tag:theconversation.com,2011:/columns/john-keane-267Democracy field notes – The Conversation2017-07-17T21:31:09Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/810252017-07-17T21:31:09Z2017-07-17T21:31:09ZMexico: The Cactus Democracy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178363/original/file-20170717-5678-1o1hxw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.wallpapermade.com/wallpaper/5182/cactus-in-mexico-desert-3d-art/">Austin/WallpaperMade</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This research note on Mexican politics and society was inspired by a recent visit to Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca, as a guest of the country’s <a href="http://www.ine.mx/">Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE)</a>.</em></p>
<p>Visitors to Mexico are almost always struck by its dramatic contrasts. Here is a vast and varied, rugged and beautiful land so sparkling yet so spoiled by contradictions that it seems to be less a country and more a word for bewilderment, a place where reality is undone by the unreal. The Chilean poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda">Pablo Neruda</a> famously described Mexico as a land of deserts and hurricanes, colourful creations and violent destruction, a spellbinding place “covered in flowers and thorns”. He saw Mexico as the land of the cactus plant. So does the official symbol: a golden eagle devouring a snake perched atop a prickly pear cactus. </p>
<p>Found almost everywhere throughout the country, from Sonora in the north to inland Oaxaca in the south, the cactus has become an enduring symbol of the country’s reputation abroad and an ingredient of the staple diet of its people at home. The cactus comes in many hundreds of varieties, but common to all are their resilience to melting sun and torrential rain, their gorgeous orange, red, fuchsia and yellow blooms, their mildly savoury <em>nopal</em> flesh and sweet tuna fruit, all of this manifested in daunting columns and paddles shielded by razor-sharp thorns that warn away would-be predators. </p>
<h2>Cactus magic</h2>
<p>We could say that Mexico is marked by cactus magic. Its beauty is everywhere, from the old-world civility to the youthful hipster entrepreneurs hungry for angel investors and high-tech innovation. It is more than volcanoes, blue skies, vivid colours and breathtaking landscapes dotted with green cactus of many shapes and sizes. Green is the well-chosen local colour of hope, a symbol of the cheerful optimism of people. Their enthusiasm for things is plentiful. </p>
<p>Mexico unsurprisingly ranks second (after Costa Rica) on the 140-country <a href="http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/mexico">Happy Planet Index</a>, designed by the UK’s New Economics Foundation to measure human wellbeing and environmental impact. Millions of Mexican citizens live well and believe in tomorrow. They seem remarkably unafraid of death, even enjoying an annual public holiday (<a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_de_Muertos"><em>Día de Muertos</em></a>) when in old Aztec style they eat and drink to its health. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
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<p>On the ground, people radiate warmth. Folklore has it that Mexican citizens unfailingly mistrust their neighbours. Opinion polls, for what they are worth, suggest that around 70% don’t trust other people, which is unsurprising when it is considered that most of those same people are worried about crime and general insecurity. </p>
<p>What is surprising for outsiders is the way Mexicans seem to be specialists in disarming smiles. Their children are taught its arts from an early age. Among the gringos to the north, toothy disembodied smiles can be unnerving; greetings are often robotic, or uncaringly insouciant. South of the border, by contrast, people are typically polite, courteous and helpful. People seem always to mean well. Their sensibility is serious and caring, a secular gift perhaps from past times when people of religion found God in all things. </p>
<p>In the land of the beautiful cactus, birth rates are unusually high, and many people radiate a native youthfulness. More than half its citizens are younger than 30. The median age is 27. Children are valued. And Mexicans are pretty people, living proof that mixing peoples makes for good looks. Indigenous peoples (21.5% of the population) have a visible presence. Having survived the mass murders that swept the whole subcontinent following European colonisation - the largest-ever recorded genocide in human history - they are today still undervalued and forced to suffer the discriminations of prejudice and poverty. They suffer marginality, yet nothing like the horrid apartheid imposed upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Canada exists in Mexico. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178310/original/file-20170715-14267-1djzt6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
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<p>The charming southern city of Oaxaca stands as a striking symbol of this side of life in the land of the cactus. The first-ever indigenous president of the republic, the Zapotec shepherd <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Ju%C3%A1rez">Benito Juárez</a> (1806–1872), grew up there. Today, the city is a beacon of <em>mestizos</em> diversity, a reminder to the rest of the country of its roots in the pre-conquest indigenous past. Millions of Mexican citizens know by heart the advice that greets visitors at the entrance of the remarkable <a href="http://www.mna.inah.gob.mx/">National Anthropology Museum</a>, among the great wonders of the country: the appreciation of past civilisations is the secret of a successful people and the guarantee of their future. </p>
<p>Here is country where crude nationalism is difficult for the simple reason that Toltec, Mayan, Teotihuacan and Aztec influences meld and merge with the culture of the Spanish conquistadores and the globalising influences of the 21st century. Almost everybody realises there is no such thing as a “pure” Mexican. Whatever <em>caudillo</em> leaders have said in the past, or might in future say, Mexican people think that talk of a Mexican People is a fiction. </p>
<p>The hybridity shows up in the wide regional differences, in the way people dress, in their wonderfully diverse cuisine, their dialects and architectural styles. Mexico is certainly not <em>tortillas y salsa</em>. People are proud of their <em>escamoles</em> (desert ant eggs) and <em>chalupas</em> (dried grasshoppers) and chocolate sauce <em>mole</em> and their surprisingly good red wine from areas in Baja California. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
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<p>The Mexican media scene is just as lively. Though television, still the dominant medium, is the province of media oligarchs like <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mexico-richest-man-carlos-slim-press-conference-us-president-donald-trump-tensions-mexican-border-a7548721.html">Carlos Slim</a>, possibly the world’s richest man, diversity in the domain of radio and newspapers is flourishing, while new social media platforms, as elsewhere, are now turning out to be the great disruptor of things. There are plenty of brave journalists willing to take on the pharaohs of power. Thanks to them, the church, long ago disestablished, now suffers a permanent crisis of identity, charges of paedophilia and hypocrisy, with declining attendance, especially among the younger generation. </p>
<p>The secularity breeds levity. People’s sense of humour is palpable, especially when it comes to people’s favourite subject, their great northern neighbour. In the land of the cactus, everyone seems capable of reciting the old remark (attributed to seven-term President Porfirio Díaz) that Mexico’s misfortune is that it is so far from God and so near to the United States. Mexicans are generally fond of their northern neighbours. Many have worked in the United States for short periods, and everyone seems to have a relative or friend now living there. But mere mention of Donald Trump triggers instant laughter. More than a few joke that his Big Wall plans have already been scuppered by the huge Mexican diaspora, which long ago moved the border north, to include Los Angeles, now the second-largest Mexican city. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
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<h2>Perils</h2>
<p>All these fruits and flowers are impressive. So are the textbook appearances of what can be called the local cactus democracy, which appears to be in blooming good health. Measured by global standards, Mexico has been freed from the curse of dictatorship. The country enjoys regular free and fair elections among competing political parties held in check by such vibrant media publications as La Jornada, El Universal and Reforma. </p>
<p>In 2014, Mexico’s Congress approved sweeping political reforms that included stronger checks on the powers of the president, expanded voting rights for Mexican citizens living outside the country and special provisions for achieving gender parity in the parliament. A clear majority of Mexican citizens say they prefer democracy to any other system of government. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
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<p>Yet lurking beneath these democratic appearances are the prickly, dangerous sides of Mexico. Tourists understandably moan about unreliable public transport, traffic jams, street robberies and the capital city’s rotten air. But the challenges facing the cactus democracy are more serious, and run much deeper. They are structural: less immediately visible and more to do with dysfunctional institutions in need of serious reform.</p>
<p>The most obvious perilous dynamic is structural poverty. Everywhere visitors travel they encounter the begging mother with child, men wrapped in blankets sleeping rough near the church, villagers and barrio slum dwellers cursing the lack of electricity and running water. A distinct underclass of precariously living poor people is part of Mexican reality. </p>
<p>World Bank data shows that 61% of the country’s adult citizens don’t have a bank account, half of them because their yearly income is “insufficient or variable”. The Mexican economy has been dubbed the Aztec Tiger, or spoken of in terms of “move over Brazil” (nowadays that’s an easy comparison) and even, improbably, “the new China”. The fact is Mexico is a two-tiered economy, with no major government or opposition plans for a new taxation system or the redistribution of wealth and income, especially towards indigenous citizens, whose poverty rates are highest. </p>
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<span class="caption">Oaxaca.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
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<p>Overall, in defiance of the democratic principle of equality, at least a third of adult citizens live in severe or extreme poverty. Since 2000, when the shift to multi-party democracy began, the number of people officially living beneath the poverty line has increased by 11 million, to 52.3% of the population. In the land of the cactus, the top 20% of the population earns more than 13 times the bottom 20% of the population. The wealthiest 1% rakes in more than a fifth of total annual income. </p>
<p>Wealth imbalances, poverty and low wages on this scale are bound up with top-to-bottom corruption. In many settings, gifts and hospitality, unregulated by law, are the normal way of getting things done. Mexico’s impressive Federal Penal Code (<em>Código Penal Federal</em>) does specify stiff penalties for such criminal acts as bribery, abuse of office, extortion and facilitation, but these anti-corruption laws are almost never enforced. </p>
<p>Lawlessness is rampant. Many businesses have to deal daily with organised criminals. Public officials are rarely held liable for illegal acts. Bribery and collusion (<em>clientelismo</em>) between the police, judges and criminal groups is hard to measure, but rumours say it’s rampant. Embezzlement of funds, theft, impunity and weak law enforcement are inevitably the result. </p>
<p>The worst form of corruption comes tipped with fear and blood. Fed by a criminal reserve army of the poor, the cactus democracy is engaged in a war against itself. In recent years, the scale of mafia violence and disappearances has grown by alarming proportions. During the past decade, more than 50 elected city mayors have been assassinated. In the past year alone, under the presidency of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2017/jul/07/mexico-to-pay-for-border-wall-says-trump-in-front-of-pena-nieto-video">Enrique Peña Nieto</a>, the country saw an official 22% increase in homicides, from 17,034 in 2015 to 20,789. The actual figures may be higher. According to Mexico’s Interior Department, there were nearly 10,000 killings nationwide during the first five months of this year - a spike of about 30% compared with the same period last year. </p>
<p>No democracy can survive such figures indefinitely. Both state institutions and the rather weak fledgling civil society of Mexico are already suffering the effects of dis-organised crime and the privatisation of death and disappearance. Evidence is growing that the major part of the murderous violence is no longer linked to the drug trade. The violence has rather become an end in itself, big business that endangers the precious legitimacy and efficacy of many public institutions. During the past two decades, for instance, freedom of communication has been badly damaged by violent attacks on media buildings, widespread intimidation, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/world/americas/veracruz-mexico-reporters-killed.html?action=click&contentCollection=Americas&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article">murder of over 100 journalists</a> and the disappearance of at least 25 others. The judiciary is floundering under the pressure of large-scale terrorist violence: during the years of the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) alone, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/mexico">Human Rights Watch</a> reports that at least 35,000 citizens were murdered, yet the effective conviction rate of the gangsters responsible was a miserable 0.06%. </p>
<p>Elections free and fair are being poisoned by violent threats and assaults on voters and party candidates. The local deployment of soldiers against the criminal oligarchs and networks meanwhile threatens to undermine public respect for the armed forces. And, in recent months, accused of spying on its lawyer and journalist critics using Israeli software technology, the presidency itself has become engulfed in a potentially major public scandal. </p>
<h2>Elections</h2>
<p>All of this is bad for democracy, if by that word is meant the self-government of people, through their elected representatives, aided by institutions designed to protect citizens in all walks of life from predators. It so happens that in just under a year from now the prickly subjects of poverty, corruption and violence will be the focus of elections scheduled for the lower and upper chambers of the congress and the presidency. This will be the largest-ever election in the history of the country. Officials at the <a href="http://www.ine.mx/">Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE)</a> are already in full swing making arrangements, and doing so with energy, professional dedication and purpose. </p>
<p>Measured by global standards, INE is a special independent organisation actively committed to the protection and flourishing of electoral democracy in Mexico. Its stated brief is to “create conditions for citizens to responsibly exercise their political rights, without ignoring the issues of injustice, inequality, marginalisation or poverty”.</p>
<p>INE stands for the public ownership of voting. It stands against vote buying, campaign overspending and predatory violence. Its job, one could say, is to pluck the spines from the flesh and fruit of the Mexican cactus. Independent of the presidency, and the parliament, it is beholden to neither governments nor markets. It is the BBC of Mexican elections, which means that its role is much more than ensuring that elections are free and fair. Operating within the fields of tension generated by the slow-but-sure breakdown of one-party PRI rule, INE sees itself as having the mission of reminding all Mexicans that they are the owners of elections, that democracy is not for sale, and that therefore the privatisation of elections, for instance by dark money, party bribery, criminal violence and foreign intervention, is the enemy of citizens and the common good. </p>
<h2>The caudillo</h2>
<p>Most impressive, and unusual by world standards, is INE’s employment of citizens, randomly selected on a rotational basis, as trained election monitors and counters of votes. Equally impressive is its Civic Culture (<a href="http://portalanterior.ine.mx/archivos2/portal/DECEYEC/EducacionCivica/estrategiaNacional/">ENCCÍVICA</a>) program. Its aim is to strengthen a civic culture of citizen participation, accountability of power and respect for human rights. </p>
<p>The overall aim of INE is to win public trust in elections, to overcome the disenchantment with democracy in a country where 70% of the population say that they have no influence on government and that politicians never listen to them. Under these conditions, INE functions inevitably as a political lightning rod, attracting more than its fair share of public abuse, much of it ignorant or undeserved, often in the form of sublimated pent-up grievances and frustrations linked to political party rivalries. INE’s work is daily assaulted by media shit storms and Twitter wars. And just over the horizon is the biggest coming challenge to its mission: the possible election to the presidency of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/05/01/andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-mexico-will-wage-a-battle-of-ideas-against-trump/?utm_term=.7acb38981162">Andrés Manuel López Obrador</a>. </p>
<p>A controversial public figure who was formerly mayor of Mexico City, and who came within a whisker of winning the presidency in 2006, Obrador is the local populist outsider on the rise. Leader of the party known as the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) and currently front-runner in the polls, he specialises in lashing out against corruption and violence, which is curable, he once said, through “hugs not bullets” (“<em>abrazos, no balazos</em>”). He vows to reverse by means of a referendum the privatisation of Mexico’s oil resources, and says he wants a much tougher, “sovereign” Mexican foreign policy. </p>
<p>For outsiders, López Obrador is a strange political animal: an economic nationalist, a supporter of low taxes, market competition and a welfare state, an opportunist, a man of the people, a <em>caudillo</em> who fancies himself as a great saviour and redeemer (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/redeemers-by-enrique-krauze-book-review.html">Enrique Krauze</a>) of the Mexican nation. On Twitter he rails against “the mafia of power”, which helps explain his habit of calling elections he loses “a farce”, as he did big time in 2006, when his supporters disputed the results for many months and went on to proclaim López Obrador as the “legitimate president”, crowning him head of a parallel government in a dramatic public ceremony, staged in the capital city’s main square, the Zócalo. </p>
<p>Whatever is thought of López Obrador, his track record and proposed policies, there’s no doubt his electoral magnetism stems in part from his frontal attacks on the establishment (<em>la casta</em>) and his political knack of stirring up a sense among citizens of the possibility that things can be different, that the ruling PRI-dominated regime can be felled. His victory next year would be highly significant, not just for Mexico, but for the whole region. It would signal an end to a presidency mired in corruption and a surveillance scandal. </p>
<p>López Obrador’s victory would be a victory for a new politics of apostolic zeal. It would be the final death knell of one-party dominance, at the highest level of state. It certainly would fuel deep tensions with the embattled Trump administration. But it may also turn out that López Obrador will not win, or that he will refuse to admit defeat, as he did in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/world/americas/mexico-governor-race-ruling-party-pri.html">recent governorship election</a> in Estado de México. Whether he can attract voters to the polls and win sufficient support, or whether he will honestly and humbly acknowledge defeat, are among the life-and-death questions now facing the democracy of this beautiful land of cactus flowers and thorns.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81025/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
This research note on Mexican politics and society was inspired by a recent visit to Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca, as a guest of the country’s Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE). Visitors to Mexico are…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/767962017-04-29T03:27:12Z2017-04-29T03:27:12ZWittgenstein and the Dangers of Certainty<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167244/original/file-20170429-13003-1ci98sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Swansea, Wales, September 1947</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ben Richards</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The following notes on the politics of rising uncertainty and the future of democracy were prepared for the inaugural CISS global forum, Peace and Security under Uncertainty, Quarantine Station, Sydney, April 28 2017. The remarks were inspired by a remarkable set of 676 aphorisms known as <a href="http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/files/wittgenstein-on-certainty.pdf">On Certainty</a> (Über Gewissheit). These jottings were made by the Vienna-born philosopher <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/">Ludwig Wittgenstein</a> during the final 18 months of his life, on the move, from Ithaca to Vienna and Oxford, from mid-1949 to his death – 66 years ago today – on April 29 1951.</em> </p>
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<p>Although nobody can be certain, there seems to be growing public agreement that our planet and its peoples have entered a new era of great uncertainty. Drawn by such forces as big-power militarism, war, environmental destruction, economic stagnation, deepening inequality and populism, the tides of uncertainty appear to be rising. Some observers even speak of a great regression towards catastrophe, a return to the world of the 1920s and 1930s fuelled by widespread feelings of disquiet and fear that the future will yield only threats, rather than new opportunities to live well. </p>
<p>These claims about a new age of uncertainty are themselves dogged by doubts. When seen historically, for instance, it’s quite uncertain whether, and to what extent, the new uncertainty exceeds or even matches previous periods of calamity. Is our era really comparable to the great disruption and turbulence of the first half of the 20th century, with its economic crises, dissolved empires, democratic collapse, totalitarianism and catastrophic global wars? Or how do the uncertainties of our age compare with the great religious turmoil of the late medieval and early modern period, masterfully analysed by <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1990-09-08/entertainment/ca-597_1_jean-delumeau-original-sin-western-guilt-culture">Jean Delumeau</a>: the fears of damnation and death mobilised by the church and compounded by episodes of military violence, famine, disease and the widespread belief in witchcraft and other forces of magic? </p>
<p>We don’t really know how to respond straightforwardly to these challenging, unsettling questions. When comparing whole epochs, it’s not clear how best to classify let alone measure the experience of uncertainty. Even the definition of uncertainty remains uncertain. That should come as no surprise, for only lived experiences unaffected by the flow of time can be defined with any certainty. So we could say that uncertainty is a fickle character, a moody challenger of certitude and a capricious tormentor of human conviction. That is a key reason why Ludwig Wittgenstein’s <em>On Certainty</em> (Über Gewissheit) continues to be a living masterpiece, a deservedly classic work that remains highly relevant for our times.</p>
<h2>Everyday life</h2>
<p><em>On Certainty</em> is a text that can plausibly be interpreted as an anthem against the human will to certitude and mastery of the world. Most obviously, it reminds us that uncertainty is an intimate, everyday matter. There is a personal dimension of the experience of not knowing exactly who we are, what our world is and where both we and our world are heading. Big talk of global spikes and planetary spectres of uncertainty is one thing. Daily living with uncertainty is another. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1175&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1175&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167241/original/file-20170429-12963-15r7kx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1175&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>We typically cope with uncertainty by setting it aside and hiding away from it. We imagine it has no grip on our daily lives. We hedge ourselves with certainties. We build nests of predictability. Whatever doubts we harbour, we do so on the basis of supposing things to be fixed, certain, settled. “The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty,” wrote Wittgenstein (115). Just as a child “learns by believing the adult” and suspending doubt, which “comes after belief” (160), so in our daily lives all of us arm ourselves with unshakeable beliefs and cocoon ourselves within language-shaped practices that we suppose to be indubitable, “true” and morally “right”. “I act with complete certainty,” remarks Wittgenstein. “But this certainty is my own.” (174)</p>
<p>We doze, pillow talk, spring from our beds the same side each and every morning. We sit on the toilet; wash our faces, peer in the mirror at our bodies while brushing our teeth. We boil kettles, make tea, drink coffee, kiss loved ones goodbye, catch buses, walk, mount our bicycles, send text messages, scan breaking news, say good morning, daydream before wielding the word “absolutely” in our first morning conversations. Certainty is our mantra against lost bearings, but it is not just a practical remedy for confusion and disempowerment: certainty is a condition of possibility of our being-in-the-world. </p>
<h2>Language games</h2>
<p>A second pertinent insight provided by Wittgenstein’s <em>On Certainty</em> has to do with his thoughts on the contingent and fabricated quality of certainty. By thinking with and against the Cambridge Apostle defender of “here is one hand, here is another” common sense <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._Moore">G.E. Moore</a>, Wittgenstein points out in these aphorisms that the word certainty (Gewissheit) and its family of terms are fixated on a set of meanings that include determined, not variable, reliable, sure (Latin: <em>certus</em>: settled, sure), not to be doubted, established as a “fact”, or (more strongly) as “truth”. Consoling and comforting they all may be, but all these words serve to obfuscate the anchored, embedded, thoroughly contextual and contingent quality of what we take for granted, or agree upon. </p>
<p>“Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement [Anerkennung],” (378) says Wittgenstein. The thought is radical: what we take to be true, factual, evidence-based, certain and incontrovertible is always and everywhere anchored, positioned and defined within a “language game”. Though he does not say things this way, Wittgenstein in effect revives a now-obsolete verb from the early 16th century: to certain, which means to make certain, or to certify something as beyond doubt. The point is that all truth claims are assertions made from within the confines of a given language game. What counts as evidence and “the facts”, and all testing, confirmation and disconfirmation of truth claims based on “evidence” and “the facts”, takes place within the scaffolding (Gerüst) of a language game (105). “The reason why the use of the expression ‘true or false’ has something misleading about it,” Wittgenstein notes, “is that it is like saying ‘it tallies with the facts or it doesn’t’, and the very thing that is in question here is what counts as ‘tallying’ [Übereinstimmung].” (199) </p>
<p>Certainty about ourselves and the world derives from our efforts to make things certain, to certify them. Evidence is adduced. Facts are artefacts. Truth is claimed. Certainty is fabricated, and it thus has a time-bounded quality. “When language-games change,” he wrote, “then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.” (65; 256) It follows that “what men and women consider reasonable alters”, says Wittgenstein. “At certain periods, men and women find reasonable what at other periods they found unreasonable. And vice versa.” (336)</p>
<p>Nothing is forever. Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs. Not even taxes and death are certain, we could say. Although Wittgenstein doesn’t put things this way, truth claims, paradoxically, stir up doubts about truth. Truth is a contaminant of truth. Its yearning for certainty calls into question things that are taken for granted. Nothing is certain but the uncertainty of the unforeseen. Hence Wittgenstein appeals for greater humility about what we know, or suppose we know. He asks us to imagine language games in which an understanding of “knowledge” and even the word “know” are entirely absent (443; 562). (Think of the Pitjantjatjara peoples of central Australia, who use a family of terms such as mula, mulapa, mula-mula, mula-mulani to describe speaking honestly as synonymous with convincing someone of something and asking them in the same breath whether they agree.) Wittgenstein also calls on all believers in evidence, facts and truth to acknowledge the contingency of their own assertiveness. “Suppose it were forbidden to say ‘I know’, he wrote, so that we were "only allowed to say 'I believe I know’?” (366)</p>
<h2>Democracy</h2>
<p>There’s another noteworthy insight to be found within the aphorisms of <em>On Certainty</em>: Wittgenstein’s conviction that the “groundlessness [Grundlosigkeit] of our believing” (166) poses a great difficulty for our era, especially for those professions and organisations committed to the gathering of evidence and the pursuit of fact-based truth. Rephrased in more nuanced terms that go well beyond his limited political horizons, we could say that the special challenge is to live our lives with a tolerable measure of certainty all the while recognising that our different and various ways of being-in-the-world are groundless, in the sense that they are without ultimate foundations and, hence, haunted by uncertainty. </p>
<p>There’s a French proverb that runs <em>rien n’est sûr que la chose incertaine</em> (nothing’s certain but uncertainty). This could easily be a motto for democracy. Considered as a political form and as a whole way of life, democracy is like no other. All hitherto existing political forms, as well as the emerging Russian, Turkish and other despotisms of our day, try to handle uncertainty by attempting to annihilate it. For instance, <em>tyranny</em> imposes certainty through tough public order measures that have the unintended effect of triggering disquiet among its subjects and (as Lucian’s famous tract on the Sicilian tyrant <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl2/wl216.htm">Phalaris</a> reminds us) endless sleepless nights for the ruler who grows afraid of plots, assassinations and popular rebellion. <em>Oligarchy</em> supposes that the ruling few can quell their infighting and rule in calm unison by leaving their loyal subjects to cope “in peace” with their existential uncertainties. <em>Monarchy</em> is a form of God-given government guided by a different formula for deciding, on the basis of blood lineage and pregnancy, who should rule, and how accession from one ruler to another takes place. </p>
<p>Measured in terms of the uncertainty problematic, democracy is different, and unique. Considered ideally as a form of self-government of people who treat each other as equals, it is the only political form that publicly admits of uncertainty as well as enables people to deal constructively with its potentially damaging effects. The old complaint about democracy, that it puts power in the hands of ignorant “commoners” who then behave like the <a href="http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/The%20Gadarene%20Swine%20Fallacy.htm">foolish swine of Gadara</a>, is unconvincing. </p>
<p>In practice, democracy depends upon institutions that provide secure lifeboats in seas of uncertainty: written constitutions and rule of law procedures; timetabled elections; sitting parliaments; integrity watchdogs; public service bureaucracies and media platforms. By means of these and other institutions, democracy thus enables people and their representatives to spot and deal with the sources of destructive uncertainty, like reckless military adventures, gang violence and market failures, including risky and fool-headed efforts to monetise uncertainty using such financial instruments as derivative securities, indemnities and catastrophe bonds.</p>
<p>Democracy also whips up uncertainties. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/democracy-and-the-market/8BB2B73D2DBB302B681B61D622F9B4BB">Adam Przeworski</a> long ago reminded us that in matters of policy making democracy “institutionalises uncertainty”, but the drivers of this uncertainty are not just party competition and periodic elections. It is the public openness, institutional pluralism and continuous public scrutiny of arbitrary power typical of democracy that enable individuals, groups and whole organisations to question and overturn the supposedly “natural” order of things. Fallibility is a guiding principle of democracy. When it works well, democracy casts doubts on what Wittgenstein called “complete conviction, the total absence of doubt” (194). </p>
<p>Democracy tutors people’s sense of pluralism. It has quantum effects. It robs reality of its reality, which is why political smoke and mirrors and lying are deemed unwelcome. Democracy serves reminders that “truth” rests upon acknowledgment, and that “truth” has many faces. It tempts citizens to think for themselves; to see the same world in different ways, from different angles; and to sharpen their overall sense that prevailing power relationships are not “natural”, but contingent. </p>
<p>We could say that democracy triggers a long-term mood swing, a transformation of people’s perceptions of the world that Wittgenstein’s <em>On Certainty</em> manages to capture well. The metaphysical idea of an objective, out-there-at-a-distance “reality” is weakened; so too is the presumption that stubborn “factual truth” is superior to power. </p>
<p>The fabled distinction between what people can see with their eyes and what they are told about the emperor’s new clothes breaks down. Especially under media-saturated conditions, when vibrant democracies are marked by dynamism, pluralism and an entangled multiverse of competing stories told about how the world works, “information” ceases to be a fixed category with incontrovertible content. What counts as information is less and less understood by citizens and their representatives as “brute physical facts” (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle">John Searle</a>), or as chunks of unassailable “reality”. <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28112-quantum-weirdness-proved-real-in-first-loophole-free-experiment/">Quantum weirdness</a> gets the upper hand. What is called “reality”, including the “reality” promoted by the powerful, comes to be understood as always “reported reality”, as “reality” produced by some for others, in other words, as mediated messages that are shaped and re-shaped and re-shaped again in the process of transmission. Reality is multiple and mutable, a matter of re-description and interpretation – and of the power marshalled by wise citizens and their representatives to prevent particular interpretations of the world from being forced down others’ throats. </p>
<h2>The curse of uncertainty</h2>
<p>It may be thought that all of the king’s horses and all the king’s men are unlikely to reverse this fallibilist trend. Wittgenstein seemed to think so; once it takes grip on people’s lives, uncertainty about certainty is irreversible, or so <em>On Certainty</em> implies. We should be less certain. </p>
<p>Democracy requires wise citizens and wise representatives: experienced and humble people who know they don’t know everything, and who therefore are suspicious of those who think they do, especially when they try to camouflage or enforce their arrogant will to power over others. But there have been many times in the past when the political form known as democracy destroys wisdom in this sense. When things go well, democracy provides spaces and mechanisms for people to define with some certainty their own insecurities. When things go badly, democracy does the opposite: it produces feelings of uncertainty that grip millions of people, sometimes with decadent effects. </p>
<p>Pressured by outside forces and internal weaknesses, democracy stumbles, paralyses its own workings, produces an excess of uncertainty. Democracy is cursed by uncertainty. It nurtures feelings that there’s too much confusion and too little relief. It begins to be ripped apart by uncertainty, catapulted into chaos. External discomfort and internal confusion feed upon each other. The decadence gives heart to wilful fantasists sure of their ground. Power mongers armed with their Big Truth pounce. Loud-mouthed people who “talk rather more about certain things than the rest of us” (338) say they can put an end to uncertainty. Citizens who have lost their bearings pay attention. The old <a href="https://archive.org/details/acompleatcollec00raygoog">17th-century proverb</a> then applies: “He that leaves certainty and sticks to chance, When fools pipe he may dance.” That is the moment when the tyrant, the fascist or the populist despot makes their appearance and offers their poisonous gifts to the confused, the perplexed sufferers of unbearable uncertainty. </p>
<p>In our times, described by some as a new age of uncertainty, might the moment of popular submission to grand certainties once again be heading our way? </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167242/original/file-20170429-12992-lmp420.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez campaigning in Caracas, 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Jorge Silva</span></span>
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<p><em>This column article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures-14603">Democracy Futures</a> series, a joint global initiative with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76796/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The following notes on the politics of rising uncertainty and the future of democracy were prepared for the inaugural CISS global forum, Peace and Security under Uncertainty, Quarantine Station, Sydney…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/744272017-03-13T06:10:26Z2017-03-13T06:10:26ZThe Cherry Blossom Uprising: Monitory Democracy in Korea<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160444/original/image-20170313-19256-pdkc4d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anti-Park protesters in Seoul stage a candlelight vigil calling for her impeachment and arrest.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Political scientists trained or based in the Atlantic region have a bad habit of ignoring trends in our Asia-Pacific region. When they do pay attention to its dynamics, they often misleadingly measure them by their own particular standards dressed up as false universals. Larry Diamond’s <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/thespiritofdemocracy/larrydiamond/9780805089134/">Spirit of Democracy</a> (2008) is an influential case in point. It measures the whole world by the norm of what he and his fellow American political scientists call “liberal democracy”. By this he means: a political system founded on “regular, free, and fair elections” that guarantee “individual freedom” thanks to a vibrant “civil society”, a multi-party system, a written constitution and “control over the military and state security apparatus by civilians who are ultimately accountable to the people through elections”. </p>
<p>The dramatic impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in Korea shows why the analysts and friends of democracy need to rethink and reject these biased liberal presumptions. Something dramatically <em>non-liberal</em> has just happened in the Republic of Korea. Monitory democracy, what Korean scholars and citizens call <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20151129000437"><em>pasugun min ju ju ei</em></a>, has scored an important victory against an elected president secretly backed by family-controlled “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol">chaebol</a>” business conglomerates. </p>
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<span class="caption">Protesters calling for the impeachment and arrest of Park Geun-hye set off fireworks near the Presidential Blue House, central Seoul, in December 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters</span></span>
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<p>Last Friday, the Constitutional Court ruled that former President Park had infringed upon the constitution and other laws by abusing her status and power for the interests of her long-time friend <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2017/03/251_225436.html">Choi Soon-sil</a>. The investigations of the court, backed by muckraking investigative journalists and courageous citizens’ protests, revealed the deeply damaging effects of dark money on Korean democracy.</p>
<p>An independent counsel team noted that more than 50 leading Korean companies had provided 77.4 billion won ($US66.4 million) in funding for two foundations controlled by Choi. The sums are staggering. The Samsung Group “donated” 20.4 billion won. The Hyundai Motor Group chipped in 12.8 billion won and the SK Group added an extra 7.8 billion won. The independent counsel team investigating the scandal regarded the donations as bribes from the conglomerates, which were seeking business favours in return.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160432/original/image-20170313-19247-15g580a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Impeached President Park Geun-hye.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Korean Culture and Information Service</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Separation of powers</h2>
<p>These findings, backed by determined street protests by brave citizens throughout the harsh winter months, have great significance, not only for the future of Korea, a strategically significant wealthy democracy facing <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-moment-for-south-korea">new military pressures</a>, but for the whole of our Asia-Pacific region. The Cherry Blossom Uprising, let’s call it, has shown that peaceful, digitally connected citizens can act as dynamos of the democratisation of governmental power. The success of the citizen uprising proves that things can be changed by citizens in between “free and fair” elections that yield a corrupted government lacking public legitimacy. </p>
<p>The Cherry Blossom Uprising shows as well that democracy is much more than “free and fair” elections. Liberals take note: my attempt (with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Sang-jin_(sociologist)">Sang-Jin Han</a>) to sketch a new history of democracy for Korean readers, <em>Monitory Democracy and the Future of Korean Politics</em>, points out that the years since 1945 have witnessed the creation of scores of new watchdog bodies and public scrutiny experiments (what Koreans call <em>pasugun</em>) designed to keep tabs on those who exercise power, especially in the fields of business and government, and in cross-border settings. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160439/original/image-20170313-19270-eh6yl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>Seen from this perspective, what is really significant about the Cherry Blossom Uprising is that it shows that democracy is coming to have a new historical meaning, that it should nowadays be understood as self-government of citizens and their chosen representatives by means of periodic elections <em>plus</em> the continuous public scrutiny and restraint of power wherever it is exercised, in the bedroom, in the boardroom, behind closed doors, or on the battlefield. </p>
<p>Democracy is becoming a dynamic, leaks-ridden, noisy affair, an unending effort to prevent the abuse of power, wherever and whenever it happens. Local proof that Korea has entered the age of monitory democracy came last week in the form of a rare “supplementary opinion” by one of the eight Constitutional Court justices who made a unanimous verdict to oust Park. <a href="http://english.ccourt.go.kr/cckhome/eng/introduction/organization/justices.do#none">Justice Ahn Chang-ho</a> noted that one of the lessons of the Park-Choi scandal lies with the concentration of power in the president. He pointed out that the existing constitution, revised in 1987 in the wake of a pro-democracy movement, affirmed the principle of a direct popular vote for the president. While that reform put an end to successive military dictatorships, which began with Park Geun-hye’s father, the late President Park Chung-hee, in 1961, the 1987 basic law still enables elected presidents to abuse their considerable powers. </p>
<p>In effect, said Justice Ahn Chang-ho, the “imperial presidency” was the root cause of the Park-Choi scandal. It produced meddling in state affairs by the president’s civilian associates and the collusion between the president and businesses, all in the name of a fictive “sovereign people”. </p>
<p>In recent days, the supplementary opinion has been widely noted and discussed publicly. It will surely help fuel efforts to remove powerful watchdog agencies, such as the tax service and anti-trust and financial agencies, from the clutches of future elected presidents. More monitory democracy would in effect mean the abolition of the imperial presidency: not just its transformation into a semi-presidential or Taiwanese-style double executive system, in which the president shares power with the prime minister and a parliamentary cabinet system, but the empowerment of <em>unelected</em> monitory bodies dedicated to the <em>restraint and humbling of arbitrary state power</em>. </p>
<h2>Democracy Failure</h2>
<p>The Cherry Blossom Uprising has an even deeper significance. It points to the need to redefine democracy much more capaciously than liberals do, and to recognise that “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/recession-regulation-markets">democracy failure</a>” happens when arbitrary power is allowed to flourish in the big-money realm of capitalist markets. </p>
<p>It’s now an open secret in Korean society that business tycoons who made donations to foundations run by Choi couldn’t easily reject demands from the president or her aides, for fear of government reprisals. But what’s also clear is that the family-controlled “chaebol” conglomerates are themselves rotten boroughs. </p>
<p>Stable cleaning inside government, many Korean citizens are now saying, requires the radical reform of the “chaebol” conglomerates themselves. In other words: the best remedy for democracy failure is the strengthening of democracy <em>inside</em> the corporate world.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160445/original/image-20170313-19226-199zd7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lee Jae-yong is accused of offering bribes worth 43 billion won ($US36 million) to Choi in return for the Park administration’s backing of a merger of two Samsung affiliates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jung Ui-Chel/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Before last week’s impeachment decision, the country’s major conglomerates had already come up with reform plans. Many critics said that the plans were much too timid and tepid. Following the arrest of Samsung Electronics vice-chairman <a href="http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170217000004">Lee Jae-yong</a>, Samsung Group’s de facto boss, the country’s biggest conglomerate changed its tune. It has now closed its Future Strategy Office, the body that nurtured the company’s links with government. Samsung has also announced that hereon any company sponsorship or donations deal exceeding 1 billion won will have to be approved by its board of directors.</p>
<p>SK Hynix and SK Telecom are following suit, and the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), the “chaebol” lobby group that helped collect bribe money from the conglomerates, also announced plans to reform itself. Is it just possible, with a bit of luck, citizen pressure and the loyal backing of the police and army, that Korea is setting a bold new trend, doing something that no democracy in the Asia Pacific has so far dared do properly: putting an end to dark money and crony capitalism in public affairs?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74427/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Political scientists trained or based in the Atlantic region have a bad habit of ignoring trends in our Asia-Pacific region. When they do pay attention to its dynamics, they often misleadingly measure…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/728472017-02-17T22:42:08Z2017-02-17T22:42:08ZThe Death of President Trump<p>We live in darkening times, so it’s time for some dark humour.</p>
<p>Inspired by the antics of a Big Man with a Big Mouth, think just for a moment about the important subject of how democracies treat their elected leaders. When they function well, democracies are irreverently harsh on those who take decisions on behalf of others. Why? In no small measure because democracy has the effect of destroying the fiction that there is, or could be, a unified body politic symbolised and held together by a Great Leader. </p>
<p>The coming of democracy ensures that political communities are permanently fractured. Differences of opinion and ways of life flourish. Whatever contemporary populists might say, there’s no “Sovereign Nation”, no “Body Politic” and no single unified body called “The People” who bind everything together. Compromise, consensus and working agreements to disagree happen, of course. But typically there are chronic tensions between civil societies and governments, and conflicts as well within civil societies and governments themselves. Whatever unity the polity enjoys is permanently questionable and continually up for grabs, simply because the exercise of power over others is always publicly scrutinised, contested, divided, constrained. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157059/original/image-20170216-27409-gjgkoe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russian Czar Peter the Great (1672 - 1725)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Kent/Jacob Abbott</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The contrast with early modern European monarchies and 20th-century totalitarian regimes is striking, and revealing. Think for a few seconds about how monarchies once symbolically represented the power they wielded over their subjects. The physical body of kings like Charles I (1600 - 1649) and Peter the Great (1672 - 1725) was conceived both in the figure of God the Father and Christ the Son. The monarch’s body was divine. It was therefore considered immortal and unbreakable. It could not be admitted that kings died. Their bodies symbolised infinite perfection. </p>
<p>Like God and his Son, kings could do no wrong. That was why the violation of their bodies - through un-Godly acts ranging from unsolicited touching by their subjects through to attempted regicide - were harshly punishable. The body of kings also symbolised the unbreakable quality of the “body politic” over which they ruled. Like God, kings were omnipresent and their bodies coterminous with the polity itself. Monarchs were God-given givers of laws. But they also resembled God the Son. Sent by God to redeem humankind, kings had a “body natural” - the sign of God in the world - as well as a body politic. Just like the persons of the Trinity, the two bodies plus the authority they radiated were one, inseparable and indivisible. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157070/original/image-20170216-27402-1xpbyk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pol Pot (1928 - 1998) addresses a closed meeting in Phnom Penh after the 1975 Khmer Rouge victory.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">History Place</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s a strange historical fact that 20th-century totalitarianism thrived on a version of the same fiction of a unified body politic, “pure as a diamond”, as the butcher Great Leader Pol Pot explained in a little-known 1949 pamphlet, <em><a href="http://www.moreorless.net.au/killers/pol-pot.html">Monarchy or Democracy</a></em>. In the name of “the people”, but like the monarchies of old, totalitarianism put the body of the Great Leader on a grand pedestal for the grand purpose of establishing Him as the ultimate source of wisdom, strength, knowledge and power. </p>
<p>The embalming and public display of Lenin’s corpse in the Soviet Union in January 1924 was a foretaste of such practices, which reached something of a climax in the huge Memorial Hall edifice in Tiananmen Square constructed in memory of the Great Helmsman of the Chinese people, Mao Tse-tung. Those who have seen it with their own eyes will agree that it’s no simple grave for a common corpse. It more than resembles the royal tombs reserved for the <a href="http://en.chnmuseum.cn/Default.aspx?TabId=520&ExhibitionLanguageID=405&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1">Sons of Heaven</a> who were at once elevated persons and divine persons, in whose bodies time figuratively stood still, forever. </p>
<p>The Tiananmen edifice preserves this custom for a revolutionary saint. It contains a marble statue and a crystal-covered sarcophagus containing Mao’s embalmed remains, together with an inscription in the green marble of its southern wall: a telling phrase dedicated to the memory of “our great leader and teacher Chairman Mao Tse-tung: forever eternal without corrupting”. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Big poster commemorating Mao’s death and the completion of the Memorial Hall, 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Professor Harriet Evans/University of Westminster</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In striking contrast, when they function well, democrats and democracies put embodied notions of power and leadership under a pedestal. Democracies, understood as forms of government and ways of life in which no body rules, dispense with the fetish of rulers. They of course need leaders, respect them, follow them, learn from them - but they do not worship them as Leaders blessed with metaphysical powers. The bodies of leaders like George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon are not reckoned identical with the office of President of the United States. Executive power is disembodied. Representatives are not the same as the roles they play. And that is why, when they function properly, democracies like the United States regularly poke fun publicly at the bodies of politicians, with impunity. </p>
<p>I remember this dollop of dark humour from the darkest moments of the first-term presidency of George W. Bush. Halted by a traffic snarl on a freeway leading into Washington D.C., a driver was startled by shouting. She wound down her window, to be greeted by an excited citizen carrying a jerry can and bearing breaking news. “The president has just been kidnapped by terrorists! They’re demanding a huge ransom, otherwise they say they’ll set him on fire! The government says citizens should contribute, so the situation can be resolved fast.” Replied the startled driver: “How much on average are citizens donating?” Said the messenger: “About a gallon apiece.” </p>
<p>The dark humour’s back, as a Jewish friend of mine reminded me a few days ago. President Donald J. Trump is on his first state visit to Israel, where red tie around his neck he travels to Jerusalem, to open the brand new United States Embassy. There without warning he suffers a massive heart attack. Medical people spoke of acute coronary thrombosis and myocardial infarction. But truth was the Leader was dead. </p>
<p>As the news broke, pandemonium spread through the country, all the way back to Washington. Waiting for instructions, federal agents nervously guarded the body. Eager local Zionists called for the Great Leader Son of Israel to be buried on local soil. An enterprising local undertaker quickly came forward with a funeral plan. “I can arrange everything”, he said. “Best casket, beautiful flowers. Fast service. Reasonable price.” Behind the scenes, United States officials were unpersuaded. “We can’t risk it”, said one, off the record. “Two thousand years ago, another big guy died here. Three days later, he was back on his feet again.”</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures-14603">Democracy Futures</a> series, a joint global initiative with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72847/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
We live in darkening times, so it’s time for some dark humour. Inspired by the antics of a Big Man with a Big Mouth, think just for a moment about the important subject of how democracies treat their elected…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/706532016-12-20T06:03:07Z2016-12-20T06:03:07ZWhy violence in Berlin is dangerous for democracy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150921/original/image-20161220-26732-yffwjx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A festive decoration hangs from the truck that ploughed into the Christmas market in Berlin.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Stay at home and don’t spread rumours,” Berlin’s police chief <a href="@PolizeiBerlin_E">tweeted</a> last night as news spread of the shockingly violent assault on a Christmas market. The incident, now being widely described as a <a href="http://www.taz.de/Weihnachtsmarkt-in-Berlin/!5368077/">deliberate attack</a>, happened just after 8pm local time in Breitscheidplatz, at the foot of the famous bombed-out Kaiser Wilhelm church, in the heart of west Berlin’s fanciest shopping area. </p>
<p>The police are emphasising that investigations are still under way and that no conclusions should yet be drawn. A passenger in the Polish-registered truck is reportedly dead. Its driver, reported to be “<a href="http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/berlin/liveticker-verdaechtiger-afghane-wohl-als-fluechtling-eingereist-25341200">an Afghan and a refugee</a>” and possibly a hijacker, is under arrest. With at least 12 people dead and perhaps 50 people injured, Berlin’s mayor, <a href="http://www.taz.de/Weihnachtsmarkt-in-Berlin/!5368077/">Michael Müller</a>, was quick to arrive at the scene. He told journalists:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s just terrible to see this. It is very depressing, a shock, because we have always hoped that this situation wouldn’t happen in Berlin.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, it now has, in the much-loved city where I have been visiting and working for the past three decades. The political consequences of the attack are naturally hard to predict. But some things can be said with certainty. None of them is easy to swallow. </p>
<p>Whoever the attacker(s) are, and whatever their motives may have been, the parallels with the <a href="https://theconversation.com/nice-attack-brings-a-difficult-question-into-sharp-focus-why-france-62556">truck attack earlier this year</a> on Bastille Day crowds, in the French city of Nice, are unavoidable. Nice’s mayor, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38373867">Christian Estrosi</a>, has already drawn that analogy in a tweet: “Horror in Berlin. Support for the mayor of Berlin and the German people. Never again.” </p>
<p>When that comparison is made, the Berlin violence bodes ill for an already troubled Germany, and for the rest of a deeply troubled Europe. The heartbreaking attack is yet another example of a violent media event with a global footprint, a vicious attack that was ruthlessly calculated, carried out in cold blood, and daringly simple. It was designed not just to spoil the Christmas market fun of Berliners. It was aimed at the heart of the most un-German city, which has suffered modern war and violence many times over, a place and a people renowned for their robust multiculturalism and resilient toleration of differences. </p>
<p>There’s a good chance that Berlin citizens will display a measure of detachment from the language of shock and disapprobation that will surely sweep through the country, and the rest of Europe, during the coming days. We should hope that a local version of Sydney’s <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/martin-place-siege-illridewithyou-hashtag-goes-viral-20141215-127rm1.html">#illridewithyou</a> citizens’ initiative will spring up out of the carnage. Given its history, there’s a good chance that a majority of Berlin citizens will reject the bigoted reactions that are surely coming. Their cool-headed detachment will be needed, because as the news from Berlin wafts like a toxic cloud through Germany, and across the rest of Europe, many strange things are now going to happen. </p>
<p>There may be journalists and politicians who misinterpret the attack as the work of “lone wolves” and “disturbed” individuals. That kind of talk overlooks the larger pattern, the shootings and knifings, the hostage taking, bombings and truck attacks that have already taken place in cities such as Brussels, Köln, Nice, Dijon, Nantes, London and Paris. More urban savagery is surely on its way. </p>
<p>During the coming days and weeks, mainstream media narratives in Germany and elsewhere will no doubt describe all this violence as “inhuman” (strange language, as if “humanity” has a perfect track record in the field of non-violence). There will be talk of threats to “Germany” and the “German way of life”. And if the violence does indeed turn out to be a deliberate attack, and if it is claimed by, or somehow connected to, an Islamic group, there’ll be no end of mutterings and murmurings about the “jihadist cancer” (<a href="https://twitter.com/rupertmurdoch/status/553734788881076225?lang=en">Rupert Murdoch’s words</a>) spreading through our world. </p>
<p>North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister of the interior, <a href="http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/berlin/liveticker-verdaechtiger-afghane-wohl-als-fluechtling-eingereist-25341200">Ralf Jäger</a>, has already described the violence as an act of “terrorism”. President-elect <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/update/2016-12-19/donald-trump-berlin-events-a-terror-attack/">Donald Trump</a> is not far behind. The post-truth ventriloquist is saying that the Berlin carnage is a “terror attack”. It is yet more proof that “Islamist terrorists” slaughter Christians “as part of their global jihad” and (says a tweet) a wake-up call that the “civilized world must change thinking!”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"810988379051610112"}"></div></p>
<p>Yes, a change of thinking is badly needed. But a major problem with this kind of incendiary language is its ignorance of the undeniable fact that Muslim radicalism and violence in Europe and elsewhere are being fuelled by the bigoted fear and hatred of Islam whipped up by the “war on terror”, and by populist parties now operating in practically every European country.</p>
<p>In most parts of the European Union, where more than 20 million Muslim people now dwell, Muslim baiting has become a popular sport. Organised suspicion, insult and denigration of Islam are spreading. The bigotry, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, is <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-european-fear-of-islam-from-paris-to-dresden-36242">the new anti-Semitism</a> that is being peddled, sadly and strangely, by free speech champions, who wilfully muddle the difference between speech that unsettles the powerful and speech that vilifies the powerless.</p>
<p>As more details of the Berlin violence come to hand, we’ll know better what kind of attack this is, and why it happened. The death and maiming of innocent citizens at the foot of the Kaiser Wilhelm church is nevertheless a clear reminder to Berliners, and to thinking citizens everywhere, that civil society and its rules of peaceful civility and the public embrace of difference are gossamer-thin constructions. They are precious customs with no historical guarantees. </p>
<p>The Berlin carnage equally serves as a reminder that European civil societies have their dark side, which are less than civil, not only in their maltreatment and denigration of Muslims, but also in the willingness of their citizens to embrace authoritarian methods of policing and surveillance. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150934/original/image-20161220-26729-1e6jqe5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germany’s KSK special forces in training.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Sohn/sputnik international</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Attacks like the one in Berlin harm democracy because they spread fear and self-censorship among citizens. Just as threatening is the way they strengthen the hand of the garrison state. Dawn police raids, red alerts and security checks are bad for democracy. So are drones and helicopters hovering overhead, troops on the streets, gun battles and, worst of all, the military siege mentality that is settling not just on Muslim minorities, but on the democratic rights of each and every citizen.</p>
<p>There’s a final reason why the murderous attacks in Berlin matter politically. Germany and the rest of Europe are passing through a black swan moment when democratic values and institutions are being challenged frontally by anti-immigrant, Muslim-baiting populism. With general elections less than a year away, the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its support groups <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37274201">are riding high in their political saddles</a>. In September’s regional elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where Angela Merkel’s own constituency is located, the AfD managed to push her CDU party into third place. After Berlin, high on the opium of general disaffection with the way things are going in Germany, the AfD and its many fringe group supporters will likely ride even higher. </p>
<p>What is this AfD phenomenon, which is not just a German peculiarity? The short answer is that it has potentially wide public appeal because it means many different things to so many different people. It attracts the “angry citizen” (Wutbürger) from many different walks of life. In the ranks of the party and the movement are small-business people, football fans, educated middle-class intellectuals and opponents of factory farming. There are neo-Nazis, Christians, Putin sympathisers, street hooligans and the rich upper middle class. </p>
<p>AfD supporters and sympathisers may seem a motley crew, but they have important things in common. They’re against the grand coalition government led by Angela Merkel. They are generally annoyed with politicians and the political establishment. They curse the “lying media”. They’re sure the prevailing party system doesn’t represent either their material interests or their gut feeling that their own nation is drowning in the rising tides of Islam. They particularly object to Merkel’s decision last year to open Germany’s borders to more than a million asylum seekers. </p>
<p>AfD supporters are the Pied Pipers of the new anti-Muslim bigotry, the feeling that Muslims are taking over Europe. They see no need for a New Deal with Muslims, which is in fact what the whole European region now so urgently needs. They say they respect people of the Muslim faith. Then they add in the next breath that they’ve had enough of Muslim asylum seekers, even if they’ve fled for their lives from the war-zone hell of Syria and Iraq. </p>
<p>The new German populists side with people who are just like themselves: good people who are white, upright, German-speaking and hard-working citizens. They say they now want their homeland back. They think of themselves as people of The People. They consider themselves rightful owners of their country. They want to turn back the clock. They want to move forward by stepping back in time, into a world where The People supposedly once ruled, and will now rule again. That’s why they’ll surely try to feed like parasites off the Berlin attack, and why they are dangerous for democracy. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>This column piece is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures-14603">Democracy Futures</a> series, a joint global initiative with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The series aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70653/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Attacks like the one in Berlin harm democracy because they spread fear and self-censorship among citizens.John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/697782016-12-16T21:28:09Z2016-12-16T21:28:09ZWar and democracy in the age of Trump<p>The ancient Greek historian <a href="http://www.shsu.edu/%7Ehis_ncp/Heropers.html">Herodotus</a> once observed that Persian rulers indulged the habit of getting drunk when making important decisions. When sober and sensible next morning, their custom was to reconsider their decision, and either stick to it, or revise or reject it outright. They had another method of decision-making, he noted: they took decisions when sober, then affirmed or declined them when drunk. </p>
<p>His story was probably apocryphal. But let’s for a moment take the cue of Herodotus and imagine a polity whose ruler outdoes the Persians, by a mile: a ruler who is gripped by narcissistic urges, an ethnarch who feels compelled to take decisions and do deals all day and night, intoxicated by his own power. </p>
<p>Another concocted fiction, perhaps. But on the eve of the inauguration of Donald Trump, speculation mounts everywhere that the world is in for trouble at the hands of a deal-making, decision-taking president high on his vast executive powers and his narcissistic self. “Trying to predict how Trump will behave is very difficult,” says Harvard’s <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/unpredictable-commander-in-chief_us_5847f77ae4b0b9feb0da4b6d">Joseph Nye</a>. “This country has never experienced a commander in chief who is this unpredictable. And that surely is dangerous.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The power of the US president and the unpredictability of Donald Trump is a dangerous combination.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Randall Hill/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most serious rumours in circulation centre on the possibility that Trump is either preparing to launch a major war, or that his deal-making impulsiveness will <a href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1100/RR1140/RAND_RR1140.pdf">lead to a major war, for instance with China</a>. Such rumours of course overlook the fact that the United States already has troops and military installations in 150 countries, and that it is engaged in constant drone battling and other forms of armed manoeuvring and engagement. The American imperium is <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2016/05/american-imperium/4/">permanently at war</a>. </p>
<p>Whatever Trump does, we can be sure that he won’t break with this pattern. He’ll preserve the all-party consensus, the peculiar fact that America has no peace party. He’ll keep the war machine switched on; succour the widespread belief among the citizens of America that their country has a global responsibility to keep the world safe, for America, in its own self-image. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">US drone strike in Renay Parchao area of Afghanistan, 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.dawn.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All this suggests it’s a good moment to look at <em><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10638.html">On War and Democracy</a></em>, the latest publication of Christopher Kutz, the leading scholar of war, ethics and democracy at the University of California Berkeley. This timely book, actually a set of essays, was published some months before Trump’s campaign victory, but the political and ethical territory it covers is more or less the same terrain in which President Trump will operate. </p>
<p>The background ethical question raised by Kutz is whether or not democracies are ethically duty-bound to protect others. Are they obliged to intervene militarily in support of people in far-away lands and cities, the infernos of Aleppo and Idlib, for instance, whose citizens are victimised by insufferable bullying, or terrible violence that crushes and destroys the lives of many tens of thousands? </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Princeton University Press (2016)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a fine scholar of ethics, Kutz is well aware of normative dilemmas and aporia. None is arguably so fundamental as the ethical dilemma that confronts all states that claim to be democratic: if they intervene in contexts riddled with violence, as India did in Bangladesh in 1971, and the United States first did in Mexico, the Philippines and Cuba, and has repeatedly done around the world during recent decades, then democracies are readily accused of double standards. They are said to have violated the territorial “sovereignty” and autonomy of peoples entitled to govern themselves. Democracies and their democrats are called meddlers, autocrats, colonisers and imperialists.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if democratic states fiddle while people’s lives are ruined, and choose by design or default not to intervene (recent cases include Syria, Ukraine, Rwanda, Palestine and Timor Leste), then democracies are easily accused of hypocrisy. They are condemned for their wilfully blind eyes, their duplicitous ignoring of cruelty that flouts the democratic principle that all people should be treated as dignified equals. </p>
<p>Commander-in-Chief Trump will likely tweet, and treat, this ethical dilemma as an irrelevance in the jungles of global politics. Making America strong again will for him have little or nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with threats, tough bargaining and triumphant deals. It’s a sign of the times that Kutz’s <em>On War and Democracy</em> shares a similar starting point, but for quite different reasons. Using philosophical argument rather than populist prattle, Kutz tries to set aside the ethical dilemma, and to do so by beating a double retreat. </p>
<p>To begin with, the distinguished philosopher opts for a trimmed-down understanding of democracy. For Kutz, it isn’t a whole way of life, as it was for Tocqueville, and today remains for many citizens and political thinkers. He speaks instead of “agentic democracy”. It’s an unlovely neologism, by which he means that democracy is a set of liberal norms centred on free and fair elections protected by law and the “public working out of shared values, in a process of dialogue and accommodation”. </p>
<p>Democracy in this liberal sense is for Kutz not a universal principle. It’s certainly valuable, and to be valued, by decent and reasonable people. But it’s just one political norm among many possible others, including opposite norms such as the sovereign right of states to declare and prosecute war.</p>
<p>What is interesting is that Kutz uses this cut-back definition of democracy to beat a second retreat. He argues against efforts to draw the democratic ethic into the dirty business of geopolitics, military intervention and killing and maiming people. Drawing upon the work of the American philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel">Thomas Nagel</a> and others, the true task of a theory of democratic ethics, says Kutz, is prickliness. The ethic of democracy should be crabby, querulous, ornery. Its ethical obligation is to stand back from talk of war, to sound the alarm against military folly. The democratic ethic should apply pressure on all theories and practices of war by calling into question their claimed permissibility. </p>
<p>Kutz says little about the unfinished global discussion that began a generation ago concerning the ethics of the atomic bomb. It remains relevant, if only because, in the hands of thinkers and writers otherwise as different as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1179527.Common_Sense_and_Nuclear_Warfare">Bertrand Russell</a>, <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo5953283.html">Hans Jonas</a> and George Orwell (“<a href="http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb">The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle</a>,” he soberly reminded his readers in October 1945), democratic ethics was inclined not just to call for a halt to the production of weapons of war, but to demand the abolition of war itself. </p>
<p>Kutz is rather silent about this line of radical thinking born of the nuclear age. He’s also silent about a more recent version of the absurdity-of-war argument: the rising claim by many people and organisations on our planet that war provides no solution to our principal security challenges, which include species destruction and climate change. Kutz downplays these concerns. He instead wants to point out that the ethic of democracy, as he defines it, stands equally in tension with the old state-centric principle of <em>jus ad bellum</em> (the untrammelled right of “sovereign” states to declare war), the UN Charter and its restriction of war to self-defence, and muscular human rights norms that have been used, in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, to justify military intervention.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Homs, once a major industrial centre and third largest city in Syria, February 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">micstagesuk.com</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The ethic of democracy, says Kutz, is equally opposed to ISIS and al-Qaeda forms of violence that don’t conform to the “regular war constellation” model of uniformed, hierarchically ordered armies. The salient point made by Kutz is that the ethic of democracy is <em>against violence</em>. It is also telic. That’s to say that the norm of democracy should be seen as “relentlessly critical”, as a restraint on “collective violence, not as a new source of war’s legitimacy”. This is the “operating conceit” of <em>On War and Democracy</em>, says Kutz: “the respect for our personhood that animates democracy demands a humility in the face of conflict, rather than the imperial assertiveness that has characterised so much democratic rhetoric, from the French Revolution to the Second Iraq War”.</p>
<p>Like all vanities, the operating conceit of this book is not without limitations, several of them far from trivial. Classicists will note that had Kutz paid attention to scholarship (by <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/war-democracy-and-culture-classical-athens?format=HB&isbn=9780521190336">David Pritchard and others</a>) on the ancient Greek democracies, he would have been forced to ponder, and to worry philosophically about, their ingrained bellicosity. <a href="http://thelifeanddeathofdemocracy.org/">The Life and Death of Democracy</a> points, for instance, to the discomforting but still little-known fact that the norm of <em>dēmokratia</em> originally harboured connotations of military rule. Usually translated as “to rule” or “to govern”, for instance, the root verb <em>kratein</em> [κρατείν] meant mastery, military conquest, getting the upper hand over somebody or something. </p>
<p>Some readers will point out that Kutz says practically nothing about the entanglement of the ethic of democracy with violence <em>inside</em> democracies. Think of the Second Amendment, and the way American democrats use it to justify the God-given right to bear arms in public. Other readers will spot the way this book is mainly silent about the worrying spread in our time of privatised violence perpetrated by <em>condottieri</em> unhindered by the “laws of war” (around 50% of the US forces that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq comprised contractors employed by for-profit companies such as Blackwater). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Private contractor soldier in Iraq, 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Texas at Austin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Still other readers will note how Kutz unwisely presumes, with Francis Fukuyama and other American liberal ideologues, that the normative ideal of “democracy remains unchallenged, even unchallengeable”. Would that things were so simple. This liberal presumption, as these field notes have been pointing out for several years, is crumbling fast. Understandably, since not only does it understate the multiple dysfunctions that are now paralysing states called democracies. The end of history thesis is equally blind to the great resilience of its competitor enemies, including the new phantom democracies of Russia, Iran and China, which are not simply species of “managerial capitalism”, as Kutz claims they are. These regimes are better understood as <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/the-new-despotism-of-the-21st-century-imagining-the-end-of-democracy/">despotisms</a>. </p>
<p>This brings me, finally, to the most serious weakness of this book: the way Kutz’s cut-back liberal definition of democracy concedes too much ground by ignoring recent efforts (<em>The Life and Death of Democracy</em> is my own contribution) to redescribe democracy as not just one norm among others, but as a universal norm. The theory of monitory democracy tries to do this. It treats democracy as a universal norm because it defines democracy as suspicion of all talk of Grand Universal Norms, such as the Market, the Sovereign Nation or God. Monitory democracy puts pressure on all of these arrogant First Principles to admit their own particularity. </p>
<p>Democracy so conceived is a type of anti-foundationalist ethic. It is an ethic of humility and equality. It is an ethic that stands against all forms of arrogant arbitrary power, including on the battlefield. Seen in this way, the ethic of democracy is much more than a <em>prickly outsider</em> of war, and talk of war, as Kutz supposes. The ethic of democracy instead <em>demands entry into the citadels of military power</em>. It does so because it knows of the follies and idiocies of those who arrogantly plan and prosecute war. It therefore calls for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html">slow thinking</a>, for public openness and for the restraint of arbitrary power, especially when it is backed by weapons that kill, maim and destroy humans and the biomes in which they dwell. </p>
<p>Exactly this point about democracy as a universal ethical principle was made with great eloquence against the Blair government by the convenor of the 2016 Iraq Inquiry. In all matters of military power, said <a href="http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/247010/2016-09-06-sir-john-chilcots-public-statement.pdf">Sir John Chilcot</a> in his executive summary, “all aspects of any intervention” must be “calculated, debated and challenged with the utmost rigour”. </p>
<p>In practice, this monitory democracy principle means, of course, that many if not most proposed military interventions would simply never happen. It means, too, that whenever violence of any form is legitimately used under battlefield conditions, for instance in self-defence or for the protection of vulnerable people, those responsible for the violence cannot ever be allowed to wield their power arbitrarily. They must give reasons for what they do, or are planning to do. They must not, and they cannot be allowed to, rape, pillage and wantonly destroy. </p>
<p>When democracy is understood as a universal ethical principle, the double retreat recommended by Kutz looks much too timid, and philosophically unconvincing. It nevertheless has important merits. <em>On War and Democracy</em> is thoughtful, erudite, a cut well above the old discredited consequentialism of “<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5302.html">democratic peace</a>” theorems. The book draws our attention to subjects as varied as torture, assassination, drones, secrecy and the dilemmas posed by revolutionary transitions to democracy. But the greatest strength of <em>On War and Democracy</em> is surely that it speaks to our troubled times. It’s a philosophical abreaction against the fact that the American democratic empire – like its two predecessors, classical Athens and revolutionary France – is today permanently at war. </p>
<p>We live in an age of “belligerent democracy”, says Kutz. We certainly do. The times they are a changin’, and unless things markedly improve, democrats who aren’t already swimming may well sink like stones, into public irrelevance. In this strange new era of global war, Kutz powerfully reminds us, the ethic of democracy is being victimised by imperial interventions in the name of democracy. Against political talk of “realism”, “war on terror”, “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect”, his fundamental point is that the ethic of democratic politics is irenic. But it’s much more than that. It’s a non-violent weapon that is militant; it’s a precautionary principle that is as active as it is everywhere, and at all times, indispensable. The ethic of democracy speaks against the beasts of war, as surely it will be required to do during the Trump era that has already begun. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">American-built Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet on a training exercise, 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">paper4pc.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<hr>
<p><em>This column piece is also part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures-14603">Democracy Futures</a> series, a joint global initiative with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The series aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69778/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once observed that Persian rulers indulged the habit of getting drunk when making important decisions. When sober and sensible next morning, their custom was to reconsider…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/691372016-12-02T21:13:29Z2016-12-02T21:13:29ZA New Politics of Time<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146702/original/image-20161121-30353-1dln8lh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aimar Roll</span></span>
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<p><em>There’s a widespread belief that actually existing democracies are in the grip of a fast-paced world dominated by breaking news and all things instant. The following contribution sets out to question this belief. It takes readers on a time journey. It sets out to probe the meaning of time, and explains why time has a malleable quality. It asks why time is a political matter and why, when they function well, democracies do intriguing things to people’s shared sense of time. The text is a revised version of a presentation to the international conference, The Toronto School: Then, Now, Next held at the University of Toronto, October 15, 2016.</em></p>
<p>Thinking about the subject of time and politics is a challenge. It’s not just that time, a word we use every day, is incorrigibly abstract, in that time cannot be touched, tasted, heard, seen or smelled. More challenging is the fact that the “reality” of time is never straightforwardly “real”. Time has surreal qualities. What counts as “time”, how it is defined or measured, or why it’s important in our lives, always comes wrapped in media-structured perceptions of the world. </p>
<p>Think of the way languages quantify and spatialise time differently: native speakers of Greek imagine duration of time in quantitative terms (<em>poli ora</em>, “much time”) whereas English speakers typically consider duration of time in terms of linear distance (“a long time”), along the way confusingly mixing their metaphors by saying that they do such things as “waste time”, “spend time” or “save time”. Mandarin speakers referring to time (<em>shíjiān</em>) visually represent the future as if it is below us; speakers of <a href="http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/language-time.pdf">Aymara</a> (peoples of the Andes) think of the future as behind us, while native speakers of English imagine the future to be ahead of us. People who read text from right to left (Arabic, Hebrew) tend to think of time as unfolding in that direction; those who read text from left to right do just the opposite. </p>
<p>These simple examples suggest that time is hostage to the more or less taken-for-granted presumptions harboured by what <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Certainty-English-German-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/0061316865">Wittgenstein</a> called the language “scaffolding” (<em>Gerüst</em>) within which we think, interpret, judge and live our everyday lives. This structuring of peoples’ sense of time by the mediated language through which they live their lives is a dynamic and often contradictory process. Time is at the mercy of the mediated language games people play. </p>
<p>What I mean is that certainties about “time” aren’t set in stone. <em><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/james-gleick-time-travel-1474648390">James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History</a></em> (2016) reminds us they’re contingent. What counts as time is vulnerable to doubt, challenge and transformation. Time is fickle. The “time” people live can change. The transformation may be gradual, the accumulation of increments. The change may also be dramatic, as for example during the heady “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” moments of a revolutionary upheaval, when the “meagre, stale, forbidding ways” (William Wordsworth) of habitually lived time are torn apart. Filled with tidings, time feels out of joint. When that happens, time is redefined so abruptly that what counts as time one day morphs next day into a sense of lived time that feels unrecognisably different. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=605&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=605&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146706/original/image-20161121-30364-8w3jci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=605&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Eugène Delacroix, La liberté guidant le peuple (1830)</span>
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<h2>Myopia</h2>
<p>If people’s lived sense of time is variable, then an obvious question is: what does the way of life known as democracy, popular self-government, do to peoples’ sense of time? </p>
<p>The commonplace view is that democracy is myopic. Buoyed by the sense that the past is over and the future is not yet, democracy encourages a fixation on the here and now. “Democracy is partial toward the present,” writes <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9464286/Representing%20Future%20Generations-Barry%20final.pdf?sequence=1">Dennis Thompson</a>. “Most citizens tend to discount the future, and to the extent that the democratic process responds to their demands, the laws it produces tend to neglect future generations.” </p>
<p>Democratic procedures are said to amplify a “natural human tendency” to think in the present tense. Myopia is the effect of periodic elections and representative government. For the sake of their own skins, elected representatives are compelled to pay attention to the concerns and demands of their constituents; and they have to do so within the framework of repeated election cycles. </p>
<p>Democracy is a form of government <em>pro tempore</em>, says Thompson. It panders to self-interested majorities. The resulting “presentism”, the bias towards the now and the neglect of both the past and the future, may have advantages. “Compared to other forms of government”, writes Thompson, “democracy is not disposed to sacrifice citizens or a whole generation for some distant future goal. It is less vulnerable to the claims of utopian idealists, religious zealots, or radical revolutionaries who call for great sacrifices from the present generation to bring about even greater good for the future of mankind [sic].” He adds: “It is a virtue of democracy that it pays attention to actual citizens and seeks to hold actual rulers accountable for the actions they take on behalf of citizens.” </p>
<p>Other commentators point to the seriously disadvantaging effects of democratic myopia. Democratic institutions are said to discriminate against younger generations. By allocating health care resources for the elderly and financing social insurance schemes out of current taxes, for instance, democracies in effect rob the young and the unborn of their votes. </p>
<p>Democracies are also accused of turning a blind eye to long-term environmental degradation and (say) to the risks associated with bio-genetic engineering and burgeoning population growth. And especially when democracies grow self-satisfied with their present-day performance, egged on by claims that they stand at “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">the end of history</a>” (Fukuyama), they become poor anticipators of crises, the critics allege. Democracies are said to take forever to read writings on the wall. They’re easily distracted by frivolous media events and fake crises. They are sedated by their track record of success (<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10055.html">David Runciman speaks of a “confidence trap”</a>). </p>
<p>Burdened by elections and fickle public opinion and constitutional proprieties, democracies typically lack a sense of urgency, or proportion. They muddle their way into crises triggered by such anti-democratic forces as war and market failure. Then they twiddle their thumbs, usually for so long that they’re forced, finally, to spring into action. </p>
<h2>A Plea for Time</h2>
<p>The scathing assessment of democracy by the influential Canadian scholar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis">Harold Innis</a> (1894-1952) runs in a similar direction. Renowned for his avant-garde research and writing on space, time and communications, Innis crafted a remarkable essay on the subject of time during the darkest moments of the 1940s. Later delivered within a series of sesquicentennial lectures at the University of New Brunswick (March 30, 1950), “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/innis-plea/innis-plea-00-h.html">A Plea for Time</a>” railed against the “present-mindedness” of the modern era. According to Innis, respect for the past, and the future, is dying. A variety of modern forces has seriously disturbed the balance between time and space, with disastrous consequences for Western civilisation, parliamentary democracy included. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146962/original/image-20161122-24538-fjpydb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Harold Innis, the first Canadian-born theorist to achieve an international reputation in the research field of communications.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library and Archives Canada/NLC-12491</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How did this unbalancing of time and space happen? Among the key driving forces of “present-mindedness” was the rise of capitalism, Innis argued. Capitalism fostered the measurement of time. That in turn facilitated the use of credit and the rise of exchange-based calculations of futures that are deemed predictable, and insurable. </p>
<p>John Maynard Keynes captured its spirit in his <em>Tract on Monetary Reform</em> (1923): mainstream economists, he said, with a touch of sarcasm, have a bad habit of supposing that since in the long run we are all dead, and since capitalism is an equilibrium system, government intervention isn’t needed to support a better future. Capitalism breeds myopia. It requires market actors to believe that “when the storm is past the ocean is flat again”. Capital and labour are forced to concentrate on the present, interested only in living now, and for the immediate future. </p>
<p>Equally important as a driving force of “present-mindedness” was the rise of the “nationalist state”, Innis argued. The modern territorial state helped destroy feast days and other traditional time-keeping practices of the church. Innis doesn’t mention the imaginings of Newtonian physics, which quantified time, graphed it against space and measured it against the motion of clocks. He preferred instead to underscore the invention of the printing press, and how the growing use of paper hastened the decline of Latin and the rise of vernacular languages. “The printing press supported the Reformation and destroyed the monopoly of the church over time,” he wrote. </p>
<p>Increased newspaper circulation, aided by telegraphy and railways, fed the growth of new forms of marketing, such as the department store. It also promoted a culture of news that fed on advertising to cater to momentary sensationalism. The resulting myopic culture of “orgies and excitement” was reinforced by the invention of photography and the electronic media of cinema and radio. </p>
<p>“Effectiveness of an appeal to the ear was enhanced by development of the radio and by the linking of sound to the cinema and to television,” Innis wrote. “Printed material gave way in effectiveness to the broadcast and to the loud speaker. Political leaders were able to appeal directly to constituents and to build up a pressure of public opinion on legislatures.” He added: “The rise of Hitler to power was facilitated by the use of the loud speaker and the radio.” </p>
<p>Fascism was in this sense no accident on the highway to Western modernity. “The political realization of democracy invariably encourages the hypnotist”, wrote Innis. Electronic broadcast media “accentuated the importance of the ephemeral and of the superficial”. The new means of communication helped spread “illusions in catchwords such as democracy, freedom of the press and freedom of speech”. </p>
<p>Organised entertainment and deception of a myopic populace became possible. “As modern developments in communication have made for greater realism they have made for greater possibilities of delusion. We are under the spell of Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” Innis concluded. “The shell and pea game of the country fair has been magnified and elevated to a universal level.” </p>
<p>Under these conditions of instant manipulation, the “dummy sham democracy” of our age finally destroys the spirit and substance of the oral tradition that enabled Greek citizens living in city states to figure out for themselves a proper balance between the past, present and future. </p>
<h2>Rethinking democracy</h2>
<p>A strange feature of Innis’s dark summary of the fate of democracy in dark times was its silence about the robust discussions of the future of democracy that erupted globally during the decade of the 1940s. I’ve explained <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-origins-of-monitory-democracy-9752">in these field notes</a> that the new ideal of monitory democracy was born of this period, at a moment of profound crisis of majority-rule parliamentary democracy, as it had come to be known during the course of the previous two centuries. </p>
<p>This decade of the 1940s remains poorly researched. That’s a pity because it turned out in retrospect to be a decade of ‘dark energy’: it was one of those rare moments when the universe of meaning of democracy underwent a dramatic expansion, in defiance of the cosmic gravity of contemporary events. </p>
<p>The Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann (1875-1955) gave voice to the shift when noting the need for “democracy’s deep and forceful recollection of itself, the renewal of its spiritual and moral self-consciousness”. The Irish man of letters, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) sharpened the point. “A great deal of democratic enthusiasm,” he wrote, “descends from the ideas of people … who believed in a democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.” </p>
<p>Lewis added that he was opposed to all forms of slavery and unaccountable power because no human beings were “fit to be masters”. The “real reason for democracy”, he wrote, is that human beings are corruptible creatures, so that “no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows”. </p>
<p>Deep suspicion of unchecked power undoubtedly fuelled the conviction of Innis that the grave crisis of the 1940s required a return to Greek-style assembly democracy. “The fanaticism of party, religion, race, professions, nationalism, and militarism,” he wrote, “must somehow be met in the government of the city first and foremost and after that little is left of world problems.” </p>
<p>Alas, his conviction that the city was the only possible safe haven for democracy wasn’t widely shared. Most of his contemporaries, for very good reasons, saw his call to recapture the spirit and substance of Greek assembly democracy as a failure of political imagination. They also considered it practically incapable of meeting the challenges of the dark and dangerous times. Far bolder and forward-looking measures were badly needed, most commentators insisted.</p>
<p>Against the prevailing restricted understanding of democracy as free and fair elections conducted within the confines of territorial states, the new democrats thought differently: they proposed that hereon democracy should be understood as the permanent public struggle by citizens and their chosen representatives to restrain and humble arbitrary power, wherever it is exercised, in any setting, drawing on a wide variety of means that shunned violence. </p>
<p>This moment of dark energy revealed something deeper, more fundamental and more intriguing about democracy itself: its tendency to stimulate people’s sense of the contingency of the power relations through which they live their lives in institutional settings. The decade of the 1940s witnessed what might be called a Schrödinger moment: like the indeterminate fate of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOYyCHGWJq4">Schrödinger’s cat</a>, democracy found itself in a moment of ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition">superposition</a>’. By this quantum word I mean that democracy found itself entrapped in multiple parallel states: what had already happened (tragic auto-destruction and near-total annihilation of representative democracy) was bound up with what potentially could happen (the birth of a new historical form of democracy unknown either to the Greeks, or to the early modern champions of representative democracy). </p>
<p>The re-imagining of democracy that took place during the 1940s had an even deeper significance. It highlighted the capacity of democrats and democratic institutions to understand their superposition, to grasp that since the world is always in flux, and that since time tries all things, the world can and must be changed, through intervention by citizens and their chosen representatives. The experience of the 1940s, we could say, showed that compared with all other modes of handling power, the political form known as democracy is <em>uniquely time-sensitive</em>. Attuned to the role played by time in worldly affairs, democracy denatures time. It shows that time is not simply time. It demonstrates in practice that what counts as time can be changed. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147162/original/image-20161123-19712-1xcw1vq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Greek philosopher Parmenides (born c. 515 BCE)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Francis Drake</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The point may seem obstruse. It isn’t. To grasp its meaning and significance, ponder just for a moment the famous surviving Fragment 8 of the ancient Greek philosopher <a href="http://www.ancientgreekphilosopher.com/2012/04/06/parmenides-fragment-8-translation/">Parmenides</a>. When all things are considered, he famously claimed, our world is in essence imperishable, indivisible, continuous. It is an unchangeable, eternal whole. It wants for nothing because it never was, nor will be, but only is. </p>
<p>Now think of democracy, a way of life that encourages citizens and their representatives to cultivate a shared public sense of the malleability of power relations within worldly human affairs. The experience of democracy requires and reinforces people’s shared sense of the mutability of the world. It beckons us to see that the world is infused with time experienced as living in between past, present and future. It calls on us to doubt talk of “nature” and “human nature”. It rejects claims that the business of who gets what, when and how in life is determined by ‘natural’, or God-given or deity-determined processes, or by mere chance. </p>
<p>When seen from this time-sensitive angle, democracy is much more than citizens gathering together and deliberating in public assemblies. It goes well beyond joining or supporting political parties. It means more than voting in periodic elections. It goes well beyond blowing whistles, exposing corruption or keeping tabs on decisions taken by elected and unelected representatives. All these democratic practices are in fact surface symptoms of a dynamic that runs much deeper. </p>
<p>Considered as an ideal set of institutions, and as a whole way of life, democracy stimulates people’s awareness that, as equals, they don’t need to be bossed about by powerful others. It teaches them that they have the ability to shape and structure their lives, as equals who are capable of living together without violence, and of deciding in common their priorities during their time on Earth. Democracy thus supposes and enables humans’ release from pure determination by forces natural and supernatural, however they are conceived. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147369/original/image-20161124-15333-3y0f2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anankē, Ancient Greek goddess of necessity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Platone</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Democracy doesn’t necessarily demand the practical rejection of belief in transcendent or sacred standards (see my summary in these pages of the way the history of democracy brims with examples of actors and customs and institutions which thrive on <a href="https://theconversation.com/god-the-gods-and-democracy-part-one-49451">belief in the sacred</a>). But for a society to qualify as “democratic”, it must minimally contain mechanisms that foster a measure of public scepticism about arbitrary power. In its commitment to greater equality among citizens, we could say, democracy shows that Anankē, the ancient Greek goddess of necessity, compulsion and inevitability, has lost her grip on the world. Democracy is the friend of contingency. It is the active champion of public awareness that is and ought are not inescapably identical; it shows that things do not have to be what they currently are, or seem to be.</p>
<h2>A new chronopolitics?</h2>
<p>Proof positive of democracy’s strengthening of a public sense among citizens of the “unreality” of temporal “reality” is to be found in perhaps the most remarkable development of all. It was unforeseen by Innis: the birth of what the American sociologist <a href="http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/1/102.abstract">George W. Wallis</a> first called “chronopolitics” and, with it, challenges to clock time and the multiplication of different modes of lived time. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147641/original/image-20161126-32004-1oq8gai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Prison of Time.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">sherezada_light</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That’s another way of saying that monitory democracy unleashes public struggles to disenchant and redefine time. It exposes the contingency of its reigning definitions, in effect by nurturing a plurality of modes of time that both complicates the patterned rhythms of people’s daily lives and offers them the possibility of living well, as equals, in parallel universes of time. </p>
<p>It’s understandable that Innis chose to foreground the dangers of ‘present-mindedness’, the ways in which amnesia and myopia are deeply structured into such practices as stock exchange transactions and mainstream ‘breaking news’ journalism. He was certainly aware of the stranglehold exercised by mechanical clock time over the daily lives of many millions of people. His insights have a perennial value. We indeed still live in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Metronomic-Society-Natural-Rhythms-Timetables/dp/0674571959">metronomic societies</a> marked by mechanical definitions of time imposed by institutions such as factories, offices, airports and government bureaucracies. Free rein is given to clocks, timetables and other linear compulsions that privilege the present; years are carved into equal days, days, minutes, seconds and fractions of seconds. Clock time rules, often harshly; and it produces casualties. The resulting culture of speed produces forms of “speed sickness” (let’s call it) and “<a href="http://asq.sagepub.com/content/44/1/57.short">time famines</a>” and other crippling effects on a range of activities that cannot be so measured, or temporally rationed. </p>
<p>Harold Innis was right about the tyranny of myopia measured by clocks. The metronome remains a basic determinant of the lives of citizens. But what he didn’t foresee is the way that monitory democracy challenges and undermines the tyranny of clock-driven compulsions. By granting freedoms to individuals, groups, organisations and networks, monitory democracy unleashes a rising sense of the manifold ways the lives of individuals, groups and institutions are infused with ebbs and flows of past, present and future. </p>
<p>At the moment of birth of monitory democracy, under the influence of Christianity, <a href="http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/4-gidding.htm">T.S. Eliot</a> captured this point with ecumenical insight, and elegance. “Time present and time past,” he wrote, “Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.” He added: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning/The end is where we start from.” </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147465/original/image-20161124-15362-g8anso.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scots founder of geology James Hutton (1776)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Henry Raeburn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We could say that the public belief that past, present and future flow in liquid ways through the contingent lives of citizens and their institutions is a gift of monitory democracy. New democratic practices, and scientific breakthroughs, nurture the trend. </p>
<p>Fashionable and excessively general talk by geographers of “<a href="http://epd.sagepub.com/content/17/5/607.short">time compression</a>” fails to capture the novelties of our age. Let’s take some examples of what could be called <em>the democratisation of time</em>. Think of the way independent research in the biological sciences has yielded insights into the way all living creatures are structured by biological rhythms, intricately connected cycles that range from a day (<a href="https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/Factsheet_CircadianRhythms.aspx">circadian cycles</a>) to a year or multiple years (<a href="http://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/bahcm/staff/barbarahelm/barbarahelm/long-term/">circannual rhythms</a>) that are more or less synchronised with the motions of the sun and moon. </p>
<p>Then consider the rising awareness of <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674891999&content=reviews">deep time</a>. Itself a visionary ‘secular’ product of the late 18th century, articulated for instance in the work of the Scots geologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton">James Hutton</a> (1726-1797), deep time was first imagined as the way life on our planet evolved from within the unending cycles of rocks formed by sedimentation under the ocean, then uplifted and twisted and tilted, only to be eroded gradually to form new land features and sedimentary rock strata under the oceans of our planet. </p>
<p>The whole notion of deep time threatened biblical perceptions of time. Prevailing theological accounts of the origins of our planet began to look flimsy, and to feel questionable. Deep time had another effect: it tended to bring humans back to Earth, to plant our feet and put us in our place. Hereon, as <a href="http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcphee.pdf">John McPhee</a> famously reminded his readers, thanks to the notion of deep time our planet’s history became comparable to the old measure of the English yard, the distance from a king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, with human history but a single stroke of a nail file on the monarch’s middle finger. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147470/original/image-20161124-15325-1zxmf8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Similar humbling effects are produced by the rising public appreciation of <em>indigenous understandings of deep time</em> as sacred, repetitious and productive. For many indigenous people living in states such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Bolivia and Peru, the now is more than the now, or the beginning. Their experiments with new forms of self-government, for instance in the north-east Pacific archipelago <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haida_Gwaii">Haida Gwaii</a> (Islands of the Haida People), the <a href="http://maorilawreview.co.nz/2014/05/ruruku-whakatupua-te-mana-o-te-awa-tupua-upholding-the-mana-of-the-whanganui-river/">Whanganui River Te Awa Tupua framework agreement</a> in New Zealand and <a href="https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/f7d3c167-8bd1-470a-a502-ba222067e1ac/files/management-plan.pdf">Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park</a> in central Australia, preserve and enliven different understandings of time. They are carriers of what <a href="http://press.anu.edu.au/publications/aboriginal-history-monographs/long-history-deep-time">Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb</a> call “long history, deep time”. </p>
<p>These experiments in “bio-democracy” suppose that the long-time-ago beginning is equally productive of the future. They suppose that the future is past, and present. They see the past not as a primordial bygone beginning now shrouded and suffocated in long-forgotten mystery. Nurtured by ceremony, song and storytelling, the past is for indigenous peoples a creative force that both keeps the present alive and guarantees a future. The past is not past; ancestors live on, as creative beings incarnated as simultaneously animal and human, as landforms, fire, water, trees and animals. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147495/original/image-20161125-15325-bsq9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Whanganui River, New Zealand.</span>
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<p>A new politics of remembering and <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/restorative-justice/">restorative justice</a> is also among the important political effects of monitory democracy. Consider the 1982-1984 National Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances (<a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comisi%C3%B3n_Nacional_de_B%C3%BAsqueda_de_Desaparecidos">Comisión Nacional de Investigación de Desaparecidos</a>), the first government commission of inquiry into past political injustices in Bolivia. It set the pattern for later “truth and reconciliation” tribunals by hosting extended public hearings in which victims/survivors could share their stories of past suffering and sometimes confront their former abusers. These hearings break silence about a terrible past. They ring the bells of justice backwards. They extend the right of representation to the departed, and to suffering survivors. </p>
<p>In effect, these hearings drive home the principle that democracy among the living requires democracy among the deceased. They do so in the expectation that those who committed crimes will display penitence, that the deceased will be honoured and respected, and that victims who survived violence will show forgiveness for past wrongdoings by others. These public inquiries are bearers of pain, suffering and anger. But they are also carriers of hope. They suppose that bygones can become bygones, so that when confronted with details of past crimes, citizens living in the present can embrace some measure of common feeling that forgiveness and compromise for past crimes can be a source of future healing. </p>
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<span class="caption">Public demonstration against disappearances, Mexico City, July 2015.</span>
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<p>There’s a final example of the new chronopolitics spawned by monitory democracy. It’s of rising public importance: the spread of a robust sense of <em>the importance of the future for the present</em>. This new politics of the future has several faces. </p>
<p>In some quarters, public spaces are created for the revival and flourishing of a shared sense of <em>the eternal</em>. Citizens come to embrace the conviction that God or the gods are immutable, that humans themselves may in future be able to live outside of time. Sempiternity is their thing. They believe in an indeterminately long period of time to come, a future in which they will enjoy interminable life to the full, forever. </p>
<p>Other citizens prefer thoroughly secular understandings of the future. Think for a moment of the rise of a new <em>politics of senescence</em>. “Silver politics” asks tough basic questions about what ageing “silver citizens” want from their remaining lives, and what resources they need to enable them to live well, in dignity, enjoying public respect. José Saramago’s wonderfully imaginative <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/10/shopping.fiction">Death at Intervals</a></em> (2008) is something of an anthem for this emerging sensibility about the future. It invites readers to imagine a society populated by living dead or “over-aged” people who are haunted and challenged by basic questions about what they want out of life. </p>
<p>The forward-looking mentality cultivated by monitory democracy is equally apparent in the growth of a robust sense of <em>trusteeship of future generations</em>. Public awareness that time future is contained in time present lies at the heart of the workings of such power-monitoring inventions as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Time-Capsules-Cultural-William-Jarvis/dp/0786412615">time capsules</a>, futures commissions, Saskatchewan-style <a href="https://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/emergency/saskalert">emergency alert</a> schemes, forestry protection bodies, climate change panels and networked city forums. </p>
<p>These democratic inventions are in effect a type of inverse archaeology. They call upon those living in the present to pay attention to the needs of unborn generations. They aim to raise raise public awareness of the contingency of present-day arrangements. They demand recognition of the humbling principle that future citizens are entitled to be represented in the here and now. They suppose that democracy among the living requires democracy among the unborn. </p>
<h2>A democracy of many rhythms?</h2>
<p>Can we make good sense of these disparate and often contradictory trends? What is their significance for the way we think about time, and about politics? Might the new chronopolitics have long-term implications for the way people imagine and practise democracy as a way of life committed to equality with freedom for all? </p>
<p>Let’s return for a moment to Innis, whose “plea for time” nearly a generation ago still remains globally relevant. We could say it did us the service of tabling troubling questions about the puzzling relationship between democracy and time. His call for recovering the oral spirit and the unhurried rhythms of the clock-free assembly democracy of the ancient Greek world rightly warned of the social and political dangers of “present-mindedness”. The hollowing out of democracy, “dummy sham democracy” he called it, bothered him, as it now bothers us, admittedly under different but equally challenging historical circumstances. </p>
<p>Much can still be learned about the subject of time by reading Innis, certainly. But our times, and the politics of time, are different. It turns out that democrats in the age of monitory democracy have helped stir up public awareness of the limits and dangers of present-mindedness. The shifts that are taking place are palpable. </p>
<p>Most probably, we’re living through the early stages of some kind of transformation. But we can’t yet be sure how epochal it will turn out to be. Will the new public struggles centred (say) on species destruction, climate change and future generations prove to be as stormy, and as consequential, as the great conflicts over work discipline (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">E.P. Thompson</a>), working hours and guaranteed pensions that marked the age of representative democracy? We don’t yet know. </p>
<p>What is clear is that compared with the period when Innis was writing, the pitfalls and perils of myopia have become much better understood. Blind faith in progress and “<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-interview-francis-fukuyama-on-the-road-to-utopia-1100962.html">end of history</a>” perspectives, Panglossian presumptions about the teleological unfolding of time in positive directions, are unfashionable, except in minority circles. A sense of urgency about the political import of the past, and the future, is becoming part of the common sense of the living. There are refusals to rush through daily life. Political talk of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2014.916471">slow journalism</a>, slow cooking and slow living can be heard. And public awareness that our lives are entangled in multiple rhythms is spreading. There are even signs, recently displayed in Yuval Noah Harari’s <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/11/homo-deus-brief-history-tomorrow-yuval-noah-harari-review">Homo Deus</a></em> (2016), of mounting fascination with dystopian thinking that predicts a post-human future in which democracy plays no role because humans have swapped meaningful self-government for technical prowess. </p>
<p>The new politics of time, and the multiplication of its forms, are complex and contested processes. They no doubt trigger many tricky intellectual and political questions. Of paramount importance is the matter of whether, and to what extent, democracies can cope with, or reconcile tensions among, a contested plurality of lived modes of time. Workers complain about being overworked, and their lack of ‘free time’. Others bemoan time limits, deadlines, fast food, speeding tickets and the burdens of instant communications. Elderly people know that their biological rhythms grate against the tick of the clock, past memories and future hopes. Religious believers in eternity feel discomfort in the company of believers in secular, mechanical time. Indigenous peoples are sure that the greedy myopia of markets destroys the deep-time eco-cultures in which they dwell; and so on. </p>
<p>These tensions among different modalities of lived time aren’t easily softened, or resolved. Why? Partly because different institutions (compare airports and stock exchanges, mosques and ashrams) feed upon different rhythms, which cannot easily be altered, for instance by “<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/religion/stories/s1115995.htm">downshifting</a>”, without damaging or abolishing the institution itself. There’s also the point that rhythms enter deeply into the lives of people, as habits they presume to be “normal”, and to which they stubbornly cling; and there’s the fact that time juggling can be stressful, and exhausting, as people know from everyday experience, for instance when they raise children while they are employed full-time in the labour market. Just as challenging is the fact that antagonisms among different rhythms bring into focus the difficult political issue of whether, and to what extent, citizens can and should enjoy <em>equal access to different modalities of time</em> that are at present distributed unequally. </p>
<p>There are many damaging forms of inequality in our world; <em>inequalities of rhythm</em> are among them. Unequal access of citizens to different modalities of time, their enforced confinement to just one type, such as full-time employment, often has crippling effects on people’s lives. That is why networks and groups and elected governments are beginning to search for new ways to redress these inequalities of lived time. Consider <a href="http://timebanks.org/">time banks</a>, forward-looking schemes such as the <a href="http://www.apfc.org/home/Content/aboutFund/aboutPermFund.cfm">Alaska Permanent Fund</a> and public calls for a <a href="http://basicincome.org/news/2016/11/paul-mason-post-capitalism-universal-basic-income/">universal basic income</a> enjoyed as of right by all citizens: don’t these and other initiatives tell us that the survival and flourishing of democracy as a way of life functionally requires not merely the cultivation of memories of an ancient past, as Innis proposed, but a new politics of <em>temporal justice</em>? A politics that draws upon the spirit of the old struggles against the tyranny of clock time in the factory? A democratic politics that pushes beyond our familiar time horizons, towards a democracy of many rhythms, open to all, chosen and enjoyed by citizens who regard each other as their equals? </p>
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<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Keane receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). </span></em></p>There’s a widespread belief that actually existing democracies are in the grip of a fast-paced world dominated by breaking news and all things instant. The following contribution sets out to question this…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/679342016-10-31T09:42:26Z2016-10-31T09:42:26ZHillary Clinton, Julian Assange and the US election<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143879/original/image-20161031-15728-ifnghe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Julian Assange in October this year, celebrating 10 years of Wikileaks from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Maurizio Gambarini</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The following field note will shortly appear in Germany’s <a href="http://www.zeit.de/index">Die Zeit</a>. It is a brief commentary on the factual errors and misjudgements of numerous journalists when reporting the role recently played by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in revealing inside details of Hillary Clinton’s now-embattled presidential campaign.</em> </p>
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<p>The past few months have been a rough roller coaster for Julian Assange. Trapped in his Ecuador Embassy prison, hopes for his release after the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-arbitrary-detention-of-julian-assange-54342">UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention</a> ruled in his favour were dashed. Then came a long spiky string of accusations by government officials, journalists and pundits. He is now being called everything under the sun. A one-sentence summary of the main accusations would run: Julian Assange is a rotten rapist Russian government agent whose wild document dumps and dislike of redaction stems from his narcissistic paranoia and unshakeable revolutionary arrogance. </p>
<p>Australian journalist <a href="http://feedingthechooks.com/about-me-2/">Martin McKenzie-Murray</a> repeats these misreckonings, more or less verbatim, but with less brevity, and less wisdom. Writing in last weekend’s <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/10/29/what-going-with-wikileaks-julian-assange/14776596003917">The Saturday Paper</a>, McKenzie-Murray is a self-confessed “<a href="http://feedingthechooks.com/about-me-2/">former speechwriter and Labor hack” who likes verbally “to masturbate</a>”. There’s no shortage of that in a lead piece that not only contains a howler typo (Assange is referred to as “Julian garret”) but variously claims that Assange suffers “zealotry” and foolishly regards “redaction as a form of cowardice”. While the world has changed, whatever that means, the WikiLeaks founder “has not changed”. That’s because (writes McKenzie-Murray) Assange has lost the plot. He has become unhinged from reality. “It appears to have rarely occurred to Assange’s supporters that his chilling remoteness from actual people [Assange is regularly visited by dozens of visitors each week JK] might disqualify him from possession of life-altering secrets”. </p>
<p>The most fanciful charge made by McKenzie-Murray is that Assange carries “Putin’s water”. The founder of WikiLeaks is trapped in “a very serious contradiction”. He preaches transparency yet practises “counterespionage”. He peddles the “tactical mistruths” of the Kremlin. With more than a touch of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism">McCarthyism</a>, McKenzie-Murray berates the decision of WikiLeaks to release previously hidden details of Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy. He makes much as well of the reported decision of Assange’s protectors briefly to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/10/18/ecuador-cuts-internet-access-julian-assange-preserve-neutrality-us-election/">cut his internet connection</a> a fortnight ago. McKenzie-Murray quotes approvingly the official diplomatic statement. “The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states”, it read. “It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favour any particular candidate.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143855/original/image-20161031-15814-g2k7u5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Julian Assange.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Les Wilson/Sydney Democracy Network</span></span>
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<p>The reasons why the Ecuador Government temporarily did what they did remain controversial, but its decision no doubt made Julian Assange chuckle, then sigh. The statement overlooked a simple fact, one that is well understood by Assange: this American presidential election campaign is a global affair whose outcome will have global consequences. The point is that we are now living in times when democracy is no longer confined to state barracks. Thanks to cross-border communication networks, elections in every country produce butterfly effects and feedback loops. Local elections have gone global. What happens in one country can have grave consequences for other countries, and for whole regions. </p>
<p>Presidential elections in the United States are the embodiment of this trend, but you’d never know this when reading McKenzie-Murray’s wild diatribe against Assange for meddling in American politics. “One suspects that like the Kremlin he [Assange] favours Trump not only out of spitefulness towards Clinton, but on some anarchic impulse.” He adds: “Perhaps the United States will be reborn in flames. One thing is clear: Assange has no qualms about collateral damage.” </p>
<p>“Collateral damage” are very strange words to describe the right of thinking citizens and their representatives everywhere to a real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the campaign methods and political character of the woman who in just over a week’s time may well be the next president of the most powerful state on our planet. Much can be learned from these leaks about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/24/business/media/rutenberg-wikileaks-american-democracy.html">Clinton’s taste for secrecy and dodgy journalists, and her cynical fund-raising strategies</a>, for instance. That is the point Assange and his team want to emphasise. In this sense, they have offered a generous gift to monitory democracy. Their leaks have provided us with raw material for public efforts to bring greater humility and more democracy to a sick democracy weighed down by people who are too rich, too arrogant and too powerful.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67934/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Martin McKenzie-Murray’s recent take-down of Julian Assange and Wikileaks misses the mark in many ways.John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/674762016-10-23T21:55:30Z2016-10-23T21:55:30ZHistory of Russian populism provides important lessons for today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142747/original/image-20161022-1785-oezdm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>‘When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s Stick.’</p>
<p>Mikhail Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (1873)</p>
<p>Populism is in the air: it’s the topic of the moment, the subject everybody wants to discuss, to dispute, to praise, or to loathe and condemn. Journalists and scholars understandably concentrate on the American and European cases (Trump, Le Pen, Hofer and all that), yet much can be learned about populism from elsewhere, and by examining carefully its history. </p>
<p>Russian populism is an important case in point. Born during the 1860s, populism in that country remains interesting and important, for several reasons. It highlights the way populism is a species of political hypnotism whose talk of “the people” turns real, breathing and blinking people into a phantasm. The Russian case reveals as well why populism has a close affinity with violence, and why intellectuals, who should know better, are often prone to develop an aesthetic fascination for the subject, and the substance, of populism. Finally, and of great importance in making sense of the contemporary grip of Putinism, the Russian case shows that the language of populism, for all its talk of the urgent need to pit the people against the political establishment, can be absorbed by osmosis into the structures of government. In doing so it enable those who govern to rule in the name of “the people”, who become the victims of state power.</p>
<p>The Russian case also reminds us that the ideology of populism is seductive because it has “democratic” qualities. Known locally as <em>narodnichestvo</em>, 19th-century Russian populism was the local substitute for American, British and French-style representative democracy. Russian populism, defended by an intelligentsia that considered itself the only free beings in a political order of slaves, called for Russian unity and government through the Russian people, in opposition to the combined power and authority of the Tsar, the Church and the landed nobility. Populism was born not simply of a bad local reaction to the revolutionary ideals of “representative democracy” that Napoleon’s troops had tried (and failed) to impose by force on the Russian lands. Russian populism registered and absorbed those ideals by acknowledging that the commoners were no longer to be treated like scum. It praised them and spoke constantly of the <em>narod</em> (“people”, “folk”) and the “people’s will”. </p>
<p>Buried deep in the politics of populism everywhere is simple mindedness, the worrying urge to deal with the complexity of the world through wilfully simplified formulae. The Russian case was among the earliest examples. It thrived on a metaphysical, almost apocalyptic presumption: that a clean revolutionary break with the past was both necessary and possible, and that popular upheaval would result in the abolition of dehumanising power structures. This upheaval would be followed by a cleansing, a clarification of the true nature of things which would lead, finally, to full human emancipation. </p>
<p>Populists emphasised the people’s rustic, tellurian qualities. Russian populists generally disliked industrialisation. They were not friends of technical progress, and rejected as false the whole modern idea of the liberation of humanity through the domination of nature driven by markets and science. The populists saw no need for representative mechanisms, for they thought of themselves as bearers of the unchanging essence of the Russian people. That is why state-organised capitalism guided by parliamentary democracy was for them a miserable chimera, an unworkable fantasy that was bound in practice to produce delusion and unhappiness, founded on slavery. </p>
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<span class="caption">Petr Tkachev (1844-1886)</span>
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<p>What then was the political alternative? Russian populists were often at their own throats; no generally agreed vision surfaced. Although they dominated the opposition to czarism during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from the 1870s, the populists never formed an organised political party and refused a coherent doctrine. It was a movement comprising various organisations and factions, including the anarchists, the Nihilists and the Social Revolutionaries. Their ranks contained regicides, anti-capitalists, and eccentric figures, like <a href="https://www.amazon.com/First-Bolshevik-Political-Biography-Tkachev/dp/0814704271">Petr Tkachev</a> (1844-1886), who reportedly urged the rebirth of Russia by eliminating every person over the age of 25 years. The populists suffered frequent political setbacks, as in the summer of 1874, when peasants failed to embrace their ascribed role as “the people” by handing student populist agitators clad in peasant clothes over to the Tsar’s police. The harsh realities of czarism nevertheless kept them going, at times united, above all in their emphatic rejection of monarchy and “bourgeois” representative democracy. </p>
<p>Russian populists typically described themselves as “apolitical”, meaning that they had no truck with plutocracy, petit-bourgeois or bourgeois electoral politics and its corresponding fantasy of taking up seats in a parliament. Populists put their faith in a new revolutionary subject - the peasants and small producers - and they were convinced that Russia could leapfrog the age of industrial capitalism and representative government. The typical populist was a Janus, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/narodniks/ch04s6.htm">V.I. Lenin</a> wrote, “looking with one face to the past and the other to the future”. Most populists embraced a version of Aleksandr Herzen’s alternative - originally mediaeval - vision of the natural harmony of the <em>mir</em>, the free association of peasants, empowered periodically to redistribute arable land and through its decisions granting each and every peasant an equal say in determining how to live their lives as equals. Populism stood for the protection of the people in the <em>mir</em> by the <em>mir</em>. It imagined the new Russia as a decentralised confederation of self-governing units, as a new type of post-democracy freed from the evils of serfdom, industrialism, capitalism, and the violence of the territorial state. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142737/original/image-20161021-1782-1pd7lzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Sergei Korovin, A Gathering of the Mir (1893)</span>
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<p>The point was to change the world by upending old Russia. Tens of thousands of young populists heeded the call (first spelled out in 1868, in a famous article by Mikhail Bakunin in the émigré journal <em>People’s Cause</em>) to “go to the people”. Others known as Jacobins drew the conclusion that “the people” were incapable of liberating themselves. It followed from this that, since their role could only ever be that of a negative, destructive force, the people needed, as a lion needs a tamer, strong leadership provided by a tightly-organised vanguard that would help fashion revolution out of the chaos sparked by popular uprisings. Then there were populists who were so convinced that the Russian state (as Petr Tkachev explained) was “suspended in thin air” and “absolutely absurd and absurdly absolute” that its rulers deserved assassination. </p>
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<span class="caption">Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s L'attentat de Berezowski contre le tsar Alexandre II (6 June 1867)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Musée d'Orsay, Paris</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Their first two attempts to kill the Tsar and the czarist system with one violent blow - a plot to blow up the emperor’s train, and an explosion in the Winter Palace prepared by Stepan Khalturin (1857 - 1882) - failed. </p>
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<span class="caption">Stepan Khalturin (1857 - 1882)</span>
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<p>It was third strike lucky. On March 1st 1881, a bomb thrown by the Russified Pole Ignacy Hryniewiecki (1856 - 1881), a member of the underground party called “The People’s Will” struck down and killed Alexander II. Many populists were overjoyed; but their spirits soon slumped. The regime of Alexander III arrested and executed five accomplices (Hryniewicki was killed by his own bomb), flatly rejected calls for a freely elected National Assembly, then tightened the screws of repression. Populist violence fed despotism, followed by revolution, then yet more despotism. Russians were forced to wait in the queue for constitutional representative democracy - where they are still waiting, two generations later. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142674/original/image-20161021-1769-1ehtis9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Arrest of a Propagandist (1892) by Ilya Repin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.</span></span>
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</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67476/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Keane receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).</span></em></p>Populism is a hot topic around the globe right now, and much can be learned from studying its history.John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/660132016-09-24T06:52:49Z2016-09-24T06:52:49ZA New Democratic Enlightenment?<p>This is the slightly rewritten text of my address to the opening plenary session, ‘New Enlightenment <em>Neue Aufklärung</em>’, at the European Forum Alpbach, Alpbach, Austria, 28 August 2016.</p>
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<span class="caption">European Forum Alpbach, Austria.</span>
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<p>Ladies and Gentlemen, Citizens and Citizenesses:</p>
<p>The disintegration of Europe that the world is witnessing, and in some quarters beginning to fear, no doubt has multiple causes and causers. One cause whose power to shape ultimate outcomes should not be underestimated is the felt decadence of democratic institutions. Many observers speak of a developing crisis of European democracy. While the headline phrase triggers my discomfort about unwarranted exaggeration, it plausibly captures a basic fact of contemporary European politics: the fact that the present-day paralysis of the spirit and institutions of democracy in the European region is bound up with the slow death of social democracy. </p>
<p>In the Austrian context, in the run-up to a bitterly contested presidential election, I’m aware that talk of the death of social democracy sounds straightforwardly a political statement. Understandably so, for once upon a time the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAPÖ) was among the most powerful, dynamic and forward-thinking party machines of the modern world. In striking contrast, today’s Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) is a sickly pale shadow of its former robust self. The decline of social democracy in Austria is palpable. Yet what I have to offer to you this afternoon is an analysis that aims to be less local and more far-reaching, an audit of social democracy that is at the same time conceptual and historical and concerned with global trends, a probe that equally pays attention to language, through which (I remind you in the village of Erwin Schrödinger) people form pictures of ‘reality’ and move through their world. </p>
<h2>Enlightenment</h2>
<p>The theme of our European Forum Alpbach symposium on politics is the New Enlightenment (<em>Neue Aufklärung</em>) so here’s my opening conjecture: the language and ideal of social democracy has its roots in the 18th-century Enlightenment. Enlightenment: when people encounter the word, they think immediately of reason and rationality, a black swan moment when new mental energies flowed, when the early modern 18th-century world began to be turned upside down by fearless criticism of prejudice, pride and power.</p>
<p>The interpretation is unfortunately too simple. Truth is that the intellectual upheaval that came to be called the Enlightenment (the phrase was largely a 19th-century neologism, typically circulated by its enemies) was a much messier affair. Historians, philosophers and political thinkers have taught us to see this 18th-century upheaval in less Whiggish and sanguine ways. Most analysts of the so-called Enlightenment today prefer to view it as multiple enlightenments, as various intellectual and literary tendencies centred on many different themes, with positive and negative effects. </p>
<p>Consider, for example, how Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Michel Foucault long ago challenged us to see that the 18th-century fetish of ‘reason’, its will to know everything and to measure and master the world, fed the spirit of bureaucratic ‘unreason’, incarceration and totalitarian rule. Or think of Isaiah Berlin’s reminder that the opponents of Enlightenment, dubbed the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, included thinkers, poets, painters and writers who plausibly championed pluralism and attacked the blind belief in scientific progress, in effect because they viewed the world as shaped not by the ‘laws of nature’, but by the contingencies of history. </p>
<p>My research on Thomas Paine and the eighteenth century (published as <em>Tom Paine: A Political Life</em>) tried to complicate matters by making the point that the Enlightenment also included champions of civil rights, social justice and democratic representation, rebels and radicals who were sharply aware of the miseries suffered by people ground down by modern institutions not of their own choosing. These dissenting rebels despised misery. Thanks to them, we could say, misery was given its proper name. Starvation and indignity, violence and powerlessness, were denounced as unnecessary blights on the face of the world. Misery was no longer regarded as God-given, or as part of the natural order of things (<em>natura naturans</em>). It was seen to be contingent, remediable, if necessary by means of revolutionary upheavals.</p>
<h2>Social Democracy</h2>
<p>Social democracy was the offspring of this bold way of imagining a world freed from misery. Its fortunes were tied to the rise and expansion of modern industrial capitalism. Coined during the 1840s, the neologism <em>Sozialdemokratie</em> first circulated among disaffected German-speaking skilled craftsmen, farm and factory workers, whose support for social democracy made possible the conversion of isolated pockets of social resistance into powerful mass movements protected by trade unions, political parties and governments committed to widening the franchise and building welfare state institutions.</p>
<p>Market inequalities fuelled resentments among the supporters of social democracy. Their powerful charge was that ‘free market’ competition produces chronic gaps between winners and losers and, eventually, a society defined by private splendour and public squalor. If Eduard Bernstein, Karl Renner, Rosa Luxemburg, Clement Attlee, Jawaharlal Nehru or Bruno Kreisky were suddenly to reappear in our midst, they would not be surprised by the way practically all market-driven democracies are today coming to resemble hour glass-shaped societies. In these societies, as Thomas Piketty and other political economists explain, the wealth of small numbers of extremely rich people has multiplied, the shrinking middle classes feel insecure and the ranks of the permanently poor and the precariat are swelling – as in the United States, the richest capitalist market economy on the face of the earth, where 1% of households now own 38% of the national wealth; or in Britain, where at the end of three decades of deregulated growth, 30 per cent of children live in poverty; or in Austria, where at least 20% of citizens are now suffering money and dignity problems. </p>
<p>Social democrats of the 19th- and early-20th centuries found obnoxious, and actively resisted, social inequality on this scale. They railed against the general dehumanising effects of treating people as commodities. Social democrats acknowledged the technical prowess, productivity and dynamism of markets. But they were sure that love and friendship, family life, public freedoms and the vote could not be bought with money, or somehow be manufactured by commodity production, exchange and consumption. That was the whole point of their radical demands for a living wage, the abolition of child labour and Eight Hours Work, Eight Hours Recreation and Eight Hours Rest. In the dark year of 1944, the Hungarian social democrat Karl Polanyi put the point in defiant words: ‘To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment’, he wrote, ‘would result in the demolition of society’. His reasoning, traceable to the 18th-century Enlightenment, was that human beings are ‘fictitious commodities’. His conclusion: dignity through democracy had to be fought for politically, which at a minimum meant the weakening of market forces and strengthening the hand of the commonweal against private profits, money and selfishness.</p>
<h2>Market Failures</h2>
<p>More than a few social democrats went further, by pointing out, in opposition to Jean-Baptiste Say, Friedrich von Hayek and other liberal political economists, the reasons why unregulated markets are prone to collapse. Economists of recent decades have regularly described these failures as ‘externalities’, but their jargon is misleading. Something more fundamental is at stake. Free markets periodically cripple themselves, sometimes to the point of total breakdown, for instance because (a) they whip up socially disruptive storms of technical innovation (Joseph Schumpeter’s point) or because (b) as we know from recent bitter experience, unregulated markets generate bubbles whose inevitable bursting bring whole economies to their knees.</p>
<p>The social democratic critique of free market capitalism proved compelling for millions of people. But what exactly did social democracy mean to its champions and sympathisers? Winning parliamentary elections and controlling the levers of state power, certainly. Yet there was always some muddle over the meaning of the ‘social’ in social democracy; and there were frequent brawls about whether and how the taming of markets, which many called ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’, could be achieved. </p>
<p>There is no time for me to recall the great moments of high drama, conceptual strife and contradictions, dark sides and luscious ironies that form part of a recorded history that includes courageous struggles of the downtrodden to form co-operatives, friendly societies, free trade unions, and to spread literacy and win the struggle for the universal franchise through social democratic parties. There were fractious splits that gave birth to anarchism and Bolshevism; and outbursts of nationalism and xenophobia and (in Sweden) experiments with eugenics. The history also includes the re-launch of social democratic parties at the Frankfurt Declaration of the Socialist International (1951), as well as efforts to nationalise railways and heavy industry, to socialise the provision of health care and formal education for all citizens. And the history of social democracy also embraces big and bold thinking, romantic talk of the need to abolish alienation, respect for what Paul Lafargue called the right to be lazy (<em>le droit à la paresse</em>), even the vision of a future communist society projected by his father-in-law Karl Marx, a society in which women and men, freed from the shackles of the market, went hunting in the morning, fished in the afternoon and, after a good dinner, engaged others in frank political discussion.</p>
<h2>A Slow Death</h2>
<p>A strange but striking feature of the history of social democracy is just how distant and worn out this language now feels. The slow death of social democracy during the past several decades has the quality of an unfolding political tragedy; it certainly signals the decline and disappearance of the spirit and substance of the old Enlightenment. Yes, there is a <em>Grosse Koalition</em> in Germany, and a red-green government led by Stefan Löfven in Sweden. But almost everywhere social democratic political parties and organisations have run out of steam; their loss of organising energy and political imagination is palpable. Collaborators with financial capitalism (Jürgen Kocka) then double-speak apologists of austerity, their Third Way has turned out to be a dead end. </p>
<p>Gone are the flags, historic speeches and bouquets of red roses. Party leader intellectuals of the calibre of Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941) and C.A.R. Crosland (1918-1977) are figures of a distant past. Today’s party leaders who still dare to call themselves social democrats are by comparison intellectual pygmies. Loud calls for greater equality, social justice and public service have faded, often into choking silence. Positive references to the Keynesian welfare state have disappeared. As if to prove that social democracy was just an intermezzo between capitalism and more capitalism, these leaders speak of budgetary restraint, triple ‘A’ ratings, ‘renewed growth’ and ‘competition’, public-private partnerships, ‘stakeholders’ and ‘business partners’. </p>
<p>Sometimes the duplicity induces pain. I once witnessed the fabulist Tony Blair reassure a gathering of trade unionists that he was against free market forces before moving on, two hours later, after a light lunch together, to tell a group of business executives exactly the opposite. The crisis of Atlantic-region capitalism since 2008 seems to have amplified the duplicity. Within the dwindling ranks of committed social democrats, few now call themselves socialists (Alexis Tsipras and Jeremy Corbyn are exceptions), or even social democrats. Most leaders are party faithful, machine men and women surrounded by media advisers, connoisseurs of governmental power geared to free markets. Few make noise about tax avoidance by big business and the rich, the decay of public services, the weakening of trade unions, or rising inequality. All of them, usually without knowing it, are blind apologists of the drift towards a new form of financial capitalism protected by what I have elsewhere called ‘banking states’ that have lost control over money supply, so that in most democratic countries over 95% of the ‘broad money’ supply is now in the hands of private banks and credit institutions.</p>
<p>Ladies and gentlemen: social democracy failed to understand, let alone regulate, this new historical type of capitalism, whose near-breakdown in 2007/2008 has damaged the lives of millions of people in Europe and elsewhere. But the disintegration of social democracy has been overdetermined by other, multiple forces. Among the most important are these entangled trends, here summarised in the briefest form:</p>
<p>● Membership of social democratic parties has dipped dramatically. Although accurate figures are hard to obtain – these parties are notoriously secretive about their active membership lists - we know that in 1950 the Norwegian Labour Party, one of the most successful in the world, had over 200,000 paid-up members; and that today its membership is barely one-quarter that figure. Much the same trend is evident within the British Labour Party, whose membership peaked in the early 1950s at over 1 million and is today less than half that figure. Helped by the recent £3 special offer registration, total membership of the Labour Party is now around 370,000 – less than the 400,000 figure recorded at the 1997 general election. During Blair’s years of leadership alone, membership declined steadily every year from 405,000 to 166,000. When it is considered that during the post-1945 period, the size of the electorate in most countries has been steadily increasing (by 20% between 1964 and 2005 in Britain alone) the proportion of people who are no longer members of social democratic parties is far more substantial than even the raw numbers suggest. The figures imply a profound waning of enthusiasm for social democracy in party form. Satirists might even say that its parties are waging a new political struggle: the struggle for self-effacement. </p>
<p>● Social democratic parties were among the slowest to react to the upheavals effected by the digital, globally networked communications revolution that began during the 1960s. The harnessing of big data through networked campaigning techniques by these parties has often been resisted, or ignored. Striking is the contrast with the powerful social democratic parties of the late 19th century. They stood for universal public literacy and published influential newspapers, books, pamphlets and best-selling utopian novels and literary fantasies such as Edward Bellamy’s <em>Looking Backward, 2000–1887</em> (1888). Social democracy was once a powerful symbol of democratic openness and communicative empowerment. Today it symbolises sound bites and media grabs, the avoidance of bad news. The old class struggles have been replaced by phrase struggles; </p>
<p>● Social democratic parties have shown limited awareness of the emergence, since the 1940s, of monitory democracy. This is a new historical form of democracy in which free and fair elections and parliaments are of declining importance, certainly when compared with the rising importance of the public monitoring and restraint - humbling – of arbitrary power by means of a multitude of newly-invented watchdog institutions such as citizens’ assemblies, teach-ins, public forums, activist courts, environmental networks and WikiLeaks, to name just a few innovations;</p>
<p>● Gripped by a territorial state mentality and confined to nation state barracks, social democratic parties have underestimated the agenda-setting and blackmail and veto effects of cross-border chains of organised corporate and governmental power. Operating within the boundaries of territorial states, social democratic parties and governments have consequently been weakened and victimised by what Albert Einstein dubbed ‘spooky action at a distance’: cross-border butterfly effects, arbitrage pressures and quantum tunnels, all of which have greatly complicated the politics of wealth and income redistribution; </p>
<p>● The rise of the People’s Republic of China as an economic great power on the global power stage has had two ironic effects: it has weakened an important part of the social support base of social democracy (industrial manufacturing, trade unions, workers) and established a viable ‘socialist’ alternative to capitalism in social democratic form: one party state capitalism legitimated by locally-made forms of democratic rule; and</p>
<p>● The long-term silence of social democrats about environmental degradation has accelerated the death of social democracy. We have entered an age of gradually rising public awareness of the destructive effects of the modern human will to dominate our biosphere, of the bad habit of treating nature, just as Africans or indigenous peoples were once treated, as commodities, as objects of production, profit and other selfishly human ends.</p>
<p>This last-mentioned development needs some elaboration. For more than half a generation, beginning with works such as Rachel Carson’s _Silent Spring _(1962), green thinkers, scientists, journalists, politicians and social movement activists have been pointing out that the whole social democratic tradition is implicated deeply in the spoliation of our planet. They note that social democracy was the Janus face of free-market capitalism: both stood for the human domination of nature. Hence they call for a new politics with green qualities, a new democratic enlightenment that poses a fundamental challenge to both the style and substance of the old social democracy, or what remains of it.</p>
<h2>The New Democratic Enlightenment</h2>
<p>What is this new democratic enlightenment? It has multiple features, especially a strong sense of the complexity and indeterminacy of things and processes in our world. It displays resistance to wilful simplification, and opposition to all ideologies, including populism. There is preference for extra-parliamentary civic action and monitory democracy against the old model of electoral democracy in territorial state form. The <em>Neue Aufklärung</em> features sympathy for a rich repertoire of new political tactics practised in a variety of local and cross-border settings: citizen science networks, Barcelona-style <em>municipalismo</em>, bio-regional assemblies, green political parties (the first in the world was the United Tasmania Group), earth watch summits and the skilful staging of non-violent media events (Greenpeace originally called them ‘mind bombs’). </p>
<p>The new democratic enlightenment is marked by an earthy cosmopolitanism. It displays a deep sensitivity to the global interdependence of peoples and their ecosystems. There is support for new post-carbon energy regimes and opposition to fossil-fuelled growth and habitat destruction. There is also acute awareness of the opportunities and dangers posed by marketisation of the most intimate areas of everyday life, for instance fertility outsourcing, data harvesting, nanotechnologies, stem cell research and humanoid robots. The new enlightenment has a clear understanding of the golden rule that whoever has the gold rules. It displays strong awareness that market control of daily life, civil society and political institutions has negative social and political consequences, unless checked by open public debate, political resistance, public regulation and the positive redistribution of wealth, for instance through a basic citizens’ income. Especially striking is the new enlightenment’s call for the ‘de-commodification’ (Claus Offe) of the biosphere, in effect, the replacement of social democracy’s will to dominate nature and its innocent attachment to History with a more prudent sense of ‘deep time’ aware of the fragile complexity of the biosphere and its multiple rhythms. </p>
<p>The new democratic enlightenment is opposed to the old social democratic metaphysics of economic progress, and the machismo of its favoured imagery of warrior male bodies gathered at the gates of pits, docks and factories, singing hymns to industrial growth, under smoke-stained skies. The new enlightenment issues a warning: that unless we human beings change our ways with the world in which we dwell things may turn out badly – very badly indeed. Its overall attitude to the world is precautionary: whether we know it or not, it is said, we humans are now deciding which evolutionary pathway awaits us, including the possibility that we are trapped in an extinction event of our own making.</p>
<p>It is worth asking whether these themes of the new enlightenment are evidence of a black swan moment in global affairs? Are they proof that we are living through the beginning of a large phase transformation analogous to the last decades of the 18th century, when the rough-and-tumble resistance to the miseries produced by market-driven industrial capitalism slowly but surely morphed into a highly disciplined workers’ movement receptive to the siren calls of social democracy?</p>
<p>It is impossible to know with utter certainty whether these are the right questions, or whether our times are like that. Only the historians of the future will be able to tell us, yet it should be noted that many champions of the new enlightenment are now convinced that a tipping point has indeed been reached. Their sense of alternative possibilities (Robert Musil’s <em>Möglichkeitsinne</em>) is strong. In effect, the new enlightenment is an exercise in democracy ‘dreaming itself’. It demands that democracy be taken seriously and self-reflexively redefined as monitory democracy. It insists that the point is not only to change the world, but also to interpret it in new ways, through new languages, to grasp that so many things of our times are too strange to be thought, to see that although democracy is never fully realisable, that it is always the ‘democracy to come’ (Jacques Derrida), it is nevertheless still the most powerful earthly weapon available for humbling the powerful and taming their arrogant and foolish will to power. </p>
<p>But where does this new enlightenment leave social democracy? What is the relationship between the first and second enlightenments? Thinking social democrats will reply to such questions by emphasising the flexibility of their creed, the capacity of their originally 19th-century standpoint to adapt to 21st-century circumstances. I have friends and colleagues who are adamant that it’s much too early to bid farewell to social democracy. They reject the charge that it is a worn-out ideology whose moments of triumph belong to the past, or that it is a mournful lament for the achievements of bygone days (Tony Judt). </p>
<p>These social democrats admit that the goal of re-building social solidarity among citizens through civil society and government action has been damaged by market-produced inequality and fudged agendas designed to win votes from business, the rich and right-wing political competitors. These thinking social democrats know that the old slogans and sense of time of social democracy are exhausted. They admit to being impressed by the media-savvy initiatives and staged détournement of civic networks such as M-15, Amnesty International and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose actions aim to put a stop to the violence of states, armies and gangs, but also to corporate misconduct and market injustices and miseries in cross-border settings. These thinking social democrats then play the ace card in their pack: they reiterate the importance of ‘complex equality’ (Michael Walzer) as the core value of their creed. These social democrats aim to retrieve its most fruitful old ‘wish image’ (Wunschbild) to deal politically with the new problems of our time. They are sure that the old topic of misery, inequality, capitalism and democracy deserves to be revived. In a recent lecture in Firenze, along these lines, Jürgen Kocka, one of Germany’s most influential social democratic intellectuals, expressed this point well. The new ‘financialised’ capitalism, he noted, is ‘becoming more and more market radical, more mobile, unsteady and breathless’. His conclusion is defiant: ‘capitalism is not democratic and democracy not capitalistic’.</p>
<h2>The Future?</h2>
<p>Ladies and gentlemen: you will no doubt be asking after the chances of practical success of the new enlightenment, this new dreaming of democracy. In Europe and elsewhere, how viable is the hope that red and green can be mixed, you will ask? Can the result be more than bland shades of neutral brown? Might the old and new be combined into a powerful force for an enlightened politics of democratic equality against the power of money and markets and their ruination of our biosphere? Time will tell whether the proposed metamorphosis I’ve sketched can happen successfully. As things stand, only one thing can safely be said. If the new enlightenment happened then it would confirm an old political axiom famously outlined by the English designer, poet and socialist William Morris (1834 - 1896): when enlightened people fight for liberty, equality and democracy, he noted, the battles and wars they lose typically inspire others to carry on their fight. When they do that, in much-changed circumstances, he noted, they need to experiment with new languages, and use new and improved means, fuelled by new hopes and new sensibilities. Shouldn’t a new enlightenment, a second enlightenment that is less intellectually arrogant and more democratically powerful than its predecessor, heed this wise advice?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66013/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Keane receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). </span></em></p>This is the slightly rewritten text of my address to the opening plenary session, ‘New Enlightenment Neue Aufklärung’, at the European Forum Alpbach, Alpbach, Austria, 28 August 2016. Ladies and Gentlemen…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.