Democracy is easy to acquire, but very difficult and indeed expensive to maintain. In all nations where democracy has been achieved and successfully maintained, there has to be a major personal and pecuniary sacrifice from several patriots. A good example, that took place around the same time as the American Revolution is France (Sterling, 2015). The first French Revolution was driven by the poor. It did not survive long because as a result of their bitterness, the poor transformed democracy into a dictatorship of the majority. In a very short time, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew democracy and declared himself Emperor. Several decades later, his nephew was to repeat the same feat and transform himself from a democratically elected president into Napoleon III, Emperor of France (Sterling, 2015). Just as it takes a great effort to tend a garden once cleared so it is to maintain a democracy once created, but poor populace would however, prefer to jump over the weeds as they look for food instead of taking the time to work on it; this is the main premises for the failure of democracy in poor countries.
The advent of democracy was in Athens, an affluent city in Greece where there were more slaves that citizens. Athenians, with nothing to do would spend all day in the city square discussing politics. Their availability created and maintained a powerful democratic city state. This would not have happened had they been poor. Similarly, at the advent of democracy in the USA, there was no salary for elected leaders. Therefore, for the democracy to survive, several patriots had to find a way of surviving on their means in Washington, yet spend whole days arguing politics in parliament. Most of these men were slave owners who had people to work for them as they argued politics just as the Athenians. Had there not been enough rich patriots to undertake this onerous and thankless task, perchance America would either be a dictatorship or monarchy. These two examples, which differ sharply with the French example herein above, establish a clear correlation between wealth and democracy.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Dictatorships, whether military or monarchial are much easier than democracies (Sterling, 2015). All they take are a few determined people who control and superintend over the populace with an iron fist, and the only obligation left upon the populace is to obey, endure, and ignore. These are extremely simple obligations, but for a democracy to thrive, these people need to do the exact opposite. After removing the dictator and installing a democratic government, they must learn to keep an eye on that government and take a careful audit of its performance. They must maintain political parties and civil education. Create a robust civil society and maintain a parallel government to check any excesses of the main government (Sterling, 2015).
Most importantly, they must learn to disagree without resulting to hatred, to confront one another without violence and not to have permanent friends or enemies. These are the dictates of a lasting democracy. For them to be achieved however there is need for two fundamental bearing factors; a good education and time. Unfortunately both cost money, which poor nations do not have. Even if teachers and teaching materials are available, a poor populace will be too worried about the next meal to spend time in learning. A man with a starving family will not attend a political rally, and if he does, he will be so angry and will likely cause chaos.
From the totality of the foregoing, even when poor countries achieve democracy, it never survives long enough to pass the Samuel P. Huntington's “two turnover test.” By definition, the two turnover test is a measure for the achievement of a successful democracy developed by American political analyst Samuel Phillips Huntington (McGlinchey, 2010). According to Huntington, a democracy is not established until there has been two successful democratic power handover. The individual who is initially elected democratically must hand over power democratically to a second leader, then that leader hands it over to a third democratically elected leader.
Ordinarily, this process takes over 20 years to be achieved. Due to the above listed grounds, it is almost a virtual impossibility for any poor country to maintain democratic institutions for that long (McGlinchey, 2010). This is because the populace is too busy, trying to find basic needs. With time, therefore, the democratically bequeathed power, after lacking sufficient oversight slowly mutates into dictatorship as happened in France and has been happening across third world countries in the 20 th century (McGlinchey, 2010).
One of the building stones of any democracy is knowledge. However, as democracy is about the majority, knowledge will only be effective if it is held by a good cross section of the populace. There are two main ways that knowledge is fundamental to democracy. As indicated, democracy is achieve and maintained through active participation of the populace (Sterling, 2015). Active participation takes time and resources applied in the right manner. This creates two basic issues to wit the desire to expend resources and the enlightenment to expend them properly. It takes knowledge to understand that democracy is a worthy investment. Secondly, its takes knowledge to figure out how best to expend the resources to achieve a sustainable democracy.
The second building stone is power, which is defined as the ability or capacity to achieve something (Sterling, 2015). One of the fundamental principles in political philosophy is that there can never be a power vacuum. As long as there is a community, there must be dominant force which is either active or passive. In a democracy, this force is the people through their votes. In the absence of a democracy, the force is a dictatorship governed by a small cross section of the community (Sterling, 2015).
In order to remove a dictatorship, an element of power must be used to forcefully eject the dictatorship and replace it with a democratically elected leadership. Once a democracy is established, the power is then vested through a set of basic laws reduced into a constitution. Among the basic prerequisites of a law is enforceability. When a democracy is founded on power and the spirit of the law, it creates a powerful force in that anyone who attempts to interfere with the democracy can be repelled through the use of law and the legally established institutions. In this way, power and law are used to maintain a democracy.
From a philosophical perspective, morality is the basic individual definition of right and wrong, premised on belief. What a populace believes is right or wrong will determine how they will expend the power available to them. Before the advent of the Arab spring, the populace of Tunisia in North Africa knew that something was not right about their government. However, their moral compasses did not compel them to do anything about it. A singular man, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi stirred the moral fabric of the populace through his martyrdom (Sterling, 2015). The populace realized that by holding their peace, they were condoning the dictatorship. In this manner, their moral fabric was transformed triggering the use of the power vented in them by virtue of numbers to create a democracy in Tunisia.
The upshot of the foregoing is that as history will reflect, the experiment of democracy has always failed among the poor and succeeded among the rich. This is because just like maintaining a garden whose plants have not yet borne fruit, the populace must work on a democracy without seeing the fruits thereof. This takes knowledge to create an understanding that the fruits will eventually come. With knowledge, the populace will learn how to expend power to overthrow the dictatorship and replace it with a democratically elected government. After that, the populace will use the same power to create laws that will protect the democracy. Finally, the moral fabric of the populace will be informed on the dictates of democracy which they will commit themselves to protect. It is only through the totality of these factors that a democracy I strong enough to pass the Samuel Phillips Huntington’s “two-turnover test”.
References
McGlinchey, S. (2010). Review - A Second look at Huntington’s Third wave thesis . Retrieved from http://www.e-ir.info/2010/09/23/review-a-second-look-at-huntingtons-third-wave-thesis/
Sterling, R. W. (2015). Ethics in a world of power: The political ideas of Friedrich Meinecke. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
