The winding course of true democracy
Regina Ip says the experience of the West shows that every journey to universal suffrage not only takes time, but also arrives at an answer unique to its own circumstances
As the government continues to stay silent on its proposals for constitutional reform and the timing of its consultation, democracy advocates - including representatives of foreign governments - have lost no time in turning up the heat on the authorities to implement "full democracy" or "genuine democratic suffrage" in Hong Kong.
Yet none has been able to provide a full and convincing account to the people of what they mean by "true democracy" or "genuine democratic suffrage".
If by "full democracy" the proponent has in mind a system whereby every citizen can have a direct say in the running of his or her city, the truth is that this form of direct democracy existed in the city of Athens about 2,500 years ago. At that time, Athens was a city state of about 300,000 people, with only roughly 25,000 citizens with voting rights, the rest being women and slaves.
Such a system ceased to be viable as the population grew, and democratic experiments in Greek city states became either supplanted by rule by "tyrants" or overrun by more powerful military empires.
"Liberal democracy", referring to a system of government underpinned by respect for fundamental rights and freedoms, and involving periodic, peaceful transfer of power to elected representatives of the people, has emerged as the preferred system of government in the West for only about 300 years, starting with the American revolution of 1776.
As Samuel Huntington pointed out, this much-glorified "first new nation", benefitting from the ideas about separation of powers and checks and balances of Locke and Montesquieu and refined by framers of the American constitution, achieved a finely calibrated division of powers combined with fusion of functions. Yet the relevance of the American experience to contemporary modernising nations is debatable; America, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution" and was "born equal, instead of becoming so".
Eighteenth-century America had a "pleasing uniformity" of the "one-state" of well-endowed settlers rebelling against their home country. The American revolution is different in kind from the social revolutions of Russia or China, which involved a struggle of the poor against the rich, the oppressed against the oppressors.