Democracy is a political form of governance where the body politik is the sovereign political power. The etymology of this ancient Greek word shows the notion at the heart of it: it is formed by kratos and demos. Kratos means power, not in the sense of having the ability to exercise a right, but rather of being in the dominant position to enforce one’s will, to prevail. Demos denoted the people constituting the society of a political formation, whether a city or a nation. In that sense, democracy is defined as the prevailing of people’s power. That ancient Greece was not fully democratic was conditioned on the restrictions placed on whom constituted a member of the demos, through limitations as to whom participated in the body politik. Such curtailing of political rights has continued to the present days in malfunctioning democracies.
But suffrage for all members of a democratic state is not adequate for the constitution of democracy. Democracy, as the enforcing of people’s will in a modern state, is not limited to the voting rights but encompasses different branches of power, in theory independently of one another: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, supported by a free press and importantly by knowledgeable citizens that share the values of democracy. For any democratic system to function, informed citizens and a core of shared values are necessary. Uninformed on uncaring citizenry, individuals unaware of their rights and obligations within it and the absence of shared values that place the prosperity of the majority of the population at the top of the hierarchy of objectives form elements that presage democracies that easily slide into authoritarian regimes. Malfunctioning democracies are also those in which the citizens are not fully informed because laws, often at loggerheads with the constitution, place limits on the freedom of press or fully control it. Equally, no democracy can function when other checks and balances of democracy – such as the checking of the executive power by the legislative and the judiciary branches – do not take place.
In recent decades the warped notion has prevailed that the mechanism of holding elections is sufficient to meet the definition of democracy. This erroneous understanding is then applied to supra-national organizations that are considered ‘democratic’ (e.g. the European Union), when they lack the main criteria for defining a democracy: the equal representation of vested interests and the direct will of people that elect those who represent them, which presupposes accountability of power. Moreover, what exists of people’s power in the activities, even legal, of lobby organizations that promote financial interests? Non-democratic institutions operating on the supra-national levels with no mechanisms of accountability of power to those they represent without proper mechanisms of election threaten democracies. Other external threats that can destroy democracies are posed by the globalized neoliberal economic model via which corporations far override the power of nation-states. Moreover, the supra-national domination of one state through illegal overreaches of power, via military and judicial means, at loggerheads with international law, undermines or de facto abolish democracy even when the demos itself acts in support of the democratic functioning of the state.
Such forms of domination over other countries have been capitalized to create the false concept of democracy as a commodity for export or as a business franchise via which the political or military might of one state can result in the imposition of democracy on another, via war, economic sanctions or political persuasion. This is a profoundly fallacious notion given that democracy can only be born from within a body politik. Anything imposed from the outside constitutes the antithesis of democracy.
A common predicament of declining democracies is the procedural understanding of it as a form of government where popular sovereignty begins and ends with the casting of vote at the ballot box, while a spate of suppression mechanisms downgrade the power-sharing basis: the restriction of the remit of independent authorities, the limitation of free speech via the press and the voting of laws against free journalism and political satire, as well as the malicious use of legal means to curtail public participation (e.g. legal actions targeting journalists or activists), the conformity of academic research via influences on the public funding mechanisms of universities and the delayed, insufficient or aborted justice delivered at courts of laws. Under these circumstances the citizen turns, from a member of the sovereign political power, into a spectator of decisions taken at the expense of the majority in a system of power that excludes the majority. At the end point of the unravelling of democracy, the citizen consumes the public spectacles of banal authoritarianism as if sitting among the audience of a satirical performance, while depending on the power of the authoritarian, nominal only, democracy to exert military power, other states suffer too, however democratic. And ironically, all of that may take place “in the name of democracy”.
Eleftheria Pappa