Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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226<br />
DEMOCRACY TODAY<br />
of our society, which already titles itself as ‘democratic’. As Barber<br />
states, “The history of democracy itself is contained in the history of<br />
the word democracy” [Barber, 1984, p. 195]. In our opinion, the history<br />
of democracy is a development of both people (‘δήμος’) and power<br />
(‘κράτος’), concretizing the phenomena that constitute democracy<br />
notion. In Ancient times, the democracy of poleis was based on the<br />
labor of masses of slaves, deprived of any rights, even of the right<br />
to be considered as a human being. The ‘δήμος’ (the people who<br />
can be and are subjects of democracy) never meant all the population<br />
in general. In other words, ‘the people’ here are certainly not<br />
the demos we often refer to when we talk about true democracy in<br />
the contemporary meaning of the word. Medieval European cities,<br />
which also featured some form of democracy, supplied obstacles of<br />
similar kind as well. Until the end of the 18 th c., strict qualifications<br />
based on property or social status prevented many people from<br />
participating in political life, let alone providing for their ability to<br />
serve as subjects of power. Gradually, in the course of time, the slaves,<br />
the serfs, the workers, the poor, women, national minorities, and<br />
other groups and strata are tending to be included into the notion<br />
of ‘demos’, into the volume of people formally subject to be bearers<br />
and conductors of power.<br />
Thus, ‘national democracy’ discovers that different ethnic groups<br />
have equal rights for participation in the life of society. Similarly, social<br />
democracy defends rights of the poor, and stands for equality of all<br />
human beings irrelevant to their social and economical positions. In<br />
20 th c., we could observe those two ways of comprehending the notion<br />
of people serving as ideologies under emerged state organizations<br />
alternative to the older liberal representative democracy that prevailed<br />
mostly in Western Europe and North America: the USSR and other<br />
socialist countries preferred a social aspect of democracy, their ‘people<br />
democracy’ being quite anti-liberal, but with a considerable level<br />
of social justice achieved; while young democracies of the so called<br />
‘Third world’ represented mostly colonial and post-colonial countries<br />
fighting for their national free<strong>do</strong>m and comprehending democracy<br />
from its national perspective. We prefer to use Greek words denoting<br />
different aspects of ‘the people’ notion to accentuate such ways of<br />
comprehending democracy (See Fig. 1).