If democracies are no better than tyrannies or dictatorships, then why focus on democracy at all and why associate democracy with freedom, as so many patriots have done? The attraction of democracy is that it raises possibilities for creating what the nineteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham called "the greatest happiness for the greatest number." By the sheer quantity of ideas people reasoning together can promote, democracies increase the chances of achieving peace, justice, and social benefits for all. But, democracy has never come easily and its only chance for gaining what it, more than any other set of practices, might achieve, is by making it ever more inclusive. Since democracy never rests and must continuously be re-created and protected, it is always unstable and threatened with extinction.
With that long struggle in mind, ninety-three-year-old Frances Baard, who had already spent most of her life fighting to be a citizen in the country where she was born, voted for the first time in South Africa in 1994. She had joined with others in demonstrating against unjust laws, had fought to win the rights she and other workers required, had struggled to retain her freedom when charged with resisting unjust laws, and had campaigned against carrying passes that acted as internal passports forbidding her to live and work in certain places. Although casting her vote was one of the high points of her life, voting merely marked the culmination of a life devoted to winning what she considered to be democracy.
For those who think that democracy simply entails citizens electing governments that rule through representative institutions according to specific legal codes or constitutions, Baard represents the activists who have shaped democracy for thousands of years. During that time, democracy has referred to a variety of ideals, legal systems, associations, political practices, institutions, and social movements in which various people have united to gain the individual and collective freedom that they need to survive and live together in equality and peace. This second category of democracy, known as direct or participatory democracy, includes local movements and decision-making processes of ordinary people, whether or not they are considered full citizens; they create organizations to uphold laws and rules they consider vital; they form social movements in order to win the democratic rights they desire; and they construct systems to control natural resources and the economy for their mutual benefit. At one time or another, each form of democracy has had to partake in choosing rulers, formulating policy, creating legal codes and judicial processes, and organizing public assemblies and organizations.
Like other governmental forms, democracies often fail in their professed goals. At various times, democracies have excluded ordiscriminated against people of particular castes, classes, religions, nationalities, ethnicities, sexual groups, and races, as the original Constitution of the United States did when it counted black slaves as three-fifths of a person. But the existence of democracy in even the smallest group usually persuades women, people of color, suppressed minorities or majorities, and other excluded groups to demand their rights to participate as equal citizens of every community. And, as we will see in this book, movements for democratic systems and struggles for the expansion of democratic rights have long motivated people and their communities around the world, leading many to consciously risk their lives in order to realize this powerful ideal.
Both representative and participatory democracy have generated written codes designed to prevent the stealing of land or water; or ending torture, enslavement, and false imprisonment; or advancing freedom of religion or freedom from state religions. Both systems of democracy have enhanced free expression, human rights, and, perhaps, most importantly, freedom of speech and publication, necessary for the maintenance of public life. Periodically, individuals and communities of almost all races, sexes, and ethnicities have attempted to govern themselves, secure precious resources, move freely, and shape their own lives.
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Accompanying democracy's achievements, most democracies have historically had two fatal flaws: one is the lack of effective routine communication between elected officials and ordinary people needed to share ideas and work out conflicts. The other is that democracies, like authoritarian governments, have tendencies that reach toward expansionism. Even in efforts to grant citizenship and extend democratic rights to previously excluded groups of former slaves, immigrants, and people of different ethnic origins, for example, most democracies have imposed themselves on others, colonizing them and dislodging or suppressing original inhabitants. Often, conflicts even within established democracies have also led to oppressive conditions for some of the population. Recent access to the internet and social media provides a new and important way to link ordinary people to those who wield political power, but it also presents authorities with powerful tools to manipulate public opinion. Although democracy seems easy to take for granted, humans have not found a guaranteed way to create and permanently preserve democracy. Yet, despite democracy's many failures, it remains a stirring dream, a fantasy, an ideal that has taken various institutional forms over time and generated hopes for creating equitable social, economic, and political arrangements now and in the future.
iNTRODUCTION
Though few democratic systems have sustained themselves effectively for very long, their periodic emergence nearly everywhere on earth over thousands of years indicates the resilience despite the fragility of the democratic ideal. Rather than viewing democracy as simply an unrealizable goal, many people regard democracy as an infinitely changeable set of processes, a creative form of life that distinguishes humans from all other living beings. For these reasons as well as the periodic recognition that there has to be some political alternative to the political systems under which most people live, various claims for democracy have emerged throughout history.
Parting the Waters and Organizing the People
A
ncient democracy depended on the ability of people to supplement hunting and gathering with farming, which required regular access to water. In fact, the need to share water required settlers of any kind to take responsibility for their own actions and collaborate with their neighbors to direct the flow of water and distribute it to canals, water basins, and sluices. In the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia in contemporary Iraq, a network of canals brought the waters of the Tigris-Euphrates together to irrigate the surrounding fields.
Attempts to control the distribution of water appear for the first time in a code of law written for King Hammurabi of Babylonia, Mesopotamia, between 1792 and 1750 before the Common Era (bce), 450 years before the Ten Commandments appeared. The threat of floods in the Fertile Crescent required constant vigilance not only of overseers, but of ordinary farmers who rented or sharecropped their land. Their own survival depended on working with neighbors to maintain the dikes and keep sluices in good order, and this code of law enforced a trajectory of local people working for their mutual benefit. Those individuals and groups charged with overseeing bridges, ports, and canals might incur sanctions if they attempted to advance their own interests over those of their neighbors. And the code encouraged farmers to improve the use of waterways and control how water was distributed. For example, the code mandated that "if any one open his ditches to water his crop, but is careless, and the water flood[s] the field of his neighbor, then he shall pay his neighbor corn [wheat] for his loss. . . ." Furthermore, "if he be not able to replace the corn, then he and his possessions shall be divided among the farmers whose corn he has flooded."1 Punishments were even harsher for those whose dams were not kept up: "if any one be too lazy to keep his dam in propercondition, and does not so keep it; if then the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall he in whose dam the break occurred be sold for money, and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined."2