A three-part review in the Journal of World History.

Just arrived: my review of three books concerning  democracy in world history.  The point I make is that all three touch on interesting facets of democratic history, but none of them are successful at looking at the big picture.  But truth be told two of the three aren't intended to deal with the big picture.  At least, not the big, big picture.

Journal of World History, 27:4, pp.692-8

Temma Kaplan, Democracy: A world history. Oxford University Press. 2015.

Armin Mattes, Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The transatlantic origins of American democracy and nationhood. University of Virginia Press. 2015.

Christopher Meckstroth, The Struggle for Democracy:Paradoxes of Progress and the Politics of Change.  Oxford University Press. 2015.

It is not to laugh

Karl Sharro in Politico says, "America, you look like an Arab country right now." Excerpts:

Dear America,

We have been watching the drama of your presidential elections with much interest and curiosity for some time now. It’s hard not to notice the many similarities between our own countries and yours. From fiery inauguration protests and bitter disputes about crowd size, to the intelligence service’s forays into politics and the rise of right-wing extremists, it appears that you are traveling very much in our direction—and at the same time, like us, becoming a curiosity for foreign correspondents trying to explain what’s happening in your region to the world. You might be distraught about where you are headed, but we aren’t! Perhaps this will be an opportunity to put our differences aside and recognize how similar we are.

Let’s start at the beginning. During the campaign we were surprised to learn of the influence that the head of the American mukhabarat (state security, i.e. your FBI) can wield over the election process, simply by choosing to pursue a certain line of investigation. As you may know, this has been a constant feature of our politics since independence. Our surprise turned to astonishment when we started to witness the blossoming feud between the then-president-elect and the American mukhabarat, another important feature of Arab politics.

On top of that, we started to hear reports of foreign meddling in your elections, which some say may have influenced the result. Of course, we are quite familiar with that situation, too, not least because of the efforts of your own administrations over the decades. Yet it came as a surprise to hear talk of “foreign hands” and “secret agendas” in a country like America. We sympathize.

...

The moment at which we felt real solidarity with the American people, though, was when we started hearing BBC reporters talking to your citizens with the patronizing tone they normally reserve for the Middle East. Correspondents were sent to far-flung corners of the United States to talk to farmers and factory workers to try to understand how they feel and to ask condescending questions. I’m from the British Broadcasting Corporation, are you familiar with the BBC? Where do you get your news from? Do you feel angry? Does religion play a role in how you are voting?. (The only thing missing were pictures of people with blue ink on their thumbs; please consider introducing that practice in the future.)

Some good news on the democracy front!

From Romania!

The largest anti-government crowds since the violent 1989 revolution that toppled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu succeeded Sunday in pressuring Romania’s new government to repeal a hastily adopted decree that would have eased penalties for official corruption.

The law, opposed by the influential Romanian Orthodox Church, would have weakened the country’s emerging anti-corruption effort, which has begun to make progress against a ruling culture accustomed to acting with impunity.

The government backed down Sunday following six days of street protests, but plans to introduce another version of the law in Parliament, where it would be debated and possibly passed.

The late-night introduction last week of an emergency ordinance< to turn a blind eye toward abuse in office by officials if the amount involved was less than about $48,500 provoked a lightning response from Romania’s civil society.

Nightly throngs in Bucharest and other major cities pit angry citizens who believe a modern, pro-European Romania must not condone corruption in high places against a moneyed elite that stands to benefit, if the law eventually passes.

Trump's rhetoric

Using Trump's words against him.

Heather Havrilesky is on to something. If you are entitled to vote in the USA, your opinion means something to your Representative and Senators. Instead of ranting at your friends who already agree with you, and at real Trump supporters, who never will, try this strategy:

In just two short weeks, President Donald Trump has destabilized the globe and quickly eroded even our most trusted alliances. This is exactly what his likely sponsor Putin wants, of course. This is exactly what his white supremacist advisor Bannon wants — he’s said so on the record (“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”). And if sowing fear in the populace offers the GOP an excuse to pump up military spending, so be it. Most Americans, however, prefer to sleep well at night. And if we’re going to take a clear, resounding stand against this unthinkable menace, we have to use his own tricks against him.

For instance:


Think about how you might discuss the head-spinningly bad judgment that led to his first and failed military operation in Yemen. Instead of talking about how all special ops are sticky but President Obama, in spite of his flaws, was incredibly careful about not putting American forces in harm’s way, try this: It was a disaster, a huge disaster, and totally preventable. Trump messed up. Completely incompetent. Or maybe you'd say: Those SEALs went in there, and got torn apart. Nightmare, never should’ve happened. Trump messed up, big league. Completely unstable. Of course, Democrats and progressives are incredibly afraid of using rhetoric of fear, like Trump and Bannon do. But isn’t fear our new reality? Aren’t we scared out of our minds over Trump, a man who has quickly demonstrated that he’s self-obsessed, unthinkably reckless, and utterly incapable of making even the faintest diplomatic sounds come out of his mouth? We can’t sit back and wait, because his mistakes are going to build on each other until they snowball into a global disaster.

Think about how you might discuss the head-spinningly bad judgment that led to his first and failed military operation in Yemen. Instead of talking about how all special ops are sticky but President Obama, in spite of his flaws, was incredibly careful about not putting American forces in harm’s way, try this:

It was a disaster, a huge disaster, and totally preventable. Trump messed up. Completely incompetent.

Not so long ago...

...it looked like the world was experiencing an impressive democratic wave, similar to but even more widespread than the one that took place around 1905.  Things don't look too good now.  It is discouraging how in the name of democracy the republican tradition of Turkey, never completely secure in regards to its democratic practice, is being throughly trashed.

Juan Cole has a rather detailed summary of recent developments. Read 'em and weep.

The Turkish government has detained 11 members of parliament from the leftist, feminist and pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP),including the party’s co-chairs. This step is intended to give Erdogan the majority in parliament he needs to make himself president for life, and to give Turkey (currently a parliamentary government) an imperial presidency on the Egyptian model. The pretext was that these MPs declined to testify in a witch-hunt inquiry. I.e., this is precisely McCarthyism.

Since the failed July 15 coup, the Turkish government of President Tayyip Erdogan has fired 110,000 people–10,000 of them just last weekend– from the police, judiciary and other government offices. He has had 12,000 professors fired. Some 15 private universities have been summarily shut down on the grounds that they have some Gulen link. If all of them were involved in the coup, that action might be understandable. But manifestly, all were not. It is true that the rightwing religious Gulen cult has seeded covert agents throughout the Turkish government and business sector. But surely there are hundreds of them, not 110,000. Among the authoritarian steps he has taken is the lifting of parliamentary immunity, setting the stage or his current coup d’etat.

Erdogan has also closed down 45 newspapers, 16 television channels and all told, 130 media organizations. Some were accused of having Gulen tendencies. Others are pro-Kurdish. Still others are secular. Many are just sometimes critical of Erdogan, which apparently is no longer going to be allowed.

Gender War

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo points out Donald Trump's greatest weekness:

There are numerous articles I've seen this morning talking about the emerging "gender war" in the 2016 general election, which now seems officially underway. 'Trump’s ‘woman’s card’ comment escalates the campaign’s gender wars', 'Trump escalates his gender war' are just a couple examples. There's plenty of misogyny in our society and our politics. Women face various campaign or perception hurdles men do not. Is this female candidate tough enough to be president? Is she too tough ("angry", "abrasive") and therefore not likable? Etc etc. But the simple fact is that if you are explicitly fighting a 'gender war' with a female candidate, you're already losing and probably losing badly, as Tierney Sneed's article this morning confirms in the polling numbers.

It comes down to a simple issue of the 19th Amendment: women can vote! And in addition to being able to vote, there are slightly more women than men and they actually vote a bit more. But it really comes down to: women can vote!

In electoral terms, the dynamics of gender and race are different in various ways. But they're pretty similar in this way. If you are thematically invoking racial or gender stereotypes without doing so openly or explicitly you can mobilize societal prejudice in your favor - what we sometimes generically call 'dog-whistling'. But if you're attacking your opponent as a women - and yes, attacking her as only doing well because she's a woman or 'playing the woman card' - that's not a gender war. It's a gender massacre and you're the one being massacred.

Reading list for next year?

Much more substantial than my own collection of good posts for the past year is Phil Paine's annotated list of books that inspired him this year. There is no point in duplicating his post; instead I will just include one fairly long excerpt and hope that you will look for the rest at his website. 

… what does this have to do with rebel­lions in Canada? Well, the failed rebel­lions had a trans­form­ing impact on two young men who were both ardent demo­c­ra­tic reform­ers, Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine in Lower Canada, and Robert Bald­win in Upper Canada. Both men had come to the con­clu­sion that the rebel­lions led by fire­brands like Louis-Joseph Pap­ineau and William Lyon Macken­zie, which they had ini­tially sup­ported, had been more destruc­tive than pro­duc­tive of reform, and that a more ratio­nal strat­egy was required. Lafontaine still had faith in the demands made by the Patri­otes in the rebel­lion: demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment by uni­ver­sal male suf­frage, with prop­erty qual­i­fi­ca­tions abol­ished; equal­ity of Eng­lish and French as legal and gov­ern­ing lan­guages; trial by jury in all crim­i­nal and most civil cases; abo­li­tion of the death penalty for all crimes except first degree mur­der; equal rights for all abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples “the same as any other cit­i­zen”; guar­an­tees of free­dom of speech and the press; free­dom of reli­gion and total sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State; abo­li­tion of seigneural tenure and rem­nant “feu­dal” prac­tices; a free mar­ket in land; pub­lic edu­ca­tion. It should be noted that these demands, made in 1837, went much fur­ther in the direc­tion of mod­ern democ­racy than any­thing con­tem­plated else­where. But the rebel­lions had only brought about a tri­umphant Con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion, with mas­sive abuses of civil rights.

In 1841, the two colonies were con­sol­i­dated, after this was urged by the inves­ti­gat­ing emis­sary from Britain, Lord Durham. There would be an elected assem­bly for the new “United Canada”, but the inten­tion was to dilute the power of the French-speaking major­ity in Lower Canada, with a long-term goal of “assim­i­lat­ing” French Cana­di­ans into obliv­ion. While there were some con­sti­tional gains, the assem­bly hav­ing more power on money bills than before, there were obvi­ous losses. Lower Canada had actu­ally rejoiced in a degree of women’s suf­frage: women who met the prop­erty qual­i­fi­ca­tions had the vote, and these qual­i­fi­ca­tions were low enough that they applied to a sub­stan­tial num­ber of women. There was, in fact, noth­ing like it in any other place in the world. In one con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ment I ran across, it is casu­ally men­tioned to a vis­i­tor that “in our coun­try, women are the polit­i­cal equals of men.” This female suf­frage would be abol­ished by the new United Canada. In Upper Canada, the auto­cratic power of the Fam­ily Com­pact was strength­ened, and reform stymied. Lafontaine and Bald­win, both ardent democ­rats, looked upon the ash-heap left by the rebel­lions and tried to think out a strat­egy to bring the reform move­ment back to life.

 At this point, Lafontaine gave a speech in his home rid­ing of Ter­re­bonne, where he was run­ning for the new par­lia­ment. He told the crowd that the best strat­egy was not to boy­cott the new regime, as many advo­cated, but to embrace it, use all the polit­i­cal power they could muster, and win reforms step by step. Foil the plans to assim­i­late French Canada by becom­ing the colony’s most adept par­lia­men­tar­i­ans. Win through grit and deter­mi­na­tion what the rebels had failed to win with arms. Lafontaine would eas­ily have been elected to his rid­ing, but Con­ser­v­a­tive hooli­gans, beat­ing and intim­i­dat­ing vot­ers, kept him out of office.

News of these events reached Robert Bald­win in Upper Canada. The young man, whose equally young wife had just died of ill­ness, had with­drawn into a twi­light of grief. His father, also a life-long reformer, told him he must find a new strat­egy for reform, and pur­sue it, or wal­low use­lessly in self-pity. He sug­gested that Lafontaine’s speech held the key. The elder Bald­win resigned from his seat in the Assem­bly, forc­ing a bi-election in the rid­ing of New­mar­ket. Robert Bald­win wrote to Lafontaine, invit­ing him to come to Upper Canada and run as a Reform can­di­date in New­mar­ket. This was the first step in what turned out to be a life-long col­lab­o­ra­tion and inti­mate friend­ship. Bald­win was even­tu­ally to learn French, and send his daugh­ters to be edu­cated in Lower Cana­dian schools. Lafontaine, unwill­ingly child­less, lived with the Bald­wins in New­mar­ket and came to think of them as fam­ily. …
 Bald­win and Lafontaine are far more impor­tant char­ac­ters than Cana­dian his­tory books would indi­cate. In their writ­ings and cor­re­spon­dence, you see the emer­gence of a set of ideas that were unprece­dented. Cana­dian his­to­ri­ans are mostly inter­ested in the fact that their activism even­tu­ally led to the cre­ation of the Cana­dian Con­fed­er­a­tion in 1867, but do not notice the pro­found orig­i­nal­ity of their polit­i­cal think­ing. At the time, most polit­i­cal reform and rad­i­cal­ism was built on the premises of roman­tic nation­al­ism. It was taken for granted that the nation was the nat­ural unit of pol­i­tics, and even where polit­i­cal move­ments envi­sioned demo­c­ra­tic gov­er­nance, this was seen as sec­ondary to the mys­ti­cism of the nation as a col­lec­tive agency. The “nation” embod­ied bio­log­i­cal descent, and required “unity” — con­for­mity of lan­guage, faith, and cus­tom. No Euro­pean intel­lec­tual of the period, that I can find, val­ued diver­sity or felt that it was a good thing to com­bine dif­fer­ent lan­guages, faiths, or eth­nic­i­ties into the same polity. It was seen as a defect that might have to be tol­er­ated, but not as some­thing of pos­i­tive value. Pro­mot­ers of empires con­sid­ered diver­sity the weak­ness of their realms. Pro­mot­ers of national inde­pen­dence envi­sioned their “lib­er­ated” states as cul­tur­ally uni­form units. Lafontaine and Bald­win had come to the oppo­site con­clu­sion, putting them into a dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory from other reform­ers of the era. They explic­itly advo­cated a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, held together by a com­mit­ment to share a polit­i­cal com­mu­nity with­out con­for­mity. In their view, democ­racy and the rule of law formed an abstact frame­work of val­ues that could allow free­dom to pros­per with­out need­ing any of the tra­di­tional defin­ing fea­tures of nation­hood. As they saw it, and stated explic­itly, this diver­sity con­sti­tuted a strength, not a weak­ness, just as they had found in their per­sonal friend­ship. But this was not some­thing that any sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of intel­lec­tu­als were advo­cat­ing. … 

Europe would go on to more extreme and dis­as­trous man­i­fes­ta­tions of Uni­for­mi­tar­i­an­ism. The colo­nial empires of Britain, France, Spain, Por­tu­gal and Ger­many left no doubt that there was to be noth­ing equal about the eth­nic­i­ties, lan­guages and cus­toms within them. The United States strug­gled with a schiz­o­phrenic her­itage, the implied val­ues of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion in con­stant con­flict with the urge to cre­ate a uni­for­mi­tar­ian state, immi­grants under con­stant pres­sure to “melt” into con­for­mity. But in Canada, the ideas of Bald­win and Lafontaine became the main­stream shap­ing the country’s des­tiny. Con­fed­er­a­tion in 1867 was clearly founded on them. … When inter­viewed while wel­com­ing Syr­ian refugees to Canada, a few weeks ago, Prime Min­is­ter Justin Trudeau pretty much stated them as if they were obvi­ous. But they are by no means obvi­ous to most of the world, or there would be no refugees to wel­come. So read­ing Lafontaine and Bald­win, see­ing these ideas being born, was emo­tion­ally, as well as intel­lec­tu­ally satisfying.

Image: Lafontaine and Baldwin

  

Some of the flavor of The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz

Here is the author summarizing a northern Republican looking back over the 1850s from just before the Civil War.

(Page 705):

As Seward remarked, the events of the mid-1850s threw into sharp relief how two different democracies, shaped by slavery, had arisen within the same nation. Although some southern franchises and systems representation were, in fact, more equal than others, slaveholders, normally wealthy slaveholders, held a commanding power in the courts and legislatures throughout the South. By contrast, power was more dispersed and most of the North, where ordinary farmers and even wage earners not only voted but also held state offices. Southern politics could brook no criticism of slavery for fear of destabilizing the system; northerners were free to write and say whatever they wanted to about any political subject. In Kansas, upholders of southern- style popular sovereignty had flagrantly rigged elections, violently seized control of polling places, and turned democracy into a mockery – and had gained federal sanction from a doughface Democrat bullied into compliance by Slave Power congressmen and cabinet members. When an elected northern Republican had the temerity to call the bullies to account, one of them cut him down and beat him mercilessly on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Social revolution in Egypt?

According to Foreign Policy, the generation that revolted against Mubarak hasn't given up on demanding personal liberty.

Corruption and investigative journalism in Costa Rica

Another detailed analysis from Foreign Policy:

In the fall of 2003 the story made its way to journalists at La Nación, the leading national newspaper in the Central American republic of Costa Rica. The reporters at the paper’s investigative unit pricked up their ears as soon as the disgruntled real estate agent spoke the name of her exasperating client: Eliseo Vargas, the man in charge of the country’s vaunted national health care agency. “We didn’t really know what she had,” recalls reporter Ernesto Rivera. “She was just angry she didn’t get her commission. She knew who the guy was but she didn’t know why he was acting that way.”

Rivera and his colleagues smelled a story. Yet as the journalists started digging into the tale of Vargas’s peculiar living arrangements, it never occurred to them that they were about to unravel a scandal that would upend their nation’s sedate political establishment. In the early 2000s, Costa Rica enjoyed a long-established reputation as the most prosperous and well-managed country in its region. But by the time the La Nación reporters were done, they had uncovered a wide-ranging web of corruption that extended through the political and business elite.

Along the way they derailed the careers of three ex-presidents, sending two of them to jail; prompted far-reaching legal reform; and jolted a major blow to a cozy political system that had, until then, been dominated by two main parties. Alejandro Urbina, the paper’s editor-in-chief at the time, puts it this way: “The current president wouldn’t be the president if we hadn’t published these stories.”

The three journalists who made up La Nación’s investigative unit — Giannina Segnini, Mauricio Hererra, and Rivera — deployed the full arsenal of traditional reporting techniques as they pursued the story. But the sheer magnitude of the financial and political information they unearthed prompted them to rely increasingly on computerized tools to rummage through databases that revealed unexpected connections. While tips from well-informed sources like the disgruntled real estate agent are vital, says Segnini, human sources also have limitations: “You can’t visit 160,000 people,” she notes. “But you can easily interrogate 160,000 records.”

Glad to see a positive story on CR.

The end of the Egyptian revolution -- so far

An excerpt from a recent book,Thanassis Cambanis’s Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story:

A few days after the end of Ramadan, on August 14, the police and army closed in again on Rabaa Square. For days, el-Sisi’s government had talked of the need to clear the Brotherhood protests once and for all. The sun had not yet risen when officers drove directly into the sit-in with armored bulldozers and began firing into the crowd with tear gas, birdshot, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. The death toll was staggering and indiscriminate: children, teenage boys and girls, and the elderly fell alongside the adult men trying to protect the sit-in with their futile wooden clubs. The military had shown before that it knew how to clear a protest without killing; this time it put the police in the forefront and pursued tactics that maximized the death toll. It wanted more than to merely end the Rabaa sit-in, the final vestige of the Brotherhood’s elec­toral success; it wanted vengeance and to break the Brotherhood.

Moaz’s father pleaded with him to come home. At every major protest or massacre, Moaz had worked in the clinic treating wounded protest­ers. His political ventures didn’t always work out, but his expertise in the combat-like conditions of protest hospitals was indisputable. He had no intention of staying away from Rabaa while hundreds of people were being gunned down.

“You weren’t killed on January 25,” his father said. “You will be killed today.”

“We are trying to solve problems,” Moaz said. “You should support me.”

Rabaa was awash in blood. Tanks blocked all the main thoroughfares, but people could escape through small alleys. At the same time, the army swept through the other, smaller Muslim Brotherhood sit-in at Nahda Square on the other side of the Nile. Pro-Sisi plainclothes thugs, work­ing with the police, erected checkpoints all over the city to harass anyone who looked like a Brotherhood supporter. Scattered gunshots echoed all over Cairo, even far from Rabaa and Nahda Squares.

In the wake of these massacres, Moaz felt his last hope slip away. He railed aloud against its perpetrators. “What do you think the families of the people you killed will do? Don’t you think they will kill your families? You are writing your own future. No matter how many times you hit the people, it won’t solve the problem.”

People screamed and ran away from the gas and bullets. Some took refuge in the nearby apartment buildings, hiding in garages. Moaz loaded the wounded into his car and ferried them to hospitals. One man bled to death in Moaz’s backseat. Around Rabaa Square, it seemed like ev­erything was on fire, including the field hospital. Soldiers weren’t let­ting anyone pass, even medical volunteers like Moaz. Almost twenty-four hours after they began, soldiers and police were still shooting stragglers in Rabaa. Exhausted, Moaz was crying as he drove. He could smell blood on the street. He tried to return once more to the center of Rabaa, where he knew a wounded man was trapped in a building that had once served as the sit-in’s clinic. So far, he had successfully passed through checkpoints with his pharmacist ID. A soldier pointed his rifle at Moaz and forced him from his car.

“What are you doing in a military area?”

“I am a pharmacist,” Moaz told his interrogator. “My job is to help people.”

“Go to the Iman Mosque,” the officer said. “That’s where all bodies are. We will let you pass this time, but if you appear again, there’s no say­ing what might happen to you.”

“But there’s a man in a building in Rabaa, and he has phoned me for help,” Moaz pleaded.

“No one here is alive,” the officer snapped. “Everyone is dead. If any­one is still alive, he will be dead within an hour.”

Moaz gave up and joined the effort in the Iman Mosque to identify the hundreds of corpses. The military soon attacked even there, arrest­ing the family members who had come to claim their dead. The military was sending a clear message: it would do anything, even disrespect the most basic Islamic funeral rites, to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood. The government stopped counting the dead after the number exceeded seven hundred. The Brothers estimated that more than a thousand people were killed that day, including many children of senior Brotherhood leaders, apparently singled out by snipers. Many leaders were caught, but a few escaped the country or found hiding places. From there they delivered menacing threats. Now, they vowed, Egypt would burn.

The massacre at Rabaa would be the pivotal litmus test that separated the masses praising el-Sisi from the small community of Egyptians who decried any abuse of human beings. Some activists, such as Ahmed Maher from the April 6 Movement, had been relatively quiet about the mili­tary’s return to power in July but reacted swiftly to condemn the crime of Rabaa. Mohamed ElBaradei belatedly developed a conscience. In the wake of the violence at Rabaa, he resigned from the post of vice president that he had held for just a month. For his act of decency, ElBaradei was investigated for the criminal offense of “breaching the national trust.” In­stead of staying to challenge the increasingly fascist political atmosphere, ElBaradei chose exile. He had taken a lead role as a political enabler of el-Sisi’s rise, but he was not alone. The Social Democratic Party, the cho­sen home for many of the secular revolutionaries, wholeheartedly cast its lot with the military. Dr. Mohamed Aboul-Ghar, the leader of the Social Democrats, busily defended the massacre on television as a neces­sary evil. Ziad Bahaa el-Din, considered one of the smartest members of the party, had accepted a position as deputy prime minister in the transi­tional government and used his position to reassure foreign governments and Egyptian liberals that there was no reason to fear the military men in charge. These were the most liberal members of the mainstream political elite; their embrace of the coup and massacres paved the way for public opinion to follow.

Like many secular or liberal Egyptians, Basem was willing to blame the Brotherhood for the massacre in which so many of its members per­ished, especially when in the aftermath the Brotherhood appeared to en­dorse a jihadist insurgency in retribution. “Everyone now knows that the Brotherhood is a terrorist organization,” Basem said. “There can be no more talk about reconciliation.”

The American Civil War as a global struggle

Excerpted “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War”by Don H. Doyle in a recent Salon:

While the war was being fought on the battlefields of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, another contest was waged overseas. The Confederacy sought international recognition and alliances to secure independence, and the Union was determined not to let that happen. “No battle, not Gettysburg, not the Wilderness,” one historian claimed, “was more important than the contest waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion.” The history of Civil War diplomacy—that is, the formal negotiations among governments and the strategies surrounding them—has been told and told well. This book turns to the less familiar forum of public opinion, which was filled with clamorous debate for four years. It took place in print (in newspapers, pamphlets, and books) as well as oratory (in meeting halls, pubs, lodges, union halls, and parliaments). Wherever free speech was stifled, as it was in France, the debate continued over private dinner tables and at cafés. Whatever one’s views, there was general agreement that the American question mattered greatly to the world and to the future.

The Union and Confederacy each hired special agents, who usually operated under cover of some kind. They were typically veteran journalists and political operators whose job it was, as one of them deftly put it, to give “a right direction to public sentiment” and correct “erroneous” reports that favored the other side. Some bribed editors and hired journalists, while others published their own pamphlets, books, and even newspapers. Few were above planting rumors or circulating damaging stories, and some of what they produced can only be described as propaganda and misinformation. But that was only part of the story of what was more often a sophisticated appeal to ideology and values.

In today’s parlance the diplomatic duel that took place during America’s Civil War can be understood as a contest of smart power, the adroit combination of hard-power coercion with soft-power appeals to basic values. Hard-power diplomacy typically involves the threat or use of military force, but can also include economic coercion (blockades, embargoes) and inducements (low tariffs, commercial monopolies). The employment of soft power involves persuasion and information, but the underlying strategy is to appeal to the fundamental values and interests of the foreign country, to demonstrate that the two countries in question share common aspirations. Soft power resides in “the power of attraction,” not in crude propagandizing.

The Union won and the South lost this diplomatic duel abroad not because the Union possessed an obviously more appealing message. To the contrary, at the outset many foreigners found the South’s narrative of valiant rebellion against the North’s oppressive central government far more attractive. Slavery had never disqualified a nation from acceptance into the family of nations. The United States and most European powers had at some point sanctioned slavery with no loss of status under international law. Confederate emissaries abroad were nonetheless instructed to avoid discus.sion of slavery as the motive for secession, and they happily pointed to Lincoln’s own promises to protect slavery in the Southern states as proof that this was not the issue. Southern diplomats crafted an appeal that evoked widely admired liberal principles of self-government and free trade. The conflict, they told the world, was one arising naturally between industrial and agrarian societies, not freedom and slavery. The industrial North wanted high protective tariffs, while the agrarian South wanted free trade with Eur. Southern leaders had rehearsed their foreign policy for years, and they began their rebellion fully confident that Europe would bow to “King Cotton.” “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?” South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond asked in 1858. “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.

The American crisis not only heartened the enemies of democracy; it also emboldened them to invade the Western Hemisphere, to topple governments, install European monarchs, and reclaim lost American empires. Suddenly, the Civil War rendered the Monroe Doctrine toothless. Republican regimes in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and, not least, the United States were suddenly vulnerable to imperialist aggression, including nefarious plots to install European princes and recolonize their lands.

The most audacious of European schemes was Napoleon III’s Grand Design for  Latin Catholic empire. It began with an allied invasion of Mexico late in 1861 and led to the installation of the Hapsburg archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico in 1864. The Grand Design went far beyond Mexico to envision the unification of the “Latin race” in America and Europe, under the auspices of the French, and to reverse the advances of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and egalitarian democracy in the Western Hemisphere.As its bid to win support in Britain foundered, some thought due to popular antislavery sentiment, the Confederacy sought to align itself with Napoleon III by adopting a Latin strategy that would make common cause with the French and the Catholic Church against the “Puritan fanatics” of the North. The Confederacy sent emissaries to the vatican, appealing to Pope Pius IX, the archenemy of republicanism, to bless their “holy war” against the “infidels” of the North. They also contrasted the North’s “mobocracy” to the traditions of patrician rule among the South’s European-style gentry. Southerners even encouraged Europeans to think the Confederacy might prefer a monarchical form of government, perhaps under a European prince. on several occasions Southern leaders proposed some kind of permanent league with, or protectorate under, France, Britain, or Spain. All this portended far more than mere separation under a new flag.

Southerners also took pains to emphasize they were sympathetic with European designs to restore monarchy and Catholic authority in Latin America. Confederate diplomats were instructed to repudiate the South’s earlier imperialist ambitions for a tropical empire in Latin America. They assured Europeans that with an independent South, expansion would no longer be necessary.

... At the end of the war, Eugène Pelletan, a leading French republican, expressed eloquently what the American question had meant to the world: “America is not only America, one place or one race more on the map, it is yet and especially the model school of liberty. If against all possibility it had perished, with it would fall a great experiment."

Some readers may feel such unqualified admiration of America was undeserved. The Union, everyone knows, had been painfully slow to embrace emancipation, and America’s deeply ingrained racial prejudice would long outlast slavery. These were only some of the egregious flaws in the nation foreign admirers hailed as the Great Republic.

Yet we miss something vitally important if we view Pelletan and other foreigners who saw America as the vanguard of hope as naive or misguided. Foreign admirers typically regarded the United States not as some exceptional city upon a hill, but as exactly the opposite: an imperfect but viable model of society based on universal principles of natural rights and theories of government that originated in Europe but had thus far failed to succeed there. In the 1860s they were horrified to see government of the people seriously imperiled in the one place it had achieved its most enduring success. Abraham Lincoln was hardly boasting when he referred to America as the “last best hope of earth.” His was a forlorn plea to defend America’s—and the world’s—experiment in popular government.

In the mid-nineteenth century, it appeared to many that the world was moving away from democracy and equality toward repressive govern- ment and the expansion of slavery. Far from being pushed off the world’s stage by human progress, slavery, aristocratic rule, and imperialism seemed to be finding new life and aggressive new defenders. The Confederate South had no intention of putting slavery on the road to extinction; its very purpose in breaking away was to extend and perpetuate slavery— forever, according to its constitution. Had the Confederacy succeeded, it would have meant a new birth of slavery, rather than freedom, possibly throughout the Americas, and it would have been a serious blow to the experiment in egalitarian democracy throughout the Atlantic world.

Long after the defeat of the Confederacy, enemies of liberal, egalitarian society had every reason to look back on America’s Civil War with regret. In 1933, during an after-dinner discussion in Munich, Adolf Hitler bemoaned the South’s defeat in chilling terms: “The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.” Hitler’s reading of America’s history might have been grotesquely flawed, but his outburst echoed the same refrains against the evils of “extreme democracy” and “fanatical egalitarianism” heard in the 1860s.

Believing in the Arab Spring -- "At this point it’s either the Arab Spring or no Arabs."

Iyad el-Baghdadi in Foreign Policy:

Mariam looked up at me. I’ll never forget what she said next. It was as if she poured all of her frustration, all of her betrayal, all of her pain, into this one question: 

“Do you mean to tell me you still believe? After all of this, you still believe in an Arab Spring?”

I’ll never forget how she said that. I said, “Yes.” And she looked at me like I was crazy. I never got to explain. I’ll try to do so now.

There are three reasons why I maintain my confidence despite all the catastrophes. The first reason is that 2011 happened. It wasnot a dream. It was not an illusion. Millions of young Arabs really did take to the streets demanding liberty, and dignity, and justice. Something green and fresh and beautiful appeared and captured the world’s imagination. It wasn’t a mirage. We really do exist.

We’re not a minority, either. We only appear to be a minority because we’re not organized; we’re not on the menu. When the only options presented are black or white, it does not mean that red or green or blue are a minority. When the only options presented are religious authoritarianism or nationalistic fascism, it does not mean that a third option doesn’t exist. It’s just not on the menu. Our historical responsibility right now is to put ourselves on the menu.

The second reason I am confident is that the friendships that arose since 2011 cannot be unmade. The online scene isn’t “virtual,” ladies and gentlemen. No, it’s all too real. The ideas are real, the friendships are real. Many of us activists have never met face to face — but we talk almost daily about things we care very deeply about. We’re a family. These friendships are forever. Martin Luther King once said, “Those who want peace must organize as effectively as those who want war.” I’m going to adapt this gem as follows: “Those who want liberty must organize as effectively as those who want tyranny.” These online friendships can form the nucleus for an intellectual movement as we work together on campaigns, projects, and books.

The third, and perhaps most important reason why I remain confident, is that the old order, the Arab ancien regime, has, for all its cruelty and deep pockets, no vision or hope to offer beyond sectarianism, demagoguery, and jingoism. It lives on borrowed time supported by mass hysteria; it’s unsustainable. It will bring no stability or growth.

More importantly, they have a dirty little secret. They’re afraid of us. They’re not afraid of those with guns; after all, they have bigger guns. But they’re afraid of those with ideas.

John Keane, Antarctica, and sovereignty

An interesting but in some respects puzzling article, Antarctica: Notes on the Fate of Sovereignty,

 came across my screen this morning. It is by John Keane, author of The Life and Death of Democracy and other works on the world history of democracy.

The recent article appeared in The Conversation and is not necessarily all that clear to the reader new to his thought. In his magnum opus, Keane made the interesting point that what we generally call democracy now is the 19th century version of that practice, in which sovereignty is exercised by elected representatives. Keen believed that this type of democracy is not sufficient for the conditions of either the 20th or 21st century. He convinced me, largely because looking at the United States with its 18th-century Constitution and Canada with its 19th century parliamentary structures, we see that in neither case do the common people have a meaningful role in government, once the very rich and very influential have had a chance to undermine these earlier approximations of democracy. Democratic governments, 19th-century style, exercise sovereignty, absolute power justified by ancient beliefs that are deeply undemocratic, even when exercised by a prime minister or cabinet instead of a monarch.

Keane's prescription for greater democracy in modern times requires in his phrase "monitory democracy," institutions that monitor other institutions and investigate and correct problems that arise from the natural oligarchical inertia of human societies.

If you have this background, this new article makes a lot more sense.

Keane believes that Antarctica may avoid the trap of sovereign government, since international agreements that created the institutions of Antarctica are not based on  sovereignty. Keane argues – unfortunately without much in the way of concrete examples – that a network of monitoring institutions have grown up in Antarctica, and this may be an example for everybody else in times to come.

Fascinating excerpts from the article:

The examples remind us that in matters concerning Antarctica and its future, sovereignty remains a keyword. But what exactly does the word mean? What can we say about its genealogy? Has the settlement of Antarctica altered, or at least compounded, its range of meanings? Has Antarctica begun to loosen the grip of sovereignty on our political imaginations?

Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de La République (first published 1576)

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Straightforward replies to these questions are difficult, but we can safely say the category of sovereignty is fundamentally a political concept. It therefore needs to be handled with care. Its theological origins are worth noting. So, too, are its ‘meme’ qualities, its propensity for replication and mutation and time-space variation (an example is the early modern doctrine of popular sovereignty, which is an earthly form of the originally Christian theological doctrine of God as the singular source of political authority). It’s worth remembering as well that the sovereignty principle has triggered bitter controversies about both its meaning and legitimacy. What is nevertheless striking is the resilience of the early modern European doctrine of sovereignty, whose earliest definitions are traceable to such political writers as Jean Bodin, De la république (book 1, chapter 9): ‘All the characteristics of sovereignty are contained in this, to have power to give laws to each and everyone of his subjects, and to receive none.’

This way of political reasoning, repeated by Thomas Hobbes and a thousand subsequent writers, was arguably bound up (Lauren Benton’s A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 points out) with the expansion of European empires through webs of corridors and enclaves, such as sea lanes, rivers, and roads connecting island bases, missions, trading posts, towns and garrisons. The establishment of sovereignty over foreign lands, we can say, took place not merely by force of arms. It also happened through imperial acts of legal possession against the claims of rivals. In addition to legal talk of sovereignty, various other techniques were used to establish sovereign claims: the planting of flags and crosses; the establishment of settlements; the drafting of maps and travel itineraries that eased officials' navigation within distant realms; and the creation of new governing structures that served as carriers of the sovereignty imaginary.

It was within this historical context that William Blackstone’s well-known and influential Commentaries on the Laws of England(1765-1770; book 1, introduction, section 2) forcefully presented a version of the sovereignty principle. ‘How the several forms of government we now see in the world at first actually began, is matter of great uncertainty, and has occasioned infinite disputes’, he wrote. ‘However they began, or by what right soever they subsist, there is and must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summi imperii or the rights of sovereignty, reside.’

Such thinking, the belief that ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, owed at least some of its force to its theological bent, or so argued the Weimar jurist and political thinker Carl Schmitt. ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’, he wrote in Political Theology, so that ‘the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver…The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’. In other words, sovereignty is a word bound up with disagreement, mounting tensions, political outbursts, power struggles that may well end in the surprise declaration of a state of emergency (what Schmitt called the Ausnahmezustand). The principle of sovereignty is bellicose. It supposes the possibility and desirability of unlimited power, omnipotence. Sovereignty can’t be shared. It is indivisible. It comes alive at the moment when those who control state institutions decide arbitrarily for others what is to be done, and see that it is done, if necessary by robbing their opponents of their liberties, properties, livelihoods and lives.

...

Antarctica could be said to be a strange new form of slow democracy. By that I am not referring to the familiar point (once attributed to Thomas Carlyle, the lover of noble talent, no great friend of democracy, and recently repeated by David Runciman), that democracy is cumbersome, slow and inefficient, but in due time the voice of the people will be heard, and their latent wisdom will prevail, through good leadership. I rather have in mind something more complicated, more enigmatic and more pragmatic: under Antarctic conditions, when questions arise concerning who gets what, when and how, and who represents whom, matters are typically subject to open deliberation and decided through what are called decisions, measures and resolutions - each following their own practical rule-bound logic, and each subject to a unanimity rule. Decisions bear upon internal organisational matters of the ATCM. Resolutions are not legally binding on the contracting parties; they are hortatory texts, directed beyond their ranks to include various interested parties. Then there are measures, which are legally binding once they have been approved by all the Consultative Parties.
Decisions, resolutions and measures are all encased within multilateral legal networks that highlight the passing away of the fiction of the legal sovereignty of territorial states. Yes, talk of sovereignty survives. Perhaps it is on the increase, often sustained by bizarre definitions (the Argentinaclaim, for instance, is based on such ragbag criteria as ‘historical heritage coming from Spain’, former ‘seal-hunting activities’, ‘installation and management of lighthouses’, scientific and military operations and the ‘rescue’ of two Englishmen from misfortune). ...Despite these anomalies, the new Antarctic reality has moved beyond the old world of sovereignty. The polycentric governing institutions of the continent are proving durable, in no small measure because they come clothed in law. Subject to legalisation through forms of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ (erga omnes) legal arrangements, these institutions regularly function as brakes on attempts by states to exercise power arbitrarily, without public scrutiny, in the old sovereignty ways.
If Antarctica is a law-abiding post-sovereign polity comprising a salmagundi of clumsy power-sharing institutions, themselves designed to produce and administer decisions subject to the exercise of voting rights, then matters are made even more complicated, conceptually speaking, by the fact that its governing instruments are not tied in any simple sense to territory. Entangled in world-wide webs of interdependence that are oiled by space- and time-shrinking flows of communication, Antarctic politics does not stand in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Spill-over effects, arbitrage pressures and butterfly effects are common. The upshot is that things that happen politically within and around the continent sometimes have effects elsewhere, in far-away locations. The reverse also commonly happens: events, information flows, declarations and deals that happen in far-off places can and do touch off immediate consequences in Antarctica.
...
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Sovereignty and the Domination of NatureIt is not often noted that Antarctica has dispensed with the formal imagery of sovereignty. It’s true there is an emblem of the Antarctic Treaty, featuring a white continent marked by lines of latitude and longitude; and there’s a richly contested variety of both serious and satirical cartographic representations, ranging from the continent wrapped in national flags, including the ensign of the short-lived Nazi protectorate of Neuschwabenland, to the multi-coloured LGBT flag map of Antarctica. Yet the fact is that Antarctica has no official flag, no national anthem or currency or coat of arms. Something much more historically unusual and of deeper long-term significance is also at work: a novelty that brings us back, full-circle, to the lead theme of the Antarctopia pavilion.
Put simply, Antarctica is the first continent to rid itself of the bestial metaphors in which the doctrine of sovereignty always came wrapped. The point is typically ignored by journalists, diplomats and scholars alike. Expressed in terse terms, sovereignty always had a feral snarl. The big and pompous modern European idea of sovereignty typically supposed that a people living within a territory would otherwise quarrel and be violent, and tear one another to bits, unless governed, above all in moments of exception, by a sharp-edged form of armed power that is unified, unconditional and indivisible.
The whole idea of state sovereignty supped with the devilish image of the sovereign ruler pitted against the wild animal. Sovereign are those rulers who manage to separate themselves from, and rise above, the world of nature, which was typically thought of as a fear-ridden domain ruled by beasts locked permanently in deathly power struggles. Sovereign rulers are different, or so it was argued. They bring orderly rule. Yet in laying down the laws, within a demarcated territory, using force if necessary, they reserve for themselves the prerogative of acting outside the laws, just like wild animals.

Take a well-known early example of this seductive but self-contradictory vision of sovereign rule: Machiavelli’s recommendation (chapter 18 of The Prince) that the good and powerful ruler must act as both a lion and a fox. Sovereign are those rulers who know that they must of necessity roar like a lion and be as crafty as a fox, so as to scare and cajole the resident population into conformity, for the sake of its own self-preservation, within a demarcated territorial setting, protected from its external enemies. In this well-known formulation, the condition of possibility of sovereignty is also its undoing. For it turns out that the ruling sovereign and the wild animal beast are an oddly matched pair. In order to act in sovereign ways, the sovereign by definition must overcome the beast within itself. But by acting in an unbounded fashion, the sovereign behaves just like a beast, ruling ultimately through fear and violence, unconstrained by customs, laws and procedures which, for the sake of order and good government, it nevertheless creates and then imposes, onto others, from the outside.

Since the 1950s, numerous developments in Antarctica have strongly challenged, and in some cases rejected outright, the deeply anti-democratic, bestial imagery coded into the old sovereignty principle. As Ben Saul, Tim Stephens and others have warned, the paralysing uncertainty surrounding the polity of Antarctica should not be underestimated; but, in fact, the rejection of bestial imagery may be the most important, and irreversible, achievement of the governing arrangements of Antarctica, where metaphors of fixed territory, rule and wild animals are conspicuous by their absence.

What are the symptoms of this metamorphosis? Most obviously, governing arrangements in Antarctica reject the fixed territorial mentality and the will to dominate nature built into the doctrine of sovereignty. Just like the continent’s birds, sea cucumbers and free-swimming snails, which know no fixed abode and (remarkably) find the energy and bearings to migrate annually from pole to pole, the legal and governmental institutions targeted at the continent are co-defined by, and connected to, parallel and sometimes overlapping mechanisms located elsewhere. Antarctica is the embodiment of the quantum principle of non-locality: those who seek to govern the continent are daily reminded that the continent is not ‘dead’ or lifeless territory. It is a vibrant biosphere, comprising living systems permanently in motion, interconnected with the rest of the planet. Symbols of the vibrancy are the seals that want to play and interrupt scientists as they go about their fieldwork; and the emperor penguins that seem as naturally skilled at the arts of posing and performing before cameras as they are in organising altruistic wave-motion huddles to ensure that each individual penguin member stays warm. The UN Highly Migratory Fish Stocks Agreement and the High Seas Fisheries Compliance Agreement are two revealing institutional cases of the same point: both agreements involve efforts to protect endangered species of fish, which of course recognise no fixed territorial boundaries, and whose protection and nurturing require alternative arrangements guided by precautionary principles.

Humble stewardship of the dynamically contingent, the fragile and the vulnerable: especially since the adoption (from the end of the 1980s) of the Environmental Protocol and its numerous Annexes, these metaphors, and general sympathy for the biosphere, have come to replace the old bestial images of sovereignty. The flipside of this semantic switch is a new politics of representation of the non-human world. When analysing the ‘spirit’ and practices of such bodies as the Convention on Biological diversity (CBD), the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the Agreement on Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), all of which politically shape Antarctica as we know it today, what’s striking is how they widen and deepen inherited meanings of political representation.
What’s meant by this? All human societies create ways of registering or re-presenting their interdependence with the natural world and its (sometimes invisible) elements by means of verbal, oral and pictorial signifiers. Antarctica obeys this rule, but gives it a twist. It’s perhaps an exaggeration to put things this way, but the continent is a world-leading laboratory in the arts of enfranchising nature. It brings to life, and puts into practice, new ways of imagining the political inclusion of the biosphere as a legitimate, potentially equal partner, within human affairs. In Antarctica, the nature/politics dualism of the doctrine of sovereignty no longer makes sense. It’s not just a continent where non-human nature constantly makes its presence felt among the humans who dwell or visit there. It’s also (conversely) a place where awareness runs high among humans that there are different ways of representing and acting upon the biosphere. In other words, the biosphere is not seen as raw, non-human, ‘out there’ nature, ripe for human exploitation, but as a complex set of interacting living elements whose significance is shaped by human perceptions and actions, which are themselves bound up with the deep dynamics of the biosphere.
By experimenting with new ways of practically extending voices and votes to our fragile biomes, Antarctica does more than revive and stretch the principle of the political representation of non-human domains. Arguably, the most far-reaching political significance of Antarctica is the way both positive and threatening developments there prompt fundamental 21st-century questions about whether human beings are capable of humbling ourselves by collectively recognising our ineluctably deep dependence upon the biomes in which we dwell. Are human beings capable, in theory and practice, of ridding ourselves of our own anthropocentrism? Can we live beyond the still-dominant view that we humans are the pinnacle of creation, lords and ladies of the universe, ‘the people’ and their states who are the ultimate source of sovereign power and authority on Earth? Is Antarctica perhaps even an important harbinger of the global commons principle, a reminder that the Earth’s surface should not be carved up by national jurisdictions?

These are fundamental political questions that await twenty-first century answers. 

Image:  Narmer, club-wielding sovereign lord of Egypt:

41,000

On the week of the 25th anniversary of the Tien An Men repression, an event that has disappeared from the official record in China, it is sobering to learn that there are 41,000 political prisoners in Egypt.

The Square (2013) – an intense look at the Egyptian revolution

The Square (meaning, Tahrir Square) is an Egyptian movie that follows several people from Cairo through their political journey through the  recent upheavals in their country. The filmmakers caught several eloquent and serious people to be their subjects, to show through their debates and ruminations what kind of different ideals have been present in this remarkable historical moment.

I have been thinking recently that nobody knows what's going on in Egypt, and I feel that more strongly now, if a bit more hopefully. All the possibilities are there, good and bad. And if you ever thought that people outside of "the West" could not possibly understand democracy and human rights, here's your refutation.

Of course there are no guarantees that they will achieve a worthwhile democracy, but many of them know that they want it and it's not so different from what many people in Canada and elsewhere want.

As of today The Square is available on Netflix and I highly recommend it.

Phil Paine reissues his "Meditations on Democracy."

My friend Phil Paine deserves some kind of designation as a great Canadian eccentric

The only thing preventing this is that the country is full of them.

But really, this is inaccurate. Phil is a truly original thinker, the most original I have ever met. He and I have sometimes worked together, with him coming up with the unexpected insights and me reorganizing them into a form acceptable to normal intellectuals and scholars. What I have done with Phil may be some of my most important work.

A few days ago I went over to his blog at PhilPaine.com and found that Phil
had reorganized it to feature its most important content, his Meditations on Democracy.

Go have a look. 

Lawrence Martin on the history of Canadian democracy

Canada’s forgotten independence day

March 11, 1848, was the day when Canada’s united colonies got responsible government. You might go so far as to call it our independence day – the day real democracy arrived.

It followed decades of struggle against British rule, the rebellions of 1837 and 1838 being foremost examples. Power passed from colonial elites to citizens when a Reform government headed by Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin was sworn in that day by governor-general Lord Elgin. The Reformers had won an election over conservative forces aligned to the monarchy.

Baldwin and LaFontaine, leaders of the territories now known as Ontario and Quebec, convinced their colonial masters that allowing power to reside with an elected assembly instead of a governor’s appointed executive council was the only way to stave off anarchy.

In the context of times, of so many countries seeking and failing to establish democratic systems, it was a remarkable achievement. We were “almost first out of the modern democracy gate,” writes John Ralston Saul in his book on LaFontaine and Baldwin. While you probably wouldn’t want to high-five our democracy today, given what it has become, we were trailblazers back then.

Europe-wide democratic revolutions marked 1848. Counterrevolutions followed shortly thereafter, and one was ignited in Canada. In 1849, reactionary mobs burned down the parliament buildings, then located in Montreal. But LaFontaine and Baldwin handled the crisis in a spirit of conciliation and compromise, as they had in bringing their culturally divergent provinces into union years earlier.

No such spirit prevailed in the United States, which was on the road to civil war, or in European jurisdictions where upheaval would mark the road to democratic legitimacy and world wars would be triggered.

The model put in place in our colonies was sound enough to endure through time with minimal politically inspired violence and bloodshed. The Baldwin and LaFontaine ministry decentralized power, establishing municipal governments. It brought in a modern legal and jury system and established secular public universities.

John A. Macdonald became our nation maker, as biographer Richard Gwyn calls him, but these men put in place the foundation. Lawyers by profession, they were not your typical win-at-all-costs politicians. Baldwin was a soft-spoken man who went about his work with a sunken heart. The pain at the loss of his adored wife at a young age never escaped him. But inescapable too was his devotion to the principles of democracy, social equity and justice. LaFontaine had that same commitment. He overcame strident opposition from francophone leaders in realizing his vision of a democratic union of the two cultures.

Not to be overlooked is Nova Scotia’s Joseph Howe, who secured responsible government for Nova Scotia two months earlier than Ontario and Quebec. His philosophy of governance paralleled that of Baldwin and LaFontaine. “The only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?” he said.

That’s a credo today’s political leaders would do well to heed. The responsible government fashioned in 1848 was primitive in many ways, but the form of democracy, in which the executive was controlled by the elected assembly, was a purer one than now. Now, the system is more akin to what existed prior to March 11, 1848, when the governor had all the power.

It’s all the more reason to remember that date, but we don’t. Academic David E. Smith notes in his book, Across the Aisle, that Canada’s contribution to responsible government used to be “a venerable theme in Canadian high school classes.” Sadly, he notes, that’s no longer the case.

Democracy in trouble

People in Egypt and elsewhere have expressed their concern about recent events in that country as indicating a breakdown in a commitment to democratic values and democratic institutions. The recent deposition of the democratically elected but increasingly autocratic president has divided Egyptians and observers alike. Was that deposition of Morsi necessary and justifiable or was it a strategic mistake in the long run, since electoral politics has been trumped once again by direct action, and the intervention of the Army? I think it is safe to say that many people don’t know what to think, given the unattractive alternatives.

It is easy enough to point out that Egyptians have not had much experience in democratic debate and dealmaking, with the result that an appeal to force or the threat of force comes too easily. However, a little bit closer to home for those of us in North America we are also seeing the erosion of democratic principles and practices.

First let us look at Canada. Our parliamentary institutions are based on 19^th century practices and beliefs. Many of them are not really written down. Both parliamentarians and the general public have lost track of customs that worked very well in the 19^th century but are not really understood today. Canadians strictly speaking do not elect a leader, a president, a Prime Minister, but a government which can command the support of the House of Commons. Ministers of the Crown hold that position as much through a relationship with the Crown as they do as partners with the Prime Minister. In principle they have a lot of independent authority. Thus the now obsolescent practice of ministers who have blown it big time resigning their position in Cabinet. They held the authority in the situation in question, and because they did not fulfill their role adequately, they felt obliged to quit. When was the last time this happened in Canada? Ministers no longer resign because of scandals and no one can really make them do so except perhaps the Prime Minister, because it’s an old custom that no longer is part of the political culture of either parliamentarians or the population at large.

Indeed an even more important principle has been lost track of in just the last few years. That is the idea that the Prime Minister and his cabinet only hold office when they can command the confidence of the House of Commons. Remember when Steven Harper was held in contempt of Parliament by majority of the members? And the Governor General let him get away with ignoring this and treating it as merely a partisan stunt? One can have a certain amount of sympathy for the Governor General who probably felt that if she fired Harper instead of letting him prorogue Parliament, she would enjoy no support whatsoever in the political class. She was right, but right here the Canadian Constitution broke down, and few people noticed or at least took it seriously. Our elections seem to have been transformed into something like a plebiscite on who makes the best Prime Minister. Canada has come to have something like a presidential system but without much in the way of countervailing institutions – with the important exception of the power of the provinces to resist the feds.

So our 19^th century institutions are in a shambles because we don’t remember the 19^th century principles that made them effective, and we haven’t replaced them with more recent principles and institutions. Close as we come is the tremendous power of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) which I’m pretty sure is not constitutionally defined institution at all.

If you look at the United States things are even worse. The United States has at least two governments, the publicly recognized one and the secret security apparatus. The security government does pretty much what it wants, while the publicly recognize government flails around, and fails spectacularly at dealing practically with real problems. See this recent article about the Republican tactic or attitude of devaluing legislation, at least on the federal level where there are many important fights that they can’t win. Compromise and dealmaking are out – just like in the 1850s! (Alarm should sound!)The dysfunction is not on the constitutional level, rather in the bizarre rules of the House and Senate that make sensible discussion almost impossible. These bizarre rules are not anything new, but when the will to discuss issues evaporates – well, anyone can see the result.

John Keane in his Life and Death of Democracy has pointed out that what we think of as democratic institutions – elections and parliaments – are really not sufficient to make democratic practice possible in the modern world. This is even more true of democratic ideas. Too many people in established democratic countries have no serious understanding of how the system might and could and should work, and the price they pay is its dysfunctional situation now.

Phil Paine on Metis democracy

http://academia.edu/1649062/The_Hunters_Who_Owned_Themselves