Blog de Maria Elisa Castellanos Solá. Sobre o Homem, o Ser, a Sociedade, as Circunstâncias e o Futuro. Um arquivo pessoal de caráter multidisciplinar que compartilho com o público.
Com mestrado na Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) de São Paulo
sobre os empresários e o golpe de 64 e em fase de conclusão do
doutorado sobre os empresários e a Constituição de 1988, o professor
Fabio Venturini esmiuçou os detalhes de “como a economia nacional foi colocada em função das grandes corporações
nacionais, ligadas às corporações internacionais e o Estado funcionando
como grande financiador e impulsionador deste desenvolvimento,
desviando de forma legalizada — com leis feitas para isso — o dinheiro
público para a atividade empresarial privada”. Segundo o pesquisador, é isto o que nos afeta ainda hoje, pois os empresários conseguiram emplacar a continuidade das vantagens na Carta de 88.
Venturini cita uma série de empresários que se deram muito bem
durante a ditadura militar, como o banqueiro Ângelo Calmon de Sá (ligado
a Antonio Carlos Magalhães) e Paulo Maluf (empresário que foi prefeito biônico, ou seja, sem votos, de São Paulo).
Na outra ponta, apenas dois empresários se deram muito mal com
o golpe de 64: Mário Wallace Simonsen, um dos maiores exportadores de
café, dono da Panair e da TV Excelsior; e Fernando Gasparian. Ambos eram
nacionalistas e legalistas. A Excelsior foi a única emissora que chamou
a “Revolução” dos militares de “golpe” em seu principal telejornal.
Sobre as vantagens
dadas aos empresários: além da repressão desarticular o sindicalismo,
com intervenções, prisões e cassações, beneficiou grupos como o Ultra,
de Henning Albert Boilesen, alargando prazo para pagamento de matéria prima ou recolhimento de impostos, o que equivalia a fazer um empréstimo sem juros,
além de outras vantagens. Boilesen foi um dos que fizeram caixa para a
tortura, e comparecia pessoalmente ao Doi-CODI para assistir a sessões
de tortura. Foi justiçado por guerrilheiros.
Outros empresários estiveram na mira da resistência, como Octávio
Frias de Oliveira, do Grupo Folha, que apoiou o golpe. O que motivou o
desejo da guerrilha de justiçar Frias foi o fato de que o Grupo Folha
emprestou viaturas de distribuição de jornal para campanas da Operação
Bandeirante (a Ultragás, do Grupo Ultra, fez o mesmo com seus caminhões de distribuição de gás). Mais tarde, a Folha entregou um de seus jornais, a Folha da Tarde, à repressão.
“Se uma empresa foi beneficiada pela ditadura, a mais beneficiada foi a Globo, porque isso não acabou com a ditadura. Roberto Marinho participou da articulação do golpe, fez doações para o Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas
e Sociais (Ipes, que organizou o golpe). O jornal O Globo deu apoio
durante o golpe. Em 65, o presente, a contrapartida foi a concessão dos
canais de TV, TV Globo, Canal 4 do Rio de Janeiro e Canal 5 São Paulo”,
diz Fabio Venturini.
Ainda segundo o pesquisador, “na década de 70 a estrutura de
telecomunicações era praticamente inexistente no Brasil e foi totalmente
montada com dinheiro
estatal, possibilitando entre outras coisas ter o primeiro telejornal
que abrangesse todo o território nacional, que foi o Jornal Nacional,
que só foi possível transmitir nacionalmente por causa da estrutura
construída com dinheiro estatal. Do ponto-de-vista empresarial, sem
considerar o conteúdo, a Globo foi a que mais lucrou”.
“A Globo foi pensada como líder de um aparato de comunicação para ser
uma espécie de BBC no Brasil. A BBC atende ao interesse público. No
Brasil foi montada uma empresa privada, de interesse privado, para ser
porta-voz governamental. Se a BBC era para fiscalizar o Estado, a Globo
foi montada para evitar a fiscalização do Estado. Tudo isso tem a
contrapartida, uma empresa altamente lucrativa, que se tornou uma das
maiores do mundo (no ramo).”
Venturini também fala do papel de Victor Civita, do Grupo Abril, que
“tinha simpatia pela ordem” e usou suas revistas segmentadas para fazer a
cabeça de empresários, embora não tenha conspirado.
Saiba Mais: viomundo
28 de marzo de 2014 El Presidente de China, Xi
Jinping, pronunció un discurso inspirador en la sede de la Organización de las
Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO, por sus
siglas en inglés) en París el jueves 27, en el cual abordó la manera poética,
cultural y filosófica de resolver algunos de los problemas y peligros más
apremiantes hoy en día.
Sin hacer ninguna referencia específica, partió
de la historia "oficial" de la UNESCO para destacar de manera muy enérgica
durante los primeros seis párrafos de su discurso, la necesaria pelea contra el
peligro de guerra:
"La UNESCO nació hace 69 años cuando apenas se
había disipado el humo de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en contra del fascismo... A
través de los siglos, la gente ha anhelado la paz duradera, pero la guerra ha
perseguido a la humanidad a cada paso de su progreso... El muro de piedra a la
entrada de la sede de la UNESCO... tiene la inscripción de un mensaje en
diferentes idiomas: 'Dado que las guerras comienzan en las mentes de los
hombres, es en las mentes de los hombres que se deben construir las defensas de
la paz'... En tanto que la idea de paz pueda hacer profundas raíces y que la
bandera de la paz se pueda enarbolar en los corazones y las mentes de la gente
en todo el mundo, se construirá una fuerte defensa para impedir y detener la
guerra... Para esto precisamente se estableció la UNESCO en primer lugar", para
sembrar las semillas de la paz, fomentando los intercambios, la educación y el
avance científico. "Debemos intensificar" estas actividades de tal manera que
"las semillas de la paz broten, echen raíz en los corazones y mentes de los
pueblos del mundo".
Armonía del uno y de los
muchos
Luego, de modo muy poético, Xi polemizó de
muchas maneras a favor de una sociedad multicultural, donde la sociedad humana
viva en armonía: "Las civilizaciones vienen en diferentes colores y esa
diversidad ha hecho que los intercambios y el aprendizaje mutuo entre las
civilizaciones sea relevante y valioso, así como la luz del Sol tiene siete
colores, nuestro mundo es un lugar de colores deslumbrantes".
"Una sola flor no hace la primavera, mientras
que cien flores en plenitud llevan la primavera al jardín", dijo, en el momento
en que por todo París comienzan a brotar las flores. "Si solo hubiese un tipo de
flor en el mundo, la gente se aburriría sin importar cuan bella
fuese". "Las civilizaciones son inclusivas", dijo Xi
Jinping, "cada civilización es única", cada una de ellas constituye la
"cristalización de la ardua labor y sabiduría de la humanidad". Es por eso que
"copiar mecánica o ciegamente las civilizaciones es como cortarse dedos del pie
para que calce el zapato". A este concepto de inclusión, agregó que "solo
mediante el intercambio y el aprendizaje mutuo se puede llenar de vitalidad una
civilización". Por ejemplo, "la civilización china, aunque nació en el suelo de
China, ha llegado a su forma presente mediante el intercambio constante y el
aprendizaje mutuo con otras civilizaciones". Por lo tanto, la inclusión es la
clave para evitar un "choque de civilizaciones" y hacer de la "armonía de las
civilizaciones" una "realidad".
Luego pasó a detallar como ha ocurrido ese
desarrollo a través del proceso de intercambio, desde el siglo 2 AC hasta el
presente, en el transcurso de más de 2000 años, que ha cambiado a China de modo
fundamental.
Xi Jinping aprovechó para utilizar algunas
manifestaciones culinarias, algo que comparten la cultura francesa y la china, y
se refirió a Zuo Qiuming, un historiador chino de hace 2500 años, que registró
los siguientes comentarios de Yan Ying, el primer ministro del estado de Qi, a
quien citó así:
"Lograr la armonía es como preparar la sopa
espesa. El pescado y la carne solo se pueden cocinar con el sabor correcto con
la cantidad adecuada de agua, fuego, vinagre, salsa de carne, sal y ciruela...
Lo mismo cuando se trata de la música. Solo mediante la combinación de los
sonidos de diferentes instrumentos con el ritmo y la entonación correcta, así
como tono y estilo, se puede producir una melodía excelente. ¿Quién puede comer
la sopa con nada más que agua en ella? ¿Qué oído puede tolerar el mismo tono
tocado repetidamente en un instrumento?" Con unos 200 países y regiones y más de
2500 grupos étnicos y religiones, "difícilmente nos podemos imaginar que el
mundo tuviese un solo estilo de vida y un lenguaje, un tipo de música y un
estilo de ropa".
Para cerrar con una bella cita de Victor
Hugo: "Victor Hugo dijo una vez, 'Hay una expectativa
mayor que el mar, y es el cielo; hay una expectativa mayor que el cielo, y es el
alma humana'. En verdad, necesitamos una mente que sea más amplia que el cielo
en nuestra búsqueda de civilizaciones diferentes. Las civilizaciones son como el
agua, que humedecen todo silenciosamente. Tenemos que fomentar el respeto entre
las diferentes civilizaciones y vivir juntas en armonía, a la vez que fomentamos
el intercambio de aprendizaje mutuo como un puente de amistad entre los pueblos,
la fuerza motriz del progreso humano y un lazo fuerte para la paz
humana".
La búsqueda de los valores materiales y
espirituales deben ir juntas
En la parte final de su discurso, subrayó la
necesidad de que el progreso material y el progreso espiritual vayan de la mano.
La educación de la población inspira la sabiduría, dijo, e insistió en que
"debemos desarrollar la ciencia y la tecnología más vigorosamente. El avance
científico y la innovación pueden ayudar a la gente a entenderse a sí misma y al
mundo y estar en una posición más firme para cambiar su sociedad para
mejorar...
"El pueblo chino se esfuerza por hacer realidad
el sueño chino de la gran renovación de la nación china. El sueño chino es la
prosperidad del país, el rejuvenecimiento de la nación y la felicidad del
pueblo. Refleja al mismo tiempo el ideal del pueblo chino hoy día y nuestra
tradición que honramos desde hace tiempo, para buscar el progreso constante...
El sueño chino se hará realidad mediante el desarrollo equilibrado y el
fortalecimiento mutuo del progreso material y del progreso cultural... En la
civilización china, la búsqueda de la cultura siempre forma parte de la vida
espiritual del pueblo y de los ideales sociales. Así que la realización del
sueño chino es un proceso de desarrollo tanto material como
cultural...
"Una civilización lleva sobre sus espaldas el
alma de un país o nación. Se tiene que pasar de una generación a otra, y lo más
importante, tiene que mantener el ritmo de los tiempos e innovar con
valentía.
"En tanto que procuramos el sueño chino, el
pueblo chino va a fomentar los cambios creativos y avances innovadores de la
civilización china a tono con el progreso de los tiempos.
"Tenemos que inyectar nueva vitalidad a la
civilización china, estimulando todos los elementos culturales, las tendencias
del momento, las fronteras del espacio y las nacionales, y lo que plantea
interés perpetuo y los valores actuales.
"Y tenemos que dar vida a todas las colecciones
de nuestros museos, toda la herencia y exhibiciones por todas nuestras las
crónicas en nuestros clásicos.
"De este modo, la civilización china, junto con
todas las ricas y coloridas civilizaciones creadas por los pueblos de otros
países, aportará a la humanidad la guía cultural correcta y una motivación
vigorosa.
"Señora directora general, damas y caballeros,
queridos amigos: como dice un antiguo poema chino, cuando vuelvo la mirada ante
la presencia de una brisa primaveral, yo sé que miles de flores, moradas y
rojas, se preparan para iluminar la primavera".
"A
nova era individualista conseguiu a façanha de atrofiar nas consciências
a alta consideração que desfrutava o ideal altruísta, redimiu o
egocentrismo e legitimou o direito de viver só para si"
A
vida às vezes mantêm portas fechadas e como se não bastasse, por vezes,
para não deixar dúvida, abre a porta e a volta a fechá-la imediatamente.
Aí a mensagem é clara, inequívoca.
Democracy was the most successful
political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and
what can be done to revive it?
The Economist - 1 março 2014
THE protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine have
many aspirations for their country. Their placards called for closer
relations with the European Union (EU), an end to Russian intervention
in Ukraine’s politics and the establishment of a clean government to
replace the kleptocracy of President Viktor Yanukovych. But their
fundamental demand is one that has motivated people over many decades to
take a stand against corrupt, abusive and autocratic governments. They
want a rules-based democracy.
It is easy to understand why.
Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely
to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More
fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their
own and their children’s futures. That so many people in so many
different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea
is testimony to its enduring appeal.
Yet these days the
exhilaration generated by events like those in Kiev is mixed with
anxiety, for a troubling pattern has repeated itself in capital after
capital. The people mass in the main square. Regime-sanctioned thugs try
to fight back but lose their nerve in the face of popular intransigence
and global news coverage. The world applauds the collapse of the regime
and offers to help build a democracy. But turfing out an autocrat turns
out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government.
The new regime stumbles, the economy flounders and the country finds
itself in a state at least as bad as it was before. This is what
happened in much of the Arab spring, and also in Ukraine’s Orange
revolution a decade ago. In 2004 Mr Yanukovych was ousted from office by
vast street protests, only to be re-elected to the presidency (with the
help of huge amounts of Russian money) in 2010, after the opposition
politicians who replaced him turned out to be just as hopeless.
Democracy
is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out
of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable
democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system
have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife.
Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate
the world.
In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had
taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany,
which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s
largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa,
which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host
of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way
to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil
(1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the Soviet Union created many
fledgling democracies in central Europe. By 2000 Freedom House, an
American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world
total, as democracies.
Representatives of more than 100 countries
gathered at the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim
that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of
government”. A report issued by America’s State Department declared that
having seen off “failed experiments” with authoritarian and
totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last,
democracy is triumphant.”
Such hubris was surely understandable
after such a run of successes. But stand farther back and the triumph of
democracy looks rather less inevitable. After the fall of Athens, where
it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the
Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later. In the 18th century only the
American revolution produced a sustainable democracy. During the 19th
century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard action against
democratic forces. In the first half of the 20th century nascent
democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. By 1941 there were
only 11 democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might
not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the
blackout of barbarism”.
A high-water mark?
Freedom score, by country
Africa
Asia north
Asia south
Europe
Middle East
North America
South America
Not free
Partly free
Free
1972
Sources: Freedom House; The Economist
The
progress seen in the late 20th century has stalled in the 21st. Even
though around 40% of the world’s population, more people than ever
before, live in countries that will hold free and fair elections this
year, democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have
gone into reverse. Freedom House reckons that 2013 was the eighth
consecutive year in which global freedom declined, and that its forward
march peaked around the beginning of the century. Between 1980 and 2000
the cause of democracy experienced only a few setbacks, but since 2000
there have been many. And democracy’s problems run deeper than mere
numbers suggest. Many nominal democracies have slid towards autocracy,
maintaining the outward appearance of democracy through elections, but
without the rights and institutions that are equally important aspects
of a functioning democratic system.
Faith in democracy flares up
in moments of triumph, such as the overthrow of unpopular regimes in
Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once again. Outside the West,
democracy often advances only to collapse. And within the West,
democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at
home and overreach abroad. Democracy has always had its critics, but now
old doubts are being treated with renewed respect as the weaknesses of
democracy in its Western strongholds, and the fragility of its influence
elsewhere, have become increasingly apparent. Why has democracy lost
its forward momentum?
THE two main reasons are the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the
rise of China. The damage the crisis did was psychological as well as
financial. It revealed fundamental weaknesses in the West’s political
systems, undermining the self-confidence that had been one of their
great assets. Governments had steadily extended entitlements over
decades, allowing dangerous levels of debt to develop, and politicians
came to believe that they had abolished boom-bust cycles and tamed risk.
Many people became disillusioned with the workings of their political
systems—particularly when governments bailed out bankers with taxpayers’
money and then stood by impotently as financiers continued to pay
themselves huge bonuses. The crisis turned the Washington consensus into
a term of reproach across the emerging world.
Meanwhile, the
Chinese Communist Party has broken the democratic world’s monopoly on
economic progress. Larry Summers, of Harvard University, observes that
when America was growing fastest, it doubled living standards roughly
every 30 years. China has been doubling living standards roughly every
decade for the past 30 years. The Chinese elite argue that their
model—tight control by the Communist Party, coupled with a relentless
effort to recruit talented people into its upper ranks—is more efficient
than democracy and less susceptible to gridlock. The political
leadership changes every decade or so, and there is a constant supply of
fresh talent as party cadres are promoted based on their ability to hit
targets.
China’s critics rightly condemn the government
for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning
dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime’s obsession
with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public
opinion. At the same time China’s leaders have been able to tackle some
of the big problems of state-building that can take decades to deal with
in a democracy. In just two years China has extended pension coverage
to an extra 240m rural dwellers, for example—far more than the total
number of people covered by America’s public-pension system.
Many Chinese are prepared to put up with their system if it delivers
growth. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85% of
Chinese were “very satisfied” with their country’s direction, compared
with 31% of Americans. Some Chinese intellectuals have become positively
boastful. Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University argues that democracy is
destroying the West, and particularly America, because it
institutionalises gridlock, trivialises decision-making and throws up
second-rate presidents like George Bush junior. Yu Keping of Beijing
University argues that democracy makes simple things “overly complicated
and frivolous” and allows “certain sweet-talking politicians to mislead
the people”. Wang Jisi, also of Beijing University, has observed that
“many developing countries that have introduced Western values and
political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos” and that China
offers an alternative model. Countries from Africa (Rwanda) to the
Middle East (Dubai) to South-East Asia (Vietnam) are taking this advice
seriously.
China’s
advance is all the more potent in the context of a series of
disappointments for democrats since 2000. The first great setback was in
Russia. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the democratisation
of the old Soviet Union seemed inevitable. In the 1990s Russia took a
few drunken steps in that direction under Boris Yeltsin. But at the end
of 1999 he resigned and handed power to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB
operative who has since been both prime minister and president twice.
This postmodern tsar has destroyed the substance of democracy in Russia,
muzzling the press and imprisoning his opponents, while preserving the
show—everyone can vote, so long as Mr Putin wins. Autocratic leaders in
Venezuela, Ukraine, Argentina and elsewhere have followed suit,
perpetuating a perverted simulacrum of democracy rather than doing away
with it altogether, and thus discrediting it further.
The next big
setback was the Iraq war. When Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass
destruction failed to materialise after the American-led invasion of
2003, Mr Bush switched instead to justifying the war as a fight for
freedom and democracy. “The concerted effort of free nations to promote
democracy is a prelude to our enemies’ defeat,” he argued in his second
inaugural address. This was more than mere opportunism: Mr Bush
sincerely believed that the Middle East would remain a breeding ground
for terrorism so long as it was dominated by dictators. But it did the
democratic cause great harm. Left-wingers regarded it as proof that
democracy was just a figleaf for American imperialism. Foreign-policy
realists took Iraq’s growing chaos as proof that American-led promotion
of democratisation was a recipe for instability. And disillusioned
neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, an American political
scientist, saw it as proof that democracy cannot put down roots in stony
ground.
A third serious setback was Egypt. The collapse of Hosni
Mubarak’s regime in 2011, amid giant protests, raised hopes that
democracy would spread in the Middle East. But the euphoria soon turned
to despair. Egypt’s ensuing elections were won not by liberal activists
(who were hopelessly divided into a myriad of Pythonesque parties) but
by Muhammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Mr Morsi treated democracy as a
winner-takes-all system, packing the state with Brothers, granting
himself almost unlimited powers and creating an upper house with a
permanent Islamic majority. In July 2013 the army stepped in, arresting
Egypt’s first democratically elected president, imprisoning leading
members of the Brotherhood and killing hundreds of demonstrators. Along
with war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, this has dashed the hope that
the Arab spring would lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle
East.
Meanwhile
some recent recruits to the democratic camp have lost their lustre.
Since the introduction of democracy in 1994 South Africa has been ruled
by the same party, the African National Congress, which has become
progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine
moderate Islam with prosperity and democracy, is descending into
corruption and autocracy. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia,
opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept
their results.
All this has demonstrated that building the
institutions needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and
has dispelled the once-popular notion that democracy will blossom
rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted. Although democracy
may be a “universal aspiration”, as Mr Bush and Tony Blair insisted, it
is a culturally rooted practice. Western countries almost all extended
the right to vote long after the establishment of sophisticated
political systems, with powerful civil services and entrenched
constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of
individual rights and independent judiciaries.
Anti-austerity protests in Greece, October 2010
“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.” Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”
Yet
in recent years the very institutions that are meant to provide models
for new democracies have come to seem outdated and dysfunctional in
established ones. The United States has become a byword for gridlock, so
obsessed with partisan point-scoring that it has come to the verge of
defaulting on its debts twice in the past two years. Its democracy is
also corrupted by gerrymandering, the practice of drawing constituency
boundaries to entrench the power of incumbents. This encourages
extremism, because politicians have to appeal only to the party
faithful, and in effect disenfranchises large numbers of voters. And
money talks louder than ever in American politics. Thousands of
lobbyists (more than 20 for every member of Congress) add to the length
and complexity of legislation, the better to smuggle in special
privileges. All this creates the impression that American democracy is
for sale and that the rich have more power than the poor, even as
lobbyists and donors insist that political expenditure is an exercise in
free speech. The result is that America’s image—and by extension that
of democracy itself—has taken a terrible battering.
Nor is the EU a
paragon of democracy. The decision to introduce the euro in 1999 was
taken largely by technocrats; only two countries, Denmark and Sweden,
held referendums on the matter (both said no). Efforts to win popular
approval for the Lisbon Treaty, which consolidated power in Brussels,
were abandoned when people started voting the wrong way. During the
darkest days of the euro crisis the euro-elite forced Italy and Greece
to replace democratically elected leaders with technocrats. The European
Parliament, an unsuccessful attempt to fix Europe’s democratic deficit,
is both ignored and despised. The EU has become a breeding ground for
populist parties, such as Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the
Netherlands and Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which claim to
defend ordinary people against an arrogant and incompetent elite.
Greece’s Golden Dawn is testing how far democracies can tolerate
Nazi-style parties. A project designed to tame the beast of European
populism is instead poking it back into life.
EVEN in its heartland, democracy is clearly suffering from
serious structural problems, rather than a few isolated ailments. Since
the dawn of the modern democratic era in the late 19th century,
democracy has expressed itself through nation-states and national
parliaments. People elect representatives who pull the levers of
national power for a fixed period. But this arrangement is now under
assault from both above and below.
From above, globalisation has
changed national politics profoundly. National politicians have
surrendered ever more power, for example over trade and financial flows,
to global markets and supranational bodies, and may thus find that they
are unable to keep promises they have made to voters. International
organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade
Organisation and the European Union have extended their influence. There
is a compelling logic to much of this: how can a single country deal
with problems like climate change or tax evasion? National politicians
have also responded to globalisation by limiting their discretion and
handing power to unelected technocrats in some areas. The number of
countries with independent central banks, for example, has increased
from about 20 in 1980 to more than 160 today.
From below come
equally powerful challenges: from would-be breakaway nations, such as
the Catalans and the Scots, from Indian states, from American city
mayors. All are trying to reclaim power from national governments. There
are also a host of what Moisés Naim, of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, calls “micro-powers”, such as NGOs and lobbyists,
which are disrupting traditional politics and making life harder for
democratic and autocratic leaders alike. The internet makes it easier to
organise and agitate; in a world where people can participate in
reality-TV votes every week, or support a petition with the click of a
mouse, the machinery and institutions of parliamentary democracy, where
elections happen only every few years, look increasingly anachronistic.
Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional
politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a
world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want
whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming
service.
The
biggest challenge to democracy, however, comes neither from above nor
below but from within—from the voters themselves. Plato’s great worry
about democracy, that citizens would “live from day to day, indulging
the pleasure of the moment”, has proved prescient. Democratic
governments got into the habit of running big structural deficits as a
matter of course, borrowing to give voters what they wanted in the short
term, while neglecting long-term investment. France and Italy have not
balanced their budgets for more than 30 years. The financial crisis
starkly exposed the unsustainability of such debt-financed democracy.
With
the post-crisis stimulus winding down, politicians must now confront
the difficult trade-offs they avoided during years of steady growth and
easy credit. But persuading voters to adapt to a new age of austerity
will not prove popular at the ballot box. Slow growth and tight budgets
will provoke conflict as interest groups compete for limited resources.
To make matters worse, this competition is taking place as Western
populations are ageing. Older people have always been better at getting
their voices heard than younger ones, voting in greater numbers and
organising pressure groups like America’s mighty AARP. They will
increasingly have absolute numbers on their side. Many democracies now
face a fight between past and future, between inherited entitlements and
future investment.
Adjusting to hard times will be made even more
difficult by a growing cynicism towards politics. Party membership is
declining across the developed world: only 1% of Britons are now members
of political parties compared with 20% in 1950. Voter turnout is
falling, too: a study of 49 democracies found that it had declined by 10
percentage points between 1980-84 and 2007-13. A survey of seven
European countries in 2012 found that more than half of voters “had no
trust in government” whatsoever. A YouGov opinion poll of British voters
in the same year found that 62% of those polled agreed that
“politicians tell lies all the time”.
Meanwhile the border between
poking fun and launching protest campaigns is fast eroding. In 2010
Iceland’s Best Party, promising to be openly corrupt, won enough votes
to co-run Reykjavik’s city council. And in 2013 a quarter of Italians
voted for a party founded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian. All this popular
cynicism about politics might be healthy if people demanded little from
their governments, but they continue to want a great deal. The result
can be a toxic and unstable mixture: dependency on government on the one
hand, and disdain for it on the other. The dependency forces government
to overexpand and overburden itself, while the disdain robs it of its
legitimacy. Democratic dysfunction goes hand in hand with democratic
distemper.
Spotifying politics
Democracy’s
problems in its heartland help explain its setbacks elsewhere.
Democracy did well in the 20th century in part because of American
hegemony: other countries naturally wanted to emulate the world’s
leading power. But as China’s influence has grown, America and Europe
have lost their appeal as role models and their appetite for spreading
democracy. The Obama administration now seems paralysed by the fear that
democracy will produce rogue regimes or empower jihadists. And why
should developing countries regard democracy as the ideal form of
government when the American government cannot even pass a budget, let
alone plan for the future? Why should autocrats listen to lectures on
democracy from Europe, when the euro-elite sacks elected leaders who get
in the way of fiscal orthodoxy?
At
the same time, democracies in the emerging world have encountered the
same problems as those in the rich world. They too have overindulged in
short-term spending rather than long-term investment. Brazil allows
public-sector workers to retire at 53 but has done little to create a
modern airport system. India pays off vast numbers of client groups but
invests too little in infrastructure. Political systems have been
captured by interest groups and undermined by anti-democratic habits.
Patrick French, a British historian, notes that every member of India’s
lower house under the age of 30 is a member of a political dynasty. Even
within the capitalist elite, support for democracy is fraying: Indian
business moguls constantly complain that India’s chaotic democracy
produces rotten infrastructure while China’s authoritarian system
produces highways, gleaming airports and high-speed trains.
Democracy
has been on the back foot before. In the 1920s and 1930s communism and
fascism looked like the coming things: when Spain temporarily restored
its parliamentary government in 1931, Benito Mussolini likened it to
returning to oil lamps in the age of electricity. In the mid-1970s Willy
Brandt, a former German chancellor, pronounced that “western Europe has
only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will
slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of
dictatorship”. Things are not that bad these days, but China poses a far
more credible threat than communism ever did to the idea that democracy
is inherently superior and will eventually prevail.
Yet China’s
stunning advances conceal deeper problems. The elite is becoming a
self-perpetuating and self-serving clique. The 50 richest members of the
China’s National People’s Congress are collectively worth $94.7
billion—60 times as much as the 50 richest members of America’s
Congress. China’s growth rate has slowed from 10% to below 8% and is
expected to fall further—an enormous challenge for a regime whose
legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver consistent growth.
At
the same time, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in the 19th
century, democracies always look weaker than they really are: they are
all confusion on the surface but have lots of hidden strengths. Being
able to install alternative leaders offering alternative policies makes
democracies better than autocracies at finding creative solutions to
problems and rising to existential challenges, though they often take a
while to zigzag to the right policies. But to succeed, both fledgling
and established democracies must ensure they are built on firm
foundations.
THE most striking thing about the founders of modern democracy
such as James Madison and John Stuart Mill is how hard-headed they were.
They regarded democracy as a powerful but imperfect mechanism:
something that needed to be designed carefully, in order to harness
human creativity but also to check human perversity, and then kept in
good working order, constantly oiled, adjusted and worked upon.
The
need for hard-headedness is particularly pressing when establishing a
nascent democracy. One reason why so many democratic experiments have
failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too
little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the
state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as
freedom of speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. The most
successful new democracies have all worked in large part because they
avoided the temptation of majoritarianism—the notion that winning an
election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases. India has
survived as a democracy since 1947 (apart from a couple of years of
emergency rule) and Brazil since the mid-1980s for much the same reason:
both put limits on the power of the government and provided guarantees
for individual rights.
Robust constitutions not only promote
long-term stability, reducing the likelihood that disgruntled minorities
will take against the regime. They also bolster the struggle against
corruption, the bane of developing countries. Conversely, the first sign
that a fledgling democracy is heading for the rocks often comes when
elected rulers try to erode constraints on their power—often in the name
of majority rule. Mr Morsi tried to pack Egypt’s upper house with
supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr Yanukovych reduced the power of
Ukraine’s parliament. Mr Putin has ridden roughshod over Russia’s
independent institutions in the name of the people. Several African
leaders are engaging in crude majoritarianism—removing term limits on
the presidency or expanding penalties against homosexual behaviour, as
Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni did on February 24th.
Foreign
leaders should be more willing to speak out when rulers engage in such
illiberal behaviour, even if a majority supports it. But the people who
most need to learn this lesson are the architects of new democracies:
they must recognise that robust checks and balances are just as vital to
the establishment of a healthy democracy as the right to vote.
Paradoxically even potential dictators have a lot to learn from events
in Egypt and Ukraine: Mr Morsi would not be spending his life shuttling
between prison and a glass box in an Egyptian court, and Mr Yanukovych
would not be fleeing for his life, if they had not enraged their
compatriots by accumulating so much power.
Video
Democracy: A view from Cairo
Even
those lucky enough to live in mature democracies need to pay close
attention to the architecture of their political systems. The
combination of globalisation and the digital revolution has made some of
democracy’s most cherished institutions look outdated. Established
democracies need to update their own political systems both to address
the problems they face at home, and to revitalise democracy’s image
abroad. Some countries have already embarked upon this process.
America’s Senate has made it harder for senators to filibuster
appointments. A few states have introduced open primaries and handed
redistricting to independent boundary commissions. Other obvious changes
would improve matters. Reform of party financing, so that the names of
all donors are made public, might reduce the influence of special
interests. The European Parliament could require its MPs to present
receipts with their expenses. Italy’s parliament has far too many
members who are paid too much, and two equally powerful chambers, which
makes it difficult to get anything done.
But reformers need to be
much more ambitious. The best way to constrain the power of special
interests is to limit the number of goodies that the state can hand out.
And the best way to address popular disillusion towards politicians is
to reduce the number of promises they can make. The key to a healthier
democracy, in short, is a narrower state—an idea that dates back to the
American revolution. “In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men”, Madison argued, “the great difficulty
lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the
governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The notion
of limited government was also integral to the relaunch of democracy
after the second world war. The United Nations Charter (1945) and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) established rights and
norms that countries could not breach, even if majorities wanted to do
so.
These
checks and balances were motivated by fear of tyranny. But today,
particularly in the West, the big dangers to democracy are harder to
spot. One is the growing size of the state. The relentless expansion of
government is reducing liberty and handing ever more power to special
interests. The other comes from government’s habit of making promises
that it cannot fulfil, either by creating entitlements it cannot pay for
or by waging wars that it cannot win, such as that on drugs. Both
voters and governments must be persuaded of the merits of accepting
restraints on the state’s natural tendency to overreach. Giving control
of monetary policy to independent central banks tamed the rampant
inflation of the 1980s, for example. It is time to apply the same
principle of limited government to a broader range of policies. Mature
democracies, just like nascent ones, require appropriate checks and
balances on the power of elected government.
Governments can
exercise self-restraint in several different ways. They can put on a
golden straitjacket by adopting tight fiscal rules—as the Swedes have
done by pledging to balance their budget over the economic cycle. They
can introduce “sunset clauses” that force politicians to renew laws
every ten years, say. They can ask non-partisan commissions to propose
long-term reforms. The Swedes rescued their pension system from collapse
when an independent commission suggested pragmatic reforms including
greater use of private pensions, and linking the retirement age to
life-expectancy. Chile has been particularly successful at managing the
combination of the volatility of the copper market and populist pressure
to spend the surplus in good times. It has introduced strict rules to
ensure that it runs a surplus over the economic cycle, and appointed a
commission of experts to determine how to cope with economic volatility.
Isn’t
this a recipe for weakening democracy by handing more power to the
great and the good? Not necessarily. Self-denying rules can strengthen
democracy by preventing people from voting for spending policies that
produce bankruptcy and social breakdown and by protecting minorities
from persecution. But technocracy can certainly be taken too far. Power
must be delegated sparingly, in a few big areas such as monetary policy
and entitlement reform, and the process must be open and transparent.
And
delegation upwards towards grandees and technocrats must be balanced by
delegation downwards, handing some decisions to ordinary people. The
trick is to harness the twin forces of globalism and localism, rather
than trying to ignore or resist them. With the right balance of these
two approaches, the same forces that threaten established democracies
from above, through globalisation, and below, through the rise of
micro-powers, can reinforce rather than undermine democracy.
Tocqueville
argued that local democracy frequently represented democracy at its
best: “Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science;
they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and
enjoy it.” City mayors regularly get twice the approval ratings of
national politicians. Modern technology can implement a modern version
of Tocqueville’s town-hall meetings to promote civic involvement and
innovation. An online hyperdemocracy where everything is put to an
endless series of public votes would play to the hand of
special-interest groups. But technocracy and direct democracy can keep
each other in check: independent budget commissions can assess the cost
and feasibility of local ballot initiatives, for example.
Voters in California cast their ballots, November 2012
“You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”James Madison, America's fourth president
Several
places are making progress towards getting this mixture right. The most
encouraging example is California. Its system of direct democracy
allowed its citizens to vote for contradictory policies, such as higher
spending and lower taxes, while closed primaries and gerrymandered
districts institutionalised extremism. But over the past five years
California has introduced a series of reforms, thanks in part to the
efforts of Nicolas Berggruen, a philanthropist and investor. The state
has introduced a “Think Long” committee to counteract the short-term
tendencies of ballot initiatives. It has introduced open primaries and
handed power to redraw boundaries to an independent commission. And it
has succeeded in balancing its budget—an achievement which Darrell
Steinberg, the leader of the California Senate, described as “almost
surreal”.
Similarly, the Finnish government has set up a
non-partisan commission to produce proposals for the future of its
pension system. At the same time it is trying to harness e-democracy:
parliament is obliged to consider any citizens’ initiative that gains
50,000 signatures. But many more such experiments are needed—combining
technocracy with direct democracy, and upward and downward delegation—if
democracy is to zigzag its way back to health.
John Adams,
America’s second president, once pronounced that “democracy never lasts
long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a
democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” He was clearly wrong.
Democracy was the great victor of the ideological clashes of the 20th
century. But if democracy is to remain as successful in the 21st century
as it was in the 20th, it must be both assiduously nurtured when it is
young—and carefully maintained when it is mature.
Postagens
