Democracy is looking sick just now. At the start of 2008 Churchill’s nostrum that it is the worst form of government “except for the others” is being tested close to destruction, assassinated in Pakistan, sabotaged in Kenya, massacred in Iraq, strangled in Russia, ridiculed in South Africa and purchased in America. But then it depends on what you mean by democracy.

This week the “better” democracies are wagging fingers at worse ones, like 17th-century popes reprimanding missionaries in the distant jungle. They tut-tut over a stuffed ballot box in Nairobi, a banned radio station in Islamabad or a murdered journalist in Moscow. They condemn a riot here, a bombed polling booth there and an imprisoned politician somewhere else.

The British government is peculiarly unable to resist such finger-wagging. While Tories long to rule a better Britain, the Blair/Brown Labour party longs to rule a better world. Last month foreign secretary David Miliband told Pakistan’s prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, “what actions we expect his government to take”. Last weekend, Gordon Brown telephoned President Pervez Musharraf to explain to him “the need to push ahead with the democratic process and to avoid any significant delay in the electoral timetable”. He added that Britain expected Pakistan’s elections to be “free, fair and secure”.

Democratic catechism
On the other phone line, Brown had the benighted rulers of Kenya, another of Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law” needing instruction in the democratic catechism. He commanded them to “behave responsibly”. He said he would be talking to the various parties for all the world as if Kenya were still a colony.

If I had been Musharraf in receipt of such patronising remarks, I would have drawn deep from the well of irony. I would have referred Britain’s prime minister to his poor poll rating and said Islamabad was “dismayed” he had funked a democratic mandate last October.

One peep from Brown about the Taliban and I would have pointed out that it was his drugs policy that underpinned the world price of heroin and thus subsidised the Taliban, among other things, to kill Benazir Bhutto.
Democracy has never been perfect. From the moment self-government lost touch with “self” it adapted itself to nations and peoples. Its institutions depend more on local history, culture and geography than on Madison, Mill and De Tocqueville. This week the rituals of heredity, not democracy, decided the leadership of the Pakistan People’s party. Most Asian and African democracies are ballots qualified by assassination, corruption and inheritance. Yet we still grace them with the term.

Students of politics are taught to tick off the qualities that award the status of democracy to a polity. Are there free and fair elections? Can the franchise turn a regime out of office? Are there supporting institutions such as an open parliament, security of public assembly, elected local government, a free media, the rule of law? No one of these is either sufficient or necessary for democracy, which is rather a sliding scale of liberties, to which constitutions and regimes ascribe varying degrees of priority.

For all the manifest horror of the past week in Pakistan and Kenya it is presumptuous for the west to demand that the world take the same route to self-government that it spent bloodthirsty centuries pursuing.

Preaching
We are not so clean that we can lecture others on how they should govern themselves, especially those whom the west has polluted with aid, debt, trade curbs and wars along their borders.

The British and American constitutions are both currently battered by criticism from their subjects for falling short of democratic ideals, notably in handling accountability and checks on executive power. Americans would hardly have welcomed election monitors from Ukraine, India or Thailand encamped in the Miami Hilton.

Democratic principles are rooted in human freedom and tested empirically over time. But democracy is best propagated by example, not by conquest or official admonition.

Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world. Its fragile half-democracy is conditioned by the insecurities of its recent past and by desperate poverty. There are a hundred ways of helping it along the rocky path between democracy and dictatorship, a path Britain spent a leisurely two centuries traversing. But ultimately Pakistan, like Kenya, will be the stronger for taking this path alone. The last thing it needs is hectoring phone calls from a post-imperial nanny.

(The Guardian)