Reviews

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Tribune Magazine Published 12 November 2009 (original link here) BOOKS: Is something rotten with the state of democracy today? Time, perhaps, to raise a third cheer… The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane Simon & Schuster, £30 John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster, and author of several other books on democracy, has written a new, and near 1,000-page book, chronicling the life and death of democracy over several thousand years of human history. Its publication is timely as the scandal of MPs’ expenses this summer has led to one of democracy’s near death experiences. Is democracy worth saving or should its life support systems be turned off? Keane includes a jibe from Japan about democracy to make his point: “What’s the best way to restore the public’s faith in political parties and democratic government?” asks a television presenter. “The best way”, answers a panellist, “is first to let the political system collapse”. Letting the political system collapse, cleaning the Augean stables and starting anew, has its supporters. Keane has written in an article for The Guardian that the current financial crisis and public nausea of politicians could knock the life out of democracy. It is no wonder that fun is being poked in the face of democracy and concern expressed about its survival. In the past year, several other writers have expressed their concern. Kevin Darcy in his samizdat-type publication about democracy in Britain today wants to know who is in charge. Peter Kellner has highlighted the historic events in the growth of democracy in Britain over the past thousand years. David Marquand focused on British democracy’s strange path since 1918. Something, it seems, is rotten about the state of democracy in Britain today. Keane’s suggested remedy comes later in his book; the opening chapters deal with the birth of democracy and, in doing so, he debunks a couple of the myths about where it was born. Despite all the scholarly work that Professor Keane has undertaken over the past decade in researching material for his book, it is the dilemmas facing democracy and the course he believes it should take that are the most thought-provoking (and it is probably churlish to point out the typo on page 700 about the date of the general election in 2005). Democracy, he says, is full of enigmas, confusions and not a few surprises. The biggest surprise is perhaps the belief that democracy was born in Ancient Greece. Democracy was not, he says, the child of Athenian genius, military might or simple good fortune. Democracy was not in fact a Western invention; it was only taken up by the Greeks. Neither was the practice of self-governing assemblies a Greek innovation, either. Keane says the lamp of assembly-based democracy was first lit in lands that geographically correspond to modern day Syria, Iraq and Iran. He argues that historians have chosen to ignore the evidence of their existence and, in so doing, pandered to the prejudice that democracy was a Greek invention. And he says that none of this has been registered in previous accounts of the history of democracy partly because of an ignorance of or antipathy towards Islam. Keane also wants it to be known that democracy is not immortal, like the Greek gods, especially at a time when its efficacy and meaning are being questioned. Keane acts as his own devil’s advocate as to whether democracy died. Isn’t democracy, he wonders, “just one of those pompous little Western values that jostle for people’s attention, dazzle them with its promises and, for a time, cons them into believing that it isn’t a mask for power, a tool useful in the struggle by some for mastery over others?” He poses the question in the paragraph following his visit to a Pashtun tribal assembly in southern Afghanistan. He tells how after the meeting an elder queried the relevance of voting in an election to elect a president. What did democracy mean to him, he asked, he lived in a tent. It is a question he is not alone in asking. Keane tries to provide an answer. He puts his hopes in what he calls monitory democracy. He admits it is not the most elegant description of a process that began during the second half of the last century; a new kind of democracy that is distinctly different from the assembly-based and representative democracies that up to now have existed. Its purpose is to keep politicians on their toes. Although not the most stylish of writers, Keane has written a book that exudes more quotations from literary giants – and some jokes, thereby passing the AJP Taylor test – than one would expect in a book about democracy. He begins with the quotation from Burnt Norton, the first of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, about time present and time past. It forms the basis on which the book is written. And for his justification of democracy he turns to EM Forster. Written in the 1930s, when representative democracies were collapsing, he believed democracy deserved a couple of cheers: “Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.” Keane believes democracy deserves a third cheer. Why? Well, because democracy is “the best human weapon that has ever been invented against the folly and hubris that always come with concentration of unaccountable power”. Terry McGrenera

 

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