[atlarge-discuss] Democracies Re: [atlarge-discuss] Risks and digitalcertificates (was Re: [atlarge-discuss]Election Preparation)

[espresso@e-scape.net]

At 08:23 +0200 2003/04/28, Holger Steiner wrote:
>espresso@e-scape.net schrieb:
>>
>[snip]
>> Not everyone shares your confidence that bombardment and
>> installation of puppet regimes is the best way to bring
>> democracy to undemocratic nations. (I can't think of a
>> single country where that worked in the past.)
>
>Germany.

Thanks, Holger. I should have phrased that remark of mine
more carefully.

Germany was an exception to what I said but it had actually
been a democracy (of sorts) before Hitler de-democratized it,
so the Allies were merely reversing a "regime change". The
same is more-or-less true of Italy. Actually, Japan is the
one place where there was a far more democratic system
after the war than before.

However, the various bombardments and invasions of places
like Afghanistan don't tend to have that result. The
British, the Russians and the Americans tried in their
various ways to take control and set a different future
course for the county but as soon as the occupations end
and the puppets are on their own, things tend to revert
to what was there before.

Most puppet regimes are actually installed and maintained
to *prevent* the kind of government the people of a
particular country want. Whether we're talking about the
countries the Soviet Union conquered or the ones the U.S.
invaded, or go back further to the colonies of Britain,
France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal or the Netherlands.
I'm not saying whatever is demolished in a conquest is
necessarily good or democratic -- just that you don't
normally make a country democratic by bombing it to
rubble and then occupying it to run it yourself or
with hand-picked nationals of the country in question.

In Afghanistan, despite the various occupations, what
the majority of people actually seem to want is to
continue their own traditions -- that is, a form of
government based on a warrior culture where all men
bear arms and support one or another of the tribal
warlords. If anything, the desire to resist a strong
force from outside reinforces that model. Whether
that wouldn't change gradually all by itself as Afghanis
started relating to the rest of the world as trading
partners instead of rival warlords trying to muscle in
is yet to be seen: I think myself that if fighting
the occupiers can unify competing warlords, so could
the prospect of mutual benefits from a government
that didn't depend on drug-money, arms-smuggling and
hosting terrorists from abroad.

Tribalism is likewise a strong factor in most of the
African nations, and also parts of Latin America. Their
situations are complicated by the legacy of colonial
regimes which, although accustomed to some degree of
democracy for themselves, didn't necessarily want it
fully extended to the "natives".

The great success of the Roman Empire was where it
immediately tried to Romanize the countries it occupied
(unified administration, enforced the rule of law, etc.)
to the point where the "natives" who adapted were also
recognized as citizens. Its great failure was that, in
becoming the Empire, it left democracy behind as "old-
fashioned" and put its faith in military might to crush
the response to cruelty and mismanagement for the benefit
of an ever-greedier bunch of patricians back in Rome
who lived by flattering the Emperor that his every whim
was divine. Soon the tribes were chipping away at the
Empire until they reached the gates of Rome itself,
and the experimental democracy of the Pax Roman led to
several centuries of setback before one could reasonably
start talking about city-states and nations rather than
personal fiefdoms again.

Democracies seem to happen when a majority of people
in a country have well and truly had it with their
traditional form of government and are willing to
take a chance on something new and risky -- like
defying the existing power-structure and its allies,
and letting the citizenry take responsibility for
governance, on the assumption that they can't do much
worse than the previous rulers.

Wasn't that what this group had originally set out
to convince ICANN, the U.S. Department of Commerce
et al. to try?

Regards,

Judyth

##########################################################
Judyth Mermelstein     "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, QC           <espresso@e-scape.net>
##########################################################
"A word to the wise is sufficient. For others, use more."
"Un mot suffit aux sages; pour les autres, il en faut plus."
##########################################################



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