Spreading Democracy

January 16, 2005 8:44 AM

PoliticalTheoryFilter: Given that all forms of government are eventually unsustainable or only last a certain time for whatever reason, does spreading Democracy to places that never had it actually hasten its decline? (tiny bit more inside)

see Feudalism, Empires, Communism, City-States, etc

I think Communism (or the Roman Empire) may be the most closely related thing--when the USSR, for instance, gathered in satellite states behind the Iron Curtain, didn't that make it too hard to sustain?

posted by amberglow to law & government (30 comments total)

Why would it? Are you talking about genuine democracy and self-determination, or a sham democracy as part os someone's empire?
posted by LarryC at 8:58 AM on January 16, 2005

Duoh! That should be "of someone's empire."
posted by LarryC at 8:59 AM on January 16, 2005

Spreading our certain brand of democracy to other countries sometimes is shortsighted because it's not always the best type of government for all countries at all times. Countries have their own cultures and values and economies and democracy isn't always the best fit.
posted by Arch Stanton at 8:59 AM on January 16, 2005

Larry, probably sham democracy, since we don't even live up to our ideals at all. No existing govt. ever really has the form it's labeled with anyway. The USSR called themselves Communist but weren't truly entirely so.
posted by amberglow at 9:01 AM on January 16, 2005

Arch, would doing that hurt Democracy in general, or our Democracy tho?
posted by amberglow at 9:03 AM on January 16, 2005

So, your argument is whether there would be a great number of 'failed state democracies' that would cause the government type of democracy to be thrown into the 'dust bin of history'. I think the idea has merit in theory, but the real issue isn't weather 'failed state democracies hurts democracy as an idea' it's whether a country has the culture and values and peace enough to embrace the ideas of democracy and if that is a true test of what democracy really is.
posted by Arch Stanton at 9:15 AM on January 16, 2005

If the "eventually" in your hypothesis means with respect to time, then no, there's no reason your conclusion should follow. If "eventually" means with respect to size, then the implication is tautologically true.

But I don't believe we know much about the truth of the hypothesis in either case, and your few example cases don't do enough to justify it. (In particular, I don't think it was expansion that doomed the USSR, but that is probably a long debate for somewhere else.)
posted by Wolfdog at 9:20 AM on January 16, 2005

Why would we want to spread democracy abroad when we've never really tried it at home?
posted by scottymac at 9:22 AM on January 16, 2005

Well, is it money or power or control that kills off democracy? scotty's point is important here too: The classic definition of democracy is that the power, authority and legitimacy of democratic government is derived from the citizenry alone. Citizens rule in a democracy, not the people who claim mandates from their God, nor the people who have more wealth and might than others. --from here

Many people feel we really aren't a democracy anymore anyway. Are we doing a good enough job ourselves killing it off? Should i not even be looking at our attempts to spread/export it?
posted by amberglow at 9:34 AM on January 16, 2005

Derail: If Democracy is going to expire, what's gonna be the 'next big thing' of goverments?
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:45 AM on January 16, 2005

Hmmm. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but there's a difference between a type of government declining and a particular government declining.

You list "empires," but one could easily argue that that type of government is alive and well, even if particular examples have declined. Same with dictatorships, which have been around forever and show no signs of disappearing.

Perhaps you meant to ask if we are weakening our particular government (not democracy as a whole) by spreading it? Yes, I think we are. It's not just that we're exporting it, it's that we're trying to actively "manage" it in a lot of different places, so we're spreading ourselves awfully thin--just as, say, the Roman Empire did.
posted by equipoise at 9:45 AM on January 16, 2005

We can't possibly know whether we're hastening its demise or not, since that's a hypothetical. That's the answer to your question.

Anyway, we're not concerned with the existence of a government, since, as you observe, governments come and go. What we're interested in is the continued existence of a people.
posted by Hildago at 10:07 AM on January 16, 2005

Just to clarify, amber, you feel that the U.S. is "spreading democracy"? Based on current events, or history?
posted by signal at 10:19 AM on January 16, 2005

I feel we're paying lipservice, and paying with our lives to do that, even if it's bullshit. It's costing us plenty, including maybe the extinction of democracy.

I'm with equipoise i guess.
posted by amberglow at 10:32 AM on January 16, 2005

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract is more or less a valentine to Switzerland, which may be the longest living democracy. Basically, people expect to trade responsibilities for rights (benefits). When that expectation is violated, the argument goes, social order collapses.

Let's play devil's advocate and agree that the US is a "democracy", whatever that means.

When its leader goes on campaigns (for whatever reasons) that cost Americans in lives and livelihoods, and there are less resources to take care of basic services for its citizens, there is the increasing realization that the system is gamed.

In this sense, American democracy will fail not because the country is "spread too thin" but because its populace becomes more and more fed up with its end of the social contract being violated.

Its possible that this realization would have happened even without fighting an unsanctioned war overseas, but I'd suggest our expensive military campaigns are hastening this system's demise.
posted by AlexReynolds at 10:53 AM on January 16, 2005

An interesting question although, as an aside, we don't have a Democracy, we have a Republic. I like the quote attributed to Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others than have been tried."
posted by Pressed Rat at 11:24 AM on January 16, 2005

i thought we had a democratic republic, with the democratic part just as important?
posted by amberglow at 12:24 PM on January 16, 2005

amberglow, I think there exists a serious discrepancy between what you think of the definition of democracy is and what posters here are assuming that it is. Perhaps if you created a list of criteria, you may get a better, more accurate response to your (IMHO) very specific question.

For instance, you might want to explain to us your idea of the differences between a republic and a democracy.
posted by BlueTrain at 12:38 PM on January 16, 2005

i thought we had a democratic republic, with the democratic part just as important?

When your vote doesn't get counted, and your representation does not represent you, but represents the interests of organizations and individuals who were never given the right to vote, and laws are passed to codify these inequalities, its hard to say that the word "democracy" has any legitimate meaning any more, or ever did. The word has no consistent meaning in this country, outside of a textbook.
posted by AlexReynolds at 12:43 PM on January 16, 2005

Blue, i think the quote i posted above matches my definition pretty closely. Doesn't it match most people's?

Alex, i don't know--each time we finally granted voting rights to groups not previously allowed to vote, we've been acting democratically, i think. Each time the fight for rights other people are granted but some aren't has gone on we've acted democratically.
posted by amberglow at 12:57 PM on January 16, 2005

I thought we had a representative democracy??
posted by spicynuts at 1:48 PM on January 16, 2005

Alex, i don't know--each time we finally granted voting rights to groups not previously allowed to vote, we've been acting democratically, i think. Each time the fight for rights other people are granted but some aren't has gone on we've acted democratically.

The problem is that the Constitution specified "democracy" from the start, and only recently in this country's history has it been enforced, and then on an off-and-on, inconsistent basis. Further, non-citizens (corporations) receive representation that they are not legally allowed, and wealthy equity holders receive disproportional representation.

If it comes down strictly to your definition of democracy, then the US is not a democracy. What we're spreading across the world is something, but it isn't democracy.

Personally it seems more about opening up markets for American products and the associated consumer lifestyle.

Is there a word for the symbiosis of consumerocracy and (fascist-by-definition) corporate-federal oligarchy that makes the country chug along?

I guess such a system has democratic instincts, but only by convenience. We could just as easily have a more authoritarian setup, or become one, as our recent election suggests it will.
posted by AlexReynolds at 1:56 PM on January 16, 2005

yay! amberglow's with me! all my metafilter dreams have come true now!

ahem. you may now return to your regularly scheduled debate.
posted by equipoise at 2:52 PM on January 16, 2005

Our system of government's been running for over 800 years, and evolving as it goes. Seems fairly sustainable to me.
posted by bonaldi at 7:06 PM on January 16, 2005

Amberglow, as ephemeral as our time on this world appears to be, I would say we will see more changes around this planet in the next 20 years than ever before in human history. Information appears to be growing expedentially and minds from across borders are sharing thoughts and material items at record pace. Democracy, at least our type of Democracy, will morph into what ever our future ancestors will need and want. It might be chaotic and deeply unsettling. We have a pretty unsettling 'war' right now. I believe our collective psyche, world psyche if you will, is ajusting and questioning many dogmatic, 800 year old rules that worked in the past but don't work now. When things don't work for us humans we are pretty resourceful and we do bring changes that cause shifts in vision. I'm just a house painter in a rural part of Oregon, but I've lived in the Philippines, Japan and England. People make silly laws and rules everywhere I've been, but deep down we're the same.
posted by alteredcarbon at 10:14 PM on January 16, 2005

There's the infamous quote (probably an urban legend) that democracy can last only until the people vote themselves largess from the public purse (more or less), which has been invoked by George Will about 87,000 times over his career. In any case, this is the same sort of conventional wisdom you're invoking with all forms of government are eventually unsustainable, which I believe to be a gross error, or at the very least unprovable in any objective sense.

The question that Will and the alleged Scotsman raise is whether a social contract is sustainable in a democracy. I don't think that can be simply answered. Jared Diamond would say (and has, in his book) that Dutch society has much more of a sense of interconnectedness and interdependency as a result of the polders, and thus Dutch society may be more sustainable in the long run. Many commentators have it that the US social contract relies, to be blunt, on the plunder of resources and manipulation of markets around the world (you'd never hear such radical thoughts around here, though), and as such the US social contract is unsustainable; even if you take a more pragmatic and centrist view of things you have to wonder how long it can go on, knowledge society and all notwithstanding.

I take democracy as more of a moral imperative: it's the only legitimate form of government of free men. We should all be permitted to decide our own destiny, even if that has drawbacks such as nationalism, destruction of the environment, and so forth. On the other hand, Diamond may have a point; at some level the people of Easter Island must have realized they were signing their own death warrant, yet proceeded anyway to cut down all their trees. A benevolent dictatorship could have prevented that, e.g. by protecting forests in the style of European and Japanese feudal governments. So, certain non-democratic institutions may actually do better at creating sustainable societies.

In the end, though, collapse of institutions, democratic or anti-democratic, is not necessarily the same as or foretelling of the collpase of the larger society.
posted by dhartung at 11:54 PM on January 16, 2005

the question is framed as though politics is some kind of "hard science" (hard in the sense that it is clearly defined and predictable). unless you're a pretty committed marxist that's just not true. without that assumption you seem to be asking "given that nothing lasts for ever, should we not bother with anything?". if that's what you're asking, the answer is "christ what a stupid question".
posted by andrew cooke at 4:08 AM on January 17, 2005

thanks dhartung, but if it's a moral imperative, does that go for others that currently don't live under a democratic system? is it really a human right, for all humans, and what are the implications of that?

andrew, that's not what i'm asking. I guess i'm wondering if our actions in spreading democracy are either inherently undemocratic or may kill democracy altogether.

Imposing a social contract (a la what dhartung said) can't be done from without, i don't think.
posted by amberglow at 7:59 AM on January 17, 2005

> does spreading Democracy to places that never had it actually hasten its decline?

These things dont age like animals. They go corrupt, thus the cycle of coup's and revolutions. So you can have your pick of governments, but its temporary and it will simply go corrupt after a while.

Maybe some progressive thinking and better constitutions and better policing of power structures may one day solve this problem or make it so revolutions are less frequent, but currently everything is going to end badly and restart badly, get better, be ok, get worse, end badly, etc.
posted by skallas at 8:06 AM on January 17, 2005

well, where are we now in that cycle?
posted by amberglow at 4:20 PM on January 17, 2005