Benjamin Geer on Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:28:32 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Democracy without borders? |
A short essay on the possibility of democracy on an international level, taking as its starting point an observation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Also available here (in several languages): http://political-explorations.info/democracy_without_borders_en.html Ben ---------- Democracy Without Borders? Benjamin Geer 6 April 2006 Many observers of the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections have pointed out that the US has been caught in the trap of its own commitment to Palestinian democracy. Having declared its support for free and fair Palestinian elections, it now faces the annoyance of a Hamas victory. The US government's response to the elections has been to try to pressure Hamas into becoming the sort of party that it would find acceptable, by insisting that Hamas disarm and recognise Israel.[1] Meanwhile, in Israel, the party of Ehud Olmert, the current acting prime minister, has won the Israeli parliamentary elections. Olmert has said he will not negotiate with Hamas, and that the priority of the next Israeli government should be to to fix Israel's final borders unilaterally.[2] Something is clearly wrong with democracy as it is being practiced in this conflict. The policies of the Israeli government have an overwhelming effect on Palestinians, yet Israel's democracy doesn't give Palestinians any say in those policies. Those of the Palestinian Authority have a far smaller yet still significant effect on Israelis, and Israelis likewise have no say in Palestinian democracy. This failure is inherent in the very concept of the state: states only allow their own citizens to vote in their elections. To take another example, the vast majority of Iraqis were not consulted on the issue of whether the US should invade and occupy their country. People joke that, since the US president's power extends throughout the world, the whole world should vote in American presidential elections. This joke reflects an intuitive recognition that it would be fairer if people could exercise influence over decisions to the extent that they are affected by those decisions. I have suggested elsewhere that we call this principle "fair influence". Non-Americans suffer from an influence deficit with regard to American foreign policy. Of course, existing democracies are far from implementing fair influence even for their own citizens. For example, in the West, parties and electoral campaigns require large sums of money, and political platforms are thus limited to the range of options that wealthy donors wish to support. The wealthy also control the media that shape public opinion. Moreover, the structure of the economic system is excluded from the sphere of issues that the electoral process is authorised to change.[3] Even if democracy faithfully represented the majority's interests, majority rule would still place minorities at a disadvantage. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of these problems. Let us assume for the moment that democracy can be improved so that it truly implements fair influence in domestic politics, and that a state's constitution could specify how such a democracy would work. Could fair influence then be practiced on an international level as well? Max Weber defined the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory".[4] A state thus reflects an agreement to resolve local conflicts peacefully within a certain political and legal framework, leaving the state itself as the sole entity authorised to use force in order to ensure that citizens respect that framework. When that agreement breaks down, and the state no longer has a monopoly of force, the result can be civil war or the rule of bandits. Because states need weapons to enforce their constitutions internally, they can also make war against each other, and all states must therefore rely on armies to protect themselves. Therefore the pact that gives the state a monopoly of force on a domestic level cannot be reproduced on an international level. Two or more states could sign a treaty giving each of them some influence in the other's domestic decision-making, but the militarily strongest state would be free to violate the treaty whenever it wished. Therefore, a real solution to the global influence deficit may require a new kind of political entity yet to be imagined, one that departs from Weber's definition of the state. In the meantime, in a world composed of states, the greater a state's relative military strength, the greater the risk that it will dominate other states. Thus, perhaps one way to reduce this risk is to undermine the economic basis of the wealth that the richest countries spend on weapons. That wealth currently depends on the exploitation of labour and raw materials in less wealthy countries, with the cooperation of local elites. The more a state implements the principle of fair influence, the more it will refuse such exploitation. Notes 1. George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 31 January 2006. 2. "Olmert vows to set final borders", BBC News web site, 13 February 2006, accessed 3 March 2006. 3. Kees van der Pijl, "A Lockean Europe?", New Left Review 37, January-February 2006, pp. 9-37. 4. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation" (1918), in The Vocation Lectures: "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation", Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 2004. Copyright (c) 2006 Benjamin Geer This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net