Article: The EU is an antidote to democratic governments, argues President Barroso

In a blog article by the conservative eurosceptic UK Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and lead writer of the "Daily Telegraph", Daniel Hannan, published on 1 October 2010 on the website of the newspaper, the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, is cited as being critical of democracy ("The EU is an antidote to democratic governments, argues President Barroso", so the title of the article). Unfortunately, the quote and sentiments attributed to Barroso are not referenced by the author.

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100056661/the-eu-is-an-antidote-to-democratic-governments-argues-president-barroso/

Excerpts: "Barroso [...] has offered one of the few utterly honest arguments for European integration. The reason we need the EU, he suggests, is precisely because it's not democratic. Left to themselves, elected governments might do all sorts of things simply to humour their voters: 'Governments are not always right. If governments were always right we would not have the situation that we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.' This was, in large measure, the original rationale for European unification. The founding fathers had come through the Second World War with – perhaps understandably – a jaded view of democracy. They fretted that, left to themselves, electorates might fall for demagogues. So they deliberately designed a system in which supreme power was wielded by appointed Commissioners who didn't need to worry about public opinion. It would be going too far to describe the Euro-patriarchs as anti-democratic: Robert Schuman had a sincere commitment to the ballot box, even if Jean Monnet hadn't. But it is fair to say that they believed that the democratic process sometimes needed to be guided, tempered, constrained.

"There are still plenty of people who think this way. Whenever I make the case for referendums, someone in the audience objects that the issues are too difficult for the man in the street, that the experts should be allowed to get on, that we are quietly relieved when politicians do what they think is best for us. [...] Most Barrosistas want a kind of moderated democracy, where voters are ultimately in charge, but where experts also have their place. Yet this has been the argument of every tyrant in history: Bonaparte, Mussolini, Salazar, Lenin. It is, mutatis mutandis, the justification of the ayatollahs in Teheran, who allow elections, but empower an unelected commission to step in when people get the result wrong. It is the argument you hear in private from Chinese Communists: yes, people should be free to elect candidates for certain offices, but a country like this would fall apart without the expertise concentrated in our party. [...] Voters, being human, can make mistakes. But it doesn't follow that a class of experts would have made a better decision." (italics removed)

Book: Political Institutions under Dictatorship

Jennifer Gandhi, "Political Institutions under Dictatorship" (Cambridge University Press, September 2008):

www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521897952

Publisher's description: "Often dismissed as window-dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of authoritarian regimes. She examines how and why these institutions are useful to dictatorships in maintaining power, analyzing the way dictators utilize institutions as a forum in which to organize political concessions to potential opposition in an effort to neutralize threats to their power and to solicit cooperation from groups outside of the ruling elite. The use of legislatures and parties to co-opt opposition results in significant institutional effects on policies and outcomes under dictatorship."

Endorsements: "This book represents a major contribution to the resurgent study of non-democratic regimes. It is one of the first substantial pieces of modern social scientific analysis of the phenomenon, skillfully combining formal and quantitative cross-national analysis with country case studies. It will have a major impact in the study of modern authoritarian regimes." (Miriam A. Golden, UCLA)

"Her three kinds of dictatorship and two kinds of institutions produce a rich and informative empirical analysis in which she explains variation in the longevity, policy and performance of non-democratic governments." (William R. Keech, Carnegie Mellon University)

In 2009, the book won the triennial Award for Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Politics granted by the Research Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City.

Jennifer Gandhi is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.

Book: Alternatives to Athens

Edited by Roger Brock and Stephen Hodkinson and based on a series of seminars is the collection "Alternatives to Athens: Varieties of Political Organization and Community in Ancient Greece" (Oxford University Press, 2000):

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199258109.do

Abstract: "In 1993 the world celebrated the 2500th anniversary of the birth of democracy in ancient Athens, whose polis – or citizen state – is often viewed as the model ancient Greek state. In an age when democracy has apparently triumphed following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it tends to be forgetten [sic] that the democratic citizen state was only one of many forms of political community in Greek antiquity. This volume aims to redress the balance by showing that democratic Athens was not the model ancient Greek state, and focuses on a range of city states operating a variety of non-democratic political systems in the ancient Greek world. Eighteen essays by established and younger historians examine alternative political systems and ideologies: oligarchies, monarchies, and mixed constitutions, along with diverse forms of communal and regional associations such as ethnoi, amphiktyonies, and confederacies. The papers, which span the length and breadth of the Hellenic world from the Balkans and Anatolia to Magna Graecia and North Africa, highlight the immense political flexibility and diversity of ancient Greek civilization."

We probably shouldn't view Athens as much as the model for democracy as ancient Greece as the model for a world of competitive government – competing and coexistent forms of political
organization – that may yet return in our time.

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=J5Jg8raPTZsC&printsec=frontcover

Roger Brock is now a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Leeds.

Stephen Hodkinson is now Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham.

Book: The King Never Smiles

The meaning of democracy and democratic rule in Thailand, a constitutional monarchy frequently subjected to military coups, have been hotly contested for decades. The first unauthorized biography of the King of Thailand tries to shed light on an underappreciated component of it – Paul M. Handley's "The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej" (Yale University Press, 2006):

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300106824

From the publisher's description: "Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and is now the world's longest-serving monarch. The King Never Smiles [...] tells the unexpected story [...] how a Western-raised boy came to be seen by his people as a living Buddha, and how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political and autocratic. [...] [L]ooking beyond the widely accepted image of the king as egalitarian and virtuous, Handley portrays an anti-democratic monarch who, together with allies in big business and the corrupt Thai military, has protected a centuries-old, barely modified feudal dynasty.

"When at nineteen Bhumibol assumed the throne, the Thai monarchy had been stripped of power and prestige. Over the ensuing decades, Bhumibol became the paramount political actor in the kingdom, silencing critics while winning the hearts and minds of his people. The book details this process and depicts Thailand's unique constitutional monarch – his life, his thinking, and his ruling philosophy."

Reviews: "For too long, the issue of the monarchy has been the prone elephant that analysts of Thai history and politics have had to treat carefully around. That era should now pass. ... In sum, this is the classic story of an exceptional man recrafting a monarchy against the grain of an era." (Chris Baker, "Asia Sentinel")

"A new and comprehensive history of the Thai modern monarchy ... [which] presents a direct counterpoint to years of methodical royal image-making." (Jane Perlez, "The Sunday Telegraph")

"This work is essential to understanding Thailand's modern political history and, particularly, the latest coup." (Major Dewayne J. Creamer, "Proceedings"/US Naval Institute)

Excerpt: "[U]nquestioning adoration also arises from the toughly enforced law of lèse-majesté protecting his inviolateness. Embedded within national security statutes, the lèse-majesté law is applied to protect not only the person of the king and his immediate family but the institution of the monarchy itself, both current and historical. Maligning even a previous king can bring charges, conviction for which could bring over ten years' imprisonment. [...]

"[O]ver time he concluded that elected parliaments were self-serving and unrepresentative of the people's true needs. He decided that constitutional law in practice benefited the non-royal elite and didn't protect his subjects. Ultimately, he believed, European-style democracy, constitutionalism, and capitalism only divided the people, undermining the unifying and justice-dispensing role of the dhammaraja [king]. In his alternative vision, the modern Thai state would be guided by the king and the laws of dhamma, and administered by virtuous, loyal, able, and also tough men, neo-princes found in the top ranks of the military and civil service who worked at their jobs under the king's guidance for the good of the whole."

For reasons of lèse-majesté, the book has been banned in Thailand and local authorities blocked access to websites advertising it. It is also not for sale in many other Asian countries.

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=d75WYMdp8-0C&printsec=frontcover

Paul M. Handley is a freelance journalist who lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in Thailand for thirteen years.

Book: Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy

A book-length study on old and new understandings of traditional chieftaincy in South Africa: "Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa", by J. Michael Williams (Indiana University Press, December 2009).

www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=137805

Publisher's description: "As South Africa consolidates its democracy, chieftaincy has remained a controversial and influential institution that has adapted to recent changes. J. Michael Williams examines the chieftaincy and how it has sought to assert its power since the end of apartheid. By taking local-level politics seriously and looking closely at how chiefs negotiate the new political order, Williams takes a position between those who see the chieftaincy as an indigenous democratic form deserving recognition and protection, and those who view it as incompatible with democracy. Williams describes a network of formal and informal accommodations that have influenced the ways state and local authorities interact. By focusing on local perceptions of the chieftaincy and its interactions with the state, Williams reveals an ongoing struggle for democratization at the local and national levels in South Africa."

Contents: 1. Introduction: The Chieftaincy, the State, and the Desire to Dominate; 2. "The Binding Together of the People": The Historical Development of the Chieftaincy and the Principle of Unity; 3. The Making of a Mixed Polity: The Accommodation and Transformation of the Chieftaincy; 4. The Contested Nature of Politics, Democracy, and Rights in Rural South Africa; 5. The Chieftaincy and the Establishment of Local Government: Multiple Boundaries and the Ambiguities of Representation; 6. The Chieftaincy and Development: Expanding the Parameters of Tradition; 7. Legitimacy Lost? The Fall of a Chief and the Survival of a Chieftaincy; 8. Conclusion: The Chieftaincy and the Post-Apartheid State: Authority and Democracy in a Mixed Polity.

J. Michael Williams is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego.

Public lecture: The Mixed Constitution: Monarchical and Aristocratic Aspects of Modern Democracy

The 2010 British Academy Lecture, at the British Academy, 10 Carlton Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH, 25 February 2010, 5.30-6.30 pm

Mogens Herman Hansen (University of Copenhagen): "The Mixed Constitution: Monarchical and Aristocratic Aspects of Modern Democracy"

www.britac.ac.uk/events/2010/bal2010/index.cfm

The theory of the separation of powers between a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary is the foundation of modern representative democracy. It was developed by Montesquieu and came to replace the older theory of the mixed constitution which goes back to Plato, Aristotle, and Polybios, that there are three types of constitution: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. When institutions from each of the three types are mixed, an interplay between the institutions emerges that affects all functions of state. Today Montesquieu's separation of powers is obsolete. The mixed constitution deserves to be revived as a corrective to the prevailing view that western states are pure democracies. Ancient political thought is remarkably modern or – rather – modern political thought has much to learn from the Greek and Roman political thinkers.

The annual keynote British Academy Lecture is intended to address a wider audience than the purely scholarly.

British Academy Lectures are freely open to the general public and everyone is welcome; there is no charge for admission, no tickets will be issued, and seats cannot be reserved. The Lecture Room is opened at 5.00 pm, and the first 80 audience members arriving at the Academy will be offered a seat in the Lecture Room; the next 60 people to arrive will be offered a seat in the Overflow Room, which has a video and audio link to the Lecture Room. Lectures are followed by a reception at 6.30 pm, to which members of the audience are invited.