April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

owners of a major communications company.
This sort of personal connection between an elected politician in the West
and a despot elsewhere is hardly unique. The French Foreign Minister
Michele Alliot-Marie spent her Christmas holiday in Tunisia as a guest of a
businessman with close ties to Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali as the protests
against Ben Ali were gathering strength. The first response of the French
state to the protests in Tunisia was to send arms to Ben Ali. The French
Prime Minister Francois Fillon spent his Christmas holiday on the Nile as a
guest of the Egyptian state. In March 2009 US Secretary of State, Hillary
Clinton, commented, in a discussion about severe and routine human rights
violations by the Mubarak regime, that “I really consider President and
Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.”
In recent years all sorts of European institutions beyond oil companies and
security agencies made their own deals with the dictatorship in Tripoli.
The London School of Economics accepted a £1.5m grant from the Gaddafi
International Charity and Development Foundation for a ‘virtual democracy
centre’. The Foundation is headed by the same Saif al-Islam Gaddafi who
recently went on to Libyan television to tell protestors that his father’s
government would ‘fight to the last minute, until the last bullet’.
The Europe of colonialism, slavery and genocide has no claim to moral
leadership in this world. The Europe that backed the Mubarak dictatorship
for thirty years and the Ben Ali dictatorship for twenty-three years has no
claim to moral leadership in this world. The Europe that helped to smash
Iraq in the invasion of 2003 has no claim to moral leadership in this world.
The Europe that refused to allow the Haitian people to elect a leadership
of its choosing by supporting a coup against that leadership in 2004 has no
claim to moral leadership in this world. The Europe that has been directly
responsible for the documented deaths of almost 14,000 migrants since
1993 has no claim to moral leadership in this world.
It is true enough that the modern form of democracy began in Europe with
the French Revolution of 1789. But when African slaves in Haiti took the
ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity seriously and won their own
revolution in 1804 it immediately became clear that the French did not
intend democracy to be for everyone. That has been the European position
ever since.
To choose democracy is not to choose Europe and it is certainly not to
choose the United States of America, which has overthrown democratically
elected governments around the world when electorates have had the
temerity to elect the ‘wrong’ leaders. In fact, any serious commitment to
democracy has to reject the moral and political authority of Europe and
the United States of America. Any commitment to democracy has to
assert, very clearly, that all people everywhere have the right to govern
themselves according to their own will.
We cannot know the trajectories of the uprisings that have swept North
Africa and the Middle East. But one thing is for sure. Whatever pompous
claims to the contrary come out of Washington and Brussels, these are not
revolts for American or European values. On the contrary they are a direct
challenge to those values. They are revolts against a global power
structure that is formed by an international alliance of elites with one of
its key principles being the idea, the racist idea, that Arabs are ‘not yet
ready’ for democracy. This, of course, is an echo of one of the common
justifications for apartheid. But the plain fact of the matter is that anyone
who says that anyone else isn’t yet ready for democracy is no democrat.