What is democracy?

Recent events in South Africa have resurrected the age-old question of democracy. What is it? What does it mean to say, ever so glibly, that democracy is ‘the rule of the people’?

Putting it that way does not necessarily mean ‘the rule of the people by the people’, but could easily reflect a docile kind of acceptance that the people have to be ruled, although by whom, in what manner, is less clear.

When Hardt and Negri speak of democracy in Multitude (2005), they understand it as a form of social and political organisation which can only, justifiably, ‘arise from below’, as ‘the rule of everyone by everyone’. That everything is not well with democracy in this sense across the globe today, is apparent from their discussion of a number of ‘global demands for democracy’ in the contemporary world, which have been steadily increasing in strength, and which are attempts to communicate a variety of grievances pertaining to serious encroachments on the principles of democracy as understood by them.

Keeping in mind that it is much more difficult, given the size of populations today, to devise ways of instantiating democracy as ‘the rule of everyone by everyone’ -– ‘direct’ democracy, as it existed in limited form in ancient Greece, is hardly possible in the complex contemporary world -– it is nevertheless striking that the three principal elements listed by them, which recur constantly across the board in all the global demands in question as preconditions for democracy, include ‘… the critique of existing forms of representation’, (the other two being the ‘protest against poverty, and the opposition to war’).

The challenge for democracy would therefore be to devise effective and just forms of representational governance with the ‘participation’ of the people (who would thus be both the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled’). The worldwide protests against the global political and economic system can therefore be understood as a sign that ‘democracy cannot be made or imposed from above’. There’s the rub -– everywhere, it seems, people are aware, to a greater or a lesser degree, that the existing modes of ‘representation’ (local, regional, national, international) are inadequate because of the myriad ways in which the ‘representatives’ can and often do abuse their positions, usually through the protean forms of corruption (mostly of a venal kind). In South Africa we have been witness to this on many occasions and there seems to be no abating of the tide of venality in both the public and private sectors -– in a culture where money is regarded as the supreme good, someone who is not ‘purchasable’ is the exception.

But apart from the corruptibility of representatives in the ‘democratic’ order, the whole question of representation and representativity -– that is, the extent to which ‘representatives’ truly ‘represent’ their constituencies -– is a major issue for Hardt and Negri in Multitude (2005) as well as in their earlier book, Empire (2001), and one can understand why. How many governments truly keep in contact with ‘the people’ once they have been elected, instead of which ‘representatives’ abuse their positions of power to a greater or lesser extent, precisely by ‘imposing democracy from above’ (which vitiates the inalienable principle of democracy, which has to be interpreted and applied over and over again, namely that it is the ‘rule of everyone by everyone’). Small wonder Jacques Derrida has observed that ‘democracy is always to come’ – what he implies, is that no extant embodiment of the idea of democracy is ever perfect, or beyond improvement.

Although one could write a book-length study on the ways that ‘democracy’ is implemented in various countries at a constitutional as well as at the concrete level of daily political practice, it seems to me clear that South Africa has a long way to go before the gap between its democratic constitution and concrete political practices is significantly narrowed. To mention but one thing -– whatever one may have thought of the Thabo Mbeki presidency, the way that the ruling ANC has removed Mbeki from office does not strike me as being ‘democratic’, except perhaps within the narrow circle of the top structures in the party itself. Not even Parliament was given a chance to vote in a leadership contest between himself and someone else (like Kgalema Motlanthe), let alone the population at large. Instead, he was ‘recalled’ by the party as if he was still its president and not that of the country as a whole. And the possibility that this was done on the basis (or with the excuse) of Judge Nicholson’s remarks concerning Mbeki’s involvement in the continued prosecution/persecution of Jacob Zuma by the NPA, makes it even less ‘democratic’. (I believe that the true reason lies elsewhere, namely in the economic policies pursued by government under Mbeki’s leadership, which the ANC wishes to change by all means; something which I, for one, would welcome -– but that is another story.)

The second thing I want to consider briefly is the question of the much discussed and invoked ‘unity’ within the governing party. And the more signs appear that it would only be an accurate reflection of deep ideological divisions within the ANC if it would finally split in two, the more vociferously do ‘top’ members of the party deny that this is the case, or declare that such a breakaway party would be still-born. Methinks the lady protesteth too much. I believe the truth is that the ANC is petrified that there may just be a schism, which would weaken its monolithic hold on power over the last fourteen years significantly.

Ben Cashdan recently wrote a wonderful piece on TL about the need for ‘disunity’, which would be a sign of South Africa maturing as a democracy. I could not agree more. The test of democracy as ‘the rule of everyone by everyone’ is to find ways in which all the diverse political beliefs in a complex, multicultural nation such as this one may be accommodated in decision-making legislative institutions. One way of achieving this is by means of multi-party democratic practice, something that has not been attained in South Africa. A split in the ruling party would bring us closer to that, because -– if such a party would form a significant new opposition, for example -– it could usher in the need for a coalition government. And this would mean facing up to the need for alliances, for compromise, for give and take; the monolithic, oligarchic hold that the ANC has had on power since 1994 would be broken.

Is this possible? Are there people in the ANC who are courageous enough to break with the party, in the process acknowledging that, since 1994, their ideological opponents have not been as easy to identify as during the apartheid years -– they can now, surprisingly, be within the same party. And given how deep these ideological differences appear to run (judging by what the public has seen of them), I doubt whether the ‘democratic mechanisms’ exist within the party to address the ‘grievances’ concerned on the part of those who feel disaffected.

During 1989, when I was a member of a group of academics and other professionals who travelled to Windhoek, Harare and Lusaka to meet with, among others, SWAPO and the ANC (in an effort to hasten the downfall of apartheid), we had a very revealing experience regarding democracy in Africa. On one occasion we were addressed by Didimus Mutasa, then Speaker in the Zimbabwean parliament, who (in the course of the discussion) told us that we ‘whites’ do not understand how democracy works in Africa. In Africa, he averred, democracy does not assume the shape of a multi-party political system. Typically, there is only one party, he claimed, and one either belongs to it or one does not.

I would like to believe that we are not stuck in that dead-end street in South Africa, and that our democracy is indeed sufficiently mature to be able to handle a multi-party system. Too much power always corrupts (as Lord Acton so famously observed, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’), with the consequence that loss of such unchallenged power may just inculcate a certain humility, or perhaps less radically, some modesty, in the ruling ‘elite’. A split in the ANC would defuse the excessive power the party has always had and pave the way for a better kind of democracy, with greater diversity of participation and simultaneously a closer approximation of ‘the rule of everyone by everyone’.