Part III

Monitory Democracy

THE STORY OF DEMOCRACY’S PAST so far told in these pages has aimed to mimic the renegade spirit of democracy. It has questioned the reigning narratives fabricated by its enemies, cast doubts on the mental blind spots, tactical errors and prejudices of past democrats, and noted as honestly as possible the uncertainties and great unknowns of democracy’s past. Many silenced ancestors of democracy have been granted a voice. Supposing that democracy can only be lived forwards by understanding itself backwards, these pages have made a case for bringing more democracy to the history of democracy.

But the task of discussing the changing contemporary fortunes of democracy – that’s formidable. The history under our noses is always the hardest to define and assess. Things are made more challenging by fractious disputes among historians and political thinkers about how to make sense of the changes that are said to have happened or not happened. For some, our generation is a glorious tale of the triumph of ‘liberal’ democracy. For others, the old spirit of assembly democracy – people deciding things in face-to-face settings – is making a grand return and taking its revenge on the false promises of electoral democracy. Still others say that democracy’s fancy goals have been ignominiously cast aside by the predatory forces of state power, populism and capitalism, and that democracy, now facing a global catastrophe for our species as a whole, is suffering creeping irrelevance or terminal decline.1 These interpretations need to be considered, but they aren’t altogether compelling. For one thing can safely be said when looking back on the multitude of happenings since 1945: against tremendous odds, in terrible circumstances, in defiance of economic collapse, dictatorship, totalitarianism and total war, the ideals and institutions of democracy enjoyed a reincarnation. Its ‘wild’ qualities flourished, pushed along by what came to be called ‘people power’ – the intrepid resistance and resolve of citizens to put clamps on corrupt, bossy and violent government that had exceeded its limits, abused its authority, failed to deliver on its promises and brought great evils to the world.

This rejuvenation and metamorphosis proved yet again that democratic institutions and ways of life aren’t set in stone, and that democracies can democratise by inventing new methods of popular self-government in contexts previously untouched by its spirit. After 1945, the world witnessed the birth of a new species: monitory democracy. The transformation was astonishing, and it was global. For the first time in history, the lived language of democracy became familiar to most people – even if it often had an American accent. The upshot was that monitory democracy went on trial in all four corners of the world.

The coming of democracy to the southern tip of Africa was a case in point. In mid-February 1990, millions around the world, glued to their televisions, watched Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) walk free from prison after twenty-seven years. In Cape Town, he was greeted under a molten sun by an estimated crowd of 250,000 people desperately trying to catch a glimpse of their leader. Citizens erupted in song, clenched fists, danced, waved flags; at one point, with megaphone calls to move back inaudible, scores of people took turns to stand or sit on the boot of Mandela’s car. So great was the crush that marshals took more than two hours to deliver him to the town hall podium. There, he stood calmly for several minutes, nodding to the assembly gently, before raising his hands for quiet. Punctuated by roars from the crowd, his twenty-minute speech, surely among the greatest in the post-1945 period, announced the beginning of the end of apartheid. ‘I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination,’ he said in a strong, clear voice. ‘I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal that I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’2

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Nelson Mandela with his then wife, Winnie, arriving at Cape Town City Hall from Victor Verster Prison, greeted by a massive crowd of victorious supporters clamouring to hear their newly freed hero speak his first words.

Almost everywhere it seemed that rulers had lost the plot – and the argument – and were pushed onto the back foot in situations of high drama that doubled as grand media events. In March 1946, the French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) told a New York audience that the world had been ‘ruled by the will to power’, torn apart by divisions between masters and slaves and the ‘monstrous hypocrisy’ of treating human suffering as no longer scandalous. Things had to change. The political task hereon was to ‘fight against injustice, against slavery and terror’ and to create a world in which people understood that nobody has ‘the right to decide that their own truth is good enough to impose on others’. The rhetorical power of Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech – on the eve of the birth of the democratic Republic of India – was later matched by the stirring ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech by US president John F. Kennedy, broadcast on radio to millions around the world, during the last week of June 1963. Forgiven by locals for likening himself in bad German to a jam doughnut, Kennedy spoke of the indivisibility of freedom and declared that the world’s democrats were eligible for Berlin citizenship. ‘Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us,’ he said, to wild applause.3

In the long wave of democracy that swept through many parts of the globe after 1945, media platforms directed their microphones and cameras at less well-known figures; some of these unknown democrats became global celebrities. A young man, carrying shopping bags, halted a column of Chinese army tanks one day after a massacre in Tiananmen Square. A woman, Aung San Suu Kyi – her name in Burmese means ‘a bright collection of strange victories’ – faced down a firing squad after troops who’d been ordered to cut short her life suddenly lost their will to pull the trigger.

Miracles didn’t always happen. The early decades after 1945 witnessed plenty of setbacks for democracy. This was the case in the oil-rich ‘petro-dictatorships’ of the Middle East and the former colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Brazil, where a US-backed military junta ruled with a steel fist for several decades, and the Republic of China, where the results of the January 1948 legislative elections were shredded within months by widespread disorder and the violence of a revolutionary takeover led by the communist forces of Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976). Political scientists pointed out that one-third of the world’s thirty-two functioning, multi-party democracies in 1958 had by the mid-1970s lapsed into some form of dictatorship; in 1962, thirteen of the world’s governments were products of a coup d’état; by the mid-1970s, the number of military dictatorships had nearly trebled, to thirty-eight.4

The military setbacks were frequently vicious – as in Athens in mid-November 1973, when in the name of dēmokratia several thousand students barricaded themselves within their campus and used their pirate radio station to broadcast a call for the overthrow of the military government of Colonel Papadopoulos (1919–1999). The dictator replied by despatching a tank to smash through the campus gates; several dozen students and supporters were shot, some by military snipers. At Kent State University on 4 May 1970, the American bombardment of Indochina was brought home against protesting students by masked, heavily armed National Guards, who shot and killed four, wounded nine and forced the rest to crawl to safety through tear gas and puddles of blood and vomit. The massacre was the first time students had been killed in an anti-war gathering in US history. In the former French colony of Algeria, something much worse happened. In late 1991, following the lifting of bans on political parties, the Islamic opposition party Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) won a parliamentary majority. The results were quickly annulled by military intervention. A state of emergency was declared. FIS and its local and regional council administrations were disbanded. The country was plunged into a decade-long, murderous uncivil war.

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Wearing red ribbons, wielding a three-fingered victory salute against military slavery, teachers from the Yangon Education University joined the civil disobedience campaign in Myanmar in early February 2021. Following that month’s coup d’état, more than 10,000 teachers were suspended and over 700 university and high-school students arrested, many of them tortured.

Not for the first time in the history of democracy – think of Thailand after the 2014 military coup, or the American colonists’ revolution against the redcoats of the British Empire – armed force produced citizen resistance, and some spectacular surprises. There was Costa Rica, which abolished its standing army in 1948; and the political humbling of the Kuomintang (KMT) military government by citizen uprisings in Taiwan.5 The willingness of military officers to withdraw from the messy business of government was reinforced by the non-violence of their street-level opponents. Given the catastrophes of the twentieth century, democrats everywhere yearned for a world without barbed wire and cattle prods, tanks and tear gas, to live untroubled by the crunch of boots on the streets. ‘As a rule,’ said the Polish democrat Adam Michnik, ‘dictatorships guarantee safe streets and the terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.’6 The quip applied to Portugal, where in early 1974 young officers of the Movimento das Forças Armadas felled the dictatorship of Marcello Caetano (1906–1980). Key ministry buildings, postal and telecommunications offices, and broadcasting stations were occupied, along with the country’s airports. Huge crowds gathered in the streets of Lisbon to cheer the soldiers on duty. Fresh-cut carnations were slipped into the barrels of their rifles. Caetano surrendered within hours. Following the death of fascist dictator General Franco in November 1975, the military government of neighbouring Spain suffered the same fate.

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On 25 April 1974, mutinous Portuguese troops from the Santarém barracks drove their tanks and other armoured vehicles into central Lisbon and occupied Terreiro do Paço, where nervous citizens offered them pink, red and white carnations. It marked the beginning of a political revolution in favour of what junior officers called ‘democratisation, decolonisation and development’ (democratizar, descolonizar e desenvolver).

Public disgust for military violence surfaced regularly during the following decades. In the Philippines, electoral officers helped trigger the downfall of the military government led by General Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) by refusing, in the middle of the night, to carry on counting rigged election ballot papers. In Latin America, Brazil shook off the most violent and criminal dictatorship in its history. The abertura, or political opening, re-established freedom of the press along with habeas corpus, amnesty for political prisoners, the freedom to form political parties and direct elections for state governors. True to its reputation as the democratic laboratory of Latin America, Uruguay had already set the pace when a decisive majority of citizens (57 per cent) stood against their own military government in a November 1980 plebiscite to decide on a new constitution biased towards the ruling executive power. Since there was still martial law, the victors couldn’t take to the streets to celebrate. So they dressed in yellow, the colour of the democratic opposition, and heeded the advice of Montevideo radio-station owner Germán Araújo to spread a ‘smile revolution’: curls of the lips to demonstrate their magnificent triumph to friends, colleagues and strangers in the streets.

A VELVET REVOLUTION

A sense of urgent joy infused the biggest global victory for the spirit and institutions of democracy after 1945: the citizen uprisings that rocked Estonia, Poland, East Germany and other Central-East European countries and helped trigger the fall of the Soviet empire during the summer and autumn of 1989.

Stunning events that came to be known as the Velvet Revolution gripped Czechoslovakia.7 The phrase was poached from one of the coolest 1960s New York rock bands, the Velvet Underground, which was ironic considering that the first day of the revolution was littered with ghastly violence.

On the evening of 17 November 1989, a crowd of 15,000 students gathered peacefully outside the Institute of Pathology in Prague to commemorate the death of a student victim of the Nazi occupation fifty years earlier. The commemoration had the ruling Communist Party’s blessing; the list of speakers had been compiled by its Communist Youth Union. The mourners were to march to the Slavín tomb in the Prague district of Vyšehrad, where nineteenth-century poet Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836) was interred. It was agreed with the authorities that candles would be lit, wreaths and flowers laid, and the national anthem sung, after which the procession would disperse.

It didn’t. Thousands of students, feeling their spines straighten, headed spontaneously for Wenceslas Square, singing the national anthem. A flying wedge of grim-faced police wielding truncheons cut into the ranks of the best brains in the country. Shouting and chanting erupted. The sound of boots was temporarily drowned by cries of ‘We are unarmed’ and ‘No violence!’ The demonstrators managed to shake off their opponents and march on defiantly, towards the square. Scores of curious bystanders joined in silently, like monks hastening to prayer. Café patrons downed their drinks and joined the throng.

As the demonstration reached the National Theatre, actors and theatre staff joined too. That gave courage to the young demonstrators. They chanted in defiant tones, ‘Join us – the nation’s helping itself.’ Numbers soon mushroomed to more than 50,000; after all the years of isolation, of surveillance and ideological division, it was as if people could not get enough of each other’s company.

Around eight p.m., as it entered the avenue Národni Třída, the demonstration was greeted by white-helmeted riot police determined to stop the marchers from reaching the square. Fearing a repeat of a Tiananmen-style massacre, the crowd realised that it was at the mercy of the police. ‘We have bare hands,’ they cried, but the police, having sealed off all escape routes, attacked the students and dragged hundreds into custody.

And so came the moment when everything changed. ‘No violence,’ some chanted. Others taunted their captors with ‘Freedom!’ Still others jangled keys. A handful of women gave flowers to the unsmiling police. Hundreds of candles were lit. ‘We have bare hands! No violence! Freedom! Freedom!’ the believers in candle-power chanted, yellow light flickering on their faces.

They were soon to get their way. Time was up for communism.

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During the night that sparked the Velvet Revolution, Prague protesters responded to police violence at Wenceslas Square by staging a peaceful sit-in, lighting candles, chanting slogans and calling for an end to communist rule.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY TRIUMPHANT?

The dramatic collapse of the Soviet empire under pressure from ‘people power’ stirred the imagination of intellectuals, especially in the United States, where rather extravagant ‘the world is becoming just like us’ interpretations quickly became orthodoxy. A think tank called Freedom House purported to show that in 1900, when monarchies and empires still predominated, there were no electoral democracies with universal suffrage and competitive multi-party elections. There were a few ‘restricted democracies’ – twenty-five, accounting for just 12.4 per cent of the world’s population. By 1950, with the beginnings of decolonisation and the postwar reconstruction of Japan and Europe, there were twenty-two democracies, accounting for 31 per cent of the world’s population, and a further twenty-one restricted democracies, covering 11.9 per cent of the world’s population. By the end of the century, the report observed, democracy had arrived on the shores of Latin America, post-communist Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. At least on paper, 119 of 192 countries could be described as ‘electoral democracies’ – 58.2 per cent of the global population. Eighty-five of these – 38 per cent of the world’s inhabitants – enjoyed forms of democracy ‘respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law’. So the report found that the ideal of ‘liberal democracy’ was now within practical reach of the whole world. ‘In a very real sense,’ ran the ebullient conclusion, ‘the twentieth century has become the “Democratic Century”’, defined by ‘the extension of the democratic franchise to all parts of the world and to all major civilizations and religions’.8

A similar story was told by ‘end of history’ man Francis Fukuyama (1952–), who said the collapse of communism proved that ‘the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West’, and the ideals of liberal representative democracy – free and fair elections backed by respect for civil rights and guarantees of private property ownership and free markets – had finally crushed their competitors. Perhaps, speculated Fukuyama, the world now stood at ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’, with ‘Western liberal democracy … the final form of human government’.9

This was big but biased talk. Its presumption that American-style liberal democracy was the gold standard came as no surprise. It was perhaps to be expected of a global empire whose mainstream intellectuals viewed the world narcissistically, through the narrow lens of its unquestioned self-image. But the certainty was misguided, most obviously because the period since 1945 has witnessed the invention and diffusion of many unusual democratic customs that defied the norms of US liberal democracy. As the world came to be shaped by democracy, we could say, democracy became worldly, more cosmopolitan and less dogmatically liberal.

Consider the thought-provoking but not atypical case of Senegal, the western African country where the importation of elections from Europe showed that democracy could mix with négritude (a Pan-African positive sense of blackness) and meld with a predominantly agrarian Muslim society to produce unusual customs that were simply not describable as ‘liberal democracy’.10 Here was a people introduced to Islamic customs from across the Sahara by Berber merchants in the mid-fifteenth century; a territory where electoral politics in limited form dated back to 1848, when (unusually) voting rights were granted by the French colonial authorities to the adult men of the principal urban settlements; a country whose French-speaking elites thought of démocratie as a synonym for equality before the law, freedom of association, a free press and the holding of fair and open elections. Under colonialism, voters were only a tiny minority of the population, but the culture of voting and elections gradually spread, culminating in a victory for male and female suffrage in 1956. Following independence in 1960, the government of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) did its best to turn the country into a one-party system. Attempts to ban opposition parties and rig elections failed, partly due to strong support for demokaraasi among Senegal’s Wolof-speaking Muslim majority.

In a remarkable shift of cultural coordinates, some party leaders and journalists, and many citizens, had learned to liken political parties and elections to the sacred place of worship, the mosque. Elections were seen as more than the ousting of a government by ballots, not bullets. They were moments when parties and their leaders resembled muezzins, whose job is to stand atop the minaret to call the faithful – voters – to prayer. Laypeople can become muezzins in Senegalese Islam, so anybody can form and lead a party. Just as at mosque, demokaraasi draws on the principle of rotation of muezzins under the supervision of the imam, the one who stands before the assembled faithful to lead them in prayer. Those who head government resemble the imam (the Arabic root of imām means ‘in front of’); supported by the wider community and supervised from a distance by the real holders of power, the religious brotherhoods, leaders are expected to guide others through daily life with the help of parties, on the basis that they have been put in front – chosen – by the wider community.

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Friday prayers can overflow into the streets in Dakar, Senegal, a country whose citizens, comprising ten distinct ethnic groups, are mostly avowed Muslims.

In practice, the analogy between the mosque and democracy proved challenging. It stirred up public disputes among Senegalese citizens about how imams and politicians are chosen, whether imams have veto rights against elected governments, and how limited-term and lobbied governments can best deal with the realities of poverty, discrimination against women and people of disability, corporate exploitation of natural resources, and tax avoidance. Still, there’s no denying that for many Senegalese ‘mosque democracy’ (as we might call the mutation) was meaningful. For it followed from their way of thinking about demokaraasi that it was more than just a mundane method of selecting a government based on community consent; wrapped in sacred language, it was a way of life, a set of beliefs and institutions that bind people together in the presence of the divine. Demokaraasi meant sharing resources, mutual recognition, reaching a governing consensus and community solidarity. Demokaraasi in this sense knew no distinction between the sacred and the profane. It instead resembled a community of believers bound together by their quest to harmonise their differences through multi-party government and good leadership, under the watchful eye of an exacting God.

THE RISE OF MONITORY DEMOCRACY

Developments in Senegal, South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere showed that in the decades after 1945, democracy was no longer a white-skinned, Western affair – as it had been, say, when Lord James Bryce wrote his classic Modern Democracies in 1921, or when a Natal-based historian of democracy spoke of election-based, parliamentary government as ‘largely the outcome of the character and historical development of Englishmen’, unsuited to ‘states where the population does not display the same talents for, or interest in, the management of public affairs’.11

Yes, broadly speaking, the many different species of democracies that sprang up on every continent still belonged to the genus called democracy, not just in name, but also in spirit. Political leaders and citizens who thought of themselves as democrats were still bound by respect for non-violent, lawful government based on the consent of ‘the people’. They were suspicious of concentrated and unaccountable power; they were committed to the principle that all citizens are equals. But the indigenisation of democracy in environments radically different to the earlier parent electoral democracies of Western Europe, Spanish America and the United States was nevertheless remarkable.

India, soon to become known as the world’s ‘largest democracy’, was no liberal democracy, if that means American-style representative government founded on a large middle class, a free market economy and the spirit of possessive individualism.12 India’s tryst with democracy fundamentally challenged the presumption that economic growth is the core requirement of democracy – that free and fair elections are practical only when a majority of citizens owns or enjoys commodities such as cars, refrigerators and radios. Weighed down by destitution of heart-breaking proportions, millions of poor and illiterate people rejected the prejudice that a country must first be wealthy before it can be democratic. They decided instead that they could become materially stronger through democracy. Not only that: the Indian pathway to democracy bearded the woolly predictions of experts who said that French-style secularism, the compulsory retreat of religious myths into the private sphere, was necessary before hard-nosed democracy could happen. The Indian polity contains every major faith known to humanity and is home to hundreds of languages. Social complexity on this scale led Indian democrats to a new justification of democracy. It was no longer a means to protect a homogeneous society of equal individuals. It came to be regarded as the fairest way to enable people of different backgrounds and divergent group identities to live together harmoniously, as equals, without civil war.

India showed that the spirit and substance of democracy were alive globally in local sentiments, languages, institutions and shifting and contested forms of power. After 1945, democracy grew more grounded. But since then something else of historic importance – a transformation less obvious – has been happening: the growth of monitory democracy, a new form of self-government distinctively different from the assembly-based and electoral democracies of the past.

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During the 1952 Indian general election, the first held after independence, conservatives claimed that women’s involvement in politics threatened ancient caste and gender hierarchies. They had a point: energised by democracy’s egalitarianism, women’s turnout in elections and contributions to public life have since been rising steadily, often outstripping men’s participation, as in the 2015 elections in Bihar, the country’s poorest state.

What is monitory democracy? Why the adjective ‘monitory’ – which first entered English in the mid-fifteenth century (from the Latin monere, to warn, to advise) to refer to issuing a warning of an impending danger, or an admonition to check the content or quality of something, or to refrain from a foolish or offensive action? It is a form of democracy defined by the rapid growth of many new kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms: ‘guide dog’, ‘watchdog’ and ‘barking dog’ institutions. Monitory democracy includes practices such as election monitoring, workplace codetermination and participatory budgeting. It also includes bodies such as future generations commissions, bridge doctors, truth and reconciliation forums and coral-reef monitoring networks. These monitory or public accountability mechanisms are newcomers in the history of democracy. They spring up in many different contexts and are not simply ‘Western’ inventions.

The rights of workers to elect representatives to their company’s governing boards in workplace codetermination schemes (Mitbestimmung) first happened in war-torn Germany in the 1940s. Participatory budgeting, in which citizens decide how to spend part of a public budget, is a Brazilian invention. Future generations commissions with statutory power to champion the rights of unborn citizens were born in Wales. Bridge doctors – volunteer teams of university engineering students checking the safety of city bridges – are a South Korean specialty. South Africa made famous truth and reconciliation forums. Coral-reef monitoring networks are a product of global cooperation.

These monitory bodies have taken root everywhere within the local and national fields of government and civil society, as well as in cross-border settings. As a result, the whole architecture of representative government is changing. The grip of elections, political parties and parliaments in shaping citizens’ lives and representing their interests is weakening. If electoral democracy rested on the principle of ‘one person, one vote, one representative’, the guiding ethic of monitory democracy is ‘one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives’. Under these new conditions, democracy means much more than elections. Within and outside states, independent and toothy watchdog bodies have begun to reshape the landscapes of power. By keeping corporations and elected governments, parties and politicians permanently on their toes, the new watchtowers question abuses of power, force governments and businesses to modify their agendas – and sometimes smother them in public disgrace.

Monitory democracy is the most complex and vibrant form of democracy yet. In the name of ‘people’, ‘the public’, ‘public accountability’ or ‘citizens’ – the terms are normally used interchangeably – power-challenging and power-tempering institutions are springing up all over the place. Corruption scandals and public outcries against monkey business are becoming the new normal. This does not mean that elections, political parties, legislatures and public assemblies are disappearing or declining in importance, but they are most definitely losing their pole position as hosts and drivers of politics. Democracy is no longer simply a way of handling and taming the power of elected governments, and no longer confined to territorial states. Gone are the days when democracy could be described, and in the next breath attacked, as an abuse of statistics, as ‘government by the unrestricted will of the majority’; or, in the oft-cited words of the Moravian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), the ‘institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’.13 The age of representative democracy is behind us. Whether we are talking about local, national or supranational government, or the world of non-governmental organisations and networks, those who wield power are now routinely subject to public monitoring and restraint by an assortment of extra-parliamentary bodies.

The advent of monitory democracy challenges earlier, election-centred understandings of democracy. It spells trouble as well for the commonsense view that democracy is essentially a method of controlling governments and taming state power. What’s remarkable is how the spirit and power-scrutinising mechanisms of monitory democracy spread ‘downwards’, into areas of social life previously untouched by democrats. Assembly democracies typically regarded power dynamics within households, and the treatment of women and slaves, as private matters. We saw how the age of representative democracy witnessed resistance to slavery and to the exclusion of women, workers and the colonised from elections. Elected governments intervened in such areas as healthcare and education. One thing that’s different about the age of monitory democracy is that it enables, as never before, organised public scrutiny and refusal of arbitrary power in the whole of social life. Matters such as workplace bullying, sexual harassment, racial and gender discrimination, animal abuse, homelessness, disability and data harvesting all become central themes of democratic politics.

Parties, parliaments and elected governments are typically reactive to such issues. Monitory bodies and networks therefore become the true drivers of politics. They help deepen democracy. Its spirit of equality and openness spreads through social life and across state borders. For the first time in the history of democracy, not surprisingly, ‘civil society’ is a phrase routinely used by democrats at every point on our planet.14 Monitory democracy springs up wherever there are abuses of power. Uncontested rule in areas ranging from family life to employment is checked – if and when it’s checked – not just by elected representatives in government, but also by a host of new institutions that remind millions of citizens of a simple but perennial truth: democracy requires colossal transformations of people’s daily lives. Their habits of heart and everyday routines must grow more allergic to abuse of power. To stand against bossing and bullying, people need to nurture the spirit of democracy within, as well as to spread it and keep it alive in others. Citizens must be confident that they themselves are the source of power of the institutions that govern their lives; that government and other bodies indeed rest upon the consent of the governed; and that when they withdraw their consent from these institutions and demand alternatives, things can change for the better, even if only in the smallest of ways.

WHY MONITORY DEMOCRACY?

Is this new kind of accountability democracy a sustainable, historically irreversible development? We don’t yet know.

A sceptic might ask for more evidence of its novelty, beginning with how it developed. As always in democracy’s story, the path of innovation has been circuitous and generalisations are tricky. Monitory democracy has had both its causes and causers; it wasn’t hatched from a single cell. It’s the product of many forces, including the breakdown of states, citizen disaffection and plain good luck. Plus a vital factor Tocqueville spotted long ago: what could be called the democratic contagion – people’s ability to draw the inference that when some of their grievances are remedied, others must also be addressed.15

A less obvious but hugely important explanation of the birth of monitory democracy is the role of political catastrophe. In the history of democracy, political breakdown, violence and the pity and suffering of war sometimes yielded more than darkness and despair. The origin of parliaments is an example: against great odds, political crises were midwives of new democratic institutions. That rule applied to the first half of the twentieth century, the most murderous in recorded human history. An economic depression plus two global wars punctuated by terrible cruelties against whole populations shattered old structures of security, sparked aggression and elbowing for power, and unleashed angry popular energies that fed major upheavals – including attacks on electoral democracy in the shape of Bolshevism and Stalinism in Russia, fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and military imperialism in Japan. These regimes denounced electoral democracy as parliamentary dithering, liberal perplexity, bourgeois hypocrisy and military cowardice. In consequence, near the mid-point of the twentieth century, democracy was on its knees – spiritless, paralysed, doomed. By 1941, when President Roosevelt called for ‘shielding the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism’ while untold numbers of villains had drawn the contrary conclusion that dictatorship and totalitarianism were the future, fewer than a dozen electoral democracies remained.16

Then something extraordinary happened. The carnage produced by war, dictatorship and totalitarianism prompted thinkers and writers from across the political spectrum to bring about a shift in the definition and ethical justification of democracy. They helped trigger a moment of what physicists and astronomers call ‘dark energy’: in defiance of the gravity of contemporary events, the universe of meaning of democracy underwent a dramatic expansion. The German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955) gave voice to the trend in noting the need for ‘democracy’s deep and forceful recollection of itself, the renewal of its spiritual and moral self-consciousness’. Others expressed shock and dismay at the way the electoral democracies of the 1920s and 1930s had facilitated the rise of demagogues (German philosopher Theodor Adorno dubbed them ‘glorified barkers’). These populists were skilled at calling on ‘the people’ to mount the stage of history – only to muzzle, maim and murder in the people’s name, so destroying the freedom and political equality for which electoral democracy had avowedly stood. There was general agreement that the recent catastrophes proved the naivety of the formula that people should obey their governments because their rulers protect their lives and possessions. This pact was no longer workable; worse, it was politically dangerous. The problem was no longer ‘mob rule’ by ignorant, unkempt commoners, as critics of democracy had insisted from Plato and Thucydides until well into the nineteenth century. Totalitarianism proved that mob rule had its true source in thuggish leaders skilled in the art of manipulating and seducing ‘the people’. Ruling through brute force and cunning was now the fundamental political problem.

And so it was during the 1940s that a fresh historical form of democracy was imagined.17 Its distinctive spirit and new institutions were marked by a militant commitment to casting out the devils of arbitrary, publicly unaccountable power. The Irish man of letters C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) captured the point: ‘A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people … who believed in a democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.’ The ‘real reason for democracy’ is that ‘no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows’.

The Chinese writer Lin Yutang (1895–1976), whose My Country and My People enjoyed a wide readership during this period, put the same point in pithier terms. Politicians aren’t ‘benevolent rulers’ who ‘love the people as their own sons’; far better to treat them as ‘potential prison-inmates’ and ‘devise ways and means to prevent these potential convicts from robbing the people and selling the country’. Democracy hereon had to suppose that people were ‘more like potential crooks than honest gentlefolk’, and that since they can’t be expected always to be good, ‘ways must be found of making it impossible for them to be bad’.18

From left to right on the political spectrum, a global assortment of writers, theologians, scientists and scholars voiced fears that parliamentary democracy’s narrow escape from the clutches of economic collapse, war, dictatorship and totalitarianism might just be a temporary reprieve. Deeply troubled, they called for new remedies for the maladies of electoral democracy, beginning with the abandonment of sentimental optimism about ‘popular sovereignty’. There was widespread rejection of pseudo-democratic, fascist talk of ‘the will of the people’. Joseph Schumpeter, who served as Austria’s first finance minister and made and lost a fortune as an investment banker before becoming a Harvard professor, warned that ‘groups with an ax to grind’ have a nasty habit of ‘staging and managing political shows’ bent on manufacturing ‘the will of the people’. The French Catholic philosopher and early champion of human rights Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) insisted that ‘the people are not God, the people do not have infallible reason and virtues without flaw’. The BBC radio lectures by J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) – broadcast on Sunday evenings through 1940 and again in 1941, drawing peak audiences that rivalled Churchill’s – repeated the point by asking, ‘Who are the people?’ His answer, with Hitler on his mind:

The people are real human beings. If you prick them, they bleed. They have fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sweethearts, wives and children. They swing between fear and hope. They have strange dreams. They hunger for happiness. They all have names and faces. They are not some cross-section of abstract stuff.19

The 1940s rebels knew too much. Their sadness and alarm were too deep for tears. They had witnessed how electoral democracy had been a weak opponent and a willing accomplice of totalitarian destruction. They were defiant, sure that the greed for unlimited power and murderous spell cast by the new totalitarians had to be resisted. That is why they reasoned that a radical alteration of the language of democracy was needed. Democracy had to be talked about differently – and practised in novel ways. In these despairing times, the poetry mattered: without new words, new meanings, no new democracy could emerge. These rebels were certain that the fetish of elections and majority rule was dangerous folly. Its grip on the democratic imagination had to be broken. Democracy was too precious to be left to politicians and governments; the old belief that elections are its heart and soul was a great mistake. Badly needed was a new commitment to democracy understood as the protection of citizens from cowing and coercing, the celebration of diversity and the reduction of social inequality using methods in addition to free and fair elections.

The rebels didn’t quite put things this way, but in effect they called for a second round of democratisation of the ‘sovereign people’ principle of electoral democracy. We’ve seen already that the reimagining of electoral democracy kickstarted the work of humbling the metaphysical principle of ‘the people’. The whole idea of electoral democracy underscored the importance of political leadership. It also cleared the way for the admission, absent in the ancient Athenian understanding, that any given democracy must provide room for legitimate differences of public opinion and divisions of material interest. The rebels took things further. The task was as much theoretical as practical: to ensure that democracy could function as a weapon against all forms of abusive power, including evils perpetrated by elections conducted in the name of a fictional ‘sovereign people’.

This much was agreed. But opinions here divided, for instance over the merits and perils of private property and free-market competition against concentrated state power. The drafter of the Indian constitution, B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), was among those who cautioned that unbridled capitalism would plague democracy with a ‘life of contradictions’ generated by the conflict between the struggle for good government based on political equality and a society ruined by huge social and material inequalities. Many commentators recommended the building of public-spirited welfare-state institutions in support of the right to a decent education and universal healthcare. Others went further by championing workers’ right to vote for representatives on the board of directors of their company – the extension of the principle of elected representation into the heartlands of the market, as later happened in Germany, Denmark, France, Sweden and other countries.

Disagreements aside, most of the rebels supported a form of democracy whose spirit and institutions were infused with a robust commitment to dealing with the devils of unaccountable power. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), who later won prominent admirers, including Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968), delivered one of the weightiest cases for renewing and transforming democracy along these lines. ‘The perils of uncontrolled power are perennial reminders of the virtues of a democratic society,’ he wrote in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1945). ‘But modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis, not only in order to anticipate and understand the perils to which it is exposed, but also to give it a more persuasive justification.’ He concluded with words that became famous: ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.’20 The remark implied a new understanding of democracy as the continuous public scrutiny, tempering and control of power according to standards ‘deeper’ and more universal than the old reigning principles of periodic elections, majority rule and popular sovereignty.

Capturing the new spirit, political thinker Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) called for active confrontation with the demons of arbitrary power. ‘The problem of evil,’ she wrote in 1945, ‘will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe.’ In fact, the hurts and pains caused by unchecked power were a global problem. In perhaps the boldest move of the period, some thinkers proposed ditching the reigning presumption that the ‘natural’ home of democracy was the sovereign territorial state, or what the distinguished French jurist René Cassin (1887–1976) – disabled Jewish World War I veteran, De Gaulle’s chief legal adviser, co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and condemned to death by the fascist Vichy government – dubbed the Leviathan State. So they pleaded for extending the democratic principle of equality of power across territorial borders. ‘ The history of the past twenty years,’ the German scholar Carl Friedrich (1901–1984) wrote, ‘has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that constitutional democracy cannot function effectively on a national plane.’ Thomas Mann similarly repudiated state-centric definitions of democracy. Multilateral institutions could help protect vulnerable minorities and liberate citizens from narrow-minded nationalism and abuses of power by states and businesses. ‘We must reach higher and envisage the whole,’ he said. ‘We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.’21

COMMUNICATIVE ABUNDANCE

If democracy was now to be understood as the ongoing struggle for self-government backed by new forms of public accountability, the practical challenge was to find in these grimly tempestuous times of the 1940s methods of placing constraints on dangerous concentrations of power. Although greater citizen participation in public affairs was widely recommended, especially at the city and workplace levels, scrapping representative politics and returning to Greek-style assembly democracy was unpopular; it was seen as incapable of meeting the large-scale challenges of the dark times. Far bolder and more forward-looking measures were needed. Countries such as the Federal Republic of Germany (1949) and India (1950) responded by adopting written constitutions designed to prevent abuses of power by imposing duties on elected governments to respect the fundamental rights of their citizens. The worldwide growth of monitory organisations, networks and campaigns committed to the protection of human rights was another innovation.

The crowning achievement of the decade was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Drafted in 1947–1948 in response to genocide in the aftermath of global war, the declaration – the most translated document ever, today available in 500 languages – proclaimed a series of rights to be enjoyed by everyone, ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’. Its preamble spoke of ‘the inherent dignity’ and ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. The declaration in effect solved a basic problem that had dogged assembly and electoral democracy: who decides who ‘the people’ are? The redefinition of democracy as the global protection and nurturing of human rights gave an answer: every human being is entitled to exercise their right to have rights, including the right to prevent arbitrary exercises of power through independent public monitoring and free association with others. In practice, that meant no elected government was entitled to ride roughshod over any individual or group anywhere. Torture, the abuse of women, cruelty to children, rigged elections, religious discrimination and media censorship were not permissible – even when carried out in the name of ‘democracy’ and a ‘sovereign people’.

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The authors of the Declaration of Human Rights included René Cassin (second from left); Chinese playwright, literary critic and diplomat Peng-chun Chang (third from left); chair of the drafting commission Eleanor Roosevelt (centre); and Lebanese Thomist thinker of Greek Orthodox convictions Charles Malik (third from right), who presented the final draft to the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.

The new way of thinking about democracy proved to be the candle in the gloom bred by the death of forty-five million people, terrible physical destruction and spiritual misery, and the mounting postwar tensions bound up with such political troubles as the bloody partition of Pakistan and India, the Berlin blockade and the architectural cleansing and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland by the British-backed state of Israel. Impressive was how the reimagining of democracy enabled the design of scores of power-tempering institutions that had never existed before in the history of democracy. The age of monitory democracy has seen the application of the rules of representation, democratic accountability and public participation to an ever-wider range of settings, including citizen assemblies, teach-ins, climate strikes, anti-corruption commissions and constitutional safaris (famously used by the drafters of the new South African constitution to examine best practice elsewhere). And let’s not forget Indonesian local religious courts, Indian public interest litigation, consumer testing agencies, medical councils, war crimes tribunals, democracy cafés, peer review panels, investigative journalism and web platforms dedicated to tracking and stopping the abuse of power.

The wide range of innovations turned out to be good for the democratic principle that who gets how much, when and how should depend on an active citizenry as well as the public scrutiny and restraint of power, and not just on bland talk of ‘the right to vote’ or democracy limited to elections. Monitory democracy in this sense still today feeds upon the spirit of resistance to arbitrary power dating back to the 1940s. But most of the recent democratic innovations have come to depend heavily for their vitality on an equally significant driver: the digital communications revolution, which has been reshaping institutions and the daily lives of people globally during the past half-century.

Too little attention is paid to the way that all historical forms of democracy are grounded within and shaped by communication media, so let’s for a moment think of things in this way: assembly-based democracy belonged to an era dominated by the spoken word, backed up by laws written on papyrus and stone, and by messages dispatched by foot, donkey or horse. Electoral democracy sprang up in the era of print culture – the book, pamphlet and newspaper, and telegraphed and railway-delivered messages – and fell into crisis during the advent of early mass broadcasting media, especially radio, cinema and (in its infancy) television. By contrast, monitory democracy has come to be tied to multimedia-saturated societies – whose structures of power are continuously tracked and resisted by citizens and representatives acting within digital media ecosystems. This world of communicative abundance is structured by linked media devices that integrate text, sound and images, and enable communication to take place through multiple user points, within modularised global networks accessible to many hundreds of millions of people scattered across the globe. Monitory democracy and computerised media networks are conjoined twins. If the new galaxy of communicative abundance suddenly imploded, monitory democracy would probably not survive.

We know about the organised manipulation of information by hidden algorithms, corporate data harvesting, political gaslighting, state surveillance and other decadent trends, yet equally striking is the way the decadence breeds stiff public resistance. Communicative abundance feeds the restless spirit of monitory democracy.22 It never pauses. Compared with the era of electoral democracy, when print culture and limited-spectrum audio-visual media were aligned with and could be controlled by political parties and governments, the age of monitory democracy witnesses constant spats about power, to the point where it seems as if no organisation or leader or area within government and civil society is immune from political trouble. Every nook and cranny of power becomes the potential target of ‘publicity’ and ‘public exposure’. Birth and death, diet and health are stripped of their certainties. Police violence and abuses of power against religious, racial and sexual-preference minorities are no longer considered ‘normal’, or excused. The public handling of a global pestilence and its implications for wealth distribution, jobs and wellbeing are widely seen as political matters. In the era of communicative abundance, no hidden topic is protected unconditionally from media coverage, and from possible politicisation; the more ‘private’ it is, the more ‘publicity’ it often gets. Nothing is sacrosanct – not even the efforts of those who try to protect or rebuild what they claim to be sacrosanct. Past generations would find the whole process astonishing in its scale and democratic intensity. With the click of a camera or the flick of a switch, hidden worlds can be made public: everything from the bedroom to the boardroom, the bureaucracy to the battlefield. Citizens and investigative journalists using multiple media platforms keep alive the utopian ideals of shedding light on power, freedom of information and greater transparency in government and business. Little wonder that public objections to wrongdoing and corruption are common in the era of monitory democracy. There seems to be no end of scandals; and there are even times when scandals, like earthquakes, unsettle whole political orders.

DEMOCRACY’S GREENING

In the age of monitory democracy, some scandals become legendary – such as the whopping lies about weapons of mass destruction spun by the defenders of the disastrous US-led military invasion of Iraq in the 2000s. In a time when every field of power is potentially the target of ‘publicity’ and ‘public exposure’, new types of public dissent also happen – strikingly, in exchanges between humans and non-human environments.

For the first time in democracy’s history, monitory institutions conduct campaigns to block wanton environmental destruction and issue public warnings about an uninhabitable future Earth. Most obviously, green political parties help lead the charge – the first in the world were the United Tasmania Group in Australia and the Values Party in New Zealand in the early 1970s. Independent statutory bodies such as the UK’s Climate Change Committee are briefed to keep governments on track to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Global bio-agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Aarhus Convention, call upon states to guarantee their citizens information about and participation in environmental decision-making. Environmental impact hearings and citizen science projects – such as the UK’s Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) project, which encourages people to act as stewards of their local environments – proliferate. Climate strikes and multimedia civic insurgencies like Extinction Rebellion multiply. Large-scale Earthwatch summits, bio-regional assemblies, green think tanks and academies, and conventions to protect regional marine environments sit alongside local initiatives, such as building butterfly and bee ‘bridges’ in urban spaces to protect endangered species from traffic. For the first time, there are victories for the legal redefinition of lands deemed to enjoy ‘all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’, as in New Zealand’s (Aotearoa’s) Te Urewera Act 2014.

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Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent civil disobedience initiative that aims to prompt government and business action on climate, dug up the lawn around Isaac Newton’s apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, in February 2020. The excavation – a calculated mimicry of the college’s continuing investment in coal and gas mining – generated international media coverage and prompted the college to disinvest $20 million in fossil fuels and commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

Also for the first time there are constitutional clauses designed to protect the biosphere, which radically alter the meaning of citizenship in a democratic political order. Chapter 2, Article 6 of Mongolia’s constitution expressly states that citizens must enjoy rights to a ‘healthy and safe environment, and to be protected against environmental pollution and ecological imbalance’. Article 70A of Slovenia’s stipulates that ‘everyone has the right to drinkable water’, while Article 5 of the Kingdom of Bhutan’s specifies that every citizen must contribute to the conservation of Bhutan’s rich biodiversity and to the prevention of ecological degradation, including visual, noise and physical pollution, by supporting and adopting environment-friendly practices and policies. There are also trend-setting land management and environmental stewardship schemes backed by indigenous self-government, for instance in the Haida Gwaii (Islands of the People) in the north-east Pacific and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Central Australia.

All these experiments have great significance for the way we think about democracy. They are infused with a strong democratic sense of the dynamic and fragile complexity of our world. They raise awareness of the interconnectivity of all living and nonliving elements and foster deep respect for the nonhuman and its legitimate right to be represented in human affairs. There’s more: these watchdog platforms craft new ways of shaming and chastening human predation. They suppose that, in order to secure the clean air, water and food humans need to thrive, people must become guardians of the places where they live. They urge people to see the wondrous in the common, and to value the commons. They probe the reasons why people don’t act in order to get them to act. They insist that some things are not for sale and highlight the costs of public ignorance of climate change, species destruction and ‘development’. These platforms call upon humans to swap their innocent attachments to talk of ‘the economy’ and ideologies of ‘GDP growth’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’ with a more prudent sense of deep time that highlights the fragile complexity of our biosphere and its multiple rhythms.

These viridescent platforms help complicate and enrich everyday understandings of democracy. They force a redefinition of democracy, ridding it of its anthropocentrism by asking: why suppose ‘the people’ are the pinnacle of creation, lords and ladies of the universe, the rightful masters and possessors of ‘nature’ because they are the ultimate source of sovereign power and authority on Earth? These watchdog platforms grant a political voice to the biosphere. They reconnect the political and natural worlds in what the French anthropologist Bruno Latour (1947–) aptly calls ‘parliaments of things’. ‘Law should not be centered around Men, but around Life’, the argument runs.23 This is more than urging humans to reimagine themselves as humble beings whose fate is deeply entangled with the ecosystems in which they dwell. Democracy is redefined to mean a way of life that renders power publicly accountable – through elected and unelected representative institutions in which humans and their biosphere are given equal footing.

HARD TIMES

The new environmental guardians specialise in issuing warnings that unless we humans have the courage to change our ways, things may turn out badly – so badly that the ideals and institutions of monitory democracy will perish, along with millions of biomes and living species that might also include the species questionably known as Homo sapiens. We’ve seen how democracies in times past were bedevilled by losses of self-confidence and bouts of self-destructiveness. During the late fourth century BCE, when Athens faced invasion by Alexander the Great, records show that its citizens grew so despondent that more than once the whole assembly slumped into silence when confronted by bad news. During the 1920s and 1930s, many electoral democracies lost their bearings, surrendered to their enemies or bumbled into committing democide. The spreading sense among millions of people that democracy is now endangered is on a par with these previous periods of despondency. But it is different. These warnings – which date back to the 1940s, when fears of global nuclear annihilation first surfaced – are without precedent. It is not only that the new sentinels are alerting publics to the growing frequency of environmental catastrophes and their cascading effects. Never before has it been said by so many that democracy must be set aside, at least temporarily; that there is no time for prevarication and piecemeal reforms when our planet is facing a civilisational crisis that requires drastic action to save our species.

The alarm about the global fate of democracy is compounded by a cluster of other anxieties. High on today’s list of complaints is the hollowing out of representative government by the forces of centralised state power – the drift towards what Thomas Jefferson called ‘elective despotism’. A prominent historian of democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon (1948–), claims the centre of political gravity in contemporary democracies has shifted from political parties, elections and parliaments towards strong-armed executive rule. The legislative branch of government is now subordinate to government by the few. The ‘age of presidentialism’ is upon us. It breeds citizen dissatisfaction and loud complaints about ‘leaders making decisions without consultation, failing to take responsibility for their actions, lying with impunity, living in a bubble’.24

The change resembles a slow-motion coup d’état – helped along by tactics such as gag orders, leak investigations, hidden payments, the appointment of acting heads of government departments without the approval of the legislature used during the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Compounded by rulers’ willingness to mobilise the machinery of government to enforce extended lockdowns during COVID-19 in countries such as Germany and South Africa, there are signs that elective despotism is triggering not only citizen disaffection and grumbling about politicians, but also morbid complaints against ‘democracy’ itself. More than a few say things are going worse than anybody expected. Many think democracy is fucked.

A 27-country survey conducted in 2019 found that 51 per cent of interviewees were ‘not satisfied with the way democracy is working’. Researchers at the Economist Intelligence Unit documented a steady ten-year waning confidence in democracy between 2007 and 2017, and a marked rise in citizens’ concerns about transparency, accountability and corruption. A prominent Scandinavian democracy monitoring body has noted that ‘the aspects of democracy that make elections truly meaningful are in decline. Media autonomy, freedom of expression and alternative sources of information, and the rule of law, have undergone the greatest declines among democracy metrics in recent years.’ An American think tank was gloomier. ‘Democracy is in crisis,’ it concluded. ‘The values it embodies – particularly the right to choose leaders in free and fair elections, freedom of the press, and the rule of law – are under assault and in retreat globally.’

Measured in terms of the future resilience of monitory democracy, perhaps the most worrying finding is that young people are almost everywhere the least satisfied with democracy and – as if they have seen through the official pageantry and pretence and wooden reassurances of their elders – more disaffected than previous generations at the same age.25

There are unwelcome findings in India, which is fast becoming the world’s largest failing democracy. Support for democracy among its people dropped from 70 per cent to 63 per cent between 2005 and 2017. The proportion of citizens ‘satisfied’ with democracy plunged from 79 per cent to 55 per cent; dissatisfaction was lower still among those with tertiary educations (47 per cent). More than half of respondents in the 2010–2014 period said they’d back ‘a governing system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts’, up from 43 per cent in 1999–2004. Respect for the armed forces runs unusually high; together with Vietnam, South Africa and Indonesia, India is one of only four countries where a majority of citizens (53 per cent) say they would support military rule. In its Democracy Report 2020, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute noted that India ‘has almost lost its status as a democracy’ and ranked the country below Sierra Leone, Guatemala and Hungary.26

There’s also discouraging news from Latin America, where reportedly less than a quarter (24 per cent) of citizens are happy with the way democracy is working in their countries, the lowest figure since survey polling began. Many complain about social injustices linked to poverty. More than 40 per cent of Argentina’s forty-five million people – and nearly 60 per cent of its children – live in shantytown poverty. After 2000, when the shift to multi-party democracy in Mexico began, the number of people officially living beneath the poverty line increased to more than 50 per cent of the population. Fed by a reserve army of the poor, mafia violence has grown by alarming proportions. Scores of elected city mayors have been assassinated, several hundred journalists murdered or disappeared, and more than a quarter of a million citizens have been robbed of their lives.

Many observers point out that much citizen disaffection is traceable to the widening gaps between rich and poor, which make a mockery of the principle of democratic equality. Symptomatic is the way that during the first year of a global pandemic, the total wealth of billionaires in countries such as India, Sweden, France and the United States more than doubled. Almost every democracy is feeling the pinch of the old rule that capitalism and democracy are ultimately incompatible, and it seems we’re again living through a period when the egalitarian spirit of democratic self-government is reduced to a mantra that functions as ‘a cloak to cover the nakedness of a government that does business for the kept classes’.27 Daily life is being scarred by the growth of plutocracy, meritocratic elites and the emergence of a substantial ‘precariat’ of under-and part-time employed people in gig-economy jobs that pay poorly and have no union protection or long-term security.

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Little despot, big despot: a brewing bromance between Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin at a Budapest press conference announcing new deals for purchasing Russian nuclear energy technology and gas supplies from energy giant Gazprom in February 2015.

Leading political thinkers are pointing out that the damage done to democratic institutions by ‘corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry … and the degradation of political dialogues promoted by the media’ are ‘the basics of the system, not excrescences upon it’. They warn of the birth of a ‘managed democracy’ and ‘inverted totalitarianism’ in which private corporations seize control of government with the help of commercial media that demobilises and shepherds the citizenry.28 Corporate power’s colonisation of democratic institutions has led some historians to turn the ‘third wave of democracy’ and ‘triumph of liberal democracy’ stories on their head, to say that ever since the 1970s, democracy, at least in the West, has been disfigured by the ‘triumvirate power of business, banking and political leaders’. State policies of ‘saving capitalism’ have weakened trade unions, promoted deregulation of public services and spread the culture of consumption fuelled by private credit and the belief in the ‘sanctity of the unobliged individual’.29

THE NEW DESPOTISM

That’s not all. The mood of despondency about the socially and politically damaging effects of environmental despoliation, concentrated state power, and threats posed by financial turbo-capitalism is compounded by rising awareness that monitory democracies are facing a new global competitor: despotic regimes that in Turkey, Russia, Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and China have a top-down political architecture and capacity to win the loyalty of their subjects using methods unlike anything known to the earlier modern world.

Like vultures pecking at rotting flesh, the critics of monitory democracy are enjoying once-in-a-lifetime feasts of cynicism and rejection of power-sharing democracy. Chinese critics are especially scathing in their attacks on American-style liberal democracy. Scholar Su Changhe believes a key priority is to ‘pull apart the language of Western democracy’, for ‘to have a truly free spirit and an independent national character, [China] must first take the idea of democracy promoted by a minority of Western countries and demote it from universal to local’. The People’s Republic mustn’t fall into the ‘democracy trap’ that produces ‘social divisions, ethnic antagonism, political strife, endless political instability and weak and feeble governments’, he writes. Chinese journalist Thomas Hon Wing Polin adds that ‘Western-style liberal democracy is but one form of democracy. It neither puts the people in charge, nor their interests uppermost. It is at the bottom an oligarchy that serves the interests of a tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority.’

China’s best-known sci-fi writer, Liu Cixin, is even blunter. ‘If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,’ he told The New Yorker in 2019, a provocation that reappears in a scene towards the end of his bestselling trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past. It describes the disasters triggered by the invasion of an alien species that quarantines most of Earth’s population onto the Australian continent. ‘The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways,’ Liu writes. ‘People realised that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government.’30

Order and strong government sanctioned by ‘the people’ is exactly what’s offered by the self-confident rulers of a new crop of despotisms that are a global alternative to power-sharing monitory democracy. These rulers are strengthened by their subjects’ belief that the thing called Western democracy is falling apart. Hence their temptation to confront monitory democracies, to challenge them on a global scale, just as dictatorships, monarchies and totalitarian regimes did a century ago when encircling electoral democracies. The new despotisms aren’t old-fashioned tyrannies or autocracies or military dictatorships. And they mustn’t be confused with twentieth-century fascism or totalitarianism.

Despotism is rather a new type of strong-armed state led by tough-minded rulers skilled in the arts of manipulating and meddling with people’s lives, marshalling their support and winning their conformity. Despotisms craft top-to-bottom relations of dependency oiled by wealth, money, law, elections and much media talk of defending ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’ (the phrases are often interchangeable in local languages) against ‘domestic subversives’ and ‘foreign enemies’. Despotisms are top-down pyramids of power, but it’s a mistake to suppose they are based simply on repression and raw force. They strive to practise nimble governance. They do more than repeat and repeat again the mantra of ‘popular sovereignty’. Their leaders harness public opinion polling agencies, think tanks, election campaigns, happiness forums, policy feedback groups, online hearings and other early warning detectors of dissent. The rulers of the new despotisms are deception and seduction perfectionists. They are masters of ‘phantom democracy’. They do all they can to camouflage the violence they use on those who refuse to conform. Using a combination of slick means, including calibrated coercion masked by balaclavas, disappearances and back-room torture, they manage to win the loyalty of sections of the middle classes, workers and the poor. They labour to nurture their willing subjects’ docility. Voluntary servitude is their thing. And they travel in packs. The new despotisms, led by a newly confident China, are skilled at navigating multilateral institutions to win business partners and do military deals well beyond the borders of the states they rule.

While Erdoğan, Putin and other new despots claim to practise their own forms of ‘democracy’ grounded in the authority of ‘the people’, they have no love of monitory democracy. Their true passion is power, exercised arbitrarily over others. They can be ruthless and vengeful in its pursuit, using military means. Yet they are not blindly reckless. They normally pay meticulous attention to details, cleverly interfere with people’s lives, stand over them, issue targeted threats and bully dissenters into submission. The public support these rulers enjoy is thus surprising, especially when it’s considered that despotisms are state capitalist regimes dominated by poligarchs – rich government and businesspeople who concentrate staggering amounts of wealth in their own hands, and within the family dynasties they control and protect.

Democracies such as Britain, Spain and the most powerful of them all, the United States, are also warped and weighed down by massive inequalities of opportunity and wealth. Other ingredients of despotic power are alive and well inside monitory democracies, too. Think of the way a new kind of ‘surveillance capitalism’, run by giant state-backed data-harvesting corporations such as Amazon and Google, is colonising, manipulating and reshaping the personal lives of many millions of people for the sake of profit and power, without their consent and regardless of election outcomes. Or how elected populist governments in Brazil, India, Poland and Mexico are potentially midwives of despotism. Trump’s four-year presidency set the pace: nourished by disaffected citizens and corporate donations, his government spread disinformation, undermined the rule of law, picked fights with enemies, discredited expertise and investigative journalism (‘fake news’) and generally accelerated the drift towards strong-armed rule. During elections, he promised redemption for all. In practice, in the name of a fictional ‘people’ and helped by dark money and tighter links between government and business, his presidency favoured top-down rule by the few of the many.

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‘So you want democracy?’ the policeman asks the begging dogs, in a satirical cartoon circulated widely on Chinese microblogging site Weibo in 2016. The harmony produced by strong, well-armed government is contrasted with the false promises, disorder and violence of Western-style democracy.

In these and other ways, democracies serve as the incubators of despotism. When it’s also considered that democracies and despotisms are entangled in cross-border chains of shadowy power, and cooperate in transport infrastructure projects, banking and arms deals, it should be clear that the principles and practices of constitutional power-sharing democracies, as we have known them since the 1940s, are threatened not only by outside political rivals. Hungary, Kazakhstan and Turkey – to name just several cases – show that a transition from a power-sharing democracy to despotism can happen rapidly, in not much more than a decade.31 These cases serve as warnings that monitory democracy can be snuffed out by stealth, bit by bit, using governing methods that bear a strong resemblance to those found in China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. These new despotisms should wake up democrats everywhere, reminding them that they are living through times in which the writing is on democracy’s wall.

WHY DEMOCRACY?

And so, through the thickening fog and dooming gloom, we must ask some basic questions: just as electoral democrats succumbed and collaborated with their opponents during the 1920s and 1930s, why shouldn’t today’s democrats just give in to the despotism alternative and bid adieu to the ideals and institutions of power-sharing, monitory democracy? Doesn’t realism dictate the need to accept the urgings of Putin, Erdoğan and other despots, to concede that the time has come to prepare the last rites for the ‘Western’ shambles called monitory democracy? To see that the new world order emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union, current European stagnation, disorder in the Arab world, the decline of the American empire, the return of a belligerent Russia and a self-confidently ambitious China favours top-down despotism, not democracy? In short, why be on the wrong side of history? Why cling to that old-hat thing called democracy?

Why indeed should different peoples with diverse interests at different points on our planet favour monitory democracy as a way of life? Why must they commit to greater public accountability, the humbling of the powerful and the equalisation of life chances for all? Could democracy instead be a fake global norm, a pseudo-universal ideal that jostles for attention, dazzles with its promises and, for a time, seduces people into believing that it is a weapon of the weak against the strong – when in reality it is just organised bribery of the poor by the rich, an ignorant belief in collective wisdom, an accomplice of human crimes against nature, a pretentious little value peddled by second-rate shopkeepers with second-rate minds (as the nineteenth-century German anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought)?32 Said differently: is monitory democracy really to be valued in Cape Town and Caracas as much as in Chennai, Canberra, Copenhagen and Chongqing?

In tackling these ethical questions, retrieving and breathing life into past justifications of democracy isn’t an option because – here comes a surprise! – the history of democracy is littered with dogmatic, strangely anti-democratic and self-contradictory justifications of why democracy is a universal norm. Take a few examples from the age of electoral democracy. The nineteenth-century Christian view, expressed in American publisher Nahum Capen’s (1804–1886) attempt to write the first full-length history of democracy, was that democracy is desirable because it draws inspiration and truth from the Gospels – that’s bad news for Muslims, Hindus, Confucians and others.33 Early modern champions of national sovereignty insisted that each Nation (they liked the upper case) was entitled to govern itself, and that struggles for national self-determination had History on their side – in practice, the doctrine proved often to be murderous, such as for Irish Catholics, condemned to be underdogs in a dominant nation-state; or for Palestinians and Kurds, who were stateless; or for Romany, Sámi, Inuit and other indigenous peoples who were deemed unfit for nationhood. And an influential tract called Government (1820), written for an encyclopaedia by the Scottish preacher and civil servant James Mill (1773–1836), explained that representative democracy was the protector of private property and possessive individualism and the guarantor of the utilitarian principle that ‘if the end of Government be to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, that end cannot be attained by making the greatest number slaves’.34

Philosophically speaking, the trouble with these old justifications isn’t only that they are in contradiction. They suffer from single-mindedness. They presume their justification of democracy is universally applicable because it rests on a timeless first principle that requires democrats, as well as all their opponents, to bow down in its presence. That philosophical conceit of course rubs against the self-questioning and levelling spirit of democracy. Talk of God, Nation, History and Private Property is not just doctrinaire metaphysics. Its pontifical quality contradicts the whole idea of monitory democracy as the defender of an open diversity of ways of life freed from the bossy dictates of the high-and-mighty.

The resort to justifying democracy by looking at its positive practical consequences is equally unconvincing. For instance, democracy isn’t always a promoter of peace – the empires of Athens and present-day Israel and the United States show exactly the opposite. It’s not the universal precondition of market-generated wealth or sustained or sustainable ‘economic growth’ – ask the Chinese or Vietnamese governments, or green activists, about that claim. And to say that democracy fosters ‘human development more fully than any feasible alternative’ – as did American political thinker Robert Dahl (1915–2014) – raises difficult questions about the meaning of the terms ‘human’ and ‘development’, and ignores non-human dynamics.

And so the search begins for fresh ethical justifications of democracy that rely on more rigorously humble ways of thinking, without clinging to platitudes such as ‘democracy is good because it lets people decide how they want to live’, or by cynically embracing a ‘nothing is true and anything goes’ relativism that inevitably sides with the enemies of democracy who say it is mere tripe and twaddle.

Is there a way to escape the double trap of dogmatism and relativism? There is. What’s needed are lateral ways of reimagining democracy as our universal ideal because it is the guardian of plurality – the protector of different ways of living freed from the dictates of arrogant, violent and predatory power.

Thinking of democracy as the guardian of open-minded diversity and the champion of publicly accountable power makes the ethic of democracy more capacious, more universally tolerant of different and conflicting definitions of democracy, and more capable of respecting the fragile complexity of our human and non-human worlds. It parts company with the lurid philosophical search for timeless first principles, but it doesn’t accept that thinking about democracy must hereon travel light, following the path of pragmatic calculation.35 In these embattled times, thinking about the merits of monitory democracy requires more thought, not less reflection.

Of course, in the villages and cities of Nigeria, Indonesia, Chile, Brazil and other countries, the word ‘democracy’ is typically not treated as a philosophical matter. When it is prized, it is for much less esoteric reasons, to do with uncorrupted, elected governments providing clean running water, electricity, vaccinations and decent schools and hospitals. It’s also true that elsewhere ‘democracy’ serves as a code of commonsense belief. ‘Have faith in democracy,’ said outgoing US president Barack Obama. ‘It’s not always pretty, I know. I’ve been living it. But it’s how, bit by bit, generation by generation, we have made progress.’36 Considered as a way of life, monitory democracy draws strength from these and other sentiments in its favour. But they aren’t enough. For when the going gets rough and times are troubling, a compelling argument for democracy really counts. It can make a difference to public opinion and the power dynamics within any given context. It can persuade people to hold fast to their commitment to democracy, or to change their minds in its favour, to see and feel things differently – above all to recognise the need to rein in any form of power that harms their lives by bringing them hardship, sorrow and indignity.

The suggestion that the problem of abusive power should be central to how we think about democracy is a vital clue why it can be considered indispensable everywhere. If democracy is understood as an unending process of humbling unconstrained power, then we must abandon all earlier efforts to link it to arrogant first principles. ‘Democracy is not figurable,’ writes the French scholar Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021).37 Like water, it has no fixed form or substance. Not only does it vary through time and space, as we have seen, but its defiance of fixed ways of living and refusal of all forms of top-down power masquerading as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ are compelling. Democracy has a punk quality. It is anarchic, permanently unsatisfied with the way things are. The actions unleashed by its spirit and institutions create space for unexpected beginnings. Always on the side of the targets and victims of predatory power, democracy doubts orthodoxies, loosens fixed boundaries, widens horizons and pushes towards the unknown.

Thinking of democracy as a shape-shifting way of protecting humans and their biosphere against the corrupting effects of unaccountable power reveals its radical potential: the defiant insistence that people’s lives are never fixed, that all things, human and non-human, are built on the shifting sands of space-time, and that no person or group, no matter how much power they hold, can be trusted permanently, in any context, to govern the lives of others. We could say, thinking back to the age of the first popular assemblies, that democracy is a means of damage prevention. It’s an early warning system, a way of enabling citizens, and whole organisations and networks, to sound the alarm whenever they suspect that others are about to cause them harm, or when calamities are already bearing down on their heads. Nietzsche famously complained that democracy stands for the disbelief in rule by elites and strongmen. It does, and for good reason. Democracy brings things back to earth. It serves as a ‘reality check’ on unrestrained power. It is a potent means of ensuring that those in charge of organisations don’t stray into cuckoo land, wander into territory where misadventures of power are concealed by fine words, lies, bullshit and silence.

When thought of in this way, the early warning principle of democracy counts as a global good. Mention of democracy no longer courts humdrum fantasies of bringing peace, economic growth or humanity to people, or indulges university-seminar illusions of citizens inspired by rational deliberation to join hands in harmonious agreement. It requires giving up dogmatic attachments to a first principle, be it Truth or Happiness or Human Rights or Nation or Market or the Sovereign People. It refuses to indulge worn-out put-downs of democracy as ‘government by orgy, almost by orgasm’ (as the Baltimore writer H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) said in his attack on the ‘primitive appetites and emotions’ of ‘the lower orders of men’ in his 1927 Notes on Democracy). It urges critics who today trash it as a synonym for spineless liberal muddle or Western arrogance to think again about the perils of uncontrolled power. Profoundly suspicious of power exercised arbitrarily, a champion of the weak and the wise against the strong and the foolish, the early warning principle of democracy applies equally to the criss-crossing worlds of everyday life and big business, local and national governments and international organisations. It’s constantly on watch for all forms of arbitrary power, wherever they take root. It warns that catastrophes usually result from group think, wilful blindness and other pathologies of unchecked power.38 It is therefore just as applicable to poorly designed and badly run mega-projects in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, multi-billion-dollar tar-sand extraction projects in Canada and the corporate extinction of forests in Brazil as it is to the secretive ‘modernisation’ of military forces or risky credit and banking sector ventures in London, Amsterdam, Shanghai and New York.

Gripped by a strong sense of reality as fluid and alterable, democracy is a fair-minded defender of openness, a friend of perplexity when in the company of those who exercise power with cocksure certainty. Nothing about human behaviour comes as a surprise: it sees that humans are capable of the best, and perpetrators of the worst. For that reason, democracy stands against every form of hubris. It considers concentrated power blind and therefore hazardous; it reckons that humans are not to be entrusted with unchecked rule over their fellows, or the biomes in which they dwell. It upends the old complaint that democracy resembles a ship of fools, or a rollicking circus run by monkeys. Democracy stands against stupidity and dissembling; it is opposed to silent arrogance and has no truck with bossing, bullying and violence. Its role as an early warning system makes it attuned to conundrums and alive to difficulties. It warns citizens and their representatives about the possible dangers of unknown consequences of consequences of consequences. It is serious about the calamities of our times, and it tracks the calamities to come.

When reimagined in terms of the precautionary principle, monitory democracy, the most power-sensitive form of self-government in the history of democracy, is clearly the best weapon so far invented for guarding against the ‘illusions of certainty’39 and for breaking up monopolies of unaccountable power, wherever and however they operate. Seeing democracy in this way doesn’t suppose, philosophically speaking, that it is a True and Right golden standard. Just the reverse: the ethic of monitory democracy is the precondition of breaking the grip of moral swagger. The ethic of democracy is aware of its own and others’ limits, aware that democracy is not ‘natural’ and aware that it has no meta-historical guarantees. It doesn’t indulge arrogant idiots. It refuses the humiliation and indignity of people. Power on stilts is not its thing.

Democracy doubts talk of good kings and queens, benevolent dictators and smart despots. In an age when millions of people sense they have lost control over how political decisions are taken, democracy questions the arrogant and takes the side of the powerless against those who abuse their power. It well understands that the defence of social and political pluralism can be pushed to the point where diversity destroys the conditions that make pluralism possible in the first place. It knows that the powerless can turn against power sharing. Populism shows that the ship of democracy can indeed be sunk by its mutinous sailors. With the practical help of a plethora of power-humbling mechanisms, democracy nevertheless supposes that a more equal world of wellbeing, openness and diversity is possible. It champions these ideals not because all women and men are ‘naturally’ equal, or because they are anointed by God or the deities or ‘modernisation’ or History. Instead, democracy shows us that no man or woman is perfect enough to rule unaccountably over their fellows, or the fragile lands and seas in which they dwell.

Is that not wisdom of global value?

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