Open Democracy is About More than "Allowing Citizens to Have Their Say" on the Sidelines of Policymaking

The Club of Madrid's own U.S. News Briefings about the opening of the Madrid Summit emphasize the role of the experts and state powerbrokers at the Summit, while mentioning almost as a footnote the following:

During the three days of the Summit, participants will discuss and debate ways to develop a comprehensive democratic response to the threat of terrorism. Alongside the meeting, an on-line forum will be hosted by OpenDemocracy.net to allow citizens around the world to have their say.

This information, posted by the Madrid Summit's institutional sponsors, underlines the potentially severe limitations of "democracy" at the "International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security." Indeed, if we take the Club of Madrid's literal marginalization of the on-line forum--the most open and democratic element of the entire Summit process--as representative of the actual relationship between the experts and the role of citizens at the Madrid Summit this week, then we will have to question the legitimacy of the Summit's stated objective of developing a "comprehensive democratic response to the threat of terrorism."

How can a policymaking Summit develop a democratic response if its own institutional processes do not substantially embody the practice of democracy? Or are we to assume that what the Madrid Summit means by "democracy" is really the same old 20th-century Orwellian "democracy of experts"?

A Summit meeting that was democratic in a truly functional sense (rather than only in the liberal sense of window-dressing) would not simply "allow" citizens to "have their say" from the sidelines--"alongside" the real policymaking work of the meeting. A truly democratic Summit would find ways to integrate the participation of citizens into the heart of the policymaking and Agenda-making process.

While we therefore wish only the best of luck to the participants of the Madrid Summit in their work of producing an Agenda for policymaking that is a progressive improvement on the now dominant global Policy Agenda, we can only hope that future Summits with pretensions to achieve any kind of democratic policymaking Agenda for the world work harder to integrate the particpation of "citizens around the world" into the institutional structure of the policymaking process.

For democratic citizens around the world are tired of simply being "allowed" to "have their say" from the sidelines of policymaking processes from which they are excluded. Democratic citizens understand that democratic society and government is constituted only through their own participation in the policymaking process. All the rest is commentary. --Which is not to sideline the value of commentary, but simply to emphasize that democratic commentary develops in relation to active engagement in the policymaking process, not from the sidelines where neoliberal institutions would like to keep us.

Neoliberal institutional frames of policymaking seek to keep democratic citizens on the sidelines, restricted to voicing their opinions about things over which they have no control. Truly democratic institutional frames engage citizens in the work of policymaking, where the knowledge invested in democratic people becomes the power to change policy.

Let us hope that from the limitations of the institutional structure of this first Madrid Summit may grow more robustly democratic institutional structures of the future.

But beyond mere hope, let all democratic citizens around the world organize to make it so. And if the Club of Madrid will not allow a more democratic process of policymaking to transform its institutional spaces, then democratic citizens will need to bring a more democratic institutionalization of policymaking to the Club of Madrid.

Democratic citizens are not satisfied with allowing others to make their policy for them, while they remain on the sidelines. Democratic citizens know that effective self-government means participating in the policymaking process that allows them to establish their own government, and to govern themselves as democrats who understand that the denial of the human rights of one citizen constitutes the denial of the human rights of all citizens.

Toward More Democratic Institution Building

Nancy Skougor's kindly encouraging words in response to my critique of the Madrid Summit process raise interesting points of their own about what it means to create democratic institutional space within the internet or any other institution, including that of the Club de Madrid. And especially so in relation to institutions of democratic policymaking like that which the Madrid Summit is attempting to embody --

As participants in the Summit discuss these issues, however, I would caution all not to assume that there is anything inherently "democratic" about Internet-enabled space or those who engage in politics primarily through internet rather than more traditional space. --Just as I would NOT assume that the individuals participating in the Madrid Summit working groups were any less democratic than those participating in the on-line Forums simply because the working groups were fairly closed in their structure.

Institutional Structures are the core problem we need to be addressing, since undemocratic, closed structures limit the ability of all of us to practice democracy as a way of life, no matter how much we might wish to do so. Too much discussion of democracy as an ideal in the United States and elsewhere today goes on as if people think creating "democracy" only requires good hearts and the military or political power to impose it on a country or the world. This vague thinking is possible only by skipping over the entire problem of what it means to engage in the hard work of democratic institution building.

If the Bush administration planners for the invasion of Iraq had thought clearly about building democracy as a process of institution-building, instead of simply as an ideological project of men with good hearts and powerful guns, they would not have allowed all of the core institutions of Iraqi society to be looted and reduced to rubble as the starting point for "building democracy" in Iraq. Building real democracy is as much about the work of structuring democratic access to institutions of economic life and policymaking as it is about voting.

Internet space can after all be as anti-democratic as any other institutional space. This is the underlying point of what I hope will be understood as my constructive, appreciative, and friendly "critique" of the safe.democracy.org Forum. And I'm afraid that those who conduct most of their politics online, under the assumption that by doing so they are more democratic than those who take their politics off-line, can be just as self-deluded as more traditional political folks.

As with all technologies, the internet enables some good things (access to global communication networks) as well as some bad things (new forms of exclusion and hierarchy). The only way to be sure the internet (or any institution) works as a democratic site is to do the hard work of figuring out how to structure it in ways that invite and nurture democratic participation. There is never any easy answer for how to do this, which is why it takes democratic collaborative work to build democratic institutions. Democratic institutions cannot be built from the top-down, by the few, whether on-line or off. It is not any easier to do this kind of institutional structuring work with the internet than with any other institution, which is why we still have a long way to go in thinking through these issues in deeper ways. Any truly democratic "third force" network tied together by the internet will have to tackle these tough problems front and center.

Because any effective third force/civil society network will need to engage and involve both state and private sector actors in productive and creative new ways, the surest way to limit the effectiveness of such a network would be to give more traditional state actors the impression that they are viewed as inherently less democratic than internet-savvy actors. I'm sure, after all, that many of the expert insiders in the working groups are themselves quite internet savvy. So I don't think the problem is one of bringing state-oriented actors or dignitaries into the new "life form" of the internet (which would suggest that somehow the technology of the internet carries with it an inherently democratic "life form"). Rather, I think the technology of the internet, like any technology, offers us a resource we need to learn to use most effectively to challenge ourselves and others (whether in spheres of business, state, or civil society) to live up to our greatest democratic potential.

Those of us working from the sphere of civil society need the democratic state-oriented members of the working groups to help us to live up to our democratic potential as much as they need democratic civil society folk to help them live up to their potential. Which is why strong and effective democratic networks for "human security" can only be built through what public health scholar Larry Gostin has termed "intersectoral" partnerships (linkages between business, nonprofit, and state actors).

As far as creating the new "life form" of Open Democracy is concerned, we are all in the same boat--and therefore we all need each other to challenge each other to live up to our collective best.

And again, this is why even the limitations of the present safe.democracy Forum can provide a fine basis for beginning the institutional work of thinking about what we can do better in the next summit to structure this kind of internet space to enable more deeply engaged democratic collaborations in policymaking.... so we're not continually stuck in institutional space that allows us only to "voice" our opinions "about" democracy, but instead can begin to build a truly democratic institutional space through the way we conduct ourselves with each other in practice....

--If you're interested in engaging the collaborative work of thinking through these issues in practice, whether you're in the spheres of business, government, or civil society, please join us in this work by joining the discussion here, or by emailing us at:

policybusters@hotmail.com

NOW--Democracy in Danger in the U.S.?

PBS's Weekly newsmagazine NOW feature of the week is "Democracy in Danger? Civil Liberties after 9/11." Their on-line coverage includes a fine review of the reasons restrictions were placed on domestic powers to spy on American citizens conducting peaceful political activities after 1971. Unfortunately, these restrictions have now been largely wiped away. See NOW's discussion of "COINTELPRO Again?"--the history of COINTELPRO at:
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/cointelpro.html

This Week: International "Madrid Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security" Prepares Its Agenda

Toward Opening Up the Madrid Summit Process

As one of the participants in the on-line Summit debate Forum, which OpenDemocracy's Bill Thompson created to try to open up the process of the Madrid Summit (see his posting on NMK), I wanted to indicate how much I have appreciated his work and that of safedemocracy.org. I also greatly appreciate the way Thompson underlined in his comments the rather paradoxical limitations of the way most of the work of the Summit has been conducted through relatively closed group discussions. Thompson's comments underline what could be the most fundamental contradiction of the Madrid Summit: the distance between its stated objective of creating a more democratic framework for responding to contemporary threats to democracy, and its fairly closed process centered around the work of the same experts and former state leaders who usually determine the policymaking process. I will be interested in what OpenDemocracy has to say in its post-Summit evaluation of what was "democratic" about the Madrid Summit Process--

Unfortunately, if the only significant element of "openness" in the Madrid Summit process is the on-line Forum that OpenDemocracy has created, The Forum may simply be covering over the degree to which this Summit is reproducing many of the same old closed and relatively undemocratic policymaking structures and agendas. I hope, of course, the Framework of the final Summit Agenda suggests otherwise. But the Summit process, at least from the perspective of this outside observer, does not so far suggest too much reason for optimism.

If the Agenda produced by the Summit ends up merely repeating much of the already existing liberal Agenda of experts and state policymakers for responding to terrorism, I hope OpenDemocracy will not hold back its critique of the Agenda and the relatively closed process that created it, simply because it has been instrumental in providing the Forum as a supplement to the working group process. We know, after all, that too often public comment, as in a newspaper's editorial column, is "allowed" to happen so that people will feel they have a place to "voice their opinion" about what goes on beyond their sphere of influence. This is a major technology for "manufacturing consent." But democracy is not simply about voting and allowing opinions to be voiced on the periphery of a policymaking process controlled by others. Substantial democracy is about taking part in the policymaking process--helping to make policy, establish agendas, and the frameworks for implementing them.

If OpenDemocracy wants to make sure its involvement with the Madrid Summit does not serve merely to cover over the serious democratic shortfalls within the micropolitics of the Summit, and the potential contradictions existing between the stated objectives of the Summit and its own political process, I hope OpenDemocracy will devote considerable attention to critical discussion of the Madrid Agenda, the micropolitical process that produced it, and the extent to which the creation of the on-line Forum did or did not "make any difference" to what went on within the working groups, or to how the Madrid Agenda was framed and written. Did the presence of the on-line Forum exert any real influence on the Madrid Process, or was it merely window-dressing, a space for those not materially involved in the process to voice opinions from the sidelines?

Whatever the results of the Madrid Summit, Bill Thompson and OpenDemocracy have provided a valuable example of the way such on-line forums can work to challenge future international summits to be more open to real democratic interchange. But in order to build on this experiment in Open Democracy, I hope the members of OpenDemocracy involved in the Summit will take up the democratic challenge of being anthropological participant observers of the micropolitics of the Summit events this week. And I hope all participants will think about what we can learn from what did and did not happen at this Summit to make future international policymaking Summits more truly democratic in both their process and their results--

I expect, for example, we can learn much simply by examining the limits of the discussion that developed on the Madrid Summit's SafeDemocracy Debate site. If analyzed, the Archive of the Forum discussion will yield insights for what can be done better next time to provide not merely a space for civil society to voice its opinions from the periphery, but to engage and open up the policymaking process at this kind of global Summit.

Briefly stated, the SafeDemocracy Forum space seems to have been added on, rather late, to a Summit process that was already largely formulated without consideration for any deeper structural questions of democratic process. The Debate Forum therefore seems to have been set up primarily to offer space for those who were clearly outside the activity of the working groups, to "voice" their opinions. Insofar as the Forum space was added onto the Summit process as a kind of secondary appendage, rather than incorporated into the fundamental process of the Summit working groups, the Forum may thus have worked to enforce, rather than break down, the traditional division between those on the outside of the policymaking/working group process ('ordinary' citizens), and those on the inside (the experts and the state policymakers).

Thus, ironically, even in trying to open up the Summit to more democratic voices, the structuring of the Forum site as primarily a space for voicing opinions rather than interacting directly with members of the working groups, may have enforced the traditional hierarchical divisions between the everyday citizens "voicing" their opinions about issues from the periphery of the policymaking space, while the actual work of policymaking was conducted within the closed working groups--as usual beyond the reach and active involvement of everyday citizens.

The rather perfunctory reports posted in mid-February on the Forum by some of the working groups, seemed only further to underline the ways in which the working groups seemed to be carrying on their discussions just as they would have without the existence of the Forum. For all these reasons, I would be especially interested in the pre- and post-mortem reflections of Bill Thompson and other members of OpenDemocracy who are participating in the Summit, on what they thought worked well and not so well in the interactions between the Debate Forum space and the policymaking space of the working groups.

In any case, whatever the limitations of the process and results of this particular Summit, OpenDemocracy's work to create this Forum in relation to the Madrid Summit has opened up a new space for democratic experimentation that, as the postings of Nancy Skougor and Paul Hilder already indicate, may lead to the creation of more truly democratic "Third Force" policymaking Summits of the future. And for the work of Bill Thompson and all the Forum participants in opening up this space of democratic experimentation--a space open to the future of “democracy to come”--I am grateful.

May everyone who can afford to be in Madrid to participate in the Summit events, do so by keeping in mind all of us who cannot afford to be there, but who still have a significant contribution to make to any truly democratic global policymaking process. As we all think about ways to open up and democratize the policymaking process, through integrating virtual Forums like this one more directly into the “working group” process, we can all make a significant contribution to building the future of democracy to come.

Policybusters.net

Policybusters Unite! We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains!

In the spirit of Adbusters publisher Kalle Lasn's observation that far too few intellectuals move beyond "theories and explanations" to directly engage injustices, we issue this challenge: If we are to move beyond critique to tangible material change, we need to transform the way we discuss, write about, and make policy.

After the recent U.S. election, Lasn's critique is painfully apt as it relates to most writing and thinking about policy in the United States. If we want to reclaim the power of policymaking from the elite wonks and thinktanks (both conservative and liberal) that now own it, we need to engage the discussion, critique, and revisioning of domestic and foreign policy in creative ways that involve a diverse public in the activist work of democratic policy-making.

Inspired by the indymedia movement, this site is the seedbed of a new media forum (with both virtual and real world public manifestations) called "POLICYBUSTERS: A Public Forum for the Democratic Transformation of American Policy and Culture." This forum is dedicated to bringing together progressive intellectuals and activists, within and beyond academia, to transform the character of public debate on issues of public policy.

POLICYBUSTERS is dedicated to developing a framework of collaboratively engaged policymaking that breaks down the divides between democratic citizens and the work of government and policy. Policymaking, like government, should be owned by common citizens in our everyday thinking and action. Since our policy, like our government, is what we make of it, let us take on the work of reforging public policy that will allow us to live up to the ideals of democracy, instead of continually betraying our democratic aspirations.

Democracy functions well only to the degree that a diverse majority of people go beyond mere voting to claim their authority and power to be policymakers. POLICYBUSTERS will develop public forums that bring citizens together to engage the common work of reclaiming both government and policy from those who have betrayed their democratic potential.

Insofar as the Bush administration's ideal of an "Ownership Society" strengthens the existing regime of elite control of the means for making and determining policy, it is an "ideal" that fundamentally betrays democracy. The only way to take back real democratic "ownership" of society from those who have claimed it as their property to manage at will, is to recreate and reinvigorate the democratic spaces and powers of policymaking. This can be done through building an organized, diverse, collaborative democratic movement. Fostering an insurgent movement of democratic policymaking is the primary objective of Policybusters in the years ahead.

For before we can truly assist the development of democracy in the rest of the world, we must be sure we know how to create real democracy in our own countries. Without democracy at home, in full consciousness that real democratic politics rejects all practices of domination, the call for a national crusade to foster democracy abroad becomes nothing more than an invitation to imperial intervention and military domination--and to the destruction of democracy everywhere, including in the United States. Without effective democratic control of policymaking, the "Homeland Security" state becomes a Homeland Police State (voting, after all, in the United States or Iraq, can be merely a distracting tool of domination in the absence of more democratic processes of policymaking).

At this moment, to do nothing is to allow the sham democracy, masquerading in the name of the people of the United States, to continue to impose its imperial will on the world, to the detriment of all humanity. Effective democracy at home requires us to recreate and take back to ourselves the democratic powers and spaces of policymaking.

Please join us in this public work.

Contact us at policybusters@hotmail.com