DEMOCRACY: THE HISTORICAL ACCIDENT

The Barbarian in History

If the Roman Empire had never been invaded by barbarians, parliament – and, therefore, representative democracy - would never have evolved in western civilization. An accident of history has been elevated into a prescription for the world, largely for its association, until recently, with growth and development.  The rise of China and the East Asian 'miracles' has demonstrated that democracy is not a precondition for development.

In ancient times, civilizations were ruled by emperors, that is to say, they were empires. The Egyptian Civilisation, for instance, passed through twelve dynasties from 3,100 BC to 30 BC, when it became part of the Roman Empire. According to S.E.Finer, this 'palace polity' has been the most common throughout history, as opposed to the 'forum polity' of Greece, the Roman Republic, and the Italian city-states – until the rise of America and, briefly, France.  

Most civilizations were surrounded by barbaric people, from the Guti around Mesopotamia to the Germanic tribes around the Roman Republic and Empire. These 'barbarians' have played a greater role in history than they have been credited with.  

Civilised societies were settled agricultural societies practicing trade within and with other societies. They were highly stratified, with the king and priests at the top and the workers at the bottom (slaves were significant only in Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, as I have argued elsewhere.) Barbaric societies were nomadic and unsettled. At the same time, they were highly egalitarian. The king, in barbaric societies, was elected: his office, or function, wasn't  hereditary. Dynastic succession was usually peculiar to civilized peoples, like the Romans and the Egyptians.

I spoke above of the islands of civilization in a general sea of barbarism. The sea posed a constant threat of flooding the islands. If one imagines the possibility (today the actuality) of the Maghreb countries' teeming millions paddling across the Mediterranean today – like the Cubans descending on America, or Vietnamese on Australia – to overwhelm the European Union by sheer number, one will understand what I mean. Consequently, every civilization had its frontiers where the two societies met, bought and (usually) fought. The most visible monument of such a contact point is the Great Wall of China, erected over 2,000 years ago by the Ch'in dynasty to keep out the northern barbarians. (The wall was subsequently destroyed and rebuilt by the Sui and Ming dynasties.)

The Roman Empire relied on natural boundaries to keep the barbarians out, such as the Rhine between Germany and France. But the barbarians crossed the Rhine and flooded the Empire – indeed, in 476 AD, taken to be the year of the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian Odoacer.

For 1,000 years thereafter Western Europe had no government. No other civilization in the world experienced such breakdown; which is why no other civilization had a Renaissance – there had been no scope of rebirth simply because there had never been a break with the past. Only in the fifteenth century did strong monarchs begin to create centralized governments throughout Europe.

The Germanic tribes, as the northern European barbarians were known, brought with them their peculiar social organization, and we shall focus chiefly on their idea of kingship.

As I have said, the king in barbaric societies was usually elected, and he was more a war leader than a king in the usual sense of the word. The Germanic tribes were, therefore, democratic societies, and we already see the seeds of the modern Western democratic states emerging (curiously, a throwback to barbarism). Tacitus has given us a vivid anthropological description.

An aspiring European king generally had to contend against three powers for supremacy: the Church, his fellow-barbarians - the nobility/aristocracy – and, in more settled times, the merchants.

Of these, the first was obviously unique to Europe alone – no other civilization had inherited an organized Episcopal, hierarchical Church from a dead empire. This was the beginning of 'civil society' – beyond the state, apart from business, away from politics, an entity autonomous.

The second power had been initially absent. When Rome collapsed and government died, so did trade, and with trade, the town. Merchants became prominent before and after the crusades, when the Mediterranean had been cleared of the Muslim threat. Indeed, the fourth crusade was a purely commercial enterprise.

The idea of universal taxation had been buried beneath the rubble of Rome. To levy taxes, even, and especially, to finance wars (that royal pursuit), the king was frequently compelled to convene a parliament of (in order to parley with) the above three groups and win their consent. The situation stemmed from his position within the second group, where he was merely primus inter pares. One of the first examples of such compulsion resulted in the signing of the Magna Carta by King John. Much later, in 1789, the convening of a defunct parliament to defray the cost of involvement in the American War of Independence resulted in the French revolution. Between these two events, of course, lay the English civil war, ignited when Charles I had to convene parliament to pay for his Scottish adventures. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 consummated the power of parliament by dispatching a Catholic king who had sired a Catholic heir out of England – without a shot being fired. Parliaments didn't like kings, and kings didn't like parliaments.

The psychological effect of parliament was to make the king appear less remote. Orientalists have noted that Eastern emperors were separated from their people by a huge chasm – they were beings apart, closer to heaven than to earthly men. The proximity to people has been carried to its most extreme in the White House, where children can roll Easter eggs with the president! A story from Herodotus, however fantastic, will help us appreciate this aloofness. The story runs as follows.

After the Medes had overthrown Assyrian rule, anarchy prevailed in the absence of government. A fellow called Deioces took it into his head to become king of the Medes. Already famous for his judgment in disputes, he began to judge cases with greater enthusiasm When demand for his services peaked, he threatened to withdraw them. "We cannot possibly," said the Medes, "go on living in this country if things continue as they now are: let us therefore set a king over us, so that the land may be well-governed, and we ourselves may be able to attend to our own affairs, and not be forced to quit our country on account of anarchy."

Deioces was, naturally chosen, and he went about building a capital city, Ecbatana, and the Medes were told to live outside the walls.

"When the town was finished," continues Herodotus, "he proceeded to arrange the ceremonial. He allowed no one to have direct access to the king, but made all communication pass through the hands of messengers, and forbade the king to be seen by his subjects. He also made it an offence for anyone whatsoever to laugh or spit in the royal presence. This ceremonial, of which he was the first inventor, Deioces established for his own security, fearing that his compeers, who were brought up together with him, and were of as good a family as he, and no whit inferior to him in manly qualities – if they saw his frequently would be pained at the sight, and would therefore be likely to conspire against him; whereas if they did not see him, they would think him quite a different sort of being from themselves."

The story illustrates two points. First, kingship is a Hobbesean social contract to preserve order. It is an irrevocable, one-off act by the people. Second – and here is where the east differs from the west – in order to fulfill that function the emperor must elevate himself above the people. Clearly, the difference is historical. In a western version of the story, the friends (and enemies) of the would-be king would never have willingly permitted him to rise above them. In short, they would have tried to rein in the executive, as the Roman republicans did, in fact, try to do.

The distinguishing characteristic of the democratic state is the checks and balances imposed on the executive. If for the executive, you read the king, then it is no surprise that it took a thousand years for kings to assert themselves against the above trio of powers, and create the absolute monarchies of western Europe, and a few more centuries for that self-assertion to be diluted into republicanism by the parliaments the king had always been forced to consult during those thousand years.

Nor is it surprising that some states failed to produce a strong king, that is, failed to become effective states. Neither Peter the Great nor Catherine the Great of Russia could – their greatness notwithstanding – subjugate the aristocracy into recognizing their superiority. The nobles continued to see the king as an equal. Thus, neither the Russian king nor nobles were ever compelled to come to a compromise at a parliament, which is why Russia has found it impossible to balance executive and Duma effectively.

One may be tempted to jump to the conclusion that what is needed for the rest of the world to be democratic is a spell of absolutism, followed by a parliamentary weakening of dictators. Unfortunately, what I've said at the beginning rules out such a possibility. The western experience was an historical accident – an interruption of civilization without parallel and precedent. An accident cannot, ipso facto, be generalized upon. 

Let's take the case of China, currently considered the least democratic and most authoritarian of all states. The following are the dates and names of its dynasties.

Ch'in 221 – 206 BC; Han 202 BC – 9 AD, 25 – 220 AD; Sui   589 – 618; Tang 618 – 907; Sung  960 – 1279; Yuan (Mongol) 1279 – 1368; Ming  1368 – 1644; Ch'ing (Manchu) 1644 – 1911

We notice a major gap of only three and a half centuries between the Hun and the Sui, when China was disunited. But even during this brief interregnum, so to speak, the northern barbarian nomads formed short-lived states (known as the 'Sixteen Kingdoms', they shared the following characteristics: (1) all began as steppe-nomads with a way of life different from that of agricultural China; (2) after forming states, all became at least partially Sinicised. Chinese from great families, which had preserved the Han traditions, served as their tutors and administrators).

Thus we see that even during the interregnum, brief as it was, China remained Chinese (Sinic) in spirit and did not really break with its past as Europe did for a much longer period. The hope of a democratic China would appear to be fantastic.

A similar break with the past occurred in the history of ancient Egypt – three times. They have been called the "Intermediate Periods". But none of them ever gave rise to a new civilization until the conquest by Rome: the pharaoh painfully, but inevitably, reappeared to reunite his realm.

An amusing incident will illustrate the total powers of the Chinese emperors and shed some light on the Tiananmen Square Episode. Hai Jui, the most famous censor of the Ming period, had the temerity to criticize the emperor's idiosyncrasies. The emperor flew into a rage and ordered that Hai Jui not be allowed to escape. "Never fear, sire," said the eunuch go-between to the emperor. "He has said goodbye to his family, has brought his coffin with him, and waits at the gate!" The emperor was so taken aback by the splendid example of Confucian ethical formation that he forgave him.

The story should be taken cum grano salis: it was rare for Chinese emperors to wield absolute power. They were frequently checked by the mighty bureaucracy, as we can see in the vignette. However, in theory, he was absolute, if not in fact. And certain emperors – usually those starting a new dynasty – were vigorous enough to override even the bureaucracy. S.E.Finer tells a revealing tale of the nadir of the power of an emperor when one was forced to collude with the eunuchs against the mandarins – in the temple bathroom!  

Such powers of life and death, even theoretical, were unthinkable in an European king, but is more redolent of the Roman emperors. It is not that they did not desire such powers; rather, they were prevented by the triad of countervailing forces – church, nobility and merchants – from ever possessing them. What is remarkable is that the European kings did manage to acquire enough power to form states at all.

The Well-Trained Dog

As an epilogue, it would pay dividend to reflect for a moment on the words of a recently deceased scholar and lieutenant to a popular American president. I speak here of Jeane Kirkpatrick. She observed: "Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government. Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain-because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions." Again: "Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road from the Magna Carta to the Act of Settlement, to the great Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1885, took seven centuries to traverse. American history gives no better grounds for believing that democracy comes easily, quickly, or for the asking. A war of independence, an unsuccessful constitution, a civil war, a long process of gradual enfranchisement marked our progress toward constitutional democratic government. The French path was still more difficult."

However, she betrays her ethnocentrism in mentioning the lack of discipline of non-democratic people: the ancient Egyptians were not only disciplined; they were perhaps a mite over-disciplined, as was surely their Mesopotamian siblings. Who would say today that the Chinese lack discipline?

One is reminded of passages from the early book on anthropology "Sex and Society" by William I. Thomas. He was at pains to refute the prevalent view that the 'savage' lacked self-discipline. His counterargument is interesting: 'A native of Queensland will put his mark on an unripe zamia fruit, and may be sure that it will be untouched and that when it is ripe he has only to go and get it. The Eskimos, though starving, will not molest the sacred seal basking before their huts. Similarly in social intercourse the inhibitions are numerous. To some of his sisters, blood and tribal, the Australian may not speak at all; to others only at certain distances, according to the degree of kinship. The west African fetish acts as a police, and property protected by it is safer than under civilized laws. Food and palm wine are placed beside the path with a piece of fetish suspended near by, and no one will touch them without leaving the proper payment. The garden of a native may be a mile from the house, unfenced, and sometimes unvisited for weeks by the owner; but it is immune from depredations if protected by fetish. Our proverb says, "A hungry belly has no ears," and it must be admitted that the inhibition of food impulses implies no small power of restraint.' Indeed.

The generosity of Bertrand Russell for the poor savage finds expression in this line:   "There are many nations which lack the self-restraint and political experience that are required for the success of parliamentary institutions, where the democrat, while he would wish them to acquire the necessary political education, will recognize that it is useless to thrust upon them prematurely a system which is almost certain to break down." It is small wonder that the eastern intellectual cringes with self-contempt when he reads this sort of verbal tat.

In Bangladesh, the army, egged on by western donors, had to intervene just before a murderous election: proof positive that the Bangladeshis lack self-restraint? Never mind that they are disciplined farmers, never mind that they are disciplined workers, never mind that they are disciplined students. Only when it comes to democracy, all discipline and restraint go by the board. Why? Because democracy is an idea we devalue: we don’t think it worthy of respect, as a field, or a machine, or a book is worthy of respect.

And what is to count as self-restraint? In western capitalism, one is not required to show self-restraint in the pursuit of material goods: it would be the beginning of the end of the system. Saving was, until recently, considered a vice. Yet Asians are notorious for their thrift. Again, William Thomas puts it well: "The truth is that the restraints exercised in a group depend largely on the traditions, views, and teachings of the group, and, if we have this in mind, the savage cannot be called deficient on the side of inhibition."

Thus we have Amartya Sen, the Indian neocon's, breathless insight: 'Throughout the nineteenth century, theorists of democracy found it quite natural to discuss whether one country or another was “fit for democracy.” This thinking changed only in the twentieth century, with the recognition that the question itself was wrong: A country does not have to be deemed fit for democracy; rather, it has to become fit through democracy. This is indeed a momentous change, extending the potential reach of democracy to cover billions of people, with their varying histories and cultures and disparate levels of affluence.' One can append any preposition one likes after the word 'fit' – for, through, between, behind, across from, near, next to, under, above…but the fact remains that one group of people will never behave like another group. Their circumstances are entirely different. All humans are capable of self-restraint and are fir for this or that: the object of their restraint and the goal of their fitness must vary according to their experience. Bombing Iraq to bring democracy to a savage people was, no doubt, according to Amartya Sen, a noble thing to do: they could only be made fit 'through' democracy and in every direction around or above it except towards it. (Notice that Sen offers no empirical proof for his doctrine of 'fit-through-democracy': he means merely that after the cold war, the west has imposed democracy on their clients, whatever the consequences, such as over a million deaths in Iraq.)

Behind Sen's lines we hear the old nineteenth century complaints of Herbert Spencer et al that some of us lacked 'restraint'. To quote Thomas again: "Sir John Lubbock pointed out long ago that the savage is hedged about by conventions so minute and so mandatory that he is actually the least free person in the world. But, in spite of this, Spencer and others have insisted that he is incapable of self-restraint, is carried away like a child by the impulse of the moment, and is incapable of rejecting an immediate gratification for a greater future one." Samuel Huntington, however, was prescient about the Iraq tragedy. "He also came as close as anybody to predicting America’s agonies in Iraq by pointing out that democracy is the product of very specific cultural processes (The Economist, January 3^rd 2009, p 29)." And if democracy means becoming anything like the United States of America or the United Kingdom, it is a fate well avoided by a people.  

And why make such a fuss about self-restraint, anyway? Why does the question of 'fit for' and 'fit through' (what I call the 'fifor-fithrough' question) arise at all? We'll let William Thomas have the Parthian shot.

"Altogether too much has been made of inhibition, anyway, as a sign of mentality, for it is not even characteristic of the human species. The well-trained dog inhibits in the presence of the most enticing stimulations of the kitchen."

Greek Gift

"To lose one civilisation may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

Here we may regard Oscar to be referring to the Greek and Roman civilizations: we have seen how the latter was lost for a thousand years; now we turn to see how the former was mislaid. For we have been able to account for the rise of parliament, but we haven't yet accounted for the rise of democracy itself – in Hellas.

We go back to a time before Greece, when every government in the world was of the palace polity variety. How did the first forum polity arise?

The Cretan civilisation was the first European civilisation; stimulated by the east, it was a monarchical, hierarchic entity; the Greeks, an Indo-European people, descended on Greece around 2000 BC, moved southward over hundreds of years, and, inspired by Crete, and in conjunction with their predecessors, created the mainland civilisation of Mycenae. However, with the Dorian invasion the light went out in the Aegean and a Dark Age ensued from 1100 BC to 750 BC. This was the period described by Homer, as I have mentioned in another place. This was the first time that Europe lost a parent. But the offspring was to be totally different from the sire.

When civilisation reemerged around 750 BC, it was far less hierarchic: we see Agamemnon abused by Achilles with impunity. The former, indeed, was merely primus inter pares. Thus the forum polity began to emerge, and kingship went out of fashion. Thus the first Dark Age gave rise to democracy, and the second to representative government. The similarity doesn't end there. In Greece, the tyrants emerged to provide stable government, just as absolute monarchs were later to emerge in Western Europe. They were both deposed, and 'the people' came to be in charge.

The idea of democracy, as S.E.Finer has suggested, transmitted itself over the ages: he called it 'ideational transmission'. One of the things that irked Thomas Hobbes was the ideal of democracy propounded in the universities of his age. He says 'And because the Athenians were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their Government,) that they were Freemen, and all that lived under Monarchy were slaves; therefore Aristotle puts it down in his Politiques,(lib.6.cap.2) "In democracy, Liberty is to be supposed: for 'tis commonly held, that no man is Free in any other Government." And as Aristotle; so Cicero, and other Writers have grounded their Civill doctrine, on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate Monarchy, at first, by them that having deposed their Soveraign, shared amongst them the Soveraignty of Rome; and afterwards by their Successors. And by reading of these Greek, and Latine Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Soveraigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood; as I think I may truly say, there was never any thing so deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latine tongues.' Amen. Today, the English tongue has very much the same effect and we have dearly bought in these eastern parts the learning of the western tongues.

But Hobbes's words raise a fresh problem: how to account for the Roman Republic? Now, it  might very well have been an ideational transmission from Greece for there were numerous Greek outposts in the south of Italy. Indeed, the myth of the founding of the Republic smacks totally of a Roman adaptation from the overthrow of the tyranny of Hippias in Athens, which made way for the innovation of democracy by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. In fact, the traditional Roman date for the transition from monarchy falls suspiciously close to the corresponding year in Athens, namely 509 BC! This was clearly a fiction. However, there appears so far to have been no ideational transmission of the kind detested by Thomas Hobbes.

The explanation is far more mundane: it was a power vacuum that paved the way for the gradual emergence of the Republic. Etruscan kings ruled over Rome, but the last king was not run out of the city on account of his son's rape of Lucretia, as folklore had it. The Etruscans were already in decline when they received a coup de grace from the Greeks in the waters of Cumae in 474 BC. Thus, the transition to the Republic must be dated at least to 470 BC (Greco-Roman Civilisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15^th edition, p313). When the Etruscans abandoned the Romans, the latter found themselves leaderless. Naturally, they had to form some kind of government, and they hit upon the choice of praetor maximus, an imperial legacy that later gave way to that of two consuls elected for a year.

The result, however, was not a democracy and not even representative government, but an oligarchy. Until the 1980s, according to Karl-J. Hölkeskamp"it had been agreed that the social and political order of the libera res publica had been aristocratic or even ‘oligarchic,’ meaning that all institutions and positions of power were controlled by a particular kind of ruling class, which recruited not only magistrates, generals, priests, and senators from its ranks, but also the official representatives of the people, the tribuni plebis. Scholars had generally taken for granted that this ruling (or ‘political’) class—often called an “aristocracy of office” or the “senatorial aristocracy”—had an inner circle, the true nobilitas, consisting of those families with a consular tradition and a kind of virtually, though not formally, hereditary claim to the highest magistracy. This nobility also controlled the Senate, because the (higher) magistrates regularly returned into its ranks after their year of office; the Senate was taken to have been the central institutional organ of this aristocracy and, therefore, the actual decision-making and thus, in the full sense, ‘ruling’ body." This consensus was questioned by a scholar and the present author has lately written a book to reestablish the former consensus.  We need not get into the debate here, but need merely note that the republican credentials of the Romans have been seriously questioned.

Hence we find that several accidents – in Greece, Rome and Western Europe – have given rise to the practice and idea of democracy.  The first gave way to the Hellenistic world, the second to the Empire and the third to the European Union. Most of humanity has simply bypassed these accidents: and most of humanity will remain immune to them, for accidents affect only those who participate in them, not those who have never been present.