h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

From the top down or the bottom up, how can a bill or rights, a constitution or representation by population be created out of thin air without democratic principles to create it? Who initially decides what moral and ethical underpinnings are used to form the basis of interpretation of democratic rule of law and government? Is democracy static or constantly changing?

you cannot impose democracy, it has to be fought and earned by a population that wants it.

look at all the great sucsess of american forign policy, and the countries that wanted democracy

vietnam, cuba, korea, iraq, afganistan,

My question is, is there any way that the seeds can be sown, that the process can be jump started or what, for instance could be prerequisites?

bloody revolution and support from a world power

vietnam at the end of WW11 was ready for democracy

ho chi mihn drafted a constitution along the lines of the american one and asked america to recognize them,

they handed it back to france, so uncle ho became a bit redder and more resentfull

Personally I would say education is the first step, followed by a bureaucracy that supports it and charismatic leaders who desire it. Then an effective legal system and a decentralized but strong military and police force.

first of all the population must want it, then they have to fight for it, so they earn it, then they will apreciate it, with stories like, "your grandad took a bullet in the shoulder so that you could vote"

it cannot be imposed from outside because stories like "lots of arrogant forign soldiers died so you could vote, and dissmantled our tribal ways at the same time" wont stir the blood of the population

I completely agree with Taff.

For a change.

How do you impose democracy? Well, at a base level you can't because democracy is about giving people the right to choose their government and is all about not imposing on them. You can only "impose" on a country's people if you don't give them the vote. You can, of course, impose democracy on a state which previously denied its people the vote.

>look at all the great sucsess of american forign policy, and the countries that wanted democracy

Of those examples, the only two where democracy was imposed on the ruling regime were Iraq and Afghanistan (and the population of those countries *wanted* democracy, it's just that the governments were too weak to gain a hold over the whole country so when the Americans talked about "democratic Iraq" only a portion of the country was actually under democratic rule whilst the rest was under the rule of local warlords).

Cuba was never a democracy whilst it was under American influence, it was a dictatorship and the Cuban regime and their American supporters never pretended anything else. The same goes for South Vietnam where early moves towards democracy were abandoned in favour of a pro-Western dictatorship.

As for examples of countries where an "imposed" democracy worked - Japan (1950), Germany (1948), Haiti (1994).

Germany is an interesting case in that it's possibly the closest we have to democracy being "imposed" on a people in the sense that some people use it. The country was rigorously de-nazified and the population was essentially re-educated into accepting the rule of law and government by consent rather than the rule of strongmen. This was, to some extent, an over-reaction since Germany as a whole had never accepted nazi rule and it was informed, in part, by the persistence of beliefs in fundamental "national characters" and "racial traits" that seemed to think Germans had militarism and disciplinarianism in their blood and that they would need to be re-moulded as a people before they could join the civilised world. It's incredible that people honestly believed this sort of stuff only 60 years ago.

>it cannot be imposed from outside because stories like "lots of arrogant forign soldiers died so you could vote, and dissmantled our tribal ways at the same time" wont stir the blood of the population

Yes it can as I've demonstrated (and postwar American and West German relations were very good partly because the Germans liked the fact the Americans got them out of the yolk of the ruinous far-right who had effectively had control of the country since the early 20th century). Besides, belief in democracy isn't about the "blood of the population" being "stirred", that's a rather strange and nationalistic way of looking at it. It's simply a good, fair political system. An awful lot of countries didn't get it through some kind of protracted bloody war of independence or against a regime (partly because, understandably, most people would rather leave that bit out if they can) but because it's a good idea.

>first of all the population must want it, then they have to fight for it, so they earn it, then they will apreciate it, with stories like, "your grandad took a bullet in the shoulder so that you could vote"

No they don't, why on Earth should someone have to "fight" for a political system (which you keep suggesting means actual violence) just to "earn" it? The general concensus is that people have the right to vote as a *right*, not as something they have to, as individuals or as a people, fight for first; this isn't a Robert Heinlein novel. Take Japan, for example, their democracy was built by the occupying Americans after World War II, they don't have any "fighting for democracy" nationalist blood-and-soil legend to show that they "earned" it. They both like their democracy and want to keep it, it's not insecure or invalid just because they didn't build it in splendid isolation.

>From the top down or the bottom up, how can a bill or rights, a constitution or representation by population be created out of thin air without democratic principles to create it? Who initially decides what moral and ethical underpinnings are used to form the basis of interpretation of democratic rule of law and government? Is democracy static or constantly changing?

Going back to a few interesting questions in the original post.

>how can a bill or rights, a constitution or representation by population be created out of thin air without democratic principles to create it?

This is a good question. For a long time, especially in the 19th century, there was an idea that what we'd now call democracy, liberty, human rights and the like were something that a national group had to "evolve" after centuries of infighting (if they did at all). For a long time, it was popular amongst European conservatives that this was something that only white men had achieved or (amongst the more rightwing ones) something that only white men *could* achieve. This went against liberal thinking which argued that all of humanity had the right to these things regardless of their "development". The old "evolve" argument has never gone away. It was used as an apologia for Western democracies backing tyranny overseas during the cold war, it popped-up in some rightwing circles during the Bosnian war as an excuse to not get involved and it remains a cornerstone of paleoconservatism and rightwing libertarianism.

Now, personally, I think the liberal opinion was and is correct and I've a tendency to stop bothering to argue with anyone who pulls out the old "people too primitive/aren't ready for democracy" no matter how it's dressed up. There is, though, a good piece of reasoning buried in this and that is that countries that evolve democracy tend to be more stable than younger democracies. This is, in a large part, because societies are rooted in tradition and traditions can be hard to break.

Japan remains, for me, an interesting case. During World War II they had a soldiery (and, to some extent, a citizenry) who were almost fanatically loyal to a "Godlike" emperor and were militarist and disciplined in a way Hitler and Mussolini could only dream of and yet, within the space of a few years they had adjusted to liberal democracy and pacifism with very little pushing. It's probably this experience that gave Americans the impression that democracy could replace despotism with very little trouble, an impression that lead to the mess they made in Iraq.

>Who initially decides what moral and ethical underpinnings are used to form the basis of interpretation of democratic rule of law and government?

There is a simple basis to democracy: rule by consent. This is universal. Any other aspect attached to this becomes more complicated . For example, Western democracy is "liberal" democracy meaning that even minority opinion is protected. It's possible to have democracies that are "illiberal", meaning that the government rules by consent but persecutes minority opinion. We can't impose democracy on a people but we *can* impose liberal democracy on them by forcing the majority to respect the rights of the minority. This has, to some extent, been the problem in Iraq where a long-persecuted majority isn't necessarily interested in the rights of the minority.

>Is democracy static or constantly changing?

The idea is pretty-much static. What we call democracy is what used to be called "republic" - government by elected bodies. There is a possibility that "true" democracy - direct government by the people - might be tried in the future but this would be extremely hard to implement properly and probably disasterous leading to virtual rule by demagogues and media barons.

>Personally I would say education is the first step, followed by a bureaucracy that supports it and charismatic leaders who desire it. Then an effective legal system and a decentralized but strong military and police force.

I agree with all of those, although I don't think it's so important that the leaders believe in it. I think, for example, there's been quite a few Western leaders who found the constraints of the democratic process frustrating and yet it didn't make them any serious danger because those constraints were so strong and difficult to overthrow. Th really important thing is that the state apparatus (especially the police and army) uphold democracy. It's one of the reasons that democratic countries make their soldiers swear an oath of allegiance to the constitution or the republic rather than its leadership.

Democracy also relies strongly on the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't work then democracy gives way to strongmen, warlords or mob rule. This is what happened in much of Iraq.

I think the most difficult democratic concept for those unfamiliar with it to grasp is the idea of what in the UK is called "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition".

It's an odd thing. Having a government that makes decisions and laws is fairly easy to understand, but the idea of an opposition is an odd one. Convention and law effectively set up a space for a group of people to oppose the will of the government but through words and argument only - no matter how strongly it feels, it may not act against the government. The government, in turn, is forbidden from taking any action against the opposition other than through words and argument.

As a system it seems obvious if you've grown up with it, but it's a hard thing to understand and implement from scratch. Democracy requires respect from government and from opposition parties about the extent and limits of their rights to act against each other. Loyal opposition is dissent that does not become treason or treachery.

If by 'democracy' we mean the liberal democratic notion of 'majority rule, minority rights', then there's also the issue of coming to a shared understanding of the limits of the public and private spheres - of what is government's business to regulate and control, and what is private.

"It's an odd thing. Having a government that makes decisions and laws is fairly easy to understand, but the idea of an opposition is an odd one. Convention and law effectively set up a space for a group of people to oppose the will of the government but through words and argument only - no matter how strongly it feels, it may not act against the government. The government, in turn, is forbidden from taking any action against the opposition other than through words and argument."

The notion that both government and opposition activism should be "gentlemanly" is a characteristic of liberal democracy. There are instances of democratically-elected governments acting against opposition (sometimes even in liberal democracies, Watergate for example, although these tend to end in prosecution). It's here the question of "imposition" comes into things. Say we install a democratic regime and the elected government starts beating up its opponents so we step in and say "no, you can't do that" but the supporters of the government (who are in the majority) want this to carry on. What is the right thing to do?

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germany was a democracy,(how else did the nazis come to power) and was liberated in 1945 after 12 years of nazi rule

turns out japan had democracy before the war as well

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and if the "godlike" emperor said 'embrace democracy' as part of the terms of surrender, then the people who worship him embrace it

>germany was a democracy,(how else did the nazis come to power) and was liberated in 1945 after 12 years of nazi rule

Briefly (from 1918 until 1933) and then the Nazis quite openly dismantled it and very effectively replaced it with their own regime. In fact, the thinking in the West was largely that the Germans had briefly tried democracy and then used it to vote themselves back into despotism (not really true). Part of the "denazification" wasn't just an attempt to install a democratic mindset, by the way, it was an attempt to get rid of the racism and militarism that the nazi regime had (it was assumed) grown out of. This was never done in Austria (which was regarded as a victim of Nazi Germany) and a recent survey revealed that large numbers of Austrians are still anti-semitic...

>and if the "godlike" emperor said 'embrace democracy' as part of the terms of surrender, then the people who worship him embrace it

No he didn't. Part of Japan's wartime surrender conditions was that the emperor renounce his claim to be a living god that the Japanese people had to obey without question.