Today I continue on looking at the essays I’ve been reading from the ‘Occupy Handbook’. A couple of weeks ago I looked at a piece called “A Nation of Business Junkies” and today I’m going to reflect on Pankaj Mishra’s piece “Globalization and the Perils of Democracy.”
Mishra’s essay looks at the links between the major protest movements of 2011 (and those preceding it) and the nature of modern capitalist democracy. There are many different issues that Mishra brings out in his (rather short) essay, including looking at the links between democracy and the major protests of 2011, the role of the middle class in developing modern democratic systems in the developing world (and the perils that brings), and the links between our economic system and modern democracy. There is one area I’d like to quickly look at though in this blog; the role democracy has played as part of our ideological debate.
If you look at the major (mainstream) ideological debate of the couple of decades you can see it largely as one of ‘democracy’ vs. ‘non-democracy’. For us in the west, with the ‘capitalism’ vs ‘communism’ debate ‘won’, we have spent the last decades looking to ‘promote democracy’ around the world. As part of this we have seen global struggles/protest movements solely under the lens of a desire from people to access democracy.
What Mishra seems to argue in his piece, is that this debate is largely inflated, and if you look at the protest movements that have swept across the globe, it does not reflect the views of those taking to the streets.
To understand this, Mishra takes a quick look at modernisation theory; or the theory developed in the 70s and 80s that countries can take a linear path to ‘development’, one that involves a shift to a democratic capitalist system. With the collapse of communism in the early nineties, and the ever-increasing adoption of ‘state-based-capitalism’ by so-called communist nations as China, this modernisation approach has continued to be seen as the answer – adopt a capitalist model, begin a process to democratisation, become a developed nation. In doing so, the great ideological debate, the one how our economic systems work, has been given up on.
Mishra contends however that the global protest movements show that this debate really isn’t over. The movements present a much more complex picture than that, one of much more disdain for the modernist approach to economic management. As he says:
“…public anger derives from a single source: a form of economic progress that, geared toward private wealth creation, is indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, ideas of collective welfare, social justice, and environmental protection.”
And this isn’t just in places like the United States – places where ‘democracy’ is apparently at its best. Those places ‘on the way to democracy’ are also seeing great revolt – but this revolt is not about the lack of democracy, but about the economic system our democracy is based on.
For example, looking at movements in Tibet, Mishra argues that instead of being about democratic or religious rights – these movements are more about the creep of capitalism. Tibetans see a system that has the capacity to enforce a new cultural system which they simply do not want.
Looking at Thailand, a ‘democratic country’, but one where democracy has been tough, Mishra argues that despite his attacks on democratic rights, the former President Thaksin Shinawatra continues to remain popular, in part because of the progressive economic reforms he implemented (developing a welfare state, instituting free public healthcare etc.):
“Successive elections, most recently in 2011, have proved that a majority of Thais still back Thaksin in spite of his contempt for civil liberties.”
The problem, Mishra argues, is that modernisation theory hasn’t take into account the complexity of modern capitalism and globalisation:
“Modernisation theorists, resident in a simple world defined by the ideological binaries of communism and capitalism, were hardly in a position to anticipate the vast, complex, and unpredictable forces of economic globalisation we live with today: how they would weaken national sovereignty, and turn electoral democracy itself into another source of the seemingly permanent political conflict and instability in large parts of the world.”
This presents a picture in which we can no longer think of a great ideological debate between democracy vs non-democracy. Despite what the many may say about the protest movements of the past years (that they are about a strive towards participation in a modern democratic system), the reality is much more complex than that. These movements are about our economic system, a revolt against the failing of modernisation, and a reopening of the great ideological debates of the past.