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.