Changes

"Democracy" is not merely the "power of, by, and for the people," it is not enough just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically coincide) of the large majority determine the state decisions. Democracy - in the way this term is used today - concerns, above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. "Democracy" means that, whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were effectively "democratic": in spite of obvious electoral manipulations, and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple hundred of Florida voices will decide who will be the president, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the elections, Bill Clinton made an appropriate acerbic comment: "The American people have spoken; we just don't know what they said." This comment should be taken more seriously than it was meant: even now, we don't know it - and, maybe, because there was no substantial "message" behind the result at all. This is the sense in which one should render problematic democracy: why should the Left always and unconditionally respect the formal democratic "rules of the game"? Why should it not, in some circumstances, at least, put in question the legitimacy of the outcome of a formal democratic procedure?

The obverse of the same tendency to counteract the excesses of "deMOREcracy" is the open dismissal of any international body that would effectively control the conduct of a war - exemplary is here Kenneth Anderson's "Who Owns the Rules of War?" (in The New York Times Magazine, April 13 2003), whose subtitle make the point unambiguously clear: "The war in Iraq demands a rethinking of the international rules of conduct. The outcome could mean less power for neutral, well-meaning human rights groups and more for big-stick-wielding states. That would be a good thing." The main complaint of this essay is that, "for the past 20 years, the center of gravity in establishing, interpreting and shaping the law of war has gradually shifted away from the militaries of leading states and toward more activist human rights organizations;" this tendency is perceived as unbalanced, "unfair" towards the big military powers who intervene in other countries, and partial towards the attacked countries - with the clear conclusion that the militaries on the "big-stick-wielding states" should themselves determine the standards by which their actions will be judged. This conclusion is quite consistent with the US rejection of the authority of the Hague War Crimes tribunal over its citizens. Effectively, as they would have put it in Lord of the Rings, a new Dark Age is descending upon the human race.

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