Between 26 and 29 April 1994, the sight of millions of people voting for the first time in the South African general election was intensely moving.
The Apartheid regime was thrown out, and Nelson Mandela was installed as President, not as the consequence of a bloody coup, but by the people's will as expressed peacefully in the ballot box. It was a high water mark for democracy.
"Democracy is the worst form of government," Churchill famously said, "apart from all the others." And Benjamin Franklin said: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Neither opinion is a ringing endorsement. Yet that has not stopped the West from adopting democracy as a core belief.
Moreover, it is a belief that it has tried to impose on other countries. There is, of course, an undeniable irony in using democracy as justification for military intervention, but that is what happened in the 1980s in Lebanon, Granada and Panama. In 1991, the US military action in Haiti was even called Operation Uphold Democracy. And then of course we have Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.
Democracy may well be a core belief of the Western world, but what is it? Abraham Lincoln's classic definition, "government of the people, by the people, for the people", is a magnificent sound-bite, but it is a definition without meaning – not least because, when he said it in 1863, the vote in the US was restricted to white men.
It is easiest to define democracy by what it isn't. It isn't autocracy and it isn't oligarchy. It is a political system that allows the people to oust the government without the need for a revolution or a military coup.
In 1942, there were a mere 12 democracies in the world, increasing to just 36 by 1962. In the mid-1970s, autocratic governments in Spain, Portugal and Greece all fell, followed in the 1980s by their equivalents in South America and in the 1990s by the countries behind the iron curtain. At the end of 2015, the number of democracies stood at 103, just over half of the world's countries.
Despite this increase in democratic nations, organisations such as Freedom House nonetheless argue that the last 15 years have seen a decline in democratic freedoms, a decline that sped up in 2020 under cover of the pandemic. One thing we have learned in recent years is that democracy can provide perfect cover for those with autocratic tendencies.
This is partly because the term democracy is used so imprecisely. Kofi Annan has said: "there are as many different forms of democracy as there are democratic nations in the world". Democracy is a belief with no agreed structure.
Let's take a look at democracy in the UK. In the 2019 election, the Conservatives won 57.5% of the seats on 43.6% of the vote, which is an intriguing definition of 'representative'. However, it looks positively proportionate when viewed against the Scottish results - where the SNP won 81.4% of the seats based on 45% of the vote. And, of course, there's the House of Lords, where 100% of the seats are allocated based on 0% of the vote.
It makes you wonder whether we actually believe in democracy at all. If we believed in democracy, we would make it easier for people to vote, we would make it easier to scrutinise our governments' decisions and we would applaud judges when they uphold the rule of law. And yet. And yet.
In his book, The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane argued that democratic history has had three phases.
First, there was the assembly phase, in which the people would meet and vote as a whole in an assembly.
Second, there was the representational phase, in which the people were represented by individuals in a parliament. Keane's theory is that representational democracy ultimately failed, particularly in the years leading up to the Second World War, when it proved unable to resist the rise of authoritarianism.
As such, the third phase, after the War, saw democracy evolve into what he calls monitory democracy.
If representational democracy can be summarised as 'one person, one vote, one representative', monitory democracy is 'one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives'.
Monitory democracy is conducted through an array of extra-parliamentary bodies, such as think tanks, quangos, NGOs, commissions, tribunals, judicial enquiries, online petitions, ombudsmen, charities and other watch-dog organisations, all of which seek to monitor and challenge governmental activity.
Monitory democracy is what allows Marcus Rashford, a footballer, to change government policy. A voice on Twitter is now arguably more powerful than a voice in the House of Commons and a 'like' on social media is potentially more meaningful than a vote at an election, particularly for those who live in 'safe' parliamentary seats where an individual vote is statistically irrelevant.
A monitory democracy places the emphasis firmly on us as individuals, not just on the way we use our vote, but the way we use our voice. So, wise up, get out of your bubble, listen to views that you disagree with and learn, learn, learn. As Nelson Mandela put it: "An educated, enlightened and informed population is one of the surest ways of promoting the health of a democracy."
Next: E is for Existentialism
Written by Pete Mansfield
