In January 2004, the de Borda Institute gave
a presentation to the Democracy Commission, during which we
spoke about all three aspects of governance: decision-making,
elections, and power-sharing. Needless to say, we advocated
the modified Borda count (MBC)
for use in decision-making at all levels of government -
in local council, in Dáil Éireann, and in
multi-option referendums;
the quota Borda system (QBS)
for the main electoral system in both local council and
general elections; and
the QBS matrix vote for
use in all elected chambers which wish to have power-sharing,
and this should include both the NI Assembly and the Dáil.
We also pointed out that for as long as Dáil
Éireann remains majoritarian, the Unionists will have
reason to fear that they will never be in a position of power.
In Britain, however, history has seen the Unionists in such
a situation on a number of occasions, i.e., whenever there
is a hung parliament. In 1977-8, for example, Labour actually
went into coalition with the Unionists, in the last grim days
of the Callaghan government.
In addition to this submission, the de Borda
Institute has made two presentations and written a number
of submissions to the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the
Constitution.
Its most recent contribution, which followed
a lecture in UCD organised by John Baker of the politics department,
is as follows:
An Outline Submission on the Abortion
Question to the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution
Download...
(42K pdf document)
Furthermore, the Institute has published two
feature articles in The Irish Times, (see Publications),
as well as a number of letters to the editor.
Our attempts to influence the political scene
in the Britain are only now beginning to enjoy some success.
The director demonstrated the modified Borda
count or Borda preferendum at a meeting in Edinburgh in 1990,
where a number of different groups came together to talk of
how united they all were in favour of some sort of devolution,
and where all but the sole MP, Mr. George Galloway, were prepared
to show how united they actually were by participating in
a multi-option preference vote.
Charter 88 attended our 1995 “Where
Lies the Compromise?” conference and was positively
enthused by its proceedings. The New Economics Foundation
published, “Towards a Better Way Democracy”
in the August 2003 edition of Radical Economics. Read more...
The director first visited Yugoslavia in 1990
when he completed a cycle ride from Moscow to Tirana. At that
time, he visited Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, but the
latter two only briefly.
He returned in 1992/3, when he visited Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia. Apart from Bosnia and
Kosovo which are covered separately (see below), he passed
through Croatia in 1997, 1998 and 2003; he cycled through
the Serbian Sand?ak in 1999 on his way to Kosovo, and returned
in 2000, when he worked as an OSCE election observer in Vojvodina,
before then cycling across the Preševo Valley into Kosovo
and out again. He also made a second visit to Montenegro in
2003.
Bosnia
Acting on behalf of the de Borda Institute,
the director was deployed in Bosnia in January 1999, to promote
inclusive decision-making processes and electoral systems.
It is a country he knows fairly well, for he first worked
in this country as a war correspondent in the winter of 1992-3
when he travelled (by push-bike) across Bosnia, from Zagreb
via Banja-Luka and 'the corridor' to Belgrade, and then back
again, from Belgrade via Zvornik, Pale and Sarajevo, to Mostar
and Split. In 1996, he worked as an OSCE observer for the
first post-Dayton elections, as well as on further occasions
in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
His January 1999 visit was as a political
adviser to the OSCE, working under the auspices of the (Irish)
Department of Foreign Affairs. The work involved many meetings
throughout Bosnia, in both Republika Srpska and the Federation,
discussing inclusive voting procedures with politicians, journalists,
human rights activists, and so on. Sitting on a bus one day,
on his way to Brcko, he was reading Sarajevo's now legendary
newspaper, Oslobodjenje; it said that "...all the wars
in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum" {"...su
svi ratovi u bivšoj Yugoslaviji poceli nekim referendumom"}
op. cit, p 11, 7.2.99.
This deployment took place one month after
the Madrid Peace Implementation Council had decided to review
Bosnia's post-Dayton electoral system. Accordingly, having
first met Ambassador Barry, OSCE Head of Mission, the director
(who speaks some Serbo-Croat) drafted a proposal for the National
Working Group, the name given to the Bosnian electoral commission
under Prof. Nadzer Milicevic.
One of several written proposals was as follows
and, by the end of this consultation process, the Quota Borda
System (QBS) was one of six electoral systems short listed.
On his return to Bosnia in July 1999, Prof. Milicevic informed
the director that if Bosnia had had an electronic counting
system, the commission might well have chosen QBS.
Bosnian Quota Borda System proposalDownload... (47K pdf document)
His second trip of 1999 was to present two
papers to a standing conference in Konjic on "Strengthening
Democracy", and he also spoke at some of the subsequent
seminars, in 2000, 2002 and 2003. One of these presentations
has since been published; (see publications).
Following his January '99 deployment in Bosnia,
the director visited the OSCE Headquarters in Vienna in February,
where he met Ambassador Stoudmann of the Office for Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) from Warsaw, who then
invited the de Borda Institute to participate in devising
an electoral system for Kosova. This too, it was suggested,
could be based on a Quota Borda System, as proposed for Bosnia,
and papers were written to this effect. Unfortunately, however,
the OSCE chose the very system which Bosnia had rejected,
namely, the closed list PR system in which the voter may express
only one preference. Needless to say, it works like a sectarian
head-count.
Given this work, the director visited Kosova/Kosovo
in July 1999, (his spare bicycle was in Sarajevo), on a tour
which included Mitrovica, Priština, Prizren and Pec/Peja.
He returned in January 2000, travelling by
bicycle from Bujanovac in Serbia, across the Preševo
Valley (which was then under the illegal command of the KLA)
to Priština, where he renewed some of his contacts from
his earlier visit.
In July 2001, he was back again, this time
to work as an International Trainer for the OSCE, and was
thus responsible for the conduct of both the international
supervisors and the national trainers in forty polling stations
in the Nov. 2001 Assembly elections.
In 2002, he returned as a short term election
observer.
The director's first visit to the Caucasus
was in 1990, when he gave a press conference (in Russian)
in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, on inclusive democratic
structures. At that time, many of the Soviet Union's Republics
were hoping to become independent, and many citizens in Tbilisi
were wanting to set up such democratic structures as might
help Georgia to develop speedily but above all peacefully.
Sadly, their efforts were unsuccessful.
He returned in 1993, by which time Georgia
had suffered one civil war and two ethnic conflicts; the former
was when Gamsakhurdia lost power to Shevardnadze, while the
latter battles took place in Abhazia and South Ossetia. The
Abhazian conflict was then at its height, and having delivered
a further press conference in Tbilisi, the director visited
Sukumi, the 'capital' of that province, which was then under
siege.
In 1999, in his capacity as director of the
de Borda Institute, he visited the Caucasus on two separate
occasions. In June, he gave a presentation to "The International
Conference of Journalists" in Batumi, Georgia, on behalf
of the British East-West Centre under the (British) Foreign
Office. And in November, working as a political adviser under
the (Irish) Department of Foreign Affairs, he visited all
three countries - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan - as well
as two of its conflict zones: Abhazia again, and Nagorno-Karabakh.
As in Bosnia, his work involved meeting government
ministers, journalists, politicians, political scientists,
human rights activists, mediators in conflict resolution work
and electoral commissioners, to talk primarily on decision-making
both in national/regional referendums and in majority voting
in parliaments, but also on electoral systems.
His most recent visits were in Novermber 2003
and January 2004, where he worked as an election observer
during the presidential elections in Azerbaijan and Georgia
respectively. The first allowed for the son of the former
president, Aliyev, to take over, as it were, democratically.
While the Georgian election saw Mikhail Saakashvili come to
power.
Prior to the inauguration of the de Borda
Institute, the director worked in Russia from 1988 to 1990,
with other visits in '84, '86, '87, '93 and 2004. Thus he
was able to witness, and participate in, the whole process
of democratisation, with articles in Moscow News ('Moskovskiye
Novosti') No 6, 5.2.99, for example. Shortly afterwards, according
to the deputy editor of that newspaper, Mikhail Gorbachev
used the word 'consensus' for the first time, (whereas the
usual Russian word for 'agreement' is 'soglasiye'. Later,
of course, the President changed his mind, and at a 1990 meeting
of the Russian parliament, he was heard to yell: "Consensusa
nyet i ne budet!" ["There is no consensus, and
there's not going to be any either!"]
The director and his co-author, Irina Bazileva,
a patron of this Institute, were published alongside Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn in 'Novy Mir' [New World] No 3/90. They were
also published in book form in 'Pravo i Vlast' [Power and
the Law], an anthology in which they were featured with the
late Anatoly Sobchak and others. In addition, the director
was interviewed in 'Pravda' [The Truth] as well as being published
in a number of other magazines like 'Svyet' [The Light]
and in various provincial newspapers.
For some reason, none of these achievements
were ever acknowledged in the Irish media, North or South.
And partly because of the lack of interest shown by various
western correspondents in any non-majoritarian democratic
structures, the new Russian parliament adopted the traditional
majority vote of western democracies. This ensured that one
half of the new government (as represented by the Nobel peace-prize
winner, Mikhail Gorbachev) was locked into opposition with
the New Regional Group (under the other Nobel laureate, Andrei
Sakharov).
Was it wise, we ask now in hindsight, for
the new Russian parliament, faced with such enormous problems,
to adopt a decision-making process in which one 'half' had
a vested interest in the failures of the other 'half'?
Secondly, did the West realise that, by advocating
the majority vote and the right of majority rule, by promoting
what may best be summed up in the word 'majoritarianism',
it was actually using a phrase which translates as 'bolshevism'?
(The Russian word for 'majority' is 'bolshinstvo', and those
who were members of the majority were the 'bolsheviks' or
'bolsheviki', and thus were they named by Vladimir Ilich Lenin,
in 1903. The losers of that vote, the minority, became the
mensheviks, from the Russian 'menshinstvo' meaning 'minority'.)
His most recent visit was in March 2004, when
he worked as an OSCE observer during the presidential elections
which saw Mr. Putin returned to power. Much has changed, in
Moscow. But out in the villages, life is still much as it
was under Brezhnev.
In an earlier stage of his life, the director
worked as a volunteer maths teacher in Kenya. It was a time
when Kenyatta was in charge (of everything!) in Kenya, when
Nyerere was promoting his socialist policies of ujamaa in
Tanzania, and when Uganda fell from one tyrant, Obote, to
another, Idi Amin. And the young volunteer from Europe asked
himself if the British system of two-party politics was actually
appropriate for a non-British setting. (Later on, of course,
he realised that it is not suitable for Britain either!)
In 2003, having brushed up on his Swahili,
he returned to all three countries, and made his first visit
to Rwanda. A report is attached. More...
Lebanon
The director made his first visit to the Middle
East, to Lebanon, in December, 2003. The purpose was to study
the rather unique electoral system they use out there, a system
which was first devised in 1943, during the throes of the
Second World War, as part of the Taif Accords. Basically,
if it is considered that a constituency will be represented
fairly if it has, let us say, one Druze, one Maronite and
one Shia, they hold three 'first-past-the-post' elections
on one ballot paper. Every voter votes for his/her favourite
Druze, Maronite and Shia, and the easiest way of doing this
is to vote for just one 'ticket'. In other words, this electoral
system encourages the politicians of different confessional
backgrounds to nevertheless work together on matters political.
The disadvantage is that the system itself perpetuates the
very idea that confessionalism is important; indeed, the system
institutionalises it.
It would be nice to think that Paisley, before
he stood again in Northern Ireland, would have to find a Catholic
who shared his political 'ideals'.
OurKingdom, the new economics foundation and the de Borda Institute recently gave interested parties from think tanks, research groups and campaigning organisations, and members of the general public, the opportunity to participate in an online trial of consensus decision making.
The de Borda Institute and nef (the new economics foundation) have received a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to test the potential of consensus voting More...
Site information now available in a number
of langugages
