Slavoj Zizek: Too Much democracy?

[anna balint]

[This piece was read at Columbia University, Monday 4/14/03]

 
 
TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY?

by Slavoj Zizek


"Democracy" is not merely the "power of, by, and for the people," it is not enough 
just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way 
automatically coincide) of the large majority determine the state decisions. 
Democracy - in the way this term is used today - concerns, above all, formal 
legalism: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of 
formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic 
game. "Democracy" means that, whatever electoral manipulation took place, every 
political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US 
presidential elections of 2000 were effectively "democratic": in spite of obvious 
electoral manipulations, and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple 
hundred of Florida voices will decide who will be the president, the Democratic 
candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the elections, Bill 
Clinton made an appropriate acerbic comment: "The American people have spoken; we 
just don't know what they said." This comment should be taken more seriously than it 
was meant: even now, we don't know it - and, maybe, because there was no substantial 
"message" behind the result at all. This is the sense in which one should render 
problematic democracy: why should the Left always and unconditionally respect the 
formal democratic "rules of the game"? Why should it not, in some circumstances, at 
least, put in question the legitimacy of the outcome of a formal democratic 
procedure?

Interestingly enough, there is at least one case in which formal democrats 
themselves (or, at least, a substantial part of them) would tolerate the suspension 
of democracy: what if the formally free elections are won by an anti-democratic 
party whose platform promises the abolition of formal democracy? (This did happen, 
among other places, in Algeria a couple of years ago, and the situation is similar 
in today's Pakistan.) In such a case, many a democrat would concede that the people 
was not yet "mature" enough to be allowed democracy, and that some kind of 
enlightened despotism whose aim will be to educate the majority into proper 
democrats is preferable.

This strategic suspension of democracy is reaching new heights today. The US were 
putting tremendous pressure on Turkey where, according to opinion polls, 94% of the 
people are opposed to allowing the US troops' presence for the war against Iraq - 
where is democracy here? Every old Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The Communist 
Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the Communists that they aim at undermining 
family, property, etc.: it is the capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is 
destroying the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today than 
in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population. In 
the same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as global defenders of 
democracy are effectively undermining it? In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the 
pro-war leaders are confronted with the brutal fact that their politics is out-of-
tune with the majority of their population, they take recourse to the commonplace 
wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does not follow" - and this from leaders 
otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...

When politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical terms, one can 
be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up some dark, threatening prospects. It is 
the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetoric in George W. Bush's recent public 
statements (of the "Does the world have the courage to act against Evil or not?" 
type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of the U.S. position - the function 
of ethical reference is here purely mystifying, merely serving to mask the true 
political stakes (which are not difficult to discern). In order to trace these 
stakes, recall how the geopolitic hardliners like to compare today's situation of 
the US to that of a patient on dialysis: the US ªway of life´ in all its aspects, 
including the ideological ones, crucially depends on the availability of a certain 
minimal amount of the oil supply, only one third of which can be provided by the US 
themselves. The US are thus like a patient on dialysis whose survival depends on the 
influx of oil mostly controlled by the Muslim population which is antagonistic to 
the US values and might - in short, a patient whose dialysis machine is controlled 
by a crazy doctor who hates the patient... The only way to avoid the permanent 
threat is to directly take control of the key oil suppliers in the Middle East. The 
gradual limitation of democracy is clearly perceptible in the attempts to "rethink" 
the present situation - one is, of course, for democracy and human rights, but one 
should "rethink" them, and a series of recent interventions in the public debate 
give a clear sense of the direction of this "rethinking." In The Future of Freedom, 
Fareed Zakaria, Bush's favored columnist, locates the threat to freedom in 
"overdoing democracy," i.e., in the rise of "illiberal democracy at home and 
abroad" (the books subtitle). He draws the lesson that democracy can only "catch 
on" in economically developed countries: if the developing countries are 
"prematurely democratized," the result is a populism which ends in economic 
catastrophe and political despotism - no wonder that today's economically most 
successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full 
democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. The immediate lessons for Iraq 
is clear and unambiguous: yes, the US should bring democracy to Iraq, but not impose 
it immediately - there should first be a period of five or so years in which a 
benevolently-authoritarian US dominated regime would create proper conditions for 
the effective functioning of democracy... We know now what bringing democracy means: 
it means that the US and its "willing partners" impose themselves as the ultimate 
judges who decide if a country is ripe for democracy.

As for the US themselves, Zakaria's diagnosis is that "America is increasingly 
embracing a simple-minded populism that values popularity and openness as the key 
measures of legitimacy. /.../ The result is a deep imbalance in the American system, 
more democracy but less liberty." The remedy is thus to counteract this excessive 
"democratization of democracy" (or "deMOREcracy") by delegating more power to 
impartial experts insulated from the democratic fray, like the independent central 
banks. Such a diagnosis cannot but provoke an ironic laughter: today, in the alleged 
"overdemocratization," the US and the UK started a war on Iraq against the will of 
the majority of their own populations, not to mention the international community. 
And are we not all the time witnessing the imposition of key decisions concerning 
global economy (trade agreements, etc.) by "impartial" bodies exempted from 
democratic control? Is the idea that, in our post-ideological era, economy should be 
de-politicized and run by experts, today not a commonplace shared by all 
participants? Even more fundamentally, is it not ridiculous to complain about 
"overdemocratization" in a time when the key economic and geopolitic decisions are 
as a rule not an issue in elections: for at least three decades, what Zakaria 
demands is already a fact. What we are effectively witnessing today is a split into 
ideological life-style issues where fierce debates rage and choices are solicited 
(abortion, gay marriages, etc.), and the basic economic policy which is presented as 
a depoliticized domain of expert decisions - the proliferation of "overdemocracy" 
with the "excesses" or affirmative action, the "culture of complaint," and the 
demands for financial and other restitutions of victims, is ultimately the front 
whose back side is the silent weaving of the economic logic.

The obverse of the same tendency to counteract the excesses of "deMOREcracy" is the 
open dismissal of any international body that would effectively control the conduct 
of a war - exemplary is here Kenneth Anderson's "Who Owns the Rules of War?" (in The 
New York Times Magazine, April 13 2003), whose subtitle make the point unambiguously 
clear: "The war in Iraq demands a rethinking of the international rules of conduct. 
The outcome could mean less power for neutral, well-meaning human rights groups and 
more for big-stick-wielding states. That would be a good thing." The main complaint 
of this essay is that, "for the past 20 years, the center of gravity in 
establishing, interpreting and shaping the law of war has gradually shifted away 
from the militaries of leading states and toward more activist human rights 
organizations;" this tendency is perceived as unbalanced, "unfair" towards the big 
military powers who intervene in other countries, and partial towards the attacked 
countries - with the clear conclusion that the militaries on the "big-stick-wielding 
states" should themselves determine the standards by which their actions will be 
judged. This conclusion is quite consistent with the US rejection of the authority 
of the Hague War Crimes tribunal over its citizens. Effectively, as they would have 
put it in Lord of the Rings, a new Dark Age is descending upon the human race. 

  
 
 
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