Culture and democracy -- more

There’s been a bit of a break, but I’ve not forgotten about the culture-and-democracy question.

And I’ve been spurred on to pursue this thread, despite the brain-ache it gives me, by several interesting pieces on governance/democracy in SEA lately – among them, a couple of fairly pessimistic ones by Joshua Kurlantzick, a much more upbeat one by Michael Vatikiotis, and a kind of in-the-middle one by Ernie Bower.

So here’s the next little bit:

The previous post made the point that culture affects the way we "do" democracy. In many cases, it was democracy as modelled in the West that was imported into newly democratizing countries – hence the feeling (expressed by the student quoted in the last post) that this imported “jacket”, though better than nothing, didn’t quite fit.

Where does that leave us?

Well, certainly not with the conclusion that democracy and Southeast Asian cultures don’t belong together. After all, many communities in SEA (and in the rest of Asia) have enthusiastically embraced democracy. And anyway, there are all kinds of participatory or consultative traditions in all kinds of cultures. They may not call themselves democracy, but they have a similar aim: making sure the larger group shares in the task of governing. (It’s interesting to speculate on what different kinds of participatory or consultative traditions might have taken root in different parts of the world if the slow consolidation of democracy in the West hadn’t coincided with the slow expansion of colonialism... But that’s a cat that is well out of the bag.)

Arguably, unless we are ancient Greeks, democracy is a borrowed jacket for all of us. What we practise today is nothing like the process the word first described.

But the older democracies had many centuries to tailor something that felt comfortable. By the time they’d done that, they’d amassed, as a group, quite considerable power.

Their version of democracy certainly seemed (to many, at least) genuinely appealing. People generally do want more say in how to organize their lives. But it also came inextricably packaged up with power. Passively, power always makes things look just that little bit more attractive. And actively, once the constraints of the Cold War were removed, democratic power was freed up to incentivize democratization by adding conditions to aid, investment, loans, and so on, and to make “freedom and democracy” an important global narrative.

So, we have to wonder not only about the relationship between culture and democracy, but also about where power fits into it all. How much choice do newer democracies get over the “jacket” they borrow? And how much choice do they get in the way they can tailor it?

This rather one-way dynamic has probably not worked out well for the older democracies either. Many of these older democracies are facing pretty tough times at the moment. Could they not benefit, too, from some cross-cultural input on how to optimize democracy?

Fred Dallmayr writes: “The only proper way to mobilise democracy cross-culturally is through reciprocal engagement and recognition”. It’s a two-way thing, based on a sense of equality and mutual respect. Rather than “the unilateral export of western democracy to the rest of the world”, what is needed, he says, is “the creation of a space or arena where learning about democracy can happen”. In such an arena, “Western advocates of democracy may discover that some of their beliefs have congealed into ideologies, perhaps even dogmas – requiring renewed self-scrutiny… On the other hand, societies or cultures which are novices to modern democracy may … discover in their own traditions resources for the development of their own kind of modernity and their own version of modern democracy.”

Learning from each other, cross-culturally, about what makes for better participation, consultation, and governance – so that we all end up with a better product – sounds like a good idea to me.

To be continued… Endlessly, probably…