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Stabroek News ended an editorial ‘Now more than ever, civil society has an ever-growing role to hold the government accountable akin to the campaign being waged by progressive democrats in Israel to prevent the Netanyahu government from undermining the judiciary’ (SN: 02/08/2023). Let us not harbour the view that Israel is a liberal democracy and that its political arrangements can be a model for Guyanese to follow. The Palestinians and Jews have had a very long and tortuous history for which some solution will have to be found. However, what is presently taking place there is much more complex than what is happening in Guyana, is not democracy, although for some time I have detected the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) hankering after this kind of non-democratic justification for its dash towards ethnic/political dominance. (‘Towards an ethnic non-democratic state?’ SN: 31/10/2018).
Liberal democracy is usually based upon universal citizenship with equal rights, but in 2018 Israel promulgated a controversial new ‘nation-state law’ that ‘the right to exercise national self-determination’ (is) unique to the Jewish people’. It also established Hebrew as Israel’s official language, downgraded Arabic, which is spoken by most Arabs, to having a special status, entrenched ‘Jewish settlement as a national value’ and mandates that the state ‘will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development’ (https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/)
From its creation in the 1940s, the Jews have envisaged Israel as a Jewish state and the Arabs have been complaining about discrimination. ‘For Arab Israelis, … the new nation-state law is merely the culmination of years of institutional discrimination. Only now the discrimination is officially enshrined in Israel’s constitution’ (Ibid). When the nation-state law was passed, Arab members of parliament ripped up copies of the bill with shouts of ‘Apartheid’, on the floor of parliament. In a statement, the leader of an opposition coalition of mainly Arab parties said that Israel ‘passed a law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens.’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, overjoyed at the passing of the legislation, was taking selfies and lauded the law as ‘a defining moment in the history of the state’. As is happening in Guyana, over the years Netanyahu’s government has also restricted the political space. For example, it has made it harder for human rights groups to acquire funds and has forbidden groups that criticize the military or the Palestinian occupation from speaking in schools.
There are two ideal forms of liberal democracy. In the first, the state treats all its citizens equally and makes them members of a common civic nation in which the nation-state maintains and fosters a single language, culture, identity, and public school system homogenise, integrate and assimilate the population. The second, more unusual form, uses various mechanisms such as power-sharing – minority inclusion in the national power structure, proportionality – distribution of resources according to the size of the group, veto power – to avoid decisions that adversely affect vital interests of the minority, and politics of negotiation, compromise, consensus, and indecision instead of majority rule.
Professor Sammy Smootha of Israel’s Haifa University described a state that prioritises the interest of one ethnic group, as the Israeli government has done, as an ‘ethnic democracy’ and said that such states fall far short of the universality and participation normally expected of democracy. But such states came into being as countries try to deal with entrenched ethnic difficulties, are now constitutionalised in a few places and are internationally accepted as democratic (‘The model of ethnic democracy: Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’).
Several conditions are identified as giving rise to the development of these ethnic democracies, namely pre-existing ethnic nationalism, a real or perceived threat to the ethnic group that requires mobilisation of the majority to preserve its rights, ideological or pragmatic commitment to democracy, without which a non-democracy would emerge, and the manageable size of the minority. If the minority is either small or disorganised, the majority can opt for a workable ethnic democracy without renouncing its domination. Facing a very large or too strong minority, the majority may choose ethnic non-democracy because it is too difficult to maintain ethnic democracy.
Israel aside, Smootha claims that Canada was an ethnic democracy from independence in 1867 to the Quiet Revolution of 1976 that raised the status of French Canadians to the level of English Canadians. Northern Ireland from the Partition of Ireland in 1921 to the Sunningdale Agreement in 1972, favored Protestants over Catholics. Article 153 of Malaysia Constitution gives more rights to ethnic Malaysians than to Malaysian Chinese and Indian minorities. The Slovak constitution makes it clear that ‘State-building and nation-building in Slovakia are designed to install ethnic Slovaks as the sole nation and to prevent any sign of bi-nationalism’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_democracy).
For the Jews in Israel the future lies in the Palestinians accommodating themselves within the Jewish state and assume that as trust is built, they will all live happily together. Since the Palestinians have no intention of accepting the status quo, their resistance and its consequences have persisted. Although some previous efforts were made to universalize citizen rights, a similar situation existed in Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 put an end to the turmoil.
Although the theoretical conditions that give rise to ‘ethnic democracies’ do not hold in Guyana, each country must develop government institutions to suit its context, and confronted by a virulent ethnic opposition, the PPP, now a substantial minority party, believes that the only way for it and its supporters’ interests to be protected is for it to establish ethnic/political dominance in Guyana (SN: ‘Towards a non-democracy’). This it seeks to do by creating its own business class, keeping strict control of the governmental and security apparatuses, dominating the media environment, subverting its power base and generally trying to diminish the opposition, etc. As in Israel, the other ethnic groups are expected to accommodate themselves to PPP dominance until trust is built and then all will live happily together in ‘One Guyana’. Since the PPP is not numerically strong enough, the other ethnicities will not settle for its hegemony and the result has been disturbances, alienation and a tendency towards non-democracy (dictatorship).
Neither the PPP nor the People’s National Congress (PNC) can make a serious case of being able to democratically manage Guyana successfully. If nothing else, history has shown that alone they cannot hope to make a nation of its peoples. Since Forbes Burnham, the ‘One Guyana’ aspiration has been entrenched in the national motto, but the country remains as divided as ever. The PPP knows and accepts much of this, but contending that, given its ethnic nature, Guyana cannot be governed more democratically, it has been slyly attempting to establish and win national and international support for an acceptable form of ethnic democracy.
On coming to government, the present United States administration called upon the political elites in Guyana to reform the winner-takes-all political system and establish an effective democracy. Today the global struggle is between democracy and autocracy. Add to this the turmoil that persists in Israel and the successful experience with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the PPP’s position is now pellucidly untenable.
However, the PNC needs to take serious note. It had deceived the world when it failed to fulfill its 2015 manifesto promise to reform and establish a more democratic and inclusive system. For it to now base its future on anyone, apart from most of its ethnic supporters, believing that it can singly make a nation of Guyana would be an enormous conceptual and practical retrogression.
