Confidence is even more essential to democratic policies than to economies, and nothing destroys a people’s confidence in its way of life more than the impression that democratically elected officials are incompetent. To export representative democracy without knowing how to handle its fine, contradictory structure, is to reproduce on a planetary scale the self-destructive mechanisms of representative systems of the 20th century without being able to handle them afterwards, writes Andrea Bianchi.
The use of democratic assessments during multilateral peacekeeping procedures, together with the expansion of bilateral relations, delivers plenty of ambiguities.
What is a new democracy in the framework of frozen conflicts? Relatively recently, it has become clear that the practice of frozen conflicts delivers a new burden to US taxpayers to sustain the expansion of the military budget—endless wars, without a clear aim, multiplied in many scenarios.
Electoral practice is not enough
In 1975, the Trilateral Commission Report “The Crisis of Democracy” relayed the necessary but limited tightening of representative democracy in advanced countries as a useful instrument for containing social contrasts and the fiscal crisis of the state. At the time, this curtailing of political representation in the West was aimed essentially at preventing the triggering of unsustainable inflationary spirals of wage-chasing among competing classes.
But today, democracy is not just a form of political representation, as it may appear in Europe or the US. Fifty years ago, indeed, US President Carter’s focus on respect for human, even natural rights, limited at times by reason of state, tended to overlap with and confuse respect for these same rights, with political democracy conceived as pure electoral practice.
The establishment of Western-style democracy in third countries does not automatically lead to a simultaneous improvement in relations with the rest of the world and useful internal stability. Western democracy entails a very complex set of political behaviours, which does not amount to the sum of all its parts, and isn’t completely reducible to a finite sequence of explicit, discrete and universally valid rules.
The electoral procedure is carried out by identifying—in balance between Western mass media and governments—a narrow and not-too-risky local political class, often made up of old second-raters from previous regimes who are ideologically adaptable. This means that the parties entering elections reproduce, with a kind of neophyte enthusiasm, Western social democratic and liberal-conservative traditions. At the same time, there is a narrowed political area for the new parties, together with a rather artificial and export-led tendency to expand the intermediate bodies of local civil society, even into de facto one-party structures.
How instability is generated
It is easy to deduce that a lack of clarity in the West on the democratic procedures to be established for third countries, such as we have today, produces serious geopolitical instability. The results of the application of democratic criteria have often proven ambiguous, showing a series of structural rigidities, which include rigged elections, low-quality elected officials who end up looking for help abroad, together with the tribalization of society.
Western democratic ideologies arise from very particular histories and have no interface with the history of ‘third world’ countries, even if these are their former colonies or mandates. The ‘third world political party’ is, in general terms, a technique of court management by its chiefs and a way of controlling competitor-challengers when political resources are a monopoly commodity. Society does not, therefore, produce sufficient surplus to maintain democracy, in the sense that it is the free market of voting.
Things only work if the ideological cover of the third regime is, in Western jargon, liberal; this may imply a policy of very high domestic inflation, which pays off the debts of the ruling class which has taken over the state. However, when it comes to a socialist country, it implies that one aims to sell the country’s raw materials and strategic location at high prices.
The myth of civil society
Spontaneous balance of power during real economic growth makes sense where there is a stable, structured civil society. Consumer society makes sense (if at all) where there are specific, strong patterns, which have not survived now, even in the West. It becomes improbable and grotesque in societies that still fall between the horde and the temporary mass, to use Elias Canetti’s definitions in his Crowds and power. The artificial budding of diffuse powers and counter-powers, together with the imitation of consumer-related status hierarchies, should be avoided.
Monetary stability in the various areas is another option. Recourse to inflationary practices by the new third-party ruling classes is an ongoing danger, which the IMF’s remote control is not capable of defusing or does so too late. The instability generated by third-party inflation often leads to public debt refinancing mechanisms, which drains significant resources in international markets and makes developed countries absorb inflation. Now that third countries are almost acquainted with a second-tier technology industry, the inflationary blowback of their debt can create very serious problems for G7 countries as well. The mechanism triggered by the financing of Mexico after the 1973 oil crisis should provide us with a lesson for the future.
Confidence is even more essential to democratic policies than to economies, and nothing destroys a people’s confidence in its way of life more than the impression that democratically elected officials are incompetent. To export representative democracy without knowing how to handle its fine, contradictory structure, is to reproduce on a planetary scale the self-destructive mechanisms of representative systems of the 20th century without being able to handle them afterwards.
