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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 13, 2003
Democracy in Iraq
I am not an uncritical fan of democracy I believe with E.M. Forster that it deserves "two cheers" and with Churchill that it is the worst form of government except for all the others. To me an election is a very important thing but not the most important thing in civil society. There are many competing goods and it cannot be said that any of them is always highest. There is give and take in every contested question in this world that must accommodate more than one human will. "Liberty" is in a word my highest civic ideal but as I say not the only one. "Elections" come further down the list. I have lived in a country that had freedom but at the time no elections (Thailand in the 1970s) and I follow through friends events in a country that has elections but no freedom (Zimbabwe today). I am quite certain that I would prefer Thailand under a tedious but unambitious military dictator to Zimbabwe under its mob-elected thug though I can't say that I've tried the latter. Better yet is to embrace the "both/and" proposition rather than posing a false "either/or". A free people will tend to demand representation by population; and any and every people will long for freedom after it has been taken away. The scenes broadcast this week from Baghdad again confirmed this; we saw similar scenes only half a generation ago in Berlin Warsaw Prague Budapest Bucharest and elsewhere. In each and every case freedom was the achieved condition; democracy could wait. One cannot live by euphoria alone and democracy takes time. Indeed the great strength of modern bourgeois constitutional democracy -- the kind that was pioneered in Great Britain and America the Anglo-Saxon kind -- is its capacity for muddling through. It is road-tested and battle-tested. It will not always stand up to the competition but almost always. And beyond any possible question the original Anglo-Saxon model has proved more durable than its imitators -- for the U.S. Britain Canada Australia New Zealand are among the oldest democratic regimes; the versions of continental Europe being much more recent much less tested and overall much less edifying. In the long view and in conscious opposition to the vacuous claims of the "cultural relativists" I would say that "constitutional democracy" must be accepted as an Anglo-Saxon export. The thing itself evolved grew organically within a society peculiarly British in its habits and attitudes and language over many centuries. Beyond that it required conditions of mind and feeling that were peculiarly Christian -- that depended upon living and much older ideas such as the separation of Church and State. It obviously requires adaptations to be exported to foreign lands to be grafted upon foreign cultures. The difficulties of grafting democracy onto Iraq will necessarily be huge; there are after all still difficulties in grafting democracy onto France. In our contemporary post-modern rather technocratic way of looking at things we tend to focus only on one side of the difficulties to pay attention only to the institutional problems as if the mere invention of a logically-consistent constitutional order would do the trick. Democracy is thus something we imagine being airlifted and parachuted like emergency aid. The duty of the people on the ground is only to receive the boxes and open them then consume the contents. Too often they don't like the taste and quickly return to what they were used to. Or they like the food but don 't like the work of growing it themselves. Here is the hard truth: that the world contains many cultures inured to tyranny from time out of mind. These are peoples who may long for freedom but have no practical idea how it can be got and maintained; or if they know no energy for the task. The wise columnist George Jonas wrote an instructive piece this last week on the demolition of public statuary. It was a memoir from his youth in Budapest Hungary of how during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 the young counter-revolutionists tore down a statue of Stalin even bigger and heavier than the Saddam statue that was toppled in Baghdad's Firdos Square. The Hungarians started with sledgehammers like the Baghdadis; but then consulted their elders who advised them on the use of the blow-torch. But in the end they got it down themselves. Whereas the celebrants in Firdos Square could depend on crucial technical help from American tackle and a tank. They will get technical help from U.S. constitutional experts too as they get round to erecting their democracy. Learning in the end requires not only a willing teacher but a willing student. It requires a student willing not only to solicit advice but take it; willing not only to see the demonstration performed but also to repeat it faithfully. This is all just plain common sense and yet how much of it has been forgotten in our "post-modernity": that in order to assimilate a new idea one must also discard the old idea that was standing in the way. The Iraqis do not have to become little Americans to embrace democracy. But they do have to take aboard quite a number of frankly Anglo-Saxon concepts attitudes habits of mind and feeling to master the new art. For democracy is not a neutral thing culturally or otherwise. It requires if it is ever to flourish and if the liberty behind this democracy is to be sustained skills within the general population. A whole nation must set itself with one mind to acquire these skills and to liberate ithemselves from old and failed alternative ways of thinking. And they will have to abandon much attractive nonsense such as the notion that there can be "an Islamic route to democracy". There is an Anglo-Saxon route that gets there; those taking the Islamic route have never arrived. And only by the strictest separation of Mosque and State is there any hope for democracy within the Muslim world. Democracy is thus not impossible in Iraq; it is merely unlikely. There are many impressive exiles returning. The general population is by reputation more literate and more outward-looking than that of any predominantly Arab country. The will to escape tyranny seems to be there. What remains to be seen is whether there is also at large and throughout the society the will to learn. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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