Democracy and Colonialism: Misnaming Democracy

 

            If democracy requires social equality, than nations that participate in the clearly unequal social structures of colonialism may only make false claims to democracy. This problem plagues not only earlier forces of global empire, but also nations in the present who retain colonial territories.  Nations in the present who successfully invade other nations only to leave them in ruins after an extended occupation, like the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, effectively also practice new forms of colonialism.

           Colonial practices enforce their inequalities through brutal means, including killings, torture, displacement, and destruction of the social and cultural institutions of the colonized. Equality is impossible, since the colonized are not allowed to govern themselves, denied both sovereignty and autonomy by the colonizer.

Yet colonialism also degrades the colonizer’s society. As Aimé Césaire wrote in 1950, “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to …violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that …each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact…a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, …at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged…a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery.” (p35-6) Degraded, violent, racist, infected, violating agreements, and poisoned does not make for a healthy society of equals.

How can France, England, and the United States be seen as model democracies when they still practice colonialism?  France retains colonial territories in thirteen territories, including French Polynesia and French Guiana, while England fought a recent war to retain the Falkland Islands and continues to rule Northern Ireland.

The United States practice of settler colonialism means not only that Guam, American Samoa, and the Hawaiian Islands are colonies in the classical sense, but so is its mainland territory. As Audra Simpson has argued, the “gift of democracy” to Indigenous peoples criminalized Indigenous life as it lays claim to Indigenous peoples as citizens of the United States. Robert Nichols has documented how forcing citizenship onto Indigenous communities in Canada resulted in unequal relations violating Rousseau’s social contract.

Even the classical Greek forms of democracy to which many European theorists looked for democratic models also practiced slavery and contributed to the spread of Greek empire in the Mediterranean.  Pericles, the king who supported the Athenian assembly’s power and weakened the aristocratic wealthy, also embarked on imperial conquests that denied freedom to all. And if later Greek philosophers supported democracy, Aristotle was also advisor to Alexander the Great, conqueror of Athens and the Achaemenid Empire, who Aristotle advised to “be a despot to the barbarians.”  How can a democratic body also support slavery and despotism?

Colonialism and imperialism also erode the effectiveness of democracy in the colonies of European democracies even after liberation, as in India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. Assumptions that democracy is a European invention that successfully installed equality hide the multiple modes of unequal social relations under electoral governments North and South. These social inequalities are seen not only in continuing wealth inequalities, a sign that capitalism is not an engine of equality but a system of wealth hierarchies closely tied to modern national governance systems.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, non-European societies who adopt European electoral democracy as their governance model must address the unequal historical conditions that colonialism left them before they can expect to enact democracy.  This suggests that the failure of as India, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil to transform the unequal relations of power and authority in their territories left by their colonizers makes democracy impossible for them (p20).  The colonial bourgeoisie that replace the colonizers after liberation protected their own advantages and access to power rather than practice egalitarianism.

The failure of electoral democracies to live up to their promises of equality is not only true of European governments and their settler colonies, but also true of nations of the global south.  The long-standing inequalities of the electoral government of India, often lauded as the “world’s largest democracy,” means the government has never succeeded in becoming a democracy. The assumption that democracy requires equality is only true in abstract principal. Unequal power relations cannot be ignored. 

These abstractions and erasures come from assumptions that European political systems, such as the modern nation-state, are good for all.  That is why many nations in the global south retained parliamentary systems, court systems and legal codes, and other aspects of their colonizer’s political regimes. That retention can only be a form of Eurocentrism, a Eurocentrism that repeats the racism and ethnocentrism of colonialism and imperialism.  

Ultimately, the alternative social systems that electoral democracies have attacked are an important resource for finding ways to practice equality.  In order to carry out democratic transformations of social relations of power, communities and regions can put democratic practices beyond those of the state to work.

Defend Democracy: Literacy and Citizenship

               What basic conditions does democracy require? If democracy requires elections, then reading might be one fundamental condition.  Reading makes it possible to review candidate statements, follow news reports about the impacts of candidate policies, write letters or emails to let their elected representatives know where they stand, and draft proposals for elected leaders to consider.

Yet literacy is not widely held to be a condition for democracy, and many democracies have surprisingly large numbers of illiterate citizens as voters. UNESCO estimates range from 800 million to one billion people globally are without the ability to read or count at a level that allows for full social participation as citizens.

Those who are without these skills often abandon the notion that they are full participants in their government, leaving the business of governing to educated classes and experts. Their normal lives do not include the assumption that they can participate in public discussion and in managing their own affairs, what some call subalternity. 

This abandonment of citizenship is a blow to democracy. Yet subalterns can transform their assumption that the governments of the territories where they live will never serve their interests.

Many citizens cannot read, including those in wealthy countries like the United States. Recent data shows that 19% of the U.S. adult population does not have basic reading skills, and 29% do not have basic number skills, a slight increase in illiteracy over the past quarter century. In countries widely accepted as democratic yet struggling with profound inequality, like Mexico and India, very large numbers of their citizens are not literate: over 4 million adults in Mexico and over 250 million adults in India. Other countries may hold elections but many doubt that democracy is possible when large social sectors remain unable to read, as in Egypt  where some 20 miillion are illiterate, and Brazil, where over 10 million are unable to read a ballot. Other countries claim to be democracies when large percentages of their population are not literate: including some of those least successful at democratizing wealth and social equity, like Bangladesh (25%) and Haiti (40%). 

Should citizens be able to read? The answer to that question is not settled in policy and judicial arenas. A landmark court decision was just issued by a Federal Court of Appeals in the United States stating the literacy is foundation for citizens, for example, but that decision may be appealed. The judge in the case noted that white people have repeatedly withheld education as a way to deny political power to African Americans and members of other groups. The United States Supreme Court has not been supportive of educational equality, so if the recent decision is appealed it may not have long-term traction. Even when court decisions force states to increase school funding, as in a California February, 2020  court decision, the courts may not mandate enough funding to correct the many problems causing poor school performance. The specific problems in Detroit included adequate physical facilities, qualified teachers consistently present in classrooms, and relevant textbooks (Detroit students were given biology textbooks for physics classes).

Work with subalterns can take literacy and other citizenship skills as its goal. This work would need to include the interruption of subaltern notions of their normal lives as cut off from public participation, what Gayatri Spivak calls the “uncoercive rearrangement of the desires” for subalterns. This work requires building an infrastructure that can recognize subaltern desires operating in terms that differ from those of European-derived education and liberal humanism, so that what subaltern communities are always already saying can be heard and recognized as political speech.

Rather than attempting to better the subaltern conditions along Eurocentric avenues of development, this infrastructural work will have to change what education means to begin to recognize subalterns and literate rural communities in the global south as agents of production.  This work may produce democratic mechanisms and forms of social justice that can accommodate rather than block subalterns from access to mobility and citizenship.

Rather than working for the narrow interests of the educated and wealthy, this infrastructural building project requires that we rethink the interests we serve and consider serving those with whom we have been taught to not identify, our Others.  

If those reading this blogpost are literate, then subalterns are you Others. If you have voted in an election, then your Others are those who never vote. If you have been served by your elected representatives, then subalterns are your Others.

This transformation of political work can become an entry into democracy for all, rather than for the few. It begins with illiteracy, with those who have long been shut out of democracy, the unrepresentable, the others of democracy.

Defending Democracy: Dying Democracies East and West

               The transition from a government of rotating elected officials subject to the will of voters to autocratic government is a slippery slope. Once government officials begin to allow narrow interests prevail over policies that benefit the general public, the slide downwards into oligarchy, demagoguery, and the death of democracy can be rapid. 

               President Putin’s decision to disband the Russian government and begin a transition to new political system earlier this month appears to be one such step in the direction of the end of democratic governance. While holding regular elections in the post-Soviet era, Russia may seem to be an electoral democracy.

Yet the presence of elections, even elections certified as valid by international bodies, is never enough to guarantee democracy. Indeed, the presence of elections often hide different problems with democracy.

               When electoral democracies allow oligarchs to monopolize political systems, they run the risk that the oligarchs will decide they don’t want to give up power. In Russia’s case this year, Putin seems to be pursuing a permanent political post for himself. Permanent office for political leaders mean the death of democracy.

               Those who believe in Western European governance models and capitalist economies may assume that this problem is limited to the recent history of Eastern European experience with centralized socialism under the sway of the Soviet Union. For them, the trouble begins and ends with one country, Russia, or even more narrowly with a single individual, Vladimir Putin.

But many political theorists find that all centralized governments east and west are hampered by a larger, more generalized problem. This problem is sometimes known as the state of exception, to use the language of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that any government system where leaders can declare exceptions to the rule of law risked ceding its sovereignty to individuals. In Schmitt’s view this weakness made the modern liberal state vulnerable to capture by individuals who pursued their own individual interests. Schmitt’s turn towards nationalist socialism in Germany in response to this flaw in democracies led him to support Nazi German policies. Others have responded to Schmitt's analysis of weaknesses in centralized democracies by turning away from political practices with centralized authority structures.

As Giorgio Agamben argued, this weakness of democracy is pervasive, and not limited to conservative states or European states or autocracies. The state of exception weakness suggests that all liberal democracies are vulnerable. These weaknesses are important in the United States as well, since many senior officials in U.S. administrative positions studied Schmitt carefully. They have also impacted the United States through the view of one of Schmitt’s followers, Friedrich Hayek, an important architect of present-day highly centralized economic policies known as neoliberalism.

Some have found this weakness at work in the rapid assertion of executive authority under the Bush Administration in the United States after 9/11, and in the Trump administration more recently.  While some have argued that the U.S. government is now an oligarchy and longer a democracy, it does seem clear at this point that Trump clearly does not believe he is limited by the rule of law.

One important weapon wielded to ensure subjection of the head of state to the rule of law in a constitutional democracy is the impeachment process. By placing this weapon in the hands of the legislative branch, those democracies which practice impeachment give the people's elected representatives a counter weight to the individual sovereign, the executive branch. In general concept, impeachment means the people can rule, rather than the monarch or dictator.

Keeping the balance of power tilted in the direction of the people takes hard work in all democracies. As Hakim Jeffries, Representative from Brooklyn, pointed out when he made the analogy with Putin in Russia explicit in his opening remarks to the U.S. impeachment process, this problem is found not only in the United States but also in Russia and Turkey and other nation-states that claim to be democracies.

Yet impeachment is not without its perils. Sovereigns can use legal arguments to provide a cover for those elected officials who support oligarchy and autocracy. As one Representative, Tom Railsback of Illinois, argued during preparations for the 1974 impeachment of President Nixon argued, “If the Congress doesn’t get the material we think we need and then votes to exonerate, we’ll be regarded as a paper tiger.” The risk of the current circumstances in the United States is that President Trump’s allies in the U.S. Senate will acquit him of wrongdoing, strengthening his chances of remaining in office for four more years. Demanding that a sovereign submit to the rule of law and then failing to enforce the demand would be devastating to any democracy.

History reminds us that four more years on a slippery slope may be a long ride downhill, from the foothills of democracy into the valley of autocracy. President Trump’s ally in Russia, President Putin, may be in the middle of demonstrating how to take a large nation-state on a long ride into the darkness of leaders without elections, government without rule of law, and a social order that does not respond to the will of the people.

If impeachment does not remove President Trump, there are many other weapons useful in reclaiming democracy from oligarchs, autocrats, sovereigns, and dictators. How-to handbooks at carrying out mass movements successful at removing oligarchs and autocrats from power in the past year have been presented this year in Lebanon and Algeria, to name just two struggles. Other how-to guides might be seen in street battles that have fought major national governments to a draw in China and France.  

Democracy is never handed to the people. They must fight to claim their governments as their own, to claim rule by the demos, rule by all, not rule by the few, rule by experts.

However the ongoing battle turns out over democracy and the rule of law in the United States, centralized democracies will retain their weakness for exceptions to the rule of law. So those who might want to defend democracy will continue to have reason to fight for rule by all, meetings to go to, and work to do.

Embodying Equality: Realizing the Democratic Imaginary

When does democracy fulfill its promise of equality? For some communities, democracy means putting up with unequal economic policies, with elections that don’t represent all, with barriers for some to social power, with police brutality targeting certain social groups, and more. So how can democracy come to something other than reinforcing entrenched inequalities?

Danielle Allen argues in her reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence that equality has been overrun with other goals. Elected officials and powerful corporate officials frequently argue that freedom must trump ethics and other values, often in ways that serve their own narrow interests rather than the interests of the entire political body.  

The U.S. Constitution was one reason why equality has never been realized in the United States, and may never be realized.  Even when a democratic nation goes to war with itself in an attempt to produce equality, as in the U.S. Civil War or the Mexican Revolution, equality is often the first casualty when the conflict ends. The outcome of the promise of equality in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War is well-known, and some have argued that the Jim Crow South has spread to infect the entire nation in the present day. The wealth gap that has characterized Mexican society since the Revolution is one type of physical evidence that electoral promises of land reform and the uplifting of the poor were not fulfilled. As Fanon warned, even wars of national liberation have not succeeded at producing equality of social elites and the general populace.

Why do many U.S. citizens continue to see their home as a place of equality? The African American artist Sonya Clark deployed her own woman’s body to interrupt business as usual this summer, mopping the floor of a Philadelphia museum by hand where the U.S. Declaration of Independence is inscribed. Embodying the long history of domestic work as the most that African American women could hope for in the United States, Clark’s performance piece reminds us that employment in the United States not only never was equal but may never be equal across racial differences.

Since wages for the same work still differ based on gender and race, since domestic violence against women continues without abating, since sexual violence against women continues to pervade nearly all societies, since police violence against women of color continues without reserve, embodying equality is no easy task.

Many experts would agree with Sonya Clark when it comes to economic inequality. A major recent study of the history of tax payments has documented how tax policies over the past half century in the United States have unequally benefitted the wealthy. For the authors, both academic economists, that means that even a nation that claims to be at the forefront of world democracies can be practicing policies that produce injustice.

The economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated that capitalism produces inequality in his well-known critique, Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013. His new book on capitalism includes many specific policy solutions to economic inequality that would force the superwealthy to share the wealth society produces. Capitalism and the spread of neoliberal poison have spelled the near-death of the ethics of sharing, if we focus not on individual virtuosity but on social attitudes and policies.

What would it take to embody equality? How can we do that as individuals? How can entire societies and nations put such abstract ideas into practice? Giving attention to the concrete evidence of women’s bodies is one way to interrupt pie-in-the sky abstractions like “equality,” according to Gayatri Spivak.

So when Sonya Clark works with the gendered and racialized working body to interrupt business as usual, it becomes possible to interrogate democracy as we know it. Clark’s clearing away of the dust of unequal history also allows her audience to imagine the new forms that democracy must take if equality will ever become anything more than the seductive work of flim flam artists, of elected leaders, and of others unable to pursue the general interest.