The fall of the Berlin Wall had ushered in the era of democratic revolution. This epoch in world history witnessed the mushrooming of academic and popular publications celebrating the virtues of democracy but much less has been said on how the dominant democratic discourse has often led to the othering of other cultures and civilisations.
The rise of this unsavoury predicament is wholly due to the fact that it is within the context of the new global knowledge system that the democratic discourse has written off the ideas and experiences of non-Western societies as irrelevant, if not detrimental to democratic consolidation.
One of the assaults on non-Western cultures as being incompatible with democracy came in the guise of modernisation theory.
Modernisation theory predicted democratic transformation with the advent of modernity and abandonment of tradition. The articulation of modernisation theory and its related concepts of political and civic cultures in the new global knowledge system was mediated through the filter of Orientalism.
The Orientalist insistence, for example, that Islam’s hostility to capitalism would augur badly to economic development and democracy would be taken up with a vengeance by most Orientalists. Put in another way, the preceding maxim has set off the conventional wisdom in Western policy circles that oriental cultures seem to produce Oriental despotism while a unitary Occidental culture produced Western democracy.
The birth of political culture theories which proposed that the limitations on stable democratic governance were related to culture as a set of variables which may be used in the construction of theories can also be traced to the preceding principle.
Western hypocritical stance on the relationship between culture and democracy is fairly easy to discern particularly in the postmodernists’ notion that all positions in culture and politics are open and equal, although in reality European ideas are more attractive, appealing, and equal than others.
By concocting the notion that Western culture is more compatible with democracy than others through pseudo-scientific claim of political culture theories, the West is able to assert its dominance in controlling the discourse on democracy and human rights.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Western ideas on democracy and its attendant concepts of liberalism and human rights have taken on a live of their own, and had been used as an excuse to wage wars on the pretext of spreading democracy.
Nevertheless, it is an open secret that even in Western states, the so-called democratic ideals are far from being achieved especially when the greatest non-participatory democracy in the world, the United States, finds only billionaires can now afford to make unfettered appeals to the populace. Democracy in the US is for sale to the highest bidder.
What the West has failed to tell us is the fact that democracy itself is a contestable concept. It is only desirable when the pro-Western side wins an election in a non-Western bcountry. It can be annulled, with the blessings of the West, as it was in Algeria when the undesirable “Islamic fundamentalists” won the general election.
Just as it was when Salvador Allende won electoral office in Chile only to be ousted by a bloody coup organised and operated by the unholy alliance of the Chilean generals and the CIA, and notwithstanding the fact that despite all the propaganda and explicit, unconstitutional interference in the internal affairs of another nation, the Sandanista government accepted the verdict of the Nicaraguan people and peacefully handed over power when its political opponents won the election.
Still, Western democracy is far more superior — democracy in the Third World is always fragile and of low quality. Democracy that is based on ever-changing principles has become a cynical ploy by the West to beat the rest of the world into submission. Western educated elites that are in power in the developing world would act as a sounding board for the West by extolling Western-style liberal democracy.
They not only pursue pro-Western policies but also suppress more popular traditional leadership, which tends to be anti-Western. It is therefore not surprising that the West supports dictators and autocrats as long as they are pro-West.
Whenever a traditionalist or an Islamist comes to power through a free and fair election, the West will always find an excuse to depose them even if it means resorting to violence. Democracy seems to serve not only as a front for Westernisation but also attack on Other cultures. The development of liberal democracy is an historic process inconceivable and inexplicable except for secularisation.
The nation state began in Europe as a religious state, the only citizens being those created by the compulsory rite of baptism, the only good citizen was the believer as defined by the Roman Catholic Church.
The secularisation of the nation state and the concept of citizen alone permitted the expansion.
Secularisation, however, did nothing to alter the other basis of citizenship — property. While the property requirement is no longer valid, it has re-emerged in the form of privatisation and the rise of its corollary consumerism. The same remedy is now being pushed down the throat of the developing world in the guise of democratisation.
The developing world should look within their own cultures for mechanisms by which governance is carried out by consent and citizens participate in the free discussion of issues which affect their life.
Fixation on Western-style liberal democracy would eventually turn democracy into the opiate of the masses.
Associate Professor Dr Azeem Fazwan Ahmad Farouk is director for Centre for Policy Research and International Studies
(CenPRIS), Universiti Sains Malaysia