This comes from a book review published in the Financial Times of Humphrey Hawksley’s latest, Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having the Vote? Funny how we always see Russia as the case study most often cited as why developing nations should give up on democracy, transparency, and reform – or so goes the conservative thinking.
The springtime of democracy in the last quarter of the 20th century will be noted by historians as a moment of hope and advance without precedent in world history. Democracy is difficult, messy, uneven and contradictory. But it’s also about hope, and the liberation of the human spirit to write, speak and organise economic and social relations as intelligently as possible.
It was too good to last, of course. The doomsayers of democracy are now gaining ground. Among them is Humphrey Hawksley, a model of liberal BBC journalism. He has reported from all over the world. He has poured his worries and fears about global affairs into a series of fine thrillers. Now he moves from fiction to fact.
His book has a dramatic title, Democracy Kills. But its contents do not ultimately make that case. His thesis plays into the growing conservative realpolitik pessimism that wants to turn its back on the intractable areas of the world where the act of casting a vote does not usher in peace, prosperity and progress – parts of Africa, Afghanistan, the Middle East or, increasingly, Russia.
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I suppose everybody now wants to make the point that democracy doesn’t solve economic problems, that it doesn’t guarantee the best candidates will find their way to power, that it doesn’t bring food to people’s tables, that it may not be compatible with certain cultures, etc. etc. etc.To which I suppose the basic answer is: do you know of anything better? Authoritarianism tends to degenerate into personality cults and inefficiency; oligarchy tends to lead to a high-scale tragedy of the commons; anarchy tends not to be stable.Paraphrasing the old Churchill quote, if you have a better idea, let’s hear it.
I suppose everybody now wants to make the point that democracy doesn’t solve economic problems, that it doesn’t guarantee the best candidates will find their way to power, that it doesn’t bring food to people’s tables, that it may not be compatible with certain cultures, etc. etc. etc.To which I suppose the basic answer is: do you know of anything better? Authoritarianism tends to degenerate into personality cults and inefficiency; oligarchy tends to lead to a high-scale tragedy of the commons; anarchy tends not to be stable.Paraphrasing the old Churchill quote, if you have a better idea, let’s hear it.
“To which I suppose the basic answer is: do you know of anything better?”Democracy works when that’s the objective. Democracy used as a cover for other agendas and overridden when it conflicts with the real agenda does not work.For instance, the head of the OSCE delegation observing the 1996 Russian elections, Michael Meadowcroft, has related the pressure exerted upon him by his superiors at the OSCE to downplay and paper over the manifest abuses perpetrated by Yeltsin’s massive fraud and flagrant use of “the administrative resource”.”Up to the last minute I was being pressured by [the OSCE higher-ups in] Warsaw to change what I wanted to say,” said Meadowcroft. “In terms of what the OSCE was prepared to say publicly about the election, they were very opposed to any suggestion that the election had been manipulated.”"The OSCE parliamentary assembly had a separate mission who were passionately pro-Yeltsin,” he said. “So you had two OSCE missions for the election, one of which arrived predisposed to say things were good. The other was pressured to agree.”"In Chechnya they’d been bombed out of existence, and there they were all supposedly voting for Yeltsin. It’s like what happens in Cameroon”"[The West] didn’t want [pre-election] criticism that the election had been manipulated, lest the Communists get public mileage out of it,” said Meadowcroft. “And the Communists regarded it as par for the course that they wouldn’t get a fair deal. I went to see the Zyuganov team and they said, ‘Oh it’s a waste of time to give you the dossier [on election fraud], you’re not going to do anything about it anyway.’”"He added that the EU tried to suppress a report about media manipulation submitted by a Belgian colleague working for an EU institution. When he was barred from releasing the report, he handed it over to Meadowcroft, who released it to the media as a private citizen.”"His revelations also help put into perspective what is really going on with Russia’s near-death experiment with democracy. The new low that we’ve reached in late 2007 is not some out-of-the-blue invention of Putin and his siloviki cronies, but rather the result of a joint effort which saw the worst of both sides. Democracy as birthed and fed under Boris Yeltsin was always something like the semi-stillborn fetal-freak in Eraserhead. Most of the Yeltsin-era elite saw formal democracy as a pain in the ass that had to be kept alive to for visiting Western delegations, who looked at the croaking, spitting fetus, covered in rot and slime, and declared, “It looks just like Lady Liberty!”http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=14536&IBLOCK_ID=35&PAGE=1