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	In the name of Democracy by Jonathan Power International Herald Tribune   Febrary 15, 2006   The Western democracies, so keen on exporting their political model to the rest of the world, seem to be perfecting the art of shooting themselves in the foot.   The cartoon affair, which showed Danish democracy as religiously illiterate at the onset and by last week"s end defensively bigoted, was preceded only two weeks earlier by President Jacques Chirac of France announcing that any (presumably Islamic) nation that supported groups that tried to use terrorism and weapons of mass destruction against France should expect a nuclear response.   In an age when a terrorist group could at best detonate a "dirty bomb" - conventional explosives wrapped around some stolen nuclear waste - and kill at most a thousand people, or biological weapons like the anthrax letters that killed all of half a dozen people in the United States two years ago, Chirac was showing a European democracy at its most tendentious, not to say callous and barbaric.   Recently, democracies seem so intent on revealing an ugly side that present practice might dissuade non-Westerners for all time.   All that democracy appears capable of at the moment, to quote Professor John Dunn of Cambridge University in his magisterial new study of the subject, is to make "Europe"s bigotries and parochialisms a global world-historical force, instead of a mere local deformity or a continental stigma."   Alas, for all its failing, the world has no better idea, as Winston Churchill famously declared. The 20th century saw all sorts of experiments, including fascism, socialism, anarchism, monarchism, Marxism and theocracy - and all came undone. Out of the ferocious competition between political ideas democracy came out well on top.   But today, as Dunn writes, "the term democracy has become (as the Freudians put it) too highly cathected: Saturated with emotion, irradiated by passion, tugged to and fro and ever more overwhelmed by accumulated confusion.   "To rescue it as an aid in understanding politics, we need to think our way past a mass of history and block our ears to many pressing importunities."   We need to know far more about democracy than we do. President George W. Bush, for example, has declared that, "the reason I"m so strong on democracy is democracies don"t go to war with each other." Indeed, much academic research has proved his point and it is an important and good one. But democracies have a terrible record of going to war against non-democracies, often on the flimsiest excuse.   Look at America"s 19th century war against Spain. Britain, a recent study has revealed, has gone to war more times in the last hundred years than any other country in the world.   Perhaps we should not be surprised that Plato was against the democracy of his home city, Athens. Plato believed that in the best form of government philosophers would rule.   Historians have wondered why he was so against democracy. Was it because he was from a wealthy family and Athenian democracy seemed to favor more equal income distribution? Or was it because a democratic state had sentenced to death his teacher, Socrates, falsely accusing him of impiety and treading on Greeks" religious sensibilities? No matter what the reason, Plato saw democracy as the rule of the foolish, vicious and always potentially brutal.   Athenian democracy flourished but then the idea faded away for the best part of 2000 years. The Romans had little time for it. It returned - called something else - in the struggle for American independence.   A few years later, under its own name, it became the central rallying cry of the French Revolution. Only after 1789 did people start to speak of democratizing societies and it was the French spirit, not the American one, that was its potent exporter.   Every soldier in Napoleon"s ranks, as his armies tore across Europe, carried a copy of "The Rights of Man" in his rucksack. But we must never forget that democracy would never have achieved the promise it did without the vision of Robespierre, this figure of "reptilian fascination" who organized the mass executions of those thought to oppose the path of the Revolution.   Over the next 150 years the cause of democracy gradually edged forward, but it only triumphed after 1945.   Today some of us like to think, as Pericles did in his great oration on the subject, that democracy gives society its sobriety of judgment, respect for wisdom, the pride necessary for its economic energy, generosity and even its respect for taste and responsiveness to beauty. But we are engaged in a perpetual fight against its worst elements.
	Make poverty political by Tash Shifrin The Guardian United Kingdom   February 15, 2006   A quarter of a million people filled the streets of Edinburgh last year to demand that the rich nations of the G8 take action to make poverty history. The demonstrators, with their placards, banners and whistles, had come on trains and coaches from all over Britain. But making their presence felt on the streets were not just political organisations and trade unions, but many of Britain"s best-known charities.   International aid and development is consistently Britain"s top charitable cause, measured by the amount of income from donors. Research from the Charities Aid Foundation shows that £625m was donated to international charities in 2003-04, well ahead of the £580m given to the next biggest cause, cancer. The same research put Oxfam and Save the Children in the top 10 fundraising charities.   Now, some of that cash is buying placards, flyers, badges and banners - and many of the donors are standing up to take a more active role in the increasingly politicised climate surrounding aid and development.   Aid has risen up the national and international policy agendas. The Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign saw Tony Blair ostentatiously sport a white wristband, while new Conservative leader David Cameron has put poverty among his six priority policy areas. Beyond the domestic arenas of Westminster and Whitehall, the summits of the World Trade Organisation, or meetings of the G8 or EU ministers have become the focus of an international social justice movement - and are met everywhere by demonstrations.   Richard Miller, director of ActionAid, says charities have been "catching the mood" of a public that is increasingly engaged in social justice issues. At Oxfam, the charity"s own figures show the scale of the huge rise in committed activism. The database of people who want to be involved in campaigning has grown from 20,000 names to 220,000 in the past four years, says campaigns director Adrian Lovett. "Half of that has come from speaking to existing donors about campaigning. It"s also been about reaching out to younger people," he says. "Previously, we perhaps had this fear that donors would be put off by our campaigning." Now, he says, Oxfam"s campaigning side is far more integrated into its work.   Marie Staunton, chief executive of children"s humanitarian agency Plan UK, agrees: "There"s been a leap in the last year in the understanding of people in the UK of development issues."   Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement - which, as an explicitly political campaign, is not a registered charity - sees the big international charities repositioning themselves as more activist bodies. He welcomes this as a "fantastic" move.   "Over the last couple of years, increasingly we"ve seen advocacy and campaigning moved out of the shadows, particularly at some of the bigger agencies," Southworth says. "One thing coming out of MPH, for the big agencies, was make campaigning legitimate - visible and legitimate within their own organisations."   The picture has changed sharply since 2004, when Sarah Lister, then of Sussex University"s Institute of Development Studies, warned in a report for the development NGOs network, Bond, that NGOs faced being "squeezed out of their niche, unable to recruit volunteers or attract as many donations" and could be "rejected by a new generation of activists as irrelevant, or part of the system they are fighting".   But the change has come as part of a longer-term trend. Staunton says agencies "can"t help being small-p political", as they move from the traditional model of a charity - "giving things out" - to the development agenda of helping people do things for themselves. "As you do that you see some of the barriers," Staunton says.   The need to tackle those barriers to development has drawn charities into greater political lobbying, Staunton believes. Plan UK, she says, takes the cue for its own advocacy and campaigning work from listening to the children and young people the charity supports.   ActionAid"s Miller says the shift towards a more political agenda began in the 1990s as charities began to pay more attention to economic justice and debt. "If you worked in a country like Zambia - I was there in the 1990s - it was impossible to move forward when so many resources were going out of the country in terms of servicing debt." In the early days, charities were not confident the public would understand the issues. But the Jubilee 2000 campaign against the burden of third-world debt was an eye-opener.   The "defining moment", he thinks, was the demonstration marking the 1998 G8 summit in Birmingham. Some 70,000 people turned out to form a human chain and demand that the G8 leaders drop the debt. The organisers were stunned by the turnout. "It took even seasoned campaigners by surprise," says Miller. "After debt, people began to say perhaps we can tackle more difficult issues, and we came together in MPH."   Andrew Pendleton, senior policy officer at Christian Aid, believes the Birmingham protest was the "coming of age of the development movement". Political campaigning is crucial to meeting the charity"s aims, he says. "Our goal is not just to tackle poverty with donations. We must use a proportion to challenge the systems that we and our partners see keeping people in poverty. "That leads us down the inexorable road towards a really sophisticated understanding of economic policy, insider meetings with government officials and ministers, but also working with our supporters to complete the circle... to go out on the streets with placards and say poor countries shouldn"t be forced to repay debts left by past dictators.   The balance between insider meetings with government and more critical interventions is one the aid agencies are wrestling with. The government"s readiness to jump aboard the MPH campaign was "something everyone in MPH was bothered about", Pendleton says. Many agencies speak of the need for "critical distance" between the charities and the government - and the need to maintain the pressure to ensure that the promises made by politicians are kept. "With all that, you have to be open-eyed in making sure the rhetoric and the reality at least bear some sort of resemblance," says Oxfam"s Lovett.   Already, the NGOs are pointing out that in a deal designed to cancel £12bn of debt, Nigeria is still required to pay out £7.2bn to rich creditor nations. As part of the deal, Britain will pocket £1.7bn - twice as much as it gave in aid to the whole of Africa last year - from a country where two-thirds of the population live on less than 60 pence a day. The government should hand the money back to Nigeria, Lovett says. "But the Treasury and No. 10 are digging their heels in and insisting they won"t."   Southworth says maintaining pressure will be a key challenge for the charities. "Relations between agencies and the government are slightly more complex than before. Everyone"s feeling their way through and getting used to it," he says.   Not all international aid agencies are stepping up their political activity, however. Jean-Michel Piedagnel, director of humanitarian aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières UK, says his charity stays clear of political activity in order not to compromise humanitarian access. "It could change the perception of our independence," he says.   MSF advocates putting the responsibility back on to governments and "refuses to be co-opted as one of the political actors". The charity will not be taking on the sort of campaigning or mobilisation of supporters that many other NGOs are now involved in.   Piedagnel admits this leaves MSF in "a very lonely place", although he notes that his agency focuses on humanitarian aid rather than development issues. But he says: "I still think development NGOs have to be careful not to overstate their capacity to deal with all the world"s problems."   Other organisations have approached the question of who should tackle the world"s problems in a different way, by working much more closely with partner NGOs in the "global south", Lovett says: "In almost all our campaigning work now, we set the framework at an international level and deliver at a local level. Across the sector that"s probably the trend, too."   ActionAid has gone a step further, moving its international headquarters to Johannesburg. "We thought it was no longer acceptable to sit in London and run operations around the world," says Miller. Each of ActionAid"s country programmes will gradually become independent with its own board of trustees, he adds. It is a "clear political signal that the South should have much greater leadership and power over its own development".   This internationalisation will be the next big shift for the aid and development agencies, Miller predicts. And with it will come a new attitude, he says. "When I started, development was a bit do-goody, people who wear sandals and so on," he recalls. "Now it has entered the mainstream and it"s seen much more clearly in terms of justice, rather than charity - people claiming their rights rather than standing there with a begging bowl."
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