by Steven Poole
Yet, one might argue now, ‘will’ and ‘opinion’ are not always so easily divorced. Even if one assumes that the massive popular demonstrations against a war in Iraq in March 2003 expressed a majority view of the British people, Hayek might have agreed that Tony Blair was within his rights to ignore them, because they simply expressed the people’s ‘will’ on a singular matter. But whence did this ‘will’ derive? It surely grew logically from an ‘opinion’ about what, in general, justifies or fails to justify a war. And such an ‘opinion’, on Hayek’s view, ought to be the ‘highest authority’.
Blair had perhaps armed himself against such barbs with his repeated statements over the years that Britain should be, or was already, a ‘meritocracy’. If we compare ‘meritocracy’ with ‘democracy’, we see a marked change in who is doing the ruling. It is no longer the dull mass of ‘people’, but those with ‘merit’. The word ‘meritocracy’ does a lot of Unspeak work. It could be read as saying, for example, that those currently at the top of society must deserve to be there, and that the poor and downtrodden have only themselves to blame. And yet it is usefully silent on what appears to be the crucial matter of how ‘merit’ itself is measured: money, education, athletic ability, a discriminating palate for wine? In fact the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined for satirical purposes, in the title of a 1958 novel called The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was written by Michael Young, one of the drafters of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto. His novel was meant to show that a concentration on ‘merit’, defined as the acquisition of official degrees and diplomas, to the exclusion of other qualities that did not submit to measurement, would result in an elite ruling minority and a large ‘underclass’: exactly what had since happened to Britain, Young argued in 2001, deploring the official misappropriation of his word.25
Democracy, meritocracy, or something else? Sir Harold Walker, former UK Ambassador to Iraq, comments: ‘The Iraq war has shown up the truth of the phrase “Britain is ruled by an elective dictatorship”. As long as the Prime Minister can keep his party voting for him in Parliament, he can do anything he likes.’26 Rousseau had expressed the idea thus: ‘The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.’ In modern democracies, the electorate exerts its democratic right to choose its leader every four or five years; in the interim, it appears, the people may safely be ignored. This has led many theorists to relabel current western political systems as ‘thin democracy’,27 ‘pseudo-democracy’,28 or ‘low-intensity democracy’,29 a nicely ironic nod to the military concept of ‘low-intensity warfare’.
And yet we are not slaves. Harold Walker goes so far as to say that ‘Parliamentary democracy, with all its warts, is the best political system yet invented’. This can be true, however, only if democracy is something more than just rare elections. Democracy is theorised by contemporary political scientists as a complicated interlinked process – one involving elections, institutions, law, the protection of minorities, ‘a government which grants freedom of press and of speech to all’,30 and so on – the kind of system that does obtain, though it functions imperfectly, in the industrialised West. Yet this poses problems for those who wish to argue that they are spreading democracy to more benighted countries. First, the complexity of any democratic system worth the name makes it hard to take a quick look at a society and say ‘Yes, we have democracy here’: there is no easy test. Second, in a modern culture where news is disseminated visually, it is impossible to film the whole tedious process of democracy in a thirty-second report, and thereby prove in images that democracy is happening. As a consequence, television news adopts a kind of shorthand: the shot of people standing in line to vote has become the standard means of showing ‘democracy’. The danger of such visual telescoping is that it will come to imply that voting is all there is to the concept: that democracy is nothing but elections.
Such a deliberate confusion of the part for the whole may have its propagandistic uses. When eight million people voted in the Iraq elections of January 2005, this was held up as proof that the project of bringing democracy to that country had succeeded. ‘Democracy takes hold in Iraq,’ announced George W. Bush.31 But, Harold Walker argues: ‘The elections deserved a huge hurrah, but in terms of democracy that’s just an election of one man, one vote, which is really at most one third of any democracy that’s worth having at all. You must have one man one vote, but you must also have human rights and the rule of law.’ The election itself was not immaculate: Sunnis had boycotted it completely, and it was subsequently alleged that there had been a covert US programme to rig the vote in favour of its preferred candidate, former Ba’athist and CIA asset Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, who polled at 3 or 4 per cent throughout 2004 and then garnered nearly 14 per cent of the vote.32 One UN official told Seymour Hersh: ‘The election was not an election but a referendum on ethnic and religious identity’33
Neither had US forces successfully ensured that all the institutions of democracy were in place for the election. A week before the vote, Baghdad bus driver Ali Hatem glossed the term as he saw it: ‘Right now in Iraq democracy means you can do anything you want, including killing people in the street.’34 The US, moreover, had shown itself actively hostile to the idea of a free press, as was evidenced by their habit of ‘accidentally’ bombing the offices of Arab news station Al Jazeera (in both Afghanistan and Iraq) and closing down newspapers whose propaganda contradicted their own. Still, the election was a great publicity coup. George W. Bush had claimed that his own re-election as President in 2004 had constituted his ‘accountability moment’,35 thus implying that he had felt accountable to no one during his first term, and would not during his second. Similarly, the precipitate christening of the Iraq elections as ‘democracy’ reduced the complex notion of democracy to the idea of a ‘democratic moment’.
It was also, we were told, a ‘vote for freedom’.36 In 1917, Sir Mark Sykes of the British Foreign Office had made the following statement to the people of Baghdad: ‘Our armies have not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators.’37 In 2003, Paul Wolfowitz said that the Iraqi people ‘view us as their hoped-for liberator’.38 Having been liberated again, Iraqis in 2005 were certainly voting for freedom, but their conception of freedom did not necessarily coincide with the American one. Harold Walker argues: ‘To us, at the particular stage we are in our political development, freedom on the whole means freedom against the government of the day. But to an Iraqi, freedom from the Americans, or freedom from the Ottomans or the French or the British, is more important, relatively, than freedom from his own government. […] When the Americans went into Iraq, they talked of Iraqis who would automatically want freedom from Saddam, and embrace western democracy – well, they wanted freedom from Saddam, certainly, 90 per cent of them, but then they didn’t want bloody foreigners in their country either.’ One Marine who was in Iraq summed up the matter succinctly: ‘After seven months patrolling Ramadi, I know that most Iraqis are ambivalent towards the American presence in Iraq. They are happy we removed Hussein, but frustrated we are still there. They are also angry that we haven’t provided them everything we promised: peace and safety, or even water and electricity.’39
Once it was the case that ‘liberation’ meant ridding a country of a foreign occupying power: thus one talked of the liberation of France from Nazi occupation in the Second World War, and it would have sounded mighty strange to sell that war’s aim, at the beginning, as the liberation of the German people from their own government. Things have changed. The ‘liberation’ of Iraq in 2003 turned instantly into an occupation by the same forces. This fact was inconvenient to Paul Wolfowitz, who saw the accurate description of it as bad PR. ‘Once we accepted the label of being an occupation authority, it hurt us,’ Wolfowitz complained. ‘It was debated among the lawyers, and ultimately we were told this was the i
nternational legal framework. I didn’t like it. Just the word “occupation,” I think, has allowed al-Jazeera to draw a parallel with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.’40 Wolfowitz acknowledged that, according to international law, the US was in fact engaged in ‘occupation’, but still argued that they shouldn’t have ‘accepted the label’. In other words, he seemed to think that if they had simply called it something else – perhaps a mass sleepover – then no one would have noticed that the occupation was actually an occupation. This shows a very strong faith in the power of language to pull the wool over people’s eyes: a remarkable commitment, indeed, to the principles of Unspeak.
Nonetheless, the people of occupied Iraq did turn out to vote in great numbers, despite dangerous and violent conditions. And on our television screens there was a curious visual rhyme between the Iraqi citizens at polling stations lining up two and three abreast, and columns of soldiers. Maybe freedom and democracy really were on the march after all.
Real tangible benefits
Why should the global march of freedom and democracy be considered desirable for the participants in the ‘war on terror’? Is it because, as Paula Dobriansky tried to argue, democracies don’t start wars, or, as George W. Bush recast the notion in a mathematical formula: ‘Democracies equal peace’?41 Hardly. Is it instead because terrorism cannot emerge in democracies? Ask the victims of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, or Basque group ETA, or Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. An alternative reason for the championing of freedom and democracy is suggested by a revealing form of language that sometimes slips out into official pronouncements. This is Bush’s account of how he told Vladimir Putin why Russia should become more democratic:
I told him it was very important that capital see a rule of law, that there be stability, there not be a doubt about whether or not somebody invests or whether or not the laws change.42
‘Capital’ is here anthropomorphised as a needy person, on whose behalf the President of the US has been sent to negotiate with the President of Russia. Stephen Krasner, head of policy planning at the State Department, said: ‘What we want is a world of democratic, market-oriented countries.’43 The second term glosses the first. ‘In the 1980s,’ according to Richard Falk, ‘the Reagan Doctrine identified adherence to a market economy as the crucial defining feature of a democratic polity.’44 It proved to be a durable doctrine.
Condoleezza Rice’s 2005 trip to Latin America brought further illumination as to the meaning of democracy: ‘The success of democracy in Latin America,’ she explained afterwards, ‘depends on the continued openness of our hemisphere, openness to new ideas and to new people, and especially to new trade.’45 Trade is mentioned last in this list, almost as an afterthought; but the use of ‘especially’ means it is valued above all the rest. Politely, Rice paid lip-service to vague, feel-good concepts of ‘openness’, ‘new ideas’, and ‘new people’, before coming to the real business at hand: trade. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli explained further: ‘Talk,’ he instructed the assembled journalists, ‘about things like economic reform, development of entrepreneurship, good governance, transparency, anti-corruption […] programs that translate principles of political participation, principles of emancipation, principles of tolerance and opportunity into real tangible benefits.’46 High-flown principles are just so much waffle; they can only be ‘translated’ into ‘real tangible benefits’ by the operation of western-model capitalism. Ereli’s view that principles are useless in themselves seemed to be confirmed by the foreign adventures of one famous US corporation. In June 2005, users of Microsoft’s newly launched Chinese weblog service were banned from using words and phrases such as ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic movement’: attempts to type these terms invoked an error message that read: ‘This item contains forbidden speech.’47 The ‘principles of emancipation’ had got lost in translation; but ‘real tangible benefits’ were no doubt accruing to someone.
And yet trade is, on some people’s views, the perfect democratic instrument. Indeed, if we are happy to redefine ‘democracy’ to mean only that moment at which elections are held, it is possible to consider capitalism as the ideal form of democracy, consisting of a grand procession of innumerable little electoral moments, when ‘consumer choice’ is exercised in the supermarket or the cinema or the car showroom. Now, a company can only succeed if it attracts the monetary ‘votes’ of customers. Branches of Starbuck’s could not have ramified across the western world, in what is sometimes regarded as a lamentable example of ‘globalisation’, had people in their vast multitudes not actually walked through its doors and paid remarkable sums of money for its tasty lattes. So it is tempting to suppose that the most successful companies must be the best at giving people what they want. Then one might conclude that profit is a measure of democratic efficiency, and even virtue. You might then even criticise existing forms of democracy on the basis that they do not adequately recreate capitalist models, as Matthew Taylor of Britain’s Institute for Public Policy Research did: ‘Would you choose the same supermarket for four years?’ he asked. ‘Nobody would tell an elector that they could not go to Sainsbury’s because they made a four-year contract with Tesco.’48
As a universal analysis, the idea of capitalism as ideal democracy might be challenged by the existence of monopolies (such as Microsoft) that limit people’s real options, and businesses (such as Halliburton) that do not sell directly to the people but to government agencies, in a feedback loop whereby executives move back and forth between corporate and public positions. (As of May 2004, more than a hundred officials in the Bush administration were involved in regulating businesses for which they had previously worked ‘as lobbyists, lawyers or company advocates’.49) Yet the view that commercial success equals pure moral good is one that businesspeople have used Unspeak to advocate for many hundreds of years.
Historian Quentin Skinner has shown that the newly emerging business class in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England made deliberate raids on the language of virtue in order to render their own operations respectable. There was, as Skinner explains, ‘a certain element of structural similarity – which they eagerly exploited – between the specifically Protestant ideal of individual service and devotion (to God) and the alleged commercial ideals of service (to one’s customers) and dedication (to one’s work).’50 Thus, for example, commercialists tried to apply the word ‘religious’ to their ideals of strict observance of timekeeping and administrative competence. However, Skinner argues, since ordinary people did not accept that the normal criteria for using the word ‘religious’ actually obtained in commercial operations, the attempt to cloak trade in godly virtue was a failure. The result was simply to create a new, weak meaning of ‘religious’, as in ‘I attend the meetings of my Department religiously’51 Similarly with the claims of modern businesses to have a ‘philosophy’, which is set out in their ‘literature’: we understand that these are watered-down metaphorical applications, rather than viewing the companies as sharing the rich and complex virtues of real philosophy and real literature.52
On the other hand, a successful revolution was made in the application of the term ‘commodity’, which had been first borrowed by the capitalist classes as a term of Unspeak:
Before the advent of commercial society, to speak of something as a commodity was to praise it, and in particular to affirm that it answered to one’s desires, and could thus be seen as beneficial, convenient, a source of advantage. Later an attempt was made to suggest that an article produced for sale ought to be seen as a source of benefit or advantage to its purchaser, and ought in consequence to be described and commended as a commodity. […] [E]ventually the original applications withered away, leaving us with nothing more than the current and purely descriptive meaning of commodity as an object of trade.53
Other terms of commerce appear to have followed a similar pattern, without being quite as successful in annihilating previous meanings. Consider the language of lending money. ‘Cred
it’, which means credibility, trustworthiness, or moral praiseworthiness (from Latin credere, to believe), was hijacked to mean either lending money to your bank – if your cheque account is ‘in credit’ you are therefore virtuous – or being allowed access to the bank’s money via a plastic card. ‘Interest’, meanwhile, which originally meant either intellectual curiosity or a legal or moral claim to something, became the mechanism by which money breeds more money. (We may suppose that this use was promoted by those who found money inherently interesting.)
The term ‘economy’, too, underwent a notable shift. Spelled ‘oeconomy’, it originally denoted the management of a domestic household, from the Greek word usually applied to a steward. It subsequently came to be applied to the management of a nation’s finances, first by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and more systematically with the invention of the phrase ‘political economy’ in the late eighteenth century.54 It was perhaps hoped that the connotations of domestic virtue contained in the original usage would pass over into its new use in theories of capitalism. Yet this was not to everyone’s taste: in the twentieth century, Hayek argued that this use of ‘economy’ was another instance of the confusion of language, because it might imply that an economy had to be directed and managed. Since he was, on the contrary, in favour not of direction but of ‘spontaneous order’, he proposed the term’s wholesale replacement with ‘catallaxy’. This term, he explained, ‘derived from the Greek verb katal-latein (or katallassein) which significantly means not only “to exchange” but also “to receive into the community” and “to turn from enemy into friend”’.55 Hayek’s novel philological proposal, sadly, met with limited success, but the notion that trade turned enemies into friends persisted, as we shall see later.