Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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64<br />
DEMOCRACY TODAY<br />
bad democracy, but I <strong>do</strong>ubt whether there is such a thing as minimal<br />
democracy in the contemporary world.<br />
Minimal definitions are effective in one crucial respect, in distinguishing<br />
between democratic and nondemocratic political forms.<br />
That is a core purpose of any definition – it can separate a hat from a<br />
glove, almost always with practical aims in mind. Because democracy<br />
occupies the normative high ground in international politics, rather<br />
than simply naming one category of rule among others in the political<br />
science literature, any scheme that identifies democratic regimes also<br />
ascribes virtues and defects. This is bound to be controversial, and<br />
the stakes are high. They reach the question of regime legitimacy, via<br />
the interpretation of international law and agreements.<br />
Since I <strong>do</strong>n’t think that minimal definitions are really minimal, I<br />
<strong>do</strong>n’t accept what critics are <strong>do</strong>ing at face value. I think that they have<br />
three kinds of objections to what they call minimal, formal, or purely<br />
procedural democracy. Two of these have merit but none is acceptable.<br />
I will call these the apologetic critique, the perfectionist critique, and<br />
the unitarian critique.<br />
The apologetic critique<br />
The apologetic critique is often transparent in its effort to save a government<br />
from condemnation by rejecting a definition that would deny<br />
it any serious claim to being democratic. Thus supporters of Castro<br />
or Mugabe or perhaps the regime in Kazakhstan want to emphasize<br />
that medical services are widely available in Cuba, that Mugabe’s<br />
party fought colonialism, and that Kazakhstan is a decently prosperous<br />
country for much of the population. All true (and Kazakhstan is<br />
relatively liberal compared to the others).<br />
Should we say that because such regimes can have positive<br />
attributes, they must also be democratic? If democracy is the only<br />
virtue of a government, then by logic this must be so – if medical<br />
care is okay in Cuba, then Cuba must be some kind of democracy. If<br />
democracy is the basic and in some sense the only political and social<br />
good, then anything good must be democratic.<br />
Given the weakness of this logic, those who make versions of this<br />
apologetic critique usually end up rejecting a definition of democracy