Amartya Sen: You can't 'impose' democracy. It's there already.
If you’ve ever doubted that democracy is about more than just voting, this is worth a look. A few years ago, the Nobel-winnng economist Amartya Sen penned a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal (reprising a theme that he had been touting around for some time) that offered an alternative view.
I point to this article because it’s concise and forceful in it’s argument – but I’d really urge you to read the whole thing if you get the chance:
“Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is “government by discussion,” and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society).”
And it’s not such a ‘Western’ idea as some people would have you think either….
“The belief in the allegedly “Western” nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition (”they are all Europeans,” we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).
Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance.”
If you get a bit of time to yourself, please do read the whole thing. It’s very good.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
