Two common beliefs about democracy are that it began in ancient Athens, and after its birth in ancient Greece, it remained associated with the Western world in a distinctive and special way.
But David Stasavage, a professor of politics at New York University, argues that both views are wrong, and in his article in the Books and Arts section of the Economist print edition, the American academic considers that by abandoning these two mistaken views, it will be easier to understand the hopes and fears of the current democracy experiment with a better and more perspective. Balanced.
Old democracy boom
The author shows that democracy, which he defined as ruling by consultation and approval, can be found in many early civilizations, not just ancient Greece, and among these ancient civilizations are Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamian civilization, Buddhist India, and the lands of the tribes that lived in the American Great Lakes region. In ancient times, Central America before European conquest and settlement, and in pre-colonial Africa.
Given this ancient spread of democracy, the author of the recently published book "The Decline and Rise of Democracy ... A Global History from Antiquity to Today" considered that under certain objective conditions, "democratic rule comes naturally to human beings."
But what is surprising and surprising is that autocratic rule (an individual system of government in which political power is in the hands of one person through appointment, not by election) was also completely normal.
It is also found in many ancient places, and for example, autocracy - along with a centralized bureaucracy - has been the ruling base of the system of government for centuries.
To find out why early democracy existed in the places where it was found in the past, the author draws on evidence from archeology, soil science, demographics and climate studies, and considers that information is the key to understanding what happened.
Economic and bureaucratic factors
According to the author, early democracy tended to thrive in regions where rulers knew little about what people grew and revenue from crops, as they had limited ways to find out, and rulers could guess products taxed less than they actually are, which means The authorities get less revenue, or in turn, they can overestimate or exaggerate the revenues, which may cause unrest, and for this it was better to ask people about the amount of their income from agriculture and its growth.
With such a large population, inquiring and consulting residents about their income was impractical.
Instead, rulers sent delegates and officials to estimate the revenue from growing crops and, most importantly, the number of young men who could be recruited into armies.
Thus, an old bureaucracy appeared, upon which rulers relied on imposing autocratic rule over local customs.
In pre-modern environments, this bureaucracy was more common in regions where the agricultural soil was good, produced abundant yields, and where knowledge was advanced, especially in writing and measuring, as these systems were able to impose heavy taxes at that time.
Once established, it was difficult to dismantle central bureaucracies, and while bureaucracies in turn developed in the era of modernity with the discovery of new technologies, early democracies - on the contrary - were vulnerable to risks as a result of the rise of modern states and rapid economic development, and disappeared from many places, while they remained in Other countries.
In other words, modernity and central states allowed either despotism or democracy, but was that according to a certain pattern?
Stasavage believes that, "If early democratic institutions of government were created with popular consent first, then it is possible to build a bureaucracy without deviating inevitably to authoritarianism."
This depends on what happened before, according to the American author.
Modern Arab exception suit
In his previous article for Al-Jazeera Net entitled “The Cultural Roots of the Absence of Democracy,” Burhan Ghalioun, a professor of political sociology at the Sorbonne University, considered that the reason for the absence of democratic dynamism in Arab countries is not due to the establishment of a religious or temporal authoritarian culture that shapes the structure of Arab consciousness and controls it across times and places, but rather there Geopolitical, economic and social conditions and international policies are subject to the region, which is among the most sensitive areas in international strategy, due to its geopolitical location and the size of its oil reserves.
Ghalioun denied that there is an exception that makes Arab and Islamic societies cold and static, living outside any universal historical dialectic, and only moving within a cocoon of a culture that is closed in on itself and continues as it is outside the boundaries of time and space.
And he considered that this idea of Arab and Islamic exclusion from democracy is a negative myth that aims to condemn these societies politically by closing any horizon for democratic political transformation in them, and morally as having a cultural essence that condemns them to live in dictatorial negativity and the inability to build any civil life based on the introspection of the meaning of law, freedom and individual responsibility Communicating with, influencing and influencing other cultures.
In his article, Ghalioun emphasized that the values of freedom and pluralism are at the heart of Arab and Islamic culture, and that the absence of democracy, or rather the apparent struggle to replace authoritarian regimes with democratic pluralistic regimes, is, on the contrary, due to the oppression practiced by regimes linked to and supported by the West.
"Even when circumstances change slightly and some prospects for democratic transformation appear, the silence of the people and the paralysis of their will do not express a weakness in political awareness or the absence of democratic values, but rather they are the fruit of their fear of freedom, just as the captive who is accustomed to families is afraid to get out of his cage."