Global Thinker Award 2006

Full Speech of Prof. Lord Bhikhu Parekh

During the Cold War, the West pursued what is sometimes called a realistic foreign policy and that involved supporting whichever government was in power. And quite often it involved giving a strong preference for authoritarian regimes including military rulers on the ground that these authoritarian characters were easy to handle, one could do secret deals with them because you don’t have the trouble of media questioning too strongly. They were prepared to take a strong stand against Left-wing forces and therefore forestalled revolution which the Americans and others were very keen to prevent. In the 1970s a new dimension was added to it, which is promoting human rights as one of the important objectives of foreign policy especially under Jimmy Carter but that was pursued half-heartedly and later abandoned by Kissinger, Reagan and others.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9th November, 1989, which is 9/11 according to the European calendar, which was a turning point. When the Berlin Wall fell and soon the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West returned to the projects of human rights and began to argue that it had a duty to promote democratic governments in the rest of the world. After the horrendous events of September 11th, 9/11 according to the American calendar, this time rather than the European calendar, the democratic project was once again revived and it was given an added impetus and a new justification. And the justification in this case was very complex and I think it is partly the source of some of the trouble that we are watching. That terrorism was said to be casually linked with tyranny and therefore democracy was good in itself and  therefore other people should have it. which This was the language in which it was articulated earlier,. iIncreasingly the rhetoric, m.

May be it was of for selling to the skeptical public, that democracy all over the world was necessary if we wanted to counter terrorism and therefore in the interest of everybody. So war for democracy became and extension and a legitimizing ideology for the war on terrorism. This is where we stand now. How should we respond and this is a question I want to explore.

The leftists feel the West doesn’t mean that project of democratization. They cite its support for authoritarian regimes all over the world including people in our neighbourhood. And when they have claimed to export democracy or to promote democracy as in Afghanistan, especially in Iraq, it was largely an afterthought. It was not the reason why they went in, it was an afterthought and intended to legitimize extremely dubious and self-interested interventions in the internal affairs of other societies. There is also a legitimate fear in many circles that the project of global democratization could easily become another version of the civilizing mission that inspired the colonial empires of three centuries ago and it could also easily pave the way for US led imperialism.

And many academics have already been saying that decolonization was one of the greatest mistakes that the Europeans made and what is now needed is a subtle, stealthy form of recolonisation and I hear it all the time not only amongst people on the left but certainly obviously people on the right that if the world is to be set right and if the western countries are to lead a decent life, some form of subtle and stealthy recolonisation is a must. The only question is how do you sell it and how do you get people to say that this democratization project is dangerous, even sinister and therefore we should have no sympathy with it at all. This is one reaction.

I share these fears but at the same time this negative reaction is misguided, due to a variety of reasons. In a globalizing world, our destinies are interlocked. There is a community of fate and what happens in one part of the world inevitably affects others very deeply. We also have a moral obligation to promote the well being of less fortunate societies. And the Left in particular has always insisted on global justice and a democratic way of life is an important part of global justice and a democratization can have an imperialist thrust but it can also be an emancipatory and progressive force depending on how it is done, why it is done and what are the conditions in which it is carried out.

So what I want to suggest is while remaining intensely alert to its likely misuse and its dangers, we should not dismiss it out of hand. That would be a grave mistake and my concern is to explore what it involves and how we should respond to this democratization project.

So, the question for me then is whether democracy can and should be promoted in non-democratic especially repressive societies? But, that is a loaded question, a very complex question. It in fact contains three separate questions rolled up in one and I want to separate them out and then tackle them one by one. First, what is it that we are trying to promote in the name of Democracy?

Democracy can be defined in several different ways. And it can take many different forms. Which of these forms are we seeking to promote? And even in the West, there is no agreement on democracy. British democracy is quite different in many important ways from the French or the American democracy. France and Germany had a strong state tradition. Britain never had a strong tradition but a strong civil society tradition. In United States, liberalism came first, democracy came afterwards. In fact democracy did not come until about forty years ago. And even now I am told 8 per cent of the black Americans can’t vote if they are guilty of criminal records; the felons can’t vote. So, the American democracy has a very powerful liberal thrust and therefore right to information, all kinds of things which are sadly missing in Europe.

Which brand of democracy are we trying to export? And the question is since we can’t export or expect other parts of the world to fit in with one particular model of democracy, the only way we can tackle it is to ask whether there are certain universally valid principles in democracy which may legitimately be applied to other parts of the world.

So, the first question is what within democracy is universally valid and what is culturally and historically specific and therefore cannot, and should not be attempted to be exported. The second question is, assuming that there are certain universal components of democracy, do we have a right to press them on other societies. Should we not trust our fellow human beings, accept them as equal and leave it to them to decide how they want to run their affairs, whether they want to accept these democratic principles or not?.

Why should we take it upon ourselves? Is it not a form of moral arrogance to assume that we have discovered the truth and others are living in darkness, should we not leave them to decide whether they want these principles or not?. And thirdly, even if we can answer the second question in affirmative saying ‘yes’, we don’t have a right to impose anything but we have a duty to press these principles upon other societies, ought implies can. So, the question is, – Is it likely that principles can be exported in this way? Can moral and political principles and institutions be implanted in a society that has never known them and may not provide a hospitable soil? So, these are the three questions that I want to take in turn.

Although democracy in one form or another we have known in our own country., bBy and large, democracy as we know it began in classical Athens between 450 B.C and 322 B.C. In other words, it lasted for 130 years off and on. And it is this Athenian experience that has proved the most influential throughout the history. Now for the Athenians, democracy was a very specific form of government. It was answer to a very important question that every society faces, namely, what is the best way to organize and conduct the collective affairs of a society?

And the democratic answer was people must conduct their offers affairs themselves. Why? They gave two kinds of answers, moral and prudential. Moral answers were in terms of the idea of freedom and equality. A society can be said to be free only if it is its own master. And since every individual is capable of participating in the affairs, all freeborn citizens in Athens should enjoy equality of power. So, democracy was morally the best form of government because it alone guaranteed freedom and equality.

And the prudential, practical arguments for democracy were as follows. When people conducted their affairs themselves, they were more likely to pursue common goals than otherwise. Also, when people gave the laws to themselves, it was likely that the laws would be fair, non-discriminatory and in common interest. And as Aristotle said in that wonderful phrase, since only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, people were likely to be the best judges of their own interest.

For Athenians, democracy was a form of governance, and established two important principles – Isonomia, equality before the law and Isogoria, equal freedom of speech. But this form of democracy immediately began to raise some extremely important questions. Who are the people? Common people. The Greek world “Demos” and I want you to bear this in mind that the Greek word “Demos” from which we get the word democracy had two meanings in Greek. It meant the whole community. It also meant the common people as opposed to the aristocrats. And this ambiguity was never systematically resolved.

The next question was that if you are going to say people should rule, does it mean that they might do whatever they like? What if they refuse to tolerate dissent? The Athenian treatment of Socrates was one example of this. Kill the man who refused to take conformist line. There was also the argument that since democracy implied majority rule, it was a danger to property, it could easily lead to the dispossession of propertied classes as it did repeatedly in the history of Athens, which made it extremely unstable.

And there was also the feeling that in democracy, people could be swayed by demi-Gods. So, democracy could become demigodocracy. So, there were all these dangers in democracy. After the Athenian experience ended, a lot of people began to argue that although democracy was important, it could not be an absolute value because it was also a source of dangers. Crude majority rule, ignoring basic rights, insisting that everything should be done by people and therefore bringing elections into areas where elections don’t belong, like the election of civil service, executive election of judges and all that.

So, this debate began and there have been all forms of democracy in the light of these criticisms that have been thrown up. Most important answer from our point of view begins to emerge in the 19th century in the form liberal democracy, which increasingly became representative democracy. So, in the light of these criticisms of democracy in the 19th century, people began to argue that what we need is not the Athenian kind of democracy that people rule themselves.

Their job is to elect representatives but once they elect representatives, they are the leaders and they will rule the country. In other words, it was going to be not representative government which means people governing themselves through representatives but once they elect representatives, they are the leaders and they will rule the country.

In other words, it was going to be not representative government which means people governing themselves through representatives, it was going to be representative democracy, representatives replacing democracy. And this is the form that we have been practiscing off and on with minor changes here and there for the last 150 or the last 130 years.

Now, the liberal democracy is at one level an improvement on Athenian democracy. At another level, it is a step backward. It is an improvement because it respects individual rights in a way that the Athenian democracy did not. It protects minorities and dissidents, it checks volatile public opinion and it allows the creation of stable institutions. This is progress. But it is also a step backward because it limits people’s power.

People are active only once every four or five years. Public opinion does not rule; it may occasionally influence the government. It takes away from people the most important power which people have, and they had, in classical Athens which is the right to declare war. It is extraordinary. I find it incomprehensible. It is extraordinary that whether in the United States where it is greater amount in check or in Great Britain, the Prime Minister can commit the country to a war which can lead to the deaths of lots of soldiers but also threaten the civilian integrity without the subject of this magnitude being put to the people in a referendum or without people being actually consulted.

Right to the heart of the Athenian democracy was this idea that ultimately people must have control about whether they will live or die and war is one place where you die. And if people are going to be excluded from decisions of this magnitude then it is not democracy. And in a liberal or representative democracy, that right does not belong to the people because there is no country in which the right to war is left to the people rather than delegated to the Prime Minister, the Government. In Britain, House of commons does not have to even vote, the Prime Minister can decide. Now, here is a mature democracy and it is only this time that Tony Blair was good enough to ask the House of Commons to debate, but not the House of Lords. How can you have a situation of this kind?

We already have two very different models of democracy. The Athenian model where people said the Government is ours, we want to be actively involved in it, therefore, fundamental questions about how the country will be organized, whether or where the war will be continued, where there should be a Treaty or not will be our decision because it is our life, our property. On the other hand, we have liberal democracy which is democracy within the limits of liberalism. Democracy emasculated by and also strengthened by its commitment to liberalism. So, liberal democracy is one where liberalism is the dominant premise, and the democracy is defined in terms of it. We already have two different models of democracy and there can be many others. And I want to highlight the situation of a multi-national society. What kind of a democracy is possible in a multi-ethnic society?

The Athenian democracy would not work because the Athenian democracy pre-supposes a single demos, homogenous people which of course you don’t have in a multi-ethnic society. Liberal democracy wouldn’t work either because it presupposes individuals and it dissolves the demos into a group of individuals. In a multi-ethnic society, you have multiple demos, multiple people and the question is what kind of democracy is possible or how should democracy be indigenized, adjusted to the circumstances of a multi-ethnic society.

Take Canada, which is the big battle. One people or two people, it’s a bi-national country, or the way in which we had to handle the problem of Kashmir or the Nagas or the Muslims in India. And inevitably, I think the great wisdom of our founding fathers, way back in 1946-48, long before multi-cultural societies or the ideas of multi culturalism became popular, our founding fathers knew that we needed to accommodate the sensitivities and needs and demands of different parts of the country, different groups of the country who had different needs and therefore different demands. So, a multi-ethnic society cannot have democracy of the same kind, and need to make adjustments.

I think four important conclusions followed. First, we should not make the mistake of homogenizing democracy as if there is only one universal, standard model of democracy. Secondly, democracy is an important value but there are also others such as individual liberty, national security, social harmony and inter-ethnic equality and justice. And these values need to be balanced. Thirdly, liberal democracy is a historically specific form of democracy. Some of its values can be shown to be universal, others not. And fourthly, there are some aspects of democracy, some principles of democracy which can be universalized, others cannot be. Following five are absolutely central to any form of democracy.

People should be able to govern themselves, governments should be chosen by and accountable to the people, all citizens should have equal right to participate in public life, rule of law so that law is impartially enacted and impartially enforced and finally freedom of expression associationexpression so that people are able to articulate their own opinion.

And I would suggest that when a form of government meets these principles, it is democratic and to the extent it falls short of them, it is not democratic. Now, here I think there is an important issue which is often lost sight of. Take a society which satisfies these five principles, people who rule, government is accountable to the people, elected, can be removed and so on. Suppose that society were to strike a different balance. They are about what we take to be fundamental rights. In some societies, we would say right to property is fundamental, should be protected.

Supposing this society which is democratic, decided that right to property in the sense of personal property is fine but right to property in the sense of unlimited capitalist accumulation, we do not want to allow. Supposing we believe that you should be completely free to criticize a religion, to mock religious sensibilities. Supposing, in a society which is democratic by these principles, it was decided that free speech should not be absolutised as it is in the United States for example, but that it should be balanced again, the right to religion. Are we going to say that this democratic society, because its values are not exactly the values that we want, are not liberal, is not democratic. And I think there is a constant tendency.

I want to warn against this, pack the idea of democracy with a lot of baggage with the result that societies whom we are urging to practicse democracy are asked not just to practisce democracy but to absorb a lot of moral and cultural and ideological baggage. And that is something which many societies resist and they feel that although ordinarily people in those societies might be very sympathetic to democracy, a good deal is being exported which they dislike, and, therefore, they throw away the whole package of democracy because the content that is put into it is unacceptable.

And in this context, I just want to explore this idea about which I have a very mixed attitude, of Islamicof Islamic democracy. Just like we have, we talk about democracy and we think that there is only one kind of democracy. I have argued that there can be liberal democracy which is quite different from the Athenian democracy., Ccould there be Islamic democracy?

And if there was, are we to dismiss it on the ground that look, this is all spatial pleading, there is only democracy.

But there is not only democracy becauseJust as liberal democracy is democracy within the limits of liberalism,. cCan you have democracy within the limits of Islam, Islamic democracy? And if some societies feel very strongly and profoundly that they are religious, committed to Islam and they think that it is the source of their moral values, are we going to say you can either be Islamic or you can be a democracy but you cannot be both. In the light of what I have argued, just as in the 19th century, we evolved liberal democracy, because we had thrown up a new form of economy in the form of the bourgeois society or capitalistic economy or the ideas of individual freedom and liberty where the Greek idea of Athenian democracy had to be suitably transformed and something new began to emerge in the shape of liberal democracy, is it possible that the 21st century might see the rise in some quarters of a new form of democracy called Islamic democracy?.

Now, I don’t want to press the argument too far. Whether it is possible, what are the dangers but all I want to do is we should not panic. And some of us do panic and certainly in western society, in the government circles in particular, there is a tendency to panic that the moment you hear the language of religion, or the moment we hear people talking about Islamic democracy, we say, Oh my God! How are we going to handle these fundamentalists, these Mullahs? The same kind of language you hear again and again with the result that we create a blockage between us and them and it becomes very difficult for them to sort out the issues in their own society.

To go out to their ordinary people and say, look, we know you are committed to Islam, you believe that Allah revealed himself exhaustively, definitely in Quran, alright, but within that framework, we can create space for democracy. I don’t want us to block that space and it is that attempt to block that space which frightens these people, which makes them enemies of democracy and just as they become enemies of democracy and practice terrorism, we get frightened and what we have is two rival fundamentalisms facing each other leading the world increasingly towards a semi-hot, semi-cold war which will last much longer than the last one.

The last Cold War lasted from 1946 to 1989. This one, I fear, began in 2001 may not end till 2099 because the enemies are not clear, they are not organized. 1.3 billion people on the other side of the world, 44 countries where Muslims constitute majority, you can’t function like this. This is why I want to emphasize this point that the ideas of Islamic democracy, we should not rule out of hand.

But, at the same time we should not fall in for the view that just as you can have liberal democracy, you can have Islamic democracy, why not? It is not as simple as that. Because, between liberalism and democracy, there is an inherent compatibility because democracy, and this is another big issue, if you start by democracy as people ruling themselves, as we say in our constitution or as  the great American constitution says, “We, the people”, does it mean that we are the source of all authority, not God. Is it the case that democracy is inherently secular so that to begin by accepting democracy is to begin by marginalizing the Almighty, whether or not he exists, or is it possible to talk about “We, the people” while recognizing, as many Muslims would want us to recognize, that Allah is the source of all sovereignty, he is the source of all authority but subject to that people can be the source of legitimacy.

That is how the idea of Christian democracy developed in Europe. Until the 17th century, the Catholic church was condemning democracy on the ground that this was secular, against God and so on, and through the intellectual struggle that went on, Europeans began to realize and even now in Europe we have the idea of Christian democracy, Christian democratic Party.

Why should we rule out the possibility of Islamic democracy, provided it’s genuine, it is serious and it respects those five principles that I mentioned earlier. As long as those five principles are mentioned, then if the government decides to privilege religion over free speech or if it decides that laws will be made in the light of what the Quran says, fine, it is a democracy.

We may not like what it does, we may think it is not liberal enough or individualist enough but we may criticize it on that ground not on the ground that it is not democracy. This is a very important point that I wanted to make. Coming to my second point, let me now turn to the next question. Assuming that we have these principles of democratic governance which are universally valid, the five principles I mentioned, what do we do about those societies which do not measure up to those principles.

And there are three answers, if we can impose them, leave them alone or try to encourage them. The first two responses are muddled and the third one is the only correct one. There are people who believe that we have a right, indeed a moral duty to impose these universal principles. I could produce quite a large body of literature and it tends to come very easily to religious people within the European, western, American tradition where the argument is, remember when the Christ said, “compel them to come in” or when St.Augustin said, “Error has no rights.”

If you know that these principles are absolutely true, then the same evangelical spirit which requires you to spread the truths of Christianity, you are now required to spread the truths of democracy. And there are people who talk in that language. But, there are lots of other people who do that; that error or evil has no rights and if we have discovered the truth as we have in the form of democracy, we have not only a right but also a moral duty to impose them upon the societies. I think this is a non-starter for a variety of reasons.

We have seen what happens in Iraq where more people have been dying than they died under Saddam Hussein, and it is not just a question of people dying. Those who are badly injured but not reported, property destroyed, families breaking up, the kind of salient, subdued, Hobbesian war of each against each that had been unleashed in that society.

I think it should be a salutary lesson to all of us. So, when you try to impose democracy, you provoke hospitality hostility to democracy because it comes to be identified with aggression and outside forces. You also don’t take local circumstances into account and therefore that model does not work. And in any case unless people feel committed to a form of government, especially one as important as democracy, it is not going to last

And I think there is another reason why any attempt to use force to do this kind of thing is not only morally unacceptable but invariably disastrous politically for one simple reason. When the ruling party is defeated, is it prepared to vacate? This is where the trouble comes. Introducing democracy is at one level the easiest thing in the world. Not that easy but certainly easy. The question is how do you get those guys out when they are defeated in election.

I have made some studies about 248 coups that have taken place since 1945 and in all almost 90% of these cases, the question always is government in power, over centralized, over personalized, therefore kind of paranoia about power, corrupt, thrown out in the next election and it refuses to go. What do you do? And it refuses to go because it knows that the vengeance will be taken. It refuses to go because there is so much to lose. When you lose an election, you don’t just lose an office, you lose your life, and you lose your property because you will be hunted. What do you do in those places? That is the problem. And imposing democracy at the point of a bayonet or bombing, bribing or blackmailing a society into accepting democracy in this way is disastrous. Because it may be alright, it gives us a happy feeling that we have done a good job, the question is two years later when the harvest is collected, what would happen? So, the imposition of any kind is a non-starter.

The other question is why can’t we leave societies alone? I don’t buy that argument because the question is autonomy of a ruler is not the same as autonomy of the people. And it is in the name of the people that we might try to undermine the autonomy of the ruler who might be mischievous. A new state has to be recognized, which means accepted as an equal in the community of nations. So, other states will decide whether that state is able to measure up to the basic standards. So, respect for autonomy argument would not work, or to say, democratic values are western and, therefore, we can’t have it. That is a silly argument for all kinds of reasons.

First, there is nothing western about them. Just because the west happened to have started them, that doesn’t make them western because they can be found in other societies. And they are universally valid. And equally importantly if there is nothing wrong about western technology, if that is kosher, why are western principles not kosher. So, I think the argument that every society should be left alone would not work at all.

Third argument which is that democratic principles should neither be imposed nor be indifferent to other societies. We have a duty and a right to encourage them. It is a desirable goal but is it likely to work in practice, has it worked anywhere? We take great pride in the view that if there was a secular miracle, that miracle occurred in India. There is no society after 1945 of our history which has been able to sustain democracy. And tThere is no society in human history, certainly not in the West, where democracy was introduced at one go. We introduced democracy when literacy was 26%, poverty was 58%; it has worked. And this was at one level and externally induced experiment. So, it can be done.

Take the case of Japan. After the war where the whole thing was a new constitution was passed in 1946 and adapted in 1947, that constitution was widely discussed, quite the opposite of what has happened in Iraq.. They had suffered the absence of democracy and they were already disposed to this. And this Allied powers were able to mobilize the goodwill for democracy. The Emperor breaking with thousands of years of Japanese history was persuaded to become a constitutional monarch. And things began to happen.

This has been happening in the case of European Union, then in the new accession states and if you take the case of Poland or Hungary, or the Baltic Republics, democracy has gratified two or three elections in many cases, the country has survived. And this is largely because what happens in each case when a country wants to join the European Union, there is a detailed negotiation as to what a re the minimum demands that the European Union makes. After about 10 or 12 years, the country becomes ready to enter the European Union.

Its rewards are plenty;, massive aid, single market, monetary stability, immense international respectability, the opportunity to influence the European Union’s policy. There is no opposition within that country about whether to become democratic or not. If we are really serious about promoting democracy, spreading democracy, we should be thinking in terms of moral, political, economic, cultural and other incentives. Helping societies to create conditions in which democracy can flourish.

You can’t have a flourishing democracy without a flourishing civil society. But, one needs to be slightly careful. Increasingly, in Eastern Europe and in parts of Asia and Africa, civil societies sometimes become substitute for democracy and ends up undermining democracy. It becomes safety net for discontent. So, when people are unhappy, there are voluntary groups, NGOs, they take care of that. So, the discontent is not politically mobilized into changing the decadent representative institutions.

It is also often the case where civil society groups will provide certain services on behalf of the government. So, they become indebted to the government or they will provide those services because the government wouldn’t. And therefore, they absolve the government from its own responsibilities. So, when we talk about the importance of civil society, we must remember that there is a danger if we are not careful. We should be emphasizing both the civic and the political dimension of civil society, so that the forces of civil society are used to regenerate decadent representative institutions.

We also should not think that democracy can only flourish in a capitalist economy or a whole package of privatization and all that. Of course democracy needs the discipline of the market but equally market needs the discipline of democracy because market has its own casualties, deep inequalities, inequities. And, therefore, what we need to do is while making sure that no government uses public resources as a kind of largesse to give away which we tended to do very often when we subsidise almost everything in our own country, while recognizing that the government must be subject to the discipline of the market, we must also recognize that the market should be constantly subjected to the discipline of democracy.

If one looks at how democracy can be nurtured, the important thing is to make sure that educational and other institutions are able to flourish, where societies need help, that help should be provided. If you look at the ways societies tend to collapse having started well in democracy, steady rate of economic growth or economic development is a very important factor. Poverty by itself does not undermine democracy.

I don’t know any country in which just because there was poverty, people said we don’t want democracy. On the contrary, the poor are keen on democracy. In our own country, the voting rate amongst the poor and the underprivileged is higher. What eliminates them from democracy is when poverty is seen to be unjust or avoidable or permanent. And that happens when government follows policies which are disastrous, which have no hope of success and we simply end up creating greater inequality.

It is worth bearing in mind that since economic development is quite important, the West, the rich countries of the West, if they are really serious about promoting democracy, they must commit themselves to global justice and fair terms of trade so that repressive societies making transition to democracy are able to export and import, and engage in trade on equal terms. I think the issue comes in that the danger of democratization becoming a neo-imperialist or whatever kind of project is real but the answer to this is to see the creation of democracy all over the world is a common, human project, not something that one enlightened country passing it onto the rest of the world. Why can financially large companies sway elections or why you can’t even be a candidate unless you have got 100 million dollars in your pocket? I don’t know any country where people have a right to decide whether they should go to war or not.

In other words, all societies need to democratize themselves, some more than others. Rather than approach the question in a spirit of arrogance, moral arrogance and spiritual righteousness, what we should say is creating democracy is a global, human project. We are all collectively involved in it. We all have to change in different directions and if we commit ourselves to a program of global justice, then I think this western project would be taken far more seriously and would have far grater chances of success that I fear is likely to be the case. Thank you.