Abstract：
Whence democracy? How did, does, and will it come into being? Since history
has already testified that democracy is by no means a privilege destined
to Western countries alone, what are its universal and ultimate prerequisites?
And since simply reiterating the prerequisites of democracy the way they
have been identified and discussed in contemporary literature has increasingly
become an idle undertaking, what constitutes and/or where lies its starting
point―the very factor that ignites and moves the democratic engine in the
first place? With the partial answer that could be inferred from the great
works of Tocqueville, Mill, Rawls, and Sartori, these questions linger
on even after I read Lipset, Verba, Dahl, Diamond, Lijphart, Linz &
Stepan, O’Donnell & Schmitter, Benhabib, Kymlicka, Shapiro, etc. We
could even argue that the answer to them seems remoter the more contemporary
we go along the literature―leaving the majority of the Third World ever
in the dark to what democracy is all about regarding its essential makeup.
I must state that theorizing about the origin or the genealogy of democracy
is more a haunting quest that keeps chasing me during the last fifteen
years rather than prompted by any kind of scholarly ambition whatsoever
from the outset The purpose is nothing but to draw a learned conclusion
out of the cumulation of my readings and writings in politics over the
last two decades. It is thus a theorizing in the way a theory should emerge
and stand, that is as the way Geertz puts it: “after the facts.”
Strongly driven by love for my country, I was first led in 1983 to voluminous
readings of Indonesian political history, particularly its staying aspirations
of nationalism and egalitarianism. This prompted me to get immersed in
the extensive literature of nations and nationalisms as well, then to case
and theoretical studies of democracy, to American democracy as so finely
enunciated by Tocqueville as well as its political history and finally
to that of Japan. It was the juggernaut of political insanity set in by
President Soeharto’s selfish and cowardly resignation in 1998 with its
ugly aftermath throughout Indonesia that ushered me to a kind of “clue”
toward a genealogy of democracy. In other words, I am theorizing in order
to crystallize my readings of politics, of democracy in particular, thus
far.
Democracy in the modern sense has been viewed as closely tied to Western
civilization―especially the role of the British political tradition, or
as a product of the reigning of a substantial number of bourgeoisie―a prosperous
and well-educated middle-class, or as a function of the flourishing of
civil society. To my reading, all these explanations are ad hoc if not
tangential, tautological, or even plain wrong. Even the proliferation of
comparative studies on democracies as well as that of “transitional paradigm”
does their trades not so much without a firm understanding of democratic
genealogy as for taking democracy for granted, i.e., of not applying a
deeper question into its genealogy―precisely the way they take the existence
of “nation” for granted.
Extrapolating from the utter discrepancy between the agonizing impoverishment
of centuries-long political experience of “Indonesians” and the praiseworthy
exceptionalism of that of the American and the Japanese within the same
and comparable time frame, I have come to conclude that the bedrock of
democracy is landed-nation with its autocentric working mode. It is this
mode of the landed-nation that in time greatly facilitates the drawing
of “social contracts” and/or the hard-won formulation of the body of the
Constitution.
Partly recovering the seminal thesis of Rupert Emerson in From Empire to
Nation (1962) and simultaneously correcting his strayed analysis in the
last few chapters of this classic, partly due to my readings of the American
and the Japanese experience on the one hand and that of the sub-Saharan
African countries on the other, I am convinced with the symbiotic relationship
between nation and democracy by according a more determinant role to the
former―provided it is understood the way Renan and less explicitly Gellner
and Hobsbawm take it. If Barrington Moore Jr. states that “No democracy
without bourgeoisie,” I would go with Emerson and further that “No democracy
without nation.” We must note that most students of “nations” and “nationalism”
use the two concepts interchangeably, as identical, or inseparable and
thereby confuse their analysis (Kohn, Kedourie, Anderson, Smith, Greenfeld,
Tamir, Hall, etc.). This study simultaneously serves to correct the big
mistake.
The grasping of nation as an autocentric political community brings me
to what we might call “a two-by-two conceptual genealogy of democracy”―namely
that between nation, autocentricity, (political) rationality, and democracy.
In this regard, nations beyond my present focus like Great Britain, France,
the Netherlands, India, and perhaps contemporary South Africa could all
be juxtaposed along with the USA and Japan as good exemplars to support
my thesis. I include “democracy”―an end-result in simple reasoning―as a
factor in itself, because on this count there is indeed a logicofactual
circularity at play first observed by Emerson that while democracy is largely
a function of nation, the reverse is just as true―a democratic system can
also function to mold a nation. As a matter of fact, it has been a long-reigning
fallacy to assume that “nation-building project” is capable of building
a nation. Soekarno has learned his bitterest lesson here. Indeed, not a
single nation-building endeavor that I know of has ever really succeeded
in building a nation, for, apart from the work of centuries-long historical
providence, the best alternative nation-builder is nothing but democracy
itself.
It is this “two-by-two-democratic genealogy” that I will try to enunciate
at length in this coming “Special Seminar”―not so much to win agreement
with my thesis from colleagues that could kindly spare their valuable time
to attend as to solicit their suggestions and/or criticisms. That would
be deeply appreciated as I do intend to get this study published well-cooked
for an international audience
