• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1511 0

allows democracy to function. The villages of Switzerland and Italy notwithstanding, traditional Gemeinschaft communities were for the most part rigorously undemocratic: closed, conformist, and hierarchical. Their exclusivity meant they were sealed against outsiders and intolerant of diversity; their ascriptive basis in a “given” identity (blood, race, religion) inured them to voluntary identities and held in check any notion that women and men might freely choose their social relations or join contrived social groupings at will; the hierarchical structure and dependency on charismatic leadership of traditional communities rendered them inegalitarian and resistant to social mobility; and their personalistic, noncontractual mode of relations rendered them prone to prejudice, gossip, argumentativeness, and corruption. Rural villages in Wisconsin too easily become havens of suicide, incest, and death while Vermont towns celebrated for their New England freedoms become coffins of conformity.26

Jihad’s parochialism also limits its access to real power in a centralized, interdependent world. The Hutus can massacre Tutsis, but cannot deal with Pan-African environmental despoilation. Bosnian Serbs can unilaterally make war on Muslims but they cannot unilaterally increase VCR imports. In the world of McWorld, like it or not, though participation remains local, power is ever more central. The Green adage “think globally, act locally” is contradicted by the reality that local action rarely can impinge on truly global problems. Tribes pursuing NIMBY tactics (“not in my back yard!”) with respect to regional policies (where do we put the petroleum refinery? the drug rehabilitation center? the refugees?) are themselves the impotent victims of other organizations’ regional, national, and international policies over which local community or tribal institutions, even when democratic, provide them little control.

Ethnic tribes and religious clans are not then without democratic possibilities, but Jihad is unlikely to provide the kinds of democratic values and institutions that traditional democratic nation-states of the sort they help undo once offered. Is there today a single entity that has been created by the breakdown of nation-states associated with Jihad’s multiple ethnicities, fratricides, and civil wars that looks remotely democratic? Even where they import democracy’s political structures—say, a multiparty, parliamentary system or an independent judiciary or regular elections or a nominally free press—they lack the attitudinal resources to build the kind of democratic civil society that in turn makes democratic citizenship possible and lets democratic political institutions function effectively. Tribalism is little less hostile to civil society than consumerism. Without civil society, there can be no citizens, and thus no meaningful democracy.

We can admire the efforts of Western constitutional lawyers to export their own legalistic traditions to fledgling postnational countries in Eastern Europe and the ex—Soviet Union. The Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe housed at the University of Chicago Law School and Central European University (which was initially funded by financier and philanthropist George Soros and has campuses in Prague and Budapest) has put constitution building at the center of its work. It offers a welcome contrast to the economic reductionism of those who think free markets and privatization are all there is to democracy. But a purely legalistic approach is no more likely to succeed than a purely economistic approach. A thin layer of parliamentarianism laid over a raging neotribal society cannot produce democracy.

Stephen Holmes, a principal at the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe, understands these limits, acknowledging that among the impediments to democratization is the “underreported obstacle” of “current-day Western advice,” presumably including his own. Holmes proposes that Eastern Europe might benefit from a certain degree of “constitutional postponement