Headline Issues

The coming legislative elections in Iraq raise an important question: What role do political elections play in a society wracked by violent conflict? Can they legitimize government authority and, by doing so, open the door to peaceful conflict resolution? Or are they more likely to inflame existing social divisions and increase the chances of civil war? The topic is hard to discuss because of what one might call electoral fetishism: the belief, especially strong in the United States, that elections conducted according to prescribed forms confer moral and legal legitimacy on governments, no matter what circumstances may prevail at the time the voters go to the polls. Clearly, under certain conditions, elections governed by the principle of majority rule are a useful and just way of selecting political leaders and resolving internal conflicts. But for us, they are much more than this: They are the primary sacrament of our civic religion. Elections in America — and, by extension, in other nations recognized by Americans as democratic — are civic rituals believed to constitute the only acceptable and effective means of sanctifying political power.

The great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, has argued that a people’s most sacred rituals reenact their origins as a people. These rites are not just make-believe reenactments like stage plays or historical pageants, but events that re-create the group in mythic time. In many Christian churches, for example, the Eucharist recapitulates (not merely memorializes) the Last Supper, since Jesus is considered to be actually present in the Host. Many Jews believe that the Passover ceremony is not just a “memory trip” but a collective act that re-creates and re-dedicates the community formed at Mount Sinai. Similarly, elections in the United States are believed to re-create and renew the social contract that originally bound Americans together as a people dedicated to liberty. To believers, elections do not just choose this set of leaders or that set to rule for the next few years; they literally reconstitute us as a people. This civic-religious content, it seems to me, accounts for the relative indifference of most Americans to undemocratic deformations of the electoral process, whether in their own country or elsewhere. As in the case of other important rituals, their substantive content — whether or not the winning candidates actually represent the views of most people in the community — is less important than their formal and symbolic content. We know, for example, that in U.S. elections, the choice of candidates for office is extremely limited, wealthy contributors dominate campaign financing, electoral districts are gerrymandered to favor one party over others, voting irregularities are frequent, and majority rule is a legal fiction. It is because we are dealing with a sacrament and not just a utilitarian exercise that none of this seems to “matter.”

In the 2004 American presidential elections, for example, 62 million citizens voted for George W. Bush, whose margin of victory, 50.7 percent of the total votes cast, was the smallest, percentage-wise, in American history. But more than 100 million Americans aged 18 or over who were eligible to vote did not do so. Some of these nonvoters may have been lazy or indifferent, but vast numbers were effectively disenfranchised because of poverty, illness, difficulty of complying with burdensome registration procedures, or other obstacles to getting to the polls, or because they could find no candidate to represent their views. George Bush’s “majority” therefore amounted to less than 30 percent of the eligible electorate — a fact that did not prevent him from claiming a popular mandate to make far-reaching changes in domestic social policies and to pursue an unpopular foreign war. Two other “war presidents,” Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, were elected by minorities of the total votes cast — a fact that did not prevent either of them from donning the mantle of legitimacy as they committed American troops to battle. And we recall, of course, that Al Gore “won“ the disputed election of 2000 by more than half a million votes.

Why don’t these substantive considerations matter? One may as well ask whether the size of the congregation or the income of the clergyman matters when the priest elevates the Host or the rabbi blesses the Torah. Elections in America are sacred rites that are believed to legitimize rulers, like the anointing or coronation of kings in olden days. The ritual “works” for us in the same way that other rituals do: because there has been a prior consensual acceptance of the system of beliefs and practices that includes them.

The fundamental principle ignored by electoral fetishists is this: Political elections legitimize governments only when there is a prior agreement among all major political groups that they shall do so. In other words, it is not rule by electoral majorities that legitimizes government, but a constitutional consensus that legitimizes majority rule. And, conversely, any serious erosion or disruption of this consensus tends to de-sanctify the electoral process. In 1860, Americans possessed a written constitution, but they disagreed violently about its nature and meaning. To simplify, the South believed that the Constitution enshrined slaveholders’ property rights in their slaves, while the North did not. Even though Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party pledged not to abolish slavery in the South, he received less than one percent of the vote in ten Southern states, and his election was the trigger for southern secession from the Union and the Civil War. In a less dramatic and violent way, the recent erosion of consensus over government’s relation to religion and “moral values” in the United States has contributed to skepticism about our current electoral processes.

To repeat: Elections legitimize leaders when the electoral process is itself considered legitimate. And this prior legitimation is the result of conflict resolution. It depends on an agreement among all major social groupings — not just a majority of the people — to create and participate in a certain political system. This is exactly why the great democratic theorist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, insisted that the right of a government to rule does not rest on the will of a majority of citizens, but on the “general will“ of the community. It is also what John Locke, inspirer of our Declaration of Independence, meant by the need to base democratic government on a “social contract.”

The American historical experience embodied these basic principles. First, the Patriots of 1776 rid their country of foreign occupation. Then, they negotiated a series of conflict-resolving agreements leading to the Constitution of 1789. Finally, they elected a government that could claim to be a legitimate representative of the people. Current U.S. policy in Iraq turns this natural and logical order on its head. First the Iraqis are to elect a government; then they are to draft a constitution; finally, the occupation will end.

Here we see electoral fetishism in full flower. In the first place, Iraq is under military occupation and wracked by a large-scale insurgency. If the French collaborationist government of Marshal Petain during World War II were to have held elections for the National Assembly under the guns of the German army and the Petainist police, neither French patriots nor the Allies would have considered the legislature legitimate – not even if a majority of French citizens voted for it. Nevertheless, says the Bush administration, the Iraqi elections will produce a legitimate government, because the new legislature will be dominated by Shiite Muslims, who represent some 60 percent of the Iraqi population, with participation by the Kurds, representing another 15 to 20 percent of the people. The non- Kurdish Sunnis, most of whom will boycott the elections, the militant Shiite minority loyal to Moqtader Sadr, and those who do not vote because of fear, poverty, illness, or hatred of the occupiers and their local collaborators, don’t matter: They will all be bound by the acts of the new regime even though they did not participate in choosing it.

Equally important, there is currently no agreement among the major Iraqi communities on matters vital to the creation of a new political order: the shape of the future state, ownership and control of the nation’s oil resources, relations between religion and government, or the rights to be accorded to religious minorities and women, to name just a few hotly disputed issues. Who can believe that, under these conditions, electing a legislature will help to resolve Iraq’s internal conflicts rather than inflaming existing social and religious divisions? A cynic might argue that this divisive result is exactly what the elections are designed to produce, since the occupiers hope to mobilize the Shiite community to collaborate with them in annihilating the Sunni-based insurgency. A civil war may be just what Bush and Rumsfeld have in mind, so long as it produces a pro-Western “winner.”

Finally, in the American promotion of Iraqi elections, we observe what might be called the universalization of the fetish. It seems to be in the nature of empires to want to make their most cherished and sanctified institutions global, and so to bring the “lesser breeds without the law” up to their own exalted level of civilization. The Romans felt this way about their law, the British about their administration, and the French about their language. The American Empire, exporter of voting machines, campaign advisers, political advertising, and democratic rituals, is apparently no exception to this rule. Insofar as “democratic” elections vitiate the possibility of genuine conflict resolution, however, they undermine the consensual foundations of both democracy and freedom. Ending the Anglo-American occupation will free Iraq’s divided communities to negotiate their own constitution and to decide on that basis what sort of state and society — and what sort of electoral system — they wish to construct. If the United States wishes to be a liberator rather than an occupier, it must withdraw its troops and allow the Iraqis to decide their own collective fate. Sooner or later, that is the necessity that all true lovers of freedom will have to confront.

Making the Best of a Nightmarish Situation

Dennis J.D. Sandole, ICAR Faculty

Befitting the complexity inherent in most real-world events, the Christmas 2004 earthquake and tsunamis killing over 150,000 people and destroying huge swathes of coastline and property in Asia, have also generated some otherwise “positive” results (e.g., bringing together combatants from two civil wars in the region, perhaps only temporarily, to resist the “common enemy” of the ravages of nature).

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Sri Lanka, where Tamils (Hindus), fighting a war of secession from the national Sinhalese (Buddhist)-dominated government for over 20 years, have been working together with government and other Sinhalese in relief operations. By contrast, in Aceh, Indonesia — the hardest hit area (with over 100,000 deaths) — the military and police, who have long enjoyed a warlord and organized crime-type existence in the area, have been making such cooperation difficult. In that conflict, Acehnese have been fighting for their independence from Indonesia for some 30 years, while the national government has endeavored to ruthlessly suppress the rebellion. As part of its efforts to control Aceh, the Indonesian government recently imposed a time limit on the presence of military forces of other countries participating in the comprehensive relief operation there. Despite these difficulties, cooperation between combatants has occurred in Aceh.

The catastrophic nature of the disaster and the international response to it imply at least three long-term consequences, with peacebuilding implications, for the civil wars in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia:

(1) A growing awareness among the combatants in each case that they have far more in common than they have separating them;
(2) Increasing experience and confidence among the combatants that they can work together to solve common problems; and
(3) Conflict resolution assets of the international community already in the region can delicately and in a culturally sensitive manner, facilitate further awareness, experience, and confidence among the combatants, so that, in each case, the “culture of violence” can be replaced by collaborative problem-solving.

In other words, in Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim nation — the international community has a time-sensitive opportunity not just to shift Muslim views of Western (Judaic/Christian) civilization, but to contribute to resolution of a heretofore intractable conflict (Aceh) with implications for peace and security in the entire region, not to mention the “clash of civilizations” worldwide. Meanwhile, helping to resolve the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka could have implications for the peace process already under way between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan.

Complexity Theory tells us that everything is connected to everything else. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the recent “globalization of disaster” coming out of Asia. It is also obvious in the contagiousness of conflicts and their resolution. Clearly, now is the time for the international community to go a few steps further and, in addition to saving people in the short run, help them to live and prosper in the long term, with implications for all of us worldwide!