My first lesson in democracy came from a young Chinese actress. In many Chinese cities, she said, there were squares named after democracy; these had nothing to do with the sham People’s Democracy practised by Mao. The squares acquired their names in imperial times, when China appeared set on the road to reform. Now, no one in China seemed to know what the word meant. She brought with her a video of mostly old people. ‘What does democracy mean?”, she asked them and they said they didn’t know.
I, too, had to admit I wasn’t sure. Democracy is in the headlines now, as Buddhist monks in Burma line up against their country’s military dictatorship but, growing up during the Cold War, such questions didn’t seem relevant. We had democracy and they, the luckless inhabitants of communism’s so-called people’s democracies, didn’t. But what did our democracy consist of?
Late in 2004 I helped set up a project in a resort near Cape Town. A few of us, representing a group of broadcasters, had collaborated on a series of films about HIV/Aids in Southern Africa. We were wondering what to do next. Someone mentioned democracy. This was the year after Bush’s Iraq invasion and it still seemed as if the Middle East might be remade in the image of liberal democracy. The audacity of the idea surprised us all.
We decided to commission 10 films to stimulate a global debate about democracy. They are impassioned, ironic or just plain curious about what it means to have democracy, to be in the process of losing or gaining it, or not to experience it at all. Later we resolved to attach a relevant question to each film. The idea was that these questions could then be discussed on the internet. We laboured over these 10 questions — they started as scribblings and became arguments.
What began as a modest affair blossomed into a global event. We now have 42 broadcast partners, covering every major part of the globe except China, Russia and the United States (where PBS, the public broadcaster, felt it had to see the films before deciding whether to show them). In Cape Town there is a Democracy House staffed by twentysomethings. We have partnerships with online ventures such as Joost and MySpace. Metro freesheets are carrying the questions all over the world.
Democracy, created with care, can also perish. Democracy cannot be imposed, as we are learning. No people will live free unless they wish to. Another lesson we are only starting to absorb is that there are many ways of being democratic and the Western tradition is not the only one. As Amartya Sen points out in The Argumentative Indian, a high degree of religious and moral controversy existed in India before Pericles lived in Athens. So much admiration of democracy is relatively recent. Like many contemporary Washington pundits, 19th-century liberals such as JS Mill and De Tocqueville weren’t wholehearted democrats. They believed the spirit of freedom resided in benign oligarchies and not in mob rule.
Even now backers of democracy have doubts. Do we really feel that the approved, Western variety of democracy — ballot box, poll, stock exchange and supermarket — awaits us at the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama suggested? Democracy is revered as the last civic religion capable of uniting humanity. At rock concerts and over Chardonnay at human-rights events, we celebrate freedom while reminding ourselves how short humanity falls of its ideals. Within what remains of the doctrinaire left, it is fashionable to bemoan such effusions. But the cult of democracy in our time is real enough and cannot be ascribed solely to the triumph of hope over experience. It should be possible to believe in democracy and retain a degree of scepticism, but this appears to be difficult.
Democracies cause wars. They are susceptible to the ugliest tides of public opinion. They can destroy themselves and have done so many times. Many people now believe, as did Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, that democracy is ‘rule by means of lies” exercised by corrupt politicians. Look at the frayed status of such democratic concepts as habeas corpus as liberties are reduced, ostensibly to fight ‘terror”. Look at declining voter interest levels.
I came to realise that the history of democracy can be seen as the ultimate non-fiction narrative of modern times. In recent times the freedom to plunder and consume has appeared paramount, edging out the old revolutionary values, equality and fraternity. No alternative progressive ideology appears to promise anything better.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of places where democracy is recent, or under threat, things look different. In Liberia the inspirational Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, recently elected president, appears to have convinced her people that democracy can convey good on their behalf. The women who set up Shayfeen.com, an under-resourced NGO dedicated to exposing electoral fraud in Egypt, conclude that in Egypt democracy is simply not viable. It’s better to try to ensure that a minimum of rights exists — a freeish press, half-corrupt courts, some tolerance of dissent. Maybe we should be more content with the imperfections in our own democratic state.
People ask what I really learned about democracy by working on this project and I reply that I have more admiration for politicians than when I started. If you cannot coerce people, you have to rely on argument for assent. I now know why politicians repeat themselves so frequently.
But I have another question to add to the 10: ‘Can one be a sceptic and believe in democracy?” My answer is yes; democracy is the only thing that sceptics must believe in. The pursuit of truth requires the circumstances of freedom and no one has found a way of creating these outside the institutions, however flawed, of democracy. As Winston Churchill pithily observed, we tried the other systems and they didn’t work.
Nick Fraser is chairperson of Steps International, which commissioned the Why Democracy? series
When days are dark
The series Why Democracy? has been billed as ‘the most ambitious factual multimedia event in broadcast history”. It has been put together by Steps International, the same team that created the acclaimed Steps for the Future documentary series highlighting issues around HIV and Aids.
The series comprises 10 made-for-TV documentary films that will screen simultaneously in 200 countries and territories to a potential audience of more than 300-million people. The films span the multifaceted themes of democracy and tackle such diverse subjects as torture of suspected terrorists, the machinations behind the Danish cartoon scandal and even a film about the election of a class monitor in a Chinese primary school. The idea is to create a global dialogue around ‘the dominant political issue of our time”.
But simply watching an engaging flick is not going to create the response required by civil society to invigorate the planet’s belief in democracy as the most evolved system of government. So Steps International created a media-savvy spin-off called the Democracy House, and invited a group of young activists, students and creative types from around the world to live together and spur discussion on internet platforms on the themes of the Why Democracy? documentaries. Perhaps it’s best described as a United Nations-inspired version of the Big Brother house, hosted in Cape Town, South Africa.
As Democracy House participant John Macfarlane says: ‘I think the choice of location was important. There’s a sense of volatility here in Cape Town. You have to negotiate the dynamics between wealth and poverty. It makes you question things you normally take for granted.”
John is a Canadian environmental journalist and he shares the space with a German grad student, a couple of Danish mediamakers, a Nigerian politics student, a Brazilian filmmaker, a Canadian environmental journalist, a Greek journalist, two South Africans (a criminologist and a political science grad student), an Indian filmmaker and a Singaporean political science student.
The project makes use of social network applications such as Myspace, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook to create a vibrant online community where people can upload their films, blog, debate and educate themselves about democracy. They’re even offering a trip to El Salvador, Zanzibar or Goa in a bid to boost participation. ‘Our aim is to reach a kind of critical mass,” Macfarlane says. ‘To create a community online to carry this debate forward.”
At the same time, more than 40 broadcasters around the planet will show the films. While Metro newspapers in 28 countries will run a complementary series of 10 questions about democracy, with interviewees ranging from Pele to Metallica, from Vivienne Westwood to Bill Clinton. It’s an impressive effort.
As Macfarlane surmises: ‘Why Democracy? is not about putting forward one goal or one vision of democracy that is correct. There are many different visions and there are no perfect models. I like to think about it as creating a conversation that interrogates our role as citizens.” — Andy Davis