Dialogue: Is democracy the answer for all?

There is something vaguely troubling, almost repellent, in the attitude of people like Helen Clark, Phil Goff and their Australian and American counterparts to the happenings in Fiji and the Solomon Islands.

Their smug, arrogant, patronising pronouncements, and the actions that spring from them, make me more than a little uneasy.

It seems that they have embraced the principles and practices of "Western democracy" to such an extent that it has become a rigid, narrow dogma which is so ingrained that it begs no questions and brooks no argument.

The only other place I've seen such strict and inflexible legalism is in some Churches, particularly these days in those of the Pentecostal and charismatic persuasion, where any questioning of the doctrine being peddled is met with a patronising put-down.

Among the leaders of these Churches, as among the leaders of Western democracies, there is an inflexible and unthinking insistence that they are the only ones who are right and, by definition, anyone who questions their creed or wants to go a different path must be misguided, if not evil personified.

Yet, in the case of "Western democracy" there seems to be ample evidence, accumulated over nearly a century, that it is a system that has not worked, cannot work and will not work in all times and places.

The outstanding example is Africa, where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have died and are dying because, it has lately occurred to me, the principles of Western democracy imposed by the colonisers have been tried and have been found wanting.

But what of Asia and its subcontinent, the Middle East, the Balkans and the old Soviet Union? There, too, millions have died and are dying because systems of government, generally introduced during geopolitical upheavals, have failed to overcome man's strongest ties - the bonds of blood, the ownership of land and, but not always, religion.

Just look how quickly the old Soviet Union and Tito's Yugoslavia reverted to a collection of independent states the moment the communist yoke was lifted. Thousands of years earlier the same thing happened as the Roman Empire crumbled.

It didn't happen so quickly in Africa. It took decades for the effects of colonisation to wear off, the veneer of what we in the West see as "civilisation" to wear thin, and for Africa to begin to slide back into the tribal structure that is as old as the land itself.

And I'm beginning to wonder if the same thing isn't now happening in the South Pacific and even right here in New Zealand. For is not the yearning of our Maori for the return of their land not the same yearning that sears the heart of an African tribesman, a Jew or a Palestinian, a Serb or a Croat, a Ukrainian or Chechen, an East Timorese or an Irian Jayan, a Fijian or a Solomon Islander?

We are fortunate that here in New Zealand we have been able to begin to redress these grievances with land and money and have thus far avoided, apart from the odd punch-up, anything but verbal and political conflict. Others, either my nature or by circumstance, have not been so lucky and untold thousands have died by force of arms.

Which brings me to Fiji. I hold no brief for George Speight. He is just a grubby little crook who deserves to be tied to a post and shot, not for his desire to restore Fiji to Fijians, but for the manner of his doing it.

Mind you, I don't for a moment believe that he is or has been anything else but a puppet whose strings have been pulled by a bunch of people with more brains and clout than he has.

And, after all, the putsch was laid out for him years ago by one Sitiveni Rabuka, then chief of the Army, later (in spite of his treachery to the principles of Western democracy) Prime Minister and now chairman of the all-powerful Great Council of Chiefs.

But I am not persuaded that the "you'll do it our way or else" reactions of Helen Clark, Phil Goff, Alexander Downer et al to the Fiji situation can do anything but harm. And it's no good insisting that the Fijians should behave themselves because they are a still a majority in their own land. The concept of "majority" came with Western democracy.

What I am beginning to wonder, and not just in the context of Fiji but of all the places in the world riven by tribal, ethnic or religious hostility - where people have lost and seek to regain their sense of "place" - is whether we should start thinking outside the square and looking for answers other than the imposition or reimposition of Western democracy.

I reckon we need a modern-day Plato.

E-mail: garth_george@herald.co.nz