[governance] Democracy (was Re: Remarks at UNESCO Closing Ceremony of "Connecting the Dots Conference")

[Norbert Bollow]

On Tue, 10 Mar 2015 16:29:11 +0000
Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> > The literal meaning of δημοκρατία (dēmokratía), in modern language
> > "democracy", is that "it's the people who have the power to rule".
> > This is since ancient times seen in contrast to "the rule of an
> > elite", the ancient Greek term for the latter being ἀριστοκρατία
> > (aristokratía).
> 
> And in that respect none of us really supports "democracy" do we? if
> it means that 'the people' (and who is that, exactly?) has the power
> to hang us without trial (it's called lynching in America), suppress
> minority viewpoints, etc. It's also true that we do have a choice
> other than elite rule and mob rule: rule of law.

Of course the only way in which "rule of 'the people'" can be
implemented is by means of rule of law, with laws which conform to the
universal principles which are recognized as human rights, and which
implement these human rights besides whatever else 'the people' may
decide by means of whatever democratic processes are used for
decision-making.

No decision which addresses a matter to which human rights are relevant
can be democratic if it does not strive to uphold and implement all
human rights which are relevant to the decision under consideration.
Otherwise it would be a decision which effectively or at least
potentially excludes one or more persons (those whose human rights are
violated in a significant way) from "the people who have the power to
rule".

> > How democratic governance, in the sense of that literal meaning, is
> > to be implemented in an increasingly globalized and increasingly
> > ICT-based world (of which the Internet is nowadays already a rather
> > central aspect, and it is widely expected that the centrality of
> > the Internet will continue to grow), that is something that
> > requires discussion and consensus building.
> 
> Yes, but it requires a hell of a lot more than discussion and
> consensus building.

Sure. But discussion and consensus building has to be the first part.

Otherwise, there will be no clarity in regard to what are the concrete
organizational structures that need to be built, and even if someone
had all the necessary insights for building good governance structures,
any attempts to implement those insights would still fail for lack of
acceptance among those who are supposed to make up the relevant polity
(by which word I mean: the particular set of "the people" which is
relevant to a particular system of democratic governance.)

> > In fact much of what goes wrong in the governance of national
> > states which are democratic (or which at least claim to be
> > democratic) can be blamed on the fact that even in such states
> > (despite all the checks and balances and other good countermeasures
> > against elites gaining unreasonable power) there are often still
> > elites which gain a lot of power and abuse it for their own gain;
> > the resulting anger of the people is then exploited by populists.
> 
> Interesting that you attribute all the problems with 'democracy' to
> some small elites, the bad guys, and not to irrational or greedy
> decisions by 'the people' themselves. So the people can never be
> wrong, or never be manipulated? 

Quite on the contrary: I accept the realities that people can be wrong,
irrational and greedy, and that they can potentially be manipulated, as
facts of life that no political system can change. 

And I still advocate for democracy in spite of all that, because the
alternatives are much worse.

At the same time, I advocate for making governance systems more robust
in relation to abuses of various kinds. For example, whatever the
politicians who were part of certain previous governments of Greece did
to accumulate such a huge debt burden, and whatever happened in the
rest of Europe to allow Greece to become part of the Eurozone in spite
of the lack of any effective safeguards in that respect, both of these
sides of the problem were populist abuses by politicians.

In fact, when we have a governance system in which such abuses occur,
that governance system does not qualify as democratic in those regards.

Sure, measures which lead to unsustainable state debt may be popular
with current voters, but the people of future generations had no
say. Whatever happens, people of future generations are going to be
adversely affected in quite significant ways: Either in Greece, or
elsewhere (in the case that other countries take on a major part of
that debt), or everywhere (for example in the case that the debt is made
to disappear through some abuse of the sovereign power of governments,
which IMO would certainly cause a major financial crisis.)

So I don't blame Greek voters because we can't change their human
nature. I also don't blame Greek politicians and I don't blame the
Greek corporate executives who are tangled up with them (as far as I
know not with the current Greek government, but with those previous
Greek governments which ran up that enormous public debt). We can't
change their human nature either. But political system can and
therefore must be changed to make it much more robust to function
appropriately in real life, where all the ugly realities of human
nature will be present, only waiting for opportunities to manifest
themselves.

> > The way to improve political systems in order to reduce this kind of
> > phenomenon is not to give up on the ideal of democracy, but to
> > implement it more effectively, so that there will be less abuse of
> > power by elites, and therefore less public anger, and therefore
> > less opportunity for populists who will try to exploit such anger
> > whenever they 
> 
> I am not giving up on the ideal of democracy, which to me means
> popular sovereignty. There are two things missing from these overly
> simple discussion of democratic governance, however.

Actually I'll freely agree that there are many aspects which I haven't
discussed in my recent posting. Many more than just those two aspects
which you point out below.

> One is that there is a lot about the internet that we _don't_ want to
> be centrally governed. Indeed, its resistance to central control is
> one of the reasons for its success. 
> 
> The other is the role of the market. You can't have a complex,
> post-industrial society without markets, and yet this kind of choice
> or self-governance is always unpopular with politicians, whether of
> democratic or oligarchic stripe, because it limits their power.
> Furthermore, complex market economies introduce a need for expertise
> in regulation. Regulation or intervention in markets that is
> politically popular but ill-informed can be utterly disastrous, as
> various financial crises ranging from the great depression to the
> 2008 mortgage bubble demonstrate. Greek governments who spent more
> than they had were very popular with 'the people.' Paying the debt is
> never popular. Since the Internet is a product entirely of
> market-oriented, neoliberal policies, I am always curious about this
> huge gap in the thinking of democratic governance advocates. 

Of course misguided governance can do harm. Governance which attempts
regulation of aspects of human activity for which no regulation is
needed is typically especially harmful, regardless of whether it
otherwise achieves its intended purpose or not.

I would however insist that in all cases of any doubt or dispute, it
must be decided democratically what precisely those aspects of human
activity are which need formal regulation and which are the aspects
which don't need regulation. These democratic decision processes must
of course take into account human rights and they must take into account
the reality of change. Areas of activity which don't need regulation
today might need it tomorrow, and vice versa.

Bureaucracies tend to have a strong bias in the direction of always
wanting to expand themselves, which sometimes results in them being
advocates for more and heavier regulation. Lawyers as a group benefit
from increasing complexity of the law. Politicians and unelected
government officials have tendencies of being overly supportive of the
desires of big businesses whose lobbyists invite them to a good lunch or
dinner. (Illegitimate desires expressed by lobbyists can go in the
direction of deregulation, to allow companies to act with unlimited
irresponsibility, or in the direction of regulation which would hinder
new market entrants, or regulation which would prevent or at least
delay structural change.) All of these are "human nature of elites"
effects of the kind that I discussed. When discussing governance
systems, we need to be aware of human nature in relation to how people
tend to act when given the opportunity to act in a way that would
benefit them personally or a group that they see themselves as part of,
even if it is at the expense of society as a whole. I see it as part of
what is implied by the literal meaning of the word "democracy" that the
opportunities to give in to this kind of temptations must be minimized.

Greetings,
Norbert

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