主题：【编辑】美国经济周报2010年9月第1期 -- 南方有嘉木

让我们看一下他们的反思：

Democracy Still Matters

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 20, 2010

LONDON — One mystery of the first decade of the 21st century is the decline of democracy. It’s not that nations with democratic systems have dwindled in number but that democracy has lost its luster. It’s an idea without a glow. And that’s worrying.

I said “mystery.” Those who saw something of the blood expended through the 20th century to secure liberal societies must inevitably find democracy’s diminished appeal puzzling. But there are reasons.

The lingering wars waged partly in democracy’s name in Iraq and Afghanistan hurt its reputation, however moving images of inky-fingered voters gripped by the revolutionary notion that they could decide who governs them. Given the bloody mayhem, it was easy to portray “democracy” as a fig leaf for the West’s bellicose designs and casual hypocrisies.

While the democratic West fought, a nondemocratic China grew. It emerged onto the world stage prizing stability, avoiding military adventure and delivering 10 percent annual growth of which Western democracies could only dream.

China’s “surge” was domestic. It was unencumbered by the paralyzing debate of democratic process. When the West’s financial system imploded in 2008, the Chinese response was vigorous. A “Beijing consensus” gained traction.

The borderline between democracy and authoritarianism grew more opaque. The dichotomy between freedom and tyranny suddenly seemed oh-so 20th century. The new authoritarianism of China or Russia was harder to define and therefore harder to confront.

“Regimes like the one in Russia are stabilized by the fact that they have no ideology,” said Ivan Krastev, a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. “There is really no ideological means to attack them.”

They also derive resilience from the fact that their borders are open. “The middle class is not interested in changing the system because if they don’t like it they can fly to London,” Krastev noted.

Having grown up in Communist Bulgaria, he believes democracy was oversold in the 1990’s. All good things, at the Cold War’s end, were shoveled into the democratic basket: prosperity, growth, peace. When democracy stopped delivering in these areas, it suffered. Too little was said about democratic values, including freedom.

Meanwhile technology kicked in with what the author Jonathan Franzen has called its “trillion little bits of distracting noise.” People, synched with themselves, retreated into private networks and away from the public space — the commons — where democratic politics had been played out.

Democracies seemed blocked, as in Belgium, or corrupted, as in Israel, or parodies, as in Italy, or paralyzed, as in the Netherlands.

There were exceptions, particularly the heady mass movement that brought Barack Obama to power in 2008. But Obama soon found himself caught in the gridlock of the very partisan shrieking he had vowed to overcome. Less than halfway through his presidency the prospect of legislative paralysis looked overwhelming. The world’s most powerful democracy, its promise so recently renewed, seemed mired once more in its frustrations and divisions.

So what? So what if money trumped democracy and stability trumped open societies for hundreds of millions of people? So what if the rule of law or individual freedom was compromised, the press muzzled, and media-controlling presidents thought they could use “democracy” to rule for life with occasional four-year breaks.

So what if people no longer thought their vote would change anything because politics was for sale? Perhaps liberal democracy, along with its Western cradle, had passed its zenith.

Wrong. It’s important to stanch the anti-democratic tide. Thugs and oppression ride on it.

If anyone needs reminding of that, read the remarkable Tony Judt, the historian who brought the same unstinting lucidity to his death last month from Lou Gehrig’s Disease as he did to the sweep of 20th-century European history.Judt was a British intellectual transposed to New York whose rigorous spirit of inquiry epitomized Anglo-American liberal civilization. Nobody knew better the repressive systems that create captive minds. Nobody wrote more persuasively about the struggle against them for pluralism, liberty and justice.

Judt died as I moved the other way, from New York to London. It’s a move across a continuum of language — even if I can’t get used to “letter box” or “white” coffee — but also, still, across the continuum of Anglo-American civilization, the civilization of Locke and Adam Smith and Isaiah Berlin, however marginalized those dead white men may appear in the dawning Asian century.

So I’m grateful to Timothy Garton Ash, in his tribute to Judt in The New York Review of Books, for finding in the words of a 17th-century Englishman, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a quintessential expression of the democratic idea:

“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he: and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.”

From that utterance in 1647 to Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” — is a natural progression. And democracy is still an idea worth the fight.

外链出处

简译：21世纪最初十年的一个难解之谜在于民主的衰退，这不是指民主国家数目的减少，而是说“民主”丧失了光环，这令人担忧。

经历过上世纪为民主流血斗争的人可能不可避免地感到不解，但事出有因。

以民主之名发起的对伊拉克和阿富汗的战争伤害了民主的信誉。血淋淋的伤亡令“民主”更像是穷兵黩武虚伪冷漠的西方的遮羞布。

与此同时，一个不民主的中国在成长，并出现在国际舞台，其对内保持稳定，对外避免军事冒险，且保持了10%的年度增长率----这些是西方民主国家不可想象的成就。

中国不曾被令决策体制瘫痪的民主程序所妨碍。当西方的金融体系在2008年崩溃时，北京的一致意见令中国的回应直接而有力。

民主和威权之间的界限变得越来越模糊。自由和专政的两分法突然显得如此陈旧。中国和俄国的新威权体系是更难以定义，所以也更难以面对。

维也纳人文科学院的Ivan Krastev表示，俄国这样的政体因为其缺少意识形态而稳固，因为亦无意识形态可用作武器来攻击他们。这样的政体也因为开放而获得了弹性。“中产阶级不再关心对体系进行变革，因为如果他们不喜欢它，他们可以直接飞往伦敦。”

在共产主义时代的保加利亚长大，他认为在上世纪90年代民主被过分吹嘘。在冷战结束时，所有的好事：繁荣、发展、和平等都被归因于民主。当民主不能实现这些美好时，民主的信誉受损。至于民主本身的价值，包括自由，却极少有人谈起。

同时，随着技术带来的“无数小干扰音”，人们开始遁入私人人际网络，远离民主政治开展的公共空间。

民主，或如比利时固步自封，或如以色列腐败颓坏，或如意大利拙劣荒谬，或如荷兰陷入瘫痪。

当然存在例外， 2008年将奥巴马送入白宫的群众运动真是令人陶醉。但是很快奥巴马就发现他卡在其发誓要克服的党派政治中动弹不得：立法程序几乎陷入瘫痪。这世界上最强大的民主国家，在挫败和分歧中泥足深陷。

但那又如何？如果民主臣服于金钱，开明臣服于稳定，会怎么样？如果法治或个体自由被妥协，出版被钳制，控制媒体的总统们认为他们可以利用“民主”来终身统治，将会怎么样？

如果因为金元政治，人民不再相信他们的投票能够对任何事情进行变革，会怎么样？也许自由民主，和它所发源的西方一样，已经渡过了其顶点。

不。需停止这一反民主的浪潮。让我们重温英国历史学家Tony Judt，没有人比他更好地理解压迫导致奴役。亦可重温林肯于1863年的演讲：“that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”。民主本身仍旧是一个值得为之奋斗的理念。

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