This is really quite simple, and incidentally applies to every other nation in the Middle East, and indeed, the world (that's right - I'm not one for the small issues). The reason no one in Libya will be getting democracy any time soon is that even most people in Western nations have no idea whatsoever what democracy is. Contrary to popular belief, democracy is not the political system in place in nations such as Ireland, Canada, the USA or UK. Neither is it the political system in place in Germany, France or any other European nation.
This is a highly relevant topic as pundits everywhere ask "What next for Libya/Egypt/Tunisia/insert country here", the insinuation being that the best they could possibly hope for is a system like ours. This is a common tactic that every lawyer knows called "framing the debate", and is as old as the book. Just as they have succeeded in turning a widespread revolt into a crisis centered narrowly on the two nations who have habitually ticked them off (Syria and Libya), the powers that be (this would be the G-8 governments together with media organizations who prefer to repeat pre-fed lines instead of bothering to do their own research) have also succeeded in turning the entire idea of collective empowerment (which really is what the Arab Spring is all about) into the usual shallow debate about elections. So long as you are walking around with indelibly purple index fingers, so the official wisdom goes, you are living the life and have nothing further to hope for or expect. In fact, you should be grateful. Just think of all the people in the world without purple index fingers.
Rather depressing, isn't it? But if you're sitting in Egypt or Tunisia right now, wondering what life has in store for you, beyond the ability to get some serious ink done 12 times in your life (the average number of times a person votes in national elections), or if you are in Ireland or Canada or Germany and have a vague feeling that you are being sold short and really this whole democracy thing isn't what it is cracked up to be, I've got got good news for you.
"Democracy" as we know it is not as good as it gets. This is basically because it isn't democracy. I know that is a radical claim to make, but bear with me: I spent four years researching this at Ireland's best university, and I've got a bloody high IQ and a Puritan work ethic. It was time well spent. After all, if I were dumber, I would have been satsified enough to write my thesis on something a lot more PC. By the time I'm done with this blog series, I promise you that you'll wonder how you could have ever believed that you are living in a democracy, and you'll also see why blindly inducing the newly "liberated" nations of the Middle East to copy the Western system instead of going beyond it would be a lost opportunity.
The political system in place in Western nations is a Republican system, which was explicitly and intentionally modelled on the Roman Republic (anyone doubting this may be interested in reading The Federalist Papers, which are available in paperback form from Penguin, and in which the founding fathers of the USA discuss at length how they will create a system in which the collective people will inter alia be unable to influence politics for such devious ends as debt cancellation). Republicanism is a quite different system than the demokratia in place in ancient Athens. The Founding Fathers made very clear that they did not, under any circumstances, want demokratia. I will say more about demokratia in the future, but for now, let me make a few basic points: democracy was a rather conservative and serious affair, it involved very few elections, it was highly sophisticated (indeed, reading about it may make you feel slightly depressed at the lack of progress humanity has made on some fronts in the past few thousand years), it involved massive levels of active participation from the citizen population, and it depended on a relatively egalitarian form of wealth distribution.
The Republican system of Rome utilized elections at every opportunity, resulted in high levels of active participation for certain sectors of society while the masses were relegated to rubber-stamping decisions, and encouraged the accumulation of enormous wealth disparities which needed to periodically be resolved through debt cancellation mechanisms. I'm sure this sounds familiar.
Personally, I've heard enough platitudes. It is time for a real revolution and real change - not the non-events that the Arab Spring and global economic crisis are fast turning into. Athens and democracy offer us a real-life guide as to how this could be achieved, and something that anyone interested in the "what next" question should know about.
(to be continued next week...)