April 22, 2003

April 22, 2003

EVERYTHING YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT DEMOCRACY BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Yale Kramer

Now that the United States and the Coalition have been brilliantly victorious in Iraq, the ideological assassins of the left have begun to sharpen their knives to ready the attack on the Administration’s next foreign policy aim, the plan to make the new Iraq a model for democracy in the Middle East. Their strategy will no doubt be to set the standard for what they would consider “a democracy” so high that if anything less is actually achieved it would be seen as a failure.

Most of us don’t really think too deeply about democracy as a concept. With all its faults, American democracy is still the best there is. So when we do think about democracy we think American democracy, the here and now democracy of USA 2003. Before we ask whether democracy USA 2003 is possible or even desirable in Iraq 2003 let's review a few hard facts about democracy.

Thanks to the non-profit work of Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org, founded in 1941 to measure, monitor, and work toward democracy in nations around the world, we have a more or less accurate assessment of freedom in every one of those 184 member nations of the UN. Using a large set of political and civil rights characteristics—a rather expanded and sophisticated Bill of Rights—it rates each country on the degree of political and civil freedoms that are accessible to their citizens. (For anyone interested in the various checklists that are used, you can find them on the site.) These raw scores are then condensed for the sake of convenience to a scale of seven points—1 being most free and 7 being least free.

AND THE WINNERS OF THE OSCAR FOR FREEDOM ARE….

The countries with a 1.0 score are:
Andorra
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Canada
Cyprus (G)
Denmark
Dominica
Finland
Grenada
Iceland
Ireland
Kiribati
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Malta
Marshall Islands
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Portugal
San Marino
Sweden
Switzerland
Tuvalu
United States
Uruguay

TUVALU, THE LAND OF THE FREE, AND THE HOME OF THE LOW-KEYED

Since I had never heard of Tuvalu, I decided to make sure it was really as free as it’s cracked up to be. So I googled it and this is what I found…..

Tuvalu is probably the smallest and most remote free nation in the world. It consists of nine tiny coral atolls in the South Pacific, although Tuvalu in the Polynesian language means “group of eight,” which suggests that even a small remote people have deep and paradoxical mysteries. It is somewhere between Hawaii and Australia, perhaps a couple of thousand miles east of Australia. These nine tiny island atolls are spread out over 500 miles from the northwestern most island of Nanumea to the southeastern most island of Niulakita—as though the hand of some Polynesian God had flung these little islands away in angry disregard for their worthlessness.

If you gathered all the islands together and made one pile of them you might get a total mass of about one tenth the size of Washington D.C. Each of them is about a couple of miles long and a mile wide. They have no arable land, no permanent crops, no potable water—most water needs must be met by catchment systems with storage facilities. Fortunately, there are plenty of coconut palms and fish.

As many people may know, an atoll is an island made up of a ring of coral with a central lagoon of ocean. The part of the island that we would call land consists of the ring of coral and sand, and this can vary from a few yards to a mile or so in width. Each atoll is extremely flat; its highest elevation may be 15 or 20 feet. When living on an atoll you have the sense of being in the middle of the ocean on a very large raft. One may even feel endangered by the sea, but protected by the invisible coral wall that rings and creates the island. In all but the most dangerous storms—in Tavalu, between November and March—the sea outside may be raging but the water in the lagoon and the people of Tuvalu remain calm.

Although there is no crime or parking problem in Tuvalu, life is not without its worries for this remote nation. The government is concerned about the possibility of the sea level rising due to global warming and having to watch the nation disappear into the sea. Arrangements have already been made with Australia and New Zealand for a mass evacuation should this possibility occur. There’s trouble even in paradise, after all.

European traders started working these ancient islands in the nineteenth century. They finally came under British jursidiction in 1877—known then as the Ellice Islands—and about a hundred years later, in 1978, became the independent Nation of Tuvalu.

Tuvalu is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy (although for the past ten years it has been debating whether to become a republic.) It has universal suffrage and any citizen 18 or over may vote.

The legislative branch consists of a unicameral parliament with 15 seats elected by popular vote for a four year term.

The chief of state is Queen Elizabeth II, but since she is busy with things on her own island the real power in Tuvalu resides in the head of government, the Prime Minister, who is elected by a majority of parliament. The current PM, Mr. Sopoanga, beat out his opposition by one vote last year, 8 to 7. There are no political parties, and no lobby or pressure groups of any kind in Tuvalu since there are no taxes, no military, and no labor unions.

The population, of about eleven thousand, mostly Polynesian, is scattered over the nine islands, although one in particular—Funafuti—is where the action seems to be. Funafuti Centre is the capital of the nation. It has no private cars, trucks, or public transit system because it is only about a mile long and half a mile wide, but it does have an air strip, a hospital, Government House where the parliament sits, and a philatelic center which prints and sells beautiful Tuvalu stamps to collectors all over the world—the country’s major export and a solid contribution to the national GDP.

Practically everybody speaks English in addition to Tuvaluan and goes on Sunday to the Church of Tuvalu, which is that most democratic of churches, Congregationalist. On the other days seventy percent of the population work, mostly as fishermen or sailors, but merely at a subsistence level.

Although remote, Tuvalu attracts about a thousand tourists a year who are looking to find a really low-keyed experience. A top of the line hotel goes for about $40/night and the best (fish) dinner will run you about $15 including tip.

You may wonder what the Tuvaluans do for fun. Well, besides singing, dancing, and wearing flowers in their hair on festive occasions they love to play their national game Te Ano which means “the ball.” Two teams line up facing one another and one member kicks off by throwing a heavy ball at the opposing team; they, in turn must hit it back without letting the ball fall to the ground. If it does, a point is scored for the other team. It’s kind of like a heavy version of volley ball without the net. Ten points wins the game. The game ends with the losing team performing a funny song and dance routine to bring the winner back down to earth. How do you think this would play on Super Bowl Sunday?

WHAT ABOUT THE 145 OTHER COUNTRIES? WHERE DO THEY FIT IN?

Good question. For practical purposes Freedom House has divided all the countries into three large categories: Free (with ratings from 1.0 to 2.5), Partly Free (3.0 to 5.5), and Not Free (5.5. to 7.0).

Most of the developed countries in Europe and Asia have ratings of 1.5: France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Estonia, Poland, Taiwan. There are about thirty of them. The countries rated 2.0, with freedoms that may not be as well functioning
are a group of about fifteen that include Bolivia, Chile, Greece, Israel, and Romania.

Slightly further down on the scale, there are twelve nations rated 2.5, such as Bulgaria, Croatia, India, Mexico, and the Philippines that Freedom House still considers free countries, but just marginally so. This means that about 40% of the world’s population, about 2.4 billion people, are more or less free. Some are very free like those in the United States and Tuvalu, some free like the Italians and Greeks, and some like the Mexicans. A wide range of freedom, to be sure, but free nonetheless.

And then there is 24% of the world’s population (1.4 billion) that is only Partly free. In this group (3.0 to 5.5) there is a very wide range of lack of freedoms—from Brazil and Nicaragua, through Kuwait and Turkey, to Russia, Singapore, and Zimbabwe. There are significant freedoms that can be found in each one of this group of 60 countries, all widely different, but none of them rise to a level of consistent and systematic freedom to be found in the group of Free Countries.

Finally, there are about 45 countries—36% of the worlds population—that cannot be called even partly free. They are all in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

…AND HERE ARE THE TEN MOST UNFREE COUNTRIES ON EARTH

With a score of 7.0—here are the countries with the worst civil rights and political records:

Burma
Cuba
Equatorial Guinea
Iraq
North Korea
Libya
Saudi Arabia
Sudan
Syria
Turkmenistan

DEMOCRACY IS NOT ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL

This brief review of the political facts of life suggests several important notions that will come into play as we undertake the transformation of Iraq. The first is that democracy is not a single quality, but a complex set of inter-related components that can be identified and even roughly measured, and it is possible for a country to be quite good in some of these components and not so good in others.

Furthermore, democracy is not a static concept; a democracy can lose freedom and become merely Partly Free. Sri Lanka and Colombia are recent examples of such Partly Free democracies. In other cases, countries that replaced military regimes with elected governments can have less than complete transitions to liberal democracy. Guatemala fits the description of this kind of Partly Free democracy.

Finally, the survey suggests that each nation has a unique pattern of the various components of democratic functioning that depends on its history, cultural values, religion, and economic situation. For example, the United Kingdom is extremely tolerant of all religious practices today (a fact that has not always been true), yet despite its religious tolerance it still does not accept the idea that there must be a separation of church and state. And universal suffrage was not established in the United States until the 1920s, one hundred and forty years after Jefferson wrote the Bill of Rights. Democracy apparently, like great wine, takes time, patience, and hard work to develop.

So it should not be surprising or deemed a failure if the Iraqi government that evolves in the next years will not look like America 2003. It will have been worth the effort if it rises from despotism to even a Partly Free nation.