The following is inspired by my visit to Iceland, but will draw on other experiences as well. I still have a bottle of Icelandic Schnapps (“with the goodness of lichen”), which nobody else I know here in Toronto is willing to drink. I will take a small nip of it every time I finish a paragraph.
I visited Iceland because I had long been fascinated by its peculiar history. Its medieval status as a non-aristocratic republic, with unique electoral and judicial features, far different from the urban republics of Italy, commends it to any historian of democracy. Various features of modern Iceland are equally interesting. Consequently, I had been reading about Icelandic history and culture for decades before I set foot in the place. One of the reasons I was attracted to studying the history and society of Iceland was its lesson that a country with a population as small as 300,000, blessed with few natural resources or strategic advantages, can provide its citizens with pretty much anything they would need in the modern world. While it cannot offer its citizens aircraft carriers or linear accelerators, it can easily provide most of the things that people in this century consider necessary for a good life. Most of these blessings are patently traceable to its commitment to, and experience with, effective democratic institutions. This lesson is a very important one for people in small nations, especially post-colonial ones, who yearn for both economic development and the establishment of solid democratic institutions. Iceland spent many centuries as a colony, and many centuries in poverty. It’s complete independence arrived only in the mid-twentieth century. It’s achievements since then have, on the whole, been very impressive.
But not all has been a smooth ascent. In recent times, local Conservative ideologues gained control of the country, and implemented the crackpot agenda of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, without any significant countervailing forces to oppose them, to force compromises, or to temper their fanaticism. (Fortunately, they were not accompanied by the religious, racist, and militarist nutbar factions that participate in the same movement in its American version.) The result was more or less the same as what you would expect when a country is taken over by Marxists. After an initial period of artificially generated boom-times, waste and fraud ran rampant. The rich, with access to an unmonitored and unregulated banking and financial system quickly concocted a host of scams that defrauded not only Icelanders, but millions of small investors in Britain, the Netherlands, and other countries. The Conservative ideologists made a pig’s breakfast of the country’s banking and finance institutions, and precipitated a devastating financial crisis. But once the whack-a-doodle Conservatives were driven out of office, the country was able to recover and correct itself with remarkable speed. Only four years after the crisis, Iceland has among the highest employment levels in Europe, its finances are in tolerable order, and it’s population has not undergone any severe hardships. Serious problems remain, especially with its currency, which is still worthless on the global market. Some long-term problems will emerge, as there are no magic solutions to the damage that has been done, and the current administration is neither omniscient nor necessarily correct in its policies. Much of the imaginary wealth that the country briefly thought it had has evaporated, and many who lived off pixie dust have had to make an abrupt adjustment to reality. But nobody was driven from their homes, as so many were in the United States. When I arrived in the fall of 2012, I found a country that was still pleasant and essentially optimistic, though perhaps a little more cynical.
While in Iceland, I was able to speak to an extraordinary variety of people, from farmers and fishermen, to historians and government people. All these conversations were fruitful. I also found that my imagined, distance-inspired affection for the place was supplanted by a real-experience affection. The texture changed, but the essence did not: I will always remain very fond of Iceland.
But, to begin with, I’ll call up the memory of my earliest experience of democracy.
When I was a small child, in Northern Ontario, there was a game played by the local children. It was a complicated version of “hide-and-go-seek”. Two teams of children would form up, one of which would leave a central gathering point on a complicated trail, and select a hiding place, leaving team members at strategic points, also hidden. One of their number would then return to the central point, meeting up with the other team. He or she (while the game mostly appealed to boys, girls were not excluded) would then draw a map on the ground, honestly representing the hiders’ route to their points of concealment, but omitting the crucial information of compass direction. With this partial information, the other team would set out in search, under the direction of a leader. The leader of the hiding team would accompany the searching team. He or she would shout out coded words and phrases, which had been agreed upon by his or her team mates. These would convey information such as “the searchers are near but headed away from you” or “they are searching too far to the south of you”, etc. Some of the signals were meaningless, meant to mislead or confuse the searchers. The searching team also made use of coded signals to co-ordinate their search. One signal, however, was crucial, as it would trigger a mad scramble to reach the map and erase it. This was complicated by the ability of any scout to tag another, making him “freeze” on the spot, and the ability of any other scout to “unfreeze” the frozen ones. Neither team knew, at first, who would become leader of the other team, since each had been selected after they had separated. Each team made use of various ruses, with scouts and leaders acting in various ways to confuse their opposite numbers.
It was an amazingly complex game for small children to play. I don’t know if it is still played. Later, as an adult, investigation led me to conclude that the game was of Native Canadian origin. This came as no surprise to me, as its elements are particularly suited to the Canadian physical environment and to its Native cultural environment. The hunting and tracking element, and the reliance on grasping the “high view” of a landscape are both significant.
But what is relevant here is that the game was as much a training for democracy as it was for hunting and tracking. Each stage of the game was characterized by a formal electoral process. Each team leader was elected by majority vote in each cycle of the game, and no leader could serve more than one consecutive “term”. Nomination and voting were carried out by specific procedures which, in later life, as a historian, I found documented among Native and Métis peoples in the Canadian north. It was to no team’s advantage to keep choosing the same people for the same tasks — the pattern would soon be useful to the opposition. But at the same time, a competent or experienced person was the optimal choice. Wildly competitive as the game was, it was also characterized by a consistent demand for fairness and equity. It is significant that nobody doubted that the map drawn in the ground would be an honest representation.
I grew up with this game as part of my mental furniture, and it came as a surprise to me when I found whole populations of people who had no childhood experience with any kind of democratic component. Their childhoods, I came to realize, were dominated by the experience of tyranny: parents laying down the law at home; teachers laying down the law in school; bullies laying down the law everywhere else. It is no wonder that many people have great difficulty dealing with the concept of democracy. It is no wonder that many people today cannot imagine democracy as anything more than some incomprehensible rigamarole preceding the appointment of a tyrant, who will then tell them what to do.
It is this childhood experience, I believe, that is the root of my life-long interest in the philosophy and history of democracy, and which eventually brought me to Iceland. It also prepared me for the one significant insight that has driven my work since the mid 1980s: that democracy can best be understood as a culturally diverse phenomenon, with roots in small-scale behaviour. It’s etiology transcends the standard connect-the-dots history from Athens to modern Parliaments and Congresses. Since that time, I’ve found significant examples of democratic practices on every continent and in almost every historical period. Others arrived at the same conclusions independently — precisely what you would expect with an idea whose time has come. The work on the subject that Steve Muhlberger and I did in the early 1990s presaged what is now a powerful trend among historians of democracy. This has given a good deal of hope to those struggling against aristocratic rule in many places on our globe.
Much has been written about the Icelandic Commonwealth of the Middle Ages. Mostly, historians have expressed their doubts that the arrangement which began in 930 A.D., and survived until 1262 A.D. was “truly” democratic. This is, I believe, a bit of a red herring. When we research the history of democracy, we are not studying perfected systems or utopias, we are studying the efforts of people to make decisions without aristocratic rule. For more than three centuries, the tiny population of Iceland managed its own affairs using electoral and representative methods, while the bulk of Europeans obeyed hereditary aristocracies. This is not a fleeting instance in time. The United States of America has only existed for 237 years, and Canada for only 146. Iceland’s medieval democratic culture eventually ended, as the independence of its farmers slowly eroded, and power drifted into the hands of a few families. These families tore apart the Commonwealth with the violence of their feuds, until the Icelandic Alþingi (it’s parliament) signed a Covenant (Gamli sáttmáli) of union with the Norwegian kings. Yet Icelandic society functioned well enough for more than two centuries before this came to pass, and archaeological evidence confirms that this was a period of relative prosperity for the Icelanders. One need only compare George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush, Jr. to see that promising democracies can be subject to dramatic decay, especially if the center of power drifts from the many to the few. Violations of the most fundamental principles of democracy are now accepted by Americans and Canadians with an empty-headed shrug: for example, our Conservative Prime Minister in Canada not only violated the most sacred principle of our democracy by arrogantly refusing to obey Parliament, but he has cavalierly handed control of our key natural resources to the Communist Party in Beijing. Similar aristocratic abominations in the United States are too numerous to catalog.
It was precisely this sort of thing that I was contemplating during the pleasant afternoon I spent at Þingvellir, the site of the medieval Icelandic parliament. In keeping with the folkloric nature of the institution, this is a site in the open air, not a building. The elected lögsögumaður [lawspeakers] and Goðorðsmenn [representative chieftains] carried out their deliberations in a valley created by the separating North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The early settlers of Iceland were not the lot that you would expect to settle disputes peacefully, but that is exactly what they eventually did. Over the next century, violence steadily declined in Iceland, as prestige shifted from one’s ability to wield an axe in battle to the ability to wield words in a lawsuit. Slavery disappeared from Iceland, in fact, if not strictly de jure. In contemporary England, at the time of the Doomsday Book, ten percent of the population remained slaves. Violent ways returned at the time of the Sturlungs, in the 13th century, but there were at least two centuries in which Iceland was clearly more peaceful than the norm in Europe. What generated this strange configuration of events?
The central concept in Conservatism, and in all Aristocratic thinking, is that only a minority of human beings are valuable. The majority of people are assumed to be secondary in importance, designed to be used as tools or commodities by the minority, and ultimately disposable. This concept unites all Conservative thinking in every time and place, from the contemporary Conservative Ideologues in Canada or the United States, to their equivalents in the Communist Party, the estates of the hereditary nobility of Europe, the palaces of Saudi oil sheiks, the yachts of global billionaires, or the huts of autocratic tribal chieftains in remote jungles. In today’s North Korea, you have the ultimate manifestation of Conservative Ideology. Only the ruling Kim family, and its immediate entourage, matters. The remaining 24,554,000 human beings in North Korea exist only to serve them. Each of these millions of people is ascribed a status (Songbun) based on their heredity background for three generations and on the “reliability” of their living relatives. This determines every aspect of their lives, including how much food they receive. North Korea embodies the Conservative idea in its purest form, but every Conservative in history has promoted some variant, dilution, or approximation of this “ideal”. It is the ultimate template that drives things as diverse-seeming, but interrelated, as the U.S. Republican Party’s hysterics over taxing the rich; the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Tibetan culture, religious minorities, and artists; or Vladimir Putin’s skilful manipulation of a castrated Duma. When Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, disobeyed a direct order of Parliament (and got away with it), he was proclaiming the central Conservative doctrine clearly: “I am the one who counts; the rest of you, all thirty-four and half million Canadians, do not count. You exist only to serve me, and the interests of my pals and favourites, and to carry out my orders.” A man like Stephen Harper does not have the unlimited power of Kim Yong-nam, but craves it, and will use every trick in his repertoire to enhance the power that he has. The tragedy in Canada is not so much that Harper grabbed the power he craved, but that his political opposition folded their hands and let him have it. The Canadian public did not understand the issues, and did not care, so the opposition parties did not feel compelled to do their job. But if Canadians had been raised and educated in a strongly democratic ethos, they would have been furious, and Harper’s power grab would have been stopped. Unfortunately, today’s Canadians do not grow up playing children’s games that teach democracy. They grow up with a thousand voices teaching the lesson that brute force and fraud win the day, and that arrogant bullies are to be envied and honoured.
But in some times and places the precariousness of the environment makes people inherently valuable, and the practice of using people like kleenex risks the lives of even the elite. It is not surprising that some of the most egalitarian social arrangements exist in very extreme, perilous environments. Anthropologists have long documented the egalitarian ethos of the Innuit, the Khoi-San peoples of the Kalahari, and other societies placed in environments in which survival depends on the co-operation of every hand available. Such societies cannot afford to casually dispose of any of their number, and cannot even afford to alienate them. Proclaim yourself innately superior, sneer at others, and try to boss them around, then see what happens when you need their help fighting off a polar bear. The conventional analysis of such societies emphasizes their smallness, and it is still widely believed by philosophers of democracy that “primitive” democratic institutions are a function of the size of these societies. There is some truth to this, but I would argue that the value placed on people as people is the significant feature here, and the size of the group is a collateral, if not a secondary factor.
Iceland’s original settlers, probably no more than a few thousand, spread thinly across a land isolated from the rest of Europe. It was capable of supporting people through a very limited form of agriculture, but this required every isolated farmstead to be very labour intensive. While the original settlers were warlike raiders accompanied by their retinues, accustomed to both warfare and internal violence, these activities were not very practical in the new environment. Under the new circumstances, Human beings, as just human beings, acquired a value that would not have been evident to most Europeans of the time. Kin and clients attached to the households tended to eventually get farms of their own. The settlers brought slaves with them, but within a couple of generations there is no evidence of slavery persisting. They, too, found themselves inexorably promoted. Kingship and hereditary aristocracy, such as were consolidating power in the rest of Scandinavia, gained no foothold. Instead, the Icelanders developed sophisticated institutions to resolve disputes by debate, litigation and legislation. All these developments are well-recorded in a large written literature, which Icelanders produced on a per-capita basis far outstripping that of any European society. In most pre-industrial literature, we read almost nothing about peasants, servants or anyone other than aristocrats and clerics. In the Icelandic sagas, the actions and personalities of even the humblest are described in detail. To this day, Iceland remains a very informal, relatively classless, and generally egalitarian-individualistic society.
I would argue that any group of any size has the simultaneous potential for democracy or tyranny. What determines the outcome is not the size of the group, but the value the group places on individual humans, and this is in turn determined by multiple factors: a heritage of abstract ideas, environmental challenges, economic realities, legal structures, and social norms. Jim Jones’ “utopian” community in Guyana comprised fewer than a thousand people. It duplicated in every detail the totalitarian institutions of huge empires like Mao’s Peoples Republic of China and Hitler’s Third Reich. In Jonestown, only Jim Jones and his close henchmen mattered. The smallness of the society did not generate either social equality or political democracy. Ultimately, Jones was able to murder nearly the entire population of his little society, poisoning them after training them to meekly go to their deaths. They had long been subjected to brainwashing that had reduced them to nothingness in the glare of his self-proclaimed majesty.
Size is a critical factor in any democracy, because some democratic processes and structures have built-in scale limits. Direct democracy works well up to certain size, but new problems arise when that size is exceeded. Representation has ethical and procedural problems at any scale, but they multiply with increasing population. Creating tiers of governments solves some problems, only to create new and different ones. Consequently, much debate about the nature of democracy, and its effectiveness, turns on assumptions about what constitutes “local” and “small scale” on the one hand, and “large scale” on the other. Last year, a book was published called The Secret History of Democracy, which contained chapters by myself and my colleague and collaborator Steven Muhlberger, among others. Most reviews were positive, but a few were negative. The negative reviews focused on the size of the communities from which examples of democratic practice were drawn. Because many of the cross-cultural examples involved small communities, such as the Canadian Métis in my contribution, these reviewers dismissed them as irrelevant to the development of large-scale democracy. The large-scale polities they consider significant have long been acknowledged to have evolved their institutions from similarly small-scale practices, but this has escaped their attention. The examples were “merely” local democracy, and any shmoe can do local democracy, we are told. Only the big stuff counts.
I don’t share this view. Rather, I believe that local democracy is more than the primitive ancestor of modern national democracy. It should be rightly perceived as the primary and essential manifestation of democracy, with larger-scale levels of activity properly understood as derivative, rather than “higher” levels.
Notions of what constitutes a “local” scale obviously depend on the experience of the person doing the analysis. To an American, the administrative concerns of the 2.7 million people in Chicago constitute “local government,” and that is the sort of thing American theorists think of as a mere tertiary stage in representative government, overruled by two larger levels. But the world contains many countries that are smaller than Chicago. Since much theoretical discussion of the nature of local government emanates from the universities of large countries (often with a global scale imperial past), there is a potential for a distorted interpretation of norms.
Countries that combine the highest levels of democracy with high standards of living and low levels of corruption tend to be in the less than 10 million population range. Denmark (pop. less than 4.5 million) has one of the world’s highest per capita incomes as well as the world’s highest level of income equality. It also provides high quality public services, and a comprehensive social safety and welfare net. It’s private businesses are known for their high degree of competitiveness and technical innovation. It has frequently ranked as the happiest and least corrupt country in the world [these facts are all documented in Forbes 14 July 2010]. Transparency International [Transparency.org. 15 December 2010] cites Denmark as having the greatest level of public satisfaction in the performance of its political institutions of any nation on earth. Denmark’s democracy consists of a multi-party parliamentary system with extensive devolution of powers to the local level. Like the United States or Canada, it possesses three basic levels of administration (federal, regional, and local), but the “local” level encompasses 98 municipalities with an average of 25,000 people. Denmark’s national politics would be considered “local” in the United States, the United Kingdom, or France, while its local politics would be on too microscopic a scale for any American or French intellectual to even contemplate.
Switzerland (pop. 8 million), another country with a long and remarkable democratic history, also employs a three-level structure of commune, canton and federal levels. Switzerland’s federal system, established in 1848, was inspired by the American constitution, but Switzerland went on to develop complex institutions of direct and semi-direct democracy, including a plethora of referenda. The fulcrum of power rests on the canton level. The cantons retain all powers and competencies not delegated to the Confederation by the Constitution, and are responsible for healthcare, welfare, law enforcement and public education. Most significantly, they also wield the power of taxation. The communes (= municipalities) vary greatly in size, between 15,000 and 1,390,000. Switzerland is an extremely wealthy country. Its GDP per capita is nearly double that of the United States, and it has the highest level of wealth per adult (financial and non-financial assets) of any country in the world. While American and Canadian political theorists are quick to assume that the success of the Scandinavian countries is only possible because of their “homogeneity”, this claim can hardly be made for Switzerland, which has four national languages and three major ethnic groups that do not actually like each other very much. Far more significant is its commitment to a vigorous, locally focused democratic system. The 1999 constitution has strengthened the powers of the federal level, but it remains to be seen if this is advantageous in any way.
The average population of countries in the world is 34,000,000. This average figure is, of course, largely determined by the presence of a handful of hypertrophied giants (such as China and India). It should be noted that one of these has made a creditable, though sometimes rocky attempt at functioning democratically, while the other remains a crude Conservative-Communist dictatorship. While Canadians, because they sit next to the massively populated United States, are accustomed to think of themselves as a “small” country, they are in fact, almost exactly the average in population. Iceland, however, is small by anybody’s standards. It’s total population is less than one of Toronto’s suburbs. This bears directly on both some of its successes and some of its failures. Because Iceland is so small, its “elite” is very small indeed. In fact, almost everyone with a significant influence on Icelandic society went to the same university and even to the same high school. The wave of Conservative Ideology that arrived in Iceland was generated by a small group of people, all of whom knew each other intimately. They took up roles of leadership in government and business without any significant impediments from the older elite. They were profoundly influenced by a visit to Iceland made by Milton Friedman in 1984. Friedman was invited to debate some young Icelandic economists on national television. I have, by good luck, come across a tape of this debate, and I could see how such a small thing could have a profound impact on a small society about to change its generation of leadership. Friedman could easily anticipate the positions of his debating opponents, and had no difficulty outmaneuvering them. This was a small pond, and the Icelanders were minnows encountering a shark. Friedman’s version of “freedom” had much in it to appeal to a generation who had lived in Iceland’s comfortable, but stuffy and needlessly puritanical society. There was little reason for most Icelanders to grasp that the improved night life, greater fun and apparent prosperity came with bank fraud and financial ruin embedded in its DNA. Because Iceland was a small, rather naïve society, it was easily victimized by a ruthless ideology. There were no countervailing forces. Once in power, it had free reign. Because Icelanders had a society in which honesty was the norm, they were ill-equipped to deal with professional con-men and experienced liars.
But, once the damage was done, Iceland’s small size became an advantage again. Sensible palliative and corrective measures could be applied, because the society was accustomed to thinking of itself as a family. The fraud-enriched billionaires, of course, ran off to their Manhattan penthouses and Riviera digs, leaving the Icelanders alone to patch things up. The results, as I stated earlier, do not seem to have been bad.
It is evident that given the current state of development in democratic practice, even with the best intentions, and a miraculous national consensus on reform, a country as large as the United States cannot achieve the levels of social equality, prosperity, administrative transparency, and general efficiency that Danes or Norwegians take for granted, nor can it solve any of its major social and fiscal problems. It is not merely a matter of voting in some better people, as it is in Iceland.
The trick in the successful functioning of any complex organization is to find the appropriate level on which any given action should be taken, and on which any decision should be made. The Conservative-Authoritarian-Statist mentality assumes that the “default” position should be as high up the organizational tree as possible, while the Freedom-Individualist-Democratic mentality assumes that it should rest as low as possible on the tree. I do not take seriously any claims made by Conservatives to be advocates of “small government”, of being motivated by a desire for “freedom” or to be “anti-statist”. Conservatism is an Ideology as devoted to systematic lying as Marxism, and such claims are as absurd and mendacious as Marxist claims to be champions of the common people or to promote “equality”. But the worship of the large scale, and large-scale power is not confined to such ideological zealots. While occasional lip-service is payed to “decentralization,” “devolution,” and other vague notions of democratic reform, the mind-set of most intellectuals and public officials in Canada and the United States, whatever their party label, is still firmly in the Conservative-Authoritarian-Statist mental universe. Imaginary “economies of scale” and the lust to wield large units of power still motivate most political ideas and decision-making.
Yet, you might notice that my evaluation of the United States began with “given the current state of development in democratic practice.” That state is not fixed. Democratic institutions have been less successful in dealing with large numbers of human beings because there has been little effort to modify or improve them. For the most part, they have simply been inflated, without significant innovation. It’s as if we gave up on the idea of commerce because you can’t manage a multi-national chain with the same techniques as a corner store. The unspoken assumption among politicians is that we keep our inherited democratic practices only to maintain continuity with the past, for the same reason the Catholic Church publishes encyclicals in Latin. It is only recently, after millions of ordinary people in oppressive countries have risked their lives to obtain it, that any noticeable number of intellectuals have taken democracy seriously as an idea. When Steve Muhlberger and I began our work, the word “democracy” evoked nothing but sneers and sniggers from the overwhelming majority of intellectuals (as it has throughout much of history). Now, many have jumped on the band wagon, some sincerely, though probably just as many as a duplicitous strategy. The democratic movement of today, however, is more than an intellectual fad. It is a genuine movement of the people, and in such a movement, real innovations might gestate and find enough support to be implemented. The problem of creating fair and egalitarian governance for large groups of people may find solutions — perhaps a great variety and choice of solutions — if serious effort is made to find them.
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