Conceptualizing Politics

4.   How is democracy possible? Does it have alternatives?
Apologists of democracy tend to believe that it is the best possible choice everywhere 
and at any time; some go as far as to mark it as an export good. Most people would 
indeed rejoice if democracy, the best or rather the least defective system of govern-
ment to date, were available under all possible conditions and regardless of the stage 
in evolution; lamentably, this is not the case, since democracy is itself the product of 
earthy, variable circumstances, and its assertion is futile if these are not considered – 
provided we understand democracy in the complex sense described so far rather than 
as majority rule in polls. We are now going to examine four of the framework condi-
tions (as different from the pre-conditions mentioned above) that are either indis-
pensable or highly favourable to the establishment and thriving of liberal democracy.
First. A degree of (moral) individualism in the cultural background of the society: 
important as groups and communities may be, the individual remains the ultimate 
bearer of rights and values, which are not at the disposal of the state or church or 
tribe or electoral majority. This is not to say that democracy is reserved to popula-
tions with a background in the Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment tradition, in 
which the individual and the person, two major philosophical notions, were first 
developed; but the philosophical and religious environment cannot be ignored as 
the factor that is hospitable or not to a decent version of democracy.
Individualism is conducive to democracy only if it is paired with belief in the 
basic equality of all individuals, irrespective of their income or status. Equality of 
men and women, or gender equality as it is now standard language to say, is fun-
damental in this sense, and remembering how long it took to implement it, or 
the equality among citizens of different skin colour as regards suffrage, shows how 
tortuous the road to a full-fledged democracy was, and in the many countries that 
treat women as B-citizens still is. It is also known that equality between sexes or 
ethnicities at the ballot box does not mean equal treatment in the family or the 
working place, let alone salary levels.

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96  How politics works
Second. Tolerance of other reasonable faiths or doctrines or interests, in other words 
pluralism or Weber’s politheism is indispensable. If you think that a person believing in 
another religion or an atheist or a member of a minority or the supporter of market 
economy vs. state intervention (or vice versa) is intellectually or morally less worth 
of being understood in her/his reasons and respected, you are not going to share 
a stable democracy with them. This requires, besides tolerance, an attitude towards 
compromise instead of fighting holy wars; the compromise may come from either the 
recognition of the partner’s understandable reasons or the consideration that stepping 
back today can preserve the conditions for tomorrow’s cooperation.
By ‘reasonable’ we understand doctrines not aimed at hatred and destruction, 
racial superiority, fanaticism – nor at the cancellation of democracy and funda-
mental rights once fanatics or anti-democratic populists have achieved a majority. 
This limit must be set for theoretical considerations and out of historical experi-
ence: the inability or unwillingness of Italian and German democratic politicians to 
put above all the fight against the rise of totalitarian movements in the 1920–30s 
remains an unforgettable lesson of history – though in general, history does not 
have lessons to teach, unlike what European scholars believed from the Renaissance 
to the Enlightenment.
19
In the democratic theory of the last century the relevance of pluralism has been 
most forcefully highlighted by the leading American political scientist Robert Dahl 
(1915–2014), who introduced polyarchy (
πολυαρχία/rule by many) to denote what 
a democratic society is like, in which diverse social forces and interests interact with 
each other in the framework of representative institutions.
As a meta-condition to these two framework conditions a certain degree of edu-
cation must be present among the public destined to go to the ballot box. Both the 
awareness of one’s own individual rights and the respect of plurality in the human 
and cultural environment require a literate general population and a political lead-
ership capable of arguing reasonably and not fanatically with each other. By a vote 
a citizen does not only express her or his will by making use of the equal share of 
political (electoral) power distributed in democracy, s/he assumes at the same time 
responsibility for the lot of all co-citizens and is required to do so in knowledge of 
the premises and consequences.
Third, both the scarcity of goods and the inequality in their distribution have to be 
moderate if people are to choose debate and struggle in a democracy as the dimen-
sion in which to assert their will to improve their condition. Poverty, both absolute 
and relative, but more forcefully the former, keeps people away from political par-
ticipation or drives them to fruitless rebellion. Further up in the social ladder, the 
flourishing of the middle class stabilises democratic regimes more than, say, the domi-
nance of the divide between haves (business people, high bureaucrats) and have-nots 
(unskilled working class, low-level clerks, small farmers). Rising inequality, as in the 
last decades and years at least in Western societies, is a blow to democracy’s credibility.
These points lead us back to the problem of economy and democracy. But 
before we deal with it in the last section of this chapter, the question must be raised: 
what if the framework conditions for democracy are not met?

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Government and democracy  97
It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer this question with a general rule, 
which would then be superseded by the specificity of any singular case; besides, 
this is not an operational treatise in the art of government. Nonetheless, we can 
perhaps say that the introduction of democratic institutions should not be hur-
ried where most of the conditions mentioned are absent, while a traditional non-
representative regime should not – as a transitional solution – be easily dismantled 
where the introduction of democratic mass mobilisation for parliamentary con-
flicts is likely to break up internal peace and to reinforce civil strife. For cases like 
these, John Rawls (1999) used in his work on international society the expres-
sion ‘decent hierarchical societies’ and saw them as possible members of interna-
tional society along with ‘free and democratic peoples’. Still another reason for 
not treating democracy as a salvific remedy to be spread around everywhere is 
that bestowing the label ‘democratic’ on a regime in which essential conditions 
are missing, just because it holds some kind of election, confers upon it an unde-
served legitimacy. There is hardly something as false and distorting as the equation  
‘election = democracy’.
We can push our questioning a little further and ask in a first step: is the picture 
of democracy painted here the only one available on the market of political ideas? 
Is there a non-Western form of democracy? We are not discussing here the merits 
of existing democracies, but the emergence or absence of an alternative model to 
Western democracies – which in their real contours lag often behind their own 
claims, in domestic as well as foreign policy.
The answer is negative for the time being. There are, around the world, different 
national versions of democracy, none however that raises the ambition to represent 
an alternative model. Such is not the democracy-cum-theocracy ruling Iran.
What seems to be up and coming is an alternative not within, but to democ-
racy. Leaving aside Fascism and Soviet communism, this was in the 1990s the 
vindication of ‘Asian values’ as set in the Bangkok Declaration of 1993: primacy 
of the community over individual human rights, respect for traditions and elders, 
preference for authoritarian government as well as for harmony over pluralism. 
Not even in East Asia, however, did these principles find widespread acceptance, 
thus remaining limited to countries applying them such as Singapore and Malay-
sia. In this century theorists from the People’s Republic of China have stressed 
the superiority of an anti-individualistic model of government, based on meri-
tocracy, technocratic  problem-solving and conflict-avoidance, over the Western 
model relying on the will of the citizens and the appreciation of diversity and 
mediated conflict. This latter element, they argue, is dysfunctional to efficiency 
in economy and administration; it would have made the huge and rapid growth 
impossible that lifted 400–500 million people from poverty in the post-Deng 
Hsiao Ping
20
 era – certainly a historical achievement. On the other hand it must 
be said that democratically regulated conflict would have helped China identify 
early enough roots of malaise such as pollution, corruption and unregulated 
urbanisation. To be an early warning system for social troubles is an additional 
virtue of democracy.

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98  How politics works
How far the Chinese self-appreciation is linked to China’s newly revived Con-
fucian tradition cannot be discussed here. This model is clearly opposed not only to 
democracy, but also to the idea of politics that is being developed in this book out 
of the belief that good and stable government has to provide not just the satisfac-
tion of the material needs of the population, but also its request of a balanced and 
freedom-enhancing governance. In any case, in order to gauge the robustness and 
attractiveness of the Chinese model, it is advisable to wait until its contradictions, 
to use a Hegelian-Marxian term loved by Chairman Mao, will have worked them-
selves out: I mean the contrast between the still authoritarian rule of the Com-
munist Party and the emerging middle class as well as the sub-optimal, not to say 
perverse side effects of (high-carbon) growth. The student and youth movement of 
1989 and the ensuing massacre on Tian An Men in Beijing at Deng’s order, along 
with the more recent sprawling of initiatives in the field of environmental, labour 
and human rights policies, bear witness to the resilience of democratic aspirations 
within the alleged Chinese alternative to democracy.
This notwithstanding, the cultural differences between different civilisations 
must be kept in mind when discussing the pretended universality of government 
models, even if it is wrong to ossify them into a ‘clash of civilisations’, as Harvard 
political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927–2008)
21
 and, even more, his followers 
did. It remains here an open question whether or not cultural roots make China and 
other South-East Asian countries impermeable to liberal democracy; but the belief 
in its universalizability that spread across the USA and to a lesser degree Europe 
in the second half of the twentieth century was not only naive, but arrogant, as it 
projected in an uncritical way a Western experience into the rest of the world. This 
attitude generated disasters, last but not least for the very credibility of democracy.
Furthermore, what possibly lies behind this simplistic approach to the universali-
zation of democracy is the confusion with human rights as defined in the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. These are best protected in a democracy, 
but this does not mean that they can live only in a full-fledged democracy, as they 
can be asserted and to a degree protected also in regimes that do not choose their 
leaders by democratic procedure. For both individual wellbeing and international 
peace, the protection of human rights is more crucial than how power is distributed 
and government structured. In a normative sense, being intransigent on human 
rights is universally justified, while the call for democracy everywhere and at any 
time is not.