©2004, UrbisMedia
It is almost amusing watching the Taiwanese whacking each other in their assembly chambers and brawling in their streets over a 2/10ths of one percent separation in the vote between their presidential candidates. Although the margin is considerably larger that the 537 Florida votes of 2000, when the Democrats sat on their hands and let Antonin Scalia, who had a family member working for the Boosh campaign, hand the presidency to a dunce. American democracy is of the finishing school variety, not the rough and tumble sort of the Taiwanese or the Koreans. Things couldn’t have turned out worse for us if we settled our election in the streets,.
In the summer of 2001 I gave lectures a four universities in Beijing on behalf of the California State University system. The lectures were on U.S. Public Administration, a subject that the Chinese had asked to hear about because they were presumably going to “adopt” American methods of urban public administration. They probably asked the wrong guy.
I told the large and attentive audiences (via sequential translations) that adopting U.S. methods of public administration was not as easy or simple a matter as the way in which they had adopted American methods of business and industry. (I had been driven around Beijing in a Jeep Cherokee built in a Chinese plant just outside Beijing; it seemed identical to the American built version.) I argued that American PA was constructed on “democratic principles” and that therefore the American methods and techniques wouldn’t work until China installed some Big D in its system. I felt a little like the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square a dozen years before. But they smiled, applauded, and maybe didn’t get it.
The Tiananmen dissidents didn’t get the Big D they were after in 1989 either. They may yet get it another way, if their “economic democracy” can build them a middle class that might make it work there. And, given how messy democracy can be, the wait might prove to have been salutary. In any case, the U.S. is more interested in a stable China than one that might be more worrisome by becoming more democratic. Last week, Spain, formerly one of the longest running dictatorships of the 20 th Century, flexed its democracy and may now join France and Germany, also democracies, in the coalition of the “unwilling.”
Our current “leadership” blathers about bringing the Big D to the Middle East, even at the point of cruise missile; but deep down those practitioners of realpolitik know that democracy is messy and unpredictable. When the power is all in the hands of a despot you just need to take his head; but when it is in the hands of the people you can get something as messy as . . . well . . . post-Saddam Iraq. So our present administration remains cozy with putatively “democratic” Pakistan, with the Saudi monarchy, and with a bunch of non-democratic countries that have the resources, markets, or cheap labor pools that are a boon to American business interests. When it comes to profits, hypocr acy trumps democracy just about every time.
America talks a lot of Big D, but it walks a lot of Little H. Anyway, after the “selection” of 2000, who the hell are we to be hucksters for democracy.
___________________________________
©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.26.2004)
Taken partially from James A. Clapp, “Planning and Democracy: Uneasy Partners,” World Planning Schools Congress, Shanghai, China, July 13, 2001