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Britain too flawed to lecture world about democracy

This week, the “better” democracies are wagging fingers at bad ones, like 17th-century popes reprimanding missionaries in the distant jungle. They tut-tut over a stuffed ballot box in Nairobi, a banned radio station in Islamabad or a murdered journalist in Moscow. They condemn a riot here, a bombed polling booth there, and an imprisoned politician somewhere else.

The British government is peculiarly unable to resist such finger-wagging. While Tories long to rule a better Britain, the Blair/Brown Labour party longs to rule a better world. Some time ago, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz “what actions we expect his government to take.” Last weekend, Gordon Brown telephoned President Pervez Musharraf to explain to him “the need to push ahead with the democratic process and to avoid any significant delay in the electoral timetable.” He added that Britain expected Pakistan’s elections to be “free, fair and secure.”

On the other phone line, Mr. Brown had the benighted rulers of Kenya, another of Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law” needing instruction in the democratic catechism. He professed himself “appalled” at events there and “would be talking to the various parties ... to see talks between them,” apparently unaware that Kenya is no longer part of the British empire. The British commanded Kenyans to “behave responsibly.”

If I had been President Musharraf in receipt of such patronising remarks, I would have drawn deep from the well of irony. I would have referred Mr. Brown to his poor poll rating and said Islamabad was “dismayed” he had funked a democratic mandate last October. I would have expressed Pakistan’s disappointment at Mr. Brown’s record on habeas corpus, ID cards, and the exploitation of Pakistani doctors by the NHS.

Democracy has never been perfect. From the moment self-government lost touch with “self,” it adapted itself to nations and peoples. Its institutions depend more on local history, culture and geography than on Madison, Mill, and De Tocqueville. This week the rituals of heredity, not democracy, decided the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party. Most Asian and African democracies are ballots qualified by assassination, corruption and inheritance. Yet we still grace them with the term.

Students of politics are taught to tick off the qualities that award the status of democracy to a polity. Are there free and fair elections? Can the franchise turn a regime out of office? Are there supporting institutions such as an open parliament, security of public assembly, elected local government, a free media, the rule of law? No one of these is either sufficient or necessary for democracy, which is rather a sliding scale of liberties, to which constitutions and regimes ascribe varying degrees of priority.

It is thus presumptuous for the post-imperial West to demand that the world take the same route to self-government that it spent bloodthirsty centuries pursuing. We Brits are not so clean that we can lecture others on how they should govern themselves, especially those whom the West has polluted with aid, debt, trade curbs, and wars along their borders. Democracy in Pakistan and Kenya may be looking violently unwell at present, but Western democracy too is qualified by the corruption of party lists, eccentric primaries, and electoral colleges. The British and American constitutions are both currently battered by criticism from their subjects for falling short of democratic ideals, notably in handling accountability and checks on executive power. The outcome of America’s 2000 election was decided not by the ballot but by an appointed oligarchy. Americans would hardly have welcomed election monitors from Ukraine, India or Thailand encamped in the Miami Hilton.

Democracy is best propagated by example, not by conquest or official admonition. There are too many blots on Britain’s escutcheon for its leaders to go lecturing the world in terms redolent of the new interventionism.

Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world. Its fragile half-democracy is conditioned by the insecurities of its recent past and by desperate poverty. There are a hundred ways of helping it along the rocky path between democracy and dictatorship. But ultimately Pakistan, like Kenya, will be the stronger for taking this path alone. The last thing it needs is hectoring phone calls from a post-imperial nanny. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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