Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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