Temma Kaplan - Democracy: A World History

further defines the new world history. Understanding the work­ings of global and local conditions in the past gives us tools for exam­ining our own world and for envisioning the interconnected future that is in the making.

Bonnie G. Smith Anand Yang

Introduction

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n 1947, Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Second World War, told a session of Parliament that "democracy is the worst form of government except [for] all the others that have been tried from time to time."¹ This book explores the many meanings of democracy as it has developed in both small groups and large populations over most of human history.

Simply stated, democracy is a process through which people confer with each other to secure food, shelter, land, water, and peace for their mutual benefit. As groups of people grow larger, they usually form spe­cialized committees to meet particular challenges. Although political relationships always depend on group survival, their study seldom con­siders the provision of physical resources such as land and water as this book does.

As a set of practices associated with the rule of law and widespread participation in administering that law, democracies have developed for thousands of years all over the world. But as diverse as democracies have been, the people who generate laws and those who attempt to create, maintain, or change the laws and practices that permit people to live together in peace have been relatively exclusive and nearly impossi­ble to sustain over long periods. In order to protect those recognized as citizens, most known democracies have considered at least some people as outsiders and have excluded them from the benefits of democracy and citizenship. The existence of democracy among one group does not necessarily lead to the empowerment of all residents or their inclu­sion in common deliberations. And the decisions made directly or by representatives may rule unfairly against any group that lacks its own representation. It is important to remember that, in practice, democ­racies can carry out atrocities against as well as grant benefits to large numbers of people.

If democracies are no better than tyrannies or dictatorships, then why focus on democracy at all and why associate democracy with freedom, as so many patriots have done? The attraction of democracy is that it raises possibilities for creating what the nineteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham called "the greatest happiness for the greatest number." By the sheer quantity of ideas people reasoning together can promote, democracies increase the chances of achieving peace, justice, and social benefits for all. But, democracy has never come easily and its only chance for gaining what it, more than any other set of practices, might achieve, is by making it ever more inclu­sive. Since democracy never rests and must continuously be re-created and protected, it is always unstable and threatened with extinction.

With that long struggle in mind, ninety-three-year-old Frances Baard, who had already spent most of her life fighting to be a citizen in the country where she was born, voted for the first time in South Africa in 1994. She had joined with others in demonstrating against unjust laws, had fought to win the rights she and other workers required, had struggled to retain her freedom when charged with resisting unjust laws, and had campaigned against carrying passes that acted as internal passports forbidding her to live and work in certain places. Although casting her vote was one of the high points of her life, voting merely marked the culmination of a life devoted to winning what she consid­ered to be democracy.

For those who think that democracy simply entails citizens elect­ing governments that rule through representative institutions according to specific legal codes or constitutions, Baard represents the activists who have shaped democracy for thousands of years. During that time, democracy has referred to a variety of ideals, legal systems, associa­tions, political practices, institutions, and social movements in which various people have united to gain the individual and collective free­dom that they need to survive and live together in equality and peace. This second category of democracy, known as direct or participatory democracy, includes local movements and decision-making processes of ordinary people, whether or not they are considered full citizens; they create organizations to uphold laws and rules they consider vital; they form social movements in order to win the democratic rights they desire; and they construct systems to control natural resources and the economy for their mutual benefit. At one time or another, each form of democracy has had to partake in choosing rulers, formulating policy, creating legal codes and judicial processes, and organizing public as­semblies and organizations.

Like other governmental forms, democracies often fail in their professed goals. At various times, democracies have excluded ordiscriminated against people of particular castes, classes, religions, nationalities, ethnicities, sexual groups, and races, as the original Constitution of the United States did when it counted black slaves as three-fifths of a person. But the existence of democracy in even the smallest group usually persuades women, people of color, suppressed minorities or majorities, and other excluded groups to demand their rights to participate as equal citizens of every community. And, as we will see in this book, movements for democratic systems and struggles for the expansion of democratic rights have long motivated people and their communities around the world, leading many to consciously risk their lives in order to realize this powerful ideal.

Both representative and participatory democracy have generated written codes designed to prevent the stealing of land or water; or ending torture, enslavement, and false imprisonment; or advancing freedom of religion or freedom from state religions. Both systems of democracy have enhanced free expression, human rights, and, perhaps, most importantly, freedom of speech and publication, necessary for the maintenance of public life. Periodically, individuals and commu­nities of almost all races, sexes, and ethnicities have attempted to gov­ern themselves, secure precious resources, move freely, and shape their own lives.

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Accompanying democracy's achievements, most democracies have historically had two fatal flaws: one is the lack of effective routine com­munication between elected officials and ordinary people needed to share ideas and work out conflicts. The other is that democracies, like authoritarian governments, have tendencies that reach toward expan­sionism. Even in efforts to grant citizenship and extend democratic rights to previously excluded groups of former slaves, immigrants, and people of different ethnic origins, for example, most democracies have imposed themselves on others, colonizing them and dislodging or sup­pressing original inhabitants. Often, conflicts even within established democracies have also led to oppressive conditions for some of the population. Recent access to the internet and social media provides a new and important way to link ordinary people to those who wield political power, but it also presents authorities with powerful tools to manipulate public opinion. Although democracy seems easy to take for granted, humans have not found a guaranteed way to create and per­manently preserve democracy. Yet, despite democracy's many failures, it remains a stirring dream, a fantasy, an ideal that has taken various institutional forms over time and

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