Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Take a look at the diagram below. It looks similar to the six dimensions of inequality, but this one is different:

  Figure: The six new forms of politics, all part of one emergent, “intra-relational” balance: None of the six forms are fully possible without the others, and the very meaning of each new kind of politics changes depending on how the others develop.

  Three Caveats

  A few important notes before we delve into it. First of all, it should be noted that none of these forms of politics are themselves answers to the prob­lems of modern life in any static sense .

  Each of them is a process ; one that can be more or less consciously recog­nized and monitored; more or less clearly articulated and product­iv­ely acted upon. Just like we today have mini­stries of finance and a host of instit­utions for fin­ancial regulation, this hardly guar­antees good eco­nomic gov­er­nance—likewise the existence of Demo­crat­ization Politics does not gua­rantee a good process of democ­rat­ization (and so forth with the other five forms of poli­tics).

  But it is still a good idea to have ministries of finance, and likewise it is a good idea to have a deliberately crafted politics of demo­cratization. The exist­ence of these kinds of politics does not in themselves, of course, guar­antee good politics within each field. It merely opens a host of pot­entials.

  The point is that these processes are on­going in our societies either way, whether or not we have a language to describe them and political frame­works to relate to them. As these pro­cesses become con­sciously recognized and re-organized, we increase our ability to create a free and fair society—a great potential, but no promises made.

  The manifestation of these six new processes includes several ingre­di­ents: they must become seriously con­sidered political issues that are dis­cussed in the public debate, they must have batteries of interventions and experts work­ing with them, and there must be serious efforts to expand this knowledge and under­standing through the social and behav­ioral sci­ences—i.e. they must become part and parcel of acad­emic life as well. There must be edu­ca­tional and career paths for people who want to work with these issues, and there must be sufficient recog­nition of this work. That’s how we get the new processes of society’s self-organization going.

  Why, then, is a process so much more powerful than any specific policy position or any one “concrete action”? It is because a process consists of a multitude of countless concrete actions that build upon and are coordina­ted with each other in a coherent, larger pattern. And because there is an ongoing flow of new actions taken, the process can begin to flow in new directions. It is flexible, but still has continuity and an over­arching theme. If you want to build a skyscraper, it requires many people to under­stand roughly what a skyscraper is and what it means to build one. The same goes for large, societal processes. You need to name them, define them, discuss them, and keep developing your understanding of them.

  The second point to note is that we’re not —at this point—taking a hard stance on whether these new forms of politics should rely upon state bureau­cracy, market solutions or civil society . The only thing that is certain, I would argue, is that the state cannot be entirely left out. It is going to have to involve political parties and other groups, advan­cing these issues in a political arena. But the extent to which markets and civil society can and should be relied upon is beyond the current scope of inquiry. No doubt, the answers to this questi­on can and will vary across different countries and historical circumstan­ces: some societies have more robust public institutions to build upon, other livelier civil societies, and yet others more dynamic markets.

  Future deliberations about the balance between state, market and civil society will need to be specific in nature—for instance, perhaps there is more room for market agents within democratization politics than within Gem­einschaft politics, and perhaps the optimal mix varies over time. It is quite likely that a good mix of the three will be viable within most of these areas of concern—even if the state, and politics, is likely to play an indisp­ensable role, simply because we are, after all, considering institutions.

  The third point I wish to emphasize is that I am here speaking of “soc­iety” in the abstract , not necessarily as a country with a state. Given that much of society will self-organize through other means than state instit­ut­ions in the coming period (with blockchain technologies, trans­nat­ional corporations, NGOs, strong city regions, industry hubs, supra­national org­an­izations and so forth) there is no reason to lock down our perspec­tive to states only.

  But even beyond states, through whatever form society self-organ­izes, I hold that this pattern of deeper governance is relevant. So please allow me the luxury of speaking about “society” as if it were a country with a state, and you can make inferences and adapt­ations to other structures of gov­ernance from there. This does not mean we are adopting the state-based social engineering made fam­ous by the Swedish sociologist couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in the 1930s, but rather that we are looking at wider patt­erns or processes, with the development of the state as one primary exam­ple .

  After these presentations of the six new kinds of politics I will inquire into how these taken together form a master pattern , how they each balance each other out—and how they are instituted.

  Hence, there is an element of chicken-and-egg paradox here: You need to understand all six new forms of politics to see the master pattern, but you need to see the master pattern to see how they can function and real­istically be instituted within society—so that our thoughts, feelings and act­ions may emerge together in deeper harmonic coherence across all aspects of everyday life.

  Without further ado, let us leap into the torrent. First out is Demo­cratization Politics.

  En garde !

  Chapter 9:

  DEMOCRATIZATION POLITICS

  Is democracy a done deal? Is the form of governance prevailing in the West today the most democratic there is ever going to be? We norm­ally think of democracy and dictator­ship as a binary question: either a country is a democracy or it is not. Yet this black-and-white conception of demo­cracy has been challenged, for instance by Freedom House’s graded scale or the 2014 Princeton study which argued the US is more accurately des­cribed as a civil oligarchy than a democracy per se. [75]

  To be, or not to be democratic—that isn’t really the question. No, the intelligent question is the extent to which a society manages to include its citizens into the political processes; not whether a society is a democracy, but how democratic it has become.

  So how do we determine just that? How do we define democracy and how do we measure a society’s degree of democracy?

  The mainstream account of democratic governance still goes along the lines of what the political scientist Robert Dahl described in the 1950s and onwards. According to Dahl, democracy shows up as a power balance between diff­er­ent interest groups. Such balance forces the parties into a situation in which the following five criteria must be true (this particular definition is from a 1989 book): [76]

  1. Effective participation : Citizens must have adequate and equal opport­unities to form their preference and place questions on the public agenda and express rea­sons for one outcome over the other.

  2. Voting equality at the decisive stage : Each citizen must be assured their judgments will be counted as equal in weights to the judgments of others.

  3. Enlightened understanding : Citizens must enjoy ample and equal opp­ortunities for discov­ering and affirming which choices best serve their interests.

  4. Control of the agenda : “The people” must have the opportunity to dec­ide what should be actual political matters and which should be brought up for deliberation.

  5. Inclusiveness: Equality must extend to all citizens within the state. Everyone has a leg­itimate stake within the political process.

  It should be noted that all the states commonly held as democratic fail to truly ful
fill these ideals, and that it would be more or less impossible to actually do so. Dahl’s definition of democratic gover­n­ance, despite being rather conventional, serves to illustrate how much democracy is more of an ideal than an actual state of affairs; that democracy remains an imposs­ible goal worth striving towards.

  Just like the socialist Eastern Bloc didn’t actually consider their socie­ties communist, but rather saw communism as the end-goal that the “actually existing socialism” was in the process of creating, true democra­cy remains the unrealized promise of liberal society; the equally distant utopia that the “actually existing liberalism” should be in the process of creating.

  Sadly, the idea of democracy as an ongoing process—a fight for equa­lity and liberty that never ends—has waned in favor of the belief we have already reached the end-goal of a fully democratic society. As a result, faith in democracy has eroded in recent years. Without the prospect of further democratization, those who feel disenfranchised in modern socie­ty have become more inclined to abandon democracy altogether.

  As a remedy, I propose we update democracy; that we abandon the not­i­on of democracy as a done deal and renegotiate its terms—that demo­cracy, as it is currently realized, can only ever be a proto-synthesis; that it, by necessity, remains provisional and always subject to future revision.

  Updating Democracy Itself

  I thus believe we have ample reason to challenge the relative self-content­ment of the world’s “most democratic” soc­ieties by asking how they could be­come more demo­cratic? Could the gov­ernance of societies like Swe­den or the US be transformed and im­proved upon, even beyond what Dahl envisioned? Could there be future, deep­er forms of “democracy” which are not only improvements upon the pre­sent systems, but gen­ui­nely and qualitatively different in clearly pre­ferable ways?

  From such an ima­gined future vantage point, could today’s taken-for-granted state of affairs in contemporary “democratic” societies even be viewed as terribly undemo­cratic, prim­itive and oppressive? Are we medie­val?

  It is often claimed that today’s democracy is under threat; that it is de­cay­ing, that it might be losing its grip or otherwise is becoming increa­s­ingly dysfunctional. [77] But such diagnoses can also be understood as a mal­ady of modern­ity aging, of the modern institutions, founded a cen­tury ago or more, having become un­able to effect­ively tackle the complexities of meta­modern (post­industrial, trans­national, digitized, etc.) society—a soci­ety in which the key self-organizational flows occur on a much higher order of complexity.

  Thus, we are not only talking about restoring, revita­liz­ing or “sav­ing” democracy, but about fundam­entally updating democracy and re­imagining its institutions . Hence, we are asking a more radical and dan­ger­ous question: How do we reinvent democracy? What kind of demo­cracy comes after democracy?

  T­his is an idea echoed not only in the work of Habermas, but also in the experi­mental political philosophy of the legal theorist Roberto Ung­er. Habermas points us towards a deeper form of post-liberal demo­cracy and Unger opens the door to taking an experimental stance towards the dem­ocratic institutions—that they can and should be experimented upon under controlled and reasonable forms.

  If our present political systems are in a state of relative decay, can they really be mended and saved with the currently adopted tools of demo­cratic governance? Isn’t it more realistic to ima­gine a path forward to­wards a democratic syst­em more up to speed with today’s globalized and digitized world? If our democratic institutions are working poorly due to being designed to govern a modern, industrial nation state of yester­year—doesn’t it make sense to take the issue of updating and reinven­ting these institu­tions more seriously?

  The fundamental starting point of Democratization Politics is thus a negative : There is simply no conceivable reason to believe our current forms of govern­ance in modern democratic societies would be the only possi­ble and best forms of governance for all posterity. If all other forms of gover­nance have emerged in historical time, have had beginnings and end­ings, is it really a feasible supposition that liberal parliamentary demo­cracy is an exception?

  No, democracy is not a done deal. Why would it be? It is a develop­men­tal process like everything else, just one that stabilizes around rela­tively fixed equilibria (or “local maxima”) because institutional chan­ges require such great investments and create path dependencies. With “path depen­dency” I mean that, basically, once a society has opted for a certain form of govern­ance, it is very “expensive” and difficult to change the stru­cture.

  The fact that liberal democracy has been stably operational for a good while, that is has outcompeted its modern alternatives, such as commu­nism and fascism, and that it remains very difficult to change—even to imagine a credible alternative—can create the illusion that democracy in its current form is “the natural order of things”. But of course, it isn’t.

  Luckily there are hacks; there are ways to get around this bottleneck and to open developmental paths that lie beyond liberal democracy.

  First of all, a society can expend resources, time and effort in smaller settings to experiment with potentially better forms of governance, e.g. in “exp­eri­men­tal zones”, as proposed by Roberto Ung­er. Secondly, a society can orchestrate a large number of dem­o­cratic technologies and innova­tions in governance which seek to enhan­ce demo­cracy incre­me­ntally. If enough incremental change has occurred, eventu­ally the syst­em itself will have shifted from one stage to another.

  And here’s another way of seeing it: Given the sacred status of demo­cracy, isn’t it strange that no late modern economies are mak­ing serious, concerted and patient efforts to develop it and im­prove upon its quality? By treating democracy as a given, are we not fail­ing to take our own democratic values seriously?

  The True North: Collective Intelligence

  Let’s begin by plunging into this question by identifying a few general his­t­orical trends. What does it mean for democracy to develop? How did it emerge, and why? And what were the attractors that brought democracy into being?

  I’d like to sugg­est that there are some deep and sturdy historical patt­erns which—again—don’t determine where things are going, but certainly hint us to­wards some long-term attractor points, i.e. the direction towards which things poten­tially can go.

  If democracy is not a binary variable, not a question of either-or, but a developmental matter, a direction—can we then know and recognize its “true north”? Can we know when democracy becomes deeper, retains higher qual­ity, becomes truer to its own principles and ideals?

  And if we go far enough in this direction, will democracy inevitably look like “more of the same”, or will there be qualitative shifts from one stage to another that will make democracy look like something completely differ­ent, perhaps event warranting a new word? What if liberal parlia­mentary democracy isn’t “demo­cratic enough” for governing meta­mod­ern society?

  To traverse the dangerous territory such quest­ions lead us towards, we’d better have a good sense of a “true north” lest we can get lost and end up inventing new forms of oppression, tyranny, or political dis­integration and collapse. Let’s look for such a true north.

  One un­deniable trend is the increasing dispersion of leadership and decision-making . If we go back in history it becomes perfectly clear that pre-modern and early modern monarchical leadership was more con­cen­trated, more arbitrarily wielded and relying more upon the good nature and talent of specific rulers than what is the case in present-day par­lia­mentary democracies. Today, more people partake in decision-making at all levels of society, and wider groups of citizens can be elected.

  But even nowadays, the world-system, as a whole, places incredible res­pon­sibility and power in e.g. the US President, which must be viewed as a very high-risk strategy for governance. If this one person has significant flaws—as we all do—
this leads to great costs for people all around the world. As such, there still remain pockets of irrationally and inefficiently con­cen­trated power in contemporary democracies.

  Another undeniable trend has to do with the increased total volume of active decision-making, i.e. the sheer volume of inform­ation pro­cessed by organs of governance, and the complexity of the processes deliberately shaped by governance.

  When viewed as a very long historical trend, it becomes obvious that govern­ance has become “more powerful” over the cen­turies. Govern­ments simply have much greater capacities to inter­fere in the lives of citi­zens than in the past. I have already pointed out that the taxation capaci­ties of modern societies, even while limited in practice due to corruption and the flight of trans­national corporate capital, are stagg­ering compared to any­thing that came before. Strong states levy high taxes, and they penetrate society more thoroughly in a variety of ways. As we have discus­s­ed, Fou­cault pointed out that modern “free” society requi­res many addi­tional lay­ers of control.

  Naturally, it is not that a system with greater total power is more demo­cratic in itself, as it is easy to name totalitarian states with high degrees of organization. But there certainly is a correlation between the quantity of self-organization and the growth of democratic forms of governance around the world. And even if libertarianism is a strong current in many present-day demo­cracies (seeking to minimize state pow­er), even the most libertarian ones in the world today are highly org­anized by historical standards.