What exactly is a democracy? If one refers in turn to the etymology of the word and to the multiple regimes that claimed it, from antiquity to the present, democracy proves to be a simple idea and a problem.
A simple idea first: democracy is neither more nor less than the direct power ( krátos, in Greek) by and for the people (the demos ). A problem, then, is that this simple idea is, in fact, difficult to apply in reality, even in the regime to which it is conventionally associated: the Athenian city. This is at least what is revealed by the new reading of which the functioning was the subject of the Danish Mögens H. Hansen .
Indeed, the daily practice of direct democracy faces many limitations:
- The size of the state. In order that the citizens may assemble, they should not be separated from one another. This is why the idea of democracy will traditionally be associated with city-states. In Athens itself, the Assembly gathered only a fraction of the citizens (6,000 on average over 30,000 in the fourth century).
- Congenital instability. Historical experience attests this: democracies are unstable and seem irreversibly led to anarchy or oligarchy. This is the case of the Athenian city as well as the Italian cities of the Renaissance. The perpetual divisions between factions of which they have been the theater also explain the distrust which democracy will never cease to inspire. "One can not read the history of the little republics of Greece and Italy,"writes one of the founding fathers of the American federation, without feeling horror and disgust at the spectacle of the troubles Were continually agitated, and that rapid succession of revolutions which kept them in a state of perpetual oscillation between the excesses of despotism and anarchy. "
- Limited competences of the citizen. For a citizen to participate in government, he or she must have all the technical skills required. That is why, in its daily functioning, the Athenian city was never a pure democracy, that is to say, entirely direct. The assembled people did not possess all the powers. The important functions, notably military, were fulfilled by elected magistrates. For all these reasons, direct democracy has never ceased to appear as an ideal regime because it is justly unfeasible. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an ardent defender of the regime, thus considers that there is no real direct democracy and that "a government so perfect does not fit men" but "a people of gods".
Towards Representative Democracy
Many countries have not, however, renounced the principle of a government based on the participation of the "people". The solution lies in a formula: representative democracy, ie the regime in which the will of the citizens is expressed through the mediation of representatives selected from among the people.
That democracy is a necessarily representative regime appears today as evidence. But it was not always so. For a long time, the very idea of representative democracy appeared as a contradiction in terms. From Plato to Rousseau, philosophers have never ceased to distinguish democracy from all regimes of a representative character.
Of all the philosophers, J.-J. Rousseau is the most hostile to the idea of representation.For him, delegating his power to representatives is for the people to alienate his freedom since there is no guarantee that the will of the representatives will be faithful to the general will.
This criticism has not disappeared with the establishment of representative democracies.In the interwar period, Carré de Malberg still considered that the introduction of representation entailed the "capture" of democracy, an elective oligarchy replacing the sovereign people.
Although in the eighteenth century American federalists and French revolutionaries admitted the principle of representation, they nevertheless continued to draw a clear distinction between the representative regime and democracy.
For Emmanuel Sieyès, for example, there is an "enormous difference" between democracy, where citizens themselves make the law and the representative regime in which they exercise the power of elected representatives. "Citizens who call themselves representatives shall renounce and shall renounce to make the law themselves; They have no particular will to impose. If they dictated wishes, France would no longer be this representative state; It would be a democratic state. The people, I repeat, in a country which is not a democracy (and France can not be), can not speak, can only act by its representatives. "
For their part, the American federalists have little sense of working for the birth of democracy, but for a government of a new type, reconciling the advantages of representation with the principle of the republic.
In the Principles of Representative Government, Bernard Manin recalls this strange paradox: while "a government organized according to representative principles was ... considered at the end of the eighteenth century as radically different from democracy, Today passes for one of its forms " . For him, the extension of universal suffrage, after long conflicts, only gave "a powerful impulse to the belief that the representative government was gradually transforming into a democracy".
Yet it is indeed representation that has imposed itself as the means of overcoming the impossibility of direct citizen participation in the framework of the nation-states that emerged from the eighteenth century onwards. In the course of the English, American and French revolutions, several arguments have been put forward in favor of the introduction of representation in the functioning of democracy.
- The need for a division of labor in a market economy. By entrusting the management of affairs to the representatives chosen among the people, individuals can freely go about their private occupations. The philosopher John Locke is one of the first to defend this idea. Similarly, E. Sieyes sees in representation the application to the political order of the principle of the division of labor, a principle which, in his view, constituted an essential factor of social progress.
For Benjamin Constant, "the representative system is a power given to a certain number of men by the mass of the people, who want their interests to be forbidden, and who nevertheless has no time to defend them himself" .
In fact, the context in which modern democracies are developed has little to do with the one who witnessed the birth of Athenian democracy. The question of freedom no longer concerns only the public sphere; It also concerns the private sphere.
- Representation helps to overcome division. By defending the diversity of interests, representation avoids that interest groups threaten the rights of minorities.
From this point of view, the extent of the States is no longer an obstacle but, on the contrary, favorable to democracy. According to the famous argument put forward by the federalists, "a large territory and a large population will favor the multiplication of interests and opinions, which will make the coalition of partisan interests and factions difficult, and thus the formation of a majority which would put In danger the rights of minorities, the freedom of each and, hence, the common good and the general interest ".
- Representation contributes to the formation of the general will. No more than truth is absolute or a priori , the will of the people is neither one nor indivisible, nor preexisting (as J.-J. Rousseau thinks). The will can be constituted only by all the "lights" that discussion, the exchange of ideas and the confrontation of opinions can provide to each.
The representation therefore has a corollary: deliberation. In a deliberation, writes E. Sieyes, "we must allow all particular interests to hurry, to clash with each other, to seize upon the question, and to push each one according to his strength towards the goal He proposes. In this test the useful opinions, and those which would be harmful, separate;Some of them fall, others continue to move, to swing until modified and purified by their reciprocal effects, they end by merge in one opinion. "
In turn, deliberation involves some publicity of government decisions. Even a democratically elected government does not appear as such if it abuses the decrees. The role given to deliberation will make obsolete the recourse to the imperative mandate and the revocability of the elected representatives. The imperative mandate presupposes that there is a will already formed by the voters that the representatives would have only to state. As for revocability (the possibility for voters to dismiss their elected representatives), it runs the risk of making the elected official a mere representative of particular interests.
Since then, no constitution has reverted to the principle of representative mandate. The French Constitution of 1958, for example, stipulates that "any imperative mandate is void" (Article 27, Constitution of 4 October 1958). On the institutional level, it is Parliament that has established itself as the space par excellence of deliberation. Let us note in passing that the parliaments of modern democracies are a legacy of the medieval era. This phenomenon is to be found in the history of democracy: the integration in its functioning of old institutions or practices, inherited from the Middle Ages and even from Antiquity.
The counterweights of representative democracy
Thus defined, representative democracy marks a clear break with the conception of the Ancients and of J.-J. Rousseau: if the people have sovereignty, they can not exercise it directly. It is by increasing the counterweight to the power of the representatives and the rulers that the representative regimes have finally imposed themselves as democratic regimes.
- The holding of regular elections. The regularity of electoral dates limits the autonomy enjoyed by elected representatives because of their non-revocability. An elected official must listen to his electorate at risk, if not to be re-elected.
The identification of democracy with the idea of election is nonetheless recent. As Manin points out, there are other ways of selecting representatives, starting with the draw. The thinkers of democracy have long expressed reservations about the election. In the Social Contract , J.-J. Rousseau, like Charles de Montesquieu, associates suffrage by lot with democracy, election with the aristocracy. In fact, the election calls into question the principle of rotation insofar as an elected official can be re-elected. On the other hand, and above all, it amounts to selecting citizens "distinct" from others (citizens entirely devoted to politics), which runs counter to the democratic demand for resemblance between elected representatives and voters. Another grievance, advanced this time by Alexis de Tocqueville: the election puts the risk of the tyrannical majority at risk.
Yet it was indeed the election (at regular intervals) that was imposed from the eighteenth century with the American and French revolutions. Since then, a regime is democratic when the rulers and the representatives do not inherit their office but are elected after an elective procedure, and their program is submitted to the approval of the voters. As with representation, there are several arguments in favor of the election:
- the election is better suited to nation-states. Conversely , lottery is not feasible in a society deemed complex and whose governmental functions require special skills;
- the election confers legitimacy. It creates a sense of obligation and commitment among voters towards those they have designated.
- Multipartyism. The election implies the recognition of political parties. Like the election, the party was for a long time contradictory to the idea of democracy . We must wait for A. de Tocqueville to be thought of as an essential element of democracy. The author of Democracy in America observes that the tangle of small parties in the United States and, consequently, the division of opinion, do not prevent two major tendencies from emerging and being embodied by two Large parties, "one attached to expanding popular power, the other rather inclined to restrict it".
On the theoretical level, the Prague lawyer Hans Kelsen has shown that democracy can not be envisaged without parties. "It is too clear that the isolated individual, being unable to acquire any real influence on the formation of the general will, does not have a real existence from the political point of view. Democracy can therefore only exist seriously if individuals group themselves according to their political ends and affinities, that is to say, if, between the individual and the State, these formations Each of which represents a certain orientation common to its members, a political party. Democracy is therefore necessarily and inevitably a party state. " These qualities acknowledged by the parties will serve as arguments against single-party regimes.
- Freedom of expression of public opinion. Public opinion must be able to express itself at all times, outside the institutions (assembly and parties) and in the interval between elections. From the beginning of the century, the Russian sociologist Moses Ostrogorski emphasized the necessary diversity of means of expression. "In order that this power of opinion, of an eminently subtle nature and of a very indecisive essence, may be felt, it is necessary for the whole freedom of opinion to be produced, in its varied and irregular forms.
The so-called press of opinion, authorized in the 1880s in France, is one of these means.Other means exist: petitions, demonstrations on the streets, polls ... Freedom of expression of public opinion is all the more central in that it contributes to the exercise of a continuous, though indirect, control , On the action of the elected representatives.
For the philosopher Alain, democracy is nothing else: "What defines democracy is not the origin of powers; it is the continuous and effective control that the governed exercise over the rulers . "
- The separation of powers. Another counterweight to the autonomy of elected representatives is the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers.
Beyond this subtle mechanism of mutual control, there is still the multiplication of the centers of decision. This is why it is also called "polyarchy" to characterize democracy and the dilution of power that results. For the philosopher Claude Lefort, democracy is nothing but a regime in which the place of power is empty.
- Human rights. The "old democracies" all refer to a founding text proclaiming the universal principles - freedom and equality - that every citizen has the right to oppose to possible abuses of political power: the 1689 Declaration of Rights (England), the Constitution of the 17 September 1787 (France), the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 24 June 1793 (France) ... Since the post-war period, the recognition of the status of democracy has Rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of 1948.
In the course of its history, representative democracy has been constantly transformed in France as well as in England and the United States. Among the most notable changes is the extension of universal suffrage. In the democracies that were gradually established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suffrage was censored. In the 1830s, the proportion of people authorized to participate in parliamentary elections still represents only 2% in Britain, which is considered one of the oldest democracies. In France, women only have the right to vote in 1944.
Then there is the emergence and growth of mass parties. In Western countries, their creation is relatively recent, after the establishment of most democratic institutions.Essentially parliamentary, democracies thus become at the turn of the century "party democracies" according to the formula of B. Manin.
Today, as in the past, representative democracy presents many variants due to differences in cultures, divergences in national trajectories, etc. Thus, comparative analysis reveals some notable differences, including between "old democracies" .
The crisis of representative democracy
No more than direct democracy, representative democracy has been free from criticism.The crisis of representative democracy is a recurring theme.
Today, "what we reproach readily with representative democracy is to be insufficiently democratic and insufficiently representative" according to the joke of the dean Georges Vedel.
In recent years, various trends have revived the debate around the crisis of representative democracy: rising abstentionism, volatility and increasing instability of the electorate;Corruption cases; The professionalization of political life and the weight of notables.Added to this are the new perspectives offered by the new electronic media. Some already point to the emergence of new models which, if not alternative, would help to overcome the inadequacies of representative democracy as we have known it.
- Democracy of the public. For B. Manin, "representative government has undoubtedly been democratized since its establishment in the sense that its base has been enlarged and the whole represented immensely", but at the same time "the democratization of the link The greater weight of the wishes of the governed on the decisions of the rulers proved less durable than had been thought. Democracy has certainly spread, but it is ... uncertain that it has deepened. " The current crisis of representative democracy expresses less its questioning than the emergence of a new form of representative government. According to B. Manin, we are entering an era of "public democracy" characterized by a floating and informed voter and the emergence of a new deliberative forum: the media.
In the democracy of the public, deliberation is no longer carried out only within the precincts of Parliament or within parties; It also occurs in the modern media (TV, radio) to the detriment of opinion journals. To the militants and the men of apparatus which characterized the democracy of the parties, succeeded a politico-media elite. Like the previous ones, public democracy would present both democratic and oligarchic elements.
- Democracy continues. According to the lawyer Dominique Rousseau, we will enter the era of continuous democracy. This is mainly reflected in the introduction in the political field of new organized forms of public opinion representation: polls (which not only relativize the interest of elections since the results are known in advance but also reveal The discrepancy between the aspiration of opinion and the decision of the elected representatives); The modern media (which relay the aspiration of public opinion through debates) and, lastly, the bodies responsible for monitoring the constitutionality of laws (in France, the Constitutional Council, which has had numerous occasions to amend, To annul bills and thus to relativize the pretension of the elected representatives to express the will of the people). At the same time, the election no longer appears to be the sole source of democratic legitimacy. To the parliamentarians were added other "legislative entrepreneurs": associations, lobbies, committees of the sages ... In this perspective, democracy would suffer from the resistance of the elected representatives to the questioning of their monopoly ...
Principal reproach against continuing democracy: its legitimacy; For dean G. Vedel, it is less privileged than corporatisms (media, producers of opinion polls, jurists).
- Participatory or local democracy. Underlining the inability of the national representation to reflect all the stakes of local life, others advocate the strengthening of local or participatory democracy.
Representing this current of reflection, CB Macpherson distinguishes four phases in the development of democracy: protective democracy, development democracy, equilibrium democracy, and finally: participatory democracy . This involves developing collective decisions by not restricting themselves to the places where political decisions are made.
In fact, local democracy is an old reality. In Democracy in America , Tocqueville makes it one of the sources of the vitality of democracy in the United States. In L'Ancien Régime , he explains a contrario the French Revolution by the disappearance of the medieval forms of local democracy under the Ancien Régime and the excesses of centralism.
In today's modern societies, local democracy encompasses various instruments, starting with the popular initiative referendum, used in Switzerland, but also in Italy, Spain ... The risks of the referendum are however known: when it does not revive The passions, it turns to the plebiscite (one speaks then of acclamatory democracy).
Other instruments exist, ranging from neighborhood representation to ad hoc consultation procedures initiated by associations, which emerge for a specific purpose and limited in time, such as, for example, student co-ordinations or Nurses, who appoint their own representatives. These instruments are not fundamentally incompatible with the instruments of representative democracy. The whole question is, in fact, how to articulate them to one another to respond to both the aspiration of a better representation of local interests and the stakes associated with globalization. In other words: articulate the local and global levels. This brings us to another topic of debate: subsidiarity .
- Virtual democracy or e-democracy. New communication technologies (information superhighways, the Internet) have nourished a whole literature on the theme of virtual democracy. On the Internet, discussion forums are devoted to this theme. Software, such as E. Have already been developed on the other side of the Atlantic, which allow not only remote voting but also the development of public policies. With cyberdemocracy would thus be born a new kind of citizen: netizen (net, network and citizen, citizen) ...
In a recent book that proposes (to our knowledge) the first French-language sociopolitical analysis of the Internet phenomenon, Paul Mathias underlines the limits to the advent of such a democracy .
The limits are first of all material: e-democracy requires machines with considerable processing capacities, but also that the reliability and security of transactions are guaranteed by competent and disinterested operators. Which entails the risk of a hierarchy of computer scientists replacing that of the political elites ... Above all, the evanescent nature of the exchanges between Internet users makes it illusory to transform forums into genuine public spaces.
Prior to the Internet, Mathias recalled, other media had re-emerged the ideal of direct democracy. The emergence of the first polls had thus given rise to the hope of being able to know the will of the people without mediation.
Beyond their difference in nature, these models confirm one thing: democracy is indeed a simple idea and a problem, but the data change with social, economic and technical developments ... No doubt this is why democracy appears as A challenge that is both timeless and timeless.
Do not confuse republic and democracy
In its very general sense, the republic is a regime where power is governed by law. It can therefore include elements of democracy like those of other regimes. Therefore, apart from Plato's special meaning, it is classically presented not as a pure regime, but as the result of a kind of alchemy between several regimes. Thus Cicero (1st century BC) defines the republic as the regime which combines the best in monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.
From antiquity to the present, however, the meaning of the republic has evolved according to the context in which it was conceived. From the seventeenth century, the republic is always defined as a mixed regime but also in opposition to the absolute monarchy. With American federalists, it differs from democracy in introducing the system of representation. "In a democracy," writes Madison, " the people assemble and govern themselves; In a republic, he assembled and governed by representatives and agents. It is also presented as the most appropriate regime for federal states. For their part, the French revolutionaries add a new dimension to it.From now on, the republic is representative democracy more than universal principles intended to seal the unity of the citizens' people: freedom, equality and fraternity. In this perspective, the republic is inseparable from the triptych school / secularism / citizenship.
The genealogy of a word
From the word taboo ...
The word democracy is one of those words widely used in everyday language. Yet it has not always been so.
In The Divided City , Nicole Loraux, a specialist in the history of ancient Greece, recalls this curious paradox: the Athenians, who were at the origin of the democratic model, were thinking twice before pronouncing it. Explanation: for the Athenians, the city can only be one and indivisible; Everything that evokes past divisions is therefore subversive. Now, precisely, the terms demos and krátos - which gave that of democracy - connoted, in their multiple meanings, the idea of conflict. Demos may as well designate the people as a whole, or designate the popular party in its partisan usage. On the other hand, having the krátos is "having all power over" but also, in its original meaning "to have the upper hand". The opponents of the democratic regime will not fail to recall these meanings to the point of making demokratia a very nondescript nickname. "Hence," writes N. Loraux, " the avoidance insisting on the word by the Democrats themselves. The entry of the word into the French language is rather late: it goes back to the fourteenth century. Democracy then makes reference first to antiquity.
... to its generalization
In fact, it was necessary to wait until the nineteenth century for the use of the word to spread in everyday language. This is what Pierre Rosanvallon recalls in an article devoted to the genealogy of the term.
Since then, the use of the word has largely transcended the field of political philosophy to that of the social sciences and, in particular, sociology. Democracy can no longer be reduced to a political regime, it can also concern organizations or institutions. In recent years, we have talked about democracy in schools, family democracy and democracy in the company. In these different perspectives, democracy refers to issues such as: the distribution of parental authority; Parental involvement in school life; The representation and the expression of the employees in the company ... But is it always question of democracy?
NOTES
1
1
N. Loraux, The Divided City, Payot, 1997.
2
P. Rosanvallon, "The history of the word democracy in modern times".
Thinkers of democracy
Irony of history: the thinkers of democracy who succeeded each other from antiquity to the present day were rarely in favor of democracy. Their respective work has nevertheless contributed to uncovering its constituent elements, its limits as well as its forces.
Greek thinkers:
Plato (5th-4th centuries BC) and Aristotle (4th century BC).
Greek thinkers were rather hostile towards Athenian democracy. For Plato and Socrates, the ideal model is incarnated in the republic; For Aristotle, in a mixed system combining elements of Athenian democracy with those of the aristocracy.Among the essential characteristics of democracy, the same Aristotle put forward the rotation of burdens; Each citizen is thus in turn governed and governing.
Charles of Montesquieu
(1689-1755)
We owe him the famous principle of the separation of powers. Before him, the Englishman John Locke had already suggested the idea in his Two Treaties of Government (1690), distinguishing the legislative, executive and confederative powers. In the spirit of the laws (chapter vi on the Constitution of England, of Book XI), Montesquieu added the judicial power and confused the latter two. For all that, Montesquieu is not in favor of democracy. For him, the separation of powers (in fact the control exerted on each other by reciprocal encroachments) justifies an aristocratic regime.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778)
He was one of the first philosophers to place sovereignty among the people.One and indivisible, this sovereignty is expressed by the general will which results from the deliberation between all
Assembled citizens. Therefore, Rousseau is hostile to any representative system, but also to all that divides sovereignty: pressure groups, parties.Rousseau nevertheless distinguishes the legislative power from the executive: if the former is the sole responsibility of the assembled people, the latter returns to a government, revocable at all times but distinct. Aware of the constraints of direct democracy, Rousseau admitted that it was made only for a people of gods.
Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805-1859)
Aristocrat by birth, the author of The Democracy in America and the Old Regime and the revolution believed more in a society led by enlightened people than democracy itself. Like the philosopher Stuart Mill, he considers that the election by universal suffrage is the tyranny of the majority. Still, his work brings valuable insights into the mechanisms of democracy in general, and American in particular. He is among the first thinkers to emphasize the role of parties and "intermediary bodies" in the functioning of democracy, both nationally and locally.
Joseph Schumpeter
(1883-1950)
Known for his analysis of capitalism, he is also one of the principal representatives of the so-called elitist theory of democracy. According to this theory, developed in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Western democracies constitute a regime in which individuals gain power at the end of a competition for voters' votes. In this perspective, the goal of elected officials is not to apply the will of the people, it is to acquire a power to rule on political decisions by virtue of the legitimacy conferred by the election. Until voters sanction them for unfulfilled promises in the next election ...
Robert A. Dahl
(Born in 1915)
American sociologist. We owe him the notion of "polyarchy": democracy is a polyarchical regime in the sense that power is diffuse and not concentrated in it.Political decisions stem from a complex process of adjustment and permanent regulation of conflicts between groups with not always convergent interests.
Claude Lefort
(Born in 1924)
Reflections on the democracy pursued by C. Lefort in the seventies and eighties concerned his conditions of emergence and his relations with totalitarianism (see, in particular, The Democratic Invention: The Limits of Totalitarian Domination, Fayard, 1981). In a democracy, the place of power is an "empty place": no individual can pretend to embody it. The State, the nation and the people are only symbolic representations of the unity of society, which do not exclude the possibility of dissension. In contrast, the totalitarian regime springs from the temptation to reduce society to unity and to incarnate power in the name of a social category (the proletariat, with communism) or the nation (with fascism).
Is a company democratic?
From the nineteenth century, the question arose as to whether democracy could be transposed to work situations. In France, various laws have gradually broadened the possibilities for employee representation and expression through the authorization of trade union associations (the 1864 Act abolishing the Le Chapelier law of 1791), the institution of employee delegates (1936 ), Works councils (1945), recognition of trade union sections of companies (1968), creation of expression groups (Auroux laws of 1982). For their part, companies have put in place specific mechanisms ranging from simple ideas boxes to versatile and semi-autonomous teams.
From there to speak of the democratization of the enterprise, there is only one step that one must be careful not to cross because neither the representation nor the right of expression of the employees does not imply a participation of the latter To the decision.
In the majority of companies (excepted cooperative societies), it is management that assumes strategic choices under the influence of shareholders.
Finally, hierarchical relations have become less authoritarian and patriarchal, and the theme of "corporate citizenship", launched in the 1980s, has shown its limits.
SYLVAIN GERMANY
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