Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  What are these people missing? Why is this not a fruitful way to think about and discuss this topic? I think there are three points that must be stressed.

  They don’t see that these four forms of democracy aren’t cohe­rent pre­existing systems set in stone which can “be institut­ed” at any given point. Rather, they are each a general principle which must continuously be developed in exchange with the other ones. All existing demo­cracies incorporate at least some of these elements. Hence, it’s not a question of “implementing” one “syst­­em” or another, but rather of push­ing the boundaries for demo­cratic development and cultivating new and deeper layers of governance. Within each of the four forms of demo­cracy there are of course also many different shapes and ways to go about, for instance different ballot techniques as we shall briefly discuss shortly. So it is a question of continuous enrichment of the exist­ing system by means of delimited experimentation, syst­ematic eval­uation and of an ongoing discussion regarding which criteria we should use to measure a “better democracy”. Such quality markers could be better dec­ision-mak­ing (that decisions actually have the intended effects), higher collective intelligence, more pub­lic psycholo­gical own­er­­ship of the dec­isions made (and high­er compliance to rules and regul­ations), effi­cacy, transparency, degree of inclusivity, and other criteria that may yet need to be invented and agreed upon.

  People don’t recognize that these four forms of democracy—the possibilities for them—cannot be accepted or dismissed with eternally and universally valid arguments. They are, of course, context dependent. The context within which they emerge includes the value meme demo­graphics of a society, the available technological tools of commun­ica­tion, the degree of cult­ural democratic development, the amount of accumulated human exp­er­ience with a certain kind of system, the sur­rounding bureaucratic framework, the strength and stability of the state, the kind of economy that must be governed, the size of the gover­ned society and the avail­ability of social and psychological inno­vations of dialogue and decision-making—and so forth.

  People don’t recognize that there is an inherently logical relationship betw­een the four diff­er­ent forms of democracy, and that they do in fact make up a coherent pattern of a greater whole. This is a pattern that includes both a develop­mental directionality and a mann­er in which the four forms counter the inherent weaknesses of each other.

  Okay, hopefully you can see that it’s not a simple matter of being “for” or “against” any of these democratic forms. This incorrect way of think­ing shuts down the entire discussion and any fruitful development of a deeper democracy. Either we’re invested in a “pies in the sky” model that never gets tested in real life and has any number of problems once we try it, or we simply get stuck with the current status quo and fail to make adjustments that are both possible and necessary, because we don’t see “how that system would work”.

  Interconnecting the Four

  Let us now then zoom in on the last of the three points made above. What are the interrelations between the four forms of democracy?

  First of all , there is a progression from the most basic and funda­men­tal form to the most advanced and complex one . Direct demo­cracy is the foundation of all democratic decision-making, ensuring that the gover­ned have a say in the decisions made, which is the basis of all demo­cratic leg­itimacy.

  Rep­resentative democracy puts some of this decision-making into the hands of smaller groups of people who in turn are elected by means of direct votes.

  Participatory democracy creates paths for non-elected people to reen­ter and enrich the decision processes and execution of decisions made, which thus builds upon an established representative democracy.

  And deliber­ative democracy creates venues for deeper discussions thr­ough which pe­ople’s participatory understandings themselves can be enri­ched and more aptly coordinated. Deliberative democracy builds upon a foundation of the participation of relevant stakeholders.

  Secondly , you can see that this progression also plays out as a histo­rical sequence of how democracy and democratic theory have develop­ed . Dir­ect democracy, naturally, is the basic form that evolved already in an­cient Athens and to which we all return whenever a group of people say “let’s give it a vote”.

  Representative democracy grew through various forms of republica­nism in antiquity and early modernity, taking stronger and more systema­tic hold as representation grew after the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Eng­land and corresponding developments elsewhere—becoming fully mani­fest­ed after the French and American revolutions.

  Participatory democracy has existed only in a full modern form in some socialist contexts, such as during the Spanish Civil War 1936-1938, in which the Spanish Republican anarchist factions were governed with parti­cipatory principles. And then it played a significant role during the utopian leftwing surges and intellectual currents of the 1960s.

  And deliberative democracy has bloomed chiefly as an academic con­cept, being taught at universities since a few decades back. In its con­crete forms it exists only on a micro scale, within experimental companies, local citizen inclusion projects, committees and so forth.

  Thirdly , there is an inherently logical relationship between each of the four. Direct democracy is of course democracy “in and of itself”, its purest form, which is hence the elemental substance of all democratic govern­ance. The fundamental measure of all consensual and contractual govern­ance structures must ultimately be that the governed govern.

  But this is of course always impossible in practice: Not only are there min­ors and others who cannot partake as equals, but as soon as the co­ord­inated political unit is above a certain size, this requires represent­ation in order to reduce the costs of managing the complexity of decision mak­ing. In an advanced economy with significant division of labor, it simply doesn’t make sense to have everyone expend much time and effort mak­ing deci­sions about the minutiae of all public matters.

  The larger and more complex the economy, the greater the need for representative democracy; for pol­iticians, civil serv­ants, parliaments, cab­inets and parties. Representative democracy can also curt­ail some of the good old stubbornness of the peo­ple, letting those with str­onger argu­ments win in central arenas. The fact that direct-democratic Swit­zer­land only got the vote for women in 1971 (the last canton resisted until 1990 and had to be forced by court decision), reveals the fact that even the most nece­ssary adjust­ments can be held back by the social inertia of the popul­ation. Rouss­eau famously idealized the Swiss mode of gover­nance, but in practice it often tilts the political game in a conservative rather than a pro­gressive dir­ec­tion, quite unlike what Rousseau romantically im­a­­­gined. (This being said, the Confederation of Switzerland still has much to teach other coun­tries in terms of effective democratic govern­ance.)

  The larger the political unit, the more complexity must be managed by means of representation—and hence the less viable direct democracy be­comes. This crea­tes an increasing distance between the governing pro­cesses and the con­stituency itself; i.e. there is by necessity a growing gap between the citi­zens and their leaders. Today it is common to talk about this phen­o­menon as “the democratic deficit”; a discussion held particu­larly in regard to the EU and other forms of transnational governance. The distance bet­ween a G7 summit and ordinary citizens, for instance, is simply so vast that it hardly can be called demo­cratic in any real sense.

  Hence, the role of partic­ipatory democracy is to re-con­quer these rep­res­entative structures, sub­jecting them to the wills and per­spec­tives of relevant stakeholders and “common people” without bogg­ing it all down with the impossibility of mass votes on each and every tech­nical question. Particip­atory democracy is the process of enriching the cold machinery of bureau­cracy and professionalized politics with warm hands, reconnecting the gov­erning bodies to the governed.

  And de
liberative democracy is the practice of refining the processes thr­ough which many perspectives are formed and coordinated, so that parti­cipation can be fruitful and relevant. The more stakeholders are in­clu­ded at every level of decision making, the greater the risk they clog up the relevant decision-making processes and in effect hinder the actions of one another. Hence, the issue emerges of creating smoother pro­cesses through which thoughts, perspectives and actions are coord­in­ated on a deeper and more complex level—the need for thought­fully designed, curated and facilitated processes of deliberation. Three researchers, Zelma Bone, Judith Crockett and Sandra Hodge, suggested in 2006 the table on the next page to distinguish between debate, dialogue and deli­beration. [78]

  SHAPES OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE

  (adopted from Bone, Crockett and Hodge, 2006)

  Debate

  Dialogue

  Deliberation

  Compete

  Argue

  Promote opinion

  Seek majority

  Persuade

  Dig in

  Tight structure

  Express

  Win/lose

  Exchange

  Discuss

  Build relationships

  Understand

  Seek understanding

  Reach across

  Loose structure

  Listen

  No decision

  Weigh

  Choose

  Make choices

  Seek overlap

  Seek common ground

  Framed to make choices

  Flexible structure

  Learn

  Common ground

  I think it summarizes well how deliberative democracy aims for a dis­tinct form of communication: not just “debate”, where the issue is to “win”, not just “dialo­gue”, where the issue is to “understand one another” but deliberation , where the aim is to create something new together and to find out how to do what’s best given the circumstances.

  If we put this table in a wider developmental context, we can see that we go from a pre-democratic state of settling issues by force, to a direct demo­cratic vote where people just arbitrarily take a majority stance, to a debate within central arenas of representative democracy, to a dialogue of parti­cipatory democracy, to the deliberation pertaining of course to delib­erative democracy. There is an inherent developmental sequence here, paralleled in part by the value memes (modern debate, postmodern dialo­gue, meta­modern deliber­ation).

  Of course, the later stages of this developmental sequence require high­er levels of interpersonal trust and are more suitable for handling issues of increased complexity—in which it may be difficult to delineate your inter­est from mine, or even to define and weigh my very own interests. We’ll get back to the issue of generating deeper trust under Gemeinschaft Poli­tics.

  The point we need to see now is simply that deliberative democracy facil­itates the list­ening, lear­ning and understanding processes that make parti­cipation poss­ible; and participation makes representation legitimate; and repres­en­tation makes democratic governance manageable; and direct vot­ing makes demo­cracy legitimate in the first place. Deepening delibera­tion is key to what I call “co-development”, but deliberation must be used in harmonious tandem with the other forms of democracy.

  The fourth and last connection between the four forms of democracy is that they each come in degenerated and pathological shapes, each con­stituting a distinct kind of tyranny . An important element of why each form of democratic governance can be derailed is that necessary bal­ances with the three other forms fail.

  Direct democracy was of course critiqued already during antiquity by Plato and others for its way of creating a crude majority rule, a tyranny of the majority. Naturally, there is no reason to assume that the majority pos­ition is always, or even very often, the best one. This tyrannical degen­er­ation is echoed in authoritarian communist regimes with a “dictator­ship of the proletariat”. Such regimes generally claim to be a kind of direct demo­cracy, as the Soviet system did to a signi­ficant extent. There is thus a super-concentration of power (with no division of powers à la Montes­quieu or Locke) and massifi­cation of party membership, with no division of powers as “the people” are thought to rule by decree. In practice, of course, a small group or single leader can snatch the reigns, as Napoleon did. As the communist rule progressed, the lack of proper mechanisms of re­pres­ent­ation meant that information feedback processes were bottle­necked and systemic imbalances grew. All of this harkens back, of course, to Rousseau’s famous words: “We will force you to be free!”

  Authoritarian capitalist societies like Singapore, Egypt or Pinochet’s Chile—or in our days, to some extent even China—lack even this preten­sion of being a “peo­ple’s republic”. A small elite simply claims to repre­sent the country as a whole and that they know what’s best. This repre­sentation is decoupled from any direct democratic basis, which means that it lacks any democratic legitimacy. This doesn’t in itself mean that its governance must be unsuccessful—just that it may be difficult to develop deeper forms of democratic self-organization, as these societies are nece­ssarily built upon frail monopolies of power.

  Fascist “corporativism” that grew in Mussolini’s Italy is a society orga­n­ized around professional categories, industry interest groups, or a mod­ern equivalent of medieval “guilds”. This can be said to be a perverse form of participatory democracy: If you base governance upon member partici­pa­tion, but with no direct vote and no effective representation mecha­nisms, people become deeply involved but still have few means of curbing tyranny and misuse of power. So you can get a lot of people to coordinate their actions very intensely for a while, but the lack of both democratic legi­timacy, power balance and represent­ation will ensure that the system has low social sustainability. Fas­cism, and cor­por­ativism especially, thus constitute a deranged form of parti­ci­patory demo­cracy.

  Pathological versions of deliberative democracy have yet to emerge on a larger scale—the history of the 20th century doesn’t give us any examples of a “deliberative tyranny”, after all. But we can certainly see derailed att­empts at deli­beration in smaller “progressive” organizations, which easily take on smo­thering ideals about “sensitivity”, “humility”, “listening” and so forth, to the extent that people get stuck in complicated and icky social relations while striving for an impossible consensus, accusing one another of being passive aggressive and so on. Because co-development and deeper deli­bera­tion is such a powerful attractor as society progresses into a more com­plex, post­indu­strial and global order, we are bound to become more and more acqu­ainted with the pathologies pertaining to deliberative dem­o­cracy and its particular and yet largely unknown forms of tyranny. To be sure, it will have some­thing to do with subtle transgressions of the perso­nal inte­grity of people, over­stretched subtle nudges and manipula­tions, and the kind of social-psycho­logical mechanisms that can play a part in “group-think”.

  Because we need so much deliberation, because we are compelled tow­ards co-development, we must face the darker sides of deliberation. The logic of this progression—from direct, to representative, to part­i­cipatory, to deliberative democracy (and then back again in different combinations and iterations between them)—points in a certain direction of increased capability for co-development and complex self-organization of society. But it also portends that new and subtler kinds of tyr­anny and oppression may emerge during the 21st century.

  And new sources of oppression can emerge where we least expect it: in the circles most committed to democratic ideals and to deepening demo­cracy. When everyone is comm­itted to the process and to develop­ing their own positions, the divisions of party politics can break down and hence new and subtler concentrations of power and new methods of man­i­pul­a­tion can emerge.

  What has been said thus far can be summarized in the table on the next page:

>   FORMS OF DEMOCRACY

  Direct

  Representative

  Participatory

  Deliberative

  Basic role

  Basis of democratic legitimacy

  Manages complexity and issues of scale

  Re-introduces stakeholder perspectives

  Facilitates the coordination & develop­ment of per­spectives

  How complex?

  Least complex

  Second least complex

  Second most complex

  Most complex

  Develop­mental stage

  Ancient governance, smaller units

  Modern governance, larger units

  Critical re-appropriation of modern governance

  Making critical appropriation possible in practice

  Pathology

  Tyranny of the majority, communism

  Distant and unaccountable bureaucracy

  Fascist corporativism

  Subtle smothering, manipulation and group-think

  There is a deep connection between these democratic forms of govern­ance, and not any one of them is in-and-of-itself “the best”. The issue is rather that the different forms connect to each other and create a coher­ent whole, and that the developmental possibilities of any given system of gov­ernance must be continuously evaluated and developed.

  —

  Democracy can never be a question of arriving at the best deal once and for all. The terms of governance and political participation must remain open to continual renegotiation to be considered truly demo­cratic, and only through processes of further democratization can the faith in demo­cracy be kept alive. Democracy, it’s not a thing; it’s a process.