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NEWNATIONS BULLETIN 12 OCTOBER 2009

CAN DEMOCRACY RECOUP?

The promotion of liberal democracy as the objective to be achieved in modern politics has always been the principal purpose of newnations.com and of our sister web publication, worldaudit.org. Yet it is impossible, routinely sifting the world’s news through that prism, not to observe failings of the system, country by country, of the broad brushstrokes which collectively we describe as democracy.

We define democracy in World Audit, now in its 12th year as: political rights, civil rights, media freedom/ freedom of speech, and the absence of public corruption. Less than half the world’s nations, indeed in 2008 by our criteria, only thirty seven out of those one hundred and fifty nations with a population of a million plus, could be held to be democratic. But what causes us growing unease, is observing the nature of democracy in practice, even within some of those thirty seven ‘graduate’ countries which more or less meet the criteria.

Martin Woollacott, in “Can Democracy Recoup?” lays bare the predicament that faces proponents of democracy. Certainly we never entertained the idea that democracy can come from the barrel of a gun, as in Iraq, or Afghanistan. Nor can the function of casting and counting votes alone be considered, without a similar weighting for free speech and media freedom, an impartial justice system, and the absence of public corruption, as serious evidence of democracy.

Woollacott extends the enquiry into the realm of established democracies with disturbing conclusions, so much so that there seems to be an obvious need for a democratic renaissance. It may not be broken as a political system but can it recoup? We have to be clear that even where achieved, there is no room at all for complacency as this article demonstrates. Indeed a conclusion might well be that like liberty, the price of democracy once achieved, is eternal vigilance.

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Can Democracy Recoup?

Also published on our blog: GEOPOLEMICS where readers comments are invited