THE DIVERSE ANCESTRY OF DEMOCRACY

By Amartya Sen, Financial Times, June 13, 2005

Perhaps the most important political change in the 20th century has been the widespread acceptance of democracy as the "normal" form of government to which any nation is entitled. There remains, however, an undercurrent of scepticism about prospects for democracy in the non-western world. That scepticism has received much encouragement from the recent events in Iraq. Critiques of the Iraq intervention often move from a justified censure of an ill thought-out and counterproductive military operation to a far less justified general scepticism of any notion of a democratic Iraq. Indeed, there is a widespread assumption that democracy is a peculiarly western norm, not in tune with foundational values elsewhere, such as in Arab countries. Underlying both the approaches, the militarist and the cynical, there is a basic misunderstanding about the nature of democracy.

Democracy is best seen as the opportunity of participatory reasoning and public decision making - as "government by discussion". Voting and balloting are, in this perspective, just part of a much larger story. The ancestry of democracy goes much beyond the strictly confined history of some narrowly designated practices. Tribute must, of course, be paid to the powerful role that modern western thinking, linked with European enlightenment, played in the development of liberal and democratic ideas. But the roots of these general ideas can be found in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe and America.

The belief that democracy is a quintessentially "western" idea is often linked to the practice of voting in ancient Greece, especially in Athens. There is certainly priority there, but the jump to the thesis of the quintessentially "western" or "European" nature of democracy is a leap into confusion. The most elementary problem here concerns the partitioning of the world into largely racial categories, in which ancient Greece is seen as an integral and exclusive part of an identifiable "European" tradition.

In this classificatory perspective, no great difficulty is perceived in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition ("they are all Europeans"), while there is reluctance to take note of the Greek intellectual links with ancient Egyptians, Iranians and Indians, despite the interest that the ancient Greeks themselves showed in talking to them (rather than in chatting up the ancient Visigoths).

Another difficulty concerns the fact that while public reasoning flourished in ancient Greece, it did so also in several other ancient civilisations. For example, some of the earliest open general meetings aimed specifically at settling disputes took place in India, in the sixth century BC onwards, in the so-called Buddhist "councils", where adherents of different points of view gathered to argue their differences. Emperor Ashoka, who hosted the largest of these councils in the capital city of Pataliputra (now Patna) in the third century BC, also tried to codify and promote what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion - a primitive version of the 19th-century "Robert's Rules of Order". Similarly, the so-called "constitution of 17 articles", produced by the Buddhist Prince Shotoku in Japan in 604, insisted, much in the spirit of the Magna Carta six centuries later: "Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many."

There is a considerable history of the cultivation of public reasoning, with good use of tolerance of heterodoxy, also in Muslim countries, including in the Arab world. When Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, was forced to emigrate from an intolerant Europe in the 12th century, he found refuge in the Arab world and was given an influential position in the court of Emperor Saladin in Cairo.

To take another example, when at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome (as part of the ongoing Inquisitions), Akbar, the great Moghul emperor of India (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim), had just finished his project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all. Akbar also set up in Agra perhaps the earliest multi-religious discussion group, and there were regular meetings in the 1590s of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Jews, Parsees and even atheists, to discuss where and why they differed, and how they could live together.

What, then, about Iraq? It would be a mistake to try to translate the immediate problems of Iraq into a larger case for rejecting the general possibility of - and indeed the need for - democracy in Iraq or the Middle East, or anywhere else. On the other side, the narrow and mechanical interpretation of democracy is also extracting a heavy price in Iraq. For example, while the recent elections were very welcome, in the absence of adequately open and participatory dialogue, the voting process was predictably sectarian, linked with religious and ethnic denominations. There is a similar problem in Afghanistan, with its easy reliance on gatherings of tribal leaders and councils of clerics, rather than on the more exacting, but critically important, cultivation of open, general meetings.

The requirements of democracy include the development of opportunities for participatory public reasoning, not least in Iraq. This calls for the promotion of civil rights, including freedom from arbitrary arrest (and, of course, from torture), facilities for public gathering and fuller media freedom. It is important to assist, rather than hinder, the development of non-sectarian identities of women and men, and restoration of the self-respect of Iraqis as Iraqis. The first step is to have a clearer understanding of the nature of government by discussion.

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About the writer:

Amartya Kumar Sen was born in India and was educated in Calcutta and Cambridge, England. He is the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. At Harvard University he is Lamont University Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Before joining Harvard in 1987, Professor Sen was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University and Fellow of All Souls College. Prior to that he taught at Cambridge University, Jadavpur University in Calcutta, Delhi University and the London School of Economics.

Professor Sen's research has ranged over a number of fields in economics and philosophy, including welfare economics, social choice theory, decision theory, economic measurement, development economics and moral and political philosophy.

He is past President of the American Economic Association, the International Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, the Econometric Society, and the Development Studies Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Econometric Society. In 1990 Professor Sen received both the Giovanni Agnelli International Prize for his research on ethics of modern society, and the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award for his work on understanding and preventing world hunger. Professor Sen was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on welfare economics.

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/sen/sen.html