Deliberations on Democracy

What with the UK’s EU referendum and in the aftermath of the attempted coup d’etat in Turkey, the word ‘democracy’ has been bandied about lately. I thought it was a good time to delve into its linguistic and semantic characteristics, past and present.

My understanding was that democracy (demokratia in Greek: the strength or rule of the people) referred to a political system whereby the rule of the people was effected by their elected representatives. However, what I had in mind is rightly known as representative democracy as is prevalent in western countries.

 When I first came to live and work in Greece, I remember a lady neighbor quizzing me about our political system in Great Britain. She proudly said that she lived in a republic and had a democracy while we had a royal family. The subtext seemed to be that we were most definitely a set of inferior, political animals. Her perspective was that a kingdom and democracy were mutually-exclusive political entities, that a monarch was some form of tyrant – originally meaning a member of the aristocracy in Ancient Greece, now defined as someone who seizes power unconstitutionally or who inherits such power. The other observation I made then was that for both of us, the issue was not simply one of semantics, but a highly emotive one as well.

Pericles (495 -429 BC) - largely responsible for developing the Athenian democracy.

Back to defining democracy. Direct or pure democracy describes a system whereby the people themselves participate – in practical terms, to a limited extent - in passing executive decisions, making laws, conducting trials. A referendum is an example of direct legislation.

 Representative democracy is similar but distinct from it in that it is seen to have six main features:

1.       representatives elected by the people to make laws

2.       elections held to elect these representatives

3.       civil liberties – where  citizens have freedom of speech, expression and information, etc.

4.       the rule of law – where the law is supreme and no one is above it

5.       independent judiciary – free from control of the executive or legislature

6.       an organized opposition party – to keep an eye on the policies and workings of the government

Now can I interest you in semi-democracy?  Just to further complicate things, this refers to a system that shares both democratic and authoritarian features. This latter classification would be a form of government characterized by strong, central power and limited political freedom. 

So rather than a nicely defined system we seem to have a political cline: the slippery slope of a sliding scale that goes from fully observed democratic practice to full-on authoritarianism.

Back then, my neighbour would have been confused to hear the British system actually being described as a crowned republic. But what our new-hatched understanding can tell us is that a referendum, within a representative democracy, could not supersede the rule of law. It is not in itself enough to generate major systemic change.

 It also tells us where ‘the say of the people’ is used to intimidate or coerce legitimate authorities, then what we have is mob rule. Yes, we may have leadership which was democratically elected, but wherever we see features of a representative democracy become restrained, dismantled, elected representatives being expelled, replaced by the non-elected, then we see the system deliberately and relentlessly being moved towards an authoritarian framework.

My final observation is this:  if we (?!) higher-order, cerebrally superior linguists and philosophers have been taxed by such taxonomic matters, how can we expect mere politicians (and I use the full force of pragmatic implicature here!) to grasp and commit to such complex concepts?