A flawed analysis: the inadequacies of Western liberal democracy

Mervyn Claxton

14/06/2010

Opinión

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Few would disagree with the proposition that democracy is a politico-cultural construct. Nonetheless, with very few exceptions, the academic, political, and international organization establishments in the North (whatever the geographical origins of the individuals concerned) appear to reject any notion that the cultural quotient in "Western democracy" might disqualify it as a universally-valid instrument for promoting democratic governance in the Global South, particularly in countries that belong to other value systems. (In this article, the terms "Western", "North", and "South" are all employed in the geopolitical sense).

W. H. Auden once declared that "the greatest threat to freedom is not dogmas but the reluctance to define them precisely, for in times of danger, if no one knows what is essential and unessential, the unessential is vested with religious importance….so the liberal who is so frightened by the idea of dogma that he blindly opposes any kind, instead of seeing that nothing is made an article of faith that need not be so, is promoting the very state of tyranny and witch-hunting that he desires to prevent." (Review of T. S. Eliot’s "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture", The New Yorker, 1948).

It is that reluctance, on the part of the proponents of Western liberal democracy, to define the "dogmas" associated with their theories which presents "the greatest threat to freedom" in today's world. "Instead of seeing that nothing is made an article of faith that need not be so", most particularly, the institutional forms of Western democracy which were developed in the North and are insistently urged upon countries in the South, "the liberal…is promoting the very state of tyranny….that he desires to prevent."….

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https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/142161