Wanted: democracy. Or is it?
2011 and so far 2012 have seen some quite unprecedented demands for democracy all over the world. Ironically, most of these demands were manifested not at the behest, nor even with great support of the usual "international pressure". What is also interesting about these movements for greater political rights, dignity, and freedom of expression, is that they belied the reductionist labels that we managed to quickly slap on them.
The Arab Spring has now been going for over a year. The protests in Russia are just the beginning of a long road which will hopefully allow the Russian people to chose someone other than Putin. And that is not to speak of the painfully slow, but no less important transitions that we are starting to see in North Korea, Burma and other places on which the international community has all but given up. Some of them are edged on by hereditary politics, but most are not.
All of these are important transitions the consequences of which will not be known for years, hence the reluctance to celebrate the democratic Egypt, democratic Libya and the wariness to get further involved in Iraq, Bahrain, Afghanistan or Syria to help them transition to another form of government, with contested elections. The fear of chaos and islamism is omnipresent. This fear is as natural as should have been obvious the consequences of political contestability in countries with no tradition of political pluralism.
After all, today's Gaza is not only the product of Hamas - it is, most and foremost the product of a democratic transition in the Middle East that was internationally supported and encouraged. Unlike Gaza and Iraq, and to some extent Libya which were a product of external meddling in local politics and actors vying for natural resources or broader political powers, the political changes we've seen over past year are entirely home made, with no imported ingredients.
Another incredible dimension to these transitions is that protests the Egypt and Tunisia have inspired, though not motivated, similar movements in far away places such as Russia and Bahrain. Even Palestinians got so encouraged that the normally timid Abu Mazen was emboldened to make a historic speech in front of the UN Security Council asking for national autonomy for his politically and territorially divided Palestinian National Authority.
The unprecedented backlash to financial capitalism in New York, London and other European capitals might have also been inspired and in turn motivated new political movements elsewhere. While it is debatable to what extent these movements have been mutually reinforcing, there is no debate that through them, political actors have tried to reconquer the their political or economic rights, to move the equilibrium to some elusive point of greater equality between the top political and economic echelons and the bottom.
Although due to their entirely different socio-economic contexts, the protestors reclaimed different goals and objectives: greater shareholder say on executive pay in the US, greater subsidies on staples in Egypt, better employment opportunities in Tunisia, the underlying rationale of these was fundamentally not so different. With first round of presidential elections undergoing today in France, the same rhetoric of greater equality of better redistribution is echoed in the campaign promises of most parties.
Politicians are all promising to somehow undo the spiderweb in which France is all but a lost insect: to re-enforce borders, re-industrialise, expel the immigrants, return to the franc. And yet, it seems that at least some French are too exhausted and disillusioned by past elections: 20 percent of them did not bother to vote at all, others did so barely to limit the potential damage made if an opposing party won. Whatever the reasoning of individual voters may be, the democratic rights do not appear to be appreciated by all.
Reflecting on the past year, one cannot help but wonder what it is that leads some nations raise up for greater political liberties, while others - most often those that have them - to ignore them or take them for granted. Is it possible that all along it is not democracy people have been after all along, but some sort of a more narrow and universal categories of socio-economic rights that are fundamental to their personal quality of life and that they do not see as linked to broader systems of political organisation? If so, is electoral democracy the best way to respond to such expectations?
