Democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is evolving at a rapid rate. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of democratic model and the harnessing of the expert intelligence of the Web. By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place.
Democracy has a long evolutionary history. The concept of democracy - the notion that men and women have the right to govern themselves, was practised at around 2,500 BP in Athens. The Athenian polity or political body, granted all citizens the right to be heard and to participate in the major decisions affecting their rights and well-being. The City State demanded services and loyalty from the individual in return. There is evidence however that the role of popular assembly actually arose earlier in some Phoenician cities such as Sidon and Babylon in the ancient assemblies of Syria- Mesopotamia, as an organ of local government and justice.
As demonstrated in these early periods, democracy, although imperfect, offered each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision-making processes. It therefore provided a greater incentive for each individual to cooperate to increase group productivity. Through a more open decision process, improved innovation and consequently additional wealth was generated and distributed more equitably. An increase in overall economic wellbeing in turn generated more possibilities and potential to acquire knowledge, education and employment, coupled with greater individual choice and freedom.
According to the Freedom House Report, an independent survey of political and civil liberties around the globe, the world has made great strides towards democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900 there were 25 restricted democracies in existence covering an eighth of the world’s population, but none that could be judged as based on universal suffrage. The US and Britain denied voting rights to women and in the case of the US, also to African Americans. But at the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current century, democracy continues to spread through Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.
Dictatorships or quasi democratic one party states still exist in Africa, Asia and the middle east with regimes such as China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, the Sudan, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, seeking to maintain total control over their populations. However two thirds of sub-Saharan countries have staged elections in the past ten years, with coups becoming less common and internal wars gradually waning. African nations are also starting to police human rights in their own region. African Union peacekeepers are now deployed in Darfur and are working with UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.
The global spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level. The global spread of new technology and knowledge also provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing; an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy.
The current cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution. Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funnelling them to political processes. These are often coupled to online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response.
In addition there are a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and medical stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.
By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise as that offered by the best human advisers.
It might be argued that there is still a need for the role of politicians and leaders in assessing and prioritising such expert advice in the overriding national interest. But a moment’s reflection leads to the opposite conclusion. Politicians have party allegiances and internal obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best advice. History is replete with such disastrous decisions based on false premises, driven by party political bias and populist fads predicated on flawed knowledge. One needs to look no further in recent times than the patently inadequate evidential basis for the US’s war in Iraq which has cost at least half a million civilian lives and is still unresolved.
However there remains a disjunction between the developed west and those developing countries only now recovering from colonisation, the subsequent domination by dictators and fascist regimes and ongoing natural disasters. There is in fact a time gap of several hundred years between the democratic trajectory of the west and east, which these countries are endeavouring to bridge within a generation; often creating serious short-term challenges and cultural dislocations.
A very powerful enabler for the spread of democracy as mentioned is the Internet/Web- today’s storehouse of the world’s information and expertise. By increasing the flow of essential intelligence it facilitates transparency, reduces corruption, empowers dissidents and ensures governments are more responsive to their citizen’s needs. Ii is already providing the infrastructure for the emergence of a more democratic society; empowering all people to have direct input into critical decision processes affecting their lives, without the distortion of political intermediaries.
By 2040 more democratic outcomes for all populations on the planet will be the norm. Critical and urgent decisions relating to global warming, financial regulation, economic allocation of scarce resources such as food and water, humanitarian rights and refugee migration etc, will to be sifted through community knowledge, resulting in truly representative and equitable global governance. Implementation of the democratic process itself will continue to evolve with new forms of e-voting and governance supervision, which will include the active participation of advocacy groups supported by a consensus of expert knowledge via the Intelligent Web 4.0.
Over time democracy as with all other social processes, will evolve to best suit the needs of its human environment. It will emerge as a networked model- a non-hierarchical, resilient protocol, responsive to rapid social change. Such distributed forms of government will involve local communities, operating with the best expert advice from the ground up; the opposite of political party self-interested power and superficial focus-group decision-making, as implemented by many current political systems. These are frequently unresponsive to legitimate minority group needs and can be easily corrupted by powerful lobby groups, such as those employed by the heavy carbon emitters in the global warming debate.
By 2050 a form of global consciousness will have evolved, where the back channel of opinion and reason will gradually subsume today’s hierarchical and populist consumer/brand filtered political models. New forms of the democratic process at the community and regional level are already growing, pointing towards the emergence of a new form of truly representative public participation and cooperation.
This trend towards a fairer and more peaceful society must continue if the human race is to survive the uncertainty and turmoil ahead..
No comments:
Post a Comment