The
Culture of Democracy
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…the
decisions made by the political process critically affect the functioning
of economies.
Douglass
North
Institutions, Institutional Change
And Economic Performance
(1990) |
Sophisticated
rules and technology result in the globalized stock market. When purchasing a
stock through the market, you can sit at your computer connected to the
Internet, your computer follows protocols, you follow rules, the broker follows
rules, you don’t know the former owner of the stock – but in return you get to
buy operating assets from around the world with a general assurance of fairness.
Justice,
writes Eli Sagan (1991), is a complex and abstract concept. It makes liberal
democracy possible, allowing relationships beyond trusted kin by, “…the
attribution of rights that I claim for myself to others whom I do not know…”
1 As world history in the last two hundred years has illustrated,
this idea of justice has grown to encompass more people, especially their
increasingly complex activities in economic life.
The
idea of justice can also be less extensive. In parts of the world, economic ties
are closely related to kinship ties. When economic change occurs, the social
reactions can be extreme. Sagan writes that normal and usually balanced human
goals can become, under threat, their fixated extremes. The excess of wisdom is
ideology, which is crystallized political theory.
What
warranted the invasion of Iraq? Our adventure was first warranted by WMD
2 and then by a political theory that assumes the easy spread of
liberal democracy around the world, making the U.S. safer post 9/11. In contrast
with other schools of political thought, which focus upon people in their
societies, this primarily institutional viewpoint holds that the spread of
liberal democracy is a matter of proper institutional design, with societies
“malleable.”
A
significant paper on institutionalism, published by March and Olsen in 1984 was
more nuanced. In that paper, the authors observed, “The ideas (of
institutionalism) de-emphasize the dependence of the polity on society in favor
of an interdependence between relatively autonomous social and political
institutions…” 3 Institutions, in other words, can have an effect.
This is a reasonable observation that has led to useful research into the
economic reasons why institutions and organizations exist in modern societies,
under the conditional of individual rational choice.
But,
can procedural democratic institutions whose goal is justice for all, in
themselves, create democracy and therefore spread its universal promise?
Conditions matter; societies differ significantly in how they handle
conflict.
Democracies
require trust to settle conflicts without violence, making possible rational
compromise on specific issues.
Putnam (1993) writes, “Honesty, trust and law-abidingness are prominent in most
philosophical accounts of civic virtue. Citizens in the civic community…deal
fairly with one another and expect fair dealing in return.” The author then goes
on to say the survey evidence is consistent with this account. 4 How
is this trust developed and transmitted? Almond and Verba (1965) writes about
the necessary civic culture, “The civic culture is transmitted by a complex
process that includes training in many social institutions – family, peer group,
school, work place, as well as in the political system itself.” 5
Economic globalization 6 is part of this. (Try a thought experiment,
starting with “trust,” take the inverse of all the factors we mention in this
paragraph. What do you get?)
The
New York Times 8/14/05 issue succinctly states the dilemma the U.S. now faces in
Iraq:
“When
the Americans smashed Saddam Hussein’s regime two and a half years ago, what lay
revealed was a country with no agreement on the most basic questions of national
identity. The Sunnis, a minority in charge here for five centuries, have not,
for the most part, accepted that they will no longer control the country. The
Shiites, the long-suppressed minority, want to set up a theocracy. The Kurds
don’t want to be part of Iraq at all. There is only so much that language
can do to paper over such differences.”
After
dismantling the command and control society that Saddam built, the U.S. now
faces a condominium where tribal disagreements are handled by violence, and
whose new management committee can hardly manage. Democracies can form real
political compacts to which all can subscribe according to shared ideas. If the
Iraqis are unable to reach a meaningful consensus about their society, serious
discussions should start in the U.S. and with other countries about how to
contain the chaos. The following story is about the crucial ability of
democracies to compromise.
After
twenty-seven years of intermittent fighting, Athens finally lost the
Peloponnesian War. In spite of the entreaties of their allies, the victorious
Spartans decided not to obliterate the city, to avoid creating a power vacuum.
However, they imposed a puppet government of the Thirty Tyrants that ruled for
only eight months amid a reign of terror. Major struggles within the Greek
cities were almost always between the oligarchs and the democrats. 7
When the Spartan commander, Lysander, was recalled, the democratic Athenian
forces under Thrasybulus fought their way back into the city (403 B.C.) and
restored democracy by treaty with a moderate Spartan king (there were different
factions in Sparta). What followed was not, as one might expect a counter purge,
but a general amnesty that restored calm and stability, allowing the Athenians
to rebuild their city and fleet within a decade.
The democratic Athenians repudiated further violence, exemplifying the political progress they had made since the time of Solon. 8 Aristotle wrote, “…their attitude both in private and in public in regard to the past disturbances was the most admirable and the most statesmanlike that any people have ever shown in such circumstances.” 9 The closest modern example we can think of was Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. If you are interested in politics, the “trc report" summary is definitely worth reading, for it describes the path the South Africans consciously chose. This dramatization describes what happened.
Democratic
societies are based upon a stable social consensus, the foundation for planning
and sustained economic growth.
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As a
matter of principle, when dealing with early societies that have not yet
developed the pertinent terminology, we should not take for granted that a
political concept can be simply transmitted from one area to another
unless conditions (our note) are favorable for its
reception.
…”Changes
in the matrix of rights that prevail in any society normally begin in a
struggle over specific issues, not over abstract concepts or slogans. The
rhetoric and the abstractions come later and then are (in subsequent
events, further) reified.” 10
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Aristotle
described a concept called phronesis,
discussing the considered choices involved in practical belief when handling
complexity, that involves both the particular and the
general.
The
qualitative social sciences can also justify general conclusions. In “Designing
Social Inquiry,” King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) discuss the problems of
political science analysis and show that rules relevant to quantitative
econometric research can apply as well to qualitative questions. Consider the
general hypothesis, “Liberal democracies require social trust.” Qualitative
political science makes the same core assumption, that knowing something about X
(the independent variable) reduces the uncertainty of Y (the dependent
variable).
We
have made an analogy between the democracy of ancient Athens and the modern
democracies. To validly reason by analogy, the cases have to be matched in their
essential features. But as in the significance rules of qualitative studies, the
results can be more certainly interpreted in there are a large number of cases.
The authors write, “We are always well
advised to look beyond a single analogous observation, no matter how close it
may seem. That is, the comparative approach – in which we combine evidence from
many observations even if some of them are not very close analogies to the
present situation - is always at least as good and usually better than
analogy.” Huge stakes require careful study.
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Democratic
societies also have a collective dimension.
First
consider ancient Athens. Democracy wasn’t, as Aristotle suggested (after the
Peloponnesian War), mob rule. After intense social disorder, Cleisthenes in the
sixth century B.C. split the residents of Athens up into ten fictive tribes,
“…each tribe embodied a cross section of populations, regional characteristics,
and kinds of activity that made up the city…unifying the body of citizens by
mixing them together…” (Vernant, 1982, p. 1000) This voting arrangement was
duplicated in the city’s institutions. Athens was partially governed by the
rotating Council of 500 that set the agenda for the sovereign Assembly. During a
year of service, “Each councilor learned the value of working intensively and
cooperatively on a team He learned to place his trust in men from very different
parts of the polis: a trust based on
developing a personal knowledge of them as individuals, and on a shared
dedication to the flourishing of the organization to which they all belonged.
Furthermore, the ten tribal teams had to learn, in turn, to work together.”
(Ober, 2005, p. 39) The result was, he writes, “…a system of learning and
knowledge exchange” and an Athenian team spirit that served the city well in its
subsequent history.
In
the modern world, this dimension is more complicated. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote,
“Democracy…is a…valuable form of social organization in which freedom and order
are made to support, and not to contradict, each other.” Like Athenian law
11, the laws of the United States have a substantial procedural
component, a concern for due process. They allow opposites to contest, resulting
in evolutionary social change. Globalization requires good judgment,
particularly by the United States.
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In 2015, the Greeks, now in a national state, are struggling to make their institutions of government function in a manner expected of modern democracies. Across the Aegean sea, the Turks are struggling to rid themselves of the command and control society inherited from the Ottomans, secular military rule, with personal dictatorship now threatening. This posting recounts that struggle.