The election of Barack Obama was hailed by world political leaders who hope it will usher-in a revival of multilateralism and a return to primacy of international law. Their hopes are important; they are certainly hopes that I share. Yet, they are largely generated by mistakes of the past. What is more important from the perspective of an actor in democracy-building is that the election of Barack Obama was hailed by millions and millions of American citizens, and among them particularly the youth. The sheer explosion of joy that filled the streets of Washington and other American cities at nightfall on 4 November was never seen before. This joy was not just about the time left behind. There was a strong sense that the country was about to undergo a deep and long overdue change.
Indeed, the celebration matched the significance of the event. Regardless of Obama’s success in addressing the colossal challenges ahead, his election is already a watershed and will go down in history as such. For the first time, a member of a minority that for centuries, including in recent decades, was discriminated and marginalised acceded to the presidency of one of the most powerful countries in the world.
Symbols often matter more than statistics. African-Americans in the US may still suffer from exclusion and negative social prejudice, but a key cultural threshold has been crossed. There is now a “before” and an “after”. American democracy has become more inclusive, not by law which it was already, but in practice. The gap between the ideal and the real has been reduced. Likewise the room for the disturbing, but legitimate question: “whose democracy?” Cynicism and political abstention have lost important ground to democracy.
As democracy, participation and inclusiveness are increasingly being understood as synonyms, we tend to forget that this has not always been the case. Democracy’s long process of maturation is in fact a process of advances in participation and inclusiveness.
Blatantly non-inclusive systems of governance used to claim and still claim to be branded as democracies. We had “democracies” that allowed or tolerated slavery or other humiliating forms of servitude; we had “democracies” that worked only for tiny segments of the population - “democracies” for settlers that excluded the indigenous peoples, “democracies” for property owners – and not least the most frequent form of governance today: democracies whose leadership and institutions are largely populated by men.
Inclusion and participation have been progressing steadily, sometimes incrementally and sometimes in leaps and bounds. Women political leaders are less and less seen as a political peculiarity. Indigenous peoples are changing the political landscape in Latin America. In some European countries, immigrants vote in local elections, and in fewer, they can and have been elected.
This progress has rarely been the result of peaceful dialogue and smooth consensus-building assisted by well intentioned and experienced international mediators. Established power holders rarely relinquish their privileges without being challenged. The push for democracy to be more inclusive and participative has been tumultuous: it has included resistance to oppression; posed challenges to embedded power; and has demonstrated personal courage and sometimes sacrifice of life.
Today’s inclusive democracies are indebted to countless women and men, some of them famous, others less, who by claiming their rights and those of their fellow-citizens, moved history forward: Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, of course, but also Olympe de Gouge, who in 1791, in revolutionary France, wrote and published “The Declaration on the Rights of Women and of the Citizen” and was sent to the guillotine. As democracy is gaining ground and taking roots, we have reasons to hope that the struggle for inclusiveness and genuine participation will become less violent and that these ideals may, in the future, be pursued without human sacrifice.
But, let us be frank: if participation and inclusiveness are indeed the defining features of democracy, even today, few places in the world fully meet the standards. Widespread under-representation of women and underestimation of their role in politics continue to be a major handicap to democracy; achieving full gender equity and adequate inclusion of other marginalised groups such as indigenous and migrant populations remain a major challenge for democracy in the years to come.
International IDEA is committed to supporting sustainable democratic change through sharing comparative knowledge and assisting in reform and influencing policies and politics.
In this end-of-year newsletter we offer examples of such work. Inclusiveness and participation are pursued in IDEA’s new guide for assessing the quality of democracy, in IDEA’s support to the constitution-building process in Nepal and to the constitution-building dialogue in Africa, as well as in IDEA’s explorations of practices of direct democracy in Africa and Latin America.
In each of these initiatives, inclusiveness and participation are not only means to achieve other goals, they are very much goals in themselves and key ingredients of democracy.
Vidar Helgesen
Secretary-General, International IDEA
