India’s tryst with democracy fundamentally challenged the presumption that economic growth is the core requirement of democracy–that free and fair elections are practical only when a majority of citizens owns or enjoys commodities such as cars, refrigerators and radios. But is it a ‘monitory’ democracy, an idea that challenges earlier, election-centred understandings of democracy? John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Sydney and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, explores this question in his book The Shortest History of Democracy. An excerpt:
Developments in Senegal, South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere showed that in the decades after 1945, democracy was no longer a white-skinned, Western affair – as it had been, say, when Lord James Bryce wrote his classic Modern Democracies in 1921, or when a Natal-based historian of democracy spoke of election-based, parliamentary government as ‘largely the outcome of the character and historical development of Englishmen’, unsuited to ‘states where the population does not display the same talents for, or interest in, the management of public affairs’.
Yes, broadly speaking, the many different species of democracies that sprang up on every continent still belonged to the genus called democracy, not just in name, but also in spirit. Political leaders and citizens who thought of themselves as democrats were still bound by respect for non-violent lawful government based on the consent of ‘the people’. They were suspicious of concentrated and unaccountable power; they were committed to the principle that all citizens are equals. But the indigenisation of democracy in environments radically different to the earlier parent electoral democracies of Western Europe, Spanish America and the United States was nevertheless remarkable.
India, soon to become known as the world’s ‘largest democracy’, was no liberal democracy, if that means American-style representative government founded on a large middle class, a free market economy and the spirit of possessive individualism. India’s tryst with democracy fundamentally challenged the presumption that economic growth is the core requirement of democracy – that free and fair elections are practical only when a majority of citizens owns or enjoys commodities such as cars, refrigerators and radios. Weighed down by destitution of heart-breaking proportions, millions of poor and illiterate people rejected the prejudice that a country must first be wealthy before it can be democratic. They decided instead that they could become materially stronger through democracy. Not only that: the Indian pathway to democracy bearded the woolly predictions of experts who said that French-style secularism, the compulsory retreat of religious myths into the private sphere, was necessary before hard-nosed democracy could happen. The Indian polity contains every major faith known to humanity and is home to hundreds of languages. Social complexity on this scale led Indian democrats to a new justification of democracy. It was no longer a means to protect a homogeneous society of equal individuals. It came to be regarded as the fairest way to enable people of different backgrounds and divergent group identities to live together harmoniously, as equals, without civil war.
India showed that the spirit and substance of democracy were alive globally in local sentiments, languages, institutions and shifting and contested forms of power. After 1945, democracy grew more grounded. But since then something else of historic importance – a transformation less obvious – has been happening: the growth of monitory democracy, a new form of self-government distinctively different from the assembly-based and electoral democracies of the past.
What is monitory democracy? Why the adjective ‘monitory’ – which first entered English in the mid-fifteenth century (from the Latin monere, to warn, to advise) to refer to issuing a warning of an impending danger, or an admonition to check the content or quality of something, or to refrain from a foolish or offensive action? It is a form of democracy defined by the rapid growth of many new kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms: ‘guide dog’, ‘watchdog’ and ‘barking dog’ institutions. Monitory democracy includes practices such as election monitoring, workplace codetermination and participatory budgeting. It also includes bodies such as future generations commissions, bridge doctors, truth and reconciliation forums and coral reef monitoring networks. These monitory or public accountability mechanisms are newcomers in the history of democracy. They spring up in many different contexts and are not simply ‘Western’ inventions.
The rights of workers to elect representatives to their company’s governing boards in workplace codetermination schemes (Mitbestimmung) first happened in war-torn Germany in the 1940s. Participatory budgeting, in which citizens decide how to spend part of a public budget, is a Brazilian invention. Future generations commissions with statutory power to champion the rights of unborn citizens were born in Wales. Bridge doctors – volunteer teams of university engineering students checking the safety of city bridges – are a South Korean specialty. South Africa made truth and reconciliation forums famous. Coral-reef monitoring networks are a product of global cooperation.
These monitory bodies have taken root everywhere within the local and national fields of government and civil society, as well as in cross-border settings. As a result, the whole architecture of representative government is changing. The grip of elections, political parties and parliaments in shaping citizens’ lives and representing their interests is weakening. If electoral democracy rested on the principle of ‘one person, one vote, one representative’, the guiding ethic of monitory democracy is ‘one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives’. Under these new conditions, democracy means much more than elections. Within and outside states, independent and toothy watchdog bodies have begun to reshape the landscapes of power. By keeping corporations and elected governments, parties and politicians permanently on their toes, the new watchtowers question abuses of power, force governments and businesses to modify their agendas – and sometimes smother them in public disgrace.
Monitory democracy is the most complex and vibrant form of democracy yet. In the name of ‘people’, ‘the public’, ‘public accountability’ or ‘citizens’ – the terms are normally used interchangeably – power-challenging and powertempering institutions are springing up all over the place. Corruption scandals and public outcries against monkey business are becoming the new normal. This does not mean that elections, political parties, legislatures and public assemblies are disappearing or declining in importance, but they are most definitely losing their pole position as hosts and drivers of politics. Democracy is no longer simply a way of handling and taming the power of elected governments, and no longer confined to territorial states. Gone are the days when democracy could be described, and in the next breath attacked, as an abuse of statistics, as ‘government by the unrestricted will of the majority’; or, in the oft-cited words of the Moravian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), the ‘institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’.
The age of representative democracy is behind us. Whether we are talking about local, national or supranational government, or the world of non-governmental organisations and networks, those who wield power are now routinely subject to public monitoring and restraint by an assortment of extra-parliamentary bodies.
The advent of monitory democracy challenges earlier, election-centred understandings of democracy. It spells trouble as well for the commonsense view that democracy is essentially a method of controlling governments and taming state power. What’s remarkable is how the spirit and power scrutinising mechanisms of monitory democracy spread ‘downwards’, into areas of social life previously untouched by democrats. Assembly democracies typically regarded power dynamics within households, and the treatment of women and slaves, as private matters. We saw how the age of representative democracy witnessed resistance to slavery and to the exclusion of women, workers and the colonised from elections. Elected governments intervened in such areas as healthcare and education. One thing that’s different about the age of monitory democracy is that it enables, as never before, organised public scrutiny and refusal of arbitrary power in the whole of social life. Matters such as workplace bullying, sexual harassment, racial and gender discrimination, animal abuse, homelessness, disability and data harvesting all become central themes of democratic politics.
Parties, parliaments and elected governments are typically reactive to such issues. Monitory bodies and networks therefore become the true drivers of politics. They help deepen democracy. Its spirit of equality and openness spreads through social life and across state borders. For the first time in the history of democracy, not surprisingly, ‘civil society’ is a phrase routinely used by democrats at every point on our planet. Monitory democracy springs up wherever there are abuses of power. Uncontested rule in areas ranging from family life to employment is checked – if and when it’s checked – not just by elected representatives in government, but also by a host of new institutions that remind millions of citizens of a simple but perennial truth: democracy requires colossal transformations of people’s daily lives. Their habits of heart and everyday routines must grow more allergic to abuse of power. To stand against bossing and bullying, people need to nurture the spirit of democracy within, as well as to spread it and keep it alive in others. Citizens must be confident that they themselves are the source of power of the institutions that govern their lives; that government and other bodies indeed rest upon the consent of the governed; and that when they withdraw their consent from these institutions and demand alternatives, things can change for the better, even if only in the smallest of ways.
(Excerpted with permission from The Shortest History Of Democracy, published by Picador India.)