Dan Snow's History Hit - The Shortest History of Democracy

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

In a time of grave uncertainty about the future of our planet, the radical potential of democracy is more important than ever.From its beginnings in Syria-Mesopotamia – and not Athens – to its role in fomenting revolutionary fervour in France and America, democracy has subverted fixed ways of deciding who should enjoy power and privilege, and why. Democracy encourages people to do something radical: to come together as equals, to determine their own lives and futures.In this vigorous, illuminating history, acclaimed political thinker John Keane traces its Byzantine history, from the age of assembly democracy in Athens, to European-inspired electoral democracy and the birth of representative government, to our age of monitory democracy. He gives new reasons why democracy is a precious global ideal and shows that as the world has come to be shaped by democracy, it has grown more worldly – American-style liberal democracy is giving way to regional varieties with a local character in places such as Taiwan, India, Senegal and South Africa.In an age of cascading crises, we need the radical potential of democracy more than ever. Does it have a future, or will the demagogues and despots win? We are about to find out.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi buddy, welcome to Darren Snow's History. We're talking about democracy today. The short history of democracy. It's going to be very short, it's about half an hour podcast. We're going to go from the beginning to the end. Well, hopefully not the end. That's what we're talking about at the moment. From the beginning to the middle bit of democracy. The democratic story is hopefully not reaching an end at the moment, although it can feel like that. I've got John Keane here. He's a professor of politics at the University of Sydney. He's co-founder and director of the Sydney Democracy Network. He's renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He's the dude when it

comes to democracy. And if you want to listen to other podcasts in which I discuss the issue of democracy, its rise, its challenges at the moment, you can do so at History Hit TV. All the previous episodes of the podcast are all there without the ads. Deep back into our archive seven years ago, we've got hundreds of hours of TV shows. We've got the excellent Falkland show, which is just smashing records at the moment on there, 40 years since the Falklands War. So please go and check that out. If you follow the link in the notes of this podcast, click on that little link, it'll take you straight there as if by magic and then you can take part in a little democratic exercise of joining history at this grassroots organisation for better history on TV. Then you'll be being a responsible global digital citizen. So go and do that. In the meantime though

folks, here is John Keane. Enjoy. John, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Dan, it's a great pleasure. Of the many things I enjoyed and found stimulating about your work, I thought you had the neatest definition of democracy, because sometimes when you ask people to define what democracy is, it's like asking a physicist to talk about mass, their heads just explode and it's very difficult. Could you tell us all, when you think about democracy, what is the essence of democracy for you? The quintessence is that democracy was once upon a time a remarkable invention that emphasised a central point that flesh and blood people living on the face of our planet were just good enough to govern themselves without depending upon tyrants and monarchs and aristocrats and oligarchs, self-government of the people who consider themselves to be equals

would be another way of putting it. The history of democracy goes back before 5th century BC Athens, where lots of us think it might sort of start. You talk about a much deeper history, a deeper tradition of societies, which makes total sense, where people got together and went, you know what? If the king is just going a bit mental, let's rein him in. Let's try and protect ourselves against arbitrary, lunatic government. is a Greek invention that it all started in Athens around 507 BCE, is actually a modern myth that has come under really intense scrutiny. There are some serious problems with that rather

Eurocentric Western view. One problem is that we now know, thanks to a Danish archaeologist, Thor Kjeld Jakobsen, who in the 1920s and 30s dug in what is today Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Iraq, and he discovered evidence of the first assemblies, so where people got together. And that happened at least 2,000 years before Athens. The word itself, democracy, the original Greek, classical Greek is demokratia. That word actually has deeper roots, going back to at least the language of Linear B some thousand years before. So the latest evidence is that democracy is actually an Eastern invention, and it was taken over through time by the Greek world, and Greeks during the 200-year period of democracy claimed it as their own invention. It was a bit of a tall story.

The wonderful source, is it the Book of Princes? What's that Assyrian source that you talk about which explains the consequences for bad behaviour by a sovereign? Yes, that book, and there's other evidence, that what motivated those early assemblies, Dan, was the fear of people who from various walks of life consider themselves as equals, the fear that concentrated power would be abusive power, that those monarchs, emperors who monopolized power couldn't be trusted to wield that power for the common good. And therefore, there had to be checks and balances on that power. The whole point of the earliest assemblies we now know from these kinds of texts is that these assemblies assumed that power should come from below.

It should come from people acting together in concert. And that they could give their consent to rulers, but rulers were not allowed to behave as arbitrarily as if, you know, they were gods on earth. Democracy was a great check on that idea of a kind of universal sovereign, you know, big boss power. We're always in dialogue with the past, given our current situation, but it is the essential question as we look at the rise of strong men around the world.

I always get in trouble saying strong men, as we understand it in political terms. They're mostly men. The strong men. Yeah, and it is about restraining the power of these people over the rest of us. It is so powerful reading your book to realise that is what communities of humans have been trying to do since we've started living in these settled, nucleated settlements in which random members of them exercise great power and influence over the rest of us. an influence over the rest of us. Yes, though this shortest history of democracy complicates that story because, first of all, the history of democracy has been written by its enemies.

That's one of the striking things that I note and what I try to do in this book is to write history democratically. Well, that's at least a challenge. You know, can you retell the story of democracies past from the standpoint of the present so that multiple voices can get their say, so that the complexities of the whole subject come through? Well, that's at least what I tried to do. Another complication, I think, to the story, it's, if you like, the darker side of democracy. I'm no blind-eyed, starry, head-in-the-heavens Democrat. And I'm not, because there were moments in the history of democracy where the notion that people were entitled to govern themselves produced very strange things. For instance, we now know in the case of Athens

that that early democracy was constantly vulnerable to demagogues, individual politicians who were good rhetorically, who stood up before the demos, the people, and who persuaded them to do this and that, and who became, in a way, monopolizers of power. The Greeks, the Athenians, had a very good remedy for that, by the way, for that autoimmune disease, I call it, of democracy, I call it, of democracy, demagogy. And their remedy was to have annually a vote to decide which demagogue should be thrown out of the polis. It was called ostracism. So once a year, a vote was taken. It was like an unpopularity vote to decide who should be sent into exile,

because it was understood by the Athenian Democrats that demagogy was a peculiarly democratic disease and had to be dealt with. Well, that is what today we would call populism. And in the book, I have quite a few things to say about the return of populism during the last several decades, beginning with figures like Berlusconi all the way through to the great blonde leader of the United Kingdom.

These are figures who, in the name of the people, say that they are empowered to do many things and to thereby abuse their power. That is a longstanding problem, a perennial problem in the history of democracy. Right. And the problem with also definitionally is democracy is also about other things. It's also about, well, it needs to presumably be about the protection of minorities. It needs to be about things that curiously the people aren't allowed to do, like commit genocide. And so, for example, the extent to which the people are sovereign or Parliament is sovereign, or there should be some overarching set of constitutional laws on a higher plane. Those are the things that are our intention within this idea of democracy, aren't they? Yes, they are. So during the 1940s, democracy was on its knees. What I call electoral or

parliamentary democracy was on its knees. There were call electoral or parliamentary democracy was on its knees. There were only 11 parliamentary democracies left in 1941. Nationalism, populism, fascism, the Bolshevik revolution, two global wars nearly destroyed the spirit and the substance of democracy, and it's in that decade that thinkers, journalists, statespeople begin to ponder the future of democracy. They worry that it may not have a future. And what is remarkable about that decade is that for the first time in the history of democracy, a whole clutch of new institutions began to be born.

In the 1940s, the birth of the idea that human rights can trump what a people decides to do, a leader whom they elect. And since that time, there's been more than 100 new kinds of institutions whose job is to prevent the abuse of power, to stop arbitrary power in its tracks. That includes not only human rights networks, but integrity, anti-corruption bodies, environmental watch networks, truth and reconciliation forums, famously popularized in the South African case, election monitoring, the list goes on. What's really interesting about the period that we're living in, it's often called liberal democracy.

I don't much like that term because it supposes that the whole world is like the United States. What is really interesting is the way that democracy has come in my lifetime, in our lifetimes, since the 1940s, to mean nothing less than free and fair elections but something much more. And that something much more is the daily ongoing scrutiny, public monitoring and restraint of power by a whole variety of watchdog and barking dog institutions. I call it monetary democracy. It's not very poetic, but it's a phrase that carries within it an old meaning to monitor. It goes back to the medieval European period. to monitor, it goes back to the medieval European period, to monitor is to watch the exercise of power, to blow whistles on power that is considered to be evil or dangerous. That was the originally

Christian meaning in the high Middle Ages. And I've taken that term and I've built it into democracy to capture this point that we live in times where growing numbers of scandals are not the result of elections or parties or parliament, but the scandals are produced by watchdog bodies that blow whistles on power. And they do so because they suppose, rightly in my view, that arbitrary power is abusive power, that it violates the democratic principle that people are or are entitled to be equals, that there should be openness, that there should be fairness in the distribution of power. Democracy is what I call it, and it seems to me that it's under great pressure at the moment, but its great advantage is that it's the most complicated form of democracy known in the history of democracy, complicated because the scrutiny of power, the restraint of arbitrary power, stretches from households, the way in which men abuse women and are violent against women, all the way to the battlefield. We live in times where very unusually there are many watchdog bodies whose job is to

keep an eye on power to prevent it from committing great evils. As you're talking about that, I wonder if the populism that we touched on earlier, is that a response to people's frustration at monetary democracy? If you've got all these bodies around that appear to be curtailing and stopping the rough expression of the general will, it's like sort of Rousseau for a second. But from politicians, we're doing whatever they like. That's easy to whip up a majority against, isn't it? Here we are, I'm trying to do X, and the judiciary and the media and these whistleblowers and these other NGOs are stopping us. That is anti-democratic. Yes, this populism that dates back a couple of decades is a revolt against monetary democracy. In the name of the people, politicians, parties vie for victory, and they do so claiming that the present system is corrupt, that it's stacked against the people. And they have a point, because during the past 40 years or so, the gap between rich and poor has

been growing in practically every democracy. And it's not surprising that middle classes feel squeezed in so many so-named democracies, that millions of people feel what the French call ressentiment. This is more than resentment. They have a certain envy to those who are more powerful, but they have disgust in their guts against those injustices. And when a leader, number 45 in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, the list goes on. When a figure like that comes along and denounces the gap between rich and poor

and says that the political system is stacked against the people, this has a definite resonance. And what's to be watched is when they get into office, what they actually do. And it has older historical roots. When populists get into power, what typically happens is that they try to concentrate power into their own hands.

So they attack the judiciary. Erdoğan in Turkey calls it the juristocracy and says, you know, what could be more anti-democratic than an independent court? Or Modi in India attacks journalists calling them prostitutes. What could be more anti-democratic than these journalists who suppose that they're a voice unto themselves? So in practice, this populism is a strange autoimmune disease of democracy. It feeds on the disgruntlement, the disaffection with existing monetary democracy. But in practice, it also drives that monetary democracy towards the edge of a cliff. And if you think this is an overstatement, take a look at what Orbán did in Hungary in just a decade. And he's been re-elected.

What did he do? Using elections, free and fair elections, in the name of the Hungarian people, he's neutered the courts, he's politicized the civil service, he's tamed the parliament, he's radically weakened journalism, and has begun to concentrate power around himself. Well, this puts a democracy on the road to what I call despotism. And that is a danger that exists in all actually existing monetary democracies at the moment, including the United States. If you don't believe me, take a look again at what happened in the last four years under the Trump administration. That phenomenon is not over. He's still a force to be reckoned with. And there are all kinds of weird anti-democratic things going on in the most powerful democracy on the face of our earth.

When I studied politics as a student, and it was in the 1990s, and there was a certain assumptions about the natural sort of end state that democracy represented, does democracy feel now like a much more fragile phenomenon? much more fragile phenomenon. Yes. One point of this history, Dan, is to show that there are no historical guarantees that democracy will triumph, that a basic rule applies throughout its several thousand year history, which is that a functioning democracy can be destroyed quite quickly. Building it takes a great deal of time and energy and willpower. So democracy is a tender, vulnerable plant, that's for sure. And I think that there is something very 21st century about the emergence of political systems, above all the Chinese political system.

That's the zone in which I'm living. I'm living in the China zone, where the whole political system is short on monetary democracy. But those who rule claim that it's a superior form of government, that it can better manage economies, that it does not have all the shenanigans of periodic elections and the wastefulness of dark money and corruption, etc. So actually existing monetary democracies are now confronted by a serious alternative. This is not a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s. We're not living in times where the main threats are totalitarian rule, fascism or Bolshevism. These despotisms, as I call them, are something different.

They operate differently. I've written about them in other contexts where I analyze the way these systems, especially the Chinese system, operate according to quite different sets of rules and command respect and loyalty of millions of their subjects. It's a great paradox, but we're living in times where that is an alternative, that is a very serious alternative to power-sharing, constitutional, rule of law, monetary democracy. You listen to Dan Snow's History, we'll talk about democracy. All coming up. Can we go back into some of the history now? I should have done this at the beginning, but should we let's go back into some of the history now i should have done this at the beginning but should we let's go back in some of the history you talk about ancient greece of course but then

you point out that actually there was a strand of kind of proto-democratic like consent-based collaborative government that kind of goes through that you think is important when you're looking at the survival of democracy this idea of democracy it't, no one called it democracy in the baronial states of Western Europe, for example. But you think that's quite important in the story, don't you? So roughly, towards the end of the 18th century, there is a reimagining of democracy. There's still an agreement among thinkers and writers that democracy is self-government of the people. But what's new from the last quarter of the 18th century is that democracy comes to be reimagined as self-government of the people through their elected representatives. And that notion of representation was simply absent.

For example, in classical Greece, they didn't even have a word for representative or representation. There were no political parties in ancient Athenian democracy. So at the end of the 18th century, during the period of Enlightenment, democracy comes to be reimagined as self-government of the people through their elected representatives with multi-party system, periodic elections, freedom of the press, and so on. And what I show is that, in fact, the roots of that whole idea of what Thomas Jefferson called government democratical in representative form, the roots of that go back well into the medieval period. So, for example, the First Parliament, this is bad news for those who love Westminster and think of it as the mother

of parliaments. I mean, the First Parliament is struck in 1188 CE in northern Spain. The church in Europe in that medieval and early modern period is a place where, for example, the notion of councils crystallizes, the idea that the church should govern itself by electing popes. It's those sorts of innovations that show that the distinction between medieval and modern doesn't make much sense when understanding the history of democracy. We can't understand the roots of elections and multi-parties without going back in time to around 1100 CE. It's one of the strange things that I try to get at. As an 18th centuryist, I am so fascinated by what happened in that crazy century. As you say, it does draw on existing traditions. But what does happen, as you mentioned, in that last quarter of that century? What's going on there?

Well, a couple of revolutions, the American and the French Revolution. For a start, they helped put an end to the notion that monarchy was God-given. That century saw the birth of the whole modern idea of a civil society, of institutions that operated or ought to operate at arm's length from government. to operate at arm's length from government. It's a century where there is a flourishing and radical defence of liberty of the press that was not known to the Greeks. They did not have newspapers, they did not have a printing press. It's a century in which representative or electoral democracy comes to be nurtured and sustained by daily newspapers, by books and pamphlets, by novels, and it's a period in which the sensitivity towards abuse of power undergoes a large leap. So that's the century in which there are figures like Montesquieu, who writes this

wonderful book in 1748 called The Spirit of the Laws, in which democracy is talked about positively, in which he says that the great fear that Europeans should have is that of despotism, should have is that of despotism, concentrated power that woos its subjects into believing that top-down power is God-given and normal. So this shouldn't be overdone. I mean, the whole story of enlightenment shouldn't be overdone. But this century, the last of the 18th century is the century towards the end where the democratic imaginary undergoes a rejuvenation. There is a paradigm shift in the way that democracy is understood and it had very radical consequences and it unleashed the dynamic that only ended in the 1920s and 30s, the dynamic struggle for one person, one vote. Women won the right to vote and the right to stand in the UK only in 1928. So between the American Revolution and the 1920s and early 1930s, democracy comes to mean the struggle to include ordinary people, to include workers, to include women, and towards the end, to include the colonized.

The belief was that there should be free and fair elections, that the rule should be one person, one vote, and that good government hereon is not monarchy, it's not aristocracy, it's not tyranny, it can't be oligarchy, and it can't be empire, that democracy is the thing of the future. empire that democracy is the thing of the future. You mentioned earlier that the Chinese have, it's a different system, but it's not a competing, thought out competing system like fascism or Bolshevism or communism was. Islamic rule is an example of that perhaps, but if we park that in terms of what great nations, Russia, China, Brazil, Indonesia, the form of government they are practicing at the moment. What's the selling point? It's like technocratic, material stability with a kind of healthy dose of nationalism. It's not a competing idea,

though, is it, to democracy? No one's yet come up with this, anything more compelling than one person, one vote, or am I wrong? I wish you were right. Two things, I think probably with respect to Anne, you've mixed together at least two trends. One trend is that after 1945, the language of democracy went global for the first time. It became a global norm. And what is interesting is the way that when the spirit and substance of democracy, free and fair elections, public monitoring of power took root in new soils

where it had never existed. What's interesting is the way that there is what can be called the indigenisation of democracy. I mean, India does something to democracy. India is not an American-style liberal democracy, nor is Taiwan, South Africa in the transition from apartheid, 11 official languages, a different written constitution, many public scrutiny bodies, et cetera, et cetera.

So the first trend that we need to mention is that the whole world is not America writ large. But the second trend, which I think runs against that, is that let's call it the Chinese model for wielding power in the world is attractive to many governments, to millions of people at various points on the planet. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were

rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Is it a finely articulated alternative? Well, one of the remarkable things, it's a very weird thing, is that this Chinese model of power is a kind of phantom democracy. Xi Jinping and party officials all the way from the top to the bottom of the system constantly refer to democracy, min chu. They say that the system is one in which the people are the sovereign base of power. When Joe Biden was about to hold his democracy versus autocracy meeting in December, the Chinese published a white paper entitled A Democracy That Works. And what the party says to the world is we have our own form of democracy,

don't preach to us. It's a form of democracy in which the Chinese people are sovereign, in which attention is paid to building, not to human rights, but to building certain other rights like the right to universal education and to a decent health care system and elimination of poverty. Now, of course, all of this is done in a one-party setting, and all of this is done in a system where there is concentrated power at the top, with the chairman of everything at the very top, Xi Jinping. Did it happen by design? Well, there was a revolution in 1949, and yes, there are certainly principles that are articulated by the party. And yes, the party produces documents about its own democratic quality. But the striking thing, regardless of how thought out it is, the striking thing is that

it is a clear alternative to power sharing, monetary democracy. And of course, this is not just an academic exercise. It's not just a textbook consideration, because I'm working on a book at the moment about the rise of a new Chinese empire. I think we're living in times in which a new empire is crystallizing. It's a kind of empire that the world has never seen before. It's not Hitlerite. It's not exactly the British Empire all over again. It's not the Ottomans. It's something new. But it is a system that is having global effects. It's a one-party system

that has at home the basis of considerable support. A very large middle class, a very large middle class, maybe 400 million people, who actually do not want a multi-party democracy. They do not want it because they consider that it would produce social disorder. And in this sense, they consider that the party has been good. This is not propaganda. Here I'm describing a clear alternative that has a certain attractiveness in African countries, and it has a certain attractiveness throughout the South Asian and East Asian region. Exciting news. Looking forward to that next book, John, just to really cheer me up. How do we renew democracy, just as someone who's been studying and thinking about it, how do we reconnect that Chinese middle class and many other people with the transformative idea of

one person, one vote, the excitement that motivated so many of our forebears to fight, to protest and die for that idea? Well, I think that the first principle is that democracy has to be understood as more than one person, one vote. It has to be seen as a system, a way of life in which arbitrary power is not cool. And in this respect, one of the great weaknesses of the Chinese model is that cover-ups, the shortages of free flows of information, are potentially threatening of the whole system. We're witnessing at the moment a party state that is handling COVID-19 with great difficulty and not allowing free flows of information throughout the system which are functionally necessary for managing a transition to living with the virus. So being clear about the meaning of democracy is a first principle. Obviously, it depends upon

people and their motivation. Obviously, parties and parliament's politicians can play a role in rejuvenating its spirit. We're seeing something like that going on at various points on the periphery, so to say, of democracy. In Chile, something very remarkable is going on. Here in Australia, we've just had a general election, and one can see that actually this spirit of monetary democracy and free elections and greater equality of life chances is alive and well. It might sound pedantic, but I think it's critically important when democracies tumble into crisis, which is what I think has been going on, is going on at the moment. And that is to be very clear-headed about why it's a good thing. It's very elementary.

And one bit of bad good news, Dan, is that when you look at the history of justifications of democracy, most of them are today either absurd or simply do not apply. For instance, there were no great democratic thinkers in classical Athens from the end of the 6th century into the 4th century. But if you look at the surviving speeches and the poems and the plays, you see that the main justification for democracy in classical Athens was that it makes we Athenians militarily strong. It's very strange. It's like George W. Bush well before his time. Or if you jump forward in time and look at, say, the anti-slavery movement at the end of the 18th and

early 19th century, it's the first great social movement of modern times. And you look at the pamphlets that talk about democracy, which I've done, you find that the typical justification of democracy is that it's God-given. And when you turn the pages, you begin to see that that God is a Protestant God. Well, that's very bad news for Catholics and Jews and Muslims and Jains and atheists. I could go on. What I try to do is to say one reason for looking at the deep history of democracy is to become more clear-headed about why it's a good thing in these years of the 21st century. And here I'm repeating myself but the key justification of democracy, of monetary democracy is that to give a little twist to the Winston Churchill remark, it's so far the most effective weapon that we humans on planet earth have invented to deal with abuses of power. Running through this book counterfactually,

so to say, is a question put to readers. Okay, if you're for monarchy, if you are for the Chinese one-party system, if you are for tyranny, if you are for technocracy, show me, please, why it is that these different systems of rule are not prone to abuses of power. And the historical record is pretty clear. They do degenerate when power is concentrated. It gets abused. So democracy is a reply to that problem. In this sense, democracy in these years of the 21st century has a precautionary function, has a punk quality, I say at one point, that democracy is an early warning detector system. When you have a healthy, robust democracy, it alerts people, millions of people that there's something wrong with what governments or corporations or other organizations are doing that if they carry on doing what they're doing or if they carry out and execute their plans there will be degradations there will be undesirable

consequences that it seems to me is a a very, very great justification of democracy. It's a very, very strong reason why we can ditch it, but at our own peril. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Make sure you read the book, everyone. What's it called, John? It is called The Shortest History of Democracy. It is pretty short. It's coming out in, so far, 13 languages scattered around the earth. I'm going to hire a C-130 transport plane and open the back doors and just kick them out over China and Russia. That's going to be my little job for next year. There is a Chinese edition coming.

Oh, brilliant. Very good. But published in Taiwan. Yeah, I was going to say. Brilliant, John. Thank you so much. My pleasure, brilliant. Very good. But published in Taiwan. Yeah, I was going to say. Brilliant, John. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Dan. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and

give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. you