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Can Democracy Survive an Omnilateral Conflict of Rights?
| Article
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11410 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
6,606 Words |
| Author
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Sir Alfred Sherman
Sir Alfred Sherman is a policy adviser to Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and has written widely on global strategic
and domestic policy. |
The euphoria generated by two world wars fought "to make the world safe for democracy" created powerful taboos against questioning the relevance of democracy to a majority of mankind or its likely durability in countries where it had struck root. Once democracy and universal suffrage were equated, to dare look this gift horse in the mouth was condemned as anti-democratic. These emotively fixed blinders have inhibited the emergence of a conceptual framework within which world developments in democracies and the rest of the world can be rationally assessed. The protests provoked by Jeane Kirkpatrick's attempt to show the superior merit of some non-democratic regimes over others in her now-famous Commentary article illustrates, among other things, the enduring power of the democratic faith. So, too, does the commitment of the Reagan administration, as shown in presidential speeches, to global democracy.
In this essay I wish to carry this questioning further and argue that the inflation of rights, in the sense of hypertrophy of claims on society that the state is responsible for levying, is inherently self-defeating. It is bound to generate conflicts of rights that will end by threatening social stability and freedom.
I owe the term 'conflict of rights' to Hegel, but I have extended its scope. Hegel noted and explored the contingency that rights could conflict. I argue that rights, as now defined, must. Ineluctably conflict and tear society apart.
Contrary to what is now believed, democracy never enjoyed a good press in past times. Aristotle took it for granted that democracy degenerated into anarchy or some form of despotism. Until our own times, it was believed that only those with wisdom and a stake in society should share power. The problem as restated by Machiavelli was how to steer society between anarchy and despotism. Anarchy led to despotism and despotism provoked anarchic revolt, whereas what citizens prized above all was order.
For millennia democracy as we now conceive it was regarded as unworkable; the balancing of social interests within a constitutional framework was thought to characterize the best possible attainable regime. That this view was held for millennia does not in itself mean that it was correct -nor, for that matter, wrong. What is more to the point is that its abandonment did not come about as the result of any great debate, but rather by circumstances that made debate inconvenient or inadvisable.
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