Assembly Project

Many have wondered, as I have, why we study history. For a long time, I only really did it for fun, only in the last few years beginning to realise that it can do more. Seeing the past puts present-day problems in perspective. It can give clues as to what may happen next, but one must be careful. As Mark Twain puts it, “History does not repeat, but it rhymes.”

The Shortest History series of books, covering countries and several topics like economics, have been a mixed bag. They are undoubtedly useful, but they can often be too, well, short. So it is with The Shortest History of Democracy, written by John Keane. A professor of politics who has explored concepts underpinning modern democracy and its recent backslide in India, he is certainly qualified for the task. The book is divided into three sections:

• Assembly democracy: Ancient times.
• Electoral democracy: Medieval until the Second World War
• Monitory democracy: After the Second World War

Although not quite a success at its own aim, there are many I’d recommend this book to because it brings to the fore some important points and challenges our conventional thinking about what democracy should be.

Assembly democracy

An example is our assumption that democracy is synonymous with representative democracy — rule by elected representatives — and centred on elections. But as John Major, a former British Prime Minister, put it in 2017, “Elections are an expression of democracy, but the ballot box alone is insufficient.” (Emphasis in original.)

As Keane notes in the first and strongest section, the democracies of ancient times were nothing like those of today. This was likely true of the world’s first democratic states, which as Keane points out, probably wasn’t Athens but earlier city-states of the Fertile Crescent. This was also true of the Roman Republic, a fascinating case study which is only mentioned later. But most of this first section deals with Athens, as it’s by far the best documented and studied of the ancient democracies.

The Athenian democracy was governed by an assembly open to all adult male citizens, and most offices were decided by sortition (random selection) rather than election. It had many things that ought not to be imitated, including its slavery, militarism and exclusion of women. But there are many things that we should learn from Athens, particularly its use of sortition, its people’s assemblies and, less visibly, preference for wide consensus over blunt majority rule. Indeed, the modern movements for assembly democracy have in at least one article been labelled as neo-Athenian.

What is also surprising is that Athens didn’t have parties or noticeable factions. To my knowledge, none of the pre-modern republics nor other pluralist societies in that time had political parties. Was this a result of communication being limited? One other reason is that parties represent factions of society, so are not needed if one such faction controls the government. During the 19th century, societies developed political parties and never looked back. One exception was the Confederate States of America, which like Athens was run by a class of slaveowners.

Electoral democracy

The second section is devoted to the rise of representative democracy, from Europe’s first parliament in the Spanish city of León to the Crisis of the 20th Century. Parliaments go from ad hoc advisory councils to the central organ of government. Elections go from being ad hoc selections to the central events in shaping a country’s destiny. Leaders go from invoking God and birthright as their source of power to invoking the people — not just democrats, but also many tyrants.

It’s from this point onwards that the book starts jumping around and getting sidetracked. The timeline bounces from the Enlightenment to the Middle Ages to the Belle Époque to the French Revolution and so on, with interludes on Latin American individuals. You don’t get much of a sense for example of how, in the century until the First World War, parliaments spread from a handful of Europe countries to virtually all of them.

Analysis is limited and in some places missing altogether. At one point, Keane writes, “electoral democracy across the world was profoundly damaged by a system of aggressive, profit-driven commodity production and exchange called capitalism”. How? Capitalism has many different definitions that can mean many different economic systems in many different eras. The paragraph doesn’t provide any concrete links between what capitalist problem has a bad effect on democracy. Some of the world’s healthiest democratic cultures like the Nordic countries have capitalist economies, but, by no coincidence, not the ‘anything goes’ kind.

Later on, Keane speaks positively of recall elections and referenda. I don’t share it. Both have the same problems of elections, their elitism and disinterested voters, but bypass the safeguards of representative democracy. The results can be downright crazy. In 2011, the mayor of Johnstown, Colorado faced a recall that was largely motivated by a plan to switch from diagonal to parallel parking spaces. Keane mentions how citizen-initiated referenda passed progressive policies in the US in the early 20th century, but not how they have benefitted causes that haven’t aged so well, such as the US states that voted in the 2000s to block same-sex marriage.

There is a strong case for more direct democracy, but there are better ways to do it: people’s assemblies and participatory budgeting. Referenda could have a future role, if they’re supervised by a citizens’ assembly, mixing the approaches of Ireland and Oregon.

Monitory democracy

The last section covers democracy since the Second World War. Once again, the timeline jumps around, starting with the freeing of Nelson Mandela in 1990. For once, I didn’t mind him get sidetracked when he discusses Senegal, a fascinating case study of an African and predominantly Muslim country that has been relatively successful in adapting democracy to its local needs. Once again though, big picture analysis is missing.

This section is titled monitory democracy — not monetary, but in the sense of “monitored”.

It is a form of democracy defined by the rapid growth of many new kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms: ‘guide dog’, ‘watchdog’ and ‘barking dog’ institutions. Monitory democracy includes practices such as election monitoring, workplace codetermination and participatory budgeting. It also includes bodies such as future generations commissions, bridge doctors, truth and reconciliation forums and coral-reef monitoring networks.

I think I get what Keane intends here. There is something to be said for the idea that modern democracy requires politicians to not just be held to account by voters, but also monitored for how well they uphold the rights of the many social groups, nearly always minorities. I am not persuaded that this is a new type of democracy in a way that representative democracy was. Many of the tenets he mentions like participatory budgeting and future generations commissions are recent innovations that are still catching on, which doesn’t fit with how the section bounces back to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

That, however, raises many questions. The problem with fighting for rights with ‘lawfare’ is that it undermines the political independence of judges by sucking them into political disputes. It can even encourage right-wing politicians to politicise the judiciary with their own allies, exactly what has happened in United States and Israel. There are similar issues when civil servants and quangos do the monitoring. Moreover, all these institutions, as well as NGOs, tend to be dominated by the affluent social groups of society. How do you stop them from fighting against the public’s wants and needs?

Assembly democracy, particularly the use of citizens’ assemblies to set national policies, could help bridge the gap between these organisations and the public. NGOs can also use them to discover acceptable policies, as the RSPCA and Nuffield Foundation are doing. They have an excellent track record for moral disputes like abortion. They are not infallible but their format can help dissolve prejudice. For example, a citizens’ assembly on trans rights can hear testimonies from trans people in their initial meetings, as well as other perspectives such as gender-critical feminism.

Future democracy?

Keane is back on his best form towards the end, noting how democracy is being challenged in the present day by the rise of populism and China. The current challenges are concerning. As he already noted in the introduction, there are similarities and differences to the Crisis of the 20th Century. Compared to previous autocrats, the new crop seem less inclined to pull off a brazen coup than to make democracy slowly backslide, paying lip service to its ideals while undermining it in practice.

As he moves into his concluding remarks, I would’ve liked to see a discussion on possible ways to revitalise democracy such as citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting, only mentioned in passing. I know I’ve mentioned a lot about ways I’d like a book with “Shortest History” in the title to be longer, but some in the series have more pages than that. On the other hand, I did appreciate his impassioned defence of a society where no man is trusted with absolute power.

His final remarks:

With the practical help of a plethora of power-humbling mechanisms, democracy nevertheless supposes that a more equal world of well-being, openness and diversity is possible. It champions these ideas not because all women and men are ‘naturally’ equal, or because they are anointed by God or the deities or ‘modernisation’ or History. Instead, democracy shows us that no man or woman is prefect enough to rule unaccountably over their fellows, or the fragile lands and seas in which they dwell.

Is that not wisdom of global value?

On that note I agree absolutely.