DEMOCRACY AROUND THE WORLD | Giving citizens a voice
11 June 2008
The Roots of Modern Democracy
Michael Mandelbaum
Liberty and self-government are the two parts of democracy, Michael Mandelbaum says. Free markets come first and make the right conditions for democracy to emerge, he says. Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., and the author of Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government (PublicAffairs, 2007).
Over the past three decades democracy has enjoyed a remarkable rise. In 1900 only 10 countries could be counted as democracies. By mid-century the number had increased to 30, and 25 years later it remained there. By 2005, however, 119 of the world’s 190 countries were democracies. How did this happen? The place to begin to answer that question is with a proper understanding of democracy itself.
For those who use the term -- and that includes almost everyone -- democracy is a single, integrated, readily identifiable political system. Yet historically, as I describe in my book Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government, democracy came about through the fusion of two political traditions that, until well into the 19th century, were not only distinct but were widely regarded as completely incompatible with each other.
The two political traditions are liberty, which is often called freedom, and popular sovereignty, or self-government. Liberty belongs to individuals, while popular sovereignty is a property of the community as a whole. Liberty involves what governments do or, more accurately, what they are forbidden to do to their citizens -- they are forbidden to abridge individual freedoms. Self-government, by contrast, has to do with the way those who govern are chosen -- they are chosen by all the people. Self-government therefore answers the question who governs, while liberty prescribes rules for how those who govern may do so, rules that impose limits on what they may do.
The two component parts of democracy have different histories. Liberty is the older of the two. It developed in three stages. Economic liberty, in the form of private property, dates in the Western European tradition from ancient Rome. Religious liberty in this tradition -- freedom of worship -- emerged largely from the split in Christian Europe caused by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. Political liberty came later than the other two -- 18th-century Britain was the first place where something resembling modern political liberty could be seen -- and it involves the absence of government control over speech, assembly, and political participation.
Popular sovereignty burst upon the world with the French Revolution of 1789, which brought forth the idea that sovereign power should reside in the people as a whole rather than in hereditary monarchs. Since it is impractical for all of the people to govern themselves directly all the time, a vehicle for popular sovereignty has developed: representative government, with the people choosing their representatives in free, fair, open elections in which all adults have the right to vote.
Until the second half of the 19th century, it was widely believed that popular sovereignty would crush liberty. If the people gained supreme power in the societies in which they lived, it was thought, they would seize the property of the affluent and enforce political and social conformity on everybody. Two classic works of 19th-century political analysis, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume study Democracy in America and the Englishman John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty,” address precisely this danger. By the 20th century, however, it was clear that liberty and popular sovereignty could coexist peacefully, as they now do in many countries around the world.
Social Safety Net
One important reason for the successful merger of the two was the development, at the end of the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th, of government programs of social protection -- old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and health care benefits -- that came to be known, collectively, as the social safety net, or the welfare state. Since every citizen is entitled to these benefits, the welfare state, in effect, made the distribution of property universal, which in turn has made the institution of private property more acceptable than it would otherwise have been.
Combining social welfare with liberty and popular sovereignty made democracy attractive. So, too, did the course of modern history, in which democracies became the richest and most powerful countries in the world -- Great Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th. Nothing succeeds like success, and because the most successful countries in the world in the second half of the 20th century -- Western Europe and Japan, as well as the United States and Great Britain -- were democracies, others sought to imitate them.
It is one thing to aspire to establish a democratic system of government, however, and quite another actually to create one. Here a difference between democracy’s two components is relevant. Popular sovereignty is a political principle that is relatively easy to implement. Free elections can be held quickly and inexpensively almost anywhere.
Liberty, however, is far more difficult to establish. It requires institutions, a full-fledged legal system foremost among them. It requires people with the skills and experience to operate these institutions. Liberty can only flourish in a society in which the values supporting these institutions, such as respect for the rule of law, are widespread. These institutions, skills, and values cannot be called into existence quickly and cannot readily be imported from abroad. In Great Britain, for example, they evolved over many centuries. This raises the question of where they come from. How do societies that lack the institutions and practices of democracy manage to get them?
The principal source of political democracy, as I explain in Democracy’s Good Name, is a free-market economy. While there have been, and continue to be, countries that practice free-market economics but not democratic politics, no country in the 21st century that is a political democracy lacks a free-market economy. Most of the countries in which democracy appeared in the last quarter of the 20th century, particularly in Southern Europe, Latin America, and East and Southeast Asia, had had at least a generation’s worth of experience in operating a working market economy.
Markets Foster Democracy
Free markets foster democracy in four different ways. First, at the heart of every free-market economy stands the institution of private property, and private property is itself a form of liberty. A country with a working free market, therefore, already has a major component of political democracy.
Second, free markets generate wealth, and many studies have shown that the wealthier a country is, the more likely it is to be governed democratically. Wealthy people have the time for the political participation that democracy requires and that poor people lack. Wealth creates what has historically been the social backbone of democracy: a middle class.
Third, the free market is the core of what social scientists call civil society, which consists of the organizations and groups in a society that are separate from the government, such as labor unions and religious and professional associations. Civil society stands between the government and the individual. It restrains the government’s power and provides social space for activity independent of the government. The organizations of civil society rely on a free-market economy for the funds that sustain them. There can be no democracy without civil society and no civil society without a functioning free-market economy.
Fourth, the free market cultivates two habits that are essential for democratic politics. One is trust. Citizens in a democracy must trust the government not to abridge their rights, and minorities must trust the majority not to harm or persecute them. In a free-market economy, buyers and sellers must each trust that the other will fulfill the terms of the bargains that they strike; otherwise, commerce will not take place.
The other market-fostered habit that is crucial for democracy is compromise. In fact, democracy may be defined as the political system in which peaceful compromise rather than violence or coercion settles the kinds of differences that are inevitable in any society. People learn to compromise through the everyday activities of a free-market economy: The buyer and the seller must always compromise on the price of their bargain since the seller will always desire to be paid more than he receives and the buyer will always wish to pay less than he gives.
Beginning in the last third of the 20th century, the free market came to be regarded virtually everywhere as the best form of economic organization for producing prosperity. All societies want to be prosperous, so almost all of them have established, or tried to establish, free-market economies. Because the first tends to promote the second, the spread of free markets has done more than anything else to make possible the remarkable rise of democracy the world over.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
