Weekend Star
Date: 08.10.2016
Page 15
Article size: 292 cm2
ColumnCM: 64.88
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NINALKHRUSHCHEVA
is professor of international affairs and associate dean for academic affairs at The New School and a senior fellow
at the World Policy Institute.
People wait in line to enter an electoral voting centre during a referendum on a peace deal between the government and Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia rebels, in Bogota, last Sunday /reuters
DIRECT DEMOCRACY STRIKES AGAIN
Once again, a referendum has turned a country upside down.
In June, British voters decided to take their country out of
the European Union; now, a narrow majority of Colombians
have rejected a peace agreement with the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. Colombians have taken a leap
in the dark ­ and perhaps a leap back into the violent abyss of nev­
er­ending war. Populists everywhere are no doubt celebrating the
that runs to more than 2,000 pages, which surely no more than a
handful of voters have actually read. Instead, most voters relied on
populist leader Geert Wilders' glib talking points, which provided
a less­than­candid assessment of the issue. Similarly, the Brexit
referendum posed a question with so many ramifications that no
voter could possibly have considered them all. And in the Colom­
bian plebiscite, voters would have needed a deep understanding
of faraway South Africa's truth­and­reconciliation process, and
post­apartheid history, to assess the peace agreement properly.
"rigged" their governments against the people. And the people,
Representative government was created to manage these types
they say, should have a direct voice in the important decisions af­
fecting their lives ­ apparently even decisions about war and peace. of complex issues. We vote for representatives ­ either individually
or as part of a political party with a relatively predictable platform
But if there really is a "democracy deficit," as populists claim,
the increased use of referendums is no cure for it. On the contrary, ­ to advocate public policies that we support. But, as Edmund
Burke famously pointed out, "Your representative owes you, not his
referendums tend to make matters far worse, and can undermine
industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays, instead of serving
democracy itself. It's an old story: Napoleon III, for example, used
you, if he sacrifices it to your
such a vote to reconstitute his elected presidency into the imperial
opinion.
IN THE REAL WORLD,
title his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had held. After the rise of
The populist campaigns in
fascism and during the Cold War, the world's democracies seemed
outcome as another clear rebuke to self­interested elites who have
to recognise that referendums and plebiscites are the handmaid­
ens of autocrats seeking to concentrate power. Adolf Hitler used
plebiscites in the Sudetenland and Austria to consolidate the Third
Reich. And, after Hitler, Joseph Stalin used referendums to incor­
porate Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc.
More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin organised a
snap referendum in Crimea that supposedly justified his annex­
ation of the territory. In the tradition of Napoleon III, Hitler, and
Stalin, he used direct democracy to pursue dictatorial ends. To be
sure, not all recent referendums have been instruments of dictato­
rial power.
But mendacity and deception worthy of the dictators of the
1930s was certainly on display in the United Kingdom's "Leave"
campaign, and in the opposition to a Dutch referendum in April to
approve an EU­Ukraine free­trade and association agreement. In
the UK, Boris Johnson cynically helped lead the Leave campaign
with an eye toward unseating, and potentially replacing, Prime
Minister David Cameron. But, when Cameron resigned in July,
Johnson's fellow Brexiteers betrayed him, so he had to settle for
becoming Foreign Secretary in Theresa May's new government.
In the Dutch case, Euroskeptics, seeking to drive a wedge
between the Netherlands and the EU, exploited the 2014 tragedy of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which departed from Amsterdam and
was shot down over Ukraine by Russian­backed separatists, leaving
a deep wound in the Dutch public psyche. The British, Dutch, and
Colombian referendums all required that complex issues be radi­
cally simplified, which played to populist leaders' strengths. In the
Netherlands, voters were asked to approve or reject an agreement
MESSY COMPROMISES ARE
A FACT OF DEMOCRATIC
LIFE; AND THE ONLY
THING MESSIER THAN
A NEGOTIATED PEACE
IS WAR ITSELF
the major referendums this
year have differed in import­
ant respects. For example,
Colombian opponents of
the peace deal appealed to
universal norms of justice for
war crimes committed by the
military and the FARC, not to
national particularism, as in
the UK and the Netherlands.
Nonetheless, they have all been motivated by a desire to scuttle gov­
ernments and institutions that they oppose. And they have all been
willing to follow the tradition of dictators, and to resort to smears,
distortions, and fantastical claims.
In the real world, messy compromises are a fact of democratic
life; and the only thing messier than a negotiated peace is war
itself. As long as compromises do not violate individual rights,
citizens in democracies accept them as necessary for the sake of
functioning governance. When we reduce a peace agreement,
a trade treaty, or EU membership to a single sentence or sound
bite, genuine democratic debate gives way to the political noise of
opt­outs, logrolling, and side deals. This is arguably a particularly
ill­advised time to hold referendums, because democratic malaise
has taken hold in many countries since the 2008 financial crisis. In
the EU, mainstream politicians must accept some responsibility for
expediently blaming "Brussels" for every problem, or for fudging
the truth about what EU membership or association agreements
with neighbours actually mean.
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