The Shortest History of Democracy by John Keane

Author:John Keane [Keane, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, History & Theory, History, World
ISBN: 9781743822142
Google: 4QA9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Schwartz
Published: 2022-02-01T20:38:35+00:00

Men casting their votes using ink brushes (máo bǐ) during the first Legislative Yuan election in China, held between 21 and 23 January 1948. It was boycotted by the Communist Party and turnout was low, but an estimated 150 million ballots were cast by citizens from the provinces and municipalities, the regions of Tibet and Mongolia, various occupational groups and citizens resident overseas. This was the largest election conducted in the era of electoral democracy and the last contested national election held on mainland soil.

WAR AND CAPITALISM

By the early years of the twentieth century, the politics of good government based on votes for all was everywhere on the move. Victory seemed to be around the corner. Italy was sometimes cited as an example of the progress being made: its 1861 general election, dominated by aristocrat powerbrokers, resulted in the unification of the country as the Kingdom of Italy. But change had been fiercely opposed by the Pope; and in any case voting was restricted to literate men over twenty-five who paid taxes. The 1913 general elections remained a man’s world, but the right of suffrage was extended to three new categories of men: those who were twenty-one or older and literate; illiterate men who’d reached the age of thirty; and all men who had served in the Italian army or navy. The trend seemed fortuitous. History was on the side of the universal franchise and representative government, or so many observers thought. They were mistaken – deeply mistaken.

Electoral democracy was about to be pushed into swamps teeming with political predators. For a start, no solution was found for the damage caused by imperial rivalries and fierce competition among armed nation-states. From around 370 BCE, during the era of assembly democracy, a remarkable cluster of citizen states in Arcadia, in the Peloponnese, formed themselves into the Arcadian League. Designed to bring peace to a region that had been dominated by Spartan power, the League resembled a simplified version of today’s European Union, in that it attempted to fashion a two-tiered confederacy bound by the rules of democratic negotiation and compromise. Run by a regional assembly called the myrioi, or ‘ Ten thousand’, it maintained a standing army based at its new capital, Megalopolis. It was the first-ever recorded experiment in cross-border democracy.

Nothing like that happened in the age of electoral democracy. Remarkably, during the 1920s, especially in trade union and social democratic and suffragette circles, there was talk for the first time of ‘international democracy’. But in its European heartlands, following a devastating world war, an influenza pandemic and the collapse of every continental empire, the language and practical hopes for cross-border democracy were swept aside. Electoral democracy found itself entrapped in a political inferno in which sovereign territorial states prevailed, locked horns for two decades (1918–1938) and brought on another catastrophic global war. As in the age of assembly democracy, the institutions of self-government were ultimately no match for the death-dealing calamities of war. Electoral democracy buckled, on a global scale.

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