Public awareness that humans are the only biological species ever to have occupied the entire planet, with potentially catastrophic consequences, is growing. Green politics has helped popularise precautionary attitudes towards ‘progress’ and its blind embrace. It has also tabled vital tactical questions: for instance, whether priority should be given to civic initiatives and social movements or to the formation of political parties and alliances with mainstream parties, how green parties are best kept ‘democratic’, and whether their political success requires broadening green politics to include themes such as immigration and gender discrimination.

Despite these notable achievements, John Keane argues, the profoundly radical implications of green politics for the way people imagine and live democracy remain poorly understood. Levels of support for democratic principles certainly run high within green circles, as confirmed by the widespread uproar triggered by James Lovelock’s suggestion that it ‘may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’. Yet why people with green sympathies should embrace democracy for more than tactical reasons, whether democratic principles themselves can be ‘greened’ and what that might imply for the way people imagine to be the essence or ‘spirit’ of democracy are matters that remain obscure within green circles and beyond – or so this talk on green politics and the future of democracy suggests.

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A sign in New York in 1913 (click to enlarge). Flickr Commons/The Library of Congress. Public domain.

The following reflection on the subject of banks and democracy has been prepared for a forthcoming OECD meeting in Paris, in late-May 2013. The text is long, stretching the definition of a field note on present-day democracy. But such matters are sadly neglected by contemporary theorists and analysts of democracy. Comments are most welcome.

Five long years into its worst economic slump since the 1930s, the European region now resembles a boiling pot of contradictory political trends, most of them traceable to the past misconduct of banks and bitter fights over their future. From a distance, it’s hard to grasp the scale and intensity of this worsening crisis, or the deep public disaffection now directed against banking and credit institutions and their government protectors.

The shock and anger among citizens is palpable, for instance in Cyprus, whose offshore banking system has effectively been terminated by an EU bailout deal, for which not one member of the local parliament voted. In Greece, criminal charges have been brought against Andreas Georgiou and other officials responsible for overstating the country’s debt, so contributing to the implosion of local markets and compounding the public misery caused by enforced austerity. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, is subject to a new investigation of claims that it falsely valued credit derivatives so as to avoid a government bailout by concealing losses as large as $12 billion. In Spain, the cajas (savings banks) have all but disappeared and their consortium replacement, known as Bankia, has crashed, leaving behind a trail of wreckage. In Britain, uproar has greeted revelations that nearly 100 top executives of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 83% owned by taxpayers, were last year awarded pay rises of a million pounds, despite the fact that its quality of service is poor and its internal computer systems have suffered from prolonged collapse. Public disaffection with the state-owned bank has been compounded by its conviction (by the British state!) for fiddling the bank inter-lending rate (LIBOR), and by the sizeable fine it has been forced to pay, at taxpayers’ expense.

Given such obscenities, for that’s what they are, it comes as no surprise that the quaint old reputation of bankers as uncorrupted local men prone to dapper eccentricity, but fair-minded in their disbursement of money, has been blown apart. In more than a few European countries, the neologism ‘bankster’ is now a popular term of abuse. It was probably first used in Italy, where the oldest bank in the world (Monte dei Paschi di Siena) has been bailed out with state funds (4 billion euros) paid for by taxpayers. ‘Once there used to be gangsters’, joked Beppe Grillo [19], well before the onset of the present banking crisis, and his recent stunning electoral success. ‘Today, we have banksters’. Since then (1998) he’s regularly hurled jokes at thieving bankers, often comparing them to dogs, who at least can be trained to return things honestly.

In one of their wilder moments, Germany’s Der Spiegel [20] has dubbed Beppe Grillo the new Mussolini, ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’, but the plain fact is that his hyperbole resonates with millions of Europeans, who know in their guts that the banking and credit sector remains both dysfunctional and deeply hurtful of the lives of citizens. Scandals centred on interest-rate fixing and mis-selling continue to erupt. Bank tycoons are still paid handsome bonuses. Politicians defend them. Two months ago, efforts by Brussels to apply stricter caps on bankers’ bonuses were slammed by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson as a ‘transparently self-defeating’ assault on ‘banking talent’.

In many countries, banks have meanwhile stopped doing what they’re supposedly chartered to do: to lend money to individuals, businesses and organisations at affordable rates of interest. In Britain, whose 30-year boom was hitched to the power of the City, bank lending to small and medium-sized businesses continues to drop, despite cut-price loans from the government’s Funding for Lending Scheme. To make matters worse, the Bank of England [21] has recently warned that in 2014 more than a few companies are vulnerable because before the crash they were saddled with huge debts by private equity firms that bought them out with money borrowed from banks. Meanwhile, whole banks continue to drop. Two months ago, the fourth largest bank in the Netherlands, SNS Reaal, was taken into state hands. The €10 billion bailout was designed to prevent the banking and insurance group’s collapse from property loan losses and to shore up confidence after a private investor-led rescue had failed. Part of the crippling cost will be borne by Dutch taxpayers.

The sad news for citizens is that the deep political crisis triggered by the collapse of risk-infused, profit-hungry banks is by no means over. There are public reminders that ‘the demons haven’t been banished; they are merely sleeping’ (Jean-Claude Juncker [22]). For the first time in the history of European integration, there are stern warnings that Europe, comprising around 7% of the world’s population and now less than 20% of global economic output, may in political economy terms be irreversibly in decline. Others point out that in the history of modern capitalism there have been eleven large-scale financial bubbles [23] whose bursting caused widespread social damage. Seven of these have occurred since the early 1970s.

That’s a spooky fact, which is why nobody, certainly not the political elites of Europe, knows what is going to happen next. For many millions of European citizens, especially for those with eyes and ears, the deepening uncertainty is sobering. They are learning about the deep structural dependence of parliamentary democracy on the financial sector. They’ve figured out that during the past three decades, banks fuelled booms, especially in the housing and construction sectors. They drove what the political sociologist Colin Crouch [24] has called ‘privatised Keynesianism’: instead of governments raising taxes, or borrowing money to fund equal access to such goods as housing, work skills and education, individual citizens themselves were encouraged, at their own risk, to take advantage of easy access to loans, to pay for the services that governments once provided.

Meanwhile, thanks to upswings in the loans business, house prices climbed. Millions of citizens felt richer. Employment levels in the banking and credit and real estate sectors blossomed. Young graduates found high-paying jobs; banks became a source of national pride, and they attracted bright and talented young things. Top executives raked in small fortunes from salaries, bonuses and equities. New bank ‘products’ centred on reckless risk-taking and hedging were produced and marketed successfully, sometimes on the sly. (Full disclosure: from direct personal experience as a long-time customer of the Royal Bank of Scotland, I can confirm that the bank operated bizarre off-shore deals lubricated by written and verbal assurances that deposited funds were ‘safe’, and not subject to mainland taxation rules.) In the end, the recklessness of the finance sector came a cropper. It brought whole economies to the edge of a political abyss. The resulting bubbles began to burst all over the place, depressing markets and dragging down whole governments. Then a most astonishing thing happened: at taxpayers’ expense, the banks that had recklessly fuelled the boom and bust rebounded by setting the austerity agenda that is now hurting the lives of millions of people and crippling the parliamentary democracies they once cherished.

After a protest at the British Bankers Association HQ in the City. Demotix/Paul Davey. All rights reserved.

The rise of the banking state

The extraordinary bounce-back reveals the most disturbing, but least obvious, largely invisible, feature of the unfinished European crisis: the transformation of democratic taxation states into post-democratic banking states.

What is meant by this mouthful? The Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter [25], long ago pointed out how modern European states (at first they were monarchies, later most became republics) fed upon taxes extracted from their subject populations. The point is still emphasised by government and politics textbooks. Usually this is done by noting that under democratic conditions elected governments are expected to satisfy the needs and respond to the demands of citizens by providing various goods and services paid for through taxation granted by their consent. Behind this observation stands the presumption that the creation and circulation of money is the prerogative of the state. ‘Money is a creature of the legal order’, wrote Georg Friedrich Knapp in his classic State Theory of Money [26] (1905).

Critics of this view long ago sensibly pointed out that the public ‘validity’ of money also stems from its quantity and purchasing power. But, what’s missing from both the criticism and today’s textbooks is acknowledgement of a deep-seated counter-trend, an epochal shift that has barely been noticed by thinkers of democracy: the emergence of banking states that are structurally dependent on financial markets.

Slowly but surely, in most European democracies, the power to create and regulate money has effectively been privatised. Without much public commentary or public resistance, governments of recent decades have surrendered their control over a vital resource, with the result that commercial banks and credit institutions now have much more ‘spending power’ than elected governments. In a most interesting new book, the acclaimed historian Harold James [27] has described how this out-flanking of European states by banks and credit institutions was reinforced at the supra-national level, disastrously it turns out, by the formation of the independent European Central Bank. From the moment of its foundation, the wholly unregulated operations of the ECB supposed that money could and should be divorced from the fiscal activities of the member states.

The ECB was designed by the Delors Committee, a body stacked with central bankers, who seriously imagined they could insulate themselves from democratic political pressures. They dared look fortune in the face. Preoccupied with keeping inflation rates low, the ECB supposed from the outset that a simultaneous failure of markets and governments was inconceivable.

It turned out that the ECB, the Maastricht Treaty and the single currency functioned as the composite framework within which cross-border banking flourished, partly for reasons of size, but also because the euro-zone offered banks hungry for acquisitions easy access to less regulated zones (German banks had a preference for Irish and Luxembourg subsidiaries, for instance). The disastrous consequence is summarised by Harold James: ‘Europe-wide banking produced self-sustaining and self-propelling credit booms and bubbles, without any built-in corrective mechanisms.’

The recent history of these various trends reveals something shocking for democrats. It shows just how misleading is the commonplace perception that banking and credit institutions are just intermediaries linking savers and borrowers. These institutions are in fact political agenda setters – institutions with tremendous power to make decisions behind the backs of elected governments, to veto their policies, or to ransack their structures.

Take the central case of Britain, where the City strikingly overshadows Westminster. An estimated 97% of the country’s money supply is in the hands of banks and credit institutions (the remaining 3% is government-created coins and notes carried around in citizens’ pockets and purses). In effect, these institutions rent out ‘digital’ money to the rest of the economy and political order. This gives the credit and banking sector vast powers over all other institutions, and of course over citizens as a whole. The sector determines whether people can rent or buy a dwelling, and whether or not ventures as different as small businesses, wind and solar energy farms and commercial real estate receive funding.  Proof of the clout of the sector is everywhere. The financial sector in Britain pays limited taxes (in 2012, only 6% of overall tax revenues came from the banking sector). It’s not required to disclose how it uses its customers’ funds. The sector is dominated by oligopolies (in the UK, just 5 banks control 85% of the money supply). They are run by board members blessed with enormous power to shape the economy and government policy, for instance through political donations to parties, or by direct access to policy makers by means of ‘backstage passes’ and ‘revolving doors’. The banking and credit sector naturally provides a comfortable home for retired politicians. Tony Blair[28] now earns 12 times his Prime Minister’s salary as a ‘senior adviser’ to JPMorgan Chase; he reportedly earns another £1 million a year ‘advising’ Zurich Financial Services.

A view of the City of London, dated 1744. Shutterstock/I. Pilon. All rights reserved.

It is painfully obvious that when the financial sector generates bubbles, and when these bubbles pop, as happened during the past five years, banking states and their citizens are at the whim and mercy of banks and credit institutions. Citizens are held hostage. It is no accident, and certainly no fleeting policy whim, that ‘too big to fail’ banks have been bailed out and propped up at taxpayers’ expense.

The rescue patterns established during the past five years simply reflect the structural power that the financial sector wields over governments, whatever their composition. What has happened, to put things brutally, is that the elected parliamentary government component of monitory democracies has been overwhelmed, transformed into a slavish sub-sector of financial markets.

These markets were protected by independent central banks and self-regulatory bodies run by the financial sector.  When those self-regulated markets failed, the democratic principle of one citizen, one vote was cast aside. Electoral democracy was reduced to being the servant of high-profile banks and shadowy credit and finance institutions, powerful bodies such as private equity firms, asset management companies and money market funds that collect money from investors, such as pension funds, insurance companies and ordinary savers, then for very short periods – weeks or months at most – lend those funds to banks, governments and business firms.

The extreme example of the trend, which implies the temporary suspension or outright abolition of elections and parliamentary government, has been unfolding in Cyprus. There, a collapsing banking system is being rescued through the imposition of capital controls (for the first time in history depositors within a euro-zone country have been blocked from taking their money out of financial institutions in large amounts and moving it elsewhere) and by literally robbing citizens (whose accounts contain more than 100,000 euros) of their savings overnight – two precedents that are highly dangerous, if only because as soon as the crisis intensifies in another euro-zone country, as it surely will, depositors may well move to withdraw their money in a flash, so intensifying the crisis.

The deepening European crisis exposes the depth of dependence of elected governments on finance capital, and it therefore comes as no surprise that opinion polls show that large majorities of citizens in many European countries are appalled by these trends. They no longer ‘bank on’ democracy; they sense that democracy is now at the whim and mercy of banks.

It’s true that there’s some public awareness of the political dangers of simplifying complexities by demonising or meting out rough treatment to individual bankers (as happened to the man formerly known as Sir Fred Goodwin [29], boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who was stripped of his knighthood and whose house was attacked by a shadowy group called ‘Bank Bosses Are Criminals’). There’s also some public recognition granted to ‘good’ bankers, those who keep their dignity by telling the truth, admitting their crimes and mistakes, and offering wise advice about what next needs to happen. The assembly democracy of Athens in the 4th century BCE had Pasion, a much talked-about former slave who quickly rose through the ranks to become a citizen-owner of a money-changing table and provider of military equipment to the armed forces of Athens. Nineteenth century representative democracy featured figures such as George Grote, a banker who championed the secret ballot and democratic parliamentary reform and wrote a twelve-volume history of classical Greece. Our age of monitory democracy [30] has George Soros, whose intelligent diagnoses of the present crisis have earned him global public respect.

The plain fact nevertheless is that figures of the calibre of Pasion, Grote and Soros are today exceptional. The world of high finance has attracted risk addicts, pathological gamblers and amoral rogues. The German political scientist,Claus Offe [31], provocatively calls them ‘freebooters’. The term captures the mood among millions of European citizens who are victims of ‘austerity’, and who are understandably disgusted by what is going on. If justice is fairness in the distribution of life chances, then (so they reason) present trends reek of piracy, lawlessness, criminal injustice.

Citizens and banks

What can be done in this European crisis to breathe life back into the least bad way of publicly handling power called democracy? Can anything be done? Learning from the past, looking backwards in order to envision a new future, is mandatory, if only because loud cries to have bankers’ guts for garters are a well-rehearsed theme in the history of democracy. Much can be learned from why past democrats felt discomfort with banks and why this disaffection triggered innovations that surely are still relevant to our times.

The principle of no taxation without representation was one of the most important of these innovations. Born of deep tensions between citizen creditors and monarchs in the prosperous Low Countries, it proved to be revolutionary. In late 16th-century cities such as Amsterdam and Bruges, influential men with money to invest demanded, as citizens, that they should only agree to lend money to governments, and to pay their taxes, if in return they were granted the power to decide who governs them.

The principle was first formulated in the name of democracy (democratie) in a remarkable Dutch-language pamphlet called, The Discourse (it’s analysed in detail in The Life and Death of Democracy [32]). Its author is unknown. Published in 1583, its 24-page reasoning elaborated a new equation responsible for kick-starting a revolution in the arts of statecraft, especially in matters of public finance: since governments had to be paid for, for instance by lending them money or paying them taxes, incumbent governments are obliged to treat those who grant them money as citizens.

If their money was to be entrusted to governments, then governments had to prove that they could be trusted with their creditors’ money. Financial trust implied political trust. Trust needed constantly to be renewed and that could only happen, so the reasoning ran, when subjects kept their eyes and ears open, doubted what their governments said and did, and demanded of them openness and propriety. Democracy is a form of government in which ‘the most competent and able inhabitants and citizens are elected to the government by their fellow citizens on certain conditions and for a specified period of office.’ Democracy means the readiness ‘to put out of office again those who have been found to be inefficient in government, or who have conducted themselves in a way unbecoming to office; and to refill them as they should be.’

The dynamic reasoning was peculiarly modern. In the ancient democracy of Athens, Pierre Vidal-Nacquet [33] and other scholars have pointed out, banks were small-scale and mainly money-changers and pawn brokers. Most of the moneyed wealth in the assembly democracy of Athens never came the way of its citizens (it was usually hoarded by the rich). Banks were not credit institutions geared to speculative or productive investment, for instance investing the money of their clients in maritime loans. As the case of Pasion shows, banks were not agents of greed, champions of unlimited wealth, what Aristotle called chrematistike.

Early modern banks, by contrast, were capitalist institutions. Their aim was to make money within secure political settings. This required political power to be regarded as a trust exercised for defining and protecting its citizens. Elected representatives were to be held permanently accountable to the (moneyed and tax-paying) people from whom it ultimately springs. The argument worked in favour of men of wealth, obviously, but the day came when it backfired on their heads. In the history of modern representative democracy, the principle of political trust fed a second democratic trend: political efforts to break up big banks that abused their powers and violated the trust invested by the people in their elected governments.

Champions of this second principle of ‘bank busting’ recognised that banks could become too big for their boots, and that periodically, for the sake of democracy and its principle of equality, elected governments had to bring them back to earth. The first such attempt to rein back banks in the name of democracy happened during the 1830s, in the young republic of the United States.

The move against money power was led by President Andrew Jackson (1767 – 1845) and his supporters. He was a strange democrat whose aggressive toughness earned him the nickname ‘Old Hickory’. Jackson was a wealthy slave holder who disliked ‘aristocracy’ and over-bearing government. In the name of ‘the people’, he took on the Bank of the United States – and managed to win, by rescinding its charter.

A contemporary caricature of ‘Mr Jackson’s financial panic’ (click to enlarge). The Times. Public domain.

Jackson’s veto message [35] (July 1832) explained why. Large banks make the rich richer, he said. By concentrating so much financial power, they threaten states’ rights, render legislatures vulnerable to their designs and expose citizens to the unaccountable power of foreign interests. The solution was to deal with the ‘hydra of corruption’ by breaking up the most powerful banks, to enable smaller local banks to flourish. ‘The Bank is trying to kill me,’ he declared, ‘but I will kill it.’

That is exactly what Jackson did. Calling for government to ‘confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor’, he ordered the withdrawal of funds from the Bank of America. They were redirected to a variety of smaller ‘pet’ banks, which fuelled investment in land, canal construction, cotton production and manufacturing – until the demand for gold and silver coins (called ‘specie’) went through the roof, to the point where many banks fell victim to a burst bubble and collapsed. A great panic ensued (in 1837), followed by a deep stagnation from which the American economy took years to recover. The collapse was compounded by a simultaneous crisis in Britain, where banks issuing paper receipts and lending excessive quantities of money pushed up prices and destabilised the economy, until the Conservative government led by Sir Robert Peel passed the 1844 Bank Charter Act, which enabled the government to regain control over the creation of bank notes.

Iceland

All this is history, of course, but history is repeating itself, this time as a disastrous farce. In the European democracies, their substance and spirit under siege, millions of citizens are now convinced that banks are abusing their vast powers and whole governments are violating the hard-won principle that they’re only ever legitimate when they rest on the consent of most people.

The principle and practice of government in charge of banks by consent of its citizens have been side-lined. A deep stalemate is developing. The consequences, which include deepening social injustice, political resistance to austerity (most recently, in the Italian elections) and, possibly, more Greek-style social explosions, are for the moment incalculable. So far, there’s only one country in the region – volcanic Iceland [36] - where corrupt banks and greedy bankers have received their due punishment, using swift, decisive and radical measures.

The 2009 ‘Pots-and-Pans Revolution’ in Iceland. Wikimedia Commons/OddurBen. Some rights reserved.

Five years ago, the citizens of one of the richest countries of the world watched aghast as their three main banks (Landbanki, Kapthing and Glitnir) went bust, and were nationalised. Government debt rocketed. The kroner fell sharply in value against the euro. Market capitalisation of the stock exchange dropped over 90%. At the end of 2008, Iceland declared bankruptcy. Public protests erupted when two successive governments tried to impose austerity measures. Demonstrators beat pots and pans in the streets and lit bonfires before the parliament. In March 2010, a national referendum was held in which 93% voted against any laws that would have made Iceland’s citizens responsible for paying more than the minimum of its bankers’ debts. A 9-volume Special Investigation Commission [37] report meanwhile slammed the criminal wrongdoings of banks, some politicians, auditing firms, government officials and administrators. Backed by citizens who were both indignant and furious, the government issued arrest warrants for the bankers responsible for the crash. A parliamentary court (the first in the history of the country) found a prime minister guilty of violating the constitution and laws of ministerial responsibility. A new draft constitution was prepared by a publicly elected Constitutional Council. Including clauses specifying the right of all citizens to have access to natural resources and the Internet, it awaits ratification through a parliamentary vote and a national referendum. Its fate now depends on the outcome of the general election, to be held this coming weekend.

Political innovations?

Will the courageous methods of Icelanders to save their democracy by politically reining in banks and bankers be adopted by others elsewhere in Europe? It’s too early to tell, unfortunately. Iceland’s circumstances are in any case special. Yet a clear implication of its recent experience is that the present crisis-ridden drift towards banking states can only be resolved by pursuing radical political reforms.

Scapegoating of individuals, the demonisation of banks and caps on bonuses are not enough. Toothy political innovation that comes from ‘above’ is badly needed, yet so far in this European crisis, predictably, there’s nothing that remotely measures up to efforts during the 1930s, such as the Glass-Steagall Act in the United States, to ring fence vanilla-flavoured mainstream savings and loans businesses from much riskier ‘casino’ investment banking, for instance by creating ‘custodial accounts’ that remain the legal property of customers, whose funds cannot be used by investment banks for risky speculations and profit-driven lending.

Few members of the political elites of Europe think in terms of ring-fencing democratic institutions against the reckless greed of banks. No democratic means has yet been found for shutting down failed banks without burdening taxpayers or endangering the financial system. Yes, on the way is European legislation in support of tougher rules governing how much capital banks must hold in reserve. There’s plenty of talk of the need to bring ‘ethics’ back into banking. There’s growing political interest in the so-called German Sparkassen, a network of local banks that have a civic duty to lend within a region and to promote local growth.

There are pop-up makeover men, like Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclays, who’ve taken to wearing modest dark blue suits, ‘trust me’ shirts and plain ties. They talk in management speak, using such acronyms as TRANSFORM (‘Turnaround’; ‘Return Acceptable NumberS’ and ‘’FORward Momentum’). Calls by politicians for bonus caps are growing louder. In a recent referendum in business-friendly Switzerland, voters approved the principle that shareholders must have a binding say on the overall pay packages for company executives and directors.

The representatives of European Union governments and the European Parliament have meanwhile just agreed that maximum annual bonuses given to bankers, starting next year, would be equal to their salaries.

Annual doubling of the salaries of powerful people heavily responsible for this deep crisis hardly seems fair. Sure, these political proposals and reforms are better than nothing, but if my short history of banks and democracy is plausible then it suggests that a much tougher and more innovative program of democratisation is needed. If the aim is to ‘throw as many wrenches as possible into the works of ‘haute finance‘ (Wolfgang Streeck [38]), then organised pressures from below, from both voters and civil society networks, will be vital.

A pertinent example is Spain’s Platform of Mortgage Victims, a militant social network geared to the protection of citizens suffering property repossessions and unaffordable mortgages. The platform is a new type of citizens’ initiative. It has managed to wrong-foot the Rajoy government by collecting nearly 1.5 million signatures in support of a petition calling on parliament to change the laws covering mortgages and to eliminate penalties for citizens who fall behind in payments.

Its prominent spokeswoman Ada Colau has gone further. During a recent parliamentary briefing, she caused a sensation by calling to his face a senior member of the Spanish banking association a ‘criminal’ who ‘should be treated like one’. She’s since publicly demanded a moratorium on house evictions and proposed that nationalised lenders should be converting empty flats into affordable social housing. She puts the underlying principle that’s at stake forcefully, in plain speech: ‘It cannot be that the most vulnerable people are made to live with the consequences of their actions until their death, while the big companies take no responsibility and are bailed out with public money.’

Given the scale of the developing catastrophe, surely Ada Colau, an unflinching democrat, is right about that?

References:

[1] http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/john-keane

[2] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/international-politics

[3] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/ideas

[4] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/democracy-and-government

[5] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/culture

[6] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/conflict

[7] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/civil-society

[8] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/iceland

[9] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/greece

[10] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/cyprus

[11] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/spain

[12] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/uk

[13] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/eu

[14] http://www.opendemocracy.net/view_content_by_region/europe.jsp

[15] http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it

[16] http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.opendemocracy.net/print/72288&t=A short history of banks and democracy

[17] http://twitter.com/share?text=A short history of banks and democracy

[18] http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/keane1big.jpg

[19] http://www.beppegrillo.it/en/2013/01/_beppe_grillo_at_the_sharehold.html

[20] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/beppe-grillo-of-italy-is-the-most-dangerous-man-in-europe-a-889104.html

[21] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/14/private-equity-financial-crisis-bank-of-england

[22] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/spiegel-interview-with-luxembourg-prime-minister-juncker-a-888021.html

[23] http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-Financial-Investment/dp/0471389455

[24] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00377.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

[25] http://www.scribd.com/doc/36871535/Schumpeter-The-Crisis-of-the-Tax-State

[26] http://books.google.com.au

[27] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066830

[28] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204154/Tony-Blair-takes-4-2m-loan-central-London-des-res-U-S-bank-advises.html

[29] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/5048091/Sir-Fred-Goodwin-attack-Bank-Bosses-Are-Criminals-group-claims-responsbility.html

[30] http://www.nation.lk/edition/focus/item/1987-monitory-democracy-for-better-governance.html

[31] http://www.eurozine.com/authors/offe.html

[32] http://www.thelifeanddeathofdemocracy.org/

[33] http://books.google.com.au/books?id=ekqCOGr1_NAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

[34] http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/keane1837.jpeg

[35] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp

[36] http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/spotlight-on-icelandic-experiment

[37] http://www.rna.is/eldri-nefndir/addragandi-og-orsakir-falls-islensku-bankanna-2008/skyrsla-nefndarinnar/english/

[38] http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/51554/1/670480223.pdf

[39] http://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/ann-pettifor/eurozone-crisis-what-way-forward

[40] http://www.opendemocracy.net/yiannis-kitromilides/cyprus-bail-in-blunder-template-for-europe

[41] http://www.opendemocracy.net/kristinn-m%C3%A1r-%C3%A1rs%C3%A6lsson/real-democracy-in-iceland

[42] http://opendemocracy.disqus.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendemocracy.net%2Fjohn-keane%2Fshort-history-of-banks-and-democracy

[43] http://theconversation.edu.au/the-politics-of-disillusionment-can-democracy-survive-6073

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-> Originally published in OpenDemocracy,  April 23, 2013

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says he will run for the Australian Senate. John Keane

Everybody warned this would be no ordinary invitation, and they were right. Three hundred metres from Knightsbridge underground station, just a stone’s throw from fashion-conscious Harrods, I suddenly encounter a wall of police. I try to remember my instructions. Look straight ahead. Avoid eye contact. If asked my name, reply with a question. Ask who authorised them to ask. Climb the stone steps. Act purposefully. Appear to know exactly where you’re heading. I don’t.

Through a set of double doors, I’m confronted by more police officers, this time armed, with meaner faces. “Good afternoon”, I say politely, as I edge towards the receptionist. “I’ve an appointment at the Ecuador embassy. Am I at the correct address?” “Ring the brass bell”, grunts the bored-looking man squatting at his desk. A few minutes later, after some confusion about whether or not my name’s on the appointments list, I’m ushered inside. I’m greeted by the personal assistant of the most wanted man in the world. “Julian is taking a call,” says the well-spoken and debonair young man in black-rimmed glasses. “I’m terribly sorry. Please do have a seat. Would you like some tea, or coffee, or polonium, perhaps?” There’s a smile, but it’s pretty faint. I know I’ve reached my destination: a prison with wit and purpose.

The deadpan irony sets the tone of the lunch and dinner to come. The silver-haired “high-tech terrorist” (Joe Biden’s description) appears quietly, dressed in crumpled slacks, a V-necked pullover, socks. He’s relaxed, and welcoming. The quarters are cramped. We shuffle down a corridor into his office, where we occupy a desk covered in laptops and cables and scraps of paper. It’s black coffee for him and tea for me. I offer gifts that I’m told he’ll like. Popular delicacies from down under: a couple of honeycomb Violet Crumbles, chocolate biscuit Tim Tams, a bottle of Dead Arm shiraz from my native South Australia. I know he likes to read. Lying on his desk is a biography of Martin Luther, the man who harnessed the printing press to split the Church. To add to his collection, I hand my pale-skinned host a small book I’ve mockingly wrapped in black tissue paper with red ribbon, tied in a bow. The noir et rouge and dead arm pranks aren’t lost on him. Nor is the significance of the book: José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island. Inside its front cover, I’ve scribbled a few words: ‘For Julian Assange, who knows about journeys because there aren’t alternatives.’

I’d been told he might be heavy weather. Fame is a terrible burden, and understandably the famous must find ways of dealing with sycophants, detractors and intruders. People said he’d circle at first, avoid questions, proffer shyness, or perhaps even radiate bored arrogance. It isn’t at all like that. Calm, witty, clear-headed throughout, he’s in a talkative mood. But there’s no small talk.

I tackle the obvious by asking him about life inside his embassy prison. “The issue is not airlessness and lack of sunshine. If anything gets to me it’s the visual monotony of it all.” He explains how we human beings have need of motion, and that our sensory apparatus, when properly “calibrated”, imparts mental and bodily feelings of being in our own self-filmed movie. Physical confinement is sensory deprivation. Sameness drags prisoners down. I tell how the Czech champion of living the truth Václav Havel, when serving a 40-month prison spell, used to find respite from monotony by doing such things as smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror. “Bradley Manning did something similar,” says Assange. “The prison authorities claimed his repeated staring in the mirror was the mark of a disturbed and dangerous character. Despite his protestations that there was nothing else to do, he was put into solitary confinement, caged, naked and stripped of his glasses.”

Life in the Ecuador embassy is nothing like this. It’s a civilised cell. After eight months, Assange tells me, the embassy staff remain unswervingly supportive, friendly and professionally helpful. They get what’s at stake. When delivering messages, they knock politely on his office door, as they did more than a few times during our time together. Yet despite feeling safe, Assange feels the pinch of confinement. He says the “de-calibration” (he uses a term borrowed from physics) that comes with “spatial confinement” is a curse. That’s why he listens to classical music, especially Rachmaninov. He has boxing lessons (gloves are on his study shelf) and works out several times a week (“just to get the room moving around”) with a wiry ex-SAS whistleblower. The need for variety is why he welcomes visitors and why, judging from the long and animated conversation to come, he’s desperately passionate about ideas.

Assange begins to enjoy the moment. Nibbling a chocolate biscuit and sipping coffee, he springs a surprise. “Truth is I love a good fight. Many people are counting on me to be strong. I want my freedom, of course, but confinement gives me time to think. I’m focussed and purposeful.” It sounds implausible. Entrapment wounds; it’s painful. Psychic defences are needed to ward off the unbearable. But striking is his utter defiance. “Never, ever become someone’s victim is a golden rule,” he says. In graphic detail, he then sketches his ten days in solitary confinement, in the basement of Wandsworth Prison, in south-west London, in late 2010. “I had expected to be completely out of my depth. But I felt no fear. I was tremendously enthusiastic about the challenge to come. I learned to adapt on my feet.” He means what he says.

I’m keen to talk about courage and its political significance. We do so for well over an hour. Lunch arrives: soup and a vegetable wrap from the local Marks and Spencer. His boxing mate appears. Assange says “it will be a while” and politely asks him to wait in the adjoining room. I remind Assange that he’s holed up in the right-wing Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, home to one of the safest Tory seats in Britain. So, just for fun, I play devil’s advocate by repeating the well-known remark of Winston Churchill that success is never final, failure is never fatal, and that what really counts in life is courage, the ability of people to carry on, despite everything. Assange lights up. “That’s undoubtedly true.” He’s never written or spoken at length about courage, but our time together convinces me he’s thought deeply and in sophisticated ways about the subject. He’s been forced to.

We discuss the detention without trial and torture of Bradley Manning. Assange mentions how the authorities are “picking off people all around me” (he’s referring to the ongoing FBI investigation and arrests of WikiLeaks activists). There’s no maudlin wobble. He understands the traps of “obsessive self-preoccupation” and speaks of the vital importance of cultivating a strong personal sense of “higher duty” to carry on. Courage is for him something that’s more important than fear because it involves putting fear in its place. I quote Aristotle at him: courage is the primary virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. “Yes, and that’s what’s worrying about present-day trends. We’re losing our civic courage.”

So where does courage come from, I ask? What are its taproots? Some people evidently draw breath from spiritual or religious sources, I say. He frowns. “My case is quite different. It’s hardship that makes or breaks us. True courage is when you manage to hold things together, even though most people expect you to fall to pieces.” The words ooze resilience. They could easily be his personal anthem, the proverb engraved on his Knightsbridge prison walls. He goes on to explain that although courage may or may not be a quality within human genes, a good measure of it is always learned. Courage is cultivated. It’s infectious. “Women on average have more of it than men,” he says. We discuss examples: on our list are Raging Grannies, Pussy Riot and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. “These women show men what courage is. Treated as outsiders, women have learned the hard way how to deal with structural power. They’re consequently much more adaptable than men. The world of men is structured force.”

The phrase catches me by surprise, but it captures in the most concise way exactly what the prisoner sitting across the table has done, in style, with great courage: he’s confronted structured force head-on. Julian Assange could be described as the Tom Paine of the early 21st century. Drawing strength from distress, disgusted by the hypocrisy of governments, willing to take on the mighty, he’s reminded the world of a universal political truth: arbitrary power thrives on secrets. We run through how WikiLeaks perfected the art of publicly challenging secretive state power. This “intelligence agency of the people” (as Assange calls his organisation) did more than harness to the full the defining features of the unfinished communications revolution of our time: the easy-access multi-media integration and low-cost copying of information that is then instantly whizzed around the world through digital networks. WikiLeaks did something much gutsier. It took on the mightiest power on earth. It managed to master the clever arts of “cryptographic anonymity”, military-grade encryption designed to protect both its sources and itself as a global publisher. For the first time, on a global scale, WikiLeaks created a custom-made mailbox that enabled disgruntled muckrakers within any organisation to deposit and store classified data in a camouflaged cloud of servers. Assange and his supporters then pushed that bullet-proofed information (video footage of an American helicopter gunship crew cursing and firing on unarmed civilians and journalists, for instance) into public circulation, as an act of radical transparency and “truth”.

We’re at the several hours mark, but everybody around me remains gracious. Nobody looks at watches; in fact, there’s not a clock to be seen. The debonair assistant pops in and out of the office, sometimes squatting at our table, tapping out messages on his laptop, fielding phone calls, several times handing his mobile to Assange. “It’s the latest crisis,” he whispers during the first of them. “We handle on average at least four or five a day.” He looks undaunted. This one’s just to do with the FBI investigation.

When Assange comes off the phone, I change topics. I ask him about his pre-Christmas speech from the embassy balcony, when he predicted that in the next Australian federal parliament an “elected senator” would replace an “unelected senator” (he was referring to Foreign Minister Bob Carr, appointed through the casual vacancy rule). Now that the federal election date (September 14th) has been announced, is he still seriously intending to stand as a candidate?

Our conversation grows intense. For several years, Assange has been serious about entering formal politics. A new WikiLeaks Party is soon to be launched. He’s sure it will easily attract the minimum of 500 paid-up members required by law. The composition of its 10-member national council is decided. There’s already a draft election manifesto. The party will field candidates for the Senate, probably in several states. And, yes, Assange is certain to be among them, probably as a candidate in Victoria, where (conveniently) three Labor senators face re-election.

Assange bounces through the probable scenarios. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa will be re-elected, for another four years. He’ll stand firm in his personal and political support for Assange. This will ramp up pressure on the Swedish authorities, whose case against him is “falling apart”, with the two women plaintiffs looking for a way to extricate themselves from the protracted messy drama. “The Swedish government should drop the case. But that requires them to make their own thorough investigation of how and why their system failed.” The man’s not for turning. He’s certainly no intention of apologising for things he hasn’t said, or done. If he wins a seat in the Senate, he says, the US Department of Justice won’t want to spark an international diplomatic row. The planet’s biggest military empire will back down. It will drop its grand jury espionage investigation. The Cameron government will follow suit, says Assange, otherwise “the political costs of the current standoff will be higher still”. So the obvious question: what are the chances of that happening? Can bytes and ballots trump bullets? Can dare claim victory in his personal battle for political freedom?

What he has in mind has never before been attempted in Australian federal politics. Eugene Debs ran for the US presidency from prison (in 1920). Sinn Fein MP Bobby Sands was elected to Westminster while on hunger strike (in 1981). Under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi won a general election (in 1990). In defiance of Israeli occupation and prison confinement, Wael Husseini was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (in 2006). There are plenty of similar examples, so why shouldn’t Julian Assange attempt to do the same, and in style?

By now the boxing mate, kept waiting several hours, has gone home. The young assistant has left for another appointment outside the embassy. Dinner is nowhere in sight. We reach for chocolate biscuits and spend the last hour drilling down into the barriers Assange might well face. We start with nagging questions about his eligibility to stand. He’s characteristically upbeat. The technical objections (raised by Graeme Orr and others) aren’t real, he says. He’s no traitor to his country, and most definitely not under the “acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power” (section 44 of the Australian constitution). Truth is he was let down by a gutless Gillard government and forced into political asylum, under threat of extradition. “I’m safe here inside the embassy walls,” he mocks, “protected by more than a dozen police, including one stationed night and day right outside my bathroom window.”

The man of courage clearly relishes the thought of being the first Australian senator catapulted from prison into a debating chamber. I crack a bad joke, telling him that he’d better hurry up, reminding him that the Commonwealth Electoral Act stipulates that people who’ve been sentenced for more than 3 years in prison don’t have the right to vote in federal elections while they’re serving their sentence. His eyes twinkle, before laying into those who insist that the federal electoral laws are against him, that he’s ineligible because candidates must already be registered to vote. “That’s untrue,” he notes. “The Act specifies only that candidates must in principle be qualified to become a voter.” Assange is right, but since he’s not currently on the electoral roll much turns on whether his preferred strategy of registering as an overseas voter will work. Courtesy of legislation pushed through by John Howard, I know from bitter experience, having once lived abroad for more than three years, what it means to lose the right to vote. Assange says his case is different. He’s been overseas for less than three years (he was last in Australia in June 2010) and intends to return home within six years – that’s why he’s just applied to be on the electoral roll in Victoria.

That leaves two final snags. If victorious, some advisors speculate, Assange might need to take oath before the Governor-General. For this to happen he’d have to be set free, naturally, but it could also be done, “for the first time ever, by video link”. Whatever the situation, continued confinement, he says, would breach the rule that he must take up his Senate seat within two months. “In that case, the Senate could vote to evict me. But that would trigger a big political row. Australians probably wouldn’t swallow it. They’ve learned a lesson from the controversial dismissal of Gough Whitlam.”

I’m curious about the kind of political party WikiLeaks will launch. “The party will combine a small, centralised leadership with maximum grass roots involvement and support. By relying on decentralised Wikipedia-style, user-generated structures, it will do without apparatchiks. The party will be incorruptible and ideologically united.” I flinch at his mention of ideological unity. He explains that the party will display iron self-discipline in its support for maximum “inclusiveness”. It will be bound together by unswerving commitment to the core principles of civic courage nourished by “understanding” and “truthfulness” and the “free flow of information”. It will practise in politics what WikiLeaks has done in the field of information. It will be digital, and stay digital. Those who don’t accept its transparency principles will be told to “rack off”. That’s the ideological unity bit.

Assange agrees the WikiLeaks Party must address and respond creatively to the creeping local disaffection with mainstream politicians, parties and parliaments. “I loathe the reactiveness of the Left,” and that’s why, he says, much can be learned from clever new initiatives in other countries. We discuss Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star movement (it could well win up to 15% of the popular vote in Italy’s forthcoming general election). On our list is the Pirate Party in Germany (it practises “liquid democracy” and has representatives in four state parliaments). So is Iceland’s Best Party. It won enough votes to co-run the Reykjavik City Council, partly on the promise that it would not honour any of its promises, that since all other political parties are secretly corrupt it would be openly corrupt. Assange lets out a laugh. “Parties should be fun. They should put the word party back into politics.” The WikiLeaks Party will try to do this, and to learn from initiatives in other democracies. Supported by networks of “friends of WikiLeaks”, it will be seen as “work in progress” designed “to outflank its opponents”.

He and his party supporters are bound to attract hordes of detractors. Tom Paine was cursed by foes; he even suffered the dishonour of being called a “filthy little atheist” by Theodore Roosevelt. Assange is similarly facing an army of spiteful enemies. In Britain and the United States, there are signs they’re now closing in on him with new arguments. He used to be denounced as a “cat torturer”, a “terrorist” and “enemy combatant” and accused of committing “an illegal act” (Julia Gillard). He was attacked as both an “anti-Semite” and a “Mossad agent”. There were murderous calls to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch” (Bob Beckel). These days the language is milder but no less vicious. He’s said to be ‘paranoid’, all ‘alone’ in his gilded prison, abandoned by his supporters, at the British taxpayers’ expense. He and WikiLeaks are guilty of the same “obfuscation and misinformation” (Jemima Khan) they claim to expose. Swedish media and politics are meanwhile crammed with crass epithets: “rapist”, “repugnant swine”, low-life “coward”, “Australian pig” and “pitiful wretch” hooked on sex-without-a-condom.

I can’t tell from our time together whether any of this stuff hurts. It’s clear he’s aware that going into parliamentary politics will involve permanent fire-fighting, but unflappable he sounds. “I’ve had to deal with the FBI, the British press and more than a few rank functionaries. The Australian press are decent by comparison. No doubt the Australian Tax Office will show an interest in our campaign. Old enemies may make an appearance.”

Assange knows that in the age of surveillance and media saturation little remains of the private sphere. I put to him a prediction: the way he dodged questions about the Swedish allegations during a recent video-link appearance before the Oxford Union (“I have answered these questions extensively in the past”) isn’t sustainable, that avoiding the subject when running for the Senate will be blood to the hounds of the press pack. He asks what he should do. I put to him a positive alternative, which is to come clean on his alleged misogyny. “I’m not interested in softening my image by planting attractive women around me, as for instance George W. Bush did. I like women. They’re on balance braver than men, and I’ve worked with many in exposing projects that damage women’s lives. An example is the scandalous practice of UN peacekeepers trading food for sex that we exposed. Our WikiLeaks Party will attract the support of many women.” But what about the charge of misogyny, I ask? Isn’t Julia Gillard’s use of the word to attack the Leader of the Opposition worth widening? The reply is very Julian Assange: “Let’s just say I prefer miso to misogyny.”

There are moments when Assange seems much too serious, nerdish even, yet one thing’s very clear: prison hasn’t ruined his deadpan humour. He’s smart, and he’s shrewd; he’s a fox, not a hedgehog. That’s why he’s counting on lots of public support down under. “When people speak up and stand together it frightens corrupt and undemocratic power”, he says. “True democracy is the resistance of people armed with truth against lies.” I wonder whether he’s right. Australians can be a politically lazy bunch, but we’re also known for our cheeky cheerfulness, our taste for the matter-of-fact, plus our strong dislike of bullshit. We respect hard work and admire courageous achievement. We’re mawkish in the company of Ned Kelly underdogs. And so, if a political fight over his election to the Senate were to break out, strong public support for Assange might suddenly surface.

Time’s up. Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I slip on my coat, prepare to say goodbye, to pass back through the wall of mean-faced police. Assange shakes my hand, twice in fact. Both of us are pretty tired and stuck for words, so I let myself loose by asking him to ponder a wild southern hemisphere fantasy, a hero’s welcome later this year, a rapscallion’s reunion with spring sunshine, fresh ocean air, flowers, banners, tweets, whistles, haunting sounds of didgeridoos. For a few seconds, he smiles, then draws back, looks down, and glances sideways. It’s the reaction of a man who knows in his guts there are no easy solutions in sight. The cards are stacked, piled high against success. He’s trapped. He knows his fate will be decided not by legal niceties, or diplomatic rulebooks, but by politics. That’s why he’s aware that in the great dramas to come, nothing should be ruled out.

The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power lists his odds of winning a Senate seat as seven-to-two. The cautious fortune telling may be significant. Down under, nationwide polls conducted by UMR Research, the company used by the Labor Party, show (during 2012) that a clear majority of Australians think he wouldn’t receive a fair trial if extradited to the United States, and that in any case he and WikiLeaks shouldn’t be prosecuted for releasing leaked diplomatic cables. Green voters (66%) and Labor supporters (45%) are sympathetic to Assange. Significant numbers of Coalition supporters (40%) think the same way. In the most recent UMR poll, Assange tells me, around 27% of voters say they’ll vote for him.

That should be enough to slingshot him from Knightsbridge to Canberra. Set aside the cheap diatribes and what you think of Julian Assange as a person, or whether he’s done this or not achieved that. The fact is that electoral victory for him later this year would be one of those rare political miracles that make life as a citizen worth living. In a country weighed down by sub-standard politicians, sub-standard journalists and sub-standard freedom of information laws, the political triumph would be great. It would breathe badly-needed life into Australian democracy. And, yes, if the miracle happened, from that very moment the fun party down under would begin.

___________________________________

Other Relevant Links

-> Originally published in The Conversation,  February 16, 2012

-> The Guardian, 18 February 2013

-> Tea with the ‘high-tech terrorist’, ABC, The DRUM Opinion

-> Nieman Journalism Lab

-> SBS, World News Australia

-> The University of Sydney

-> LeadingCompany

-> Delimiter

-> USA today

-> Report: Assange Sees Legal Defense in Politics, Associate Press

-> Sanctuary in the Senate: Assange’s political plan, The PUNCH

-> WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hopes bid for Senate seat will result in freedom, adelaidenow

-> Julian Assange Australia Senate Bid: WikiLeaks Founder Sees Legal Defense In Politics, huffingtonpost

-> MAMAMIA

-> PSYLORDS

->Julian Assange in Prison, RealClearTechnology

-> WikiLeaks founder hopes to become Australian senator, National Post

-> ‘WikiLeaks Party will attract the support of many women’: Assange, By Sunanda Creagh, Editor of  The Conversation

-> Julian Assange: «Mut ist wichtiger als Angst»

-> Assange lanza el Partido Wikileaks para cambiar el mundo, por John Keane, el puercoespin (Spanish)

-> ”We’re Losing Our Civic Courage.” Julian Assange, Irish Blog

Original Link here

El prestigioso filósofo australiano John Keane será el encargado de inaugurar el IV Ciclo de Conferencias “La democracia hoy: el fin de la representación” que organiza el Departamento de Filosofía y Sociología de la Universitat Jaume I. Keane ofrecerá, el miércoles 16 de enero de 2013 a las 19 horas en el Centro Social San Isidro de Cajamar Caja Rural, la conferencia Democracy and the Dangers of Silence en la que hablará de la estrecha relación que existe entre democracia y periodismo así como los problemas actuales que afectan a los medios de comunicación, incidiendo en los casos en los que cierta información se mantiene entre bastidores y por tanto es ocultada a la opinión pública. John Keane es un destacado teórico político cuyo trabajo se ha centrado en la sociedad civil, la democracia y los medios de comunicación. Actualmente, es director del recién fundado Institute for Democracy and Human Rights (IDHR). Entre sus numerosas publicaciones destacan: The Media and Democracy (1991), Democracia y sociedad civil (1998) y The Life and Death of Democracy(2009). El London Times lo ha catalogado como uno de los principales pensadores y escritores políticos considerando su trabajo de ¿importancia mundial¿. En 2013 saldrá publicado por Cambridge University Press su nuevo trabajo bajo el título “Media decadence and democracy” en el cual analiza el papel del periodismo en la democracia. Esta primera conferencia, que se enmarca en el proyecto de investigación del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación ¿Aportación de la neuroeconomía a la dimensión ética del diseño institucional¿ y del Máster Interuniversitario en Ética y Democracia, será en inglés y la entrada es libre hasta completar aforo. La cuarta edición del ciclo de conferencias La democracia hoy: el fin de la representación completará su programa con las charlas de Paul Dekker (Catedrático de la Tilburg University & The Netherlands Institute for Social Research | SCP) bajo el título Challenges for representative democracy el próximo 29 de Abril 2013, y la de Simon Tormey (Catedrático de The University of Sydney) Not in mine Name el próximo 19 de Junio.

In Europe as elsewhere, we’ve entered times marked by big-footprint projects, organised efforts to do things never before attempted, adventures of power that touch and transform the lives of millions of people and their bio-habitats, in unprecedented ways. These ‘megaprojects’ include under-sea tunnels, mining operations, inter-city high-speed railway networks, new airports and airport extensions. They comprise entertainment complexes, nuclear power stations, banking and credit sector experiments and new communications and weapons systems. Megaprojects are distinguished by their astronomical design and construction costs (their price tag is often well in excess of a billion euros). Their complexity, scale and deep impact upon communities of people and their environment are also striking.

What have been the consequences of mega-projects in the region of Valencia?

My impressions are naturally those of an outsider, but the impact of projects such as the lavish opera house, technology museum and sports centre complex in Valencia, and the white elephant Castellon airport, is plain to see, and typical of what happens in the age of mega-projects. Megaprojects create jobs and measurable wealth, scientific-technical know-how and improved services. Many make our lives easier; the invention of the Internet by ARPA is proof positive of that. Often a source of local and national pride, they can generate large profits, but even when no golden harvest results they add hugely to the private fortunes of their designers, owners, managers and shareholders. As Senor Calatrava knows, megaprojects make some people mega-rich. But mega-projects also go wrong.

What are the symptoms of failure?

Unless they are subject to strict public controls, mega-projects often have damaging effects. During their design and execution phases, they suffer construction problems, budget blow-outs and delayed completion schedules.London’s Olympic Games is a case in point: its bid was originally costed at £2.37 billion; the probable final cost will be around £24 billion.Spain’s love affair with mega-projects, notably in the field of construction, saddled the country with an estimated 100 billion euros of toxic debt. It’s probably much more than that. When up and running, mega-projects are plagued by chronic operation problems and ‘normal accidents’. Sometimes the mishaps do irreparable damage. Hence the household names: the Bhopal gas and chemical leak, nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl and Fukushima, gigantic oil spills courtesy of the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bankia.

Such disasters are growing in number and frequency. I’m afraid that unless things change we’re heading into a grim future, one in which risky power experiments have catastrophic effects on the lives of millions of people and their habitats.

Do you see signs of the failure of mega-projects in Valencia, and Spain more generally?

The behind-the-scenes, poorly-regulated patron-client links forged between the Spanish cajas, the construction industry and big-budget regional governments have had heart-breaking effects. Their wild love affair ended in misery. The regional government ofValencia, proportionately the most indebted in the whole ofSpain, is broke. Its debt is an estimated 25 billion euros. The region is littered with ghost towns, unfinished construction projects and an airport with no planes or passengers. Throughout the country, there is understandably great disaffection among many citizens. Half of under 25s are out of work. An estimated one and a half million people have to decide each day between eating or paying their bills. Perhaps 300,000 young graduates have leftSpain since the onset of the crisis. All this is very bad for the spirit and substance of democracy.

Why are they bad for democracy?

It’s not just that the near-collapse of your banking system and the current politics of enforced austerity are damaging the daily lives of many millions of citizens. There’s something else just as sinister: megaprojects resemble sizeable tumours of arbitrary power within the body politic of democracy. They usually defy the familiar rhythm of elections. Details of their design, financing, construction and operation are typically decided from above. Especially when it comes to military and commercial megaprojects, things are decided in strictest secrecy, with virtually no monitoring by parliaments, outside watchdog groups or voting citizens. Unless they’re subject to strict and independent public monitoring, mega-projects do away with democratic procedures. They resemble forms of emergency rule in the heartlands of democracy.

Cases of corruption are common in Valencia. Does the absence of monitoring promote it?

Yes. Corruption went viral. It’s true that megaprojects often fail to measure up to the lavish claims made in their defence because of a variety of factors and forces. Simple human miscalculation; the blind arrogance and groupthink of those in charge; inadequate ‘hedging’ for surprise events; bad decisions caused by poor co-ordination and diffused responsibility chains; systematic lying (what policy analysts call ‘strategic misinformation’); and unintended chain reactions all play their part in ensuring that when things go wrong, they really go wrong.

The gargantuan size and hyper-complexity of mega-projects make matters worse. But substantial evidence is mounting (the Danish sociologist Bent Flyvbjerg has done the ground-breaking research) that the root cause of mega-project corruption, the key source of their failure, is their refusal of robust internal and external public scrutiny. Not all disasters are human and megaprojects don’t always fail, it’s true. Yet when they do fail, in 90% of cases, the main cause is the privatisation of power. Those in charge of operations suppose, mistakenly, that their mega-organisations can be governed in silence – silence within and outside the organisation.

There’s something really paradoxical about this silence. It’s produced, usually through intensive public relations campaigns which have the effect of cocooning the mega-project from rigorous public scrutiny. Lots of positive things are said publicly about the project, despite the fact that they’re often untrue. In all this, journalists often play along. A rich diet of promises of access, sinecures and over-dependence on official handouts renders them obedient. They become ‘plane spotters’, captive cheerleaders of mega-projects, silent cogs in their machinery of compliance.

What can citizens do?

There’s a developing crisis of parliamentary democracy in Spain, so it’s the duty of citizens to become wiser and more determined, to pay attention to matters of folly, corruption and injustice, to speak out whenever and wherever necessary. Ancient Greek democrats cherished parrhesia: bold, frank, courageous speaking out publicly in defence of the common good. Every actually existing democracy now needs a good dose of parrhesia.Spain is no exception.

How would you describe the state of democracy in Valencia and Spain?

Twice during the past century, Spainstood at a political crossroad. The present situation clearly differs from the collapse of the republic during the 1930s, or the moment during the late 1970s when fascist dictatorship crumbled. Spainis at a new crossroads. Its citizens and representatives face a fundamental choice. They can continue down the road that leads nowhere, towards a bad-tempered, highly unequal phantom democracy whose key political institutions are distrusted and many citizens feel disaffected. Or Spaincan embrace a fairer and more just society protected by a vigorous form of monitory democracy (democracia monitorizada). In other words, a new type of democracy in which there are not just free and fair elections, but where citizens and their representatives also practise the art of publicly exposing and humbling arbitrary power (poder abitrario), wherever it exists.

For this to happen, much will have to change. Spanish electoral laws, which produce unfair outcomes, will need serious revision. New political parties led by honest representatives will be needed; the present two-party duopoly is chokingSpain. A new compromise about the past, a fresh regional settlement and a greener and more equitable politics of inter-generational justice are priorities. And public silences will have to be broken. The basic political mistake of the past several decades mustn’t be repeated. Hereon, businesses, banks and governing institutions at all levels must be kept humble, trusted and respected only because their power is subject to permanent public scrutiny and, ultimately, to the active consent of all citizens.

Bernard Crick was revered and respected for his writing against anti-politics and his dislike of intellectual timidity. So he might well have found the following risqué observation both politically relevant and intellectually satisfying. Look around: we’re living in an age marked by large-scale adventures of power that touch and transform the lives of millions of people and their bio-habitats in unprecedented ways…

The Political Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 4, October–December 2012

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Rethinking the history of the impact of representative democracy upon Indigenous peoples.

Although the first Australian association of self-declared democrats was formed in Sydney only in 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe, the political tides flowing in their favour were anticipated several decades earlier in a short but salient letter by the former President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Writing in the northern summer of 1816, Jefferson pondered the astonishing changes that had come over government and political thinking during his lifetime. Jefferson wasted no words: the arrival of self-government in democratic and representative form, he wrote, was fundamentally altering the dynamics of the modern world. He pointed out that the ancient Greeks knew nothing of the principles of representation. They were unable to think, let alone act, outside a political framework that posed a stark choice between either “democracy” or forms of oligarchy, such as aristocracy and tyranny. According to Jefferson, it did not occur to the Greeks “that where the citizens cannot meet to transact their business in person, they alone have the right to choose the agents who shall transact it.” Greek citizens, political thinkers and orators alike did not see the possibility of breaking free from the false choice between self-government of the people and government based on rule by a few.

The defining novelty of the modern era, Jefferson continued, was its invention of a new type of self-governing polity based on the mechanics of popular representation. The experiment in combining “government democratical, but representative, was and is still reserved for us,” he concluded. Without historical precedent, the new representative system offered “the people” a new method of protection “against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.” In providing such protection, the experiment with representative democracy “rendered useless almost everything written before on the structure of government.” ¹

Representative Democracy

Jefferson’s letter proved prescient. Its bold words accurately signalled the birth of a new vision of handling power through a form of self-government in which people, understood as voters faced with a genuine choice between at least two alternatives, are free to elect others who then act in defence of their interests, that is, represent them by deciding matters on their behalf. Lord Henry Brougham’s widely-read defence of the nineteenth-century struggle for representation captured its spirit: “the essence of representation,” he wrote, “is that the power of the people should be parted with, and given over, for a limited time, to the deputy chosen by the people.” The job of the representative is to “perform the part of the government which, but for the transfer, would have been performed by the people themselves.” ²

The vision of government by the people through their chosen representatives was charged with radical potential. Wherever it took root, the struggle for representation threw into question the anti-democratic prejudices of those—rich and powerful men—who supposed that inequalities among people were “natural.” New groups, like slaves, women and workers, demanded the franchise. Subjects of empires joined in, as in the Australian colonies, especially during the decade after 1845, when the struggle for self-government came laced in local variants of the principles of representative democracy. While its white-skinned champions often thought of themselves as free born Britons, sang God Save the Queen and professed their belief in monarchy, they were fierce champions of what they variously called “representative government,” “democracy,” “self-government” and “responsible government” based on the will of “the people.” ³ The term “representative democracy” was rarely used, but its substance and spirit commanded increasingly wide support, manifested in the refusal of “tyranny” and “corruption” and calls for adult male suffrage, periodic elections, the supremacy of parliament, a free press, trial by jury and the right of peaceful public assembly. At first, the demand was for “representative government,” with the aim of limiting the power of the Governor, who was seen as a local autocrat responsible to the British government. Legislatures were created, with a blend of nominated and elected members, but the Crown still had a veto on legislation, and Westminster representatives retained control of public affairs in the colony. By the 1850s, demands increased for a more “democratic” responsible government, where the legislature, not the Governor, controlled both government policy and its implementation. The Crown, however, still appointed the Governor (who now played a largely ceremonial role) and, most importantly, could still veto legislation considered inimical to British imperial interests.⁴

With a whiff of popular empowerment through representation permanently in the air, the nineteenth century unleashed what the French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville famously called a “great democratic revolution” in favour of political and social equality.⁵ The principle of representation seemed inherently democratic, capable of being stretched to include the whole adult population. But the historical records show that such stretching, which often reached breaking point, happened with great difficulty, and against formidable odds. Throughout the nineteenth century, the ideals and institutions of representative democracy were permanently on trial. Whatever advance they enjoyed sparked great public excitement, tinged with sabotage and pandemonium. Sending shock waves outwards from the Atlantic region, all the way to the far-flung colonies founded and run by Europeans, the revolution in favour of “government democratical, but representative” often suffered setbacks and reversals, especially in Europe, where in the early decades of the twentieth century it was to collapse into a swamp filled with political predators.⁶ Elsewhere, including the United States, the reigning definition of representation was actually narrowed during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century by withdrawing the right to vote from certain groups, particularly black and poor people.⁷ Not until the early decades of the twentieth century did the right of people to vote for their representatives come to be seen as a universal entitlement. That happened first for adult men and later—usually much later—for all adult women.

Why Popular Representation?

Organised resistance to the principles and practice of popular representation was widespread, and often effective.⁸ It confirmed that there was nothing “natural” about democratic self-government. “Ever since the birth of modern societies,” the nineteenth-century French liberal author and politician François Guizot told a Paris audience during a famous course of public lectures on the subject, “the representative form of government… has constantly loomed more or less distinctly in the distance, as the port at which they must at length arrive, in spite of the storms which scatter them, and the obstacles which confront and oppose their entrance.”⁹ Only nineteenth-century believers in historical progress could have thought so optimistically about representative democracy. For the prickly truth is that its appearance was bitterly contested, subject to unforeseen consequences and constant setbacks. Its champions were dogged by double standards, especially when they excluded women, slaves and the labouring classes from the structures of government. Great controversies erupted over what exactly representation meant, who was entitled to represent whom and what had to be done when representatives snubbed or frustrated those whom they were supposed to represent. The advantages and disadvantages of “government democratical, but representative” were hotly disputed. Its friends had to work hard to win over sceptics and opponents.

Their reasoning proved complex and novel. Popular self-government in representative form was praised as a new type of polity distinguished by its respect for the principle that when electing their representatives people are entitled publicly to air their different social interests and political opinions. Representative government consequently exposed the fictional quality of talk of “the people.” It underscored the point that “the people” is in reality rarely a homogenous social body; and that political reality is therefore usually disputed and fractured. Representative government was further praised as a way of freeing citizens from the fear of leaders to whom power is entrusted, according to merit; the elected representative temporarily “in office” was seen as a positive alternative to power personified in the body of tyrants, or unelected monarchs. Although (as in the colonies of Australia) more than a few champions of representative democracy expressed their loyalty to the Crown, they consistently thought in terms of “the people” as the ultimate source of legitimate power. Popular government founded on responsible leadership guided by merit, in their view, cast grave doubts on the view that fine breeding and regal sperm were carriers of good government. Representative government was hailed as an effective way of ridding the world of hereditary stupidity, a new method of apportioning blame for poor political performance—a way of encouraging the peaceful rotation of leadership and, thus, of overcoming the unpalatable choice between the despotism of leaders who ignore the wishes of their subjects and the confusion and demagoguery of government based on the vicissitudes of a d?mos. In open defiance of talk (later associated with figures such as Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche) of hero-worship as rooted in the human condition, representative democracy was thought of as a useful weapon against pandering to the powerful. It was reckoned to be a new form of humble government, a way of creating space for dissenting political minorities and levelling competition for power, a method of enabling elected representatives to test their leadership skills in the presence of others equipped with the power to sack them. If representatives fail, then they are removed. The rotation of leaders, hence, was seen as a way of peacefully controlling the exercise of power by means of permanent competition that ensures that nobody has the last word.

Then there was a pragmatic justification of popular representative government. Many of its nineteenth-century champions saw it as the practical expression of a simple but challenging reality: that it was not feasible for all of the people to be involved all of the time, even if they were so inclined, in the business of government. Large populations living across vast swathes of territory were unbreakable barriers to democracy in its ancient assembly form. Given that reality, so the argument ran, the people must delegate the task of government to representatives who are chosen at regular elections. The job of these representatives is to keep tabs on the expenditure of public money. Representatives make representations on behalf of their constituents to the government and its bureaucracy. Representatives debate issues and make laws. They craft foreign policy. They decide who will govern and how—on behalf of the people, at a distance from them. Thomas Paine put the point forcefully. “In its original state,” he wrote, “simple Democracy was no other than the commonhall of the ancients. As these democracies increased in population, and the territory extended, the simple democratical form became unwieldy and impracticable.”¹⁰ The peculiarly modern political problem of handling large-scale societies with diverse identities could be solved through a new form of open and fair-minded government called representative democracy. “By engrafting representation upon democracy,” he concluded, “we arrive at a system of government capable of embracing and confederating all the various interests, and every extent of territory and population.”

“The Natives”

The bold spirit of universalism fostered by the earliest champions of representative democracy was impressive, but (as we shall see) it was so deeply self-contradictory that it bequeathed problems that are still unresolved. The vision of a representative democracy did more than help unleash claims for inclusion in the body politic by unrepresented groups. The case for representative government also became entangled in the colonial problem of how its ideals and institutions could come to terms with indigenous peoples. Cold silence about their exclusion from the claimed benefits of democratic representation was one type of reaction; but those scholars who suppose indigenous peoples functioned as the “absent centre”¹¹ of the colonisation project during the nineteenth century considerably understate the great volume of public outpourings on the need to combat the “backwardness” of the peoples encountered by the colonisers.

Far from thinking in terms of occupying an uninhabited or thinly inhabited land that supposedly belonged to nobody, the colonisers treated indigenous peoples as a clearly visible problem. Democrats and anti-democrats alike rummaged around to find a political language that could recognise and assimilate these visible differences in order better to rank them as deficiencies. An initial theme, affirmed in the original “secret instructions” given more than a generation earlier to Captain Cook before setting off for Terra Australis Incognita, was the importance of “consent.” His brief was to “observe the Genius, temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any, and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them.” The appropriate means included “such Trifles as they may Value” and “every kind of Civility and Regard.” Cook was authorised “with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King.” If the territory was found to be unoccupied then the order was to “take Possession for His Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions.”¹²

The principle that the governed must consent to their representatives was fundamental to the vision of representative democracy, but this mission to engage and control peoples deemed strange and inferior required that representation be understood in the old regressive sense once defended by Thomas Hobbes. In this earlier meaning, “representation” was simply equivalent to the supposed prior authorisation of state power by its passive subjects; on the basis of that fiction, the rulers of the state were entitled to claim that they were “personating” those subjects by acting on their behalf. ¹³ Top-down definitions of representation as the “impersonation” of subjects by agents of the state may have had roots in the world of theatre, as Quentin Skinner has pointed out,¹⁴ but they nevertheless made a mockery of the whole process of representing citizens considered as independent actors entitled to express and to defend their separate interests before their representatives. The colonisers claimed to be representative of those they subjugated by virtue of their superior power. That understanding contained a difficulty for nineteenth-century definitions of self-government in representative form. In effect, it called into question the whole effort to restrain excesses of governmental power through the use of such inventions as written constitutions, adult male suffrage, periodic elections and the secret ballot. Representative democracy instead became a champion of tyranny–over people who had given their “virtual” consent to a form of popular self-government that treated them as unworthy and incapable of abiding by its rules.

The solution to the contradiction, which drew upon an earlier meaning of representation that it otherwise categorically rejected, led representative democrats towards an equally suspect family of phrases centred on terms like “civility” and “civilisation.” The ideals of representative democracy were rescued by portraying indigenous peoples as “uncivilised,” as ugly, dirty beasts miserably under-equipped for life. The linguistic pact was mooted in the additional “Instructions” given to Cook before his departure. Bloodshed should be avoided. The “voluntary consent” of “the Natives” was mandatory, both because they were “the natural… legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit” and, importantly, because these people were “the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European.”¹⁵

Talk of less “polished” peoples readily fed claims about the “savagery” of “the natives,” but great intellectual and political muddle was the consequence, especially considering that the formal acknowledgement of their status as “British subjects” had existed for some time. But the invaders had other thoughts. For if the indigenous inhabitants were indeed British “subjects” then, according to some colonial authorities, their “savagery” required that they be fully subsumed under the strictures of British law. George Grey (who became Governor of South Australia in 1841) was among the chief proponents of the view that the laws of indigenous peoples should be treated as “barbarous customs” and correspondingly replaced by British laws applied by colonial governors throughout the continent.¹⁶ The recommendation won the support of Lord John Russell, but dissenting figures such as Governor Hutt in Western Australia maintained that there were practical and ethical reasons why “the aborigines are not in a position to be treated in all points as British subjects.” Reacting against the claim by Paine and others that representative government could be applied on any scale, Hutt acknowledged the special difficulty of subjugating by law nomadic hunting and gathering peoples. He pointed out “we have not the means to supervise and control their dealings with one another in the bush and in the wild districts.” He went on to emphasise the ethical pointlessness of efforts “to make them at all times and under all circumstances in their habits and customs amenable to our laws.” Not only would “the aborigines” understandably resist the “teasing and tiresome persecution” of being forced to live under the laws of the colonial authorities. Such force would have the contradictory effect of hardening the attachment of “the aborigines” to “their own rude and barbarous observances.”¹⁷

Hutt’s “civilised” way of thinking came tinged with violence. It was profoundly anti-democratic in any meaningful sense of the word. Since colonial control over land and resources was at stake, it implied at a minimum the physical subjugation of indigenous peoples and either their outright elimination (although colonial governors typically spoke against outbreaks of frontier violence) or the transformation of these peoples, using such means as informal negotiations, government reservations and religious education, into “civilised” characters capable of acknowledging that representative democracy was a superior form of government. Here was yet another case of the self-contradiction of representative democratic norms, this time by talk of “civility” and “civilisation.” The difficulty that some people could be robbed of their land, bossed and bullied and physically eliminated in the name of a political ethic founded on the equality of citizens seemed lost on Hutt, but it triggered a nineteenth-century alternative that seemed ethically preferable: indigenous peoples were to be regarded as “dependent allies” or as “nations” with whom some kind of agreement or treaty was desirable.

The option failed to gain traction, especially at the Colonial Office, although the Aboriginal Protection Society in London did support it.¹⁸ So did J.W. Willis, a loose cannon justice of the District Court at Port Phillip whose heterodox finding in the Bonjon case (1841) was that an indigenous man accused of murder could not be tried before a colonial court because the alleged act could only be judged in terms of the criteria of indigenous customary law.¹⁹ It was a ruling with politically dangerous connotations. Although its reasoning remained, strictly speaking, within the confined universe of European “civilisation,” it stated explicitly that the indigenous tribes were “neither a conquered people” nor that they had “tacitly acquiesced in the supremacy of the settlers.” The conclusion (unsurprisingly) hastened the dismissal of Willis from the bench. By tabling the principle of competing sovereignties, he did more than call into question the legitimacy of British colonisation. Willis had also implied that indigenous peoples enjoyed their own legitimate form of law and government.

Campfire Democracy?

Among the most striking qualities of nineteenth-century thinking about “government democratical, but representative” was its insistence that the methods used by indigenous peoples to handle the exercise of power within their communities did not count as a form of government. The judgement was not nurtured by lack of curiosity, or plain ignorance. As Buchan has pointed out, figures such as Edward John Eyre and George Grey were simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by “savages” and “hordes” who allegedly had no sense of “social ties and connections,” who bore the iron yoke of “custom” that allowed no freedom of thought or action, and who therefore (as Colonial Secretary Edward Deas Thomson summarised the mantra) lacked “possession of any Code of Laws intelligible to a Civilized People.”²⁰

The claim that “the Natives” had no regular “intelligible” society or government made its mark on later ethnographic and anthropological studies of the customary habits of “primitive societies.” As we shall see in some detail, the claim was false, yet among the factors that made it appear plausible was the contrast with the North American encounter with indigenous peoples, who had considerable bargaining power in the interstices of British imperial rivalries with Spanish and French and (later) United States forces. In the colonies of Australia, indigenous peoples stood alone, face-to-face with their invaders. Growing bodies of evidence show that they resisted, cleverly and on all fronts.²¹ But the power imbalance they suffered fed the presumption, originally noted by Cook, that whereas the Tahitians, with their “kings” and “chiefs,” or the Maori, who appeared to be “united under one head or chief,” ²² the indigenous peoples of Australia had no polity. Sovereign authority and regular government was foreign to them, or so it was said. They knew nothing of the arts of making fine clothing, or putting a cup to their lips. They had no houses, no agriculture, no farms, no sense of property rights, and no systems of law or government. “It is the universal opinion of all who have seen them,” concluded a Methodist missionary in the 1830s, “that it is impossible to find men and women sunk lower in the scale of human society. With regard to their manners and customs, they are little better than the beasts.”²³

For “the Aborigines” such talk had a killing quality; it forced them into life-or-death struggles for survival. Little wonder that during the twentieth century intellectuals who tried to engage with indigenous peoples on their own terms, to right wrongs, were attracted by the thought that indigenous polities were examples of a “crude” or “primitive” or “early” form of democracy. The possibility that indigenous peoples had their own form of “democratic” self-government is implied by the research of anthropologists who claim that since democracy involves people getting together as equals, to decide things for themselves, it has in effect always been around, even in the earliest hunting-gathering societies. The claim has older provenance. Its roots stretch back to the 1940s, when the Polish-American anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski first attempted to define these societies as examples of “proto-democracy.” According to Malinowski, the propensity of people to form political communities is more or less a universal human quality. Equally human is the knack of developing independent, functionally autonomous institutions that both facilitate non-violent co-operation among divergent social interests and prevent the concentration of power in a few hands. In this respect, Malinowski argued, modern representative democracies are located on exactly the same continuum as hunting-gathering cultures, in which “there is no ballot, no vote, yet a general public approval and acceptance. There is very little centralized power, which gives results as good if not better than when such power is placed in the hands of authorities elected and controlled by the people.”²⁴

The thesis that all human beings yearn for democracy and that democracy is human; or, that to be human is to be fit for democracy, is re-stated at length by more recent political anthropologists, such as Ronald Glassman. Aware that early kinship systems were riddled with hierarchies structured by criteria such as gender and age, he nevertheless thinks of our earliest hunting-gathering ancestors as proponents of democracy as we experience it today. The propensity for democracy is among the “unique species characteristics of human beings.” He adds: “consciousness plus intelligence, plus language communication, produce the possibility of democracy.” But what is democracy? For Glassman the term is synonymous with deliberative democracy. It refers to “decision making through discussion, and rational processes of legitimation.” It is deliberation guided by such core principles as popular participation in the making of rules and the punishment of rule breakers; the application of strict limits upon the exercise of power and leadership; and the use of rules designed to preserve group order as debatable and amendable. In hunting-gathering societies, he continues, the felt need to co-ordinate both the search for food and defence against invasion spawned the growth of “campfire democracy.” It was a form of self-government founded upon the “popular assembly,” the “male council” and mechanisms for guaranteeing unanimity. Campfire democracy stimulated informal discussion of perceived problems: “the men, the women, the old, the young—everyone discusses the problem informally. Everyone makes his or her opinion known.” Campfire democracy also depended upon formal procedures for reaching agreement, above all the practice of adult men sitting “in a circle around a campfire in the center of the band.” Their job was to “attain unanimity or unanimous approval of the political course finally emergent from the formal debate.” Campfire democracy minimized the use of “physical dominance and fear.” It knew nothing of majority rule or minority rights, or the harsh punishment of deviants. “Social pressure is brought to bear on all dissenters who continue to resist the decision reached,” says Glassman. “Women as well as men are talked to, persuaded, chided, cajoled into unanimity.” ²⁵

Is there substance in this way of thinking about “proto-” or “campfire” democracy? Much evidence speaks against the whole idea of a deep political connection between modern representative democracy and hunting-gathering peoples. The implied teleology lurking within the prefix “proto-,” the inference that campfire assemblies were the first of a kind, a prototype of what was to follow, begs tough questions about their historical links with latter-day democracies. The inference supposes, in other words, that in spite of all the differences there is an unbroken evolutionary chain that links the earliest forms of assembly with contemporary representative forms of democracy, as if the Pitjantjatjara or Kunai peoples were the original brothers and sisters of James Madison, Winston Churchill, Jawarhalal Nehru and Barack Obama. That is implausible. The free use of the term “proto-democracy” risks falling into the trap of calling too many societies “democratic,” just because they lack centralised institutions and accumulated monopolies of power, or because they prohibit centres of violent oppression, blatantly illegal or camouflaged, against which people have no redress or appeal.

Matters are not helped by the anachronistic use of the word “democracy.” The anthropological record shows quite clearly that neither the word (which in fact has roots in the Mycenaean civilisation) nor anything resembling it was ever used during campfire assemblies. But this point is minor compared with the least obvious but most consequential objection: by calling campfire gatherings “democratic” there is a great danger of overlooking or understating the strange originality of democracy as a way of naming and handling and controlling power.

The experience of democracy, whether in representative or other institutionalised forms, requires and reinforces people’s shared sense of the contingency or mutability of the world—their rejection of claims that matters to do with who gets what, when and how in life are determined by “natural” or God-given or deity-determined processes, or by mere chance.²⁶ Democracy is much more than citizens gathering together in public assemblies, joining or supporting political parties, voting in periodic elections, or keeping tabs on decisions taken by parliamentary representatives. These practices are surface symptoms of something that runs much deeper. Considered as a set of institutions and as a whole way of life, democracy stimulates people’s awareness that as equals they do not need to be bossed about by powerful others; it teaches them that they have the ability to shape and structure their lives, as equals who are capable of living together and deciding in common how they are to live during their time on earth. Democracy thus supposes human’s release from pure determination by forces natural and supernatural, however they are conceived. Democracy does not necessarily demand the practical rejection of belief in transcendental or sacred standards (the history of democracy is full of examples of actors and customs and institutions which thrive on belief in the sacred). But for a society to qualify as “democratic” it must contain mechanisms that foster a measure of self-reflexivity among equals, their awareness that is and ought are not identical, that things do not have to be what they currently are, or seem to be.

It is true that those who speak of “proto-democracy” have been guided by benign intentions. Malinowski himself explicitly acknowledged that the incorporation of hunting-gathering peoples in the analysis of democracy would help counter the prejudice that they were “savages” with “blind passions” and “slaves to custom, warlike and cruel.”²⁷ He had a point. By favouring the inclusion of hunting-gathering societies in the history of democracy, he and other scholars have sought to overcome the long-standing prejudice that dismisses these people as “backward,” “uncivilised” and generally inferior to us. It is also true that those who have spoken of “proto-democracy” never intended to overlook the fundamental quality of democracy, its propensity to “de-nature” power relationships and to resist bondage, in the name of equality. Yet that is exactly what they have done, by exaggerating the degree to which hunting-gathering societies cultivated the capacity to foreground and question the so-called nature of things.

Societies Against the State

In a fine study of the Maori of New Zealand, Marshall Sahlins emphasises that hunting-gathering societies are typically in the powerful grip of cosmic myths that structure everyday life and adjust it to particular circumstances, in effect by interpreting, harnessing, controlling and concealing their contingency.²⁸ He makes the important point (against Evans-Pritchard and other anthropologists) that it is a mistake to see these societies as “frozen,” or as without “history.” That condescending view needs to be replaced with an understanding of how different cultures have different senses of historicity. But even when hunting-gathering societies are seen in this fresh way, the evidence he presents strongly suggests that these societies are different from-not necessarily inferior to–political orders defined by institutional mechanisms that have the effect of making explicit people’s felt sense of contingency of the power relations that shape their lives as equals.

Within the nineteenth-century world of Maori people, for instance, Sahlins shows that while many relationships were constructed by choice, desire and interest, the level of “openness” to history was different than anything that democracies are used to. The ongoing, daily interaction between new and old ways of doing things was structured by communities of meaning that ensured that everything ultimately appeared to its members as if it were unfolding by means of an unending process of return to the way things have always been. In the absence of means of communication (such as alphabets and writing) that enabled past, present and future to be prised apart—Sahlins presumes their absence—the present and future were understood as recurrent manifestations of a past that was very much alive. “Ontogeny,” he concludes, “‘recapitulates’ cosmogony.”²⁹

Much the same picture emerges from studies of indigenous societies in the neighbouring Australian continent. As usual, generalisations are as risky as they are difficult: in 1788, when the British colonisers began to arrive in force, there was no single Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders “nation”; and (unlike Maori) no shared language. There were at least two hundred and fifty different communities; each spoke a different language or dialect and typically occupied more or less geographically separate areas. The diversity was the product of prior indigenisation across a vast territory, but also partly the effect of differential contact with non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, for instance Indonesian and Macassan traders and fishing peoples.³⁰ Yet what is clear is that these diverse indigenous societies and the multiple spaces they inhabited were not an “Australian tribe” with a common language unblessed by a “political authority.”³¹ Contrary to the claims put by nineteenth-century believers in representative democracy, they were not “primitive” societies “lacking” a territorial state. Their modes of life and methods of handling power were different. The surviving evidence suggests that these societies had no system of government in any hierarchical sense; and that there was no single body that made laws and no hierarchy of courts or other enforcing authorities. These were most definitely “societies against the state” (the famous formulation of Pierre Clastres.) ³² Power was handled largely through informal and loosely organised means. Wherever there were hierarchies, power relations were understood in terms of “looking after” others and acknowledgement of the importance of co-operation, help and interdependence. The “boss” was duty-bound to assist and support others. Although these societies were infused with a strong sense of gerontocracy, in that older people were repositories of ancestral virtues and customs, they were always heavily dependent upon mechanisms of consensus and balance, not force. There were tribal elders (whether and how commonly they or councils of elders held sway is still disputed) but no chieftains and no organised political class of men. Marriage customs for women, along with their roles in ritual life, were typically defined by men, yet women generally regained control with age; they were not treated as objects of male consumption and typically they were protected by eminent women ancestors, who lived on in the form of birds, reptiles and other animals.³³

In all matters, including sexuality and age, the interpretation and application of ancestral laws played a primary co-ordinating role. The effect was to make it appear as if norms and rules were “external” to the community, so that matters as varied as access to land and water, the performance of ceremonies and marriage arrangements were decided for the community by reference to totemic rules that were understood to be non-arbitrary because of their timelessness. Adherence to the “proper ways” of ancestral laws, living within a totemic landscape infused with ancestral authority, meant that the Pitjantjatjara, the Pintupi and other indigenous communities had no need of legislators or legislatures; but, paradoxically, the communication of such laws by means of oral traditions scattered across wide geographic areas meant that considerable discretion in their interpretation and application was exercised by individuals, kin groups and whole communities, some of them overlapping.³⁴ More or less elaborate ceremonies, some requiring pain or privation, took care of the resulting tensions. The dramas of male initiation, bodily mutilation and female marriage, for instance, imbued ancestral laws with a “uniquely realistic” quality.³⁵ If and when they failed, and power disputes erupted, as they often did, sophisticated mechanisms for mediating and resolving disputes and nurturing order then came into play.

These conflict resolution methods are intriguing, exactly because they underscore the strange originality of representative democracy as a political form, and as a whole way of life. Common to the indigenous communities of the Australian continent were different mechanisms that had a weighty effect: since ultimate authority was collectively understood to be external and prior to the foundation of the political community its members’ sense of openness to novelty was constrained. These were not “frozen” societies in any simple sense. The ways and means of naming, handling and resolving disputes about who gets what, when and how within the community certainly depended heavily on manoeuvres by aggrieved parties to win support for their cause. Justice was contingent, and it was never blind revenge. Punishment was understood as reciprocity in exchange and its purpose was always to restore balance, even when sorcerers and “feather-foot men” filled victims with fear or (as in the case of serious infringements of ritual secrecy) the verdict was death. The proceedings were infused with a powerful sense of the primacy of past events and living-dead characters. It was taken for granted that obedience of individuals and kin groups to their instructions was mandatory, and that dangerous consequences would otherwise follow, as surely as night follows day, or sun follows rain.

The presence of the past within these events and characters was powerfully reinforced by an unshakable sense of dependence upon their surroundings, to the point where the indigenous communities normally saw themselves as extensions of the sacred living landscape. Its spirits lived inside them, beyond and around them. The landscape was their “spirit home.”³⁶ It conferred their names. It could smell their presence. Their own blood, flesh, hair, faeces and urine belonged to it. The landscape throbbed with life; it was the space of their ancestors, the medium through which they communicated with living people, offering them guidance, providing them with “the proper way” (the tjukurrpa of the Pitjantjatjara and the rom of the Yolngu are examples) and granting them powers to act, even to travel far and wide when they were asleep. At death, the individual rejoined the landscape as “spirit” or (in some communities) in reincarnated form. This strong spiritual and physical dependence upon the biosphere was supervised by a host of mythical characters who belonged to the origins of the world, but who regularly reappeared among the living, as shadowy ghosts, or as animals or objects. The strong dependence of the living upon their landscape was structured by the performance of sacred rites and sacred songs and the possession of sacred objects (known among the Loritja, the Illpirra and other peoples as tjurunga) and it was mediated by sacred places and special knowledge, vested in a few men and women of the community.

There is much surviving evidence that although indigenous peoples were unfamiliar with such distinctions and terms as “good” and “bad,” “sin” and “atonement” for wrongdoing–they were the terms used by their invaders-harsh penalties were applied to individuals or kin groups who violated the sacred rules of ancestral law. Various means were invoked. There were informal customs such as ridicule and gossip and the hearing of evidence and the meting out of punishment by meetings of older people or (as among the Ngarinyerri of South Australia) leaders of neighbouring groups.³⁷ Conflicts were resolved as well by forms of “payback,” such as thigh wounding, death by spearing, and extended blood feuds, some of them lasting for many years. The means of justice encompassed the dispatch of avenging parties (such as the Aranda atninga, where the attackers fought mainly with words, not weapons). There was compensation in the form of goods; the use of sorcerers to inflict harm on offenders, supposedly by such means as removing their “dream spirit” or inserting stones inside their bodies; and deprivation of mortuary rites. Secret meetings of ritual leaders were convened; and there was the ceremonial practice of running a gauntlet of blunted spears (an example was the magarada of northern Arnhem Land). Alleged offenders were also brought to trial before councils, such as the tendi of the Lower River Murray peoples, where different clans gathered in the presence of negotiators (rupulle) whose judgements and punishments were guided by the testimonies of the accused, the defendants and witnesses.

Ceremonies designed to repair the fabric of the social order, to structure the lived experience of time as the repetition of a living past, were typical. A pertinent example was the bugalub ceremony found in northeastern Arnhem Land.³⁸ It was not a case of “campfire democracy,” but a ritual washing ceremony that was believed to heal dissension and to produce mutual goodwill among the disputants, as well as provide entertainment for the rest of the community not directly involved in the dispute. People gathered around specially prepared ground in the main camp, outlined with mounds of sand, within which a hole had been dug to represent a sacred waterhole connected to the living-dead persons responsible for hosting the rite. Secret-sacred songs were sung, usually to the accompaniment of clapping sticks and didjeridu. During the singing, women jumped up and danced, in preparation for the moment of final healing, when the prime parties to the dispute (most often they were men) finally entered the “waterhole,” to be showered with water and invocations of the mythical beings connected with the ceremonial site.

Restorative Justice

Why should the political practices of indigenous peoples be given closer attention by historians of colonialism, political thinkers and citizens interested in the history and present-day fate of representative democracy in Australia and elsewhere? There are several reasons.

Most obviously, ceremonies such as the bugalub are revealing of the complex patterns of power and conflict resolution that structured daily life within and among indigenous communities on the threshold and during the next century of European colonisation. They show that indigenous societies were not stone-age people caught in the unbreakable grip of “kinship” obligations and “nature worship.” Indigenous communities were neither instances of “primitive society” nor examples of “proto-democracy”; they were different societies, for which different categories are needed in order to comprehend their sophisticated rituals of what are now called power and politics.

Paying attention to the historical relationship between indigenous peoples and popular self-government is important for another reason: in surprising ways, it potentially alters our understanding of the history of democracy in representative form. It prompts questions about whether and to what extent indigenous ways of handling and restraining the exercise of power helped shape, either positively or negatively, the resulting institutions of representative democracy. Contemporary scholars presume that influence was all a one-way street, altogether negative, and that during the nineteenth century indigenous forms of government were simply crushed alive. That belief (as Brown has pointed out in a critique of conventional accounts of the coming of federalist visions of democracy to Australia) probably understates the ways in which the nineteenth-century push towards a federated representative democracy was the contested resultant of many forces, including the calls by white settlers for decentralised regional institutions that were quite probably inspired by the mental maps and patterns of seasonal movement of indigenous peoples. ³⁹ The calculated use of the petition by indigenous peoples to press their claims for compassion and compensation is another example of the same counter-trend. Their petitions not only helped give them a voice in public affairs. They also publicised the vital point that the emergent system of representative democracy suffered a fundamental defect: its dependence upon the Westminster principle of “winner-takes-all” majority rule meant that some minorities, and certainly indigenous peoples, were fated mathematically to be permanent “losers” in the political game of electoral competition.⁴⁰

The broader implication here is that the “indigenisation” of representative democracy is a subject worth exploring. There is plenty of evidence that some nineteenth-century Europeans learned to speak pidgin versions of indigenous languages, whose words (kangaroo, gibber, woomera, waddy) permanently entered the local English-language vernacular.⁴¹ In the same vein, many white Australians have since carved out a distinctive sense of national identity through the generous absorption of indigenous symbols. Slowly but surely, indigenous peoples have meanwhile begun to teach white people lessons about the need to “blacken” their ways with nature, to abandon their reckless and profligate ways with the biosphere, to understand and acknowledge their dependence upon its long-term sustainability. So the question, analogously, is whether the history of Australian democracy might be redescribed, certainly so as to include the never-to-be-forgotten terrible bigotry and violence that it unloaded upon indigenous peoples and their polities but also, more positively, re-written in terms of a new understanding of the creative impact of indigenous practices upon the transplantation of representative democracy into the soils of the Australian continent?

The whole point about indigenisation is admittedly speculative, but typically it is neglected within recent historical narratives, probably because the deep implication of representative democracy in the wanton destruction of indigenous polities seems more consequential, and more disturbing. Their point is well taken; to invert the meaning of a favourite term in the arsenal of its nineteenth-century champions, the “barbarous” side of representative democracy should not be forgotten, and needs further investigation. More detailed analyses elsewhere have shown that there was nothing “essentially” violent about either the spirit or structures of representative democracy.⁴² Yet the hard fact remains that both the colonial opponents and colonial champions of representative democracy indulged talk of “the aborigines” and their “uncivilised” ways. ⁴³ As if to prove that representative democracy could sit comfortably at the table of tyranny, such talk fuelled the bigoted belief that a “people” comprising proud adult male voters could do no wrong, that the majority was always right, certainly when confronted by “savages” complaining of mistreatment.

From the point of view of indigenous peoples, the coming of representative democracy from over the horizons of Europe made things worse. Armed with strange ways of talking, weird institutions and lethal weapons, the invaders prided themselves on their commitments to popular self-government in representative and responsible form. The sad and well-documented truth is that the invaders refused to recognise and respect the fundamental difference between the hunting-gathering polities of the Australian continent and the conquering “civilisation.” The refusal inflicted great misery and violence on indigenous peoples, who nevertheless fought back hard against their conquerors. Facing frightening odds, their population numbers were reduced by an estimated five-sixths during the period of colonisation. Yet they managed to survive and to multiply, even to experiment with new ways of living, including, as in our time, demands for political representation in the prevailing structures of power.

Such demands suggest another powerful reason for rethinking the relationship between indigenous peoples and nineteenth-century representative democracy: the unintended birth of a politics of restorative justice, of the kind that has emerged in other settler democracies, such as Canada, Chile and South Africa. Thanks to their survivor qualities, indigenous peoples and their supporters have gradually forced onto the political agenda the whole issue of whether and to what extent the predominantly white citizens who are the offspring of a conquering democracy can come to feel shame, to say sorry and to strive for new democratic forms of reconciliation that have no precedent in the history of their local democracy.⁴⁴

In the Australian context, this process of restorative justice has barely begun, but its political significance and strong sense of unfinished business should not be underestimated. Guided by the fundamental principle that in the twenty-first century democracy is much more than elections, and that democracy means nothing unless it strengthens the diversity and influence of all citizens’ voices and choices in decisions that affect their lives, the unfinished politics of remembering refuses to let bygones be bygones. Its starting point is that elections and elected governments alone cannot handle the terrible injustices of the past. In effect, the politics of restorative justice seeks to extend a vote to an excluded constituency: the dead. With the help of sympathetic historians, ⁴⁵ it supposes that democracy among the living requires democracy among the dead; on that basis, it points to the need publicly to remember not only the patterns of indigenous resistance, contribution, collaboration and adaptation but also the injustices they suffered in the name of representative democracy, under the whip hand of methods ranging from murder, rape, dispersal and child removal to exclusion from elections, insult, amnesia and the silence of outright public and private denial.

The theory and politics of restorative justice keeps an open mind about whether and to what extent indigenous peoples can retain or “go back” to at least some of their customary ways of handling power, but it certainly takes a hard-nosed view of forgetfulness. It warns of the dangers to democracy of amnesia, confabulation and political manipulation. At a more personal level, restorative justice supposes that victims and victimisers alike are vulnerable to these dangers, albeit in different ways. Sure that memories of past injustices can be a corrective to present-day injustices, it therefore depends upon the encounter of all parties and requires apologies, bills of rights and treaties to protect the restitution of land and other forms of compensation for the victims.⁴⁶ The politics of restorative justice provides no quick fixes. It takes time. It is a form of slow politics. It calls on victims to take an active role in the restorative process, while offenders meanwhile are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, to help repair the harms that were done long ago, but which can still be felt and observed. Restorative justice reckons that nobody is entitled straightforwardly to cast the first stone of accusation. It supposes in principle that there were and are no saints and sinners, and that all living citizens are in one way or another deeply implicated in the sordid past.

The work of remembering the past harnesses the principle that both victims and victimisers likely suffer from what analysts call “dissociation,” the painful and disabling repression of traumatic memories. Restorative justice therefore calls on whole societies to own up, to bear witness to past acts of injustice and violence. It recognises that the tricky process of setting the record straight, opening up and democratising memories of the past is not easy; it understands that the past is at least as complicated as the present. It calculates that memories are always constructed—reconstructed—and not just straightforward matters of recall and that, for that reason, it is always better to prevent the denial of incriminating memories or the implantation of false memories by having an open process of publicly checking and cross-checking claims about what actually happened in the past. Armed with these principles, the politics of restorative justice is willing to take on accusations of wearing indigenous armbands. It opposes cults of forgetfulness. The politics of restorative justice tries in practice to shatter public silences, to expose past abuses using unconventional narratives; it examines practical ways of restoring the dignity of both the dead and the living; and it supposes that the work of publicly monitoring and compensating for the evils committed in the name of representative self-government can eventually help to discharge political tensions.

Can the balm of public “truth telling” have soothing effects, like helping symbolically to heal the wounds of indigenous peoples, or helping the offspring of the colonisers to hold their heads higher, and less in shame? The new politics of restorative justice supposes that these effects are possible, so long as certain conditions are met. Restorative justice involves much more than positive initiatives by professional experts, the courts, or by the government of the day. It operates according to the quite different but supplementary premise that the standard machinery of electoral politics and constitutional protections cannot alone deliver restorative justice, which can take effect only when citizens themselves, and the whole civil society pitches in and works hard to make amends in search of solutions that promote repair, reconciliation and the rebuilding of relationships, the better to promote a culture of mutual respect through the permanent remembrance of things past. The point of restorative justice is to keep alive what happened through public fact-finding, to promote public shaming and forgiveness, so better to enable the wider society to live together through a more durable democracy—in effect, by granting a vote to the past for the sake of the future.

Listen to Audio

The Occupy Wall Street protest started as a sit-in at Zucotti Park near the financial district of New York City on 17 September, 2011, and galvanised thousands of people across the globe, from London to Sydney’s Martin Place.

But many questions remain: what does this movement represent, what kind of changes does it want implemented and will it last? And how effective will it be in its mission to change the world?

Professor Simon Tormey, the Head of the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and the author of Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of totalitarianism and anti-capitalism, will chair the discussion.

“The Sydney Writers’ Festival event will be broad-ranging and offer perspectives from academics, activists and writers – signalling in turn that Occupy is a phenomenon that resonates well beyond the ‘political class’ and those who follow its fortunes.

“Occupy represents something much more visceral and immediate than an election – it asks us whether we are one of the 99 percent.

“Do we recognise ourselves in the claims it makes about the inequality produced by global capitalism? Do we sympathise? Do we feel driven to help or show solidarity?

“Or should we regard Occupy as yet another media spectacle reinforcing our sense of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming financial, state and police power? These are issues confronting everyone who cares about the direction contemporary society is taking.”

Professor Keane will be joined on the panel by the Italian writer and Occupy supporter, Loretta Napoleoni, who wrote Maonomics: Rogue Economics and 10 Years That Shook the World. Also on the panel will be American writer Chad Harbach, author of the novel The Art of Fielding, and one of hundreds of writers to join Occupy Writers, a group of 3277 writers who support the Occupy Movement.

Professor Keane is also a participant in the University’s What Matters community engagement campaign which brings together people from across the University’s spectrum to talk about how their work has made a difference in the world. See Professor Keane’s What Matters contribution now.

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Other related links:

-> Occupy the Sydney Writers’ Festival with John Keane

-> Occupy movement has had some success

Wednesday 4th April 2012: a funny old day, though my field notes record that it began well.

An early morning message arrives from Athens, from Periklis Douvitsas. He’s the editor of the publishing house looking after Why Democracy. It’s shortly to appear in Greek translation. “I am sending you the cover art”, he writes. He explains its minimalism. “We have had two best sellers each year (2010 and 2011) based on this design, a black [pencil sketch] drawing by P. Ghezzi.” With a hint of sadness, Periklis says he likes the “black fog” and the “scratched ballot box” because “it is a very good commentary on the Greek situation”. He signs off. “I hope you like it.” I write back to say I do, a lot.

Later that day, I log on to check the news from Athens, a city where I once briefly lived, and quickly grew to love. For nearly a year, I’ve been following events there almost daily. Political convictions should be tested, so I wrote several pieces for The Conversation. They sketched a basic thought that still seems pertinent: the citizens of Athens, against their will, have been flung into a stress-test laboratory where the meaning and viability of democracy have been pushed to breaking point.

Since those essays appeared the Greek crisis has deepened. Jürgen Habermas writes in his new book, The Crisis of the European Union, that the spectre of “post-democratic, bureaucratic rule” hangs over Europe, that its “political elites are burying their heads in the sand” and “persisting unapologetically” in the “disenfranchisement of the European citizens”.

Things are actually more complicated and much worse for Greek citizens. It’s not just that they’re being bossed about by publicly unaccountable bodies such as the European Central Bank, the IMF and the Merkel government and its allies. Truth is that the Greeks’ own system of party politics and representative government badly failed them. It helped corrupt their state and bankrupt their economy. Greek citizens were then herded into the rotten uncertainty that comes with unemployment, massive debt and poverty. Democracy failure robbed them of their dignity.

The afternoon’s gloomy news of the suicide of Dimitris Christoulas drove home these points. The distraught 77-year-old retired pharmacist shot himself through the head in Syntagma Square near the parliament building. Shaken witnesses said that before pulling the trigger he’d shouted “I don’t want to leave debts to my children.” The note he left behind, pinned to a nearby tree, compared “a dignified end to my life” as far better than “scrounging through garbage cans for my sustenance.” He added: “I believe that young people with no future [nearly 50% are now unemployed], will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”

The public reaction was swift. A motorcycle protest rally through the streets of Athens happened within hours. There was a public vigil in honour of Christoulas, organised by citizens who pointed out that Greece’s suicide rate, once nearly the lowest in Europe, had doubled since 2009. Then came the evening hooded protests, the hated riot police and street fighting. “This is not suicide, it is political murder,” one banner said. “Who will be next? ” asked another. “Austerity kills,” read still another.

The suffering of those who take their own lives is always an enigma, ultimately private and unfathomable. But towards the end of a strange day I can’t help pondering what comes after Greek democracy and wondering whether Why Democracy is too little too late…

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-> Originally published in The Conversation , April 9, 2012

Why should we assume that democracy is the best of all political systems?

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in the Arab world demanding freedom and democracy. And countless numbers have been prepared to die in exercising these demands. But here, in the relative comfort of the Sydney Recital Centre, IQ2 panelists hammer each other in a robust debate as to whether democracy is failing the planet.

Original Link here

Chaired by Dr. Simon Longstaff, The Executive Director of the St James Ethics Centre

SPEAKERS: FOR

Professor Clive Hamilton

Public Ethics and Vice Chancellor, Charles Sturt University. Founder and former Executive director of The Australia Institute, a public interest think tank.

Cheryl Kernot

Leader of the Australian Democrats in the mid 1990′s and Shadow Labor minister for 3 years. Currently Director of Social Business at the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW.

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis

Joint Managing Director, Transfield Holdings and Founder of The New Democracy Foundation, researching new forms of government.

SPEAKERS: AGAINST

Professor John Keane

Professor of Politics at University of Sydney and at theWissenschaftszentrum Berlin and Director of the recently-founded Sydney Democracy Initiative.

Professor Steven Schwartz

Vice-Chancellor Macquarie University. His academic research spans clinical psychology, psychiatry, public health and medical decision making.

Martine Letts

Deputy Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Specialised in arms control and disarmament on postings in Geneva, Vienna and policy officer in the Dept. Of Foreign Affairs and Trade.