4/14/03 - Columbia University - TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY?

by Slavoj Zizek
"Democracy" is not merely the "power of, by, and for the people," it is not
enough just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in
no way automatically coincide) of the large majority determine the state
decisions. Democracy - in the way this term is used today - concerns, above
all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to
a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully
absorbed into the agonistic game. "Democracy" means that, whatever
electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally
respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were
effectively "democratic": in spite of obvious electoral manipulations, and of
the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple hundred of Florida
voices will decide who will be the president, the Democratic candidate
accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the elections, Bill
Clinton made an appropriate acerbic comment: "The American people have
spoken; we just don't know what they said." This comment should be taken
more seriously than it was meant: even now, we don't know it - and, maybe,
because there was no substantial "message" behind the result at all. This is
the sense in which one should render problematic democracy: why should
the Left always and unconditionally respect the formal democratic "rules of
the game"? Why should it not, in some circumstances, at least, put in
question the legitimacy of the outcome of a formal democratic procedure?
Interestingly enough, there is at least one case in which formal democrats
themselves (or, at least, a substantial part of them) would tolerate the
suspension of democracy: what if the formally free elections are won by an
anti-democratic party whose platform promises the abolition of formal
democracy? (This did happen, among other places, in Algeria a couple of
years ago, and the situation is similar in today's Pakistan.) In such a case,
many a democrat would concede that the people was not yet "mature"
enough to be allowed democracy, and that some kind of enlightened
despotism whose aim will be to educate the majority into proper democrats
is preferable.
This strategic suspension of democracy is reaching new heights today. The
US were putting tremendous pressure on Turkey where, according to

opinion polls, 94% of the people are opposed to allowing the US troops'
presence for the war against Iraq - where is democracy here? Every old
Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the critics
who reproached the Communists that they aim at undermining family,
property, etc.: it is the capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is
destroying the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today
than in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the
population. In the same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as
global defenders of democracy are effectively undermining it? In a perverse
rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted with the brutal fact
that their politics is out-of-tune with the majority of their population, they
take recourse to the commonplace wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does
not follow" - and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...
When politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical terms, one
can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up some dark, threatening
prospects. It is the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetoric in George W.
Bush's recent public statements (of the "Does the world have the courage to
act against Evil or not?" type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of
the U.S. position - the function of ethical reference is here purely
mystifying, merely serving to mask the true political stakes (which are not
difficult to discern). In order to trace these stakes, recall how the geopolitic
hardliners like to compare today's situation of the US to that of a patient on
dialysis: the US way of life in all its aspects, including the ideological
ones, crucially depends on the availability of a certain minimal amount of
the oil supply, only one third of which can be provided by the US
themselves. The US are thus like a patient on dialysis whose survival
depends on the influx of oil mostly controlled by the Muslim population
which is antagonistic to the US values and might - in short, a patient whose
dialysis machine is controlled by a crazy doctor who hates the patient... The
only way to avoid the permanent threat is to directly take control of the key
oil suppliers in the Middle East. The gradual limitation of democracy is
clearly perceptible in the attempts to "rethink" the present situation - one is,
of course, for democracy and human rights, but one should "rethink" them,
and a series of recent interventions in the public debate give a clear sense of
the direction of this "rethinking." In The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria,
Bush's favored columnist, locates the threat to freedom in "overdoing
democracy," i.e., in the rise of "illiberal democracy at home and abroad" (the
books subtitle). He draws the lesson that democracy can only "catch on" in
economically developed countries: if the developing countries are

"prematurely democratized," the result is a populism which ends in

economic catastrophe and political despotism - no wonder that today's
economically most successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea,
Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. The
immediate lessons for Iraq is clear and unambiguous: yes, the US should
bring democracy to Iraq, but not impose it immediately - there should first
be a period of five or so years in which a benevolently-authoritarian US
dominated regime would create proper conditions for the effective
functioning of democracy... We know now what bringing democracy means:
it means that the US and its "willing partners" impose themselves as the
ultimate judges who decide if a country is ripe for democracy.
As for the US themselves, Zakaria's diagnosis is that "America is
increasingly embracing a simple-minded populism that values popularity
and openness as the key measures of legitimacy. /.../ The result is a deep
imbalance in the American system, more democracy but less liberty." The
remedy is thus to counteract this excessive "democratization of democracy"
(or "deMOREcracy") by delegating more power to impartial experts
insulated from the democratic fray, like the independent central banks. Such
a diagnosis cannot but provoke an ironic laughter: today, in the alleged
"overdemocratization," the US and the UK started a war on Iraq against the
will of the majority of their own populations, not to mention the
international community. And are we not all the time witnessing the
imposition of key decisions concerning global economy (trade agreements,
etc.) by "impartial" bodies exempted from democratic control? Is the idea
that, in our post-ideological era, economy should be de-politicized and run
by experts, today not a commonplace shared by all participants? Even more
fundamentally, is it not ridiculous to complain about "overdemocratization"
in a time when the key economic and geopolitic decisions are as a rule not
an issue in elections: for at least three decades, what Zakaria demands is
already a fact. What we are effectively witnessing today is a split into
ideological life-style issues where fierce debates rage and choices are
solicited (abortion, gay marriages, etc.), and the basic economic policy
which is presented as a depoliticized domain of expert decisions - the
proliferation of "overdemocracy" with the "excesses" or affirmative action,
the "culture of complaint," and the demands for financial and other
restitutions of victims, is ultimately the front whose back side is the silent
weaving of the economic logic.

The obverse of the same tendency to counteract the excesses of

"deMOREcracy" is the open dismissal of any international body that would
effectively control the conduct of a war - exemplary is here Kenneth
Anderson's "Who Owns the Rules of War?" (in The New York Times
Magazine, April 13 2003), whose subtitle make the point unambiguously
clear: "The war in Iraq demands a rethinking of the international rules of
conduct. The outcome could mean less power for neutral, well-meaning
human rights groups and more for big-stick-wielding states. That would be a
good thing." The main complaint of this essay is that, "for the past 20 years,
the center of gravity in establishing, interpreting and shaping the law of war
has gradually shifted away from the militaries of leading states and toward
more activist human rights organizations;" this tendency is perceived as
unbalanced, "unfair" towards the big military powers who intervene in other
countries, and partial towards the attacked countries - with the clear
conclusion that the militaries on the "big-stick-wielding states" should
themselves determine the standards by which their actions will be judged.
This conclusion is quite consistent with the US rejection of the authority of
the Hague War Crimes tribunal over its citizens. Effectively, as they would
have put it in Lord of the Rings, a new Dark Age is descending upon the
human race.