The Elephant and the Lion: An enquiry into the roots of democracy
This is a draft ready to be published.
1. Coincidences
Since 2006 I spend some time with my friend John Clarke at the Wild Coast in South Africa. This is the area of the amaPondo people, which has a long tradition of resistance against those who want to change their ways: from King Faku on, accommodating between the Boers, the English and the Zulu conquerors; King Sigcau, who was imprisoned by Cecil Rhodes but freed again by a High Court, which put the law above the imperial prerogatives which Rhodes usurped; the Chiefs who revolted against the apartheid regime and were hanged; an heir of king Sigcau, Mpondombini Justice Sigcau (+ 2013) who successfully won the case in the South African Constitutional Court against president Zuma who tried to depose him for embodying the resistance of the amaPondo against economic development through mining and the building of a toll road.
Those stories of conflict have been reported in John Clarke’s books: the Promise of Justice1. However there is a paradox here. The paradox is that the kingdom of the amaPondo is fundamentally democratic in nature, and it is this democracy, which has made it so resilient in the face of change. The title of this article (The Elephant and the Lion) finds its origin in the way the Swazis name separately both the queen and king in power, retaining even in the concept of royalty itself an inherent tension or conflict. After all, both animals in a quite different way can be labeled as kings of the bush. However, as animals they avoid confronting each other, they co-habit. In a similar fashion in this culture, king and queen are envisaged as equal sources of power and as such bound to have a conflict-ridden perspective. Hence the particular quality of my definition of democracy:
A democratic social system is a conflict-ridden system, which integrates the dynamic of conflict without resorting to threat or violence. Just to be clear, by violence I mean resolving conflict by getting rid of one of the parties of the conflict through exclusion: gagging, exile or execution.
1 http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Justice-Book-One-Story- ebook/dp/B00EHMT9D6 http://www.amazon.com/The-Promise-Justice-Book-Story- ebook/dp/B00GS5TR78
1 At first glance, a democratic kingdom reads as an oxymoron, quite differently from the classical definition: democracy as a form of governing the people by the people for the people. The problem with this definition is the definite article “the”. If we read: governing people by people for people, we get immediately confronted with the plural, hence plurality and diversity of the word “people”. Nationalistic populism always has hidden behind that definite article “the”. Once plurality is assumed, conflicts in purposes, worldviews, values ensue. This is why I redefined democracy in the way I did. The existence of the oxymoron begs for an inquiry into the roots of what democracy might be.
Coincidentally, the fact that I was preparing my participation to a series of conferences about democracy and the publication of the books of John has been the trigger for this article. The conferences have been held in a community of about twenty persons from 6 to 84 years, which since 1984 (coincidentally) are forming a ‘micro-democracy’. They have no problem to recognize the definition I gave to their experience.
As a cyberneticist (kubernetes=governor in Greek) in theory and in practice, I was bound to ask systemic questions: questions about the meaning of democracy and the implications of the institutions through which it is embodied in practice. Apparently, nowadays, more and more questions are being asked about those institutions. Democracy appears to be more than universal suffrage: the failure of “democratic structures” in many ex-colonies, the failure of nation-building experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the questions about the Arab ‘democratic’ revolutions and their development, in my opinion are telltale signs that some rethinking is necessary. Even the European Union and the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ come to mind together with a resurgence of nationalistic populist tendencies. As the number of voters diminishes, where voting is not obligatory, and the requirements for governance by the public opinion increases, while the governors try to reduce the public space through de-regulation and privatization, paradoxically increasing exponentially the number of laws and regulations, inevitably we have to start to see the very notion of democracy as a paradox. Given this insight, it would seem that democracy is not so much ‘acquired’ as a process that is signaled through a continuous struggle against a tendency towards totalitarianism and strong leadership - the good hegemon, as Hobbes already assumed in his Leviathan.
This article does not provide solutions. As the title indicates, it is an enquiry into the roots of the notion of democracy itself. The best that the author can do is to reframe some questions about democratic structures and processes. This reframing may help not to ‘revolutionize’ the existing processes and structures, which as human artifacts are bound to stay imperfect. Hopefully these questions may help to “Make Work Systems
2 better”2, the title I chose for my book published in 1994. Already at that time I gave some enquiring directions, mainly in the chapter treating the domain of value systems. In fact this article can be seen as the result of my experience and my thinking since then.
It seems to me that there are two perspectives, which can be taken about democracy: a focus upon the political institutions embodying democracy, the representative parliamentary system and the various public agencies making them work. I shall comment somewhat on this institutional perspective in this article. However, as a consequence of my definition of democratic social structures, my emphasis shall be more on the social mechanisms, and the democratic attitudes of the actors, which in any social system enable maintaining the conflict inherent to any coexistence of differences without violence. This is the reason for the subtitle of this article: ‘an inquiry into the roots of democracy’. This is also the reason why referring to this perspective upon democracies, I use as illustrations kingdoms, private companies, even extended families. Democracy will only be effective, if in all kinds of social systems democratic mechanisms and attitudes are accepted. Relegating democracy to only the formal political realm is in my opinion one of the reason of the continued failure to export the notion of democracy to other cultures.
In a first part of the paper, I question the concept of participative democracy from the perspective of the practitioner, using insights from systems thinking and practice. In this way, I enlarge the concept of democracy beyond the narrow meaning it has in the political sciences.
In a second part I question the abuse of ‘sums’ in political lore and show how ‘relations’ can replace them. In effect, this is a review of the concept of subsidiarity. This part of the paper confronts the problems of the scale of democratic social systems and questions its reduction to nation-states.
In a third part, based on the previous ones, I ask questions about the meaning of collective identities, of constitutions, of masses and crowds, real or virtual, in relation to the basic human need to belong to a social system.
2. Participating in what?
2.1 Participating in action: action democracy
One of the most perverse legacies of the Greek and Latin cultures regarding participation comes from the fact that although we trace notions of democracy to them, in point of fact they were slave societies –
2 Hoebeke,L Making Work Systems Better Wiley 1994
3 a split of the social between the citizen (thinker) and the doer (slave). This splitting between thinking and doing and the assumed superiority of thinking above doing still permeates our own culture, reflected ubiquitously in its structures, rewards and appreciation systems. Mostly we are unaware of it.
This has resulted in a rather strange way of organizing society: decisions and policies are discussed and taken, which have to be implemented by an executive body. The basic assumption behind this way of thinking is that certain human beings have to forget their capability of thinking for themselves and instead do exactly what is asked of them. This is the definition of a functionary: a person embodying completely a function allocated by his superior - the one who created the function in the first place. At heart, this is as inhuman as slavery, where we find its origins.
However, it is important to note that in practice it is the person who acts who is the person taking the decision. He/she takes the decision based on his/her personal interpretation; a subjective understanding of what is required from him/her. The satirical soap ‘Yes, Minister’ is a good illustration how the person who acts (the public servant), is the one who controls the events in spite of the one who is thinking (the decision-or policy-maker). This is the reason why, in Montesquieu’s proposal the separation of equal powers for a representative democratic structure, in practice the executive power becomes the most powerful.
My experience of working with groups, which are involved in a concrete joint activity is indeed that when in the group thinkers and doers start to work separately, the doers are achieving something on their own accord in spite of the best wishes and quality of the thinking process of the thinkers. One might say that tinkers (thinking in action), appear to be more effective in joint action than thinkers (thinking to delegate actions).
Trying to understand this phenomenon leads me to clarify the apparent tautology in the words participative democracy. The question to be asked is ‘participating in order to achieve something, but WHAT?’. It may be useful to get deeper insight into that ‘something’. After all, the ‘WHAT’ fundamentally changes the nature of the participative process.
First and most naturally in order to stay viable in a more or less friendly material environment, human beings as social beings always realize their identities as human beings through a variety of distributed activities, the so-called distribution of labor. In fact democratic participation for those distributed activities is the most normal form of self-regulation in a human social domain. The best examples are found in voluntary activities as in hobby teams, charity fairs, manifestations, etc. Voluntary participation is democratic in so far the participants are equal in their
4 will to achieve the purpose of the activity and accept the inequality in contributions. They may have quite different motives and views about what has to be achieved, but this common will is itself sufficient glue. Volunteers sharing the will to achieve a certain result do voluntary activities. Even, leadership as an active contribution in this social process is moving continually between the participants of the activities in function of the problems and disturbances occurring in the process they are involved in.
This insight has been well illustrated by my observations of the yearly Holy Blood procession in Bruges, wherein about 1500 citizens of the city are involved. There are no menial tasks, roles or functions. The diversity of contributions is only evaluated by how well the procession has gone. Naturally there also are planners and managers, but quite normally those functions are combined with an active participation into the material activities. The task-at-hand defines a hierarchical structure of tasks not of persons.
When people voluntarily engage themselves in a process to materialize or realize a common purpose, participative democracy is the best way of organizing. Inequalities in contribution are inevitable: participants are not equal in their contributions, but such inequality is embraced, as it is understood as a normal distribution of tasks and expertise.
Surely, as in all common human endeavors, conflicts are bound to appear. Misunderstandings cannot be avoided, even amongst people voluntarily contributing to a common purpose. Disagreements happen, even during the process, about the means to use and their usage. But incipient conflicts don’t escalate by a strong and immediate feedback system: the materialization of the common purpose, leads to quick, sometimes provisional and improvised accommodations between the conflicting parties, leaving no time or energy to be lost through conflicts and debates during the process of interaction.
However, there is proper time for such conflicts about means and their usage as an inherent aspect of viable human social endeavor after the event. And such a time for reflection is best foreseen as part of the whole process. These ‘debates’ are a preliminary to the next level of participative democracy: some of the ways to handle them and to maintain the conflict are characteristic of what I like to call the deliberative participatory democracy.
2.2. Participating through speech: the deliberative democracy
It is no coincidence that one of the major institutions of our democracies is called a parliament: we even speak of the parliamentary democracy.
5 Etymologically, the word ‘parliament’ means the place of speaking. Speaking is a different kind of action than doing. It follows or precedes action, and is rarely done at the same time. Speaking, as an expression of how people see the world and want to see it, is necessarily ‘ideological’ in nature: literally it follows the logos, the arrangement of ideas. In this space of deliberation, the direct material feedback, which accompanies an action, is lacking.
When there are debates about ends and the related means, lack of direct feedback results in particular rules of thumb, which are essential for assuring the quality of the debate.
1. In this ideological debate, differences in Weltanshauungen have to be kept visible and sustained as integral for the deliberation: unanimity is a dangerous phenomenon. Either unanimity is around such a general definition of the end that when transformed into action, the differences shall reappear in the discussions about the means to the ends or violence under any form has been applied to the dissenters, disempowering the democratic nature of the debate.
Due to the previously mentioned privileging of thinking and speaking above action, there is a basic assumption that action only is possible when there is a consensus about the ends to achieve. Hence the assumption in deliberative participation as to the need to arrive at consensus, when in fact it would be sufficient that there is an agreement on taking action. I call the process of leading to such an agreement an accommodation process. This means that all persons and parties involved accept that a certain action shall be taken by some of its members, even though some of them might disagree about the value (or ends) of that action. The ambition level of the action taken is the acceptance and expression of the power relations between the members of the process itself. Eventually, the remaining disagreement can be expressed by a vote, in which the minority states its disagreement on the principles. The key thing is agreement to come to some form of action. Skeptics and those, who let matters ride, permit the initiative against their value stance.
This is the only way to go beyond an ideological debate by permitting to act and thus opening a feedback loop with reality: empiricism as the opening of the conflict and as a learning process. It is clear that members of the deliberative process themselves take action and don’t delegate it to some external party not involved in the process, e.g. an executive power.
2. As a consequence of previous democratic rule of thumb, the number of members of a deliberative process has to be limited. In our culture, the split between decision-making and implementation in large organizations
6 result many times in processes, which are far from participative or deliberative democratic processes. As indicated in previous paragraphs, a decision is an action taken by some people confronted with a material reality. Mostly, what are labeled decisions, are nothing more than the airing of an intention by a decision-making body. That intention is the basis for interpretation for those implementing the decision, and that interpretation is again a political act, linked to the Weltanschauung of the one implementing the intention. Bureaucratic reflexes start to appear, where the one taking action, hides his/her responsibility behind the decisions taken by the decision-making body: “Ich habe es nicht gewüsst” or “Orders are orders”.
Strategies and policies in large organizations are best seen as the expression of an intention: knowing the agreements and the disagreements with that intention belongs to the real decision maker, the one whose own actions are based upon that intention. The thing to note here, is that as a natural course of matters we once more would expect to discern in these actions the incipient conflict (which conflict, however remains in the mode of the deliberative participatory decision-making body.
I have elaborated on the size of this kind of deliberative bodies in my book “Making Work Systems better”3,: around 30 is optimal, with a maximum of the span of relations: about 150 members. Don’t forget that this is the size of human social groups during the millennia, before they began to settle in greater entities (i.e. cities), following the first agricultural revolution around 10.000 BC.
3. Another consequence about the rule of thumb is that, if the feedback from the real world is essential for assessing the value of an action, such a ‘responsive’ action cannot be fully delegated to an external party. A deliberative process without action becomes a circular, never ending fight about who is right and who is wrong, mostly determined by the most powerful in the body, rather than through a flow of deliberation. It is found to exclude instead of nurture the dynamic of the inherent conflict. In a healthy participatory deliberative process, there are no winners and losers, there is a legitimate majority and accepted minority: a minority, which should not be overruled in the name of some consensus (e.g. party-line). In other words the minority agrees, in spite of their disagreement in principle, to go along with the action taken by some of the members of the deliberative process. In this way, they maintain the democratic tonus; they maintain the conflict between their values, without violence. And all persons involved remain included in the process. The late Nelson Mandela has in a certain way exemplified this
3 op.cit.
7 democratic behavior by accommodating with the white minority in South Africa in order to enable a new constitution, stressing the right of every one to be included in the ‘rainbow nation’. Another example can be found in the “sociocratic”4 decision-making processes developed in the seventies of the last century in the companies run by Endenburg in Holland.
4. In debates, seeking to elicit accommodation, there is no need to refer to the public or general interest or commonwealth in order to reinforce some abstract notion of consensus. Participative deliberative democracy consists of members who necessarily, through their Weltanschauung, talk from a partial interest and take a partial stance. No member may claim to be above the various parties. Once more, this tendency is linked to the futile search for a fixed consensus and championing the general interest is mostly a power game played by the ones wanting to be the most influential without it being named and explicit. Again - as an indicator of the quality of the process - if all members seem to 100% agree in principle, there can be said to be agreeing a ‘mother statement’5 (Stafford Beer): a statement so bland and general that nobody can be against it. Such statements are meaningless, and should be referred as quickly as possible to the dustbin. Politically correct statements against which nobody may disagree in name of tolerance and freedom of speech are exemplary for this consensus mindset. I think, that the loss of trust in political parties and their representatives is due to the fact that all of them claim only to have the general interest in mind and stating that the other parties don’t have it. Even worse, the real tendency resides to claim that each wants the ‘same’ good government. The differentiator then degrades into a focus on different styles of managerial issues such as efficiency, the ‘good’ use of means without any reference to whom or what they wish to govern. This is another major cause for increased disillusion and loss of credibility.
2.3. The delicate question of representative democracy
In several articles I have already developed the characteristics of the representative role6. I highlight here the main points I made. I don’t define a representative simply as someone elected by a constituency. I define a representative in somewhat more general terms, as someone who has the role to speak on behalf of others. Such a role may take
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy 5 Beer, S Beyond Dispute, Wiley 1994 6 e.g., Hoebeke,L Identity: the paradoxical nature of organizational closure Kybernetes 2006 Volume: 35 Issue: 1/2 Page: - 75 Emerald Group Publishing Limited
8 form in various ways: through an election by a constituency, through a lottery between citizens as was done in ancient Athens, through appointment, as is the case in organizations, where appointed managers have to fulfill that particular role in management meetings, or by chiefs and kings and queens acting in this role- indeed, even by professional, paid, lobbyists negotiating policies on behalf of their pay-masters.
It is clear that the representative role is only functional in a context of deliberative participation (as above): the representative becomes a speaker on behalf of others. In fact, from a systemic perspective, he is fulfilling a boundary role between two different social systems: on the one hand, the deliberative body in which he himself participates, on the other hand the body who appointed him as representative. Managing this double membership in him/herself is the core and fundamental art of the representative. As such, the representative embodies the conflict in himself between the tendency to accommodate as a member of the deliberative body and his distinct belonging to the body, which appointed him/her. His ability to cope with that internal conflict and to accommodate with him/herself defines the quality of the democratic process he/she is part of.
This understanding of the role of the representative leads me to a simple rule, which many times is neglected: being a representative can never be a full time job on its own. It is a role, which has to be adopted from time to time, for the duration of deliberative democratic processes. The person fulfilling this role has to contribute in one or other way to the activities of the social system, he is representing as a constitutive partner in the materialization of what the social system stands for.
This simple rule questions the role of a certain kind of organizations: what I call ideological organizations. By ideological organization, I mean an organization, which sees as its only task to speak – in other words, without the need for any feedback from a material environment. Remember it is this feedback loop, which forms a reality check of what the relevance and accuracy of what is spoken about. The ideological organization has lost sight of this fundamental requirement. The split between thinking and doing, mentioned at the beginning of this article, has generated in our society many such ideological organizations. I don’t refer only to what we think of as political parties, but also many other representative bodies which have the same characteristics: workers unions, employer’s federations, professional bodies, sectorial federations, think tanks, scientific platforms, etc.
Losing touch with this kind of feedback inevitably creates anxiety. I have frequently seen how such organizations, intended as representative intermediary agencies, start to create their own activities, start to develop
9 their own purpose and develop activities to achieve them, and quickly forget their constituency. They may become what Beer referred to as ‘pathologically autopoïetic’7. Indeed, instead of representative bodies, they become stakeholders in their own right, with their own priorities, strategies, means, etc. They cease speaking in the name of their constituency, and instead start talking in the name of their own organization, to which they belong. And it is this latter which comes to the foreground when they are involved in deliberative democratic processes. The difficult dual loyalty, proper to the representative role, becomes nearly impossible to handle, when a third loyalty interferes - loyalty to the system they are supposed to constitute through their representation.
Many dysfunctions in participative systems can be understood once this very natural human social mechanism is understood and taken account of. The need of a civil society to complement the formal representative bodies in our democracies can be seen as a symptom of this dynamic. However, if civil society in its own terms starts to develop its own ideological organizations, the problem is not solved but exacerbated and the society ceases to be ‘civil’!
My experience with stakeholder meetings is that their success (their capability to come to an accommodation and to initiate actions about the relevant issues at hand) is directly related to the fact that the persons participating in it have a real stake in the entailed issues. What this means is that they contribute in one or other way to the materialization of the purposes of the system they represent. In such meetings only initiatives taken by members participating in the meeting should be taken into account. Proposals that ‘others’ should take action must immediately be referred to the dustbin. This is the way in which in practice the dysfunction of ideological organizations can be circumvented.
I think that because of these same dysfunctional pathologies, the success of the introduction of managerial science in governance has tended to be so destructive for the democratic heart so necessary for modern day civic society. Mainstream managerial theory, takes as given the split between thinking and doing. Managers hold themselves to ‘think for the others’, who have to ‘carry out’ what the manager has thought about.
Unconsciously (hopefully consciously), the representative in a democratic deliberative process is not only representing the lofty ideals he/she stands for, but also the ‘economical’ issues within which he/she finds him/herself. By economical, I mean, those activities of the body he/she
7 Beer,S The Heart of Enterprise Wiley 1979
10 represents, which are related to the materiality of that body in its own right. Human beings are embodied beings, and what I call the ‘material’ dimension is always there, even when denied. There is nothing wrong with this as long as the denial does not become a smoke screen. Lobby groups and their representatives are after all part and parcel of any democratic deliberative process. Transparency of the process does not mean that everything in the process should be recorded and put into scrutiny for every one. Transparency is clarifying also the economical aspects behind the ideological or value context.
It is no surprise then that the political domain, which should be the domain of ideas and ideals and values, is using mainly economical (in the conventional sense) language nowadays. Most political discussions are about means and their distribution and governance becomes reduced to management. This is an unfortunate consequence of the above- mentioned denial. Human systems are always self-regulatory, sometimes in very strange ways. When only ideas and values are on the agenda, necessarily the deliberative process will necessarily start to focus upon means and resources! As Stafford Beer8 wrote: “the purpose of the system is what it does, not what it says it does”. I interpret “what it does” as related to those activities, which have a material feedback from the environment of the system, ‘the economical activities’.
3. From aggregates to relations: reviewing the subsidiarity principle.
3.1. The problem of scale and scaling up.
The democratic principles and institutions are generally supposed to have started in Athens, a small city-state. Moreover the only inhabitants able to take up arms were its citizens. At certain times the meetings in the Agora at certain times had about 6000 participants (about the same number of participants as in the yearly World Economic Forum in Davos). In the middle Ages and in the Renaissance, democratic experiences were held also on the city level in the North of Italy and some other European cities.9 With the emergence of more complex social systems and cities, we witness a major qualitative shift: from kinship to neighborhoods. A territorial dimension is added: democracy became a quality that was confined within the walls of the city and not something to do with blood or some other form of biological relations.
I first became aware of the importance of this qualitative shift when I was introduced in the history of the amaPondo kingdom in South Africa. Only recently there - in the second half of the nineteenth century – we observe
8 Beer, S Diagnosing the System for Organizations, Wiley 1985 9 Van Reybroeck, D Tegen verkiezingen, De Bezige Bij 2013
11 the shift from kinship to territoriality. King Faku addressed this issue when he was confronted with the immigration of fugitives from the violence of the Zulu king, Shaka, and the pressure of the Boers and the English colonists on the local population. In one fell swoop, the amaPondo kingdom shifted from a system of kinship relations to a territorial entity10. This scaling up is a good illustration that when size changes, there is also an intrinsic qualitative change – we can say that a new system is emerging. It would be interesting to inquire on that shift at the origins of the city-states and of their democratic institutions, though possibly too distant and hidden by events to answer. In the case of the amaPondo people, its resilience is linked to a systematic use of the subsidiarity principle, which I develop further.
The founding fathers of our own modern democracies were confronted with the legacy of absolutist countries, which had grown in territorial scale, well beyond the size of those city-states. From this qualitative shift we observe the emergence of the nation. All at once people started to belong - if sometimes obliged by force - to an entity called the nation- state. Once more, this is symptomatic of a qualitative shift, worthwhile to study on its own right.
Nowadays, we are witnessing an analogous phenomenon, with the emergence of so-called international entities. The most important example is the development after the second world war of the European Union. But, before that, the emergence of the Federal United States of America after the civil war signaled a qualitative change in the nature of the democratic institutions. The political systems in the USA are still struggling with this change and the European Union is trying to find its way out of the problems generated by its scaling up. It is quite interesting that the City Mayor’s Foundation11 started in 2003. It states quite clearly that global challenges can only be dealt with on the local scale, on the city-scale. The foundation treats the emergence of networks of cities as a new emergent democratic phenomenon: a form able to manage on a human scale the effects of globalization.12
In the same way that SME’s are not small large corporations but demand a different governance approach than the latter, because they are qualitatively different, so large democracies cannot be governed in the same way as the city-states, which were their origin. Van Reybroeck13 in his essay ‘Against Elections’, points out how the founding fathers of our modern democracies didn’t trust the people and created a meritocratic
10 Clarke J, op.cit. 11 www.citymayors.com/ 12 Barber, B. If mayors ruled the world, Yale university press 2013 13 Van Reybroeck, D op.cit.
12 elite thus separating governors and governed. For this reason, in the electoral process they discarded one of the basic dynamics in which governed and governors could interchange roles: election by lottery. This has been their way to deal with what they saw as a quantitative change, not being aware of the qualitative change they were actually faced with.
Some years ago, when thinking on democratic processes, I coined an aphorism, related to the scale phenomenon, which goes as follows:
Whatever human beings are involved in, they are involved in it at a human scale.
The notion of some ‘human scale’ comes from our human origins, where the size of social systems was reduced to kinship relations. Our span of relations - the number of people we can deal with directly in that we know their faces and can speak to them - is about 150. This span of relations is the same for the President of the United States as for the gardener of the White House. This is the scale where fruitful democratic deliberative processes take place.
3.2. Reviewing the subsidiarity principle
In the sixteenth century the Jesuit Francisco Suarez14 developed the concept of subsidiarity in the political realm. It remains one of the basic principles in the European Union, in spite of problematic issues to do with what the system ‘does’. The principle is quite simple: it makes the point that decisions are best taken on the lowest possible level, and only decisions which cannot be encompassed on that level should attract the attention or claim of a higher level. How is it that this common sense principle gets so messed up in practice in all kind of large organizations, (ie. those organizations which go beyond the possible span of relations of an individual actor and have to start to deal with ‘anonymities’, themselves as entities - departments, divisions, areas, organizations). In such a model, laws and regulations coming from a higher level have to be obeyed by lower levels and in bureaucratic systems this leads to an ‘order is order’ mentality, which seems to be rather at odds with a democratic way of operations.
What Suarez could not yet conceptualize and what has passed unnoticed in the development of large organizations is the qualitative difference between aggregates and networks of relations. It is only after the second world war that a body of knowledge has been developed to
14 Suarez,F (1602) A treatise on laws and God the lawgiver in Brown,A Davis,H.J. Waldron,J Williams,G.L(eds) Selection from three workd of Francisco Suarez, Clarendon 1944
13 understand and deal with complex systems: chaos theory, complexity theory, systems thinking and cybernetics are all approaches which arose from the consciousness that another perspective of ordering is needed than classification and aggregation. The intellectual Cartesian tradition, which is an offspring of scholastic and Platonic thinking, had found its limits and couldn’t find any other way to make sense of the complex reality than ordering by classification and to deal with classes as if they were entities on their own. And this tradition still has enormous influence and hold.
In language we discover this ordering by classification every time we use a name for an aggregate or sum of entities. The major part of economical and sociological thinking, theory and models, is built on such an ‘ordering’ methodology. Conceptually – ideologically - there is nothing wrong with it. But regarding real world issues of governance in a time where diversity and complexity are issues, using classification and sums for ordering is creating havoc. Indeed, every ordering scheme used in practice contains ambiguities and internal contradictions: reality itself refuses to adapt itself or fit into any classification system. On any classification list there is an item: others! And the person who classifies ‘reality’ interprets each class on its own.
In a self-regulating way, the proliferation of disciplines (classified science), of target groups (classified society) of ministries and public agencies (classified government) generates its own complexity where ‘more of the same’ doesn’t work any more. A cartoon I recently saw in a daily paper illustrates this marvelously. It was related to defining a quota for women in academic careers. A woman is standing before what seems to be a selection manager (selecting, thus inclusion and exclusion is a consequence of the classification methodology). He says to the woman: you would have better chances if you also were lesbian and coming in a wheel chair!
The basic unit of our democratic systems has been defined as the person, (the individual pursuing happiness), so the subsidiarity principle should relate to a sum of individuals. A system of higher order becomes then implicitly or explicitly a greater quantity of individuals. There is no reference to a change in quality when one starts to work with larger systems. E.g. the basic rule that every one is equal before the law cannot be realized in practice, because each individual is unique. Hence, we have a juridical system, which reintroduces differences before the law through mediation and courts. This juridical system becomes bogged with new rules and regulations with the basic idea that more classification and more diverse classes will match the variety of the real world. Classification schemes and aggregates reach the limits of practicability.
14
The modern disciplines, attempting to come to grips with the issue of complexity, have discovered another way of ordering: relations. Instead of focusing on the components of a system and trying to make sense of the whole through its components, they focus upon the whole and the relations between the components make sense because of that whole. As we develop further, this way of ordering is more practical to deal with an increasing complexity and diversity.
What could this mean for reviewing the useful concept of subsidiarity in democratic processes? A system of higher order does not focus upon the sum of the systems of lower order but upon their mutual relations. So, a system of lower order has its complete autonomy for its internal affairs, while it becomes part of a system of higher order when its behavior impacts the relation with other systems. Family rows are best settled in the family itself, until the neighborhood is disturbed by it. Then a neighborhood-committee in which one or more of the family members are present deliberate upon the disturbing relations with the neighborhood and in that context help the family to contain its row among the family boundaries. There are examples on community level where the same methodology has been effectively and efficiently dealt with. The usage of water and what is done to waste water in dry areas is at the base of many intercommunity contracts, defining the constraints of the usage of water for the communities without defining how they should use their water. In fact, the confederalist spirit of the Swiss system finds its origin in water issues between valleys. A long time they were settled by fight until the community representatives were tired of the waste (which war is) and accommodated their relationship through jointly accepted regulations about what created problems between them.
I refer to the work of Stafford Beer with the paradoxical title: ‘Designing Freedom’15, to help to give insight what this can mean for society and political systems. The body of knowledge and the experiences are documented: the most difficult part is the mental shift from the mainstream ineffective way of dealing with complexity through classification towards developing order through accommodating relations. This takes for granted the specificity of each situation and the necessity of deliberative democratic processes to deal with the relations, generating the issue at hand. Think globally, act locally receives a pragmatic rule of thumb, once this mental shift is taken into account.
3.3. Linking representative democracy with subsidiarity: stakeholder’s conferences as academies in democracy
15 Beer, S Designing Freedom Wiley 1975
15 Some years ago I had the privilege to be a guest of a K!gotla at the court of the King and Queen of the amaPondo people. The issue at hand was the access to an archaeological site in a disputed location. After three hours of intensive talking and listening, without any formal decision taken by the king, the archaeological team knew how to act and achieve its goals: the exploration of the site. To me, it is still an exemplar of what I have labeled as a deliberative democratic process. I suggested to my friends, also present at the occasion, that the court could become an Academy for Democracy in which many Western politicians could learn how to deal with their power and above all with their lack of power.
From the mid 90’s on I have been involved in a series of issue-based stakeholder conferences in quite different settings: from the regional development of a major city in the high north of Finland, to the re- allocation of historic heritages. I discovered that these conferences are ideal places to learn or re-learn how the democratic deliberative process can become productive and efficient, leading to social innovations for the next five to ten years.
From that experience and from the literature around it, I discovered some guidelines regarding effective and efficient democratic deliberative processes. Such processes are not restricted to the context of formal political structures in our democracies. I think that the proliferation of such processes to do with emerging challenges in our society will ultimately help these institutions to improve their operations and help relate once more the governors with the governed, as an expression of the dynamics of democracy: the maintenance of conflicts without violence.
1. Participants in a deliberative democratic process have to see themselves and be seen as stakeholders. A stakeholder is more than a representative of an interest group. A stakeholder has more than an ideological position in the issue at hand. He is also involved in real world activities, activities belonging to the added-value domain16 or the economic domain. The feedback with the material world they realize in their functioning defines their stake. This stake needs to be transparent to the outside world. This does not mean that the process itself has to be reported, but crucially that the actions taken as a consequence of the confrontational process are explicit and visible. This constraint is essential to ensure that innovative actions arise from the process. I don’t criticize ideological or academic debates, in which confrontational ideas can be aired and in this way mutually clarified because these also might form part of a democracy: but though necessary such debate is not sufficient to come to realize materiality.
16 Hoebeke,L Making Work Systems better, Wiley 1994
16 2. The issue at hand, (that which the forum has been created for), is embodied by a set of representatives connected to it. Their mutual relations and thus the relation between the stakes they represent belong to the agenda of the deliberative process. In my experience, three subsidiarity levels emerge quite naturally. The size of the forum should be at least about 30 participants (to have the requisite diversity of stakes), and at most about 400 (this to maintain the human scale). Plenary sessions and small group sessions alternate, so that every one of the participants feels able to speak. This lessens the tendency for any single participant, having a dominant voice, being able to monopolize things. However, nobody should be obliged to speak. Everything said, if written down in the conference, has an attributed author - anonymity is banned. There are many protocols and methods available for achieving this.
3. There is no need to come to a consensus about the entailed issue: on the contrary, consensus should be avoided. The process is an accommodation process in which some of the participants decide on their own behalf to initiate some actions conjointly. The rule is that such actions may not be vetoed by any one of the other participants. In addition actions cannot be delegated to people not belonging to the deliberation itself. In order to clarify the variety of stakes; voting about the issue may be a way to make incipient disagreements visible to the outside world. The means to perform those actions have to be mobilized by the ones who take the initiative. The ambition level of the action is related to the mobilizing power of those initiating the action. The actions are on a human scale: they are local, even if local means a limited virtual space. They are local, even in the context of a global issue. And again, those taking the initiative are known by name and surname.
4. The advantage of such setting is that every participant has heard the position of the other ones, has acquired a sense of the power relations and vested interests involved in the issue, hence goes back to the system he/she belongs to and can take action inside that system based upon what has been said and heard during the deliberation. Furthermore, as those actions are made public, transparency is ensured. Those, who are in favor of the actions, are invited to further stimulate the action-takers. Those, who are skeptical about the actions, are able to monitor their ambition level reflected through this dynamic.
In fact the forthcoming actions may be seen as social innovations. They follow the trajectory of all innovation: trial and error, until enough learning has been acquired so that they can be copied in a specific context. This context may change upwards as well downwards, to systems of lower and to systems of higher order as a ‘natural’ function of the subsidiarity relations ensuing from what is in its materiality the stakeholder conference. In this way, policies emerge as the result of
17 experiences in the real world, and have not to be enforced or implemented. In fact, all the effort that is put into implementing policies and the cost of learning from failure incurred by the grand scale, are avoided. In this way praxis and ideology are linked in the specific context of the issue at hand.
4. Identity in, of social systems: residents or strangers?
4.1 What does ‘collective identity’ mean?
In our globalized world, the question of national identity or cultural identity becomes on the one hand problematic on the other hand used as a defense against the same globalization. Traditionally, identity is understood as pointing to what is essential to the entity, how it is defined as the entity it is, how it is distinct from other entities of a similar type. The concept of collective identity is completely determined by the Cartesian classification mindset together with Aristotelian logic: either you belong or not to the entity, any third possibility is excluded.
However there are alternatives, one of which I developed in a previous article: identity as the formation of a permeable boundary17. The metaphor I used is a cell of a living being: all cells of an organism have an identical nucleus and cannot be identified or distinguished through it. The uniqueness of a particular cell (its identity) is defined by its boundary, and its boundary is dynamically constituted by its interaction with its environment and what is and is not able to pass through it (permeability).
To apply this to a social system: its identity develops through its interaction with a social environment, and what interactions may or may not pass across its boundary (permeability). Surely, the boundary defines what is inside and what is outside, but in a society as for the biological cell this is never completely fixed: continually transactions across the boundary differentiate between strangers and residents.
One of the sources of the concept of resident-stranger arises within the Hebrew tradition and was first mentioned by Abraham, who defines himself in this manner, while purchasing land from the Hittites of Hebron. In Deuteronomy, the Lord defines the Hebrew people in the same way: you will be resident-strangers in the Promised Land. This is in distinct contrast with the Greek tradition, in which an Aristotelian split between residents and strangers was assumed as a distinction between
17 Hoebeke,L Identity: the paradoxical nature of organizational closure Kybernetes 2006 Volume: 35 Issue: 1/2 Page: - 75 Emerald Group Publishing Limited
18 citizens and barbarians). The Hebrew tradition is quite relevant here, because it finds its origin in city-dwellers in exile. And the Jews have a long history to be resident-strangers in very different cultures and during more than two millennia.
The fundamental attitude generated by the complementarity of the concept of resident-stranger is hospitality. Even in English, and in French (hôte), the ambiguity is there in the name ‘host’! It refers at one and the same time both to the one receiving the stranger and to the stranger being received.
When this boundary definition of identity becomes alive in social systems, it becomes more than an issue of distinction and separation, and instead becomes a relational concept. Instead of being separated from the others, hence, incompatible and thus adversarial, there is a recognized public space for encounters between differences and their hosting. The deal that Abraham makes with the Hittites takes place at the gates of the city, at its boundary as an embrace of this duality.
I recall here a reaction of some leaders of the amaPondo people, trying to move towards ecological tourism as one of their ways of economic development; we don’t want tourists here, we want hosts! Although very proud of their ways of living and expressing a strong identity, they acknowledge that the opening of their boundaries is inevitable – that any boundary is permeable. They have an intuitive understanding of identity and boundary.
In the next paragraphs I highlight some consequences of taking that perspective in the organization of democratic deliberative processes.
4.2. Intimacy and rules of hospitality
A democratic deliberative process does not take place in a vacuum: the issue at hand is always systemically related to other issues and the boundary around the issue never can be determined once for all. In the real (material) world the boundary is shifting and permeable.
Because of this, it is useful to organize embodiments of this factor during the deliberative process. There is a place for hosts, for observers (strangers) and for their comments of what they observe. However, hosts have no place in the intimacy of interactions, which constitute the process itself. At the core of the intimacy of a social system are the intrinsic conflicts and its disagreements through which it emerges and confirms itself as the social system it is. Intimacy should never be confused with identity! Those two concepts are completely different: they define two completely different boundaries.
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Thus, in a family, or in a village, receiving hosts, the dirty linen is not shown. Nevertheless, one can be hosted and enjoy the identity of the family or village, its idiosyncratic ways of dealing with strangers, with visitors. What they show them and what they are proud of. What this means in practice is that observers are not involved in the deliberative process itself, which process will always imply conflict and its nurture, if it is to be democratic. When observers do get involved, they become stakeholders in their own right and change their role from strangers to residents. They take up the role of representative!
This is the reason why observers (e.g., media or lobbyists or other strangers in the deliberative process), are only invited before and after the deliberative process itself. Before the event they are informed of who are the actors (residents) dealing with the issue, and how the issue is defined in broad terms. After the event, they are informed of the results of it, the actions and the people who made them. In both cases, they are invited as hosts to air their view on what has been communicated to them. But it is for the residents, the stakeholders to bring those views into the debates of the deliberative process itself.
4.3 Intermediaries in conflicts are stakeholders!
When, as happens, conflicts escalate towards violence, it is often the case that actors from the environment, which are being disturbed by this, propose to act as intermediaries – this is often out of the very best intentions. However, they should be aware that when really they want to intermediate, in fact they interfere in the natural intimacy of the social system in conflict, and inadvertently become stakeholders with their own purposes and stake into any deliberative process trying to deal with the conflict.
In such a case, there is always the temptation to them to resort to violence in order to settle the issue – the tendency to exacerbate inherent tensions, making more difficult an intrinsic democratic deliberative process. Using violence is by definition a dictatorial activity. It can never lead to a democratic form of dealing with the conflict. This has been shown again and again during the first decade of our century. Hopefully, from the examples of last century, as from the late Gandhi and the late Nelson Mandela, and the school of thought they left, we learn our way in using non-violent means to become involved in conflicts and in violence. It is the only way in which ultimately democratic ideals can be maintained.
In the interests of all parties involved, it is essential to clarify the roles of the constituent actors: are they observers (strangers), hosted by the
20 system or are they stakeholders (residents) in the system. When those roles become blurred, the issue at hand gets exacerbated.
It is insightful to assess the role of representatives of the media from this perspective. Once, they involve themselves in the intimacy of the system, they want to report, they become imbedded into the conflict of that system and contribute to runaway violence. They slide into the status of stakeholders (residents) in their own right and have thus by definition take on an actor’s role in the processes, which are trying to deal with the conflict. The claims for objectivity or neutrality in the observing process could be much better understood and dealt with when the two perspectives, stranger and resident, are used. Thence, one can talk from an observer-stance or from an actor-stance. The observer remains outside the intimacy of the system; the actor becomes part of it.
4.4. A new concept for a constitution?
From above, it becomes possible to define a generic constitution for social systems. It becomes clear that it is necessary to expand the classical, political concept of a constitution, the basic values, laws and processes, which constitute the identity of a constitutional democracy.
A constitution of a social system should define the values, laws and processes which condition the transition from a stranger to a resident status and vice versa. If the boundary of the system is changing and permeable also the persons belonging to the system may change. This change can only be defined through the issue at hand, which makes the status of resident or stranger relevant. The power to define the nature of the issue necessarily belongs to the host, the ones who are hosting the strangers. But the acceptance of the change of status belong democratically to the resident, who wants to be a stranger to the issue, or to the stranger, who wants to defend his/her stake in the issue, hence to become resident. In this way the condition is created so that the person him/herself confronts the dilemma he/she is in. Does he/she wants to devote time and effort in the issue at hand or not. A history of those choices may lead to a more permanent shift in the status of a person.
Families and small traditional communities have implicit constitutions. Persons who decide to become part of any collective out of choice need this kind of constitution to help them in their choice.
A corollary of this way of looking at collective identities leads to the fact that any person can belong to several collective identities. Multi- membership is becoming more and more common in our interdependent world: each person can then have an internal ‘parliament’ to sort out
21 which membership at what moment is or becomes relevant. Mainly, if he/she decides to express his/her belonging to a collective, it means that he/she is ready to participate in the nurture of the conflicts, inherent in the democratic social system.
5. Final remarks.
While writing this article, I was reminded of an experience in the mid- eighties, when I presented some of these ideas in nascent form to a group of doctoral students in Political Sciences at the University of York. I received a critical reaction, because they had not heard the word power in my presentation. Also here it is a word, which I use very seldom. In fact, I have replaced them by the words conflict, violence and non- violence.
Much of the time, in political lore the term ‘power’ is used as attributed or vested power, not as an inherent element present in any and every relation between human beings, and their interactions. In the complex world we live in this attributed power increasingly disguises a real lack of power. The ‘powers’ in place, confronted with the global complexity humankind is confronted with, show much more their lack of influence, their lack of power. So that violence and paradoxically its violent repression is perceived as a major attribute of power: the language of fear and war is used by those in power, the language of accommodation is less fashionable.
Attributed power and lack of real influence plays havoc with people. Macchiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ 18is still very relevant reading for those who get trapped in this power play. David Owen has written out of experience how narcissistic personalities are drawn into what he calls the ‘Hubris Syndrome’19, once they fall into the trap of attributed power. What it does to collectivities is well illustrated by examples in ‘The Psychology of Military Incompetence’ by Norman Dixon20, which has not lost it’s relevance for understanding any ‘war against…” around us.
In this year of European elections, I read lots about Europe not being a ‘Great Power’ any more. I like it. I hope that in Europe we are able to leave behind us this way of looking at powers. The cradle of democracy would better become a world authority on dealing with diversity, conflict and democracy. Authority means able to augment, to increase: increasing the ability of people in all kind of social systems to
18 Macchiavelli, N http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232 19 Owen, D The Hybris Syndrome, Methuen 2012 20 Dixon, Norman F. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Jonathan Cape Ltd 1976 / Pimlico 1994
22 democratically nurture conflict, using non-violence and inclusion instead of violence and exclusion: hopefully in this way increasing their ability in hosting!
Where Fukuyama21 wrote that the liberal democracies were the end of history, I prefer to claim that we are only at the beginning of democracy and the understanding of what democratic processes and a democratic attitude may mean in practice. I hope this article becomes a very small contribution to this: a long and interesting history of democracies has still to emerge.
6. Acknowledgements
My colleagues and friends Leopold Vansina and Roger Harnden have reviewed a first draft of this article. Their thoughtful comments have improved its final version. Sam Ijsseling22, Catherina Schnitzer23 and Gido Berns24 were important: their comments in Campus Gelbergen where I first discussed these ideas were invaluable. Finally, without my friends in Campus Gelbergen this article would never have been written. To me they embody much of what I wrote about in it.
Luc Hoebeke 27-01-14
21 Fukuyama,F The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992. 22 Ijsseling, S Macht en Onmacht Boom 1999 23 Schnitzer, C Democratie als andering werknota 2013 24 Berns, E La porosité : un essai sur le rapport entre économie et politique Bruxelles : Ousia, 2012
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