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Democracy Kills: What's So Good About Having the Vote? by Humphrey Hawksley
In 2002, Argentina defaulted and local US dollars deposits were forcibly converted to now much devalued pesos. "Millions," writes HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY, "lost 75 per cent of their savings." Hawksley , who was in Argentina at the time, "called the press office of HSBC in London" with a question. "'If my money was not safe in the HSBC branch in Buenos Aires,' I asked, 'could HSBC supply a list of those branches of the bank in which it would be safe?'" More specifically, "'If the Hong Kong-US dollar peg suddenly goes, what will happen to my money?'"
The gentleman at the other end of the phone laughed. "'Don't be ridiculous. That would never happen.'
"'Well it happened in Argentina, didn't it?'"
Hawksley has an uncanny ability in DEMOCRACY KILLS: WHAT'S SO GOOD ABOUT HAVING THE VOTE? to connect transnational dots in an uncomfortable matter. He writes fluently and easily, whether about Africa, the Middle East, Asia or the Balkans, with a knack for merging observation, anecdote, opinion and analysis, moving from place to place and topic to topic, never dwelling so long on any one point that it becomes repetitive. His descriptions of the chocolate trade in the Ivory Coast and the mess in Iraq are devastating, emotionally as well as intellectually.
Two thoughts, however, soon arose while reading the book. First, the almost certainly deliberately provocative title isn't really supported by the content, nor does it appear that Hawksley really believes it. The argument is more that Western promotion of "free-market democracy" can be inappropriate, self-interested and/or naive. Which is course true, but whatever one can say about democracy's failures in the developing world, there is always India as the exception to prove the rule, an exception which Hawksley describes in even-handed detail. Indonesia, another country covered in this admirably wide-ranging book, may prove another.
The second thought that crossed my mind, about one-third of the way in, is how much one might wish to have the Chinese-language translation rights! A respected Western commentator, from the BBC no less, argues that each country needs to find its own path to political development and that economic development and stability should come first, if not in all cases, at least in those where that is the popular preference (determined, one supposes by "consultation").
Which is pretty much the Chinese party line on the subject.
Which isn't to say the argument is necessarily wrong -- and certainly not when the choice, as posed by Hawksley, is between benignly monarchical Dubai and "democratic" Iraq.
But autocracy -- might be fine if it were always benign, if one could assured of always have a philosopher king on the throne, if "consultation" (as an alternative to elections) were always carried through with integrity rather than an exercise to justify what one had already decided to do -- has probably killed as many people, if not more, than democracy.
This is the wrong place for a long discussion on the various possible forms of government, but one can nevertheless argue that democracy isn't necessarily so much about voting per se as accountability and that whomever government leaders are accountable to, these others must also be accountable to someone and that these links of accountability must ultimately stretch back to the citizens, who are accountable to themselves and for whom the government was instituted. One can agree that the West should not force its agenda and timetable on everyone else while still believing that democracy is on the whole an objective worthy of attention and commitment.
Hawksley proposes a guideline, quoting Paul Collier's Wars, Guns and Violence, that "a perception of about US$2,700 a year [per capita] is the balance point. If democratic reform is attempted beneath this level, societies are more prone to violence. But of reform is not started after income levels exceed US$2,700 then those societies are at risk of violence breaking out." He goes on to use Taiwan as an illustrative example.
In another illuminating example of where the West's conventional wisdom can come up against a forgotten or ignored reality, Hawksley quotes Turks rejecting the idea that teir country can be a leader and model for the Middle East for the simple reason that it not seen only as a secular, modern and modernizing Muslim-majority state, but also as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, a period of imperialism still too fresh in regional minds.
DEMOCRACY KILLS: WHAT'S SO GOOD ABOUT HAVING THE VOTE?'s strength is in these flashes of understanding, rather than in the rhetoric of its title.
Peter Gordon
12/11/2009
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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