What Criteria might be used to Define a State as Liberal Democracy - Essay Example

What Criteria might be used to Define a as Liberal Democracy Liberal democracy needs power like any other kind of so they also curtail this very same power in order to maximize the individual's autonomy from the state. There thus exists a constant tension that is inherent in liberal democracies. The liberal state can be explained as an opposition of the individual against the norms of custom, tradition, and religion (Barry et al 2001, p. 3). As a result, the liberal inherently distrusted the imposition of any authority over the individual and the forces of the marketplace. Democracy is a means by which members of a community could ensure equality while working to achieve common goals and aspirations. Liberal democracy can be defined as a political system in which the application of state power is curtailed in several specific ways. The first, most important constraint is the clear separatior if the private and the public realms. Any explicit attempt to merge the two is considered illegitimate. Liberal democracies are also political systems in which any application of political power must be sanctioned by law and a certain degree of equality before the law is accorded all citizens. Political power is subject to popular control through regular, open, and reasonably fair elections in which at least two parties compete for power. Finally, while there may not be a constitutional separation of secular and clerical authorities, the former has prevailed over the latter, at least in recent times (Bell 2006, p. 123). The main criteria used to defined the state as liberal democracy are the rule of laws and supremacy of constitution, voting rights and equality of all citizens, civil liberties and minority rights, independent judiciary and parliamentary power, independent media and religious freedom, subordination of military to the state power and freedom and autonomy of movements and assassinations. The examples of liberal democracies are France and Austria, Jamaica and Poland. Following Plattner (2007, p. 41), the general will of the community could force men to be free. Far from seeking to defend the liberty of the individual from the power of the state, the essence of democratic thought is to capture and employ the power of the state to benefit the community as a whole. Phrased another way, if liberalism proclaims the primacy of the individual, democracy demands the subordination of the individual to the collective welfare of the whole. Liberal values are not, of course, the only desiderata. There are ideals which others share, of unity, efficiency, order and security. In addition, all societies today, whether democratic or non-democratic, pursue the secular grail of economic growth, and democracy is likely to be judged not only by its merits but its performance. Some account, therefore, had to be taken of the relationship between political reform and economic freedom--a liberalization of markets and the spread of local wealth to match the dispersal of political power (Barry et al 2001, p. 43). Civil society corresponds to liberal democratic society in its political aspects and to the pluralistic society of voluntary associations and private corporations on the other. Civil society entails the freedom of contract and the market economy. The private ownership of property and the freedom of contract and the organization of the market economy around them, are necessary conditions for civility in society. Seen in the crudest terms, civility and the market seem to be antithetical to each other--one altruistic, the other egoistic, the one inclusive, the other exclusive--but in fact they are mutually dependent. The very anonymity of the market, its relative disregard for the primordial and personal, is a necessary condition of the extension of the collective self-consciousness to the inclusion of unknown and unseen persons (Bell 2006, p. 13). Political scandals in the modern world can be understood only by developing an appreciation for this ambiguity concerning the use of political power-an ambiguity present to varying degrees in all liberal democracies. Nigeria is unique in Africa, in being a federation. The balance of power with which Nigeria was endowed at the time of independence--three Regions, one the equal of the other two combined--was a bone of contention from the start. Politics, both nationally and regionally, was dominated by regionally-focused parties, seeking to consolidate their power regionally and to exclude their rivals from power nationally. Government has been, ever since, in the hands of the military--or rather an alliance of military, police and civilian administrators--except for a brief interlude, 1979-1983. The military, discredited by remaining in power long after the end of the civil war to no good purpose, had prudently given way to elected politicians. A liberal democratic society is a society of an inclusive collective self-consciousness. Any society has some measure of collective self-consciousness, a minimum of civility which might be found from time to time in the circle of counselors and scholars around the ruler in monarchies and empires, although the institutions of civil society have only a very rudimentary existence in such societies. in modern liberal democracies, the idea of equality before the law, restriction of the powers of the central authority to imprison at will individuals, especially from the peripheries, the freedom of critics of the existing center to criticize it and to attempt to modify its patterns and practices, the development of institutions to represent, through the extended franchise and through consultation, the majority of the adult male and later the entire adult male and female population, are a few of the indications of the extension of the collective self-consciousness of the center (Callan 2004, p. 48). There has been a simultaneous and corresponding extension of the society-wide collective self-consciousness to the peripheries leading to their partial amalgamation into their larger society. These developments have been the products of and the conditions for the growth of civility in modern liberal democratic societies. The state can be identified a liberal democracy if there is independent media and freedom of choice, freedom of expression and religious beliefs (Barry et al 2001, p. 87). In a liberal democratic society in which literacy and affluence are widespread and the technology of communications makes possible and stimulates a widespread attention to and interest in the center and participation in an inclusive collective self-consciousness, political activity is not confined to a tiny minority of the head of government, cabinet members, legislators, and high officials in the government and to publicists, lobbyists, and agitators (Callan 2004, p. 62). Even though many individuals do not vote, very large numbers including "non-voters" have opinions which they express and their opinions are often markedly touched with strong emotions. Public opinion polls have given prominence to a type of political participation which was previously lacking; it is a participation which makes desires known through means other than direct communication through speaking or writing (Plattner 2007, p. 39). The Philippines is the state making the widest claims to a full acceptance of the Western model even to the extent of naming its institutions after its American role model. A presidency, a senate and a house of representatives hid two more pervasive underpinnings of Philippine politics. One was the Malay basis of the society, a consensus culture which only appeared to be making its political bargains through the institutions of popular power in Manila. The state can be identified as liberal democracy if it provides the institutions through representative government and the prerequisite public liberties through which such demands could be made public; democracy brought into those institutions the classes whose demands were unspoken in public or, when spoken, were unheeded by others. No society has ever had a complete "harmony of interests" (Barry et al 2001, p. 55). Liberal democracy has made the disharmony of interests more visible and audible to all other parts of the society. The growth of wealth, the increased desires of the electorate, their increased awareness of government and their increased turning to government for the satisfaction of these desires, and the increased readiness of governments to attempt to satisfy those desires, have combined to make it appear that their demands are realizable. The belief in the realizability of a demand encourages the further articulation of demands and more forceful insistence on their gratification. On the one side, demanding groups seek satisfaction for their demands through the exertions of government (Plattner 2007, p. 33). On the other, since the demands are insatiable, indeed have grown with their practical satisfaction, the capacity of the government to satisfy those demands is diminished relative to the demands. Therefore, the authority of government is put into question because the legitimacy of government is to a large extent dependent on its effectiveness in realizing its intentions. Government is regarded almost exclusively as an instrument for the satisfaction of demands. Its legitimacy is not acknowledged unless it satisfies particular parochial demands. The press--the printed press and television--contributes to the undermining of the legitimacy of government. It denies to governments the prerogatives of sovereign power to exercise discretion in the choice of alternatives in their compromise and to refuse demands out of concern for the common good. It strengthens the tendency towards interest politics. Civil politics, in accordance with its concern for the common good of society as a whole, assumes a belief that there is such a thing as "society as a whole." If the life of a liberal democratic society is to be peaceful enough and orderly enough to allow its citizens to go about their various businesses, the different sectors must be in a peaceful equilibrium with each other. It is not possible for this balance or equilibrium to be achieved or maintained only by rational bargaining in the market and by explicit rational compromise in political institutions. Differences of interest can usually be bargained over and fixed by contract, within the setting of a civil society. Differences of ideas usually cannot be reconciled, harmonized and made universally acceptable by a rational application of a clear criterion of the common good (Plattner 2007, p. 98). In Argentina, in a classic demonstration of a major LipsetRokkan hypothesis, Peron tapped an unworked area of the "support market," after more than a decade of authoritarian rule following the immediate military coup of 1930, winning an unchallenged majority among the formerly immigrant and new migrant working class. The resulting dynamic ledeventually to the bloody and destructive alternation of the military and the Peronists in power. In Bolivia, after two decades of political turmoil following the disastrous Chaco War, successive attempts by military caudillos to launch counterelite regimes and a conservative reaction leading to the government of Urriolagoitia, the urban middle class opposition--MNR--linked up with the radicalized tin miners to put together the initially radical coalition that made the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (Barry et al 2001, p. 59). In Colombia, strong dissident factions arose in the Liberal party, espousing first agrarian reform and then urban populism under the dynamic leadership of Gaitain. The strength of these currents split the party and provoked antidemocratic currents resulting in the failure of consensus, the exacerbation of local rivalries, and the breakdown of political and civil society during the period of la violencia. In Ecuador, the excluded urban masses rallied behind the episodic populism of Velasco Ibarra which was never strong enough, either to impose itself politically for the longer term, or to provide the social base for the kinds of economic program pursued with greater effect in Argentina and Brazil. In Peru, a brief experiment with military populism canceled out the rival populism of APRA; control reverted to conservative elites only to give way successively to experimental regimes seeking an alternative way forward before the longterm military intervention and right-wing populism of General Odria, and the military-backed but ineffective reformism of Belaunde. In Uruguay, the Blanco and Colorado parties tried to keep their system going, after a very brief flurry of military interest in the 1930s, by reinforcing and extending the clientelist range of their parties, until they lost touch with the social roots, and collapsed into military authoritarianism in the 1970s. And in Venezuela, after the long Gomez dictatorship (Bell, 2006, p. 54). In sum, the demands made upon the citizen by indirect or representative self-government, in which the people confines itself to choosing those who make the decisions for the society, are incomparably less than those of direct self-government, where the citizens make those decisions themselves. Civil society preoccupies the citizens in peacetime, and the public and its call to civic nobility resound only in times of war. In foreign affairs the classical republics typically aimed at acquiring glory by subjecting their neighbors; the modern republic aims only at avoiding being subjected by its neighbors. It is as reluctant to rule others (except when it can persuade itself. The industrial working class which once had a marked sense of its own peripherality has in most liberal democratic countries come to regard itself as less remote from the center. Except for a small xenophobic and revolutionary margin, it has usually been moderately civil in the past half century in its relations with the center and with other peripheral groups. It is generally patriotic and in national crises even very patriotic. Although concerned with parochial benefits for itself, it has usually not shared in the extremes of doctrinaire class consciousness. It is probably even now the most civil of the major blocks of the population of present-day liberal democracies The intermittently uncivil attitude which was once present--not always salient--in the trade unions of the industrial working classes has lately been taken over by trade unions of white-collar workers, e.g., civil servants, postal workers, airport controllers, nurses and physicians and even university teachers. In most cases, their incivility is usually not ideological but it is uncivil nonetheless. Some of these occupations and professions were once markedly civil in the sense in which we have been using the term here. The rural and small-town population was often civil within its own restricted radius. It was usually patriotic. The rural population has dwindled very much in its numerical position in present-day liberal democratic societies and it has also lost much of its high moral status (Bell, 2006). It is moreover very concerned to exploit what advantages still accrue to it from the mercantilist governmental tradition of being nationally self-sufficient in the production of food. In situations of damaged economic fortunes, the rural population has increased in incivility, but generally these conditions are not the normal ones. Free government, its advocates believed, demanded from all citizens both thought and passion; thus it necessarily confronted them with the power and obduracy of opposing convictions and commitments. Resignation, or mutual respect, taught moderation. The experience of citizenship itself made individuals, at once, better able to discern their own and the public interest. The liberal democratic citizen is capable of patriotism and, where necessary, sacrifice, and yes, the primacy of the civic reasserts itself even in liberal democracies at moments of intense controversy or crisis BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Barry, J., Wisenburg, M., Dobson, A. 2001, Sustaining Liberal Democracy: Ecological Challenges and Opportunities. Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Bell, D. A. 2006, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context. Princeton University Press. 3. Callan, E. 2004, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford Political Theory). 4. Plattner, M. F.2007, Democracy Without Borders': Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Read More