When Democratic Institutions Fail  

                        By Fubara David-West

The  democratic institutions in Nigeria are failing badly, but the reason for that is not the popularly accepted conventional wisdom, which blames it on a terrible president, and a corrupt political class supported by a co-opted elite.  These institutions and groups are failing because the citizenry (and that is the leaders and the led) are doing a poor job of  meeting the challenges of liberal-democratic self-governance.

Democracy of the polyarchic type is a very difficult and complex political system to run, because it widely disperses the authority to make binding decisions for the governed. In its purest and incipient form, the entire population of a jurisdiction might gather periodically in some central location to make those decisions.  This is possible only in very small and homogenous communities.

That was the case, for instance, in the early New England settlements. It is also the case in certain small African communities, which have retained traditional patterns of communal consultation as the core organizing principle within their structures of chieftaincy and kingdoms.  Those structures are a far cry from anything approaching liberal-democratic notions of egalitarianism, but they represent an orderly method of political stake-holding.  Some people view those African forms as an aspect of African culture, but a closer study will show  that they are strictly speaking not that.  They are merely a universal form defined by certain social, economic and cultural conditions in time.

As social and political organization becomes less homogenous and more complex, it gets increasingly difficult to organize those patterns of town-hall consultation for every decision.  At that point, democratic polities invariably opt for some form of representational forum to which they grant the general authority to make binding decisions.  That transfer of political authority is usually carried out by a legally defined means, which also delimits the authority so displaced

At that point the profound complexity of liberal-democratic governance comes into play.  In the first place, whatever majority rules are adopted to represent the general will does not necessarily translate into the will of any particular citizen.  In the second place, every single citizen is bound by the decision that is produced by those rules.

Due to that dichotomous dynamic, liberal democratic states have to rely on a singularly predictable institution as the ultimate regulator of its processes and administrative structures.  That institution is the judiciary.  They do so under a cardinal principle: the supremacy of the law. 

However, the liberal-democratic state does not leave room for the old monarchial doctrine that the law could be inherent in the king.  That is why liberal democratic jurisprudence considers the idea that everyone is equal before the law a critical element, in the legitimation of both the constitutional state and its functionaries.  It does so with the full acceptance of the possibility that the state is not immune from the probability of failure, since its processes are as limited as the knowledge-base and the political constraints (both products of the political culture and its economic antecedents) which define political practice in any given jurisdiction.

That is why the citizens in transferring their sovereign rights to a representative assembly or institution should never expect that the liberal democratic processes once established will become a self-correcting force, capable of perfect functionality and results through time, without any further positive acts of will  by the citizenry and their representative private and public organizations and institutions.

                                        The Corruptive Core of Power

Why is that so crucial?  That is because the central organizing principle of the authoritative allocation of value (politics) is power, and it is subject to Lord Acton's seminal dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The idea that power has a corruptive core might be reconciled with Durkheim's thesis that morality and obligation are related (see "The Internalization of Social Control," in Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, trans. D. F. Pocock, 1953).  If that relationship is accepted, it becomes quite apparent that the source of the definition of obligation and morality, culture  is a primary force for regulating power.

In order to understand the context and the dimensions of that regulation, we have to come to terms with the work of one of the classic theorist of culture, Melville Herskovits, who in his Man and His Works (1940) sought to synthesize contemporary stipulations in the field.  Culture, he writes, is learned.  It derives from the biological, environmental, psychological, and historical components of human existence; it is structured; it is divided into aspects; it is dynamic and variable; it exhibits regularities and permits its analysis by scientific methods, and culture constitutes the instrument with which the individual adjusts to his or her total setting, and gains the means of creative self-_expression.  As the world increasingly becomes a global community, these charactristics of culture get even more determinate in regulating political-economic life.

Those universal characteristics of culture, together with the nature of power help explain why polities in different settings tend to show the same patterns of political and jurisprudential malaise in times of definitional crisis, in the core elements that hold a political culture together. 

In Nigeria, that tendency was clearly demonstrated in the decades of military tyranny; as it was in places like Ethiopia, Ghana, and Liberia.  The same pattern could be noted in Nazi Germany.

One might be tempted to noting the caliber of states mentioned above and the limiting factor of historical currents in places like Nazi Germany and concluding that post-industrial liberal-democracies are immune, but that will be dead wrong.

From the passage of the Patriot Act two years ago, to the current militarism in Iraq, with all of its implications for international politics and for the laws of war, to the dishonorable spectacle of an administration (or its agents) exposing a CIA agent as a payback for the gall of a citizen daring to object to critical issues of war and peace, one notices in the USA some of the disquieting infirmities that bedevil those Third World states, and Nazi Germany.

                                       Korematsu and judicial failure

Furthermore, American history suggests that what we are noticing in 2004 is not an anomaly.  At similar times of perceived crisis, the US has tended to borrow from its more repressive contemporaries, and the legal safeguards of the liberal-democratic order have failed miserably. 

For instance, the US Supreme Court would not call the government to order in the spirit and the letter of the US constitution, when Fred Korematsu was jailed following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an act in infamy, as President Roosevelt would call it, which would drag the US formally into World War 11.  What was his crime?  His crime was that he was a Japanese-American, just like thousands of Japanese-Americans who were carted off to prison camps following the Japanese assault.  The US Supreme Court did not strike down those clearly unconstitutional acts as an un-American political depravity. 

Even in 2004, the court's ruling in the Korematsu case form the basis of some of the more disagreeable actions of the Bush administration since the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC in September, 2000.  Could one notice parallels between the ineffectiveness of the US Supreme Court in these instances, and that of the Nigerian courts in not clipping the wings of the government and of government officials, when they commit unconstitutional acts, in contravention of the liberal-democratic order? Yes, and that answer highlights the universality of the human experience in the political community.

In all of these cases, when democratic institutions fail, it is a challenge to the people to take a critical look at the content and the context of the sovereign authority which they delegated to representative institutions, when their polities became too complex for the modalities of the institutions and the formal instruments for the authoritative allocation of value in the tribal kingdom, the hamlet state or in the village caucus.

The more committed a people are to constantly facing that challenge, the higher is the probability that they will overcome their most trying political and economic situations through time.  In that sense, Thomas Carlyle's notion of the determinate role extraordinary individuals or leaders play in historical development must be seen as quite unsatisfactory, especially in settings where there is a commitment to the development and the sustenance of liberal-democratic politics.  For, the single extraordinary individual is as transient as the passage of time, which is a constant.  Quite remarkably, many people in failing democratic orders tend to search for a savior in the Carlyle mode.

A people must not only accept the liberal-democratic order as the most satisfactory instrument for the empowerment of adulthood in the political order.  It must also commit itself to reform and the reformulation of legal and political precepts in the direction, as Thomas Aquinas insightfully states, of the perfection of human knowledge.

That is the true redemptive core of liberal-democratic practice.

Fubara David-West

Dallas, Texas, USA.