Democracy – Merits, Limitations, Alternatives

Abstract

Studies • volume 106 • number 423 285 Democracy – Merits, Limitations, Alternatives Martin Mansergh Democracy tends to be most treasured by those who have been long deprived of it. Angela Merkel, German Chancellor since 2005, a Lutheran pastor’s daughter, grew to adulthood in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), not able to travel outside the Eastern bloc, although sometimes looking longingly across the Iron Curtain on her holidays. It is hyperbole to describe the leader of a country that has deliberately limited its military capacity for historical reasons as the leader of the free world in the age of President Donald Trump. She has nonetheless become the world’s most senior democratic leader, known for her caution, verbal moderation, consensus-seeking and her careful protection of German, but also European, interests. She once said of democracy, ‘Democracy remains superior, also because, through its inbuilt checks and balances, it is less susceptible to failure in the long term’.1 The chief guarantee of freedom is the separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, and one might add today a fourth, the media. The checks and balances seem to work reasonably well in the United States, but this is less certain in countries which are not of similarly long democratic standing, where populist leaders set out to attack and dismantle them as an obstacle to power perpetuation. The Brexit referendum in Britain would be an example of a democratic decision with potential long-lasting effects, where the damage is likely to precede, if not out-weigh, the suggested later benefits. Democratic government is not inherently easier to conduct than other systems of government. All of them are challenging. Harmony, at least on fundamentals, is difficult for democratic leaders to maintain, though not all want to. Some elected politicians seem to thrive on division and confrontation. The achievement of national freedom does not make all problems go away. The other leading office-holder in the Federal Republic of Germany, its last President, Joachim Gauck, also from the GDR, himself a pastor, a leading figure in the Leipzig civil rights demonstrations of October 1989, stated at Democracy – Merits, Limitations, Alternatives 286 Studies • volume 106 • number 423 the conclusion of his autobiography written prior to his presidency, ‘Freedom as yearned for has a drawing power of undiminished beauty. Freedom as reality is not only happiness, but tribulation’.2 In Ireland, as in other countries that won or regained their freedom, there is ample experience of the troubles that can arise subsequently. America in the mid-nineteenth century experienced an exceptionally bloody civil war that cost an estimated 620,000 lives, more than the country lost in two world wars.3 Democratic leaders regularly face the responsibility of confronting grave, even existential, problems. Electorates can become deeply dissatisfied. Democracy does not only operate at a national level. A democratic order is a core value of the European Union, again valued particularly by those who had vivid and brutal family recollections of its absence. A Polish-Canadian wrote in a letter to the Financial Times recently, as a contribution to the Brexit debate, ‘As the grandchild of grandparents who survived the destruction of Warsaw in the Second World War and the child of parents who were born into a Poland run by a Soviet-backed Communist dictatorship, I cannot but help hold onto the EU’s ideals … The alternative of a divided Europe full of inward-looking, angry nations is unthinkable.’4 We must never forget the lessons of terrible conflicts from which most people now alive in the western world have been spared. The advantage of true democracy is that it is based on fair competition between parties and independents over who can implement the best plans for society and advance it most, as judged at regular intervals by the people who constitute the electorate. It allows for constitutional opposition, and for the peaceful transfer of power. It is bolstered by supporting institutions, such as a free press and broadcasting service, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, freedom of conscience and religion, the right to assemble and protest and to form trade unions, and the equality of citizenship, by no means an exhaustive...