As a student in South Africa in the 1970s, I was gloomy about the country’s chances of becoming a democracy. It was not just that apartheid looked likely to last for ever. It was also that many of its opponents were set on replacing racial autocracy with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marxism exerted a hold over a large swathe of apartheid’s foes, black and white. They gleefully greeted the rise to power of the Marxist Frelimo movement in Mozambique. At the largely white, left-leaning university I attended, many of my fellow students dismissed elections as a bourgeois sham, multiparty democracy as ”irrelevant”.
They were wrong, and so was I. South Africa became a democracy, of course - with multiparty elections, a free press and an independent judiciary. Many countries have been less fortunate. Russia is a democratic travesty. Iran’s exuberant election, twice, of the reformist Mohammad Khatami was frustrated by a reactionary religious establishment. Zimbabwe, once full of promise, is ruined. Democracy is hard to establish and harder to sustain.
So I was intrigued by a recent invitation from Intelligence Squared to attend a debate on the motion ”Democracy isn’t for everyone.” I am sorry it took me so long to discover Intelligence Squared. Founded in 2003, it manages to persuade sell-out audiences of more than 700 to forego London’s delights for an evening of intelligent discussion.
There are various ways to interpret Intelligence Squared’s motion. One is that some people don’t want democracy: as my former fellow-students used to argue, it is not relevant to their lives. This has always struck me as absurd. Democracy is not just about elections. It is about living under law rather than at the whim of unaccountable power. Who wants to be locked up when they have done nothing wrong, or have their property confiscated because some official has decided he wants it?
None of the debaters argued that some people didn’t want democracy. None said democracy was bad either, although Matthew Parris, the newspaper columnist and former Conservative member of parliament, said democracy could result in the oppression of minorities, and had. The debate was about something else: what can we do, if anything, to bring democracy to those who don’t have it?
Edward Luttwak, the US-based author, said there was nothing we could do. ”I think democracy is absolutely wonderful,” he said. But countries had to develop their own. Outsiders usually caused more damage than good. Countries that ran internationally approved elections invariably descended into chaos if they didn’t have the necessary supporting institutions. ”This is not an argument against democracy. This is an argument against meddling,” he said.
The opposers of the motion, Nick Cohen, the British journalist, and Bernard-Henri Levy, the French intellectual, argued impressively in favour of democracy - particularly Levy, who, after apologising, needlessly, for his ”pitiful” English, spoke eloquently without notes. But even he conceded that ”democracy is hard to export”. Look at Iraq.
So what is to be done? It is true that democracy requires more than elections. South Africa, for all the violence of its past, had a lot going for it. It already had a democracy, of sorts, for whites, although even they were at risk of arbitrary arrest. It had a small, committed liberal opposition that kept the idea of constitutional government alive (and whose contribution is scandalously undervalued in the new South Africa). And the collapse of communism allowed the parliamentary tradition of the African National Congress to assert itself against its Marxist one.
Few countries enjoy the same fortunate confluence of traditions and events. Luttwak is probably right that people can only liberate themselves. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to be done. We can publicise the cause of beleaguered democrats. We can give them shelter when they are forced into exile.
Above all, we can provide a model for them to aspire to. Before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, Nelson Mandela told the court: ”I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration. The American Congress, that country’s doctrine of separation of powers, as well as the independence of its judiciary, arouses in me similar sentiments.”
Abandoning those traditions, whether at Guantanamo Bay or through the Blair government’s persistent assault on habeas corpus, is not only a betrayal of America’s and Britain’s democratic traditions: it is a betrayal of democrats everywhere.
michael.skapinker@ft.com
Matthew Engel returns on June 23.
