CHAPTER V

ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A POST-DEMOCRATIC AND UNIVERSAL DEMOCRACY

JOSÉ LUIS GONZÁLEZ QUIRÓS

Life without illusions is impossible

—José Ortega y Gasset 

At the beginning of the 21st century, the political ideal that legitimates the form of government known as democracy has to face, at least, three essential problems: first, internal criticism in the various democratic states that note its inefficiency to ensure a sufficiently fair social order or to respect an accurate limit of restrictions to individual freedom; second, objections resulting from the assumed crisis of the nation-state (the continent where democracies have been able to flourish), and last, but not least, the extension of principles and assets of democracy to environments well beyond national borders. The first type of objection covers a considerable part of the regular political life. This means that, once free from the dangerous belief in the possibility of reaching Paradise, it belongs to the field of action rather than to the field of theory. On the contrary, in the other two cases, theory has still much to do to clear the way. The objective of this paper is to present some prior issues according to which the democratic ideal should be generalized with a view to proposing it as a specific political format in the horizon of a mankind more and more decisively confronted by the serious difficulties posed by the ideal of its unity. We will have to deal, then, with the last two problems mentioned. The nature of the borders is a crucial issue in both cases because democracy has developed in different societies—although it has not matured in others—on the basis of a very precise limitation, namely, the limitation of national borders.

This consideration should not lead us to erroneous assumptions that they have certain virtues or a certain kind of reality that provides them with an importance they actually lack. But it should make us realize that borders are a correct expression of the principle of finitude, without which man’s life tends to lose the possibility of being truly human. The finitude of our existence pervades all our actions, provides meaning to our freedom and sets a framework in which power may be legitimately established as a fully human function [Dei, 2002: 40]. It is necessary to know how to draw out the consequences of this principle, both on the national and the international plane, in places where constitutions prevail as well as in those governed by less strong principles, the legitimacy of which is not that obvious. The great issue of this newcentury is whether we will be able to build a politically human world or whether we will limit ourselves to the economic and technological conquest of the earth.

THE NATURE OF NATIONAL BORDERS

Borders are the application of the idea of a limit to the political reality, or rather, to its geographic expression. The idea of limit is ambivalent: on the one hand, it looks inwards, to what it limits; on the other, it looks outwards, to what it excludes. This ambivalence of the idea of limit is very strong, at least in two senses: the ontological and the psychological. From the ontological stance, the limit creates finitude; it distinguishes one from the other. But in so doing, it creates a difficult idea, that of identity, as a kind of conceptual atom that may be neither analyzed nor divided. It disintegrates when expressed in the form of components or characters that may be disaggregated, and may not be broken up in the form of singular individuals, because that singularity means nothing in the face of the clarity and strength of the identity label that constitutes and describes them. Now, one of the features of modernity is that it effectively questioned the doctrine of the limit anchored in the idea of identity; in this, the Parmenidean heritage has finally given leeway to more flexible lines of thinking. This has been one of the most fruitful legacies of modern scientific thought since the beginning of calculus with Newton and Leibniz up to Cantor and contemporary mathematics: the intuitive boundary of natural and rational numbers has been broken-up in favor of a much richer and rigorous concept of number.

If in political life, the analytical resources were able to defeat identity, the identity label should give way to singular human beings, capable of multiple assignments who are not subject to just one description. But new developments in the theories of mathematics and physics have not influenced political theory; for one reason, politics is not simply about truth but about interests, and for many so-called nationalists, there is no better business than the development of an assumed collective identity.

From a psychological point of view, limits are hard to recognize and accept. Transgression is an essential force in the development of human life and psychology, where the first thing one sees in limits is the opportunity to go beyond them. Given the actual continuity of experience, limits, as taught by mathematics, have to be established and calculated, and in so doing, we always learn something. The idea of limit is anything but simple; therefore, turning a virtual line in nature into the mother of an identity is an abuse that requires psychoanalyzing. In this respect we have to ask ourselves, first, whence politics has taken the idea of limit; second, what we could learn of political value by meditating on the origin of this idea. If our question refers to the origin of the limit, we may answer in two different ways: what comes from within or what comes from without. In the former case, if the limit is established from within, ours would be an Aristotelian idea of limit, because we would be asserting that the limit comes from nature, from the finite substance, and that the limit lies where this substance finishes. In the latter, we would be adopting a more modern stance by understanding that the limit has not been previously set, even though we may be aware that there is an area in the world where what is is no longer that which we have talked about. That external delimitation, by approximation, would be a convention, a calculation or a balance; an arbitrated calculation or formula, in fact, with advantages and disadvantages.

Nationalism operates on the assumption that borders are natural, whether geographic or of another more cultural type, but natural or Aristotelian depending on the nature of what the nation is. Non-nationalists believe that borders are where they are and have produced fruits of a certain quasi-identity, but that the arbitrary nature of their establishment cannot be forgotten. Nationalism justifies borders based on specific features in nature (the sea, for instance) as marks of reality itself. It is true that nature helps to set borders and to a certain extent imposes them if no technologies can overcome their obstacles, but any border is actually a limit resulting from the art of negotiation, a stratagem. Its determination depends on randomness and agreements that are sometimes lost in time (this happens almost always with land ownership, for example), but that had a huge coefficient of arbitrariness. Mostly, they were established as useful formulae to restrain violence, as signals that would remind us of the steps that should not be taken in the future; they were nothing but an agreement to settle disputes. This arbitrary and expeditious nature of borders is particularly evident in some cases by comparison with the natural and cultural continuity they separate; such is the case, for instance, of some Amazon dwellers who, though they belong to culturally homogeneous communities, are Brazilian or Colombian, without even knowing it. But borders between cultures are also arbitrary, such as, for example, the internal frontiers of languages and the limits of each of them with respect to the others.

In any case, the artificial has a positive content, added to its capacity to deny the identification between need and nature. Being the result of an agreement, borders become a seat of peace. To try to remove those means to go against that agreement, fostering a rebellion or a return to the original bellum that the establishment of the border avoided. Borders are therefore respectable, as respectable as the alphabet or the decimal metric system, precisely because they are artificial, a common finding between parties that disagreed as to where their limits finished or should finish. Threatening them implies the will to raise trouble and, normally, an uncontrollable wish to be able to make a living on that. The passage of centuries, however, has tended to provide borders with content, so that finally something happens at borders and a new alienation arises which, in the worst scenario, creates a new rivalry, such as the rivalry that, according to Baroja, confronted the two halves of a town separated by a railway line.

The most obvious result of the establishment of borders has been the consolidation of a certain class of identities, of a criterion of belonging. It is necessary to point out that it is the border that creates the identity in peace and not the other way round, since there are no Platonic identities different from the human identity. Any identity has empirical origins, it is established by aggregation and is continuously changing; only a self-referential and authoritarian turn in its development makes it something that is outside the ordinary world, a supra-reality that has to be respected. Therefore, no borders are badly established because there is no golden criterion to establish them, and whoever thinks that, in general terms, peace is better than war, should abstain from moving them or from setting new borders where there are none.

Nationalism’s tendency towards exclusion ends up by legitimating various forms of aggression. Exclusions are always a necessity that results from the definition of a criterion of inclusion (without which there would be nothing to argue about). It is qualitative exclusion that needs to be questioned because of denial of the ontological identity they state and invent. From a strictly political point of view, Kedourie perfectly defined nationalism:

Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government [Kedourie 196: 9].

This self that precedes government in Kilocurie’s definition is the key issue. Nationalism considers the matter solved even before posing it, because, as a political movement, it does not attempt to respond to any ontological question; it seeks only to possess—and it does so by appearing to respect natural realities. A theoretical assumption frequently slips in as unquestionable evidence when we assert the need for an established demos for democracy to exist, namely, we assert that the mere existence of the demos assumes and/or claims an identity element which should be in charge of facilitating the unavoidable relationship of belonging or inclusion and which, in some way, would be the true correlate of the corresponding political representation^[1]. Though highlighted in complex contemporary societies, this identity element is misunderstood if intended as something beyond a certain administrative and/or sentimental element (the ownership of a certain identity document, for instance).

This representation makes sense only in the face of a second one as it generates by itself a division by reflecting the differences that evidently exist in the heart of the community. Thus, the representation itself generates an alterity, alienation, and it is in the heart of this division where the claims for an identity, as a sign of belonging, start to acquire a politically accurate shape. The representation places the whole in front of each one and generates a tension that may give rise to a competition for authenticity. The statement of an identity is, from the very beginning, an action to facilitate rejection and exclusion, which facilitates the attempt to discredit, to exclude individuals and groups, to claim the exclusive representation.

Apart from the self-interested political use, to seek the identity element is, however, to place the cart before the oxen, it replaces a set that results from the aggregation of actual individuals with one of the subsets of those elements that share certain stressed common features; whereas the only relevant feature is the mere presence in the group whose delimitation is always arbitrary and never natural or essentialist or identitarian. Identitarian statements rarely appear without an exclusion attached, a kind of strange disagreements that are useful more to deny a specific political reality than to assert that something really exists. Any identity is either a natural feature that makes no cultural connection (because the contrary would be precisely to deny the idea of culture as free construction) or a constructed cultural feature: there is no excluded third option. Admitting natural determination is a more or less crude forms of political biologism. The creation of a new identity corresponds to amputation nationalism which corrupts and falsifies democracy because it seeks to replace this with a mafia due to its full identification with the political identity it alleges to represent.

In general, exclusion is the result of an attempt at protection in the face of the need to share our resources and efforts with our fellow men. As Rorty points out:

“Who are we?” is quite different from the traditional philosophical question "what are we?” The latter is synonymous with Kant's questions, "What is Man?” Both mean something like "how does the human species differ from the rest of the animal kingdom?" or "among the differences between us and the other animals, which ones better most?” This "what?" question is scientific or metaphysical. By contrast, the "who?" question is political. It is asked by people who want to separate off the human beings who are better suited to some particular purpose than other human beings, and to gather the former into a self-conscious moral community: that is, a community united by reciprocal trust, and by willingness to come to fellow-members' assistance when they need it. Answers to the "who?" question are attempts to forge, or re-forge, a moral identity [Rorty, 1998: 93].

The practice of exclusion may be somewhat justified if we believe that inclusion is not possible because the result would not be viable. But the identitarian exclusion lacks any kind of moral legitimacy for it assumes the creation of a core of privileged beings from which the more unfortunate and poor individuals are excluded as slaves or cannon fodder, but never as fellow men. Jacobinism tends to be the opposite of human solidarity.

The idea of politics as the development of a collective supra-entity (the nation) that takes charge of the development of history and the implementation of successive revolutions (or salvation formulas) is entirely responsible for the near complete disappearance of patriotism and, in more general terms, of the idea of civic virtue, from the conceptual map of modern political thought. As I have shown in greater depth elsewhere [González Quirós, 2002], when the nation is established as a superior reality, it becomes a political hypostasis, a monster produced by passion without the guidance of good sense.

To understand the historical disruption suffered by the idea of patriotism (a concept whose sonority refers us to the Roman Republic), note that its meaning cannot be limited to politics, though the effects pervade the political. Whenever politics tries to be identified with patriotism, it should be suspected for in a system of freedom, patriotism is not a policy among other possible ones, but something quite different. Patriotism, unlike nationalism that makes smaller or restricts, seeks emulation or the best for those who share our life. Nationalism may be defined, precisely, as the attempt to make the moral and sentimental meaning of patriotism support an exclusion policy: the nationalist is whoever claims that there may be no patriot except the one the nationalist proposes. Patriotism, at its best, is a civic and individual virtue, whereas nationalism is a collective vice, an identitarian craving. Patriotism, however, does have the tendency, almost universal nowadays, of not recognizing commitments other than those directly and immediately associated to the individual’s own and exclusive welfare.

Nationalisms are prone to re-writing history to show a reason for their positions, and that reason can be more easily defended if a long-dated affront or mistake is found. Doing this with history is easier than with the present reality, because history resists less than current events: dead people are kind and let us speak without interrupting us. History is always an invention, a reading or translation that may be more or less consistent, traditional and objective. We know that something happened and the historian’s effort is to bring us closer to it. But even though the past is, in a certain way, fixed, it changes deeply in another way, life as a landscape, what we leave behind changes as we move forward. History is not only what happened but, above all, what matters about what happened, or what is told about what happened. History has to be told and sung; we can say what Count Arnaldos’ romance asserts, “I only sing my song to whoever goes with me”. That is why history is a heritage, is a capital asset of our days, a new tale told to a new us who wish to understand the paths along which we have come to be what we are. Objectivity is, above all, an attitude of the listener who wants to leave things as they are, to prevent the past from being definitely lost. Losing along the way certain dimensions of what we actually are, we become barbarians, that is to say, part of those who believe they are not interested in history.

By making history and re-telling our past, we have to walk between the Scylla of an excessive assimilation of the past into our present and the Charybdis of a totally objective strangeness that is in fact impossible. The ideal of narrative objectivity and of understanding what no longer is as if it were alive and present cannot be denied. But it is not advisable to be carried away by enthusiasm and suppose that believing in the ideal of objectivity, and the effort to achieve it, will provide us with some kind of assurance that it has been reached. The translation of texts into contemporary language presents a particularly clear example of the problem in one of its aspects: as McIntyre wrote with respect to objectivity in the reading of old texts: “The notion of a perfect timeless translation makes no sense” [1990: 51].

In fact, the problem of objectivity in the historical narrative has exactly the same logical structure as the problem of understanding a different culture (the problem of what is a different culture and how it differs); it is, in short, a variant of the objectivity problem [González Quirós, 2003] or the problem of the incommensurability of paradigms which has been mentioned so much in the history and philosophy of science of the second half of last century. The example of history as a tale of the past is particularly relevant in considering the possibility of understanding among different cultures, because different cultures extend and distinguish themselves in both time and space: cultures of the same root but of past times, cultures of a different but contemporary root.

CUTURAL BOUNDARIES AND MULTICULTURALLISM

The differentiation among cultures refers, in the first place, to a distinction among societies, among various places and their corresponding lifestyles. Cultures do not exist in isolation, so some psychoanalysis of our idea of different cultures could help recognize that what we specifically distinguish are societies or communities, rather than cultures. We differ as much from societies far from our own as from societies that are close to but rivals of our own.

Outside this distinction of communities, boundaries between different cultures are extremely inaccurate and depend on erudite and always dubious considerations. What matters from a political point of view is not the clash of cultures but the economic, political and moral rivalry among societies confronted by historical reasons. In the strictly cultural field, there are no absolutely clear boundaries either. Considering culture as creation, as the result of free initiative, of imagination, of the responsible thought of those who work with symbols and ideas which unquestionably separate us from mere nature, the creation work of people in different environments is very connected. Those who are in the border of that task that has to be perpetually renewed and consists of making ourselves more and more owners and aware of the meaning of our life and of our own destiny are doing the same, but in different ways?

Common factors in any kind of culture carry enormous weight, and a clear philosophy and a suitable policy are required to reveal them. As Isaiah Berlin said:

I do not know any culture that lacks the notions of good and evil, true and false. As far as we know, courage, for example, has been admired in all societies. There are universal values. This is an empirical fact that appears in mankind, one of what Leibniz called verités de fait and not verités de raison. It is a fact that there are some values that many human beings in a large number of places and situations have in common, either explicitly or consciously or expressed in their behavior, manners and acts [Isaiah Berlin, 1993:59]

The idea of cultural identity hides some dangerous misunderstandings and tends to be a political combat weapon. When the existence of a cultural identity is proclaimed, what we actually do is deny the individual’s freedom, reduce people to a supposedly superior and more worthy system, drown the subject in a qualifying label. Cultures, as far as they exist in groups, are as permeable as groups themselves, they are connected through individuals, they are neither ponds nor pools: they are rather fieri than factum.

In the Western tradition, one of the currents of liberalism that may confuse us. According to John Gray’s distinction [2001, 11], there are two liberalisms: one that seeks “a rational agreement on the best possible way of life, and another one based on the“ belief that human beings can flourish in many ways of life”. Gray correctly assumes that the former is inspired and supported by thinkers such as Locke, Kant, Hayek or Rawls, while the latter responds to authors such as Hobbes, Hume, Oakeshott or Berlin. The first liberalism attempts to seek a universal project, certain utopia, while the second one strives to achieve the pacific coexistence of different, and even opposite, ways of life. In this second liberalism, tolerance is a peace strategy, the goal of which is not intellectual or moral consensus, but coexistence. Gray believes that conflict is inherent in the political life when several different ways of life are at stake, but actually, whether they are or not, conflict is the essence of political life. Gray [2001, 123] seems to assume that as the first liberalism thinks about reaching a universal civilization (because tolerance along these lines is a means to reach truth), the second one has to renounce any similar purpose. Communities and individuals with conflicting values and interests accept that coexistence, rather than the agreement on any kind of truths, is the only thing that can be achieved. These two liberalisms pose very different problems because they start from totally different pre-suppositions: the former, from a universalist point of view and the latter from the appreciation that the diversity of cultural traditions is unyielding to any kind of rule. There is a Hobbesian background in Gray’s ideas though not enough to justify why those who believe they have universally valid principles, that could improve the life of any community, should renounce defending and spreading their ideals.

This second way of understanding liberalism, although its values may be evident in the field of social practice, seems to be dominated by solipsism and the unavoidable clash of cultures that also underlies Huntington’s interpretation. At least in the latter case, it may be understood as a pessimistic comment on the current confrontations between some countries dominated by radical Islamism and the great American democracy. But the question is slightly subtler and more complex than shown by Huntington’s analysis; it should not be taken for granted that whenever there is an apparently unsolvable conflict the reason is an insurmountable identity difference. History shows to the contrary a logical process of assimilations and abilities, so that with consistent tolerance we should be optimistic and not consider that the battle has been lost before even putting up a fight. It is not reasonable to take for granted the unavoidable cultural persistence of identity manners, unable to learn, to open up to dialogue and civilized coexistence. Some processes may take longer than we would like (and we would have to consider relevant responsibilities without putting them all in the same bag), but that does not mean there is nothing impossible or eternal. Absolute relativism cannot be true, because there are always common values to talk about and particularly open individuals willing to trespass this kind of illusory border. Fundamentalism is, of course, the main obstacle that stands in the way of progress of the strategies that seek the expansion of values whose mere statement requires universality (a person’s dignity, human rights, freedom of conscience) even if they have not been recognized in many societies. Fundamentalism becomes strong in the defense of what is peculiar and that meets undue sympathies in our romantic side that balances our rationalism by acknowledging that living is more than thinking abstractly. It is impossible to live without feeling part of a community that is expressed in feelings not subject to a rational analysis.

Relativism is the other face of fundamentalism. Criticism of the excessive pretensions of universality of certain esthetic or metaphysical conceptions, has led to providing the same contingency and relativity to, for instance, clothing habits as to ethical principles; we have ended up confusing freedom of conscience (founded on an absolutely positive ideal such as respect to the human dignity) with moral skepticism. Fundamentalism not only supposes a mistake from the logical point of view, but it implies, above all, a very serious limitation to freedom, an amputation of the possibilities of choosing one form of human being or another, which means absolute submission of the individual to the random circumstances he may be forced to live.

We should not deny, in the abstract, the possibility of a solution, of finding a way to move towards a reconciliation of positions and ways of coexisting that go beyond what fundamentalists consider insurmountable. But we should not abandon ourselves either to a politically correct angelism even though, in the short term, it may seem academically attractive and sentimentally profitable. Specifically, to deny, today, that Western democracies are threatened by an enemy (who, according to Rorty [2002], and for lack of a better word, we call terrorism) against whom we do not know very well what to do, is to be stupid, or hypocritical or foolish. Nor is it good either, faced with bloody events such as those in New York, Madrid, and London (just to name the cases of the so-called first world) to blame the United States of America, carried away by an anti-Americanism useful only to hide the seriousness of the problem we have to confront in all its crudity, urgency and complexity. It is no use hiding under the cloak of a progressism that ignores what is really at stake, because, quoting again Rorty’s prophetic words:

Some day Berlin, Paris and Madrid will probably experience the shock that New York experienced last year. The people who blew up the World Trade Center may well find it equally gratifying to blow up, or spread disease germs around, the Prado, the Eiffel Tower, Potsdamer Platz or the Palace of Westminster. The difference between an intolerably arrogant and appallingly rich infidel nation and various smaller, better-mannered, slightly less rich infidel nations may not seem very significant to those who wish to imitate bin Laden's success. [Rorty, 2000]

We cannot deny the seriousness of the threat, we have the right to try to survive and not let that threat alter our system of values. Very likely, the only possible way to do so is to extend outside our borders the same type of freedoms that have allowed peace and prosperity within them, even if we know that this has rarely worked by force.

BEYOND BORDERS: DEMOCRACY AS A HUMAN IDEA

The delicate system of political balances which our democracy entails requires a polyarchy, and that is simply unimaginable in a regime in which, for instance, there is no separation between spiritual and political powers, in which there is no respect for freedom of conscience nor for the institutions that preserve it. Whether this is consistent or not with Islam, is a question in which theologians disagree, although pessimists abound. However, the situation in the world may not be limited to the analysis of just one stressful event, no matter how important it is. The problem of Islamic terrorism is only the most flamboyant of all the issues the new situation of the world presents: a very varied set of cultures, regions and societies that may not remain aloof much longer because mankind covers the limits of the Earth and globalization makes us live, for the first time, in the same world. In that unique world, suddenly turned small, large political and cultural units coexist, Europe, Russia, the English-speaking world (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zeland), Latin America, China, India, the African countries, the Islamic countries…, a mixed mosaic of societies with different religions, cultures and political systems.  

How can we think about a world community in which human rights and democracy gradually become a reality? Without them, there will be no reasonable possibility of peace, because it has always been easy to give in to the temptation of taking the different populations to the slaughterhouse to defend their alleged identities and, at the same time, the regime that exploits them. The verification of the value of this truth plays an important part in the Kantian reasoning with respect to the possibility of perpetual peace: “in a constitution under which the subject is not a citizen, in a constitution that is not therefore Republican, war is the easiest thing in the world, because the ruler is not a member of the state but its proprietor, war does not make him lose anything” [Kant, 1985, 17]. The thesis herein held is that the future political configuration of the world should be consolidated by starting from the diversity of existing nations, fostering freedom and democracy throughout the world and creating cooperative environments more and more extensive and sound among the different countries and areas. It does not seem a ridiculous thesis, but its implementation implies some conditions that may not be so evident.

The absolutely first condition for all this is to go, as Daniel Dei says [2002, 163], for “the possibility that is life”, for the flourishing of the marvelous possibilities that are the gift of human nature, the so varied forms that our freedom is able to build. It will not be possible, however, to take even one step if some basic convictions about life, its goodness and its meaning are not shared. Democracy and freedom are meaningful only if life has meaning; otherwise, and life can have meaning only, if it is respected, if its dignity is considered a superior value (which does not actually mean that it is the supreme value). This questions the current doctrine of the unlimited sovereignty of states, the presumption that—within the limits of the borders themselves—everything is an internal affair in which there may be no kind of external interference. This doctrine, regardless of how extended it may be, is strictly inhuman, because it would mean the impossibility of an intervention, for example, in the case of genocide.  

On this matter we stumble against a logical difficulty intimately associated to the nature of our borders and their relationship with legitimacy. If legitimacy were restricted to a specific territory, then, any intervention from outside the borders would be illegitimate. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that most of the external interventions hide objectives indefensible from an ethical point of view, but the question is whether we can even start to consider a world where democratic powers have the means to promote the birth of democracies in those societies where democracy has yet had no room. Interventions of just one nation or of ad hoc coalitions will always be under suspicion of unfairness, of using sublime arguments to obtain more tangible benefits, and, this however necessary they may be and ethically defensible in specific cases, as they have been at key times in past history. We should not even mention that this kind of interventions can not be limited to the military aspect, but that they have to be predominantly economic, political or cultural, and the use of force should be strictly restricted to very extreme cases, always provided an agreement has been reached by most democratic powers (something quite different from the current UN) about the legitimacy of war.

To solve this matter, we should use international institutions capable of legitimizing this kind of humanitarian intervention (if possible, without an excess of bureaucracy). But it is evident that so far we have placed the cart before the oxen in this subject, because UN bodies respond, as their name points out, to the logic of sovereign states, among which many would deserve the kind of external interventions they would not be willing to legitimate. Furthermore, in practice, the effective appearance of a state much more powerful than the rest (obviously, the United States) makes other states boycott the initiatives they think will benefit the great power or harm their own interests. In practical terms, our system of international institutions is not based on the rights of people but on the interests of the states, which mus be changed if we wish to make progress.

While more than half of the UN member states do not meet the minimum standards of democracy and human rights, to wait for this organization to make some progress, is to wait in vain. However, the idea is not to eliminate it, but rather that those members who share the ideas of democracy, freedom and respect for the citizens’ dignity and rights, and where public opinion is free, dare move one step further and establish new legal mechanisms to increase the number of rational opportunities for an international coexistence in peace and freedom. This ideal would require two quite difficult prior conditions: in the first place, the group of democratic states should put the safeguard of rights before their own interests and, consequently, they should stop treating other countries differently, for example, tolerating in China or Pakistan what they would condemn without any justification in any poor and resourceless country. That is, democracy should stop being a system of internal consumption and become a secure and habitual guide of external behavior of states, overcoming thereby the cynical appeal to a reason of state to legitimate crime and arbitrariness. The second condition is perhaps even more difficult, because it requires that the public opinion of those countries abandon the relativism that makes them judge as perfectly tolerable and even interesting what they would not consent to at home.

The idea of perpetual peace defended by Kant [1985, 14] was supported, particularly, on the conviction that “The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis); the natural state is one of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an unceasing threat of war. A state of peace, therefore, must be established”. Therefore, peace is not merely the absence of aggression—as assumed by the alleged order of non intervention. It is the achievement of an agreement among Republican states who, founded on freedom, dependence on a common law and equality of all citizens, would associate to ensure peace. And since there is no law, and there cannot be one above them, that peace would only be based on the common recognition of a set of rights for all men.

It is true that in order to be a member of the United Nations— regardless of what the texts may say—respect for human rights, freedom of conscience, guarantee of the rights of minorities or the respect for the political rights of citizens are not unavoidable conditions. Yet, it is evident that, under the current circumstances, the UN does not meet the necessary conditions to lead the search of a mankind not submitted to the despotic arbitrariness of the states. This, in turn, is the objective of a generalization of democracy and an essential condition that an idea such as perpetual peace to be at least conceivable.

Totalitarian states are totally incompatible with perpetual peace and the development of democracy throughout the planet. This is evident, not only from a historical point of view, but also from an ideological point of view. For if a state does not accept the limitations to its power born from the prior right of its citizens, how is it going to accept limitations from those who are not part of it? Only the circumstantial lack of military, economic and political power will explain its non-expansive restraint. On the contrary, the right of intervention should be the obligation of a prospective Republican federation, which would thus not only consolidate its right to peace but also be the future guarantee of peace. Obviously, it is necessary to build a new generation of international institutions, regardless of how this may alter the current balance of powers and of the important political risks it entails. That this may be done by existing organizations is a question for specialist, but having some states subject themselves to scrutiny through public parameters and goals of legitimacy appears to be very difficult indeed.

The progressive creation of the conditions required for the establishment of a universal democracy, and with it, lasting peace, requires, therefore, the modification of the nature of our national borders. The idea is to gradually create larger environments where war is not acceptable (this is, very likely, the case of the European Union) while also creating international bodies with a new legitimacy that may be only based on a pact or federation of stable democracies.

The question of whether democracy may be imposed is, therefore, very closely associated to the question of whether peace can be ensured. We are not talking now of the deterrent logic defined in the main scenario of international relations forty years ago. The enemy of civilization now is totally heterogeneous and asymmetrical: it should be identified not so much with a culture as with a historical phase which has not yet reached a sufficient expansion of the political ideals of freedom and democracy. Nothing still to be done in this field will prevent the full acknowledgement that there is an uncompromising plurality in the ways of life nor will it mean believing in a miraculous compatibility of all goods and principle—the endorsement of what Berlin called the Platonic prejudice, the assumed full harmony of any kind of goods and values. It will therefore be necessary always to take very much into account a principle of intellectual tolerance, a maxim well stated by Smullyan [1989, 202]. As our author notes, this is closely associated to Carnap’s principle of tolerance: "Instead of trying to prove your opponent is wrong, try to discover how he can be right”.

So understood, tolerance is not a surreptitious way to validate relativism, but a particular consequence of strong convictions about human nature and freedom of conscience. It is wrong, however, to unduly extend the idea of tolerance, the basis of which is the respect for the other’s conscience and dignity, to the supranational environment, where the criteria of liberality and prudence is not enough, because it is necessary to use unmistakable rules in view of the importance of the values at stake.

Darwinism has made us think in a way hardly consistent with the purpose, but human rationality is unthinkable without a valuation of the goals. Cantrary to the notion that any way of life is a response as valid as any other to the enigmas of the existence, there appears, from the very beginning of Western thinking, the conviction that a happy life is a meaningful life. This is a life that can strive to achieve certain values, even if occasionally that may, occasionally, jeopardize one’s own life. We face now a question whose seriousness depends on our response to that insurmountable alternative that supposes the final overcoming of the specific moral contradictions of modernity.

The crisis of modernity has not only been a crisis of principles; it has also been an experience of failure. We have proved how a supposedly superior culture may coexist with the mass murder of millions of innocent people and how an allegedly liberating policy and the search for a new man acted as the perfect rhetorical alibi for crime and barbarism. The 21^st century should draw very accurate lessons, very hard indeed, of those failures: it should learn to build a new cultural and political framework to support an effective promotion of human dignity. Dignity is a notion that may be dressed up with different effects some less essential aspects of which may be relativized, but whose basic core has to be absolutely unquestionable: freedom of conscience and opinion, no submission to guardianship or slavery, personal and moral autonomy. We will not undertake here a detailed analysis of the implications of the idea of a person’s dignity in its various aspects. But it is essential to highlight that we cannot speak of human dignity in a regime not governed by certain legal principles and guarantees, in a system that does not recognize popular sovereignty, in short, in a non-democratic system. Democracy is perfectly compatible with cultural and moral diversity, provided that cultural scenario respects essential principles, those that represent the dignity and inviolability of the human being and his/her essential freedom. Democracy allows for different ways of human relationships much more honorable than the mere relationships of control and submission characteristic of the situations in which non-democratic states develop.

Mankind has achieved a high level of scientific, technological and commercial development, but this development has been compatible with a variety of political forms where the democratic principle has not always obtained the required recognition of the established powers. Thus, being a man is still a synonym, in too many places, of being a subject, of being submitted to situations of legitimacy not inspired in the power of the people, and which do not consider their actions a service to the people. Evidently, many democracies also usually corrupt these principles, but, at least theoretically, they have systems that may reverse these situations perfectly well, while in non-democratic regimes, people are hopelessly submitted to the whim of a god alien to mankind: a nation, race, religion, party, ancestors, or whatever. Under these conditions, humankind may not reach maturity, may not come of age, and may even completely lose the dignity that turns us into ends rather than means, namely, the human identity that is always a moral project, and not a simple biological fact.

Reason, the human instrument to dominate the world, should surrender before man’s dignity, before the incalculable value that each of us, absolutely irreplaceable and extremely singular individuals, represent. Reason does not exist to be deified, but to enable the flourishing of the best opportunities of material and moral enrichment, everything that makes us see life as sacred and worthy. There is now an exceptional opportunity and we should stop regretting the bloody unbalance between our intellectual and material capabilities and our moral heritage. Once we have learnt from our mistakes, once we have received the lesson of realism from the holocausts of the last century, we will be ready to address, prudently but ambitiously, the objective of rescuing democracy from its national borders and undertake a true generalization of the system of freedoms and rights it comprises. It is true that, as José Jimenez Lozano points out, the layer that separates us from barbarism is always very thin, and nothing ensures us that political and moral progress will certainly take place. But we can and should strive to strengthen and extend certain conquests, even if we know that the road will be tortuous, ambiguous and, sometimes, very disappointing. The effort will always be worthwhile because it implies seeking a more reasonable, balanced, fairer, and more humane world. It will not be Paradise in earth, but should very clearly be distinguished from certain forms of hell that we have learnt so well to organize; this achievement is attainable and should therefore be a moral mandate.

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