Letter to the Guardian Published Friday, 26 November
2004
Dear Editor,
Is "no violence" really "Europe's
new cathechism"? Is it not Gandhian? (Freedom's front
line - Nov 25.) Indeed, maybe a cause of the current Ukrainian
stand-off is the European obsession with adversarial democratic
systems - the simple two-option majority vote in decision-making,
and the
winner-takes-all form of elections, as in the UK's first-past-the-post
or France's two-round electoral systems?
The EU, after all, was part of the problem
in Bosnia. In 1991, when the Balkans was beginning to fall
apart, the EU set up the Badinter Commission to suggest that
any people seeking self-determination should hold an adversarial,
win-or-lose majority vote. As a result, to quote Oslobodjenje,
7.2.1999,
"...all the wars in the former Yugoslavia
started with a referendum", while in Sarajevo itself,
the barricades went up on the day of the vote!
To-day, in the Ukraine, it is again win-or-lose.
Would it not have been wiser to use a win-win electoral system,
such as originally conceived by the US Founding Fathers, by
which the winner becomes the President, and the runner-up
the Vice-President? Granted, such a system would work better
in a parliamentary form of power-sharing governance...
... but Europe seldom questions its own modus
operandi. We blame Putin for being undemocratic. And we forgot
that our western form of democracy,
'majoritarianism', on translation into Russian, becomes 'bolshevism'.
Admittedly, we do not send our minorities
to Siberia. But that's not to say that we don't leave them
in the political cold. And given our adversarial
politics, that is the prospect for either Yanukovich or Yushchenko.
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...
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