Liberal ‘Intelligentsiacracy’ or Global Injustice

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Home Page > Law > National, State, Local > Liberal ‘Intelligentsiacracy’ or Global Injustice

Liberal ‘Intelligentsiacracy’ or Global Injustice

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Posted: Dec 08, 2010 |Comments: 0
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LIBERAL “INTELLIGENTSIACRACY”

OR GLOBAL INJUSTICE.

Abdulrahman Mele

August 2007

The status quo is a system in which a tiny fraction of the world’s over six billion peoples – a few thousands – make all the decisions and policies for the rest; in most cases against its will. This few run and shape the world. The class struggle has been won by the elite class and now it is ruling the world. Because somehow, either as a policy or the eventual outcome of otherwise-intended arrangements, the real benefits of liberal democracy is internationally restricted to the West and locally to the elite class. It is rational therefore, to question if a few people are not speaking for the majority against its wish. There is need to answer if people in power are egotistic or truly representative of the people they claim to represent, and if the world’s superpowers are not pursuing their ‘national interests’ at the direct detriment of others’.

Traditionally, power is associated with individuals holding top and decisive governmental or organisational positions and with the power to manipulate the apparatus of the state. This, in essence, will include everybody from say the President, Prime Minister or King down to the senior public servant with decision-making power. In the principles of democracy, power is however said to rest with the people, in political terms, – the electorate.

People in power or with power have the capability legitimately bestowed on them by the law, to influence the course of things in the society; by devising and implementing policies while the electorate has the power of changing the government. But apart from this traditional or formal description of power, there are the wealthy and other influential members of the society who play from behind the scene with equal or outmatched influence to those within the circle of constitutional power.

They are equally powerful but often acting outside the sanctity of the law. In the modern capitalist societies where the role of money in politics and lobbying counts first to anything, their possessions often proves more powerful than the constitution.[1] Today, the intelligentsia can decide anything including who is and who is not available to voters to elect.

Popular rule – one that is truly representative of the majority of the people – does not imply having the majority working directly in the same capacity as leaders or followers hence the grouping of society into rulers and followers is inevitable. From the prehistoric to the modern societies, this has seldom changed; some always rule over others.

Being in leadership capacity however takes some people many steps closer to despotism. Concentration of power is widely accepted as the major source of authoritarianism and the capacity to oppression; sharing of power on the other hand ensures greater justice and accountability – this is why democracy is beautiful; at least by virtue of this principle.

But the rampant conflict of interests between people and the state (demonstrations are becoming commonplace these days, for instance), makes one wonder what is actually going wrong. Governments would for the most part say it is because of communication gaps and people’s failure or inability to fully comprehend and come to term with certain state decisions and policies. Sometimes such is true; an economist may understand why the state should remove subsidies on domestic power of acting unnecessarily selfish. The sacredness of majority or representative rule is thus under threat.

While no one is ready to ascribe theses conflict-tendencies to the democratic system per se, no one is ready (or able) to give any clarification either. Because it is natural that people disagree so even in iconic democracies people would basically agree their leaders are operating on true democratic principles. But journalists, political analysts and commentators are increasingly unearthing clear evidences of diversion from the principles of good governance for other considerations. In most instances, it is – like Attartuk in Turkey – ‘For the people despite the people’.

People are largely denied the ‘precious’ democratic value of the right to self-determination. Silently, democracies are turning to authoritarianism where leaders do our thinking for us. Having created a ‘legitimate mainstream’ encompassing everything good and instilled into everybody the fear of the consequences of dissenting from it, leaders could do anything as long as they could prove to the people it is acceptable in this hallowed mainstream. A common explanation is that you cannot please all people with the same piece of decision or policy since what is food to one man might be poison to others. What is so ambiguous however is that the difference of opinion is almost always sharply split between the ruler and the ruled – between the intelligentsia and the ordinary people that in anyplace constitute the majority?

Why is it that people change suddenly and become understandable and tolerant of state policies the moment they found themselves in power and never while they are not. Not even the opinion of the opposition parties’ elite matches that of the ruling. Are there secrets in governance that are only exposed to people who succeeded in breaking into the elite circle? Or does one have to conform to some norms of leadership and therefore accept the status quo of the world of the intelligentsia? Or is democracy portrayed as ‘government of the people and by the people’ only used superficially to conceal a selfish ‘intelligentsiacracy’?

Popular demands of the people, including of course those who voted for the ruling parties, are on several occasions declined or even tramped upon by the state. Even in the iconic democracies like the US, France and UK, popular demands such as presented in demonstrations are so often ignored (increasingly these days).

The elite class almost always have the same tastes in everything. There is no mystery here – no secrets. Sometimes democracy is partly a sham (a large chunk of it indeed). It is a sort of autocracy concealed by the justification that people participated in the ruling process by directly voting for ‘representatives’ in elections who would represent them by speaking for them in law making and administration. But after elections, the true voices of the people are usually ignored and only tamed and re-exploited when it is time for re-elections. It is becoming more obvious how elections are used to give a face of legitimacy to tyrannical regimes and policies in almost all parts of the world.

Liberal democracy often has very few enemies among the global and domestic intelligentsia. The elite class is always its staunchest promoter. This is the new trend in most Muslim and non-liberal societies where the vast majority are indifferent to the Western model. A renowned writer on Islam and democracy, n o t e d that “newly e m e r g i n g leadership classes are almost everywhere displacing or marginalising the cleric of theologico-legal experts who used to control meaning and organisation in these (Muslim) societies…”[2]. Those in power are an exception in any advocacy for ‘other’ values save in a few places like Iran and China where the elite are at divergence with the world’s liberal mainstream.

Looking at the wider picture of the present situation in most countries and of the inter-state relations between the different countries of the world, it will be clear that what is really taking place in most so-called democracies is a sort of dictatorship without an identifiable dictator – not identifiable because we could not find and point on an individual like Saddam or Castro and call them dictators. It is a dictatorship of the elite; only that nobody among these notables will stay too long in the limelight to earn the name ‘dictator’.

Or is it a system of Global discrimination?

Buying and selling the democracy ticket is not easy. When collectively accepted by a real or apparent majority, it brings freedom to the people, but when the people reject or pose to reject it, it is enforced over their true will and they are deprived of their human and personal rights.

The status quo – per se, stands quite obviously for something other than what we are made to accept. Empirical realities always show something quite different from what governments and the international players are claiming. For one thing, nobody in power anywhere is prepared to risk falling away with the universal liberal mainstream – not even when his people feel otherwise. So there must be a kind of dictatorial suppression to avoid this happening. Governments in the Third World particularly, are increasingly falling out with the local majority mostly in favour of maintaining foreign allies and good names. More governments over the world are speaking for their peoples against their wishes (Pervez Musharraf, Hosni Mubarrak, Hamid Karzai, Islam Karimov, Turkey’s army Generals, for instance). Thus, the US can comfortably continue to claim it is in Iraq and Afghanistan ‘on the invitation of the Iraqis and Afghans’ when only an idiot will accept this (Nuri al-Maliki and co would obviously want them to stay until they are sure of their grip on power).

In some countries, the expectations of the international community weights heavier on the shoulders of leaders than the aspirations of the local people. The introduction of a women and child’s rights bill before the parliament in Niger Republic in December 2006 sparked protests by women groups denouncing it as being opposed to their religion and cultures. Leaders are becoming less-representative (both national and interest group leaders). In 2005, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain’s call on Muslim women in Britain to desist from using the Hijaab in order to ‘avoid reprisal attacks’ after the London bombing was met by a categorical rejection by the women themselves. The head of a British Muslim women organisation proclaimed she’d rather leave the UK than abandon the veil no matter what the circumstance [3].

The same dictatorship that is traditionally frowned upon is somehow institutionalised into the accepted mainstream. Constitutions and strong state and social institutions might exist in principle to avoid the concentration and exploitation of power by a few, but the eventual relationships of the state and the ‘free’ individual of democratic states is increasingly becoming less far-removed from dictatorial. In the politically volatile Third World, there is growing instances where leaders in power seek to tamper with everything including the established laws to elongate their tenure or achieve some purely personal objective [4].

Despite many calls for recognising what the majority voted for, the West and Israel put up inconsiderate economic siege and political boycott on Palestinians in early 2006 when over 2/3 of the Palestinians voted for the Hamas. By the ninth month, the very institutions of the Palestinian authority are in risk of complete collapse. In December 2006 the West-friendly President put all the blame squarely at the door of Hamas and threatened to dissolve the government and call for early elections. He was immediately supported by the West and the British PM paid him a visit the next day to lend him support. Today, the mainstream view is that Palestinians had made a collective irrational decision by voting for Hamas – and that legitimacy lays with the liberal Fatah and President Abbas.

There is increasingly a gradual exposure of a well-defined limit to what people or states could do with their freedoms. The current chaos in Palestine, caused by the West’s unwillingness to respect the aspirations of the majority, as well as some recent occurrences in the politics of the Muslim world are heavily undermining the credibility of democracy seen as a platform for popular governance and justifying the fact that it is the aspirations of the liberal mainstream, often accepted by a very few in most societies, that is more important than the common peoples’.

NOTES:

1 See: Mohammed El-hachmi Hamdi; “Islam and Liberal Democracy: The limits of the Western model”, Journal of Democracy. 7.2 National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University (1996). p.81

2. Robin Wright; “Islam and Liberal Democracy: Two visions of reformation”. Journal of Democracy. 7.2 (1996). p 79.

3. BBC Newshour 4/8/05 9:00pm

4. In Africa the number was so alarming that a philanthropist established an award and monetary prize of about a million dollar for any African head of state that stepped down from power deliberately.

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Abdulrahman Mele -
About the Author:

Maiduguri, Borno State Nigeria

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