The Historical Conditions for Liberal Democracy

The basic claim underlying my theoretical position is that democracy has been a real historical possibility in its modern form only after capitalism. In brief, the answer that I provide for this puzzle is based on the “discovery” that previous systems and modes of production have a transparent form of exploitation. The state and its coercive apparatus were there all the time to enforce the dominance of the upper exploiting class. The economic and the political were explicitly tied together to make the economic exploitation so direct and transparent for any one to fail to notice. For the first time in history the relation of production appears in capitalism as a free relation. There is a “market” where one can exchange “freely” whatever she has to sell or she needs to buy. The market is a neutral and just judge that evaluates things and commodities and price them according to their relative values taking into account things like offer and demand and the like.
Of course this new situation has made the need for ideology some how different. In the previous history of transparent exploitation the exploited “needs” some strong metaphysics or religion to convince them to surrender to the misery of their life hoping for some compensation somewhere else. Now that the unfairness does not follow directly from external coercion, there is some room for a secular ideology that would encourages the individual responsibility and creates the illusion that in principle every body can be better off if she does the right thing. In this very specific historical situation democracy became possible. However, I’d like to emphasize that opaqueness/transparency is a continuous variable that contains some grey areas where it’s somehow difficult to decide whether the exploitation tends more or less to be transparent.
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To provide evidence for the above hypothesis I am to make use of the diverse case to establish the needed evidence for the whole range of the spectrum of world states. John Gering suggest that the primary objective of the diverse case is “… the achievement of maximum variance along relevant dimensions.” (Gerring, 2007, p.96) To achieve this I would choose three countries that distribute for an extreme to middle to the other extreme. This would allow how the independent variable being so strong does not allow for democratization, being in the middle create some unstable shaky democracy, and being so weak allows for a stable democracy. .
There are countries which fit as examples weak presence for the independent variable like the U.S or Britain and France. And there are countries that serve as examples for the strong appearance of the independent variable like Saudi Arabia, and Iraq before the invasion, and Congo-previous Zaire-. A good example of a middle case on the continuum of “transparency” is Turkey and South Korea.
In the process tracing here I will take the U.S, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as the cases to be analyzed. However, I want to emphasize that other cases are capable of providing very similar evidence.
Malaysia is a case that I would use to control against the very popular claim of some “mysterious” association between Islam and autocracy. Though Turkey itself could control for that, but since I introduce it as an example of a shaky democracy so it does not fit for control. -Bangladesh is in some sense a better example-.
Through process tracing the study would show how the democratization took place gradually and “proportional” to recall one of Mill’s ideas to the degree of the increase of free-wage labor relations. Or not having any degree of democratization -not even pretending to have some form of it- in the case of very vivid presence of the independent variable.
One final thing to be mentioned about this design is that we choose the process tracing though some of Mill’s ways would work because, it’s important for us to establish a causal narrative that reads the “real” plot of history and how it unfolds relative to the degree of the development in the decrease of the independent variable. Here we definitely appreciate Mill’s idea of the proportional presence of the cause and effect.
Findings:
1. The United States:
The American democracy was established immediately after the independence with a suffrage confined completely to the white males who owns property. Needless to say that this had been a racist-oligarchic-sexist regime with a democratic facet. At that historical moment it was not definitely any reasonable to give the vote to the slaves.-In this sense one could find some common features between ancient Greece democracy and the Modern American one-.
Despite the fact that amendments like the 14th paved the way for the black people -being finally free people after the civil war- the real “activating” of the “principle” had to wait for a whole century for the civil rights movement to put it in use. The “liberation” of the slaves, was actually followed by Jim Crow which made it possible for practice that violates the “rules” of the free-wage game. Long time had been needed to bring the inclusions of the blacks to its happy end.
The women’s inclusion came officially even later than black people in the 1920’s. Though it did nothing of what the women’s activists thought it would. Of course it’s beyond the scope of this little paper to show the mechanism that worked exactly to make the gaining of the vote ineffective -some of the interesting treatments of this topic is Klinkner’s and Smith’s 1999- .
I think it is still useful to trace the fact that despite the gradual inclusion of groups of the society including those without property, one can show that it happened after some good “work” and thorough development in the economy that increased the percentage of people who live according to the free-wage pattern and who would as a result think that it is some individual responsibility and that the regime is innocent -or not comply responsible- for their suffering. The welfare state was the mechanism for bribery at the time of establishment of the full suffrage. Here one should recall the 1930’s when the failure of managing the rebelliousness resulting from the transparent exploitation led to fascism in Germany and Italy. In the U.S a mixture of ideology, welfare state, and direct coercion could preserve democracy. The same could be said about the 1950s when almost the same mixture played the role for preserving the democratic regime. now the defeat of egalitarian ideologies -communism in particular- and the more advancement in the economy towards more and more sophisticated electronic and service sector would make the exploitation still more difficult to observe directly by human senses, and actually that had made it possible for the American state to give up the welfare procedures knowing that the poor are so isolated and helpless to do anything.
A final thing to be said about the American democracy is that it’s designed from the right beginning as a system that does not allow for any variation in representation the “winner takes all” produces all the time the same guards(either of the two parties) of the wealthy interest. It’s actually a marvelous example of the Marxist idea of a committee to manage the interests and “conflicts” of the ruling class.
2. Saudi Arabia:
The case of Saudi Arabia is astounding one for showing the importance of the transparency of the exploitation as an explanation of dictatorship. Despite the wealth that the state has as a rental fortune resulting from oil, the country is by all means an example of a backward medieval monarchy that adopts a very old fashioned -it’s by all means a less “enlightened” version than that of the Abbasid tenth century caliphate- and combines a religious and coercive mechanisms to repress the people and impose discipline on them. It is obviously far from the subtle Facouldian ways of domination used in democracies. The problem according to the theory that we try to validate is that the wealth is perceived by people as the gift of God-or nature for the few Saudi secularists, liberals, and communists- and so the political and economic elites who dominate everything are directly stealing the wealth of the nation. Democracy is not going to bring a new party -if there is any- to office, it rather would bring the king and the majority of the members of the ruling class to face capital penalty as traitors and thieves of public resources. What can be done is such situation when almost everybody in the country regardless of her education, or income or age would but adopt the idea that the equal distribution of the national wealth is the only just distribution since no individual or group had produced it in any way.
3. Turkey:
Turkey had its democratic experiment directly after the very strong blow which the ruling class has received making it a very weak one with out actually allowing for the real hegemony of the relatively new capitalist class. The result was a strange democracy supported and lives on the charity of the military. This case is a unique case in its capacity to show repeatedly how democracy could demise easily when the industrial sector and capitalism are not strong enough to weaken the transparent exploitation. In this odd case the democracy and the out come of the elections is enforced indirectly-and some times directly by the military. The history of this country as recent as the last decade is rich of evidence of this sort including the abolishment of the results of the elections in late 1990s because it brought “extreme” Islamists.
Conclusion:
I think that the study gives some good evidence to establish some necessary link between the two variables: Transparency of exploitation and democratization. However, to show that this link can be changed into a deterministic causal relation with the absence of transparency making sufficient cause for democratization is some how more ambitious and complicated goal. Because in this case we need to prove that it’s the only cause that works in each and every case which needs more studies that should cover all the population. I think that for now there is a need for analyzing a prominent deviant case. I mean India with its relatively poor and backward economy that reflects in many aspects the pre-modern relations. This is something to be tackled if the theory has to claim a universal leverage.
Despite this the theory actually does explain some “strange” cases better than other theories. I think that Germany and Nazism. The civil war in Alger after the Islamic Front winning the election in 1992, are good examples of the theory’s capacity to predict.
The Palestinian authority election is another -very recent one: 2006- example of the work of transparency to undermine democracy by bringing “undemocratic powers” to “office”. This helps the reader appreciate the discovery of the theory that it’s necessary for democracy not to have transparent exploitation, corruption, and the like.

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