India: real estate development in the fastest growing free market democracy

The book provides readers with a global compendium written by an international team of experts and includes key features such as: Chapters covering: the United States; United Kingdom; Netherlands; Hungary; United Arab Emerites; Bahrain and ...

The complex and contested history of democracy

Democracy has never been more popular. It is successfully practiced today in a myriad of different ways by people across virtually every cultural, religious or socio-economic context. The forty-five essays collected in this companion suggest that the global popularity of democracy derives in part from its breadth and depth in the common history of human civilization. The chapters include exceptional accounts of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, modern Europe and America, among peoples’ movements and national revolutions, and its triumph since the end of the Cold War. However, this book also includes alternative accounts of democracy’s history: its origins in prehistoric societies and early city-states, under-acknowledged contributions from China, Africa and the Islamic world, its familiarity to various Indigenous Australians and Native Americans, the various challenges it faces today in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the latest democratic developments in light of globalization and new technologies, and potential future pathways to a more democratic world. Understanding where democracy comes from, where its greatest successes and most dismal failures lie, is central to democracy’s project of inventing ways to address the need of people everywhere to live in peace, freedom and with a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

Introduction : democracy and history

The notion that democracy could have a ‘secret’ history might at first seem strange to many readers. Indeed, the history of democracy has become so standardized, is so familiar and appears to be so complete that it is hard to believe that it could hold any secrets whatsoever. The ancient Greek practice of demokratia and the functions of the Roman Republic are foundational to Western understanding of politics; school textbooks introduce the Magna Carta and the rise of the English Parliament; Hollywood blockbusters recount the events surrounding the American Declaration of Independence; many best-selling novels have been written about the French Revolution; and the gradual global spread of the Western model of democracy has been a recurrent news story since the end of the Cold War. So pervasive is this traditional story of democracy that it has achieved the status of received wisdom: endlessly recycled without criticism by policy-makers, academics, in the popular media and in classrooms across the world.

What is so ‘primitive’ about ‘primitive democracy’? Comparing the ancient Middle East and classical Athens

This chapter seeks to delve deeper into the ancient history of democracy than is normally permitted, back to a time preceding the developments of classical Athens, when the earliest signs of organized society and complex governmental systems emerged across the ancient Middle East. It then seeks to compare and contrast these ancient Middle Eastern examples with those of classical Athens and to offer new insights into, and questions about, the nature and history of democracy. Building on some recent work (Fleming, 2004; Isakhan, 2007a; Keane, 2009: 78–155), this chapter also hopes to move the discussion beyond the phrase usually associated with ancient Middle Eastern democracies, that of ‘primitive democracy’. This chapter also argues that, while the Middle Eastern experiments were less rigid and formalized, they were in no measurable sense more ‘primitive’ than the later example offered by classical Athens. However, this essay also cautiously notes that, while not all of the elements which made ancient Athens significant occurred in the same way and at the same time in the ancient Middle East, all of them did exist at varying times and in varying guises across these earlier civilizations. To demonstrate this thesis, the remainder of the chapter utilizes several of the key criteria by which we commonly measure Athenian democracy – the functioning of its assembly, the mechanisms of justice and of the law, the varying voting and elective procedures, the rights and freedoms of the citizens, and the systematic exclusion of ‘non-citizens’ – and discusses precedents and parallels drawn from the extant evidence concerning the ancient Middle East.

The streets of Iraq: protests and democracy after Saddam

This chapter seeks to document and examine the Iraqi people’s exercise of their right to protest and the influence these protests have had on the political landscape of the post-Saddam era. Since 2003, the Iraqi people have frequently taken to the streets en masse, to air their concerns about everything – from the ongoing US-led occupation to the government’s failure to provide basic security and infrastructure and to the airing of ‘indecent’ programmss on Iraqi television. This paper concludes by arguing that Iraqi citizens who play an active role in their own governance and participate in democratic mechanisms such as elections and mass demonstrations are helping to create a more robust democracy.

Conclusion : democratising the history of democracy

The aim of The Secret History of Democracy has been to open debate on a larger view of democratic practice than that encapsulated by its wellknown standard history. The book came about from a concern that, while democracy was experiencing an ascendancy that began in the aftermath of the Second World War and intensified with the end of the Cold War, the global uptake of this particular form of governance came at the very moment when its limitations were becoming clearer: in its European and American heartlands there was less interest in participating in democracy; Clinton began in hope but ended in scandal; 9/11 was a victory for intolerance precisely because Western democracy restricted its own freedoms; the Bush, Blair and Howard governments became less relevant to their constituents and waged unpopular wars; the global financial crisis revealed democracy’s dependence on a flawed economic model; and difficulties in dealing with the global impact of climate change showed the limitations of national democracies, hostage to sectional interests. The exemplars of democracy were not having an easy time.

Doing democracy in difficult times: oil unions and the Maliki Government

This chapter focuses on the specific case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), Iraq’s largest and most powerful independent workers’ union. Leaving aside IFOU’s resistance of foreign occupation and its fight against privatisation, this chapter focuses on the tensions between IFOU and the Maliki government and examines the extent to which IFOU has served as a bulwark against the state’s rising authoritarianism. The chapter begins with a brief history of Iraqi trade unions under the Baathist regime and concludes by arguing that examples of civil society movements such as IFOU are perhaps Iraq’sonly real hope for genuine democratisation.

Democracy: critiquing a Eurocentric history

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the ‘standard history of democracy’ provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one’s ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.