For Democracy in Guyana

Aug 03, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

Guyanese have had a troubled relationship with “democratic” governance. Neither the Dutch founders of Guyana nor their British successors practiced democracy.

The PNC wasted its opportunity after Guyana was given “independence” under its stewardship and they proceeded to institute a dictatorship from 1968 to 1992 when they were ousted democratically from office by the PPP.

Everyone assumed that Guyana was embarked on its democratic transition along with so many other countries of that era in what one scholar labelled a “third wave” of democracy. There has been, however, much disappointment with the PPP’s record in Guyana since 1992.

At the time this writer cautioned: “the history of the previous waves should temper our euphoria somewhat. The transition process is not automatic – there are no irresistible democratic forces marching through history.

At best, there may be a demonstrator effect. The process may also be reversible: democracy has proven to be a most delicate plant to nurture, especially in the inhospitable soil of authoritarian structures.

The struggle of the people and the vision of their leaders have always defined the trajectory and range of the democratic transition. Guyana will be no exception.”

But our politicians have always claimed that “democracy” was their goal and today, we hear about “revolutionary democracy” and “democratic humanism” etc. What we don’t hear about is “indigenous democracy” yet that is what we should be discussing and debating.

If there is one thing our history should have taught us, it should be about the futility of adopting models from abroad without adapting them to the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of our local situation. If this were true of “socialist” models they are just as true for “democratic” ones.

There are undoubtedly countless issues that the entrenchment of democracy will have to confront; but the most important one will be to finally deal with the implications of the racial divisions in our society.

Now, we Guyanese are not unique; all societies have divisions. One universal division is economic or class, while other divisions are based on race, culture/ethnicity, religion, and settlement patterns (urban-rural) and these have all proven very resilient.

The nature of the political competition and the political culture depend to a large extent on which of the cleavages emerge as the most salient, and this outcome, in turn, hinges on various societal contingencies: structural/economic, historical, political and psychological.

Race/ethnicity, in Guyana, transcends class as the dominant cleavage and suffuses politics as well as most other social interactions. It defines the local political culture. Yet open discussion of “race” is taboo.

This has not only put a terrible strain on honest political discourse but has inhibited the crafting of a lasting solution to the political impasse.

It has certainly hindered democracy from taking root in Guyana. If the diagnosis is flawed, the prescription has to be of very limited utility, if at all.

The problem that societal divisions pose to democracy is that when the latter meaning – “rule by the people” – is sought to be implemented, two questions arise. Firstly, who are “the people”? In Guyana, this is now a non-issue – it’s everyone over eighteen.

The second question – how are “the people” to rule? – has proven intractable. The classical Greeks tried “direct democracy”, where, due to their small numbers, every citizen could vote on every issue in one gathering.

If more than fifty percent of the citizens voted for one particular position, then that became the position of “the people”. Majoritarian politics was born.

The direct method of voting had to be abandoned in favour of “representative democracy” due to the larger number of citizens and their wider geographical dispersion in the countries that resuscitated the democratic form of governance twenty-two centuries later.

The representatives were supposed to “re-present” the opinions of those who elected them. However, even though the circumstances were different, the majoritarian principle was retained.
The fly in the ointment in all of this, of course, was why would the minority go along with the majority?

The answer by the theorists was that the minority knew that it always had the opportunity of becoming the majority on any given issue – it just had to persuade enough folks that their stand on that issue was the right one. Every dog could have his day.

This answer, however, only addressed an ideal situation, where many citizens shifted their votes depending on the particular party’s stand on particular issues.

From the inception it was recognized that there could be what one theorist called “factions” i.e. groups of citizens who would always vote as a bloc because of having entrenched common interests.
This acted to create or reinforce the divisions in the society.

Nowadays, in one sense, we can refer to societies with entrenched “factions” as “plural societies”.
If one such faction forms a majority, then this poses a grave danger to democracy in that society – a “tyranny of the majority”.

In this situation, a minority would never have the opportunity of becoming the majority and would have to go along with that majority ad infinitum.

Thus, in plural societies with one ethnic group forming an entrenched majority, “majoritarianism”, a procedure for implementing democracy, becomes an obstacle to the substance of democracy – that all citizens feel their opinions will be taken into account when decisions that affect them are made.

This is a potential reality in Guyana today, where Indians constitute a plurality of the population and do vote as a bloc, and the Africans are just slightly lesser and also vote as a bloc.

THE ETHNIC SECURITY DILEMMAS

This reality forms one of the dilemmas of democracy in Guyana under the present Westminster majoritarian rules: how do we control factions to preclude a real or perceived tyranny of the majority?

It does not matter that the majority may be wise or just, the potential permanent exclusion of the minority from executive office challenges claims of “democracy”.

This is the African Ethnic Security Dilemma in Guyana: that if they play by the rules of Democracy, they will be excluded from the Executive.

Democracy also presumes that the State will be managed for all the people of the country. Those who manage the affairs of the State have to ensure that they are servants of the people. Hegel called them the “universal class”.

If the staffing of the institutions of the state are in the control of any one “faction” then this presents another dilemma for democracy.

Typically, the faction that is the majority also controls the state and in fact this is what produces the actual “tyranny of the majority”.

However, if there are circumstances in which a minority has control of the state institutions, especially if these include the Armed Forces and the Civil Service and the Judiciary, then the will of the majority can also be denied, since the minority would calculate that they have the wherewithal to challenge the majority violently.

This is the situation in Guyana where the minority African section has a vast overrepresentation in the key state institutions mentioned, especially in the Armed Forces, and has used this incumbency to neutralise the numerical advantage of the Indians.

This creates an Ethnic Security Dilemma for Indians since, even though they are a majority under the Westminster system and can form the Executive after “free-and-fair” elections, that Executive cannot guarantee stability, especially for their supporters.

The Executive, under the principle of “anticipated reactions”, has to always take into consideration, before taking any policy decision, as to whether the opposition will initiate violence, under cover of their control of State institutions.

It is the contention of this piece that the politicians and other actors in the public arena will have to honestly and publicly confront the ethnic/racial orientation of Guyanese political culture and structures, and attempt to deal affirmatively with the inevitable consequences.

Some theorists, such as J.S. Mill concluded that the free institutions of democracy were ‘next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities’.

Others, such as the Marxists of Guyana defined ‘classes” as the real factions and proposed a dictatorship of the working classes.

Still others, such as the early American political theorist James Madison, held that factions will always be with us and that the best we could do is to control their deleterious effects.

Modern theory and practice have demonstrated that while always difficult, with appropriate arrangements and institutions and perseverance, democracy is possible in plural societies.

This is our premise: that while institutions do not ever encompass the totality of individuals’ activities around a value, at least they delineate the ideal that individuals should strive towards. This is where policy makers can begin.

Unless a new political culture more favourable to the nourishing and support of democracy is forged, we will remain mired in a Sisyphean paradigm: doomed to struggle strenuously, perhaps even heroically, but ultimately futilely for the goal we all claim to share in common: a Guyana in which all groups can have their just share of power.