Democracy is not coffee

Oct 11, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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One of the sobering insights painfully gathered after the “Third Wave of Democratisation” ushered in after 1989, is that democracy, unlike coffee, does not come in “instant.” This has led to a great deal of frustration in some quarters, as in Guyana, because of unfulfilled expectations. Part of the problem, had to do with those expectations, which arose out of a confused appreciation of exactly what constitutes “democracy”. Very few agreed on exactly what it was but they just knew they wanted it.

“Democracy” – the ideal of rule “by the people” – has been interpreted both procedurally as being a device for choosing a government (‘free and fair elections”) and substantively as describing an involved role for the general citizenry in the governance of their polity. This is not to say that the two views are completely disjunctured. Substantive democracy has content in reference to the roles of the actors in a democracy; they take a stand on what has value, while procedural democracy can be extended to decide which substantive norms are correct and just what their content is.

The partisans of procedural democracy insist that “democracy” simply legitimizes political authority – no more, no less – through the power of the ballot. As for substance/content, they point to the programmes that the various political parties campaign on, and maintain that the electoral process provides the necessary legitimacy for the concrete actions their government would take. They complain that the models of substantive “democracy” – arrived at by a rationalistic process – are utopian and lead to unending dissatisfaction in the citizenry as they struggle for a hitherto never achieved state. Not everything imagined for the perfect society can necessarily be achieved: nature, after all does set some boundaries for nurture. Hence, some of the present angst. The proceduralists insist that their criteria of free, fair and periodic elections at least have the virtue of being measurable and achievable. If their promises to the electorate are not kept, they can always be voted out.

A more trenchant criticism is deciding who selects the content of “substantive democracy” from the veritable cornucopia out there: liberal, developmental, constitutional, deliberative, direct, economic, social, Westminster, consociational, federalist, etc. etc. There is also the question of “how”. In Guyana, the PNC had traduced the notion of procedural democracy by rigging elections between 1968 to 1985. Fundamentally therefore, the PNC had never acquired the legitimacy to carry out any aspect of its substantive program. By introducing the radical ideology of “co-operative socialism” it dismissed most of the ideals of the liberal democracy that the British had grudgingly introduced in our modern era. The norms and values of liberal democracy were so much bourgeois piffle. The substantive content of the PNC regime was not only arrived at outside the realm of procedural democracy – and indeed outside the realm of politics, but was defined in opposition to much of liberal democracy.

The PNC insisted on the “paramountcy of the party” over the state; i.e. that the party in power took precedence over the organs of the state. The bureaucracy (the Civil service), the Disciplined Forces had to literally march to the beat of the PNC drum. The PNC’s flag was even flown over the apex court. Eighty percent of the economy was nationalised. The constitution was unilaterally rewritten to make the new dispensation “legal”. Grandiose expansion of individual rights and freedoms were made merely aspirational. Fear stalked the land. Substantive democracy by any measure was in tatters.
One would have thought that with the procedural aspect of democracy reinstated in the 1992 elections it would have been understood that there would be the need to make radical changes in the institutions of Government and the state – away from the totalitarian impositions of the PNC. The best approach we thought (and proposed) at the time would have been for the major parties to have worked out a “Democratic Pact” – as was done in several authoritarian-to-democratic transition countries – that delineated the substantive aspects of the order that they wished to construct. We, for instance, had proffered some changes in our paper, “For a New Political Culture” that spelled out what we thought were appropriate substantive democratic values.

In the absence of a Democratic Pact, if the opposition wanted a return of a substantive democracy was different from that implied in the PPP’s manifesto or actions, were not democratic means the way to go? It was not to be. They adopted a scorched earth policy towards the new government even before the latter had settled in: accusations of “ethnic cleansing” in the Civil service flew fast and furious even though the PPP halted the radical downsizing of that institution undertaken by the Hoyte PNC at the behest of the IMF. A “shoot to kill” advice was offered by Mr Hoyte to PNC supporters at Boeraserie EBE in a farming dispute. House lots distribution at Paradise on the East Coast became the occasion for even more inflammatory rhetoric from Hamilton Green, the new apostle of peace. And so we segued into the riots of January 12, 1988 and its horrific aftermath of unmitigated violence.

There is no question that there is much to be done to institute almost anyone’s conception of substantive democracy (including that of the PPP) in Guyana today but in the building of those concrete advances, it takes two to tango – the government and the opposition. The opposition has not been willing to tango since 1992 – choosing rather to tangle. The results have been inevitable: action and reaction are equal and opposite. As I have been pointing out repeatedly, “The PPP had to act more as a player in the anarchy of the Hobbessian inter-state system than in the putatively settled intra-state order. In this milieu, the PPP has evidently chosen to be “realists” thus augmenting their own tendencies on control and power.”
Those who are claiming that the lack of certain aspects of their version of substantive democracy makes Guyana into a “dictatorship” are not doing the opposition’s cause any good. They commit the logical fallacy of false dilemma in posing that there is no in-between. Let us work together to build on our gains – however small we may adjudge the latter. Democracy is not like coffee.

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