Democracy and Dissent
I enjoyed this article by David Aaronovitch in The Times which is a thoughtful piece about the nature of democracy and the importance of dissent because in a modern, liberal and tolerant society - an effective opposition is the means by which political rulers are prevented from abusing their executive powers.
What looks like a democracy but smells bad?
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
Answer: a country that gives people a vote but deals ruthlessly with dissent and blames foreigners for its problems
I don’t think anything has depressed me more in the past month than the attitude taken by many perfectly sensible Britons towards the rigged referendum in the Crimea. I would summarise their view as being: “Crimeans had a vote, majority wanted to go to Russia — so live with it because isn’t that what democracy is about?”
No, it isn’t. There was no proper supervision, no proper campaign was possible, there was no proper alternative on the ballot paper, the vote was held in an atmosphere of armed intimidation and there were some striking turnout irregularities. But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?
This is not a column about Ukraine and Crimea, but about a tendency — a big and important tendency — that the Crimean referendum illustrates. It’s not about new Hitlers, revived Stalins or even warmed-up Francos. It is rather about what I would call pseudocracy — a political system that has the formal appearance of a democracy, but in which the substance of democracy is gradually eroded until the vote itself is almost the only thing left.
The world’s most powerful pseudocracy is the one that annexed the Crimea. By the time his current term of office expires in 2018, Mr Putin will have been in power, in effect, for just under 20 years. In that time he has become the pseudocrat of all the Russias.
Mr Putin was re-elected in March 2012 with 63 per cent of the vote. And there isn’t much doubt that this was what most Russian voters wanted. But before and during that campaign, according to monitoring by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 25 or more pro-Putin documentaries were aired by state and private broadcasters, while the campaigns of other candidates were pretty much ignored. Anti-corruption demonstrations were either unreported or else the subject of hostile coverage.
Mr Putin’s corralling of the mass media is a crucial element in his success. Last December, with no notice, he announced the dismantling of the national news agency, Novosti, its merger with state radio and the appointment over both of a new boss, a notorious anti-West and anti-gay TV anchor, Dmitri Kiselyov. A few weeks later the independent satellite TV station Dozhd was dropped from the providers’ service packages, hit with a tax investigation and given minimal notice of eviction from its rented offices. Meanwhile, a law passed last summer reintroduced the offence of criminal defamation, and attached huge penalties for those found guilty.
There isn’t much doubt about who would bring actions for criminal defamation, nor very much that a judiciary that is already highly politicised and staffed by Putinites would assist the criminalisation process. There are myriad other ways in which human rights and anti-corruption campaigners can be and are being harassed. And all without need for purges, pogroms, mass imprisonment or a bullet in the nape of the neck.
Of course there is a problem with all this. The pseudocracy, shorn of the checks and balances of the true democracy, tends to corruption and stasis. If too many citizens come to believe this too strongly, a president can end up being Yanukovyched.
To be popular with enough of its people a pseudocracy needs other selling points. And the biggest one, in an age of globalisation and uncertainty, seems to be social conservatism and its corollary, blaming the West for seeking to undermine national values.
At the end of last year, in a televised speech lasting more than an hour (how do you like that idea, David Cameron?), Mr Putin revealed himself as a born-again patriarch. The basis of Russia’s strength was the traditional family and what was undermining it was “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile”, ie, gays. This, he said, was a Western idea and entailed “destruction of traditional values from above”, which was “inherently anti-democratic” because it is based on an “abstract notion and runs counter to the will of the majority of people”.
It is worth noting here that this regressive proposition is usually accompanied by another malign symptom — the claim that “they” are conspiring in some way to do “us” down. So that agitation or social or political change is almost always ascribed to (usually covert) foreign action or conspiracy. Pseudocracies are great conspiracy peddlers.
If Russia is the top emerging pseudocracy, Iran offers the template. There the system is mature. If the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, decides that it is time for a reformist president, then he allows a nice restrained one to appear on the ballot and to win. Last June it was the cleric Hassan Rouhani, who was handsomely elected and then made all kinds of noises about liberalising and permitting dissent.
This, and a more emollient position towards the atomic question, has edged Iran close to the lifting of Western sanctions. But there has been no let up in censorship or the persecution of dissidents. Earlier this year an Arab poet was hanged in prison, newspapers have been closed down for tiny infractions of Islamic law and despite Mr Rouhani himself opening a Twitter account, social media in Iran remains closed down. The system itself is complete.
One wonders whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, consciously looks at Russia and Iran and thinks: “Way to go!” In power for 12 years now, Mr Erdogan did not inherit a full liberal democracy. Indeed what was remarkable about his early years was the way his moderate Islamist party, aspiring to EU membership, moved in the direction of liberal democracy.
But for two or more years now this process has been in reverse. Mr Erdogan’s way of dealing with criticism and dissent, as with accusations of corruption and misuse of power, has been to adopt an ever more confrontational and authoritarian stance. He too has appealed to the majority on the grounds of its social conservatism, has imagined foreign conspiracies and has interfered with the judiciary.
Famously, in the past few weeks, he has “banned” Twitter and YouTube, telling crowds at his rallies that social media and foreigners would see “the power of the Turkish Republic”. The local election results brought a victory for his AKP party.
But pseudocracies do, as Marx wrote, give birth to their own gravediggers. Literally. The combination of conservatism and recourse to authority holds little appeal for the educated young people whom any modern society needs to succeed. And so the attempts to cut off the young from the world outside, though they will be intensified and other countries will join in, must I think fail. À bas les pseudocrats!
Answer: a country that gives people a vote but deals ruthlessly with dissent and blames foreigners for its problems
I don’t think anything has depressed me more in the past month than the attitude taken by many perfectly sensible Britons towards the rigged referendum in the Crimea. I would summarise their view as being: “Crimeans had a vote, majority wanted to go to Russia — so live with it because isn’t that what democracy is about?”
No, it isn’t. There was no proper supervision, no proper campaign was possible, there was no proper alternative on the ballot paper, the vote was held in an atmosphere of armed intimidation and there were some striking turnout irregularities. But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?
This is not a column about Ukraine and Crimea, but about a tendency — a big and important tendency — that the Crimean referendum illustrates. It’s not about new Hitlers, revived Stalins or even warmed-up Francos. It is rather about what I would call pseudocracy — a political system that has the formal appearance of a democracy, but in which the substance of democracy is gradually eroded until the vote itself is almost the only thing left.
The world’s most powerful pseudocracy is the one that annexed the Crimea. By the time his current term of office expires in 2018, Mr Putin will have been in power, in effect, for just under 20 years. In that time he has become the pseudocrat of all the Russias.
Mr Putin was re-elected in March 2012 with 63 per cent of the vote. And there isn’t much doubt that this was what most Russian voters wanted. But before and during that campaign, according to monitoring by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 25 or more pro-Putin documentaries were aired by state and private broadcasters, while the campaigns of other candidates were pretty much ignored. Anti-corruption demonstrations were either unreported or else the subject of hostile coverage.
Mr Putin’s corralling of the mass media is a crucial element in his success. Last December, with no notice, he announced the dismantling of the national news agency, Novosti, its merger with state radio and the appointment over both of a new boss, a notorious anti-West and anti-gay TV anchor, Dmitri Kiselyov. A few weeks later the independent satellite TV station Dozhd was dropped from the providers’ service packages, hit with a tax investigation and given minimal notice of eviction from its rented offices. Meanwhile, a law passed last summer reintroduced the offence of criminal defamation, and attached huge penalties for those found guilty.
There isn’t much doubt about who would bring actions for criminal defamation, nor very much that a judiciary that is already highly politicised and staffed by Putinites would assist the criminalisation process. There are myriad other ways in which human rights and anti-corruption campaigners can be and are being harassed. And all without need for purges, pogroms, mass imprisonment or a bullet in the nape of the neck.
Of course there is a problem with all this. The pseudocracy, shorn of the checks and balances of the true democracy, tends to corruption and stasis. If too many citizens come to believe this too strongly, a president can end up being Yanukovyched.
To be popular with enough of its people a pseudocracy needs other selling points. And the biggest one, in an age of globalisation and uncertainty, seems to be social conservatism and its corollary, blaming the West for seeking to undermine national values.
At the end of last year, in a televised speech lasting more than an hour (how do you like that idea, David Cameron?), Mr Putin revealed himself as a born-again patriarch. The basis of Russia’s strength was the traditional family and what was undermining it was “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile”, ie, gays. This, he said, was a Western idea and entailed “destruction of traditional values from above”, which was “inherently anti-democratic” because it is based on an “abstract notion and runs counter to the will of the majority of people”.
It is worth noting here that this regressive proposition is usually accompanied by another malign symptom — the claim that “they” are conspiring in some way to do “us” down. So that agitation or social or political change is almost always ascribed to (usually covert) foreign action or conspiracy. Pseudocracies are great conspiracy peddlers.
If Russia is the top emerging pseudocracy, Iran offers the template. There the system is mature. If the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, decides that it is time for a reformist president, then he allows a nice restrained one to appear on the ballot and to win. Last June it was the cleric Hassan Rouhani, who was handsomely elected and then made all kinds of noises about liberalising and permitting dissent.
This, and a more emollient position towards the atomic question, has edged Iran close to the lifting of Western sanctions. But there has been no let up in censorship or the persecution of dissidents. Earlier this year an Arab poet was hanged in prison, newspapers have been closed down for tiny infractions of Islamic law and despite Mr Rouhani himself opening a Twitter account, social media in Iran remains closed down. The system itself is complete.
One wonders whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, consciously looks at Russia and Iran and thinks: “Way to go!” In power for 12 years now, Mr Erdogan did not inherit a full liberal democracy. Indeed what was remarkable about his early years was the way his moderate Islamist party, aspiring to EU membership, moved in the direction of liberal democracy.
But for two or more years now this process has been in reverse. Mr Erdogan’s way of dealing with criticism and dissent, as with accusations of corruption and misuse of power, has been to adopt an ever more confrontational and authoritarian stance. He too has appealed to the majority on the grounds of its social conservatism, has imagined foreign conspiracies and has interfered with the judiciary.
Famously, in the past few weeks, he has “banned” Twitter and YouTube, telling crowds at his rallies that social media and foreigners would see “the power of the Turkish Republic”. The local election results brought a victory for his AKP party.
But pseudocracies do, as Marx wrote, give birth to their own gravediggers. Literally. The combination of conservatism and recourse to authority holds little appeal for the educated young people whom any modern society needs to succeed. And so the attempts to cut off the young from the world outside, though they will be intensified and other countries will join in, must I think fail. À bas les pseudocrats!
