Liberty from the people

<a href=www.indianexpress.com>The Sunday Express Liberty takes on democracy Setting up his argument, Fareed Zakaria argues the vote is only one ingredient of a liberal society. From a working justice system to civil rights, there’s much more

The future of freedom Illiberal Democracy at Home & Abroad By Fareed Zakaria, Penguin/Viking, Price: Rs 395

“Suppose elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists,’’ said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in the 1990s. ‘‘That is the dilemma.’’ Indeed it is, and not merely in Yugoslavia’s past but in the world’s present. Consider, for example, the challenge we face across the Islamic world. We recognize the need for democracy in those often-repressive countries. But what if democracy produces an Islamic theocracy or something like it? It is not an idle concern. Across the globe, democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been re-elected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights. This disturbing phenomenon — visible from Peru to the Palestinian territories, from Ghana to venezuela — could be called ‘‘illiberal democracy’’.

For people in the West, democracy means ‘‘liberal democracy’’; a political system marked not only by free and fair elections but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property. But this bundle of freedoms — what might be termed ‘‘constitutional liberalism’’ — has nothing intrinsically to do with democracy and the two have not always gone together, even in the West. After all, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany via free elections. Over the last half-century in the West, democracy and liberty have merged. But today the two strands of liberal democracy, interwoven in the Western political fabric, are coming apart across the globe. Democracy is flourishing; liberty is not.

In some places, such as Central Asia, elections have paved the way for dictatorships. In others, they have exacerbated group conflict and ethnic tensions. Both Yugoslavia and Indonesia, for example, were far more tolerant and secular when they were ruled by strongmen (Tito and Suharto, respectively) than they are now as democracies. And in many nondemocracies, elections would not improve matters much. Across the Arab world elections held tomorrow would probably bring to power regimes that are more intolerant, reactionary, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic than the dictatorships currently in place.

In a world that is increasingly democratic, regimes that resist the trend produce dysfunctional societies — as in the Arab world. Their people sense the deprivation of liberty more strongly than ever before because they know the alternatives; they can see them on CNN, BBC, and Al-Jazeera. But yet, newly democratic countries too often become sham democracies, which produces disenchantment, disarray, violence, and new forms of tyranny. Look at Iran and Venezuela. This is not a reason to stop holding elections, of course, but surely it should make us ask, What is at the root of this troubling development? Why do so many developing countries have so much difficulty creating stable, genuinely democratic societies? Were we to embark on the vast challenge of building democracy in Iraq, how would we make sure that we succeed?

First, let’s be clear what we mean by political democracy. From the time of Herodotus it has been defined, first and foremost, as the rule of the people. This definition of democracy as a process of selecting governments is now widely used by scholars. In The Third Wave, the eminent political scientist Samuel P. Huntington explains why:

Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic. Democracy is one public virtue, not the only one, and the relation of democracy to other public virtues and vices can only be understood if democracy is clearly distinguished from the other characteristics of political systems.

This definition also accords with the common sense view of the term. If a country holds competitive, multiparty elections, we call it ‘‘democratic.’’ When public participation in a country’s politics is increased — for example, through the enfranchisement of women — that country is seen as having become more democratic. Of course elections must be open and fair, and this requires some protections for the freedom of speech and assembly. But to go beyond this minimal requirement and label a country democratic only if it guarantees a particular catalog of social, political, economic, and religious rights — which will vary with every observer — makes the word ‘‘democracy’’ meaningless. After all, Sweden has an economic system that many argue curtails individual property rights, France until recently had a state monopoly on television, and Britain has a state religion. But they are all clearly and identifiably democracies. To have ‘‘democracy’’ mean, subjectively, ‘‘a good government’’ makes it analytically useless.

Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, is not about the procedures for selecting government but, rather, government’s goals. It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual’s autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source — state, church, or society. The term marries two closely connected ideas. it is liberal because it draws on the philosophical strain, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, that emphasizes individual liberty. It is constitutional because it places the rule of law at the center of politics. Constitutional liberalism developed in Western Europe and the United States as a defense of an individual’s right to life and property and the freedoms of religion and speech. To secure these rights, it emphasized checks on the power of government, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, and the separation of church and state. In almost all of its variants, constitutional liberalism argues that human beings have certain natural (or ‘‘inalienable’’) rights and that governments must accept a basic law, limiting its own powers, to secure them. Thus in 1215 at Runnymede, England’s barons forced the king to limit his own authority. In the American colonies these customs were made explicit, and in 1638 the town of Hartford adopted the first written constitution in modern history. In 1789 the American Constitution created a formal framework for the new nation. In 1975 Western nations set standards of behavior even for nondemocratic regimes. Magna Carta, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the American Constitution, and the Helsinki Final Act are all expressions of constitutional liberalism.

The Nub

In a world that is increasingly democratic, regimes that resist the trend produce dysfunctional societies — as in the Arab world. Their people sense the deprivation of liberty more strongly than ever before because they know the alternatives; they can see them on CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera. But yet, newly democratic countries too often become sham democracies, which produces disenchantment, disarray, violence and tyrannySince 1945 Western governments have, for the most part, embodied both democracy and constitutional liberalism. Thus it is difficult to imagine the two apart, in the form of either illiberal democracy or liberal autocracy. In fact both have existed in the past and persist in the present. Until the twentieth century, most countries in western Europe were liberal autocracies or, at best, semi-democracies. The franchise was tightly restricted, and elected legislatures had limited power. In 1830 Great Britain, one of the most democratic European countries, allowed barely 2 per cent of its population to vote for one house of Parliament. Only in the late 1940s did most Western countries become full-fledged democracies, with universal adult suffrage. But one hundred years earlier, by the late 1840s, most of them had adopted important aspects of constitutional liberalism — the rule of law, private property rights, and increasingly, separated powers and free speech and assembly. For much of modern history, what characterized governments in Europe and North America, and differentiated them from those around the world, was not democracy but constitutional liberalism. The ‘‘Western model of government’’ is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge.

For decades the tiny island of Hong Kong was a small but revealing illustration that liberty did not depend on democracy. It had one of the highest levels of constitutional liberalism in the world but was in no way a democracy. In fact in the 1990s, as the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong drew near, many Western newspapers and magazines fretted about the dangers of this shift to Hong Kong’s democracy. But of course Hong Kong had no democracy to speak of. The threat was to its tradition of liberty and law. We continue to confuse these two concepts. American and Israeli politicians have often chided the Palestinian Authority for its lack of democracy. But in fact Yasser Arafat is the only leader in the entire Arab world who has been chosen through reasonably free elections. The Palestinian Authority’s problem lies not in its democracy — which while deeply flawed is at least half-functioning — but in its constitutional liberalism, or lack thereof.