The U.S. White House is delaying the start of Western air strikes on Syria until the British parliament can vote on it during a special session this week, but it has no plans of asking for a special session of the U.S. Congress. So if I understand this correctly, major policy decisions affecting America get a vote in the British parliament but not here at home? Didn’t we stop that with the American Revolution?
Tag Archives: democracy
AFD 52: The Right to Rule
Latest Episode:
“AFD Ep 52 – The Right to Rule”
Posted: Tues, 06 August 2013
Who has the right to rule in a society? What is a democracy? How do citizens get to participate in a civil society? In light of events in Egypt, Persephone and Bill discuss political theories of legitimacy, governance, and civil society. Then, they discuss what Boston is doing to prepare for global warming effects. Warning: This episode may be educational.
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Foreign policy by Broadway musical
Partly linking for the headline: “Mobs make fickle friends. Egypt is not Les Misérables”
And partly for some great lines like “British ministers shower bromides on Egypt in a torrent of patronising hypocrisy.”
And finally for insights like this:
In almost every case, [Western] public opinion has backed the insurgent mob against the regime, as if sated on Les Misérables. By the time of the Syrian uprising, it assumed that Arab mobs were always in the right and always win. This applied even when, as in Bahrain, this proved not to be the case, or as in Egypt, it required some ethical gymnastics. But then mobs make fickle friends.
Turkey: Unconvincing reasons to riot
I’m sympathetic to the fact that protesters in Turkey got a ridiculously abusive reaction, and I accept that Erdogan is an arrogant jerk.
But if police brutality, consolidation of electoral power by a conservative religiously-oriented party, and attempts to restrict access to abortion were grounds for forcing out or overthrowing a democratically-elected government through non-election means, then we would all be marching on Republican-led state capitols & DC in the United States today.
Plus, restricting the sale of alcohol is par for the course in the U.S. democracy even to present day so that’s also not a real reason to throw a riot.
Brief thoughts on Turkey’s protests
The police probably over-reacted and the protesters should have the right to assemble and complain about things. BUT — they aren’t freedom fighters resisting a tyrannical government. They’re extremist secularists who are unhappy with repeatedly losing democratic elections and would probably prefer secular military control to democratic moderate Islam. That’s not admirable.
Sometimes democratically elected governments do things you don’t like but aren’t gross violations or oppression. The solution is to protest peacefully and respectfully and then organize and defeat them at the ballot box. You don’t get to riot against a legitimately elected government because you don’t like their policies.
Lacking the right to assemble is a pre-existing problem, not one tied to this particular administration, so I would separate that out of this situation. I also believe there is always a need to respect minority rights within a liberal democracy, but I don’t believe that’s really the issue here.
The AKP has done a tremendous amount of work in advancing and stabilizing representative democracy in Turkey, in a way that actually represented the population — something the secularists never did. The extreme secularists are fanatically opposed to the incumbent government no matter what it does — much like the tea partiers opposing President Obama — and they have been waiting for an opportunity to challenge the government. They controlled Turkey for many decades and supported repeated military coups to prevent non-secularists from taking power. The current government has already beaten back one or two coup attempts.
This is not about their rights being respected, this is about their bitterness at being out of power for 10 years. They are not being persecuted, they are just being unsuccessful at winning elections. The protesters’ cause is basically as illegitimate as if the Canadian left tried to riot against the conservative Harper government because of their own fractured incompetence and inability to win elections for half a decade, and they decided that made him Hitler. There’s a big difference between minority rights being infringed and losing free and fair elections several times in a row.
The AKP has been way better about respecting everyone’s rights and representing the people than the secularists are or were. They’ve also dramatically expanded public education, especially for young girls, and they’ve empowered more women to study at universities. If this group of extremists took power, they would immediately start trampling citizens’ rights, particularly non-secularists’ rights.
This is about being bitter losers looking for an excuse to fight, rather than about being a harassed minority. The US and other Western democracies should stand by the government (though not the police response) to preserve a successful model moderate Islamic government for the region to look to in democracy-building.
Guinea violence renewed after election upset
Supporters of (initial) frontrunner presidential candidate Cellou Dalein Diallo reacted with violence this week after the 11/7 election was preliminarily certified in favor of “underdog” candidate and opposition leader Alpha Conde, in the first elections since decolonization. Diallo had finished significantly ahead of Conde in the summer’s first round election but the delays and postponements of the second round apparently allowed Conde to catch up.
After a tense run up to the poll and a long wait for the results, Conde was declared winner with 52.5 percent of the vote, confirming he had succeeded in overhauling Diallo’s first round lead and cancelling out an alliance Diallo secured with the third-placed candidate.
The poll is hoped to provide legal certainty for billions of dollars of recent investment by mining firms in Guinea’s bauxite and iron ore riches.
The two candidates each represent one of the two largest ethnic groups, adding a nasty ethnic edge to the contest and associated clashes. The Supreme Court has not yet certified the results officially, but will do so some time before early next week.
Meanwhile, responding to the surge in violence, the military transitional government has declared a state of emergency. Reuters:
The measure includes an overnight curfew beginning from 6 p.m. (1800 GMT) and gives the police extra powers to tackle the situation, a senior police officer told Reuters.
The poll was the former French colony’s first free vote since independence in 1958 and is due to end almost two years of military rule since the death of strongman Lansana Conte.
Despite his calls for calm as he challenges the result in court, some of Diallo’s mainly Peul supporters have taken to the streets, where they have repeatedly clashed with the security forces and Conde’s mainly Malinke backers since Monday.
“Shooting and targeted arrests are continuing,” a resident in Koloma, one of the worst-affected neighbourhoods in Conakry, told Reuters by telephone on Wednesday.
It is unclear how many people have been killed or injured in recent days (though the security forces have been restrained, for their part, in eschewing guns for restoring order), in what has been an unfortunate extra twist on a topsy-turvy historic election. As previously discussed here, the actual runoff election a week and a half ago went very peacefully. All we can say now is that it remains to be seen what will happen next.
This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.
After delay, a smooth runoff in Guinea
After a very successful first round presidential election in June – its first in the post-independence period – the West African state of Guinea finally managed to hold a smooth second round between the top two first round candidates this weekend, after a very troubling period of delays and ethnic clashes over the past several months. NY Times:
After weeks of delays, ethnic tensions and clashes between the police and rival groups of supporters, this mineral-rich but poor West African nation quietly went to the polls Sunday to choose its first-ever democratically elected president.
Sunday’s vote unfolded calmly as citizens lined up outside schools and other polling places, waiting to cast ballots in a runoff election originally scheduled for last summer. Since then, disputes over the leadership of the electoral commission and fighting between rival ethnic groups allied with each of the two candidates have led to repeated postponements.
But apart from the late arrival of voting materials — ink and ballots — at polling places in this nation of about 10 million people, international observers said they noted few hitches on Sunday.
Great news. And it appears that the key to the smooth election was to bring in a total outsider from neighboring Mali to run the election commission during the runoff, to prevent accusations that one ethnic group or another was controlling the outcome.
As the vote was repeatedly delayed, ethnic tensions increased, amid confusion over who was in charge of the election.
The first head of the electoral commission was convicted of fraud and died in Paris a short while later. His replacement was accused by Mr. Diallo, who is from a different ethnic group, of bias. In October, a Malian general was appointed to head the commission, calming the rival camps. But before that, there were repeated violent clashes. In September, one person was killed and dozens were wounded in fighting in the streets here in the capital between groups of supporters of Mr. Diallo and Mr. Conde.
The country of Mali has had a very successful transition to democracy after the end of military rule in the early 1990s and the peaceful transfer of power between presidents in 2002. The country has a functioning unity government, a popularly elected president and assembly, and the military is supportive of the civilian rulers and does not interfere with political affairs. The decision to bring in Malian advisers and figures of authority may prove to have been the crucial decision in smoothing the way for Guinea’s first election. The Malian general is an outsider, but he is from West Africa (as opposed to bringing in European or American teams), and he represents one of the best examples of democratic transition in the region, while his military status makes him an authority figure and somebody that the Guinean Transitional Government — who are also mostly military officers — would be comfortable working with.
So my pessimistic take in mid-September seems to have been unwarranted and impatient. It was never going to go off flawlessly, and this is a huge step forward. Now we just have to see how the results are greeted and whether the new democratic government can bring enough change to the country to lend it the public confidence required to endure. If it does work out, it will still go down as one of the fastest, smoothest, most direct transitions from military to democratic civilian rule in African history, to the best of my knowledge.
Hope springs eternal.
This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.
