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analysis By Brian Klaas

Critics have long argued that the African Union (AU) supports the authoritarian rule of many of the leaders of its member countries. They say it is little more than an old boys' club for dictators - Paul Biya of Cameroon, Yahya Jammeh of Gambia and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, among others - who have been in power for decades.

And that it offers these autocrats an apparently legitimate role on the international stage. Others add that the AU has allowed despots and counterfeit democrats to undermine genuine democratic reform in Africa whenever their grip on power is threatened.

At first glance, this may not be immediately apparent. Like many of the leaders of its member states, the AU is masterful at using the language and appearance of democracy, even as it helps to perpetuate authoritarian rule. Consider, for example, the AU's most significant attempt - the Lom Declaration, signed in July 2000 - to establish itself as a continent-wide force for democratisation and good governance:

The Lom Declaration codified opposition to unconstitutional transfers of power as a binding principle of the AU. Specifically, any government that came to power though an unconstitutional transfer of power, such as a coup d'tat, would be suspended from membership in the AU. For a region that has had more oustings than any other on the planet, this looked like a major step forward. Takeovers would not only be condemned rhetorically, they would also have tangible and predictable diplomatic consequences.

Moreover, the Lom Declaration claimed that the AU would henceforth condemn, isolate, and suspend member state leaders who failed to relinquish power after losing a free and fair election. At the dawn of the new millennium, it seemed like a new dawn for democracy within the AU.

Yet, some unavoidable irony attended the signing of the declaration. Many of the signatory states had leaders who had come to power through coups. Faure Gnassingb, the president of Togo, overthrew his father, who had had also come to power in a coup. Many of the other member states were led by men who had rigged elections or had refused to hold them regularly. So the example set by those who signed the document was completely at odds with this new AU principle.

Unfortunately, the Lom Declaration helped create an AU that is pragmatic with regards to policy -- except for one overriding principle: a member country may only meddle in the affairs of another member state if it would accept the same intervention. If you're a despot like Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea or Jos Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola, very few AU interventions seem acceptable. This helps explain not only the language of the AU's faux commitment to genuine democracy but also its chequered implementation of its policies.

In 2001, when the AU was formalised, replacing the older Organisation of African Unity, some parts of the Lom Declaration survived. Crucially, the provision barring unconstitutional transfers of power became Article 30 of the Constitutive Act, the founding document of the AU.

The AU's experience with coups since adopting Article 30 is instructive. Military coups are uniformly anti-democratic in nature. Even when coups do prompt genuinely democratic elections, the damage done to the integrity of democratic institutions is substantial. Once a military has removed an elected leader from power, subsequent rulers must govern with an eye to avoiding the same fate as their predecessors.

The AU's commitment to ending illegitimate transfers of power is admirable and an important signal that democratic legitimacy matters. It reminds us of the progress that the continent has made from its days of purely authoritarian one-party rule. Yet the organisation's anti-coup norm is also a tool that allows entrenched despots to avoid the biggest risk to their power: being deposed by their own militaries. For most African despots, this is a far graver existential threat than rebellion, loss at the ballot box or Western intervention.

This is a crucial point. Article 30 apparently establishes a new norm demonstrating a laudable commitment to democratic reform. In reality, however, it represents an old-style power politics that allows authoritarian leaders to hide behind a veneer of legitimacy. In the long term, it will certainly be good to see fewer coups throughout Africa. But in the short term, Article 30 also serves the status quo. And in Africa, the status quo is despotism.

The anti-coup norm - like many of the AU's rhetorical commitments - is flimsy. Madagascar was laudably suspended from the AU after a 2009 coup unseated Marc Ravalomanana, a democratically elected leader. But the AU's subsequent engagement with Madagascar was never about reinstating him. Instead, the AU worked with the post-coup government in an awkward agreement that left Madagascar with a transitional government for nearly five years.

The main problem with the AU's written commitment to democracy is that it is selective. Madagascar is no paragon of democracy, but should it have been suspended from the AU while the likes of Robert Mugabe or Teodoro Obiang were allowed seats at the table? This "democracy hypocrisy" is glaring. It undermines claims that the organisation is a force for genuine democratic change on the continent.

Today, Africa faces another critical challenge to democracy as presidents ignore restrictions - which they often penned - to their terms in office. The AU has been far too silent about this, and for a simple reason: many of the leaders of the AU's most powerful states have long overstayed their welcome. If the AU is to be a force for genuine democratic change rather than a body that pays lip service to it, it needs to condemn such blatant violations of democratic principle. At present, however, it is a reluctant and half-hearted voice spouting platitudes and calls for restraint on all sides. The AU should change tack immediately, and institute strict penalties for leaders who do not abide by existing term limits.

Fourteen African heads of state have been in power for at least 15 years, and eight of them have been in power for more than a quarter century. All 14 of the longest-serving heads of state were in power when the Lom Declaration was signed. Fifteen years later, they are the living embodiment of its failure.

The true test for the AU in the coming years will be whether it responds to the threat of coups in the same way it does to other equally damaging threats - rigged elections, violations of the rule of law and routine disregard for term limits - to democracy.

For now, the AU's claim to be a force for democracy rings hollow, as all too often it uses the language of democracy as a shield for despots.

See more here:
Africa: Democracy Hypocrisy - AllAfrica.com

Debased and de-based: thats the condition of our political systems. Corrupted, they no longer fulfil their democratic potential. They have also lost their base: the politically engaged population from which democracy is supposed to grow. The sense of ownership has been eroded to such an extent that, for millions of Americans, Donald Trump appeared to be the best the system had to offer.

I dont blame people for voting for him, or for Brexit: these are responses to a twisted, distrusted system. Elections captured by money, lobbyists and the media; policy convergence among the major parties, crushing real choice; the hollowing out of parliaments and other political institutions and the transfer of their powers to unaccountable bodies: these are a perfect formula for disenfranchisement and disillusion. The global rise of demagogues and outright liars suggests that a system nominally built on consent and participation is imploding.

So could we do better? Could a straighter system be fashioned from the crooked timber of humanity? This is the second of my occasional series on possible solutions to the multiple crises we confront. It explores some of the means by which democracy may be improved. Over the past few months, Ive read dozens of proposals, some transparently awful, others pretty good. The overall result so far is this: there is no magic formula, no single plan that could solve our democratic problems without creating worse ones. But there are plenty of ideas, just a few of which I will mention, that could enhance our politics.

The first necessary shift is a radical reform of campaign finance (political funding). The power of money in politics poisons everything literally in some cases. In my column last week, I mentioned the pollution paradox: the dirtiest companies must spend the most on politics if they are not to be regulated out of existence, so politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest companies. It applies across the board. Banks designing dodgy financial instruments; pharmaceutical companies selling outdated drugs; gambling companies seeking to stifle controls; food companies selling obesogenic junk; retail companies exploiting their workers; accountants designing tax-avoidance packages: all have an enhanced incentive to buy political space, as all, in a fair system, would find themselves under pressure. The system buckles to accommodate their demands.

My proposal for reforming campaign finance is brutally simple. Every party would be entitled to charge the same small fee for membership (perhaps 50 or $50), which would then be matched by the state, with a fixed multiple. Any other political funding, direct or indirect, would be illegal. This would also force parties to re-engage with voters. Too expensive? Not in the least. The corruption of our politics by private money costs us hundreds of times more than a funding system for which we would pay directly. That corruption has led to financial crises caused by politicians failure to regulate the banks, environmental crises caused by the political power of the dirtiest companies, and lucrative contracts for political funders; and overcharging by well-connected drugs companies.

The next crucial reform is to help voters make informed choices. Germany provides a brilliant example of how this could be done: its federal agency for civic education publishes authoritative but accessible guides to the key political issues, organises film and theatre festivals, study tours and competitions, and tries to engage with groups that turn their backs on democratic politics. It is trusted and consulted by millions.

Switzerland offers the best example of the next step: its Smartvote system presents a list of policy choices with which you can agree or disagree, then compares your answers with the policies of the parties and candidates contesting the election. It produces a graphic showing whose position most closely matches your interests. There is some excellent civic technology produced by voluntary groups elsewhere (such as Democracy Club, Crowdpac and mySociety in the UK). But without the funding and capacity of the state, it struggles to reach people who are not already well informed.

Once these reforms are in place, the next step is to change the architecture. As both US presidential elections (distorted by the electoral college system) and UK general elections (allowing a minority of the electorate to dictate to the majority) suggest, this should start with a switch to proportional representation. Ideally, in parliamentary elections this would mix the national with the local by retaining constituency links, such as the single transferable vote or the additional member system.

There may even be some virtue in the idea of a second parliamentary chamber being chosen by lot

There are plenty of proposals to replace representative democracy with either sortition (randomly selecting delegates) or direct democracy (referendums and citizens initiatives). Such systems might have worked well in small city states with a limited franchise (sortition was used in ancient Athens and medieval Venice and Florence). But in populations as large and complex as ours, these proposals are a formula for disaster. Its hard to see how we can escape the need for professional, full-time politicians. (Perhaps, in a fair and accountable system, we could learn to love them.)

But I believe that both approaches could be used to temper representative democracy. Sortition can be seen as political jury service, in which citizens chosen by lot are presented with expert testimony then asked to make a decision. As an advisory tool, it could keep representative politics grounded in the real world. It could be used to create constitutional conventions, at which proposals for better political systems are thrashed out. There might even be some virtue in the idea of a second parliamentary chamber (such as the House of Lords or the US Senate) being chosen by lot.

But we should be aware of the dangers. The Westminster governments first experiment with citizens juries (Gordon Browns attempt to determine whether doctors surgeries should be replaced with giant clinics) was corrupted from birth. Jurors were hand-picked and presented with one-sided evidence, then the results were buried when they came out wrong. No system is immune to fraud.

Once political funding has been reformed, ballot initiatives of the kind widely used in US states if you gather enough signatures you can demand a vote become a powerful political instrument, enabling people to propose legislation without waiting for their representatives (without reform they are another means by which billionaires rig the system). Referendums on huge questions, such as our membership of the EU, suffer from an imbalance between the complexity of the issue and the simplicity of the tool: they demand impossible levels of political knowledge. But for certain simple, especially local, issues should a new road be built?, should a tower block be demolished? they can, if carefully designed, enhance political transparency.

Also at the local level, a method called sociocracy could enhance democracy. This is a system designed to produce inclusive but unanimous decisions, by encouraging members of a group to keep objecting to a proposal until, between them, they produce an answer all of them can live with. A version designed by the Endenburg Electronics firm in the Netherlands is widely used in companies and cooperatives. Its not hard to see it producing better decisions than the average local authority meeting. But it is difficult to imagine how it could be scaled up without losing intelligibility.

Making any of this happen well, theres the challenge. Ill pick it up in future columns. But change happens when we decide what we want, rather than what we think we might get. Is a functioning democracy an outrageous demand?

Link:
Our democracy is broken, debased and distrusted but there are ways to fix it - The Guardian

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Im Amy Goodman. In addition to issuing presidential memos to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, President Trump and his team have taken several other actions that have alarmed environmentalists. All references to climate change have been removed from the White House website. Reuters is reporting the Environmental Protection Agency has also been ordered to remove its climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research as well as detailed data on emissions. The EPA has also been prohibited from issuing press releases, publishing blog updates or even posting information on social media. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has abruptly canceled a major conference on climate change and public health.

Joining us now from Berkeley, California, is Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA.

Annie, as we wrap up this show, can you talk about the executive actions on Dakota Access pipeline, Keystone XL, and all of what were seeing right now in the new Trump administration?

ANNIE LEONARD: Absolutely. You know, Im actually very worried. Ive been an environment activist for about a quarter of a century, and there have been many uphill battles. But in the past, we were operating within a framework where there was some respect for democracy, some respect for science, a stronger grasp on reality than President Trump is indicating. His actions yesterday, both on the pipelines as well as trying to muzzle the Environmental Protection Agency, demonstrate a complete disregard for indigenous treaty rights, a complete disregard for environmental lawsthat executive orders and memoranda dont change; those pipelines still have to go through NEPA, through the Clean Water Acta complete disregard for democracy. Millions and millions of people have voiced opposition to these pipelines. But perhaps most troubling is a complete disconnect from reality. The vast majority of the worlds scientists say that 80 percent of remaining oils needs to stay underground. The last thing we should be doing is investing in more pipeline. Its terrifying that he thinks this is an appropriate direction to move our country in.

AMY GOODMAN: And the argument he makes that this means more jobs?

ANNIE LEONARD: Well, this is one of the few things I do agree with President Trump on, is that we need more jobs. But we need sustainable, healthy and safe jobs. And the real way to get long-term meaningful jobs is through the transition to clean energy, whether its retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient, whether its building actual infrastructure for clean energy. There is an almost infinite number of healthy, sustainable, good jobs available, and thats where we need to be investing in for this much-needed jobs delivery.

AMY GOODMAN: You said in your statement, the Greenpeace statement, "A powerful alliance of Indigenous communities, ranchers, farmers, and climate activists stopped the Keystone and the Dakota Access pipelines the first time around." Protests have broken out all over the country right now around resumption of this. What do you feel the protest movement needs to do? And what does President Trump need to actually push these pipelines through?

ANNIE LEONARD: You know, Im not sure theres anything that President Trump could do to actually push these pipelines through, because in addition to actual laws and environmental impact statements, theres all of us. There are people. The word that Im hearing more than any other these days is "resistance." Actually, the second one would be "unity." All across the country, indigenous groups, climate groups, farmers groups, labor groupsall these different people are coming together and saying, "We will resist. We are not going to go away quietly. Were actually not going to go away. Were going to fight with everything we have, because whats at stake really is everything that we love. Its our democracy. Its water. Its our multicultural communities. Were not giving up. Were not going away. Were going to resist."

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, it seems very likely that Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, will be the next secretary of state, already approved by the committee, now the full Senate vote. Your response?

ANNIE LEONARD: You know, for a long time, we have fought against or been very concerned about the influence of fossil fuel money in our democracy. This appointment is just stunning in terms of an absolute, complete merger with our government and the biggest fossil fuel industries in the country. It just shows that the onus on making sure that things are handled appropriately is now on the people. More than ever before, we need to be awake, we need to be alert, and we need to be involved.

AMY GOODMAN: Annie Leonard, I want to thank you very much for being with us, executive director of Greenpeace USA.

Original post:
A Complete Disregard for Democracy: Greenpeace Condemns Trump's Move on Pipelines & Silencing of EPA - Democracy Now!

New York Times

Will France Sound the Death Knell for Social Democracy? New York Times The working-class voters of Pas-de-Calais have long supported France's Socialists along with the French Communist Party. But as in the United States, where Rust Belt voters no longer embrace the Democratic Party, these workers have increasingly lost ...

The rest is here:
Will France Sound the Death Knell for Social Democracy? - New York Times

As an American citizen, I have been rather appalled, like many others, at the rise of Donald Trump. I find it hard to imagine a personality less suited by temperament and background to be the leader of the worlds foremost democracy.

On the other hand, as a political scientist, I am looking ahead to his presidency with great interest, since it will be a fascinating test of how strong American institutions are. Americans believe deeply in the legitimacy of their constitutional system, in large measure because its checks and balances were designed to provide safeguards against tyranny and the excessive concentration of executive power. But that system in many ways has never been challenged by a leader who sets out to undermine its existing norms and rules. So we are embarked in a great natural experiment that will show whether the United States is a nation of laws or a nation of men.

President Trump differs from almost every single one of his predecessors in a variety of important ways. His business career has shown a single-minded determination to maximize his own self-interest and to get around inconvenient rules whenever they stood in his way, for example by forcing contractors to sue him in order to be paid. He was elected on the basis of a classic populist campaign, mobilizing a passionate core of largely working-class voters who believeoften quite rightlythat the system has not been working for them. He has attacked the entire elite in Washington, including his own party, as being part of a corrupt cabal that he hopes to unseat. He has already violated countless informal norms concerning presidential decorum, including overt and egregious lying, and has sought to undermine the legitimacy of any number of established institutions, from the intelligence community (which he compared to Nazis) to the Federal Reserve (which he accused of trying to elect Hillary Clinton) to the American system of electoral administration (which he said was rigged, until he won).

Daron Acemoglu, an economist who studies failing states, has argued that American checks and balances are not as strong as Americans typically believe: Congress is controlled by Trumps party and will do his bidding; the judiciary can be shifted by new appointments to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary; and the executive branch bureaucracys 4,000 political appointees will bend their agencies to the presidents will. The elites who opposed him are coming around to accepting him as a normal president. He could also have argued that the mainstream media, which thinks of itself as a fourth branch holding the president accountable, is under relentless attack from Trump and his followers as politicized purveyors of fake news. Acemoglu argues that the main source of resistance now is civil society, that is, mobilization of millions of ordinary citizens to protest Trumps policies and excesses, like the marches that took place in Washington and cities around the country the day after the inauguration.

Undermining Obamacare on a federal level will shift a huge burden onto the states, including those run by Republican governors who will have to balance budgets on the backs of the default from Washington.

Acemoglu is right that civil society is a critical check on presidential power, and that it is necessary for the progressive left to come out of its election funk and mobilize to support policies they favor. I suspect, however, that Americas institutional system is stronger than portrayed. I argue in my most recent book that the American political system in fact has too many checks and balances, and should be streamlined to permit more decisive government action. Although Trumps arrival in the White House creates huge worries about potential abuses of power, I still believe that my earlier position is correct, and the rise of an American strongman is actually a response to the earlier paralysis of the political system. More paralysis is not the answer, despite the widespread calls for resistance on the left.

Many institutional checks on power will continue to operate in a Trump presidency. While Republicans are celebrating their control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, there are huge ideological divisions within their coalition. Trump is a populist nationalist who seems to believe in strong government, not a small-government conservative, and this fracture will emerge as the new administration deals with issues from ending Obamacare to funding infrastructure projects. Trump can indeed change the judiciary, or more troubling, simply ignore court decisions and try to delegitimize those judges standing in his way. But shifting the balance in the courts is a very slow process whose effects will not be fully felt for a number of years. More overt attacks on the judiciary will produce great blowback, as happened when he attacked Federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel during the campaign.

Trump will have enormous difficulties controlling the executive branch, as anyone who has worked in it would understand. Many of Trumps Cabinet appointees, like James Mattis, Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley, have already expressed views clearly at odds with his. Even if they are loyal, it takes a huge amount of skill and experience to master Americas enormous bureaucracy. It is true that the U.S. has a far higher number of political appointees than other democracies. But Trump does not come into office with a huge cadre of loyal supporters that he can insert into the bureaucracy. He has never run anything bigger than a large family business, and does not have 4,000 children or in-laws available to staff the U.S. government. Many of the new assistant and deputy secretaries will be Republican careerists with no particular personal ties to El Jefe.

Finally, there is American federalism. Washington does not control the agenda on a host of issues. Undermining Obamacare on a federal level will shift a huge burden onto the states, including those run by Republican governors who will have to balance budgets on the backs of the default from Washington. California, where I live, is virtually a different country from Trumpland and will make its own environmental rules regardless of what the president says or does.

In the end, Trumps ability to break through institutional constraints will ultimately come down to politics, and in particular to the support he gets from other Republicans. His strategy right now is clear: He wants to use his movement to intimidate anyone who gets in the way of his policy agenda. And he hopes to intimidate the mainstream media by discrediting them and undermining their ability to hold him accountable. He is trying to do this, however, using a core base that is no more than a quarter to a third of the American electorate. There are already enough Republican senators who might break with the administration on issues like Russia or Obamacare to deny their party a majority in that body. And Trump has not done a great job since Election Day in alleviating the skepticism of anyone outside of his core group of supporters, as his steadily sagging poll numbers indicate. Demonizing the media on the second day of your administration does not bode well for your ability to use it as a megaphone to get the word out and persuade those not already on your side.

While I hope all of these checks will operate to constrain Trump, I continue to believe we need to change the rules to make government more effective by reducing certain checks that have paralyzed government. Democrats should not imitate the behavior of Republicans under President Barack Obama and oppose every single initiative or appointee coming out of the White House. It is absurd that any one of 100 senators can veto any midlevel executive branch appointee they want. In some respects, unified government will alleviate some of our recent dysfunctions, which Trumps opponents need to recognize. The last time Congress passed all of its spending bills under regular order was two decades ago. The U.S. desperately needs to spend more money on its military to meet challenges from countries like China and Russia; it has not been able to do so because the Defense Department was operating under the 2013 sequester that was in turn the product of congressional gridlock.

So Im willing to let Trump govern without trying to obstruct every single initiative that comes from him. I dont think his policies will work, and I believe the American people will see this very soon.

Or take infrastructure, which is the one part of the Trump agenda that I (and many Democrats) would support. The country has been gridlocked here as well, with the biggest source of opposition being the Tea Party wing of Trumps own party, who would have stymied Hillary Clintons own initiative had she been elected instead. Trump has the opportunity now to break with the Freedom Caucus in the House and push for major new spending on infrastructure, which he could do with help from Nancy Pelosis Democrats. Even so, such an initiative will face enormous obstacles due to the layers of regulation at federal and state levels. It is these small checks that make new infrastructure projects so costly and protracted. Anyone serious about the substance of this policy should see this an opportunity to streamline this process.

It is important to remember that one of the reasons for Trumps rise is the accurate perception that the American political system was in many respects brokencaptured by special interests and paralyzed by its inability to make or implement basic decisions. This, not a sudden affinity for Russia, is why the idea of a Putin-like strongman has suddenly gained appeal in America. The way democratic accountability is supposed to work is for the dominant party to be allowed to govern, and then be held accountable in two or four years time for the results it has produced. Continued stalemate and paralysis will only convince people that the system is so fundamentally broken that it needs to be saved by a leader who can break all rulesif not Trump, then a successor.

So Im willing to let Trump govern without trying to obstruct every single initiative that comes from him. I dont think his policies will work, and I believe the American people will see this very soon. However, the single most dangerous abuses of power are ones affecting the systems future accountability. What the new generation of populist-nationalists like Putin, Chvez in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, and Orbn in Hungary have done is to tilt the playing field to make sure they can never be removed from power in the future. That process has already been underway for some time in America, through Republican gerrymandering of congressional districts and the use of voter ID laws to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters. The moment that the field is so tilted that accountability becomes impossible is when the system shifts from being a real liberal democracy to being an electoral authoritarian one.

Francis Fukuyama is senior fellow at Stanford University and author of Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

View post:
Is American democracy strong enough for Trump? - POLITICO.eu