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Democracy's many guises and challenges

By Nick Malkoutzis

The wilting Arab Spring, conflict in Ukraine, slaughter in Iraq and Syria, citizens not trusting their governments and Europeans losing their enthusiasm for the Union most places you look you will see democracys durability being tested. Understanding why this is happening and how it could be addressed has become the most pressing question of our time.

This was the predominant issue debated at the Democracy under Pressure forum hosted by Kathimerini and the International New York Times in Athens for the second year running on Monday to mark International Democracy Day. The Acropolis Museum provided the setting for panel discussions that delved into how our assuredness that liberal democracy would ultimately become universal turned into complacency, which then became seemingly helpless alarm about the way the world is turning.

Democracy should be a verb, not a noun. We cant take democracy for granted, its something were losing sight of in the West, said Chrystia Freeland, an MP with Canadas Liberal Party and one of the panelists in the Setbacks and Advances morning discussion.

The idea that democracy is something that needs to be tended to, like a growing but vulnerable sapling, became a recurring theme on the morning panels as the cases of incomplete revolutions in the Arab world were cited alongside the examples of the growing fractures in the European Union, where an average of some 80 percent of citizens said they do not trust their national governments, according to a Eurobarometer survey published in May.

Complacency

Complacency is the greatest threat to democracy, said Kathimerini English Edition editor Nikos Konstandaras, drawing parallels between the ways in which South Africa ran into problems after apartheid and Greece foundered on the rocks in the years following the collapse of the military dictatorship.

Russians' first experiences of democracy were weakness, the absence of the state and international humiliation, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to the way in which political and economic reformers lost control of the country in the 1990s due to their blinkered approach.

We became too timid, too compromised in the way we tended to democracy, argued former Prime Minister Costas Simitis on the second panel of the day: Money and Votes.

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Democracy's many guises and challenges

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Much has been said about the impact of Scottish independence on British politics. With the predominantly socialist parliamentarians from Scotland gone, the Conservative Party would likely come to dominate British politics for the foreseeable future. The much needed economic reforms and, perhaps, withdrawal from the European Union would become very likely.

What about the impact of independence on Scotland? The breakup of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic some 21 years ago provides an interesting example.

The 1992 elections produced dramatically different results in the two parts of the former Czechoslovak federation. In the Czech Republic, the election was won by the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) led by Vaclav Klaus. Klaus was a highly regarded former federal Finance Minister, who later became Prime Minister and President of the independent Czech Republic. The ODS was dominated by economic reformers whose main goal was a speedy transition of the Czech Republic from a centrally planned economy to capitalism.

In Slovakia, the election was won by the left-leaning Movement for Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) led by Vladimir Meciar. Meciar, a former communist who instinctively opposed dramatic economic reforms favored by Klaus, won by promising the increasingly nationalistic Slovaks some type of a confederal arrangement with the Czechs, but not outright independence. Since the HZDS, with support of smaller Slovak National Party, had enough votes to block all legislation in the Federal Parliament, the future of the federation would depend on an agreement between the ODS and the HZDS.

While demanding an increased autonomy for Slovakia, the Slovak leadership did not bother to find out how far the Czechs were prepared to go. The Slovak leadership seemed to believe that the Czechs, who were more emotionally attached to the continuation of the Czechoslovak federation than the Slovaks, would simply accede to whatever demands the Slovaks chose to make. That turned out to be a colossal miscalculation.

The Czechs were determined not to have their economic reforms hindered by the more socialist Slovaks. If the federal government in Prague were to be rendered ineffective by the Slovak veto and thus prevented from reforming the socialist economies of both parts of the federation, then the two nations would have to go their separate ways. As such, the Czechs flatly rejected a confederal arrangement that would provide for a common currency, but autonomy of economic decision-making in the two parts of the federation. As the Czechs saw it, Slovak statism would destabilize the Czechoslovak crown, and thus harm the Czech economic prospects.

The Czechs called the Slovak bluff and the two republics went their separate ways.

It turned out that many of the concerns that the anti-independence Slovaks had were well founded. Slovakia was not ready for independence. Virtually all the ministries of government were in Prague and the Slovaks working there did not return to Slovakia. While the Czechs simply repainted the signs on government buildings from Czechoslovak to Czech, the Slovaks would have to do everything from the scratch.

The Czechoslovak federation was dissolved on January 31, 1993. In the Czech Republic, Klaus introduced his far-reaching economic reforms. The Czech Republic pulled ahead and became one of the early post-communist success stories. Even better, the Czechs no longer had to feel that they were subsidizing their younger sibling.

Slovakia, in contrast, suffered years of economic and political decline. Meciars style of government became increasingly authoritarian, leading the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright refer to Slovakia as the black hole in the heart of Europe. The Slovak economy remained unreformed. While some of the more lucrative enterprises were sold off to Meciars friends (who, in turn, financed his political campaigns), most of the obsolete state-owned firms kept on losing money. By 1998, when Meciar left office, Slovakia was near bankruptcy.

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Scottish Independence Will Kill Socialism on Both Sides of the Border