Democracy is an ideal rather than a reality.

         For the next 50 years, further moves were made towards the dominance of popular power in Athens. Some of these moves were directly prompted by the necessities of the Persian wars, which were taking place that time. During those 50 years Athens and the Greeks decisively rebuffed the attempts of the Persians under Darius and Xerxes to destroy their independent states. In 487 BC the archonship ceased to be an elected position, chosen by the aristocracy, and was henceforth filled by lot. In 461 BC the council of the Areopagus, which was composed by the ex-archons, was also deprived of its powers. From this time on, the council of 500, the assembly and the popular courts – with their juries filled by lot from the citizen body as a whole – became the most powerful institutions of the city-state.

        Popular government was thus established in Athens from 461 BC until it was finally swept away by the Macedonian conquerors in 322 BC, to be replaced by the kind of restricted franchise which its opponents had always preferred. Actually, the legacy of Athens was by no means accepted uncritically by the great Greek philosophers and writers who examined its ideas and culture. Plato can be characterised as the most radically anti-democratic of all political philosophers, while Socrates – his mentor – shared at least some of his views. Aristotle saw democracy with a more tempered suspicion, but undoubtedly viewed popular participation in politics with aristocratic disdain, as did the historian Thucydides, while the dramatist Aristophanes mocked the popular rule and its leader time and time again. It is a remarkable fact that there is no coherent and sustained statement of the classical Greek or Athenian case for democracy; our record from this flourishing culture must be pieced together from sources as diverse as fragments of writing, the work of the critical ‘opposition’ and the findings of historians and archaeologists.

        The essence of this democracy which aroused such controversy at the time, and still provokes debate today was the personal participation of the citizen body in the government of the city, which took two principal forms. The assembly of Ecclesia was the first, which every citizen was entitled to attend, and which took the final political decisions. It was the sovereign body, composed of all the citizens, and met around ten times a year. This was the real embodiment of the principle of popular sovereignty, as the people did not choose a government once every four or five years, but they were continuously governing themselves.

        The second feature of this system of direct popular government was the filling of nearly all the government and administration offices by citizens chosen by lot and not by competitive election. In Athens it was one of the many roles which citizens played in the public life of the ‘polis’. Excluding the ten generals, who were annually elected by the assembly, citizens chosen by lot were filling most of the other offices for limited periods.

        We can argue that between 462 and 322 BC, Athens, with the system of citizens filling offices by random rotation, and of having the right to participate in the assembly, came as near as any community ever has to achieving the democratic ideal of government by the people themselves, through citizen participation, rather than the modern substitutes of representation. Furthermore, pay was introduced first for membership of the council and for jury service and later for attendance at the assembly, in order to ensure that participation would not be confined to those with the leisure to devote to politics. The pay was always very modest, so it would not become a motive for participation, and it served to compensate working citizens for the loss of wages that otherwise would have suffered.

        Therefore, it was in a sense a government by amateurs, and those who believed that government was a specialised skill, like Socrates and Plato, unsurprisingly viewed the Athenian experiment with disapproval and annoyance. So did also outsiders, accustomed to the rule by a single person, which was, after all, to be the norm for the next two thousand years in the West, as it was in the ancient world of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

        In the modern era, democracy has often been perceived by liberals as a threat to individual freedom, and as a tyranny of the majority and of the public opinion. But in ancient Athens freedom of speech was integral to democracy, as the process of self-government by the citizens was necessarily conducted by open debate in the assembly and in the council. There also was nothing like modern party organisations through which dissentient voices could be silenced. Democracy was inseparable with open debate.

         A further precondition of the establishment of democracy was the establishment of ‘isonomia’ – the principle of equality before the law. Popular political power was based upon the recognition of the equal status of all citizens before the law, and democracy was also the guarantee that the equality would be maintained.

        Moreover, the idea of active citizenship was central to the effective working of the Athenian democracy. Citizenship did not mean mere membership in the thinned modern sense; it was an organic relationship which even anti-democrats like Aristotle endorsed. The ‘polis’ was a whole of which individuals were parts, dependent upon it and not self-sufficient, as the individuals is conceived to be in the modern liberal thought. Hence the citizen could only flourish as a person by acting as a part or member of the whole, the community. The success of the democracy was dependent upon the citizens’ acceptance of their civic responsibilities, and therefore upon sustaining a sense of identification with the fate of the ‘polis’ among the citizens.

        Nevertheless, three major groups in the Athenian society were excluded from the ‘people’: the women, the foreigners who lived and worked in Athens – the metics - and finally the slaves. The citizens’ body was constituted by the free indigenous men. Moreover, in Athens the political equality of the citizens coexisted uneasily with economic inequality, as it continues to do today; but the whole point of the democracy was that it gave the poor as well as the rich a part to play in governing the city.

Modern Democracy

        Democracy does not consist of a single unique set of institutions, as it can take many forms, while their diverse practices produce a varied set of outcomes. The specific form democracy takes depends upon the socioeconomic conditions of every country, and its state structures and policy practices. Therefore, modern political democracy is defined as ‘a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives’.

        Democracies, like all regimes, depend upon the presence of persons who occupy specialised authority roles and may give legitimate commands to others – that is the rulers. Democratic rulers are distinguished from non-democratic ones by the norms that condition how they come to power and the practices holding them accountable for their actions.

        Moreover, the public realm ‘encompasses the making of collective norms and choices that are binding on the society and backed by state coercion’. Its content may differ across democracies, depending upon pre-existing divisions between state and society, private and public, individual preferences and collective needs, and voluntary exchange and legitimate coercion. The distinction between the liberal and the socialist conception of democracy is that the liberal advocates circumscribing the public realm as narrowly as possible, while the socialist would extend the realm through regulation, subsidization, and even in some cases, collective ownership of property.

        The most distinctive elements in democracies are the citizens. Rulers and a public realm can be met to all regimes, but citizens can only be found in democratic ones. Historically, all emerging or partial democracies imposed severe restrictions on citizenship, according to criteria of gender, class, property ownership, age and so on. Nowadays, the inclusion criteria are rather standard: citizenship is entitled to all native-born adults, even though certain offices might have higher age limits.

        Regular elections, fairly conducted and honestly counted is one more defining element of democracy. Modern democracy offers a variety of competitive processes and channels for the expression of values and interests - partisan, associational, territorial, functional, collective and individual - which are all integral to its practices.

        The majority rule is one more commonly accepted image of democracy, as any governing body that decides by combining the votes of more than half of those eligible and present is considered to be democratic. However, a problem arises when a majority regularly makes decisions that harm a minority. In such cases, successful democracies tend to qualify the principle of majority rule in order to protect minority rights. Constitutional provisions are the most common form of such qualifications, where certain matters are placed beyond the reach of majorities.

        One more central feature of democracy is cooperation. The people should voluntarily make collective decisions binding on the polity as a whole, and they must cooperate in order to compete. Democracy’s freedoms should also encourage the citizens to deliberate among themselves in order to realise their common needs and to resolve their differences without always relying on a supreme central authority. In contemporary political discourse, the phenomenon of deliberation and cooperation via autonomous group activity is what we call ‘civil society’. Civil society provides an intermediate level of governance between the state and the individual, which is capable of resolving conflicts and controlling the behaviour of members without public coercion.

        However, despite that the defining components of democracy are necessarily abstract, and may give rise to a variety of institutions and subtypes of democracy, some specific procedural forms must be followed and civic rights must be respected for a democracy to thrive. These procedures alone do not define democracy; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its existence. The most generally accepted listing of the ‘procedural minimal’ conditions for a political democracy to exist has been offered by Robert Dahl, and that is: 1) Control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials. 2) Elected officials are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which coercion is comparatively uncommon. 3) Practically all adults have the right to vote in the election of officials. 4) Practically all adults have the right to run for elective offices in the government…5) Citizens have a right to express themselves without the danger of severe punishment on political matters broadly defined…6) Citizens have a right to seek out alternative sources of information. Moreover, alternative sources of information exist and are protected by law…7) …Citizens also have the right to form relatively independent associations or organisations, including independent political parties and interest groups.

Challenges facing Modern Democracies

        Contemporary Western democracies are founded upon a variety of myths, beliefs, and values. This however does not mean that there exists a complete consensus among them or that they are not subject to criticisms. Between the First World War and the sixties, the European democracies seemed fairly confident, on account of their economic prosperity and the American military umbrella. From the mid-sixties on though, a series of problems arose that put many challenges to Western democracies, and once again put into question their very bases: issues of participation, identity, representation, legitimacy, and state intervention.

        Concerning participation, on the one hand criticism was aimed at the opportunities for electoral participation, which was considered to be limited and reductionist. On the other hand it rejected the principle of elections as the democratic method of participation, and the electoral scene was denounced as a ‘theatre’ of illusions designed to render ineffective the collective, revolutionary potential of the people.

        The problem of representation raises the everlasting question of the relationship between the representatives and the represented, as all Western democracies have rejected the idea of a definite mandate binding on the representatives, but none has gone so far as to declare total autonomy for the representative. Moreover, the problems of representation also concern the more or less tenuous links that are established between representatives and represented.

        All Western democracies claim to correspond to nation-states, but as the term ‘nation-state’ is an untidy and relatively new notion, the different identities that make up the ‘nation’ in the West are organised with varying flexibility. National identity in the West has faced three main challenges in the recent years. Regionalism is the first one, reflecting often radical disputes provoked by social, economic and territorial changes, over the way in which power is organised and the balance established between the central power and the periphery (e.g. Scotland, Corsica, Basque country). The second one has arisen from immigration and the presence of ethnic minorities, while the third challenge is put by the growing importance of the European Union and the question of how much national sovereignty should be seized to Brussels.

        Finally, the legitimacy of the Western democracies rests upon their citizens’ acceptance of the procedures and the rules for selecting their representatives, determining public policies and choosing their governments. The consensus from which the institutions benefit, the acceptance of turn and turn about, together with the rejection of violence as an instrument of change, are the most remarkable consequences of this legitimacy.

Democracy as an Ideal

        The Western world has always tended to be complacent about democracy, as it has long been assumed that democracy is something which already exists in this part of the globe. During the last century democracy had to confront fascism before 1945 and communism during the Cold War. However, both threats have now vanished, or at least diminished to a point of no significance. The major task which democracies confront now is to help in the establishment of democratic institutions and systems in societies which have never known them before, or where they were swept away by authoritarian take-overs.

        If we consider what the term democracy actually means and has meant, we find that democracy is a concept before it is a fact, and as a concept it has no single, precise and agreed meaning. In its long history, democracy has had very different meanings and connotations, and today it is in a different way understood in the context of different economic and social systems. The contemporary perception of democracy would probably not satisfy those, past and present, which have had a different conception of it.

        Someone might claim that we know which nations or states are democratic and which are not. But do we really know? For example, can we consider as the test of democracy the fact that a government is elected by people’s votes? In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he did so through a normal constitutional process, and as the leader of the party with the largest single share of the popular vote in elections for the Reichstag. Hence, he had a good democratic claim to the office, but no one would describe the Third Reich as a democracy.

        Furthermore, a kind of elections used to be held in the Soviet Union and in other Communist countries, as well as in many other one-party states, but many again would not call them democracies. A common conception of democracy is that it means ‘government by people’, or by the people’s elected representatives – since in large modern states it’s impractical for the people themselves to govern. But as the people are usually divided among themselves, then the government would probably be representative, not of all, but at best of the majority of the people. Then again we have to redefine democracy. Practically it means government by the representatives of a majority of the people. In Britain though, which is considered to be a democracy, in the past forty years no British government has been elected with even a bare majority of the votes cast. With an electoral system like the British, and with more than two parties dividing the popular vote, a government is elected by only the single largest majority of those who vote. This is usually not more than forty per cent of the voters, something that leaves the non voters and the remaining sixty per cent of the voters to be governed by an administration which they did not chose. We are again far from the original idea of democracy.

        These are just a few examples to show that no matter how simple our definition of democracy is, we soon realise that it cannot be used as a plain term of description. Considering the meaning of democracy and the relation between the idea and reality, we find out that common sense is not an adequate guide. Trying to describe democracy, we need to be quite clear about what we mean by ‘democracy’, as it has always been and still is understood in a variety of different ways, which may have a common root but are not at all identical.

        Democracy is an inherently debateable and changeable idea, and a term - like ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’ – which will always signify a cherished political principle or ideal, whatever its precise meaning, and for this reason it is likely never to achieve a single meaning. Democracy is one of the most durable and central ideas in politics, and it seems unlikely to lose that centrality or its meaning to become fixed. It is likely for democracy to remain not just a contestable concept, but also a critical one – a norm or ideal by which reality is tested, and there will always be some further growth for democracy to be undertaken. We can not say that at the end a perfect democracy is attainable, any more as there is a perfect justice or freedom. It is rather that the idea and ideal will always function as a corrective, rather than as a prop, to complacency.

Bibliography

• Arblaster, A. (1987), Democracy, Buckingham: Open University Press.
• Aristotle, The Politics, 1920b.
• Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, trans. Warrington, J. (1959), London: Dent Everyman.
• Budge, I. (1996), The New Challenge of Direct Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Dahl, R. (1982), Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Dahl, R. (1986), Democracy Liberty and Equality, Oslo: Norwegian University Press.
• Dahl, R. (1997), Toward Democracy: A Journey, University of California Press.
• Davies, J. K. (1978), Democracy and Classical Greece, London: Fontana.
• Diamond, L. and Plattner, M. F. (ed.), The Global Resurgence of Democracy, London: John Hopkins Press Ltd, 1996
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• Held, D. (1996), Models of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Meny, Y. (1993), Government and Politics in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Schumpeter, J. (1943), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London: George Allen and Unwin.

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