The Democratic Ideal and New Colonialism
By Sam Vaknin

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful concerned individuals can
precipitate change in the world ... indeed, it is the only thing that ever
has"

(Margaret Mead)

I. The Democratic Ideal and New Colonialism

"Democracy" is not the rule of the people. It is government by periodically
vetted representatives of the people.

Democracy is not tantamount to a continuous expression of the popular will
as it pertains to a range of issues. Functioning and fair democracy is
representative and not participatory. Participatory "people power" is mob
rule, not democracy.

Granted, "people power" is often required in order to establish democracy
where it is unprecedented. Revolutions - velvet, rose, and orange - recently
introduced democracy in Eastern Europe, for instance. People power - mass
street demonstrations - toppled obnoxious dictatorships from Iran to the
Philippines and from Peru to Indonesia.

But once the institutions of democracy are in place and more or less
functional, the people can and must rest. They should let their chosen
delegates do the job they were elected to do. And they must hold their
emissaries responsible and accountable in fair and free ballots once every
two or four or five years.

As heads of the state in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and East Europe can
attest, these vital lessons are lost on the dozens of "new democracies" the
world over. Many of these presidents and prime ministers, though
democratically elected (multiply, in some cases), have fallen prey to
enraged and vigorous "people power" movements in their countries.

And these breaches of the democratic tradition are not the only or most
egregious ones.

The West boasts of the three waves of democratization that swept across the
world 1975. Yet, in most developing countries and nations in transition,
"democracy" is an empty word. Granted, the hallmarks of democracy are there:
candidate lists, parties, election propaganda, and voting. But its quiddity
is absent. It is being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by
election fraud, exclusionary policies, cronyism, corruption, intimidation,
and collusion with Western interests, both commercial and political.

The new "democracies" are thinly-disguised and criminalized plutocracies
(recall the Russian oligarchs), authoritarian regimes (Central Asia and the
Caucasus), or Vichy-like heterarchies (Macedonia, Bosnia, and Iraq, to
mention three recent examples).

The new "democracies" suffer from many of the same ills that afflict their
veteran role models: murky campaign finances, venal revolving doors between
state administration and private enterprise, endemic corruption,
self-censoring media, socially, economically, and politically excluded
minorities, and so on. But while this malaise does not threaten the
foundations of the United States and France - it does imperil the stability
and future of the likes of Ukraine, Serbia, and Moldova, Indonesia, Mexico,
and Bolivia.

Worse still, the West has transformed the ideal of democracy into an
ideology at the service of imposing a new colonial regime on its former
colonies. Spearheaded by the United States, the white and Christian nations
of the West embarked with missionary zeal on a transformation, willy-nilly,
of their erstwhile charges into paragons of democracy and good governance.

And not for the first time. Napoleon justified his gory campaigns by
claiming that they served to spread French ideals throughout a barbarous
world. Kipling bemoaned the "White Man's (civilizing) burden", referring
specifically to Britain's role in India. Hitler believed himself to be the
last remaining barrier between the hordes of Bolshevism and the West. The
Vatican concurred with him.

This self-righteousness would have been more tolerable had the West actually
meant and practiced what it preached, however self-delusionally. Yet, in
dozens of cases in the last 60 years alone, Western countries intervened,
often by force of arms, to reverse and nullify the outcomes of perfectly
legal and legitimate popular and democratic elections. They did so because
of economic and geopolitical interests and they usually installed rabid
dictators in place of the deposed elected functionaries.

This hypocrisy cost them dearly. Few in the poor and developing world
believe that the United States or any of its allies are out to further the
causes of democracy, human rights, and global peace. The nations of the West
have sown cynicism and they are reaping strife and terrorism in return.

Moreover, democracy is far from what it is made out to be. Confronted with
history, the myth breaks down.

For instance, it is maintained by their chief proponents that democracies
are more peaceful than dictatorships. But the two most belligerent countries
in the world are, by a wide margin, Israel and the United States (closely
followed by the United Kingdom). As of late, China is one of the most
tranquil polities.

Democracies are said to be inherently stable (or to successfully incorporate
the instability inherent in politics). This, too, is a confabulation. The
Weimar Republic gave birth to Adolf Hitler and Italy had almost 50
governments in as many years. The bloodiest civil wars in history erupted in
Republican Spain and, seven decades earlier, in the United States.
Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and Yugoslavia imploded upon becoming democratic,
having survived intact for more than half a century as tyrannies.

Democracies are said to be conducive to economic growth (indeed, to be a
prerequisite to such). But the fastest economic growth rates in history go
to imperial Rome, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and post-Mao China.

Finally, how represented is the vox populi even in established democracies?

In a democracy, people can freely protest and make their opinions known, no
doubt. Sometimes, they can even change their representatives (though the
rate of turnover in the US Congress in the last two decades is lower than it
was in the last 20 years of the Politburo).

But is this a sufficient incentive (or deterrent)? The members of the
various elites in Western democracies are mobile - they ceaselessly and
facilely hop from one lucrative sinecure to another. Lost the elections as a
Senator? How about a multi-million dollar book contract, a consultant
position with a firm you formerly oversaw or regulated, your own talk show
on television, a cushy job in the administration?

The truth is that voters are powerless. The rich and mighty take care of
their own. Malfeasance carries little risk and rarely any sanction. Western
democracies are ossified bastions of self-perpetuating interest groups aided
and abetted and legitimized by the ritualized spectacle that we call
"elections". And don't you think the denizens of Africa and Asia and eastern
Europe and the Middle East are blissfully unaware of this charade.

II. Democracy and Empire

As the United states is re-discovering in Iraq and Israel in Palestine,
maintaining democratic institutions and empire-building are incompatible
activities. History repeatedly shows that one cannot preserve a democratic
core in conjunction with an oppressed periphery of colonial real estate.

The role of imperial power entails the suppression, subversion, or
manipulation of all forms of free speech, governance, and elections. It
usually involves unsavory practices such as torture, illegal confinement,
assassinations, and collusion with organized crime. Empires typically
degenerate into an abyss of corruption, megalomaniacal projects, deceit,
paranoia, and self-directed aggression.

The annals of both Rome and Britain teach us that, as democracy grows
entrenched, empires disintegrate fitfully. Rome chose to keep its empire by
sacrificing its republic. Britain chose to democratize by letting go of its
unwieldy holdings overseas. Both polities failed to uphold their erstwhile
social institutions while they grappled with their smothering possessions.

Note - Globalization - Liberalism's Disastrous Gamble

From Venezuela to Thailand, democratic regimes are being toppled by
authoritarian substitutes: the military, charismatic left-wingers, or mere
populists. Even in the USA, the bastion of constitutional rule, civil and
human rights are being alarmingly eroded (though not without precedent in
wartime).

The prominent ideologues of liberal democracy have committed a grave error
by linking themselves inextricably with the doctrine of freemarketry and the
emerging new order of globalization. As Thomas Friedman correctly observes
in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", both strains of thought are strongly
identified with the United States of America (USA).

Thus, liberal democracy came to be perceived by the multitudes as a ruse
intended to safeguard the interests of an emerging, malignantly narcissistic
empire (the USA) and of rapacious multinationals. Liberal democracy came to
be identified with numbing, low-brow cultural homogeneity, encroachment on
privacy and the individual, and suppression of national and other
idiosyncratic sentiments.

Liberal democracy came to be confused and confuted with neo-colonial
exploitation, social Darwinism, and the crumbling of social compacts and
long-standing treaties, both explicit and implicit. It even came to be
associated with materialism and a bewildering variety of social ills: rising
crime rates, unemployment, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution, organ
trafficking, monopolistic behavior, corporate malfeasance, and other
antisocial forms of conduct.

The backlash was, thus, inevitable.

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self
Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI)
Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central
East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com