The "first" democracy------was Finland in 1906.
Maurice, something to think about, as well as about who has
a representative, proportional multi-product 3-party consensus product sortiment, as well who has more women
running the company, as well as selling more
kiddy-macho-fashion phones....etc,etc,etc..
Maybe the anglomaerican cultures will come along in this
century?? (UK is making great strides, especially
the Adam Smith Scotland, mining Wales and EU NI, although kind
of behind closed doors and very,very,very 100 years late)
----------------------------------
Wall STreet Journal - Freedom House:
the "first" democracy--the first country
to have full universal suffrage and competitive,
multiparty elections--was Finland in 1906.
interactive.wsj.com
December 29, 1999
Review & Outlook
Man and Democracy
End-of-the-millennium quiz: What was the 20th century's
first democracy? We'll provide the answer anon (this is
tricky--bet few of you will earn a gold star), but first a
word about an interesting study that is examining such
matters.
Freedom House, which has been
tracking political freedom and civil
liberties for 40 years, went back to the turn of the last
century to look at how democracy fared the past 100
years. In 1900, it found no countries had governments
elected on the principle of universal suffrage in
multiparty, competitive elections. Today, 119 countries
fit this definition of democracy. That's 58% of the
world's population.
These numbers are dramatic, but more significant is the
principle they stand for. At the century's close, a
world-wide standard favoring electoral democracy has
evolved. Individual political autonomy is now the norm
to which most of the world aspires. At the millennium
men and women in virtually every part of the globe
expect a say in how they are governed. Most of the
century's wars were fought over one variant or another of
this basic notion of self-determination.
Contrast this with what the world looked like a hundred
years ago, when monarchies and colonial dependencies
were the political systems that predominated. Only the
U.S., Britain and a handful of other countries were
democracies, and they were incomplete ones since their
definitions of "universal" suffrage excluded women and,
in the U.S., African-Americans.
That soon changed. To answer the question posed at the
top of this column, the "first" democracy--the first
country to have full universal suffrage and competitive,
multiparty elections--was Finland in 1906. The U.S. and
Britain weren't far behind. By mid-century, after the
defeat of Nazi totalitarianism and the postwar movement
toward de-colonization, Freedom House identifies 22
full democracies and 21 partial ones. Most recently,
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a "third wave" has
brought democracy to much of the post-Communist world
and parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Democracy
is making gains even in China, where local governments
are run by officials who first have to get themselves
elected.
If democracy is now a universal value, as important are
the institutions that allow it to take root and flourish.
First among these is the rule of law. One of the great
fallacies of our time is that merely staging elections
confers democratic values. This distorts and diminishes
democracy's civilizing effects. Without a functioning rule
of law, electoral rights and civil liberties have little
enduring worth.
Indeed, one of the greatest ideas to emerge during the
millennium we are leaving is that all men are equal in the
eyes of the law. Once the rule of law is established, with
its emphasis on protections for each individual, political
and civil rights are just about inevitable. Nowhere is that
better seen than in the former colonies of the British
Empire, where law and democracy go hand in hand.
When you adhere to the principle that one subset of
citizens--whether white men, an aristocracy or a
political ruling class--have certain rights, a rule of law
that is honored and respected in daily practice makes it
hard to keep others from demanding and winning those
rights for themselves as well.
There is as well a close correlation between democratic
and economic freedom. The annual "Index of Economic
Freedom," which the Journal co-publishes with the
Heritage Foundation, shows that the countries with the
highest degree of economic freedom are both the
wealthiest and have the highest degree of political
freedom and civil liberties.
It's not possible to state with statistical certainty whether
economic or political freedom comes first, but this
century has proved that it's impossible to have one
without the other. Countries in which people are free to
work without relentless governmental intrusions into
their commercial relationships are also places were they
tend to be freer to exercise political rights and fashion a
suitable system of government.
The Freedom House survey is an important reminder that
self-determination is now a universal value. The 21st
century most likely will see democracy become political
"best practice." Instant world-wide communication
ensures now that a people in one part of the world, say
Iraq or North Korea, will learn about the freer and fuller
lives of their brethren elsewhere on the globe. Indeed, a
pop quiz at the end of the next century might well pose
the question: What was the last country in the world to
become a democracy?
______________________________
Now compare to this view... look for the
original link to to see the table without
both Finland, WAP and a lot more, the proud
economist-mist..
______________________________
economist.com
Democracy?
Freedom? Justice?
Law? What’s all
this?
...and
meritocracy,
OK?
IT’S a weird idea. A day is fixed. The
citizenry, every Tom, Kim and Mary of it,
if they so choose, troops along, marks a
piece of paper and puts it in a box. The
papers are counted, and, lo, if the count so
says, the holders of the supreme powers of
the state step down. Men with the power
to tax or not tax, to spend this way but not
that, to permit or outlaw, to make war or
peace, to condemn millions to death in a
nuclear holocaust: they quietly hand over
all these powers to bitter rivals whose
policies, character and competence they
have spent months decrying. Few things
more astounding than electoral democracy
have been invented.
No less astounding is that parts of the
world can take it for granted, and the
entire planet claims to practise it. Even
China, the one state ruled very much as it
was 800 years ago, by a self-perpetuating
central elite, calls itself a “people’s
republic” and holds “elections”. And this
is just one of what are called western
values—the sovereignty of the people and
accountability of its leaders, the rights of
the individual (against both, if need be),
the rule of law to ensure equal justice for
all—that have spread worldwide.
To call the ideas “western” is a big
over-claim. Ancient Athens indeed
fathered the word “democracy” (while
excluding women and slaves from it), but
quite possibly not the idea. And certainly
you can be Maori, Korean, Hindu, Arab or
Yoruba and need no westerner to tell you
that you’d sooner think and decide for
yourself than have some ruler do it for
you. Still, the ideas have spread from the
West. Yet how recent they are there; the
Anglo-Saxon peasant of 999 waking today
would be as amazed by them as the
Yoruba one in Nigeria.
Not that either man would be quite as
amazed as we may now think. Pre-Norman
Britain had versions of local democracy
that were later lost. Yoruba chiefs, long
before British colonial officials (let alone
ballot boxes) turned up, were hedged in by
the elders of what was never their own,
personal, fief.
Nor was belief in the absolute authority of
kings any age-old tradition in Europe. The
separation of church from state, now so
often contrasted, as typically western, with
the Islamic notion of the state, is in fact
barely two centuries old. It was
commonplace, until 1600, to see the king
as sharing his authority with the other
estates—in practice, the elite—of the
realm; and all of them bound by Christian
morality, without which God would
certainly punish them. That last thought
was widened by both Protestant and
Catholic radicals into a claim that the
good Christian people could justifiably
overthrow a wicked (or
“idolatrous”/“heretical”) ruler. Even
Machiavelli, theoretician of “The Prince”,
later in life came to believe that, in a
city-state, without deep social
inequalities, republican government was
best.
From divine right to democracy
Only in 1576 did Jean Bodin, a French
political thinker, assure Europe that the
king, and he alone, was boss. Yes, and by
divine right, went a rapid extension of this
theory: appointed by God, guided by God
(however nasty the resultant kingly
actions) and with absolute power (not
least over the local church). The future
James I of England, “the wisest fool in
Christendom”, already king of Scotland,
gleefully embraced this notion—thereby
ensuring that his still more foolish son,
Charles I, lost his head to an axe.
That execution, in 1649, at Parliament’s
order, followed in 1688 by the ouster of
the even stupider James II, was the
death-blow of absolute monarchy in
Britain. But not elsewhere. Nor was it any
triumph of democracy: in 1653 the new
boss, Oliver Cromwell, sent Parliament
(such as it was) packing, nominated his
own poodle body, and when the poodles
yapped kicked them out too. Soon a king
was back; and quite soon the notion of
responsible monarchy was common coin
in Britain and, later, its empire.
Democracy, and the much wider notion of
“the rights of man”, had to wait till the two
great revolutions of the late 18th century.
Even then, the concept was limited, in
practice. For the first time, in America, a
(would-be) state, not just enlightened
thinkers, declared all men equal—but
excluded slaves and, for even longer,
women from a say in political affairs, just
like ancient Athens. France’s
revolutionaries went much further
socially, and in populist verbiage. They
also drenched their new freedom in blood;
not only that of aristocrats but of priests
and, in the Vendée massacres, peasants
who rashly disagreed with them. Within
15 years, France had an emperor; and its
women had to wait even longer to vote
than American ones.
And Britain, “mother of parliaments”? As
its reform bill of 1832 cautiously widened
the franchise a little, conservatives
thundered against “arrant democracy”.
And its own parliament long remained
packed with the well-bred and well-off;
so packed that when a newly arrived
Labour member asked an older hand
where he could relieve himself, the latter,
a famous wit, supposedly replied,
“There’s a door along there marked
‘Gentlemen’—but don’t let that put you
off.” The story is probably fiction; its
spirit is not.
Arguably, the real key to worldwide
democracy lies in the less dramatic
revolutionary ferments in Europe of 1830
and 1848. On the surface, they failed, as
did Britain’s Chartist movement between
those years. But they symbolised and
inspired what was to become the
irresistible spread of progressive thinking;
and warned the new, increasingly
bourgeois, elite of Europe that what it had
grabbed, others below it wanted too. Even
the Russian tsar got round, in 1861, to
freeing his country’s serfs.
And so from Euro-America to the world;
notably, through its empires. Already,
Latin America, freeing itself from empire,
had put on the new liberal clothes. In
Africa and Asia, the colonial rulers never
practised democracy, though Britain made
ever-so-timid, belated steps towards it in
India. But they carried their
self-subversive ideas; and in time
thousands of colonial students were to see
these at work in the imperial capitals
themselves.
When the great retreat from empire came,
in 1945-75, all the colonial powers—even
Portugal and Belgium—left behind at least
a lip-service structure of democracy;
Britain and France more than that. The
Americans meanwhile had shoved the idea
down Japanese throats. Whether these
structures were well thought-out, and
what, where, then became of them, is
another, more complex and mainly gloomy
story.
The right to law
And what about the justice system that
upholds all political and other rights, and
much else besides?
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the
lawyers,” says Dick the butcher to Cade
the tailor in one of Shakespeare’s plays, as
the two fantasise about a perfect England.
Cade loves the idea. Many today might
love it even more. At the end of the
millennium, some societies feel weighed
down by a growing burden of laws and
lawyers. How tempting to hark back, like
Dick, to a halcyon time when benign rulers
ruled with inborn, natural justice, when a
man’s word was his bond, tradition and
custom were respected, and disagreements
were resolved with simple common sense.
Too bad that it never existed.
Life for most people in 999, and long
after, was rough. Trade, investment and
innovation were to alter that. But the
transformation could not have happened
without the framework of law that first
secured property rights and personal
safety, and later made possible
transactions between strangers continents
apart, with the assurance that the deal
would be fulfilled, or else. Nor would the
invention of any amount of rights count
long for much, without means of ensuring
them. Small or primitive groups can
function with simple sets of rules and
informal understandings; not so today’s
highly urbanised society and global
economy.
Today’s legal systems have had a slow
and complex evolution. Most
contemporary law is derived from the two
great legal traditions of Western Europe,
the civil law of continental Europe and the
common law of England. The two have
spread to nearly every other region of the
world, usually imposed through
colonialism, but sometimes, as in Japan,
Korea and China, adopted in conscious
imitation of Europe. These legal
transplants, even when imposed by
outsiders, incorporated some local
customary rules, and they have diverged
from their European models. But their
ancestry can still be discerned.
Modern European law emerged from a
deliberate resurrection of Roman law. For
centuries after the collapse of the western
Roman empire, the great body of its law
lay largely forgotten. It survived in part in
the church, and in bastardised forms in
areas of southern France and Italy.
Elsewhere, the cruder customary law of
the German tribes took its place. The
uniformity of the empire gave way to a
patchwork of legal authorities, as local
princes or nobles applied local rules in a
sporadic and often capricious way.
As political order became more firmly
established, these customary rules were
ill-suited to cope with the resultant growth
in trade, the expansion of towns and the
administration of greater swathes of
territory. Responding to this need, groups
of scholars in the late 11th century
rediscovered the Corpus Juris Civilis, a
huge compilation and refinement of Roman
law made five centuries earlier at the
direction of the Byzantine emperor
Justinian I.
Centred on the University of Bologna, in
northern Italy, generations of these
scholars produced a vast literature
commenting on and expanding Roman civil
law. Students from all over Europe
flocked to Bologna to learn the new law
first-hand, and returned to their own
countries to set up law faculties in the
newborn universities. Meanwhile, guilds
and merchants’ associations were
developing their own rules and courts to
handle commercial agreements and
resolve disputes. Increasingly, public
officials, local judges, and merchants’
courts, when they needed an appropriate
rule for novel situations, turned to the
university scholars.
Though often applied in different ways or
adapted to local conditions, the new rules
thus spread throughout Europe, comprising
what became known as the jus commune, a
common stock of procedures and concepts
which gave the law of mainland Europe a
strong sense of unity. The rise of the nation
state eroded this unity, but scholars
continued to play a central role in the
law’s development, maintaining a link
with the Roman past in great national
codifications of laws, such as the Code
Napoleon of 1804, and the German Civil
Code, which took nearly 20 years to
compile, and went into effect on the first
day of the present century. Such national
codes were in turn exported to many
countries outside Europe.
England goes its own way
England took a completely different path.
The Norman conquest of 1066 had given it
a centralised government and
administration long before continental
nation-states had begun to form. This made
England resistant to the legal revolution
that later swept across the rest of Europe.
The Normans found a system of courts in
being, and not ones that always toadied to
the mighty. What customary service did the
villein John, a semi-free peasant, owe to
the lord of the manor? A jury of peasants
gathered at the manorial court would
decide. Was Robert a villein or the free
owner of the land he’d been evicted from?
A villein, said Simon, the powerful
landowner who now held it, in a recorded
case of 1202. He brought a string of
witnesses to prove his case. Bribed, said
Robert—and the court took his side.
All this, though, was ad hoc, most of it
concerned with determining matters of
fact. In time, rules created case-by-case by
the king’s counsellors, and then by a new
set of officials, the judges, replaced the
jumble of local rules and courts. The
result was England’s common law.
Roman-law teachings from the continent
did not impress English judges. They
preferred to apply royal decrees and the
decisions of their predecessors, adapting
these to novel cases through reasoning by
analogy rather than by applying abstract
rules. Early in the 19th century Jeremy
Bentham, a utilitarian philosopher, argued
that England too should codify its law. Its
politicians and lawyers thought otherwise:
English law, like its offspring in America,
remained an ad hoc mixture of statute and
precedent.
New law, old purpose
Today the volume of law has swollen
hugely, as legislatures, ever faster, pump
out new laws and regulations. This new
law often varies greatly from country to
country, even when it is meant to handle
similar problems. Yet the law is also
being pulled towards cross-border
consistency by the growth in trade,
communications and travel; most
international transactions are now
governed by English or American law.
Differences between the civil and
common-law traditions too have been
eroded, as they borrow from each other.
Civil-law courts pay more respect than in
the past to precedent, while in recent
decades common-law countries such as
the United States have enacted uniform
legal codes.
And law everywhere shares its old
purpose: to free life from arbitrary, or
merely random, action and decision, and
provide redress against them. That can
mean conviction of burglars, recompense
for injury, protection from fraudsters—or
from governments, witness the growing
use of judicial review to challenge official
action in those very countries where
lawyer is becoming a rude, if
well-rewarded, word.
In many poor countries (and not so poor
ones, like Latin America) the issue is not
too much law or too rich lawyers, but too
little access to law, let alone rule by it.
The institutions of law exist almost
everywhere. Yet much of the globe
remains literally lawless. For billions,
lawyers, binding contracts and courts to
enforce them remain out of reach. Property
rights and civil rights are the preserve of a
small elite, or even pure fiction. At best,
civil law is often what a corrupt judge
says it is, and crime is what such judges
say poor men have done but rich ones not.
And the biggest threat to life and liberty is
often the very government that poses as the
guardian of both. Remember this the next
time someone tries to raise a chuckle by
quoting the line: “Let’s kill all the
lawyers.” |
