The Challenge of Democracy after the “Third Wave”

Peter Wagner

– Let’s get started now, I’ll go ahead and introduce today’s speaker. A reminder that I am Kari Borne. I am from the Office of Continuing Education at UW Whitewater, and we sponsor the Fairhaven Lecture Series each semester.

Today’s presenter is Professor Peter Wagner, who teaches courses in European politics and international politics in the Department of Political Science at UW Whitewater. His research interests are in European politics and societies, transatlantic relations, and questions of governance.

Dr. Wagner received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and before joining the faculty at UW Whitewater in 2007, he held various academic positions in Europe, including positions at American University in Bulgaria, the University of– oh, I should have asked you pronunciation– Giessen in Germany, the University of Cluj-Napoca at the University of Bucharest in Romania.

Dr. Wagner’s lecture today is titled, “Democracy in Retreat: The Challenge of Democracy “After the Third Wave.”

Welcome Dr. Peter Wagner.

(audience applause)

– Thank you. Thank you very much, especially thank you for coming out at such a gruesome day today. If there’s one thing that I don’t like, it’s rain, for some reason. I can handle snow, but rain is really bad.

(audience chuckling)

It’s like, whoa. Okay.

For those of you who wear glasses, you know what I’m talking about.

(audience chuckling)

But, as promised, I’m hoping that the lecture today will be thought-provoking, interesting. Please do remember that while we, as political and social scientists, have a dealing with and analyzing questions of democracy, a lot of times it’s actually you, right, the citizens, so to speak, the people, who ought to be interested and actually ought to be capable of making the kinds of awkward, complex, problematic decisions that are required in a democracy.

So remember, while we are the experts in principle, you are the deciders, which means you better become experts, and real fast, right, at lots of stuff.

So, anyway, “Democracy in Retreat: “the Challenge of Democracy After the Third Wave,” that is the title of my lecture, and I guess one should begin first by actually interrogating the title itself.

What do we really mean by “Third Wave” in that title? Right, “the Challenge of Democracy “After the Third Wave,” what– So democracy.

For people who actually analyze democracy in all its variants and all its– a classic entry point is the late Samuel P. Huntington’s formulation of waves.

And he distinguished three waves, and by that we of course mean the coming of democracy. We haven’t been democratic, so the idea goes, for a very long time, right, there actually have been waves of democratization, right, waves of the coming of democracy. and Huntington offered us three waves, and as I said, a lot of people picked up on that particular idea.

So we have a first wave in Huntington’s scheme, and again as I said, right, a lot of people have picked this up, debated it, critiqued it in all kinds of ways. So it’s a good entry point.

So first wave. Essentially, democracy in our modern perception and understanding, we can date it in terms of origins, American Revolution and French Revolution, and then 1820s, in fact, the date would be 1828 or Jacksonian Democracy if you like, to the aftermath of World War I. And here we find indeed a wave of democratization, a wave of countries or nation states becoming democratic, that spans, not just the United States or France in that sense, although France, we’ll talk about that a little later.

But from Argentina to, indeed, Uruguay. And so the first wave of the acceptance of democracy, of the idea of suffrage, participation, that then reaches out and, indeed, long 19th century, as it’s called, including of course, Argentina to Uruguay.

So it’s the first wave, but we can continue. We have a second wave, and that actually takes place after World War II. West Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan. So the actual bad cases that we all know from World War II, and they of course became democratic after World War II. But we also have a host of other countries, including South Korea, right, that is included in this so-called second wave after the second World War.

The third wave is the big one, some would say. That is, the early 1970s through very early 1990s. And here we find Portugal, Spain, Greece, but also Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and indeed that’s included in the third wave Poland, Czechoslovakia, then of course, or afterwards, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania.

So in other words, the third wave includes from the military dictatorships of Portugal, the fascism of Franco’s Spain, the military dictatorship of Greece, to the other Latin American authoritarian military dictatorships to the so-called Communist, post-Communist transformation. So that’s the big third wave.

And indeed you can think of it as, well, that fits kind of nicely with that first long wave, right, 19th century, that we had when modern democracy, some would say, first established itself. That fits nicely as sort of a third long wave, where suddenly lots of folks became democratic.

Now that would of course be great, right, and we have come to think of the Arab Spring or other attempts these days as a potential fourth wave, right? And again, that’s sort of the idea, hmm, what happens, Arab Spring, I know that colleagues of mine have already talked to you about this. So the idea of a fourth wave, Arab Spring– hmm, maybe, right?

But the trick, of course, is that Huntington, and people who have dealt with him, critiqued him, are not just talking about waves of democracy, that would be nice, right, we all get more and more democratic? No. We are also talking about retreat: reaction, counter-waves or ebb.

In other words, there is actually something that happens in between those waves, and that story is of course not very encouraging, if you like. Because first we think about the first wave, well then came the years between World War I and World War II, when a lot of countries became authoritarian, I mean, really became authoritarian, right, Nazi Germany, we think of that, right?

So think of it this way, Germany was actually included in that first wave of democratization because the Weimar Republic had an electoral democracy so Germany was actually democratic at that time. But that of course flipped around, right? And Germany ended up in the worst position possible in that sense, right, as national socialistic Germany.

So again, we actually have, on the one hand, a wave that comes in, so to speak, and then it recedes again, and some have talked about even a reaction, a counter-wave or, subtitle of my talk, a retreat, right, question mark. Second retreat, we can see in the 1960s.

Greece here is a famous example, included in the second wave of democratization, but in the 1960s, we had a push in Greece and a vicious military dictatorship came into power. So again, democratization and then reaction. Third, that is of course the big question mark. We have this third wave, this explosion of democratization, from the 1970s into the 1990s. But by the mid-1990s, suddenly things began to change again.

And today, if you are somebody especially who studies Eastern Europe, we started out with a lot of hope, you know, downfall of Communism, beginning of democracy, democratization, all of that stuff, right? And yet, beginning in the mid-1990s, we realized that some places had indeed become more or less consolidated democracies, but others were actually not getting any place or indeed, were moving backwards rather than forwards.

So the places who did not go anyplace, you might say, Belarus, very famous, right? White Russia, who continues to be under the dictatorship. Georgia, also famous example. But I might have included, that is sort of my pet peeve these days, Hungary. Hungary was once the star of post-Communist transformation.

In fact, Hungary was even the star when you studied Communism, right? It was one of the so-called reform Communist countries. So there was a lot of hope placed on a democratic Hungary that would actually become a spearhead, if you like, of contemporary liberal democratic free capitalist and all that kind of stuff.

And today of course, we have a Hungary that is in the, dare I say, bad guys’ camp. Although Hungary is a member of the European Union, natch, right, that hurts. I know people in Brussels, they’re quite hurting if you talk to them about it.

But Hungary is indeed, or has become part of this reaction, because they have curtailed press power, they are not going any more for civil liberties, the opposition is being, not hunted down necessarily, but they are being really under tight control, and so on.

A new nationalism in Hungary has risen, we have instances of anti-Roma, anti-Sinti, meaning anti-Gypsy sentiment that is freely parading around, and so on and so on and so on. So there are lots of things that are going on in Hungary today, which are actually the antithesis of those democratization hopes we had.

So that third reaction, right, that hurts a lot of folks who had deep hopes for the post-Communist transformation, and of course I put in Sudan as a setback because that happened too, but we can also, some would say, other places could be mentioned here.

So that is, if you like, the setup, the three waves and their three reactions, some contemporary evidence because I talked about cases, but no better place. That’s what we usually do, everybody loves them, me too. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2014, the last report, and again, the global image for democracy, not good.

So Freedom House, for the eighth consecutive year Freedom in the World recorded more declines in democracy world-wide than gains. Some leaders effectively relied on modern authoritarianism. Central to modern authoritarianism is the capture of institutions that undergird political pluralism.

What does that mean? Well, dictators are becoming smarter. There used to be a time when you could actually interview folks, happened to me. And they told you very freely about what they would like to do. Nowadays they all have public relation folks who coach them in what to say.

More importantly, of course, that modern authoritarianism means, it’s not just dictators or about the political positions of power, but these days people actually go for mass media, take it in, turn it around, in other words what we would call the Fourth Estate, right?

No, they’re actually beginning to use it, and they’re beginning to use it quite nicely to influence the opinion in their own countries, but of course also to try to influence the opinion of other countries, right.

So getting the mass media into your hands onto your side is one of the ways that modern authoritarianism is smarter, if you like, tries to be smarter than, let’s say, the old kind of military dictatorships we had in Greece or even Portugal.

No, you tried to actually use, so to speak, our media. And when in doubt, of course, as you all know, China, good case, you try to block certain developments from actually happening, and you even produce your own versions of search engines or social media sites, all in the name of control. So indeed, I have here of course an October 10, last Friday, picture of the so-called Hong Kong protests or the so-called umbrella revolution.

So they’re actually still going on even though they’re not making any headlines any more, but they are still going on. But there are just less people involved. The umbrella revolution, as it has been dubbed by Western media, umbrella revolution because obviously you don’t see any umbrellas here, right?

I mean, there are no umbrellas in that picture. How did that actually came about, umbrella revolution? Well, when you are confronted with police, and they are trying to pepper-spray you, one of the things you can do is you open your umbrella and a lot of Hong Kongers, of course, because it’s drizzly right now, they carry umbrellas, so that became sort of, the open umbrella became the unofficial signature of the opposition.

Hence, the West, seeing photographs of all of these Hong Kongers, standing there with their umbrellas open defending themselves against the pepper spray of the police, dubbed it the umbrella revolution. Great. As if it were about umbrellas, right?

No, these people are actually fighting for their democratic rights. But of course, according to the Chinese media, subsiding Hong Kong protest, right, meaning less people now are actually going to these protests, are a sign that somehow it’s all kind of dying down and the Chinese media is actually trying to kind of tell its own people, “oh these are just these wild “western-influenced folks” and, you know, “the good people are of course on our side.”

Which you might say, well, sometimes even the Chinese do have a point because not all Hong Kongers seem to be interested in democracy. A lot of the residents where this is happening, of course, think of it as a nuisance, right?

So, “give us our roads back,” a nice sign that some Hong Kongers have enough in terms of, you can’t actually go anyplace any more. So, where does that actually leave us? And China, again, is a good example because one might say that eventually all of these attempts at democratization will somehow maybe change, you know, the Communist Party will open up the country and so on and so on and so on, there will be setbacks but it will be coming, and so on.

So if you think of it this way then the question becomes, okay, so is democracy cyclical? In fact, is history cyclical? So, it’s the only hope, in fact, that after yet another retreat there will be yet another wave, and even if that wave doesn’t penetrate the last corners of the world, yes there will be another retreat maybe, but then there will be another wave, and so on and so on and so on.

So is that kind of like what we can hope for? And my answer, of course, is, not really. I think, I think there is a better way of framing and talking about democracy than waves, and there is actually in that sense a better way of understanding what is happening in our world today. So a different perspective that begins by actually asking what did I really mean by that subtitle, the Challenge of Democracy.

Well…

I kind of, in a way, probably tricked you guys a bit because when we say democracy and when political scientists talk about waves of democracy crashing on shores, or whatever, right? The one question that we thereby avoid is the question of, what exactly is it that we’re talking about?

When I say “democracy,” all of you probably already have a particular image of what democracy is in your mind. And that’s the rhetorical trick, right? Because we all seem to be knowing what it is we’re talking about, we actually don’t have to explain it. Isn’t that cool? We say “democracy” and all discussion, so to speak, stops because it’s clear to everybody what democracy is, right? Well…

Is democracy actually just elections? And now some of you will go, “hmm, Dr. Wagner, when you ask that question this way, “maybe not.” Right?

Just elections, that may not be enough. But interestingly enough, when we talk about these democratic waves, and talk about everything from France to Germany to Argentina, a lot of times our definition of democracy is simply “suffrage.”

And in fact, not just universal suffrage, but male suffrage. That’s why somebody as erudite and smart as Samuel P. Huntington thought of the first wave of democracy beginning with American Revolution and indeed Jacksonian democracy, right, 1820s. Why that? Because, male suffrage. If we ask the question, “what about the womenfolk?”

audience chuckling)

if we actually say, let’s define democracy in terms of women’s rights– and I see plenty of womenfolk here in the audience– if we ask that, if we ask, okay, let’s define democracy in terms of women’s rights, when would Switzerland be considered democratic?

If we ask women’s rights. Switzerland, everybody knows Switzerland, right? Swiss chocolates, and all that good stuff, and the crepe. You know, one of the big democratic countries in Europe, surely, right, they must have been democratic from, because they didn’t have Naziism on anything, so they must have been democratic, right, since 1500s or something, right?

Well if it’s all about women’s rights then we’re talking the 1970s, 1971 to be more precise. In other words, it took the Swiss till the 1970s to actually give women the right to vote. Well, kind of odd, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t necessarily call a country democratic that excludes half of its people.

So, right? So the question, just elections, is even trickier than that, because we actually have to ask, okay, who has the right to vote?

And how do they actually vote? Even if we have male suffrage, maybe there are processes at work, right, that prevent even all males from going to the voting booth.

So democracy has to do with the idea of popular sovereignty, right? That’s democracy? The simple definition of it, using the word “demos” and “kratia” from ancient Greek. So “demos,” the people, and “kratia,” ruling.

So the rule of the people, democracy. We can think of it as, indeed, popular sovereignty, the people are the sovereign. All power, all laws emanate from us in that sense. We have the rule of law.

The rule of law means that there cannot be any arbitrary decisions made. It’s all codified in that sense. And of course, everybody is equal under the law. So there are no two standards for the rulers and the ruled. No, right?

The rule of law, procedures, process, equality in that sense. Separation of powers, we know that, right? So there should be a separation of the people who make laws, who then execute decisions, that sort of stuff should be in place. Would that be enough to actually define democracy? Popular sovereignty, rule of law, separation of powers.

I give you free, fair, equal, universal, and secret elections. Would that be actually enough?

See, if I’m asking like that, the answer probably is no.

(audience chuckling)

Many people do not realize that, formerly, technically speaking, German national socialism was a country of laws.

So one of the issues we actually have to think about is the fact that a community of national socialists or fascists or racists can indeed make their own laws, can indeed make their own rules legitimately, right, and democratically. And it would still be a community of racists, fascists, authoritarians.

So we actually have to think about democracy, I suggest, a lot deeper with these ideas of participation. Who can participate, who is allowed to participate? Contestation, can we change the rules, what happens actually, how free in that sense are we to speak our minds, to act on our beliefs?

And again, participation also as a substantive focus. Who can, but also how they can and to what purpose?

And that leads us to– and I couldn’t really find any kind of better single quotation. That’s really kind of how I wish to lay this out to you. German political scientist Klaus von Beyme: “Democracy never exists. “It is always in development.” The idea actually is that we never have democracy.

It’s not a wave, right? It’s not something that simply happens in a sense, or recedes, or whatever. But democracy is actually a challenge within a specific context.

And again, that challenge is about participation, contestation. So the democratic challenge today, instead of thinking of it as one sort of process, as a wave that comes and then recedes, we should say, “Yes”…

Elections are important.

Meaning when we have societies that have particular barriers to participation, that continue not to have a formal way of changing leadership governing positions in a peaceful manner, we still have to watch out for elections as a problem, as an issue. Can people vote? Are leaders standing for being elected?

Or are we still talking about societies in which leadership is duked out, in which a certain Mafia group is coming in, killing somebody and then usurping positions of power. Is there actually a simple process like elections in place that guarantees peaceful transition of power? And then, of course, we have to ask, okay, if that is in place, how is it in place? For whom?

Is it in place for everybody? And indeed, can everybody vote? What are the mechanisms? How easy is it, or how difficult is it? If you have to fear for your life, giving your vote, that’s probably not very democratic in terms of a society and a polity.

But, or yet as I put it here, democratic transparency is the new challenge in places where elections are part of the democratic normal. In other words, elections are there regularly, contested bids for representation and yet we shouldn’t actually rest, so to speak, on these laurels.

Democracy in that sense continues to be a challenge, continues to be a task, but in this different normal context, we suddenly should be worrying about different things. From our own privacy as citizens to questions of how our democratic process is influenced.

Not just can we elect, but who’s paying for it, if you like.

So we need to think about democracy in terms of the context in which we ask that question. For somebody in Afghanistan, the question of, is this the best democracy money can buy may actually not be that pressing and urgent.

Because for them elections really are revolutionary, as they used to be, if you think, for us. The right to vote is a revolutionary right, the right to decide over our representatives indeed, leaders, is a revolutionary right. So in many places, yes, that continues to be a challenge.

For us, that challenge may not be there, even today when we think about, in the American context, stuff like redistricting or all of these mechanisms by which people try to secure seats. All of that, important as it is, you still think, well, that’s a bit obvious.

But for us, I think, here is sort of a new challenge in that regard, and many people think “well, you know America and Germany or France, “we’re democratic, what can happen to us?”

So the central problem actually is, that many countries today face as in our democratic countries, the democratic question has always been one of belonging, who has the vote, it’s actually a question of belonging. Why were women not included?

Well, the answer was, because women were not included in the construction of “We the People.” But we eventually extended that to include African Americans, women into the equation of We the People, in part because obviously the idea of We the People means we have a hard time justifying exclusion.

And so I want to close this now by reminding you that when we say We the People in our context, but even when we say We the People in other contexts, our contemporary problem is actually to ask who belongs and who doesn’t.

And many of our conflicts that we talk about and see today in this world are actually conflicts of belonging. People are, to be very provocative, people are bashing their heads in, because, they make lines, they make demarcations in terms of who is we, and who are the others?

For us, as you know, in the United States in America, the question of immigration has become hugely relevant. But not only in the United States. Europeans have huge issues of immigration themselves. The first one is, of course, the U.S. example. The second one is actually for the European example, second picture.

How do we actually deal with people who want to come into these societies and live and somehow make money and not get shot at? For many Europeans, the answer is, “Well, if they’re not us, then “they should stay where they are.”

And again, this question of who belongs with us and who doesn’t I find to be currently perhaps the most vexing and the most problematic and the most urgent democratic question. Are we willing to extend what we understand as democratic rights to indeed, not just our own people, but to others? Where does the buck stop, so to speak?

My answer, of course, would be: the buck never stops, right? That’s the democratic challenge. Once you actually embrace the concept of popular sovereignty and the idea of people ruling themselves, if you like, you can’t make that train stop.

Once you let the genie of rights out of the bottle, you can’t get him back in, however problematic this may be to us, and however problematic this may, in fact, be in regions such as the Middle East today. You can’t kind of go back to the 5th or 6th centuries or whenever.

Right? Anyway, that was my little talk.

(audience applause)

Thank you very much for coming. I hope it was at least somewhat entertaining and thought-provoking, and, yah. Thanks for the two very good questions. Again, thank you very much for coming.