In a country such as Switzerland the constitution determines which laws can be passed an which cannot. This is how minorities are protected in a democracy. But in a country without constitution, any law can be passed, and democracy can always decay into an oppression by the majority. Remember, democracy is not just “voting.”
The majority can change the constitution via initiatives, however, so gradual change is possible. When an initiative gathers enough votes, it goes through an elaborate process wherein the two chambers of parliament can reject the initiative or formulate an alternative (”Gegenvorschlag”).
I’m not a political philsopher but allowing the mob to decide who a ruler should be from a group of possibly (and probably) unqualified people like in India doesn’t seem to be the right thing to do. I’d pay more attention to selecting my doctor than this system does in selecting it’s leaders. After the Godhra incident in Gujarat in India where the minority communities were (to put it bluntly) slaughtered in an almost state sponspored massacre, the mob re elected the same party to power. I’ve quite lost my faith in democracy thanks to this. It just doesn’t work when the vote bank is too huge and too diverse. Perhaps for a smaller country like Switzerland but definitely not for a giant like India. Perhaps decnentrallisation is the answer... – NoufalIbrahim on 2004-02-03 Iraq
I don’t have a good solution to this, except to say that Switzerland has not been that “civilized” in the past either. The country was founded about 700 years ago, and we have democracy, and we weren’t in the world wars, but we had terrible exploitation, rich cities ruling vast areas of poor agricultural land, religious civil war (about 150 years ago), napoleon had to invade to suppress the unrest Switzerland exportet to the surrounding countries!
I recently read a comment from a 60 year old journalist in an interview, where he said that the economic conditions of the kanton Aargau (where I grew up) back in his youth was so bad that in the same situation today the UN would send in emergency relief teams...
Thus, we should perhaps consider that “democracy” doesn’t solve all problems. It just helps avoid the most obvious mistakes. Education, civility, morals, culture, identity, justice, wealth – all these values have to be supplied from other sources.
I agree with that. It seems to me that infinite power in the hands of an infinitely wise man would solve the problem completely. Since neither is possible, we have to either delegate infinite power into the hands of a few people the average wisdom of which group is reasonably high (or to give a limited amount of power to a single individual). Now the problem is selection of these “wise people”. In a complete democracy, all people would have a say in all policies. That’s possible only in smaller nations like (perhaps) Switzerland. In this way, the common average wisdom of the people will be used in governing. This is not possible in a larger country like India and hence we have representative democracy. Now the people who we have to choose from are all equals. They have no training whatsoever for governance. They are not qualified in any fashion for the task. This makes me shudder. It’s like having to vote to decide between a murderer and a rapist to be my guardian. Bad deal.
Thoreau mentions a more pertinent issue. My sole say in the government of my country is one vote I get to cast in 4 years. That’s it. The rest of my time, I have to take what is given to me and choke it down no questions asked. Recently, in an Indian state Madhya Pradesh, the slaughter of buffaloes was banned and the posession of beef declared a crime. That’s the majority at work. What can the minority do there? Wait another four years to try voting again? The constitution really cannot forsee all these contingencies.
I’m for democracy but I think the candidates need to prove themselves through a series of exams (just a suggestion) to qualify for being a ruler. Not every person is fit to govern and not every person should be given the chance either. – NoufalIbrahim
You really should read Open Society by Karl Popper! One of the assertions he makes about democracy is that Plato introduced the question “Who should rule?” into political philosophy and that many influential thinkers have spent enormous energies in trying to solve this question, whereas Popper believes that the correct question to ask is “How do we change our government?” – Then democracy is no longer a way of choosing the most apt to rule (which he claims is impossible), but rather a way of disposing of the obvious inept to rule (which should be trivial).
This goes back to a Greek saying (source?) claiming that while it is very hard to rule, it is rather easy to judge wether somebody’s rule was good or not.
Popper makes the same point in his essays on democracy.
The book leaves two important questions open: The first he also mentions in his essays – the way he thinks about it, a system with only two major parties will work well; and he thinks highly of the system in the USA. He claims that the two parties are very similar to each other because these are in fact the values people share, and that changing from Democrats to Republicans and back is just a way of ousting the incompetent rulers.
The “European” model where parties are elected and form coalitions to govern is criticized because you cannot remove somebody from power quickly. Their party will loose influence, but it may still be part of the next coalition.
Popper argues for gradual change, and his world-view supports this. Sometimes I would personally like more change, however, and I guess neither system actually provides for radical changes in eg. immigration policy or foreign aid.
The second unresolved point is how parties are affected by corruption due to power. I think the problems in the US illustrate this: Both parties depend on donations from the corporate world. How fair is that? They should depend on nothing but their voters. But perhaps Popper would argue that even though a particular implementation is flawed, the general idea remains the same. And perhaps there are political systems out there where this works fairly?
In Switzerland, for example, the once big liberal party (FDP) has fallen quite a bit because they are the neoliberal party, the party of big corporations, and the big scandals (eg. Swissair, or Zurich Unique Airport) involved a lot of party members being both part of the government and part of the major players involved...
So I guess the main questions for me are:
1. How to avoid corruption?
2. How facilitate change without destabilizing the country?
☯
Some selected quotes on PoliticalMusings.
☯
And here are some more blog posts: