Institute of Democracy and Cooperation

Orange Networks

Publication day: 27/4/2009

The book's cover

Democracy in the Twenty-First Century: the Degeneration of Meaning and Values

by Natalia Narochnitskaya

Preface to “Orange Networks: from Belgrade to Bishkek”, ed. Natalia Narochnitskaya (St. Petersburg: Alethea Press, 2008)

Never before in history has democracy been on so many people’s lips or had so many supporters. People swear their allegiance to it on the Bible but the obvious antagonisms between Judeo-Christian values and a movement based on the desire for equality are often overlooked. François Furet characterised our age by saying that the basic noble impulse of wanting to correct social inequality has been perverted into an all-absorbing desire to equalise everything – virtue with sin, beauty with ugliness, truth with lies – until only relativism and nihilism become politically correct.

Until not long ago, the main features of democracy were said to be the state-guaranteed rights of the individual; a system by which power could be transferred democratically according to the law and the constitution; and, finally, the principles of democratic conduct in international relations. These principles were protected by international law and include especially the respect for national sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.

In recent years, however, there has been a profound change in the interpretation of all these issues. The almost totalitarian dictates of left-liberal ideologues in Europe; the proclamation of the political incorrectness of conservative and Christian views on morality; the “humanitarian interventions” which occurred at the end of the 20th century; the encouragement by self-appointed teachers of democracy of a series of “orange revolutions” which only twenty years ago would have been denounced as coups d’état by the whole world; the interference by foreign participants in the internal constitutional affairs of states – all these are evidence of a profound crisis in the very concept of democracy itself, and of an obvious collapse in the classical understanding of it.

History teaches us that ideas about building a humanitarian heaven on earth invariably follow the same pattern of origin, ascent, flowering and then decline. As soon as the idea is abused for the purpose of obtaining political respectability, or as an instrument for the pursuit of economic and political self-interest, then it starts to degrade and to turn into something else. Those who propagate the idea degenerate as well – both whole societies as well as individual authorities. The great liberals of the past mounted the scaffold for their ideals, just as the Christian martyrs did. But their successors in the 20th century maintain that there are no ideas in the world worth dying for. The faces and manners, the habits and behaviour, the general cultural level of the present leaders of the West’s “mature democracies” cause us to doubt whether humanity is progressing at all, and they remind us of the words of Talleyrand, “Whole nations would be horrified if they knew what petty men rule over them.”

In the golden age of the democratic idea, democracy was understood to mean that the people’s will was realised according to justice and the law. Today’s teachers of democracy, by contrast, have come to precisely the opposite conclusion: in the name of democracy, they support unlawful and unconstitutional transfers of power. This shows that there is a crisis in the understanding of the concept of the lawful state.

It is precisely for this reason that a serious and profound discussion is now long overdue about the meanings and values of democracy, about its essence as opposed to its appearance, about the evolution in interpretations of it, and about the difference between today’s liberalism and democracy. Democracy in the twenty-first century has become a pretext for political blackmail, for intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and for Pharisaical manipulations. Very often, these are accompanied by the sort of ideological dogmatism which recalls the most amusing or depressing examples of Communist doctrinarism. When Condoleezza Rice says, “At a time when history is moving resolutely towards the market economy and democracy, some countries are remaining by the side of the road,” one has the impression of listening to a speech by Nikita Khruschev to a Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Ever more frequently, domestic and international law is being trampled on in the name of the future of democracy. These tendencies are in fact not evidence of democracy all, but instead of its replacement by “global governance” run by a group of states and their supranationalist intellectual cohorts. This affirms its own moral “cracy” with Robespierre’s contempt for the “demos”: ‘If the people does not support our ideas, then it is time to replace the people.’

The understanding of democracy has now become so degraded, and yet at the same time so categorical, that it is giving birth to events and trends which would have been considered absurd only a few decades ago. In Christian Europe, it is now considered unacceptable to espouse Christian morality. At the same time, some people suggest that Sharia law be introduced into European states. Freedom of movement has made borders transparent but the information society has made them illusory. The philosophy of “limited sovereignty” - which not coincidentally was introduced at the end of the 1970s, just as the crusade against the “evil empire” was about to be launched – has for a long time now been encroaching ever further on the fundamental principle of international law, the sovereignty of the nation-state.

The ideology of globalisation was born in the community of political scientists. The leading British author, Hedley Bull, distinguished the system of states, encompassing the whole world, from a future society of certain states united by common goals and principles, but in fact consisting only of Western countries. In Bull’s view, only this “group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another.” Few people at the time perceived this theory as a challenge to the universal principles of international law. Universality was restricted to the “society” of Western states and not extended to the whole international system of states. When Bull wrote about respect for claims to independence, respect for decisions taken in common, cooperation in the procedures of international law, and agreement on restrictions on the use of force against other states, all these phrases applied only to the mature “society” of states. It was as if these rules of conduct did not extend to the rest of the world.

This sort of division represents a break with the generally accepted universal principles of international law, as well as with the primordial universality of Christian ideals about morality and ethics. “Thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not steal” are commandments which apply to all human beings; those who break them cannot be excused on the basis that their victim adheres to a different set of values. In past centuries, states considered it natural to perform their duties equally even in their relations with other states at different levels of development; if they broke off relations with those states, then they never justified this by saying that the other state did not deserve to have its rights respected.

It is worth recalling that, according to the classical definition offered by all schools of law, sovereignty is not something that a state acquires as a result of sharing a system of values, but is instead the feature which distinguishes the state from all other forms of public or legal association. The discussions initiated by Bull about whether intervention is legitimate or illegitimate according to its goals prepared the ground for the change in mentality, and for the doctrine of “limited sovereignty”. The very formulation of questions about what kinds of intervention are illegal itself violates the principles of non-intervention and sovereignty: is an intervention illegal if it aims to influence a state’s foreign policy and conduct, or is it illegal if it aims at changing a state’s internal political system? In an attempt to make the idea of the right to humanitarian intervention politically correct, the British political scientist, Michael Akehurst, has tried to prove that there is nothing new in the doctrine. He cites as an example the use of force by European Great Powers against Turkey in the 19th century to defend Christians from persecution in the Balkans. But he did not mention the principal difference between today’s “humanitarian interventions” and these wars in the past, which is that today’s interventions allow no right of resistance, whereas those of the past were based on official declarations of war. The formal state of war is a legal status, regulated by a set of rules: it gives a right of self-defence, and it does not presuppose the de-humanisation or demonisation of the victim of aggression. Moreover, the outcome of the conflict is by no means predetermined.

Anticipating the time when some states would force others to change their governments in an unconstitutional manner - violating the UN Charter and justifying such conduct in the name of higher moral goals - some “advanced” theorists have complained that the UN Charter and international law have, on the one hand, created a body of rules which forbid a state from mistreating its own citizens but, on the other, restricted the right of states to use force against them. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, the classic conception of democracy formulated by the leading political scientist, Stanley Hoffman, was still prevalent. His main thesis is that, in the light of the fundamental principle of state sovereignty, any intervention aimed at influencing internal politics is definitely unlawful. Nowadays, this thesis is totally rejected by the Western “school of globalism”.

Already in 1999, the international lawyer, David Armstrong, lamented in “International Affairs” (the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, Chatham House) that international law regulates relations between states but not people, and that this was because of its emphasis on sovereignty. The author welcomed the evolution of the last thirty years towards what he called “world law”. He claimed that this new form of law was “appropriate to a world society of people rather than a society of states”. [David Armstrong: “Law, justice and the idea of a world society,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 75, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 547-561] But the only way to replace international law (“the law of peoples”, ius gentium, who are sovereign in making their own choices) with “world civil law” is to dictate common criteria to everyone, and to reject national legal systems as based on distinctive philosophies of law which have grown out of different religious and cultural views about the meaning of sin and crime.

It is difficult to imagine the United States of America ever agreeing to submit its domestic legislation to foreign guidelines about law, for instance Muslim ones, or extraditing its former President to a hypothetical “International Sharia Tribunal” to be tried for adultery. Nevertheless, the USA is absolutely convinced of the legitimacy of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which adjudicates the citizen of a sovereign state for acts committed in his own country which cannot be categorised as crimes according to the law of his own nation.

An examination of the history of modern “humanitarian interventions” conducted in the name of human rights shows how long gestation period has been for these changes in the law and the theory of the fundamental concepts of sovereignty, the state of law, democracy and freedom of choice, belief and conscience. Maybe one day researchers into political process will come to see how it was that democracy - one of the many different forms of social relations but one which has certainly given a lot to the world and which is more attractive than many others - suddenly became the single unquestionable truth, leading to an almost totalitarian intolerance of other systems. How is it that some members of the international community have decided they have the right to wag their finger at other states, and to usurp the principle of the separation of powers by being judge, jury and executioner all at once, setting the rules, passing judgement and then inflicting the penalty?

One of the characteristic features of modern society is the great importance played by private groups and associations – non-governmental organisations or NGOs. Such associations, which came into being quite naturally in professional spheres and in areas of private interest, and which were created to solve particular questions, have received a new lease of life in the information society. There are plenty of non-political NGOs and they indeed represent the institutions of civil society. They are organisations created by citizens themselves in various spheres of life and activity. But there also exists a special category of NGO which claim the right to sit in judgement over the fundamental values of whole societies and state politics. Such claims obviously overstep the limits of civil society and enter instead the sphere of politics, state and social life. The paradox of modern “democracy” is that NGOs need no approved mandate for claiming this role, no democratically measured level of public support.

It is time therefore to undertake a political and scholarly analysis of this degeneration of NGOs from civil society organisations to ones which pursue overtly political activities. This change radically affects the very concept of civil society. In the past, civil society meant the sphere in which the various private interests of citizens are realised, and which exists independently of the political system of a state. The limitation of organic spheres of private interest to the family alone, which remained beyond the political and ideological control of the state, was always considered a feature of totalitarian societies: this proves precisely that civil society should not be a matter for politics.

Today, the distinction between institutions of civil society and political participation is being deliberately erased. This should have long since become a subject for study by political scientists. NGOs have acquired the role of ideological arbiters, handing down judgements not on private matters but instead on questions of ideology and fundamental values, on the political organisation of society and on the activities of the legitimately constituted organs of a state. But whereas political parties, which are the classical participants in political life, peacquire their authority by taking part in elections, demonstrating the level of public support they enjoy by the number of votes they receive - in other words, whereas they have a democratic mandate for putting forward their ideas to the whole of society – NGOs, who are involved in politics, for some reason do not have to demonstrate their right to give lessons to others.

There are now numerous NGOs who have no democratic legitimacy or public support, but who have suddenly become self-appointed representatives of “the voice of the people” and who, as never before, have sharted behaving rather like the Public Prosecutor in a totalitarian show trial. Human Rights Watch has stated in its reports that democracy has become the sine qua non for political legitimacy. One can imagine how burdensome the United Nations Charter is not only for those who bomb foreign capitals without declaring war, but also for those ideologues of liberalism who support the use of violence to make the world uniform. Chapter I of the UN Charter, entitled “Purposes and Principles,” does not proclaim democracy as an ideal. In fact, it does not mention it at all. Instead, it proclaims the sovereign equality of all members of the international community – i.e. monarchies and republics, Hindu, Muslim, Christian and liberal-secular societies alike – according to what the people exercising sovereignty chooses. Montesquieu, one of the founding fathers of liberalism and democracy, insisted that no one has the right to prevent a people from passing even bad laws. Today, however, it seems that the condition for legitimacy is not democracy at all – the realisation of the people’s will through lawful and constitutional procedures – but instead the visible and revolutionary violation by the mass media of all democratically-decided lawful mechanisms.

The following collection of articles has been commissioned from the Foundation for Historical Outlook in Moscow by the Institute for Democracy and Co-operation, a Russian NGO based in Paris. The aim is to study the effect of NGOs on political processes and public opinion during the various “colour revolutions” which have occurred recently in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The scenario is nearly always identical, with the manipulation of public opinion and ideals of democracy being at once masterly and primitive. The role of these “civil society institutions” in manipulating the political process is become plain for all to see. The economic and social basis for this sort of political operation is typical for countries in transition.

The analysis of those procedures which, one by one, have usurped the constitutional mechanisms for the transfer of power in Belgrade, Kosovo, Kiev and Tbilisi, will undoubtedly be interesting and useful for diplomats, journalists, political scientists and above all for government officials. All of these revolutions occurred to enthusiastic applause by the “society of states” – that same elite group of states which, according to Hedley Bull, are the only ones who have the right to sovereignty.