I.1 – What is democracy
I.2 – Indispensable Prerequisites of Democracy
I.3 – Generally Accepted Principles
I.4 – Lax implementation of democracy
I.5 – Summary
The common conviction is that democracy is a political system with governments elected by citizens for limited periods. When, however, we ask about the very essence of democracy, we find that democracy is not a form of government – citizens cannot rule over themselves – but a way of administering public affairs of citizens, a way of “public administration.” In a democracy, no rulers or governments should decide about public administration, the decision-making role should remain, as much as possible, in the hands of the citizens. The citizens can deal with their private affairs themselves, but a number of needs, for example communications, security and many others, they cannot satisfy by themselves in today's complex world.
When the citizens of a country succeed in removing their rulers they become themselves responsible for fulfilling those needs. In order to do so they must cooperate, in their local communities or wider bodies, regional or national. The fulfillment of any such needs has the character of services for citizens – the citizens need nothing from their public administrations but services which they cannot secure by themselves. Summing up, we can say that
the subject matter of democracy are public services for citizens, the provision of which is a responsibility of the citizens themselves.
Thus it is easy to describe the task of democracy: it is an agreement among fellow citizens how best to secure public services.
The fulfillment of this task, however, is far from being so easy. First, the citizens, as noted already in the introduction, normally have only a vague idea of what democracy is all about. And even when they do have some ideas, they usually have a difficulty to agree on a course of action. We could observe this very well on the developments of the recent “Arab Spring.” Millions of people managed to march in the streets and depose dictators, but they failed to agree on the forming of democratic public administration. In fact, it apparently did not even enter their minds, that this was what they should be trying to do at the time. In the European post-Communist region a transition towards democracy of sorts succeeded – people were closer to the Western democratic tradition, and tried to emulate the Western models. But even here the new democracies have not been very successful, with the levels of corruption extremely high. We are convinced that it is the failure to understand the essence and principles of democracy that lies at the roots of the faults and the wobbly behavior of politicians in democracies, new as well as old.
We know for sure that we do not want dictators, after the experiences with the Nazis and the Communists. This then leaves us with only one possibility with regard to public administration – we must work on designing and building acceptable democracies. So, in the following chapters, we look for the basic principles of democracy, and for practicable ways how citizens of democratic, as well as non-democratic, countries might best reach satisfactory democratic public service, and so eventually satisfactory democracy.
There are requirements of principle which democratic public service ought to comply with as a matter of course. In the first place among them is
because in a democracy it is the citizens, all citizens of the given country, who are responsible for the way public service is administered. Further such indisputable requirements of democracy are
mutual respect in the relations among people, as well as between the institutions of
At the time when democracy is being established, but also when it is already secured, it is natural when only some citizens are active in the individual regions of the country and in the various sectors of public service. All citizens, however, have the same responsibility in democracy, and so all citizens should always have the same opportunity to put shoulder to the wheel. As soon as a group of people starts forming who acquire permanent influence in a democratic public administration, stronger than other citizens, and, on the other hand, most people begin to lose the possibility of participation in public administration, elements of dictatorship begin again to return into the administrative system of the society.
Citizens ought to be ready to take over responsibility for public administration and its management. This requirement, unfortunately, is difficult to meet, because it is almost impossible to acquire the necessary education while living in a dictatorship, not to speak of experience. Moreover, the issues of democracy have generally not been sufficiently studied, and so the needed knowledge is not available in an accessible form.
In a successfully established democracy the citizens can use several fundamental instruments to participate in public service. We shall call these instruments the civic instruments of democracy. They are primarily
We shall examine these civic instruments in more detail in Section III, Civic Instruments of Democracy.
A society in which the citizens themselves bear the responsibility for public administration is a civil society – this then is the proper meaning of the term.
The well-known Chinese dissident and philosopher Wei Jingsheng said, at a conference in Prague in 2005: “The most important values, like mutual respect among people, are universal.” He thus generalized masterfully the traditional European morality, springing from the Old Testament commandments, and at the same time expressed the opinion that such morality is binding for all human societies and communities.
Indeed, no human community, from families to the societies of whole countries, can live well without mutual respect. Mutual respect is thus indispensable also for the civil societies of democracies. We take up these issues in more detail in Section II, Fundamental Principles of Democracy.
The desire for freedom and justice has always been the primary motivation of democracy. To achieve them, people underwent, and continue to undergo, the risk of confronting the power of dictators, in the hope of eventually removing the discredited rulers. More about this also in Section II.
As already said, citizens need, from the institutions they create in a democracy, only the provision of services which they cannot secure by themselves. Such services are called public services – we will keep up this term for describing them.
As the main sectors of public services we consider
In a dictatorship of any kind a significant part of the work of public administration is the protection of the ruling power. Public administration in such countries does provide some public services, too, but it primarily serves the needs of the rulers.
In contemporary democratic regimes we observe, in a various extent, the complaisance of citizens' representatives and public officials to backstage power groups, which they try to keep secret. In the new democracies such corrupt complaisance tends to be more widespread than in the traditional democracies of the West.
The citizens cannot all be experts on all the sectors of public service, they lack the time to study such issues, and many have no interest to involve themselves in public service. In addition to this, mass voting in referenda can be manipulated by disinformation campaigns, as we have last had the opportunity to observe with the “brexit.” It is therefore out of the question to organize democratic public service by means of referendum voting, the so-called “direct democracy”.
The only way to provide the needed public services is thus to employ representatives and entrust them with this task: the democratic public service must be performed representatively. The citizens must specify the tasks required, authorize their representatives and other employees of the institutions of public service to perform the work, provide them with the necessary means and pay them appropriate salaries. Then, the citizens must adequately supervise how the work is done. The only way the citizens can select their representatives are elections, another one of the above named civic instruments of democracy.
By corruption in democracy we understand the misuse of authority delegated for public service for someone's unjustified benefit. By such misuse representatives or officials take power into their own hands and introduce injustice and elements of dictatorship into democracy. Corruption is the supreme threat to democracy – its outcome is injustice, robbery of most citizens, and it may ultimately lead to a return to authoritarian subjugation.
Corruption is also the reason why the new democracies formed at the end of the 20th century are so unsuccessful – they allowed the formation of power “elites” which abuse the democratic delegated authority for their own benefit. It cannot even be excluded that they abuse it to some extent in the interest of foreign powers. The powers most suspected of wielding such influence are Russia and China.
Preventing corruption thus belongs to the most important tasks of every democracy. The best way to a successful fulfillment of this task is the consistent application of the above named civic instruments of democracy.
Some of the principles of democracy have long been accepted as indisputable. Among them, most importantly, are rule of law, free elections and guarantees of human rights. Surprisingly, however, the responsibility of citizens is still missing among them. The World Forum on Democracy, which met in Warsaw in 2000 with participants from more than 100 countries of the world, has made an attempt at a correction. It declared that the basis of governments' authority must be the “will of the people.”
We can see that these principles which are generally respected in democracies, and which are the essence of the democratic tradition, correspond more or less to the principles we have presented as indispensable for democracy in the previous chapter. We also see that the thinking about democracy develops in a reasonable direction: the “will of the people” is not the same as citizens' responsibility, but it is certainly an expression of an understanding that that it is the citizens how must play the main role in democracy.
When the American Founding Fathers were establishing the United States of America they knew they did not wish any man to rule over them – ever after they were to be ruled by law. Thus they also embraced the principle of justice for their new state. The requirement of securing justice and the rule of law, incidentally, naturally follows from the adoption of the principle of mutual respect in a society.
Liberty and human rights
There is no doubt that liberty belongs to the basic principles of democracy, because there can be no good life without liberty and it has always been the main motivation of democratic revolts. Freedom of an individual must, however, in a healthy community, respect certain limits, given again by respect – mutual respect among people, respect for spiritual principles, and respect for all creation, even inanimate – as we wrote already in the introduction. Such adequate liberty also follows from the adoption of the principle of mutual respect in a society.
Moral commandments meant to secure mutual respect in a society traditionally have the form of stating obligations. The demand for freedom, however, is an expression of a claim, and the same holds for the demand to respect “human rights.” Yet, claiming any “right” must first of all be “right”, justifiable, and this it can only be when it is in accordance with the natural moral commandments. We treat this philosophical as well as practical issue in more detail in chapter II.3, Human rights.
Free elections
Free elections are usually named as the key feature of democracy. As soon as there are elections organized in a country, later recognized by the international community as free, even when the recognition is very benevolent, such a country is then considered to be a democracy. Many people thus recognize even the authoritarian Russia as a democracy, and similarly a number of other “new democracies,” which are in essence dictatorships of oligarchical groups.
Elections are one of the main civic instruments of democracy, but in the form they tend to have in present-day democracies they are not a reliable expression of the “will of the people.” They are often manipulated by a limited selection of political parties, themselves often but disguised influence groups, by media campaigns of such groups, often utilizing covert sources of money, by discreditation of opponents, and other unfair strategies.
The form of democratic elections thus undoubtedly belongs to the elements of democracy which will require a new thorough thinking over. We devote a separate chapter to elections in Section III.
Representative character of democracy
The need for the representative model of democracy is usually not put in doubt. From time to time a populist politician appears who attempts to gain electoral votes by a propagation of “direct democracy,” but the idea that public administration could be managed by way of referenda voting is absurd. It does occasionally happen that such a politician wins the support of some journalists, and when he or she succeeds to establish a political party, they can even receive some support of voters. But such attempts cannot have a lasting success.
Suppression of corruption
The corruption of democratic systems is now already so conspicuous that almost all political parties promise to fight corruption. After the elections the victorious parties often try to avoid being reminded of such campaign promises – but sometimes they find themselves pressed, even against their own wishes, to implement some such promises. We have a Czech example of the Parliament passing a law about the obligation of the institutions of public administration to publish all economic agreements they conclude (2016).
Traditionally, the main anti-corruption instrument used in democracies are constitutional “checks and balances” limiting the powers delegated to representatives and government officials. Checks and balances were to be the original anti-corruption instrument put into the U.S. Constitution of 1788. Its core provision was to be the separation of the executive, legislative and judicial powers (Madison used the term “magistracies”). These three powers were supposed to control, check and balance one another. But not even the American Constitution fully implemented this principle, as we noted already in the Introduction. As a result, all present democratic administration systems suffer from insufficient control of the institutions of public administration, with the citizens having basically no say in such control.
Some less conspicuous constitutional and legal measures do provide certain checks to the parliamentary and government power in the existing democratic systems. Among them are periodical elections, giving some hope of occasional dismemberment of at least some corrupt structures, constitutional courts, the checks of decision-making provided, for example, by two chambers of parliaments, by a presidential veto, or by supreme control offices. The protection of human rights also erects some barriers to the arbitrariness of corruption, as does the simple lengthiness of the administrative processes which can stand in the way of urgent corrupt designs.
The huge preventive anti-corruption potential of the civic instruments of democracy is, however, practically unused in today's democracies as yet.
The basic principles and prerequisites of democracy are often implemented loosely even in more advanced democracies. At the same time, democratic administrations tend to incorporate practices which are not desirable or even detrimental for democracy. In general, the most serious shortcoming of today's democracies is the deep suppression of citizens' participation in their own public administration.
Citizens' responsibility
Even though theoreticians agree that the basis of governments' authority should be the “will of the people,” in most existing democratic systems the contributions from citizens are minimal. With the existing constitutional arrangements, the citizens can meaningfully contribute to the public administration of their countries in only one way, the elections of their representatives. And only rarely do the elections allow the citizens to choose representatives they know and can trust. This sometimes happens in local elections in smaller communities, villages or towns.
The Czech Constitution brushes the citizens off by a few empty clichés in its Article 2. It stipulates that the people are the source of all state power, but fails to say what the citizens should imagine under the terms “state power” and “the people”. In practice this is a meaningless statement, as it does not provide any possibility to participate in public affairs for the citizens. Apart from the provisions about elections the Constitution gives the citizens no possibility to participate in the public administration of their country. Similarly, meaningless is the provision of Paragraph 3 of the same Article 2 which says that the state power serves all citizens. In a democracy the citizens ought to be served by the representatives they employ to provide public services for them, and by institutions of public service which the representatives establish for such purposes on the basis of citizens' wishes. With the impersonal formulations of the Czech Constitution only few elected representatives, government officials or other workers of the institutions of public administration can be aware that it is their task to serve the citizens. The citizens are served by some undefined state power they know nothing about. Government officials approach their work as the work for any other employer and serve their superiors.
In the elections of many countries the citizens are asked to choose from candidate lists compiled of individuals whom the voters do not know, and can have no idea how they will behave, or may even have good reasons to expect that they will be corrupt. Political parties in these countries tend to be basically interest groups, or even obedient instruments of some influential individual or an group of individuals, as is now the case in the Czechlands with the party “ANO” created by the Slovak businessman, former Communist and former StB agent Andrej Babis.
Even in the older Western democracies, however, the participation of citizens in their public administration is rather limited. At best, some parliaments and governments make some effort to present to their citizens information about their work, and rather exceptionally we see also experiments of seeking solutions to some problems of public administration in cooperation with experts and citizens. So, for example, in Sweden and Finland independent non-partisan committees have been entrusted with developing proposals for pension reform. But regularly the public administration decision-making is reached without any citizens' participation, often “behind closed doors,” or even fully secretly.
So far as we know, in no country can we find efforts to create conditions for the citizens under which they could systematically participate in their public administration. The concept of civic instruments of democracy which we propose here in Section III, is, as a whole, practically unknown, even though the necessity of the individual instruments we describe does appear in some vague and varying awareness. Civic activity is viewed with embarrassment, and in many regimes, particularly in the “new democracies,” is discouraged, or suppressed. Similarly, the use of public debate for public administration decision-making is also almost unknown. As to civic control, there is practically none in the present democratic regimes – elections are considered to be a sufficient form of civic control.
Sometimes, arguments from past centuries can be heard against broader participation of citizens – the ancient worry of ochlocracy (mob rule) or Machiavelli's supposed opinion about the need of a firm hand in government. Such argumentation, however, is mistaken, or it can be used on purpose to legitimize corrupt intentions of the ruling groups. A wisely arranged opening of the process of public administration to the awareness and participation of citizens would undoubtedly lead to better and more thoughtful solutions of its tasks, and also to more frugal uses of the means provided. Countries whose political system invites more participation of citizens and opens debates about public administration to citizens, such as Switzerland or the Scandinavian countries, tend to have higher standards of living and higher satisfaction of citizens.
Giving up on traditional morality
Democracies put strong emphasis on the rule of law. Some countries succeed better in up-holding law, some worse. But failing to enforce law is not the only problem with the rule of law. Sometimes the problem is that the laws or their enforcement are not just. The retiring chairwoman of the Czech Highest Court, Iva Brozova, said in an interview for Lidove noviny that what worries her most is how often the judgments of Czech courts are unjust.
The injustice may be caused by intentional bending of law, which is pure criminality. But it can also result from purpose-written laws meant to secure benefits for some groups or even individuals. Such positivist approach by law-makers is not criminal in the sense of breaking law but it is wrong, immoral. Legally, it is a breach of natural law, in general it violates respect to other people, the fundamental moral obligation in human relations, without which human communities fall apart.
The moral attitude, that is the search for what is right, and then doing what is found to be right, is disrupted in the present democratic societies. In the post-Communist countries, it is partly a direct consequence of the former constitutionally set “leading role of the Party,” according to which what the Communist parties desired was considered right. In this environment, which punished those who wished to act right, but such behavior was in conflict with the wishes of the Communist party, the result was a decline of morality, which lingers. Many people became accustomed to immoral, or even criminal behavior. They count on their misdeeds to remain undiscovered, or else uninvestigated, or else unpunished, often with the cooperation of the responsible officials, police officers, state attorneys, even judges.
But the Western societies also suffer erosion of the traditional morality of our civilization. They are subjected to the propagation of relativism and multiculturalism which lead to the illusions that every ethnic, religious or some other social group can have its own moral rules, or even follow different laws.
All democratic countries thus face an uneasy struggle for a return to its traditional natural morality, to the natural law springing from it, and to the universal respect for thus built legality into the lives of their societies.
Anti-corruption measures
Another sore spot of democracies is corruption, which we define as abuse of delegated authority for someone's unjustified benefit.
The citizens in a democracy authorize their elected representatives to provide public services for them. They give their representatives authority for this work, and provide them with the necessary means, coming mostly from taxes. Today's democratic systems do not, however, have properly developed protections against abuses of those authorities and means, nor effective control instruments.
The crucial systemic fault is that the institutional arrangement of today's democracies lacks a full implementation of the instruments which we call the civic instruments of democracy. These instruments would, by their very establishment, fairly efficiently prevent and suppress corruption. As of now, when some measures exist for the control of the elected representative bodies, they are formed by these bodies themselves, and then they are mostly ineffective. The famed “checks and balances” can only play a secondary and partial role.
Especially in the new democracies the nets of protective anti-corruption measures are full of holes, possibly by intentions of the ruling power groups. But the older Western democracies also suffer from deep corruption. Here also the powerful special interest groups have found ways how to place their own people in the parliaments and important administrative institutions, and then to misuse their authority for their own benefit.
Justice and liberty
Strong emphasis is put on civil liberty and providing justice in today's democracies. They are expected to be partially secured by guarantees for the “human rights,” but this approach is to a large extent counterproductive. We devote more space to these issues in Section II, Fundamental Principles of Democracy.
Harmful elements in democratic systems
The most harmful element of today's democratic systems are political parties and their fundamental role in public administration. The original purpose of the political parties was to propose to the citizens a variety of programs for public administration. The citizens could then choose from these programs in the elections of their representatives. But already since the beginnings of modern democracy in England and America the political parties became instruments of interest groups, in England simply groups of nobles, in America mainly according to the attitude to slavery.
Political parties can fall and usually do fall under the influence of rich power groups, or can even be established to serve the purposes of such groups. Election campaigns are then but expensive displays of deceiving the citizens – the candidates try to present only the best sides of their programs and candidates, the power groups standing behind them pay for the outrageous expenses of the campaigns, while the campaign managers do not shrink from the dirtiest tricks to harm opposition, and various other tricks are used. The political parties thus become organizations promoting the power interests of narrow groups of people, with no true regard for public service, and so with little respect for the interests of the citizens and the whole society.
The idea of presenting various political programs and opinions, from which the citizens can choose, was faulty from the beginning. The task of democratic public service cannot be to push through solutions advantageous only to some citizens, it should be to look together for agreements about solutions most suitable for all. The qualification of the candidates should not be whether they are “leftist”, “rightist”, anti-Islamic, or otherwise profiled, but rather whether they are honorable, frugal and wise.
We can see that the existing models of democratic public administration, in the post-Communist countries as well as in the West, have many shortcomings. The citizens, who should naturally be the decision-makers in a democracy, are effectively cut off from their public administration already by the constitutions. Instead of the citizens, the decision-making has covertly been snatched by nontransparent special interest groups, domestic or foreign, whose goal is to acquire power and enjoy the benefits resulting from it. Political parties, which they infiltrated or even newly created, serve their purposes wonderfully. The result is deep systemic corruption – the governments formed by such political parties do not serve the citizens but the corrupt forces in control of these parties.
No wonder then that the societies of today's democracies are deeply dissatisfied. In every new election the citizens search for some hope of a correction of the crumbling social structures, but even new political parties bring them no improvement – again and again they find that they put their hope into one more instrument of corruption of the powerful, often worse than the preceding one.
An improvement, if one is to come, will have to be the result of the efforts of the citizens themselves. Democracy is a way of administration of public affairs for which the citizens are responsible, and so it is the citizens who bear the responsibility also for its implementation.
The first step along the way towards real democracy will have to be an understanding of how such democracy should operate, shared by a critical mass of the society. The citizens must know what democracy means, and what they must to do for it to prevail.
Proper democracy, we are convinced, will have to introduce full operation of the civic instruments of democracy, particularly of the full access to all information about public administration for all citizens, of public debate as the instrument of citizens' decision-making, and of effective civic control. It will have to form election rules which will, as much as possible, ensure that the citizens will be able to elect representatives whom they will know and will be able to trust. In a democracy, the citizens' representatives must be their employees whose task is to provide public services required by the citizens, and they must be aware of this. Their task in a democracy definitely is not to govern. The life of a democratic society and its public administration must rest on mutual respect, the now almost forgotten foundation of the Christian heritage of the West, and, in any case, the indispensable spiritual foundation of life of any well-living community.
© Strana nové demokracie, 2018 | e-mail: ohlasy-e-sign-strananovedemokracie.cz