The concept of “democracy” is equated with “freedom”, “equality” and “popular sovereignty”. These ideals are so appealing that different kinds of regimes pay lip service to them.

The truth is that not all democracies are alike. They did not drink their ideals from the same spring. The pioneers who theorised about the concept of democracy preached different sermons.

Among those who spring to mind are Edmund Burke and Walter Bagehot; Rousseau and Tocqueville, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to name but few. Taken in the mass, their writings could loosely be regarded as a basis for a theory of democracy

Yet they do not speak the same language. Burke and Rousseau, for example, sound as if they view democracy from the opposing ends of the telescope — all of which makes it difficult to draw up a single, common theory of democracy.

Complication

There is the added complication that the so-called “pioneers” theorised about a few subjects e.g. democracy, republican government, Constitutional monarchy and representative government. The debate has since been extended to such burning issues as natural and civil rights, the rule of law, universal suffrage and majority rule, the separation of powers, proportional representation, direct democracy by referendum and so on.

This array of topics is daunting. The more the debate intensifies, the more it appears that democracy has no theory. It has been more accurately described as a theorem – a proposition that it is best for free people to be sovereign and that this sovereignty implies political and social equality.

There seems to be general agreement on the issue of popular government, with political parties, parliaments and voting systems. The split comes over the machinery of government. It is how the wheels turn, and not a general theory, that makes a government free or not free

Basic reality

We do not have to go back to the themes raised for discussion in the Athenian democracies or in imperial Rome, nor even to the many themes discussed by Rousseau in his great book The Social Contract to grasp the significance of this basic reality. Suffice it to say that Hitler achieved power after he was voted in as leader of a plurality party by popular vote under a Constitution which combined the best democratic features on record.

Once the people are sovereign, they can do anything they want, including turning their Constitution upside down. Constitutions and laws can be decreed, but freedom cannot.

We have since learned that some young democracies, emerging from the penumbra of colonialism, embarked on what they thought to be the path of democracy, only to succumb to military or totalitarian rule – and this in the name of liberation and self-government!

This raises the basic question: how can a people learn the way of free government until it is free? And how can it stay free if it cannot operate the particular machinery associated with self-rule?

Grass root aspirations alone are not enough to guarantee democracy.

Nor can democracy be promoted by strangers from outside.

Ingredients for stability

Tradition, literacy and social organisation are essential ingredients for stability.

Equally important is the ability of the electorate to adapt to the social revolution that has given birth to the welfare state and to ideas of social and economic parity.

This, too could be a contentious issue if it were to become a source of day-to-day authority over individuals.

Summing up, democracy is not a “product” manufactured to a common specification.

It is the product of historical developments which have taken many forms, all seeking freedom and equality as the main objective.

Freedom calls for a government that governs least – not a government whose motto is dolce far niente; equality calls for a government that governs with social concern.

It is this that explains why the institutions of the free world are under strain and the electorates sometimes under stress.

It has been well said that while the concept of democracy still holds, its terms have changed in nature, and this particularly so because the phrase “the people” has been changed beyond recognition, first by the industrial revolution in the l9th century, then by the social revolution of the 20th century.

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