liberties, for such members of society, go by the wayside; indeed, it soon goes by the wayside for everyone else. Similarly, participation in huge rallies like those at Nuremberg at the height of the Nazi regime has very little to do with democracy as we would understand it. The purpose of my examples is not to denigrate the concept of participation; it is simply to recognize the need for a balance in democratic theory between isegoria and the more formal liberties to which isonomia, as we might interpret it for our own age, speaks. Not only is participation by all the citizens in political affairs on a continuous basis an impossibility; mass participation, when it is engineered from above and fostered through large-scale coercion or indoctrination, can take a radically anti-democratic form. So much the pseudo-participation of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes has surely taught us. This brings me to the third of our Greek terms, isomoiria, speaking to the economic dimensions of democracy. This is the dimension which is most glaringly lacking in Latin America or Asia today, and that has so far been insufficiently addressed in the West, despite the advent of the welfare state. As the following table shows, income distribution in the third world remains significantly more unequal than in the developed world. This, in turn, poses fundamental problems about access to education, to health services, to basic economic goods, and to the political system itself. Income Distribution (percentage share of household income, by percentile group of households) India Brazil Argentina U.K. U.S.

Lowest 20%

Highest 20%

Highest 10%

7.0 2.0 4.4 7.0 5.3

49.4 66.6 50.3 39.7 39.9

33.6 50.6 35.2 23.4 23.3

Source: The World Bank, World Development Report (London: Oxford University Press 1988), Table 26, 272-3.

Can we speak of equality of opportunity or of voice, if status or class differences are deeply entrenched? Without some continuous levelling of wealth, or at the minimum, a redistribution of wealth

39 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

through the taxation system to provide a safety net for all, can polities, North or South, be said to have realized the necessary preconditions for democratic politics? To our knowledge, Athens in the fifth or fourth centuries BC did not realize isomoiria in the way that it could be said to have realized isonomia and isegoria. There were real differences of wealth and income among the citizens, possibly as stark as in western liberal democracies of our own day (Kagan, 1991: 62, 270). What is true, however, is that Athens, through such devices as pay for attendance in the assembly, or measures such as the one proposed by Demosthenes in 348 BC to provide a regular stipend to every Athenian citizen to enable him to perform whatever state duty most suited his situation,10 kept a more egalitarian dimension of citizenship alive. And political power could be mobilized, to the horror of democracy's aristocratic critics such as Plato, to erode deep-rooted status and class differentials. "A key feature of the Athenian democracy was the use of political power by political equals to counterbalance various social inequalities - especially the unequal distribution of wealth" (Ober, 1990: 337). In the modern world, this seems to be what the move towards a more positive notion of the state among liberal thinkers of the late nineteenth century or the impetus to increased social spending and to Keynesian departures in macro-economic policy from the 19305 on was all about. Indeed, the Keynesian/welfare state consensus of the mid-1960s balanced off the economic power of private capital and the marketplace with the political power of the state over which trade unions and parties of the left or liberal/Christian Democratic centre had great influence. An element of isomoiria was at work in western societies, through state enterprise and, more tellingly still, through the distributive mechanisms of a progressive income tax system. The Keynesian consensus of the postwar years was to give way to the stagflation of the 19705 and to the return of more market-driven and, therefore, anti-egalitarian public philosophies associated with the new right. At the heart of neo-conservatism, whether in Britain, the United States, or in other liberal democratic societies, lay a rejection of isomoiria and of its supposedly debilitating effects both for entrepreneurship and for individual liberty.11 In societies moving from authoritarianism to democracy - for example, Spain and Portugal in the 19705 or Latin America in the 19805 - the question of isomoiria has been posed differently. Where deep class divisions of a capitalist or pre-capitalist sort existed, the problem of successful transition became mainly one of separating the question of economic redistribution from the no less thorny question

4O Global Democracy

of constitutional rule. It became crucial for parties of the centre and left to assure dominant economic interests within their societies that their interests would not be threatened in a less authoritarian-type of regime than that of Franco or the Latin American military. As Santiago Carrillo, leader of the Spanish Communist party, put it: "One must have the courage to explain to the working class that it is better to give surplus to the bourgeoisie than to create a situation that contains the risk of turning against us" (Cited in Przeworski, 1986: 63). Trade unions and popular groups had to mute their demands for isomoiria in order to ensure some isonomia and isegoria in the first place. Whether, and how successfully, they will be able to get isomoiria onto the agenda in a post-transition period will determine the ultimate success or failure of their governments in meeting the most elementary economic and social needs of the majority of the population. In Eastern Europe, isomoiria was at the very heart of MarxistLeninist ideology and its claims to have realized real democracy, as opposed to the fraudulent, class-ridden democracy of the West. While in certain regards there was in Marxist-Leninist societies greater equality between blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals (Zaslavskaya, 1990: 131), such equality came at a high price. Not only were there privileges for supporters of the regime unavailable to other members of society, but there was a general absence of democratic liberties for all and, in the end, a level of economic (and environmental) performance that put these societies decades behind what had been achieved in the capitalist mixed economies. Not surprisingly, in the short run at least, the overwhelming priority lies in the development of more market-based economies and in the entrenchment of the formal liberties we associate with isonomia. In the intermediate and longer run, however, one can postulate that some of the same reasons which led to the development of social safety nets and state intervention in the West, namely the rampant inequality engendered by an unregulated capitalism, will be at work in Eastern Europe as well. When this happens - and it may be beginning already - isomoiria will be rescued from the misuse to which it was put by Marxist-Leninist ideology in justifying an authoritarian version of state socialism. My own position - and here I will not hide a left-of-centre bias is that isomoiria needs to be an integral part of any democratic theory worth the name. It need not and should not become so overwhelming a preoccupation that it threatens the very existence of isonomia and isegoria; but conversely, formal equality of all before the law should not serve as a permanent barrier to the introduction of

41 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

significantly lower degrees of social and economic inequality than presently prevail. The question of fairer distribution of land, fairer access to education, to medical services, to housing, to material goods are burning questions in many of the newly democratizing societies of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. No less significant, when one thinks back to Solon and the indebted peasantry of Attica, is the burden which debt and a subordinate position within the international division of labour places on most of these societies. The conditions for the realization of democracy in the third world to no small degree rest upon the cancellation or drastic reduction of the debt and on an element of transfer, on an order of i or 2 per cent of GNP per annum through international institutions and the like, from the first world to the third. As Rene Dumont has argued, "The growing gap between the rich and poor countries is becoming more and more intolerable. If it continues unabated, we could by the middle of the next century have more than ten billion poor on our little planet, facing a billion rich. Such a situation would be politically untenable" (Dumont, 1991: 9). Within western societies as well, isomoiria remains a live concern. The control which those with wealth and privilege exercise over the media or over the funding of political parties in a society like the United States cannot but vitiate the operation of democracy. The absence of a universal health care system in such a society or the horrific conditions of the inner-city poor are a daily indictment of a polity in which market values have run amok. Nor is the United States the only western society in which important economic inequality exists. One wonders how Western Europe or Japan or Canada would take to proposals of the type that John Stuart Mill advanced in the middle of the last century for an 80 per cent tax on inheritance? (Mill, 1871: Book n, chap. 2) Or how far a tax on wealth of the modest sort that the French socialists experimented with in the early 19805 would be taken? In a period, moreover, which has seen the transfer of income in the guise of tax reform from the middle and lower ranks of society to the upper 20 per cent, the battle may be less for new departures than for the defence of principles of social justice inherent in the welfare state. And this battle, more and more, needs to be fought at the global level. As capitalism has become increasingly global, as regional trading blocs emerge in Europe, North America, and beyond, as the reach of transnational corporations and international agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank proves all-pervasive, we need to think about democracy in a less parochial fashion. We in the West must do more than cheer on our less fortunate fellows in Latin America, Eastern

42 Global Democracy

Europe, South or Southeast Asia, or Africa for having seen the light. We must acknowledge the need for a proper balance among isonomia, isegoria, and isomoiria, not only within our respective societies, but internationally. Where isonomia is concerned, one fundamental achievement would be the extension of the protections outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to all inhabitants of the planet. To a significant degree, external pressure on human rights did help in the liberalization and ultimate democratization of East European and Latin American societies. When human rights begin to occupy a greater place than investment rights in the foreign policy of first world states, when loans and aid on the part of international agencies come to be tied to visible improvement in the human rights record of recipient states, we may begin to see the eclipse of tyranny and dictatorship as a prevailing political form. Closely related to the formal liberties of speech, religion, and political choice are social rights. Here again, the UN Declaration of Social Progress and Development adopted by the General Assembly in 1969 helps to show the way, though more important will be the degree of commitment that the peoples and governments of the world lend to a measure of isomoiria across the globe. I am not talking about a radical levelling of wealth or any wholesale eradication of the very real differences in living standards, measured by GNP per capita, mortality rates, access to education, health care, and so on that distinguish the citizens of core countries from those on the periphery in our day. Structural differences will scarcely disappear, though the ratio of these differences can be reduced over time. A commitment to some basic version of health care, education, food and shelter for all the inhabitants of the globe does not seem an impossible objective, in a period when international tension, at least of the cold war variety, is in decline. Can the moral and political will to bring this about be galvanized? As for isegoria, we can hardly escape the structures of the nationstate within which we live, or challenge in a wholesale fashion representative political institutions with the muted role they leave for citizen participation. Yet just as forms of direct participation exist within nation-states, so are there examples of it in the international arena. Non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam, and a host of others have played an invaluable role in advancing international solidarity and in infusing tens of thousands of people around the world with the sense that participation at the global level is not an impossibility. We are still light years away from representative institutions with binding power

43 Isonomia, Isegoria, Isomoiria, and Democracy

across the continents, let alone direct democracy of the referendum sort. Still, in an age of global communications and instantaneous transmission of information, we should not underestimate the possibilities for political participation that may open up. I want to conclude on a realistic note. Athens itself, the first working model of a democracy known to us, endured for close to two centuries. Yet isonomia was flawed through the exclusion of a large majority of the population from citizenship; its isegoria did not mean that strong leaders like Pericles, Cimon, or Demosthenes did not exercise disproportionate influence over the assembly and polis as compared to ordinary citizens; as for isomoiria, it was more an aspiration for some than a lived reality in the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BC. In the modern world, liberal democracies of the North American or West European type are one or two centuries old. They also long excluded significant sections of the population (blacks in the United States, women in all western societies) from full citizenship; citizen participation has been more episodic and infrequent than in Athens; and despite modest strides where the welfare state or the progressive income tax system are concerned, these have not balanced out the more inegalitarian features of the marketplace. To postulate isonomia, isegoria, and isomoiria at the global level, therefore, would seem to be a mirage, all the more with democracy still in the testing stages in post-authoritarian polities of Latin America or Eastern Europe, and absent altogether in large parts of Africa and Asia. Yet we could do worse than think ahead to models of democracy a century or two down the line. A theory that incorporates the three Greek concepts I have been emphasizing in this essay - namely, equal citizenship rights, the opportunity for political participation, and a measure of social and economic equality - can ensure that democracy, 2,500 years after its inception, will retain its normative appeal. NOTES

1 Some of the relevant literature on this transformation would include Cardoso (1986), Drake and Silva (1986), O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986), Stepan (1989), and Touraine (1988). 2 Relevant literature on Soviet and East European developments might include Ash (1989), Brown (1989), Cohen and Heusen (1989), Gorbachev (1987), Havel (1989), Hazan (1990), Lapides (1989), and Zaslavskaya (1990). 3 Many of the writings of mainstream political scientists of the postSecond World War period, especially in the United States, argued such

44 Global Democracy a position. Examples would include Almond and Verba (1965), Berelson, Lazerfeld and McPhee (1954), Dahl (1956), and Lipset (1960). 4 Examples might include some of the writers in Kariel (1970, part 3), Pateman (1970), Macpherson (1977), Mansbridge (1980), and Barber (1984). 5 Stockton (1990). For an earlier discussion of the three terms that figure in the title of this paper, see Resnick (iggob), especially pp. 30-1. 6 There is a brief discussion of isomoiria in Masse (1986), "Egalite." For a more negative view of isomoiria, see Kagan (1991: 62, 272). See also Maier (1990, chap. 3). 7 As Giovanni Sartori (1987: 475) has correctly argued, "Not government of the people, since the people do not know enough to recognize their real interest; but government over the people, despite the people, in the interest of the people - this is the standard justification of all tyrannies." 8 Cf. Italian or Swiss referendums, where a small percentage of citizen signatures is sufficient to put a matter before the electorate. See also the practice in various American states as discussed in Cronin (1989). 9 "We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." Pericles's Funeral Oration in Thucydides, Peloponnesian War: 147. 10 Ober (1990: 202). This measure, while proposed in the Assembly, was, however, never adopted. 11 See Joseph and Sumpton (1979), Brittan (1977), and Buchanan and Wagner (1977) for some representative arguments. For a critical view of the neo-conservative turn, see among others Piven and Cloward (1985), Mishra (1990, chapters i and 2), and chap. 4 of this volume.

PART TWO

Realpolitik/ Neo-conservatism

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3 In the Shadow of Hobbes: The Challenge to Democratic Theory I prefer obeying a handsome lion born a good deal stronger than me than two hundred rats of my own species. Voltaire, in a letter to Saint-Lambert

At the root of contemporary democratic theory lies a faith in the human capacity for deciding key issues of governance for itself. Whether posited by Rousseau in The Social Contract - "Sovereignty, being nothing other than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated ... the legislative power belongs, and can only belong to the people" - or by John Stuart Mill - "A representative constitution is a means of bringing the general standard of intelligence and honesty existing in the community, and the individual intellect and virtue of its wisest members, more directly to bear upon government" - the upshot is the same: the only legitimate form of regime in the modern world is one based on popular consent. The history of modern political thought is that of a steady widening of the notion of the political subject from the seventeenth century to today and of the possibilities for citizen influence over the political system. The story, as we know it, is one of claim and counter-claim: the Levellers with their call for a measure of male suffrage in mid-seventeenth-century England against the opposition of the forces of propertied wealth; the hesitant liberalism of Montesquieu, Hamilton, or Burke when compared with the democratic credo of Rousseau or Jefferson; a broadening of the notion of citizenship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western societies as first the middle classes, then the labouring and agricultural classes, were admitted to the franchise; the gradual fall of barriers excluding women; and the reduction of race as an obstacle to democratic entitlement in societies such as the American South and South Africa.

48 Realpolitik/Neo-conservatism

This story has been told often enough not to require repeating here. So, too, a good deal has been written about the changing social and economic dimensions of western politics: the coming of the welfare state, for example, beginning with health and old age insurance in Bismarck's Germany in the i88os and its emulation in most other western societies; the acceptance of a degree of state responsibility for the regulation of the market economy and for fiscal and monetary policy in its broad parameters; the emergence of trade unions side by side with the major corporations and financial institutions of capitalist society; the rise of political parties reflective of more than elite opinion; the role that the media have come to play as a fourth estate, often with the power of breaking, no less than making, governments; the increasing role of public opinion in influencing governmental policy. So much do we live in the supposed age of democracy that the very term, more than most in the political lexicon, often seems to be stretched to the breaking point. The geographical expansion of democracy is another striking characteristic of the late twentieth century. No longer are such concepts as freedom of speech or of association reserved for a couple of dozen highly developed liberal democracies of the West. The last couple of decades have witnessed transitions to democracy in a host of countries around the globe, from Latin America to Eastern Europe, from East and South Asia to parts of Africa. So much so that there was a tendency in some quarters, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to believe that liberal democracy was the only remaining political game (Fukuyama, 1992). And to begin to look forward to the consolidation of liberal democratic institutions throughout the world. We need to be cautious, however, before we start projecting such normative assumptions onto societies that may prove far more resistant to democratic processes of the western sort. We have the experience of democratic breakdown in Italy, Germany, and Spain between the two world wars to ponder; we have the frequent lapses into military-style authoritarianism in Latin America throughout the post-Second World War period; we have the less than fulsomely democratic experiences of East Asia - Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, even Japan itself - throughout their modernizing phase and continuing, in part, even today. To assume, therefore, that China or the Arab world or many of the poorest or most ethnically divided countries of Africa will become democracies in the western sense any time soon does seem to partake of wishful thinking. Indeed, when we pause to reflect on some of the dissatisfaction with democratic institutions that has been surfacing even in western

49 In the Shadow of Hobbes

societies in recent years, we have even more reason for caution. What is one to make of anti-political parties and movements like the Perot phenomenon in the United States, or the Northern League and Forza Italia in Italy? Of anti-immigrant sentiment that has been very much on the rise in Europe or the United States? Of a general revulsion with politics and politicians, with corruption in specific cases, with overall levels of government spending in various OECD countries, or with moves towards supranational integration such as the debate over the Maastricht Treaty? It is not as though all is for the best of all possible worlds, even where liberal democratic institutions seem most secure. And when we come to analyse further both the fascist experience of our century and the Leninist detour, there is more troubling matter at hand. Both Mussolini and Hitler enjoyed significant popular support in the period immediately preceding their rise to power. Each was able to make deep inroads into middle- and lowerclass opinion and turn his exercise of power into a chillingly successful example in the manipulation of mass psychology. The appeal to social unity, to economic reconstruction, to political order, to racial purity had enormous resonance in a period of crisis, suggesting that democratic electorates could indeed succumb to authoritarian impulses. I am not sure that we have completely absorbed the implications of this even today. Leninism, it is true, did not by and large come to power in societies with strong democratic traditions (Czechoslovakia perhaps excepted). But it symbolized yet another challenge to western-style democracy. Its ideological appeal was rooted in a vision of economic equality and social justice; at the organizational level, it embodied the Jacobin principle of strong centralization, both in party and state, and of a non-liberal version of the general will (in other words, the immense majority of the toiling masses expressing itself through revolutionary institutions that reflected their interest). Ersatz claims, we may be tempted to say, in the aftermath of communism's collapse. But not entirely ersatz for the billion and a half people who lived under its sway, and for the hundreds of millions, both in the third world and even the West, who found its message beguiling. These two examples of fascism and communism, as well as the many other examples of authoritarian regimes, the continuing lure of populist figures who promise magic cures for manifold social problems, and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism - all these raise legitimate doubts about the future of the democratic project. For it is not enough to hope that as levels of income rise and middle classes come to be stabilized that liberal democratic institutions will necessarily