Canada’s Debate

The relationship between democracy and freedom is a very deep one, but the two are not the same. Never have been, and never will be. It is entirely possible to have democracy without freedom… so, the question remains, is it possible to have freedom without democracy, or more pointedly, is it possible to have democracy with no freedom? The reason I ask is simple. For the past thirty years the West (and the United States has led the charge) has been trying to fashion Democracy wherever it could. I use Democracy to denote a specific iteration of democratic government: a stable political regime with formalized public institutions, that is open to Western interests, and features enough participation to dispel potential social upheaval.

Now, whenever someone talks about “spreading democracy” they either do so in terms of benevolence or extreme distrust, but the reality of the “project” is much less idealistic. The truth is that western liberal democracy seeks to replicate itself in the same way that Communism does. Those in power in our democracies view them as the pinnacle of social development and naturally seek to replicate that success elsewhere.

So lets talk about freedom for a bit. There are two “types” of freedom employed by the Political analyst crowd: Political Freedom and Economic freedom… and while nobody knows the formula itself, the idea is that real democracy isn’t necessary so long as there is sufficient freedom of one sort or another. For the first decade or two after the decline of the LIEO in the 1970’s, the solution was too promote economic freedom as much as possible. While this was ostensibly done to promote democracy the underlying motivation was the liberalization of trade resources and access for Western capital. Motive regardless, this impression of economic freedom as paramount to political freedom led to the era of Structural Adjustment Programs and Low Intensity Conflicts in (Nicaragua, Guatamala, Afghanistan, etc.) With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the relative international stability of the 1990’s the thinking shifted, and in 2001 Bush swept into office with the idea that by trying to fashion political freedoms (often bluntly), peoples in otherwise non-western nations would embrace western style democracy and “open up.” This of course has failed almost as dramatically as the structural adjustment programs in Africa and proxy wars of Central America.

Now, all of this is interesting because China is trying an entirely different approach to reaching true democracy. The Communist Party in China is slowly introducing political and market freedoms with an eye towards maximizing stability and social well-being.

“I’ve said that democracy, law, freedom, human rights, equality and fraternity do not belong exclusively to capitalism. They are the fruits of civilization jointly formed through the entire world’s slow course of historical development,” he said in a press conference held this morning after the annual session of the National People’s Congress closed.

A socialistic democracy shall ultimately ensure people’s rights of democratic election, democratic decision-making and democratic supervision, said Wen, who made the remarks when answering the question of a journalist from French newspaper Le Monde, who quoted him as saying in a previous article that “China won’t need democracy in 100 years.”

The article goes on to talk about how promoting political and economic reform are the two most important immediate goals of China, but that these should always be done with an eye on fairness, not the resulting democracy. It is a lesson that is well to be learned.

For far too long we have been enamoured with the idea of wiping away tyranny and letting democracy just step in with only the most flimsy of foundations. Give the market control of the economy and corruption will disappear and democracy will triumph! Give the people a taste of political freedoms and they will choose a free democracy! The truth is of course somewhere in the middle. The foundation of a real democracy is freedom to be sure, but freedom stems from safety and choice, not the lack of formal restraints, and as much as it pains me to say this, the Chinese model seems to embrace this more than any of our own enlightened versions.