Bulgaria goes to the polls tomorrow – a country I wrote about last autumn. A journalist friend gives a good indication of the choice here. This post wants to explore the fundamental question of why, these days, people – particularly the younger generation – should bother going to the polls? Politicians have become fair game in the new millennium – but, for those who cared to look, the warning signs about democracy were evident a long time ago. In 1977, after almost a decade of helping local community activists and of studying the new literature of community development, I wrote a critical article about the claim of the British political system to be open and pluralist
The modern
political party was designed to perform the following functions…
- recruit political leaders
- represent community grievances, demands etc.
- implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.
- extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intraparty dialogue - into the nature of governmental decision-making (such insights can, of course, either defuse or inflame grievances!)
- protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decision-making.
Of these five
functions, it performs only the first
with any effectiveness. Community development represents almost the opposite of everything that
a modern political party stands for - is a critique,
that is, not just of certain operational deficiencies of liberal democracy but of its very essence. The modern political
party has itself a hierarchical structure and
expects others to have the same features. Its members accept this discipline because of their belief in the greater good which, it is assumed, will materialise from the occupation by their leaders of political power and/or the implementation of a particular programme. And modern parties share, to a greater or lesser extent, a belief in the capability of modern forms
of government. structure (and of
industrial organisation) viz, that plans and programmes conceived in essentially private processes imposed on society by traditional hierarchical structures will achieve specified aims with negligible negative
byproducts.
Political parties are about achievement - even if that is only the overthrow of their rivals' dogma (or their
own!). They are organised to achieve something - be that power or specific changes in policy. Community development, on the
other hand, is
about a process. Its theory, in a sense, is one of “permanent revolution" which despite its own gentleness and emphasis on trust
and sharing, has to live with the uncomfortable recognition that societies based on modern technology -whatever
their form of ownership - will subject minorities to more or
less subtle forms of repression and exploitation.
Of the functions
listed earlier, those badly performed by local government are the representative, the programmatic and the educational: of these it is perhaps the lack of the educational that is the more serious and
where certainly recent community development theory and
practice in Britain have performed well
A recent post charged the political class with treating the public like idiots
“You have,
for the past few decades, made the following assumptions about your fellows –
- They need
to be worked hard - but given bread and circuses
- Told what
to do and measured by how well they do it
- Given a
choice at elections only of those who represent an ever-circulating elite
- you
therefore feel that you no longer need to bother even going through the motions
of serving up promises and manifesto programmes
- the public
is so stupid and so easily distracted that they will believe any of your lies
- you can do whatever you want, safe in the knowledge that you have a servile media which knows that its basic task is to keep the public entertained”
Countries like Bulgaria and Romania came to democracy in the worst of times – when the very notion of governing was being treated with scorn in the West and “the market” was seen as the answer to everyone’s problems. I vividly remember being invited to speak at a training school in Romania for Young Politicians in the mid 1990s and finding it infested with young americans zealously teaching their counterparts how to market themselves. But absolutely nothing was said about the tasks and responsibilities of governing – let alone the moral aspects.
Why is it that politics is the one activity – at least in the West - which has managed to resist the call for professionalization?? In China, the political class is thoroughly trained and its progress through the layers of municipalities and companies closely monitored….
A recent book was, hopefully, a small sign that some people at least recognise the need for new skill-sets in government. That is, of course, part of a wider argument which people like Mariana Mazzucato have been pursuing for a more positive role for government.
