“Nothing should be more thrilling than the freedom to choose one’s leaders and claim a stake in a country’s future. The ability to vote, however, is not always a true exercise in democracy,” caution Roula Khalaf and Juliet Riddell in their introduction to a new anthology titled Democracy: Eleven Writers and Leaders on What It Is — and Why It Matters (Hachette India). It gathers perspectives from various parts of the world, including Turkey, Nigeria, India, Estonia, Germany, China, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The political and the spiritual
All the writers in this collection, published by Profile Books in the UK, are women. If you are wondering why, the editors have a convincing rationale to offer. They state, “When democracy is threatened, women suffer disproportionately. Women also remain under-represented nearly everywhere in institutions of democracy, while often being targeted for abuse when they are visible.” The verbal abuse being directed at Kamala Harris, who hopes to be elected as the first female President of the United States, is a clear case in point.
What makes this anthology sparkle is the brilliance of each person included here. It opens with an essay called “Terra Incognita”, where the British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak invites us to view democracy as “a delicate ecosystem — of checks and balances, rights and needs, power and accountability” and ourselves as “a diverse community of interacting organisms” who are called on to contribute without belittling our roles in “the larger circle of life”.
The ecological metaphor resonates in this era of climate anxiety, and the emphasis on interdependence suggests a way out of the separateness that identity politics has led to. Shafak encourages us to reconnect with ourselves, with each other, and with nature, to deal with the existential angst being felt as a result of majoritarianism and populist demagoguery.
She writes, “Nature is a generous teacher, if we can only manage to slow down and listen to what it is saying.” Her essay is a wonderful affirmation of how looking within is not an escape from reality; the spiritual and the political are inter-linked when we see other human beings as “fellow travellers” regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, or ancestral heritage.
The individual and the collective
This theme of placing faith in and nurturing collective well-being is picked up again later in the anthology in a beautifully written essay, “Why We Should Join Things” by Yuan Yang, who worked in Beijing as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. On her trips back home to the UK, people were curious to know “whether Chinese citizens have different interior lives to those in Western democracies”. They asked, “What does it feel like to live under authoritarianism? Do people think of themselves as individuals, with individuated rights, freedoms and futures?” Yang did not miss individualism in China. She missed joining collectives to pursue shared interests. Collectives are regarded with suspicion and subject to state intervention in China, especially when a foreign journalist is involved.
Yang, for instance, was shocked when a meditation group that she joined in Beijing forbade her from posting any photographs of the meditation hall that might give away the location. When she attended a feminist workshop on how bystanders can prevent sexual violence, the pub owner who had provided the venue for the workshop was later approached by the police.
This essay dispels the notion that the individual and the collective are necessarily at odds with each other. As a teenager, Yang was not enthusiastic about joining organizations because she thought that being part of a group would mean compromising on her individuality. Later in life, she joined a student union, a feminist group, and local Quaker meetings. These experiences gave her a chance to appreciate how collectives allow people to organize themselves around things that they care about and the goals that they wish to achieve.
She notes, “The organized expression of collective interests is what gives shape and meaning to democracy, and requires trust, continuity, structure — and the willingness of people to join things.” Both Shafak and Yang write about democracy in a way that is personal, heartfelt, and engaging without the use of language that is couched in legalese or packed with clichés.
The idea of freedom
The concern for collective well-being appears prominently in another essay titled “Freedom, Progress and Capitalism” written by Lea Ypi, a professor in political theory at the London School of Economics who spent her childhood in post-Soviet Albania. She unpacks the construct of freedom, which is widely understood as lying at the heart of democracy.
For Ypi, freedom is deeply connected to “moral agency”. This, she clarifies, is “neither the freedom of the long-gone socialist world nor that of the struggling capitalist world”. The freedom that she feels passionate about is “an awareness of our moral responsibility to others, the duty to engage with the past, and to acknowledge what we owe future generations in a way that promotes effective democracy, both economic and political, at the global level”.
This foregrounding of the global is an important point especially because countries that take pride in their own democratic traditions do not hesitate to prop up dictatorships elsewhere in the world or fund armies that violate human rights, kill innocent civilians, and steal land.
Ypi writes, “Morally speaking, a world made of the asymmetries we experience — in the distribution of power, of opportunities to move, of material resources, of the production of knowledge — is not a free world.” She urges us to think critically about the idea of freedom instead of taking it at face value, to reflect on the gap between reality and the world of ideas.
The importance of strong democratic institutions
Political philosopher Erica Benner, who teaches at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, encourages us to examine whether democracies are truly the “beacons of human progress” that they present themselves as, and raises questions about material inequalities in democratic societies where power is concentrated in the hands of a few rich and influential people.
Benner’s recommendation to abandon “the idea that people from powerful countries are uniquely qualified to design and build democracies for others” makes perfect sense after reading Adela Raz’s essay titled “Why Democracy Failed in Afghanistan”. Raz, who was the first woman to be the Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, and served as Afghanistan’s last Ambassador to the United States, refutes the idea that Afghans rejected democracy, and that democracy is unsuitable for a country like Afghanistan.
According to her, the failure must be attributed to the fact that Western policymakers were insistent on a centralized power structure that gave unchecked power to the President. This, in her opinion, was a recipe for disaster as it did not take into account the linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity of Afghanistan. Raz writes, “What was needed was an inclusive approach that could better accommodate the various interests and grievances within Afghan society.”
This essay highlights the importance of building strong democratic institutions to ensure the longevity and sustainability of democracy as a political system. Canadian novelist, poet and literary critic Margaret Atwood’s disappointingly short essay titled “Democracy” makes the same point, warning us that the extremist right in the US “already has a plan to make Donald Trump dictator for life”, and suggesting that their mandate “includes widespread purges and the bringing of all branches of government under the direct control of the president”.
The erasure of histories
Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, too, takes on a vigilant tone in her essay, “On Democracy”. Having grown up in one of Russia’s former colonies, she is wary of Russia’s growing influence through disinformation campaigns that reach wide audiences via social media. The aim of such operations, she believes, is to fuel existing fires and create new divisions in societies and to influence democratic decision-making including elections.
Mary Beard, Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of Cambridge, has written what is perhaps the most scintillating essay in this anthology. She gives a reality check to those who idolize ancient Athens as the birthplace of democracy. She writes, “Even in the supposed glory days of fifth-century Athens, democracy was always deeply contested and it was anything but gooey.” They faced issues like coups, political assassinations, low voter turnout, and lack of social mobility. Worst of all, women and slaves did not have the right to vote.
She points out that Athenians did invent the word ‘democracy’ but not democratic practice itself. “We know, for instance, that there were very early egalitarian and participatory political traditions in parts of the East that were effectively democratic from at least the time of the Athenian democracy, even though we don’t call them or recognize them as such.”
Nigerian author, poet, and publisher Lola Shoneyin’s poem “A Fragile State” is another excellent contribution that draws attention to the erasure of histories. In writing “…we were here/ Before they washed up on our shores, bibles in hand,/ their eyes on our gold, diamonds and uranium”, she recalls the missionaries and merchants who were an integral part of the project of colonization that contributed to the wealth of the richest countries in the world.
Gender (in) equality
Indian stand-up comic Aditi Mittal’s contribution titled “In That Top” is the most unusual one in terms of both form and tone. It is light-hearted but has a serious care. Instead of an essay or a poem, she offers a slice of life from an Indian home written in the form of a conversation between three characters — a father, his daughter, and a washerman. The father objects to the sleeveless top worn by his daughter on her way to work, so she reminds him that they live in a democracy. The father, in turn, argues that he is not worried about her freedom of expression but about other people’s expressions in response to her freedom of expression.
Instead of talking about the relationship between the state and the individual, Mittal pushes us to take stock of what happens in Indian families, Indian workplaces and Indian streets. Women are routinely told that freedom will come at a price, and the price often is violence.
The book ends with Dr. Vjosa Osmani’s essay titled “Notes of a Wartime Child on Democracy”. Osmani, who is the sixth President of Kosovo, wants to advance human rights and gender equality and the role of women in peace and security processes during her tenure.
Hers is a voice of unshakeable conviction. “Even in our darkest times, it was in the pursuit of democratic values that we found solace,” she says, urging us to not give in to tyrannical and oppressive forces bent on undermining “the transformative power of democracy”. She reminds us that history often fails to record the contributions that women have made but women have played and will continue to play a vital role in protecting democracy. She adds, “Our democracies are only as strong as the participation and representation that they foster.”
Needless to say, this book is worth adding to your bookshelf.
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