Re: Re: Democracy or Empire?

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie wrote:
> It all depends on what you mean by "_global_ democracy."  Naturally, I
> don't think you mean what Chris Burford means (_a shudder_), but....

I don't know what Chris means, but it seems pretty obvious that global
democracy would have to be democratic, for example, giving one vote to each
adult (rather than one vote per dollar, as under U.S. "democracy").
Obviously, that would shift the balance of world politics toward places
like China and India... But then again, by the time true democracy starts
to reign, it's possible that nation-states will have disappeared. (That
would be no loss, to my mind.)

BTW, I agree with Carrol and Yoshie that there's a link between domestic
democracy and imperialism. Jacksonian democracy and the spread of suffrage
to free men without property coincide with the expulsion of the Indians
from most of the area east of the Mississippi River (what's now called
"ethnic cleansing"), which had the effect of making the property
qualification unimportant. If the U.S. couldn't dump its problems on the
rest of the world so easily, the stakes of elections would be much higher,
so that they'd have to be even more under elite control.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine