Western Values of Democracy and Mongolia:
International Criteria in Comparative Perspective.
David Sneath
University of Cambridge
Paper for Presentation at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation International Conference on Mongolian Politics, Ulaanbaatar 10th December 2009.
Summary
Given this analytic imprecision of the term ‘democracy’ I argue that we can best approach it ‘ethnographically,’ as social anthropologists would say, and examine the ways in which the term is employed in practice by various political actors and commentators. None of the political systems described as western democracies came about in a single moment of creation. All of them developed, and continue to change, as a result of historical and contingent processes in which concrete events, crises and accommodations continually shape the political structure and the wider political culture in which it operates. Indeed, western attempts to measure democracy reveal the ways in which such projects are inextricably bound-up with value systems and what Bourdieu would term doxic knowledge – the undisputed assumptions and values that the political order requires.
Democracy has proved to be a ‘moving target’ in the twentieth century. Having aimed, relatively successfully, for Soviet style People’s Democracy for much of the twentieth century, since 1991 Mongolia has built an effective multi-party parliamentary democracy – with notable success. Since Western criteria for democracy are likely to continue to change with Western political thought; the goal posts are set to continue to move.
Mongolia has introduced a system that resembles the western democracies in a number of important ways, and has won recognition as a member of this ‘democratic club’. Its political system, which has also developed within its own national setting, is notably ‘consociational’ with a good deal of power sharing. I think this one of the reasons for its success to date, and personally, like Lijphart, I find a lot to recommend the inclusive, consensus-building approach to politics.
However, it would be wrong to pretend that there are no possible risks or challenges to this system. As the July 2008 riots showed, Mongolia is not entirely immune to political violence. And one danger of power-sharing and consensus building, when it takes place in the context of a liberal market economy, the emergence of new business elites, and large earnings from mineral extraction, is that the public may begin to worry that a self-interested elite is monopolizing both political and economic power. A too-cozy accommodation between domestic and foreign big business on the one hand and a political class meshed together by myriad private understandings and accommodations could easily provoke public cynicism and discontent. Some of the comments I heard in the crowd on the 1st July suggested that many were already concerned with elite corruption, a theme of public anxiety and media discussion for some time. This represents an important challenge for Mongolia’s political culture, particularly as major new sources of mineral wealth begin to be exploited in the future, and public concern as to where the wealth goes is only likely to increase.
But all political systems are bound to change in the future, while continuing to claim that each change represents a further perfection of democracy. For the sake of good international relations one should hope that these changes do not cause a divergence between different national systems. But, in my view, the primary drive should be to optimize national rather than international relations. One can only hope that as Mongolia begins to gain greater wealth, for example from mining development, it will be able to further refine its own version of democracy with increasing self-confidence, a system adapted for its own needs in terms of perceived public good, rather than the imitation of other states, no matter how rich and powerful they might be.
Democracy as a normative term
Academics widely agree that as an analytic concept, democracy is rather empty. As Bollen 1991:4 pointed out, “An examination of the efforts to quantify political democracy does not reveal a smooth evolution toward clear definitions…” There is little agreement on quantitative measures for democracy, and as Zinnes and Merritt (1991:209) note, different social scientists “conceptualize democracy differently, select different indicators, and rely on different sources of data.” Each measure reflects the purposes of the researchers and “their value rests on the freight it bears for that project.” (Zinnes and Merritt 1991:209). Given this analytic paucity, then, we can perhaps best approach democracy ‘ethnographically’ as social anthropologists would say, and look at the way in which the term is employed in practice by various political actors and commentators.
One of the most striking features of the term democracy is how highly normative it is. There have been many varieties of democracy since the distinctly aristocratic Athenian political system from which the word derives. But the various ideologies of Modernism that transformed so much of the globe in the twentieth century, be they Marxist or Liberal, almost all took up the term ‘democracy’ to indicate their populist claims. Of course the Liberal Democracy of the capitalist West was very different from the Democratic Centralism of the Soviet Union or the People’s Democratic Dictatorship of Mao’s China. Writing from within any one of these traditions it was easy to dismiss the others. But today the dominant form is now some variety of what might be called Liberal Democracy within the Euroamerican tradition, generally using the parliamentary or presidential model, or some combination of the two, as in the Mongolian case.
Democracy has proved to be a ‘moving target’ in the twentieth century. Having aimed, relatively successfully, for Soviet style People’s Democracy for much of the twentieth century, since 1991 Mongolia has built an effective multi-party parliamentary democracy – with notable success. But since democracy is such a normative term – a cardinal virtue for almost every political system - it is bound to be continuously redefined in different ways by different political projects. The same might be said for the term ‘modernization’ which is generally used, and continually redefined, as the sort of change the user approves of. Over much of the globe today, to be able to define what constitutes the more modern or democratic political programme is to win the argument as to ‘What Is To Be Done?’
We might predict that since Western criteria for democracy are likely to continue to change with Western political thought; the goal posts will continue to move. Other nations are bound to continue to ‘lag behind’ the rich and powerful liberal democracies, whose wealth and influence make it easy for their political systems to appear successful. I mention this because it seems to me that any country should be cautious about the extent to which it evaluates its own internal political system by the standards set by other states, no matter how rich and powerful they may be.
International indices of democracy
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the various global indices produced by western organizations to measure the level of democracy tend to place European and American nations at the top of these tables, and there is a good deal of work in political science and sociology that in effect takes some features of these political systems and judges the rest of the world by them. Even for those engaged in such projects, the limitations and flaws of these attempts to quantify democracy are all too evident (Munck and Verkuilen 2002).
In effect, then, western use of the word ‘democracy’ often means ‘a system like ours.’ Strategic rivals of the west, such as Russia and Iran, are usually found to be less democratic than cooperative nations with good links – such as Israel, the Dominican Republic or Panama. For example, the US-based Polity IV Database, whose funders include the CIA, rank each nation on a scale of +10 to -10 in terms of Levels of democracy/autocracy. This database is quite influential, used by academics such as Quan Li and Rafael Reuveny (2003). Mongolia, pleasingly enough, has been ranked as 10, the maximum ‘fully democratic’ score, since 1997. But states thought to be out of line with western interests score poorly. Iran, for example, leapt from -6 to +3 when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was elected in 1997, but sunk down to -6 in 2005, with the election of the populist candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who had an anti-western stance. The Iranian constitution has not changed significantly since 1989, but nevertheless, the Polis IV observers read the political changes in terms of amount of democracy, rather than its style or content.
Those who designed the Polity Database had a notion of political systems as existing on a single spectrum with Autocracy at one end and Democracy at the other (Jaggers and Gurr 1995:469). The effect is a sort of ‘good–to-bad’ index, which seems so entangled with the strategic interests of major powers as to make it seem rather too partial. To take another example, Freedom House, whose Chairman James Woolsey is a former director of the CIA, publishes world surveys evaluating the political systems of other countries. It does not consider either Russia or Iran to be electoral democracies at all.
It can be easy to believe that those nations that are rich and powerful owe their success to the particular political system that they advocate. At the height of its imperial power, Britain for example, was pretty much convinced that it had the best political system. America, at present, enjoys global dominance and it is perhaps unsurprising that US political scientists such as Calabresi (1998: 22) would claim that the American system “has proved a brilliant success, which parliamentary democracies all over the world would do well to copy”.
Of course other political scientists, such as Arend Lijphart, (e.g. 2000: 21) completely disagree. They point to the way that even in Presidential elections participation levels have been historically very low – even recently revived levels are barely above 60%, and congressional elections usually have far lower levels of participation. Lijphart, and other the advocates of consociational or consensus democratic systems argue that comparative analysis shows them to do better than majoritarian systems. But it seems clear that high levels of wealth make a huge difference to the operation of any political system. What is actually at stake in politics; the motivations, orientations and constraints of the various actors in the system are likely to be radically different depending on the economic circumstances – not to mention the cultural, religious and historical particularities of any given country. In this sense it makes little sense to try to extract the political system from the concrete conditions of its operation – its unique national setting. Perfecting political systems on the basis of abstract models, then, is a highly challenging enterprise.
Value systems and ‘effective’ democracy
The distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘effective’ democracy is a case in point. Since the term itself has so little analytic clarity and is used normatively to mean ‘a system like ours’ commentators had the problem of classifying countries that might match the formal requirements that they had set for democracy but did not look much like what they were supposed to. It was clear that to have the formal requirements of democracy was not the same as having a democracy ‘in effect.’ (e.g. Rose 2001). Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen, for example, says this:-
“What exactly is democracy? We must not identify democracy with majority rule. Democracy has complex demands, which certainly include voting and respect for election results, but it also requires the protection of liberties and freedoms, respect for legal entitlements, and the guaranteeing of free discussion and uncensored distribution of news and fair comment. Even elections can be deeply defective if they occur without the different sides getting an adequate opportunity to present their respective cases, or without the electorate enjoying the freedom to obtain news and to consider the views of the competing protagonists. Democracy is a demanding system, and not just a mechanical condition (like majority rule) taken in isolation.” (Sen 1999:9-10).
Rather than technical criteria, then, in effect we are dealing with something more general and subtle. This is a style of government, a tone of public life; features that are inextricably bound up with values and value systems. Debates as to the precise ingrediants of this ‘democratic style’ are bound to continue, and the set of associated values and stances are sure to change. When campaign groups manage to get their agendas accepted by the large and powerful liberal democracies this tends to be represented as a perfection of democracy, and becomes part of the wider political culture that is considered democratic. So Inglehart and Welzel (2005:56), for example, take ‘tolerance of outgroups’ as a democratic value and measure it by attitudes towards homosexuality – a position that would have seemed bizarre to most Euroamerican democrats just fifty or sixty years ago.
Much of this evaluation relies upon value judgments. Sen, like many other commentators, stresses the need for the “uncensored distribution of news and fair comment”, and deciding on “fairness” is all about values. A good deal of consensus is required, then, for this to operate smoothly. Similarly, questions are raised by the idea that different sides should have “an adequate opportunity to present their respective cases.” What constitutes these ‘adequate opportunities’ ? How much media time should be allowed to various parties and how is this to be evaluated ? If the media is dominated by commercial organizations with particular views, or by religious institutions, is that comparable to state dominance? Are there political or religious movements who should be excluded from the electoral process? If there is little consensus on these points then, when it comes to international evaluation, the answers to these and other questions will depend on the attitudes of the most influential ‘democratic’ nations.
Value judgments and systems seem inextricably linked to current uses of the word democracy. The World Movement for Democracy, for example, has a long list of aims, very few of them are actually to do with the electoral system as such.[1] Instead they reveal a wider ideological project, intimately bound up with a particular set of values – many of which rather recently emerged – such as “invigorating civil society.” Again analytically the term ‘civil society’ is a rather empty one, and has been the subject of considerable academic critique (e.g. Fisher 1997). In many cases it amounts to a set of activist organizations set up by a wide range of interested parties who have money and agendas of their own. They need not be remotely democratic themselves. Indeed their officials, who are generally unelected, may have enormous power and influence in the countries in which they operate, and since they may be funded by super-rich individuals, as in the case of the Soros network, some might consider them to be actually un-democratic, whether they do good work or not. There is also a tendency to link the goal of democracy to the interests of the activists themselves, so the World Movement for Democracy aims include: “ensuring that those who work nonviolently for the democratic transformation of their societies are provided the space and resources needed for their task.” (http://www.wmd.org/conference/founding.html as of 2nd December 2009)
Another influential organization is the Canada-based Democracy Watch. It has a mandate “20 Steps towards a Modern, Working Democracy” which reflects the normative nature of both the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘modern’. Its definition of democracy is includes currently fashionable causes in Europe and North America. Personally, I do not disagree with any of them, but some seem to have much less to do with the principles of democracy than with the current political consensus of the moment. They include, for example, strong requirements that all organizations, especially governments, multinationals and banks operate ethically and to include “strict waste-prevention measures”. (http://www.dwatch.ca/democracy.html#International%20Democracy Accessed 2nd December 2009). Good? Yes, I think so. But essentially democratic? I’m not so sure. Such aspirations indicate the way that the term democracy, as it is used in practice, is inextricably bound up with the ethical and value systems of those who use it, in effect, to advocate particular, and changeable, visions of a good society.
Then there is the role of education. Many commentators see education as necessary for democracy, since, they argue, only a properly educated public can properly evaluate the choices put to them at election. Again, this raises questions of who gets to judge education, and upon what grounds. Current Western values tend to advocate formal secular state education carried out in schools of a recognizable type, so that certain types of Islamic education might not be recognized. A recent British Council report Pakistan: The Next Generation, advocates more state secular education, as opposed to religious madrassa schools, in order to safeguard democracy. (http://www.britishcouncil.org/pakistan-next-generation-report-download.htm)
Any particular models or notions of democracy cannot easily be separated from the wider political culture in which they appear. All sorts of practices must appear to be fair, just, or reasonable, for the political system to operate, and this relies upon shared values to some degree. Hence the need for education systems that will produce subjects who share these values. We might consider this background understanding to be what Bourdieu calls doxic , referring to his notion of doxa – the universe of the undisputed. He writes “Every established order tends to produce… the naturalization of its own arbitrariness… This experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs. (Bourdieu 1977: 164). The various parties making up a multi-party democratic system must share a large amount of this doxic understanding, including their own limitations – often formulated in a constitution that sets the limits to the particular political game. What, then, of the particularities of Mongolia, and the political understandings that have emerged in the Post-Soviet era?
Mongolia – a Power-Sharing Democracy?
Tables that are drawn up using Western criteria for democracy all tend to put Mongolia at the top – in the ‘fully democratic’ category. Scanning across the various maps made showing political systems in Eurasia, Mongolia tends to stand out as one of a few nations who seem to have a ‘systems like ours’. In part this may reflect Mongolia’s commitment to its Third Neighbour Strategy, which meant that designers of the new political structure set out to produce something recognizably like parliamentary and presidential multi-party politics. In part, I think, it reflects a broader social drive to participate in a global culture with Euroamerican influence, rather than orbit either of its two neighbours too closely.
Mongolia has managed to introduce a multi-party parliamentary system with – so far – only one really serious outbreak of violence – the 1st July 2008 riots which left five people dead and several buildings damaged or destroyed by fire, including the Headquarters of the MPRP. What we should make of this recent tragedy, and what we can learn from it as far as future trends and challenges for democracy in Mongolia, I will return to later in this paper.
One of the remarkable features of Mongolia’s parliamentary democracy is the way in which it has been relatively inclusive of both the major political parties, even when one of them has gained substantial electoral victory. There has been, of course, some quite wide-ranging change-overs of top posts as a result of a change in the ruling party of government, but there has also been a good deal of continuity – and nothing much like the wholesale replacement of posts that takes place in systems such as the US. Similarly, there is a mixture of public media – television channels and newspapers, that have different political stances and so generate a spectrum of commentary on party politics. These are, in many ways, remarkable achievements.
Personally, I have a feeling that this is one of the secrets of the relative success that Mongolia has achieved in introducing a multiparty parliamentary system. Shrewdly enough, I think, politicians have tried to avoid a polarization of the political class, cutting their opponents in on some portion of what is available. This meant that in the early years of the new system the political struggle was not a fight to the death for either camp, and bitter though the arguments were, the system had a chance to bed in without any major challenges to the system as a whole.
This is the sort of result that advocates of power-sharing (consociational) political systems such as Lijphart would approve of. In his 1999 book Patterns of Democracy (recently translated by D. Ganbat as Ardchillyn Hev Zagvar) Lijphart argues that consensual democracy of the sort found in Switzerland and Belgium is a better system than the majoritarian ‘winner-takes-all’ system of Britain and the USA. Consensus democracy, they argue, is superior; particularly in divided – or we might add, potentially divided – societies. I am inclined to think this is probably right, although since it seems to me that politics is an art rather than a science, I am not sure that it is wise to take any particular abstract principles as necessarily valid. It seems to me more probable that political systems end up working in any given national setting for all sorts of contingent and particular local reasons, and that it is easier to retrospectively find reasons for success than to really predict them using some sort of political ‘first principles’.
Be that as it may, the Mongolian government is a remarkably cross-party affair. Although the MPRP dominate the Ih Hural with 46 seats to the Democratic Party’s 27, six of the 15 ministers of government are Democratic Party candidates – representing some 40% of posts. When we include one Deputy Chair of the Ih Hural, three of the seven Chairs of Standing Committees, and three of the eight Sub-Committee Chairs, we see a good deal of Democratic Party representation. Of course, this power-sharing also reflected the election of the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate – Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj – in May. Mongolia has found a sort of middle road between parliamentary and presidential political systems, and it has tended to operate it by means of various sorts of ‘grand coalition’ inclusivist strategies. It has earned widespread international recognition for its democratic credentials. But we cannot say that the political system faces no challenges.
Strains and Challenges
On 1 July, 2008, rioters set fire to the headquarters building of the MPRP following allegations of electoral fraud. Five people died in the riot, and Mongolia declared the first state of emergency since the collapse of socialism in 1990. Of course, Ulaanbaatar is no stranger to protests, and allegations of voting fraud on the part of both the MPRP and the Democratic Party (or any of its almost innumerable predecessors or coalitions of the moment) have marred almost every election. Yet the riot of 1 July was very different, both in the fact that people lost their lives and the extent of the destruction. In comparison, the democratic revolution that unfolded over the winter of 1989-1990 was decidedly peaceful. (A few accounts claim one person was killed in a protest during that spring, but this has not been confirmed.)
The riot and its aftermath were important for a number of reasons. This is the first time that political demonstrations had gone beyond the previously unstated limits of acceptable political protests. Indeed these events have helped determine what these limits are, so that the use of violent protest no longer seems a viable political option, at least for the time being. Then, from an international point of view, this further fragments the analytical category of the post-socialist zone as Mongolia takes a markedly different route from such countries as Kyrgyzstan which saw mass protests overthrow the government in the name of “democratic revolution”, a regime change that received immediate recognition from Western governments. In the Mongolian case foreign governments were unwilling to intercede or take sides in what was considered to be an internal matter. The US government, for example, simply condemned the violence. Thankfully, then, Mongolia’s parliamentary, semi-presidential democracy survived; and in the end the boundaries of acceptable political protest were re-established. But the incident revealed some hidden, or at least potential, tensions.
Talking to protesters in the square that day, I found a strange mixture of grievances. There were particular complaints about the conduct of the election, of course, but there was also a wider frustration with the political process and a suspicion that those in power were more concerned with lining their own pockets than serving the public good. Anecdotal though this is, it reflects a wider set of public anxieties and debates in the country, which has been very evident in the national press. Mongolia’s situation is in many ways unique, but other post-Soviet societies have also seen the rapid introduction of a market economy and the rapid emergence of wealthy new elites. Rose may have a point when he writes:
“Corruption is the greatest obstacle to progress in postcommunist countries. The longer a regime uses free elections as a facade while those inside government use elected office to enrich themselves, the greater the divergence will become between those countries making progress toward the completion of democracy and those going nowhere. Moreover, the longer corruption persists at the elite level, the greater the likelihood that the mass of the electorate will become indifferent to dishonesty, or decide that the only way to deal with a corrupt state is to benefit from lawbreaking oneself, whether in the form of avoiding taxes, smuggling, or corrupting civil servants and elected representatives.” (Rose 2001: 106).
Conclusion
None of the political systems described as western democracies came about in a single moment of creation. All of them developed, and continue to change, as a result of historical and contingent processes in which concrete events, crises and accommodations continually shape the political structure and the wider political culture in which it operates. Mongolia has introduced a system that resembles the western democracies in a number of important ways, and has won recognition as a member of this ‘democratic club’. Its political system, which has also developed within its own national setting, is notably ‘consociational’ with a good deal of power sharing. I think this one of the reasons for its success to date, and personally, like Lijphart, I find a lot to recommend the inclusive, consensus-building approach to this thing called democracy.
However, it would be wrong to pretend that there are no possible risks or challenges to this new political system. As the July 2008 riots showed, Mongolia is not entirely immune to political violence. And one danger of power-sharing and consensus building, particularly when it takes place in the context of a liberal market economy, the emergence of new business elites, and large earnings from mineral extraction, is that the public may begin to worry that a self-interested elite is monopolizing both political and economic power. A too-cozy accommodation between domestic and foreign big business on the one hand and a political class meshed together by myriad private understandings and accommodations seems bound to provoke public cynicism and discontent.
But all political systems are bound to change in the future, while continuing to claim that each change represents a further perfection of democracy. For the sake of good international relations one should hope that these changes do not cause a divergence between different national systems. But, in my view, the primary drive should be to optimize national rather than international relations. One can only hope that as Mongolia begins to gain greater wealth, for example from mining development, it will be able to further refine its own version of democracy with increasing self-confidence, a system adapted for its own needs in terms of perceived public good, rather than the imitation of other states, no matter how rich and powerful they might be.
References
Bollen, Kenneth, 1991, ‘Political Democracy: Conceptual and Measurement Traps’, in Alex Inkeles (ed) On Measuring Democracy. New Brunswick NJ, Transaction, pp.3-20.
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977 [1972] Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Fisher, William, 1997, ‘Doing good? The politics and anti-politics of NGO practices’ Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 27.
Inglehart Ronald and Christian Welzel, 2005, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: the human development sequence, Cambridge University Press.
Jaggers, Keith, and Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data’ Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 469-482
Lijphart, Arend, 1999, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty Six Countries, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Munck, Gerardo and Jay Verkuilen, 2002, ‘Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices’ Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, 5-34
Quan Li and Rafael Reuveny, 2003,
‘Economic Globalization and Democracy: An Empirical Analysis’ British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 29-54
Rose, Richard, 2001, ‘How People View Democracy: A Diverging Europe,’ Journal of Democracy 12.1 (2001) 93-106
Sen, Amartya K. (1999). ‘Democracy as a Universal Value.’ Journal of Democracy 10(3): 3-17.
Zinnes, Dina and Richard Merritt, 1991, ‘Democracies and War’ in Alex Inkeles (ed) On Measuring Democracy. New Brunswick NJ, Transaction, pp. 210-234.
1
[1] These include:- “improving protection for human rights and the rule of law; strengthening judicial and legislative institutions, as well as other agencies to hold state power accountable; empowering democratic governance at the local level; ensuring the equal status and full participation of women; empowering marginalized groups to become partners in the restructuring of their societies; invigorating civil society and the autonomous mass media; securing fundamental workers rights, especially freedom of association; ensuring that those who work nonviolently for the democratic transformation of their societies are provided the space and resources needed for their task; controlling corruption and promoting transparency; extending civilian control over the military; cultivating democratic values and beliefs; and resolving conflicts over minority group rights and claims through the spirit and mechanisms of democracy.” (http://www.wmd.org/conference/founding.html as of 2nd December 2009)
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