Tag Archives: Majoritarianism

Remembering Alexei Navalny and helping Ukraine

Nonviolent News, Readings, , , , ,

by Peter Emerson

In view of Alexei Navalny’s heroic life and tragic death, and the continuing horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is important to understand our own mistakes in Russia’s recent history. To quote the Russian/Ukrainian philosopher, Vladimir Vernadsky, “everything is connected,” (‘всё связано’).

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When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union of 1985, this was the end of the Cold War. In theory, it should have led to demobilisation and huge waves of disarmament. But no; and in fact, since that time, NATO has expanded. Many western ‘experts’ went to Moscow to advise him, not on peace, but on privatisation and democratisation, with a focus on, respectively, the free market and majoritarianism, i.e., majority voting/majority rule. But the original Russian translation of this term was ‘большевизм’ bolshevism; (a replacement has now been concocted, majoritarnost).

Two years later, ethno-religious clashes erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus. The headline in Moscow’s main newspaper Pravda was “Вот наш Ольстер,” (‘Vot nash Olster’), “This is our Northern Ireland.” In effect, the right of self-determination was a cause of conflict. After all, if Ireland can leave the UK, or if Azerbaijan can leave the USSR, then Northern Ireland could leave Ireland, or an enclave like Nagorno-Karabakh could leave Azerbaijan. And the Caucasus was full of enclaves. “Why should I be in the minority in your state when you could be in the minority in mine?” asked one Vladimir Gligorov in Yugoslavia, a land of one language, two scripts, three religions, four …. five republics, and six neighbours. And like the famous Russian dolls, the matrioshki, inside every majority there was yet another minority.

In those days, the Soviet Union was still a one-party state. In their first elections of 1989, therefore, every candidate was a communist… but there were green, red, blue, brown – all sorts of communists. And those who might otherwise have been in a Green Party were members of ‘the ecological union.’ They held a meeting in Moscow, in 1989, and there I met Zurab Zhvania from Georgia. We spoke about consensus and all that, and so, one year later, he invited me to go to Tbilisi to give a press conference (in Russian, my Georgian isn’t) on power-sharing.

Now initially, the West supported the maintenance of the Soviet Union, not least because of the oil in Siberia. We wanted this stuff to be available, which requires inter alia political stability. And we wanted it to be cheap, so we advised firstly, a free market – Friedman economics. But no country should ever adopt a free market at a time of deficits in the basics, like food. The law was passed; lots of unscrupulous went to the supermarket, bought up everything, set up a table outside the metro stations, and sold it all at ten times the price. Hence the oligarchs. Secondly, the West advised a freely convertible currency, i.e., Russia should float the rouble. It sank. And Russian oil was cheap.

But back to self-determination. There soon followed disturbances for independence in Georgia, Azerbaijan – Ukraine initially was relatively quiet – and then, in 1991, in Lithuania, which was different, apparently; it was more ‘European’. At this point, the West made a huge mistake: we ditched the reformer, Gorbachev, in favour of the unprincipled Boris Yeltsin. Like his English namesake, this man had one thing only (apart from a love of the vodka): ambition. Originally, he was Gorbachev’s protégé, but when given the chance, he wanted power. Over what? Oh anything, or even everything. Over the Soviet Union? And when Yeltsin realised his path to power would be better served by supporting the break-away republics, he did so. And he could become not a Soviet, only a Russian tsar.

Now Russia, in a way, was similar to England, in that in their day, both ruled empires, and both thought God was on their side. Russia with its capital of Moscow, was the third Rome. Christianity, it was argued, started in Rome, moved to Constantinople, and the one true faith was now in Moscow. And with God on its side, Russia survived the invasion of Poland during the Times of Troubles, at the turn of the 17th Century; defeated Sweden in 1709, when Peter the Great won the Battle of Poltava (which is in today’s Ukraine); halted Napoléon at the Battle of Borodino in 1812 (and hence Tchaikovsky’s famous overture); and won the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. And today, the same good God was going to save Russia from the advances of NATO.

Now just as many a Moscovite regarded the two adjectives – Russian and Soviet – as very similar, so too (in days not that long gone), many Londoners regarded the words British and English as all but synonymous. When the Soviet Union was established, or concocted, the Bolsheviks decided that every republic should have its ‘own’ communist party; hence the Georgian, the Lithuanian, etc. But there wasn’t a Russian one. Oops. In 1989, the ‘error’ was realised; the Russian Communist Party held its founding congress. Yeltsin, now a rival to Gorbachev, stood for the presidency. But Gorbachev’s man won, and Yeltsin lost. The latter then ripped up his party card and converted to Orthodox Christianity. It was just so obvious that the man was ambitious, and nothing else. Sadly, the western media, including The Irish Times, decided to support him. (Western journalists often shared the same block of flats, and frequently the same interpretation of events.)

(By this time, my co-author and I had written an article in Moscow News on consensus, which had created a huge amount of interest… in Russia! As a result, we published a number of other essays, not least one in Novy Mir (New World), Russia’s leading literary journal with a print run of three million, where we appeared alongside Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The Irish Times, I’m afraid, was just not interested in these achievements of another Irishman.)

In 1991, then, Yeltsin took over, not as a Soviet imperialist, but as a Russian one. The last thing he wanted was the right of self-determination to be popular among the various peoples in Russia, the Sumi and Komi up near the Arctic, the Tartars and Maris on the western side of the Urals, and all the various folk in the Northern Caucasus, let alone the dozens in Siberia, the Buryats near Lake Baikal or the Chukchis on the Pacific coast, for example. (In fact, the authorities themselves weren’t sure how many different peoples there were; the official figure was between 60 and 120). So Russia opposed any attempt by any people to hold a referendum and break away – matrioshki nationalism, they called it – and hence Yeltsin’s first war in Chechnya in 1994.

The Caucasus was in a mess. There were Georgians (Orthodox) in Chechnya (Muslim), fighting the Russians (Orthodox); Russians and Chechens in Abkhazia (Muslim) fighting the Georgians. And Russia was also supporting another enclave, South Ossetia, where everyone was Orthodox. Violence, as always, was breeding yet more violence. There followed a second war in Chechnya in 1999, and hence too Yeltsin’s own protégé, Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union was now dead, all the republics were now independent, including in ’91 Ukraine, a country of mainly Christian Slavs – with just a few minorities like the Crimean Tatars. Unlike Russia, other lands were also mainly Slav: Poland, Czechoslovakia (as was), Bulgaria and, not least, Yugoslavia (the southern Slavs).

Unfortunately, the West again advised majoritarianism – and Ukraine now divided into two: a Russian-speaking Orthodox ‘half’ versus a Ukrainian-speaking Catholic/Uniate ‘half’. That is what often happens when decisions are taken in binary votes, and when elections are conducted in the two-round system. The divisions worsened. In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko won the presidential election, by a whisker, and he was pro-West; in the spontaneous celebrations which followed in Kiev, some were flying confederate flags, others the Georgian flag, and many were sleeping in (spontaneous?) tents supplied from abroad. But Yushchenko was the president and, with the polity of majority rule, he could ensure Ukraine was pro-West. (At the time, I wrote in Fortnight that Ukraine could perhaps join the EU, but not NATO. As happens so often in human history, one side fails to understand how the other lot think.)

Six years later, the other Viktor, Yushchenko’s old rival, Yanukovich won, again by a whisker; oh dear, was the reaction; he was pro-Russia, and it was still majority rule. The protests in Maidan turned violent. Only in 2014 did the West change its mind: democracy was not majority rule after all, apparently; as in Northern Ireland, it was (sort of) decided that it was now power-sharing. An EU (EC as was) delegation rushed over to Kiev but…too late; on the day it arrived, Yanukovich ran into exile.

Meanwhile, the newly independent Georgia had also divided, only to fight two ethno-wars in the enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – (there was very nearly another war in Adjara) – and all over self-determination. There then followed the civil war, after which Eduard Shevardnadze restored some order. Next, in 2004, came the so-called velvet revolution, which wasn’t a revolution at all, really, but the elections did involve a changing of the guard. Shevardnadze, however, was still in his dacha in Tbilisi, not far from the hotel where I and other OSCE election observers were staying. Georgia now had a new prime minister, (my colleague), Zurab Zhvania. In 2005, he died. In a gas leak? That was the official line, but many Georgians thought he’d been murdered on the orders of the then President, Mikhail Saakashvili. They also believed that if Zhvania had still been in office on 1st August 2008, Georgia would not have gone to war with Russia in South Ossetia. But war it was. One week later – with Putin in Beijing for the Olympics – Russia recorded its first casualties. He rushed home. That war was started not only by Putin.

He now saw that referendums could be, er, useful. Russia had opposed the referendum in Kosova – yet more matrioshki nationalism – but he changed his mind (again) to support the 2006 referendum for self-determination in South Ossetia (and ignored the other referendum in Ahalgori, a Georgian enclave in South Ossetia, which voted in the opposite way). It was a repetition of what had happened in Croatia where in 1991 the Catholics had voted for independence while, one week earlier, the Orthodox had voted for the opposite; and where, in the name of democracy, partners in and adult children of mixed relationships were just, well, disenfranchised,

Back to Ukraine where, in 2014, Putin’s man Yanukovich had lost and run away, and Putin doesn’t like losing.  So he wanted Crimea to reverse its 1991 referendum decision in support of Ukraine and instead to declare independence – (from Ukraine); (such a collective vacillation is also catered for in the Belfast Agreement – the seven-year ’never-end-em’). After the shambolic, ‘little green men’ referendum in Crimea, there followed other dubious polls in Donetsk and Luhansk, and 2014, you will recall, was also the year of Scotland’s referendum. A Russian separatist in Luhansk ‘justified’ his call to arms with the word Shotlandiya Шотландия, (Scotland). “Everything is [indeed] connected.”

After yet more violence, Putin wanted Donetsk and Luhansk, not to be independent at all, but to be incorporated – (into Russia). He’d changed his mind again, (like the EU). So in 2022 more referendums were held and, supposedly, apparently, and democratically, a majority of the people had also changed their minds, and quite by chance of course, in exactly the same way. This is all democratic nonsense; in many instances, as shown by Napoléon, Hitler and countless others, majority votes in referendums, parliaments and party congresses, identify not the will of the given electorate, but the will of the author(s) of the question. (Brexit, of course, a glaring exception, backfired.)

–

Can we never question our obsession with the 2,500-year-old binary vote? Even on problems that are obviously multi-optional, must everything be reduced/distorted, either into a dichotomy, as in the 2016 Brexit referendum, or to a number of binary questions, as in Theresa May’s indicative (sic) votes? In a similar fashion, the Good Friday Agreement says that Northern Ireland has to be either British or Irish; that, as in Croatia and South Ossetia, there are these two possibilities, only; that other options, for a compromise and/or peace, or an interregnum, whatever, shall not even exist let alone be on the ballot paper.

And the world blunders on, despite the facts that:

+ “all the wars in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum,” (Oslobodjenje, 7.2.1999);

+ the same now applies to the conflict in Ukraine;

+ both Milorad Dodik in Republika Srpska want, and Anatoly Bibilov in South Ossetia wanted, yet more binary referendums, as do Sinn Féin and the SNP in their bailiwicks, as well as some Catalans, Taiwanese, Baluchis, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Finally, and, even more importantly,

+ majoritarianism, the majority coalition in the Knesset, is (not the but) a cause of the horrible violence that is now the cause of so much suffering and devastation in the Middle East.

–

So, what is to be done now? As before but now more urgently than ever, we must support those many Russians who are opposing the war, in particular, Yulia Navalnaya. The British and US ambassadors recently laid flowers at the memorial for her husband. They should do more to help (and, as I suggested earlier) support all forms of non-violent anti-war demonstrations, if only by their presence.

In addition, it would be wise to acknowledge some of our earlier mistakes, and to change those of our political structure which Putin is also using for his military aims: simplistic electoral systems and false-flag binary referendums.

As mentioned above, another complication comes from the war in the Middle East. Here too, we should question the western political structures which, inter alia, allow Netanyahu in the name of democracy to rule with Israel’s most extreme right-wing majority coalition ever! Suffice also to say that the ideal, a one-state solution, could not work if it were to be based on majority voting; if only from that point of view, we should be seeking a more inclusive form of decision-making.

A sense of urgency is required, not least because Putin is now trying to woo the Palestinians (and the ‘global South’), implying that he opposes (Israeli) violence and that his ‘special military operation’ is an act of defence against western militarism as seen, in his eyes, by the expansion of NATO.

It is important, of course – and I wrote as a pacifist who therefore believes in the principle of minimum force – to continue to supply arms and ammunitions. In many horrible instances of violence – when someone attacks a child, for example, or a violent man attacks a woman – the true pacifist will never do nothing: he/she should always intervene, if need be by putting their own body between the attacker and the victim. But we should also emphasise our long-term aspirations for a world without nuclear weapons; for a world where military expenditures are reduced; for a world in which all nations, and all parties/factions, cooperate to confront the existential problems of Climate Change.

Conflicts in the Middle East, NI and elsewhere

Nonviolent News, Readings, , , , ,

by Peter Emerson

We start with a theoretical solution to the problem; next, we examine its most recent causes; and then propose possible steps for a less violent future.

The problem

The ideal would be a one-state solution, a country where peoples of different ethno-religious backgrounds share a territory where religion is not regarded as a distinction of nationhood. This has often been the case, not only in Israel and throughout the Middle East. Suffice for the moment to say that a single state of Israel/Palestine combined could not work, at all, if its governance were based on majority voting and majority rule. 

Other jurisdictions have also been based on a religious affiliation: they include Northern Ireland, Pakistan and India, Libya, Croatia and Timor Leste. Unfortunately, in western democratic practice, problems are invariably reduced to dichotomies or series of dichotomies, and even though more sophisticated decision-making procedures have long since been devised, as often as not, decisions are still taken by a (simple, weighted or consociational) majority vote.

An alternative solution would involve the two states, Israel and Palestine, as neighbours: the former as is, contiguous, the latter split between Gaza and the West Bank. At the moment, there’s only one properly constituted nation-state, Israel, a country with a population of about 20% Arab. Therefore, in a democracy, (for as long as ethno-religious origins are considered to be so important) its parliament should also be about 20% Arab; Israel uses a closed-list form of PR, and currently, there are about 10% Arab elected representatives.

Secondly – or so it could be argued if democracy was for everybody and not just a majority – any government of ten or more ministers should include at least one or two Arabs; today’s cabinet in the Knesset consists of 28 ministers, so the number of Arabs should be three (on 10%) or six (on 20%). There are none. There were some in the previous administration, but Netanyahu now presides over the most extreme right-wing government of its history. Apparently, in current democratic practice, you can go to bed with the devil, as long as your cabinet is at least 50% + 1 of the parliament, it shall be regarded (by most) as democratic. 

In a similar fashion, in 2017, Britain’s Tories teamed up with a bunch whose policies (but not necessarily the persons) were extremist, the DUP; the Labour Party did something similar in 1978; (so both of the UK’s big parties have and have always had a vested interest in keeping NI in the UK, so its majoritarian – and sometimes hung – parliament would always include a small number of malleable outsiders). Meanwhile, elsewhere, other extremist parties have also prospered. Austria’s coalition of 1999 included its Freedom Party on 52 seats but excluded the Socialists on 65. A similar party was in government (with no ministers) in the Netherlands in 2010, and in the wake of their 2023 election, the Dutch may soon be ruled by a coalition led by this party. Meanwhile, with its Alternative für Deutschland the right in Germany and elsewhere is also on the rise.

Majority coalitions, they say, lead to stable government… yet in some instances, as in Israel in 2015, the government has had a majority of just one MP: a tail which then wags the dog.

Israel often claims it is the only democracy in the Middle East. So part of the problem there is the fact that democracy here, as practised, is so adversarial; that some electoral systems are not preferential and proportional; that most cabinets are not all-party power-sharing administrations – indeed, the only one currently in existence but not in a conflict zone is in Switzerland; and thirdly, that decision-making almost everywhere is based on majority votes.

Recent causes

The most immediate cause of the current war was the horrific violence of October last year. The situation has been exacerbated by Israel’s excessive use of force since those events. Apart from outsiders like the USA, the UK and Russia, other players in the conflict include Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and of course Iran; their histories in this problem go back a little further.

Lebanon

In 1943, Beirut benefited from the fact that there were no ‘western experts’ (because the latter were all fighting WWII), so the Lebanese devised their own political structure. They now have an almost brilliant electoral system, albeit based on Britain’s useless first-past-the-post. In any constituency of, say, 50:25:25 Sunni:Maronite:Shi’a, parties may nominate candidates, but only if they too are in the same ratio of 2:1:1; accordingly, there shall be 4 or a multiple of 4 elected representatives, always in the same 2:1:1 ratio. Voters may vote for only one party, which means in this instance they also vote for four people in that same religious ratio of 2:1:1; if they don’t want a particular candidate, they can cross him/her out and put in another one… of the same religion! In effect, then, the election takes religion out of politics. Well, not quite; but it was a nice idea. 

If NI also had that rule, if standing two candidates in North Belfast, for example, the DUP would have to include a Catholic!

Their elections, then, are pretty good. Their religiously most diverse constituency elected 17 representatives, so there were lots and lots of candidates! And a typical result for a 128-member parliament included Shi’a, Sunni, Maronite, Greek and Armenian Orthodox and Catholic, Druze, Alawite and Protestant MPs… as well as, just in case, one more for the minorities!

The Taif Agreement also catered for a form of power-sharing, with appointments to various important posts – the likes of the president, premier, and speaker – subject to religious affiliation: a Maronite, a Sunni and a Shi’a, respectively. Sadly, therefore, their power-sharing arrangement perpetuated the very problem it was supposed to overcome.

In like manner, the designations used in Stormont in consociational votes enforce the sectarianism they were designed to obviate.

In all, the authors of the Taif Agreement accepted the fact that, in every election, the voters should have a good choice. But, they continued, in decision-making, both the MPs in parliament and the voters in any referendum would have choices which were only binary.

Similarly, the authors of the Belfast Agreement agreed that, when choosing their local representatives, the voters in any council or Assembly election should be offered a choice of more than two candidates; and we still have PR-STV. When making decisions, however – ah, that’s different, apparently – the MLAs in Stormont or the voters in a referendum are to be given choices that are only binary. 

This tendency is universal. In 1949 in Germany, which had caused so many to suffer in, and/or as a consequence of, the Weimar Republic – which had a polity based on PR elections but majority voting in the parliament – the new post-Hitler settlement was to include a different form of PR in elections, but decision-making in the Bundestag still had to be binary, apparently. It’s in the Basic Law: “The fact that members of the Bundestag take decisions on behalf of the whole German people is a requirement for majority decision-making.” This oxymoron is pure gobbledegook! There is however one good proviso: all future elections of the chancellor are to be so-called constructive votes, so nobody is to vote ‘no’; rather, if they didn’t like option A, they could propose option B. In the USA, where two of the founding fathers actually invented a form of PR, decision-making in Congress has to be dichotomous. Trump is only the denouement of a binary polity.

And so it goes on, in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, decision-making on all sorts of disputes – and nearly all of them are multi-optional – is invariably binary! Even in Pyongyang, the North Korean constitution, article 97, stipulates majority voting, (not that it’s used very often).

Lebanon today is a multi-multi society, with a very fragile form of power-sharing in Beirut, while the mainly Shi’a sect of Hezbollah is concentrated in the South, close to the Israeli border.

Syria

The Golan Heights were taken by Israel, by force, during the six-day war of 1967.

In the wake of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010, democracy was on the move. Whereupon a Sunni majority in Syria decided to oppose the rule of Bashar al-Assad, a member of a Shi’a sect called the Alawites; therefore, he belonged to a minority of a minority. The protest started in 2011, peacefully, but it turned violent within a year; the rest is yet more bloody history.

Yemen

Yemen has long since been split, with a mainly Sunni population in the eastern ‘half’ opposing the Shi’as in what had been the British colony of Aden, where today’s Houthis are based. Yet again, the country is divided in a majority-versus-minority conflict, as if being a majority (no matter how defined) gives them the right to rule.

A civil war started in 2014, with the Houthis trying to take over the whole country. Saudi Arabia intervened, militarily, on the side of the Sunnis (of course), while Iran supported and armed the Houthis (again of course). In 2022, the UN brokered a cease-fire, but the events in Gaza have prompted the Houthis to attack ships in the Red Sea, supposedly in support of their fellow religionists in Gaza in Palestine.

Iran

In 1906, in Iran, Britain discovered oil, which was sort of OK, and then decided that the oil was not Iranian but British. Mossadegh thought that was not OK, so in 1953, he held a referendum to nationalise it all, and he won, massively. That was just not good enough, apparently, so the British organised a coup, installed the Shah, and he had a referendum to reverse that decision… massively. Next, in 1979, the revolutionary Ayatollah had another poll, this one to prove that the people did not want to be socialist (by 99.8%) or capitalist (by 99.9%) and actually preferred to be Islamic (by 99.5%). As usual, a majority identifies, not the will of the people, not the will of the majority, but the will of he – it’s usually a he – who sets the question. The turnout was always high… except in the last plebiscite it was only 65%, as the Shi’a voted ‘yes’, of course, but the mainly Sunni minority of Turkmens in the North abstained, of course. 

In like manner, the Catholics boycotted our 1973 border poll, as did the Orthodox in Croatia’s independence plebiscite of 1991, so too the Muslims in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1994, and the Georgians in South Ossetia in 2006, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Yet still there are people in these islands who want binary referendums, and academics in University College London and elsewhere who think of nothing else.

The future

But back to the problem of violence in the Middle East. There are at least two ways we can help:

a) at home, we could practice a form of democracy that, at least in theory, could work in a one-state solution;

and

b) in the conflict zone, where maybe a few of the great and good – religious leaders of all faiths, politicians, and retired but famous folk from many professions, with Arabic and Hebrew speakers among them – could walk, slowly, from Gaza to Jerusalem.

At Home

If we want all-party power-sharing in the Knesset, we should first practise it ourselves: the British people electing their parliament in a colour-blind, preferential and proportional system (like PR-STV); the British and Irish elected representatives then voting in a procedure which allows every member to choose, in order of preference, both those whom they wish to be in cabinet, and the ministry in which they want each of their nominees to serve – so the ballot paper is tabular. Like PR-STV, this matrix vote entices every party to nominate only as many as it thinks it can get elected; and it’s based on a Modified Borda Count which entices the parliamentarians to complete a full ballot. In effect, therefore, the voting procedure encourages every elected representative to cross the gender gap, the party divide and even the sectarian chasm! In the Knesset, it would mean that the a 28-member cabinet would invariably include about three to six Arabs.

Both Dáil Éireann and the House of Commons should not only preach all-party power-sharing; they should practise it. So too should Stormont, such that every executive would be cross-party; and governance, throughout these islands, could be more inclusive.

In the Dáil, Sinn Féin would also be in cabinet. In Ankara, the Kurds would be sharing power. And in the House of Commons, with only 1.5% of the MPs, the DUP would never be in government, (unless perhaps their number included one individual of exceptional talent). Meanwhile, the AfD would be in government in Berlin, the PVV in The Hague, and so on. And such cabinets would take all decisions in consensus, either verbally, and/or by using an MBC.

In the Middle East

By definition, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi perhaps, anti-war protests should always be ‘peace-ful’. Those involved – the more famous the better – should best be old: persons like the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, an Imam, a Rabbi, a Buddhist, a Hindu, perhaps a serving or retired president like Mary Robinson, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, along with a few interpreters and some younger persons perhaps to care for the donkeys carrying the tents and so on. They could walk, slowly, meet the victims, discuss the problems with whomsoever, not least the press… and talk peace.

–

Peter Emerson

The de Borda Institute

www.deborda.org