Mediapart: Why do you say that France has the most fossilised political system in the whole of Western Europe?
David Van Reybrouck: For a long time I thought Belgium was the ultimate "party-ocracy", meaning a democracy that the main political parties carve up between themselves. This is characterised in particular by the politicisation of the civil service, and the quasi-necessity of having a party card in order to have a job as a senior civil servant. But I observe that in France, at least at a national level, things work in just the same way, maybe even worse. The entire government apparatus is in the hands of political parties that represent only a small fraction of the country.
The other thing specific to France, which continues to surprise me, is the aristocratic status of the elite schools, and a system that reproduces very major inequalities in a country that has nevertheless put equality at the heart of its Republican ethos. I have read [French sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu, but I did not think the system he described was so powerful and enduring over time.
When I look at France, I have an impression of a greatness that has become hysteria. National pride has been transformed into hatred of oneself and of others. France embodies a hatred of elected representatives coupled with a veneration of elections, which I analyse in my book, and which creates frustrations across the board. Those who vote [for far-right party] FN are frustrated by traditional politics, but those who still vote for the parties considered as governing parties seem just as dissatisfied with the political class, and unable to imagine a remedy for the democratic crisis that France and Europe are going through.
Mediapart: From Belgium, which recently had a period of several months without a government, how do you see the institutions of France’s current constitution, the Fifth Republic?
D.VR: France, like all other Western countries, is in the process of becoming structured in a more horizontal way, yet the Fifth Republic is a very vertical regime, and this disparity creates both difficulties and blockages. The new technologies are accelerating a process in which societies become more horizontal and develop less hierarchical and pyramidal methods of organisation, and these are in conflict with your paternalistic republic – which was invented by the pater familias Charles de Gaulle as if he were presiding over a Sunday lunch.
At the time when books were still copied by hand, princes and abbots held a monopoly over information and its distribution. The printing press brought about a democratic broadening of this. Nowadays we are facing an equivalent leap with the development of social media and new technologies. We have all become princes or abbots. This changes the basis on which we function democratically, yet our democracies' political and institutional structures remain very hierarchical and under state control.
This is also true of the energy network, for example, which is incredibly pyramidal. Yet we are seeing more and more citizens organising in favour of local and decentralised production. So I think that social mutation is gathering pace towards becoming more horizontal, a bottom-up way of functioning, while France's political and institutional system remains profoundly top-down.
So it is not surprising that dissatisfaction with the so-called representative democracies is being felt most keenly in very vertically organised countries like France or Spain. In this vein, I found the way France set up the French National Public Debate Commission [Commission National du Débat Public] some years ago symptomatic of the problem. It was a pioneering attempt to allow a form of citizens' participation, but it immediately became constrained by procedure. The free exchange of ideas was immediately contained, and France had invented a national, vertical institution to look after public debate, as if in reality it were afraid of a free debate.
What is strange is that France has many thinkers who have demonstrated the limits of so-called representative democracy and proposed possible ways of remedying the democratic, including Bernard Manin, Pierre Rosanvallon, Loïc Blondiaux and Yves Sintomer, among others. But these inspiring reflections have barely been translated into practice at a national level. These ideas do not inform the actions of French society.
In the United States, someone like James Fishkin, a professor at Stanford, immediately set up experiments in deliberative democracy[1]. In Belgium, three years after launching the G1000 manifesto, in which we invite a thousand citizens from countries chosen at random to a meeting, I observe that ten out of 12 parties now support participative democracy, sometimes even with some kind of random selection.
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1: In deliberative democracy, decisions derive their legitimacy from being the outcome of a discussion rather than the expression of preferences involved in voting. Fishkin pioneered the deliberative opinion poll, which involves using a representative sample of the population to discuss the issue at hand and then polling the participants for a result.
Mediapart: You appear to be arguing in your books that democratic innovation will come about more from small entities, whether this be from countries with smaller populations or from regions. Why should this be the case?
D.VR: An innovative and deliberative democracy can exist on every level, but I think a country like France would have everything to gain from looking with interest at how things are done in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Ireland or in Iceland rather than with condescension. In Belgium we are guinea pigs for you in terms of democracy, so benefit from that rather than looking down on it. Novel things often begin at a local level. Out of 300 Flemish local authorities, 60 are working explicitly with participative processes.
The major nations with a grand history often find it difficult to look to the future. France has already found it hard to look at its colonial past, because it conceives of itself as a great country which believes that recognising its errors is a weakness, whereas I believe it is a sign of strength and greatness. So it probably needs a lot more time to admit to the structural problems of its democracy. It is necessary to also decolonise democracy and the French republic and break with the vertical, paternalistic structuring of society, and that is far from being accomplished.
Yet, following analyses by Bernard Manin or Francis Dupuis-Déri, we know that the French Revolution did not replace the aristocracy with democracy, but aristocracy by birth with elective aristocracy. Elections were introduced, consciously, to make this new regime possible, and the Athenian idea that there was no distinction between those who govern and those who are governed was abandoned. Voting for representatives is originally an aristocratic procedure that was democratised in the 19th century with the extension of the right to vote and universal suffrage. But, as Manin demonstrated, it is a quantitative, not qualitative, democratisation. More and more people have the right to vote, but very few have a real voice.
And the struggle to win the vote, which so many generations fought for, has now been abandoned if you look at the levels of abstention in municipal or European elections. The good news in all this is that nevertheless, this abstention is not the result of an aversion to democracy itself, but rather a disillusion with the democratic process more than the democratic ideal. I think a lot of French people simply thought voting required an effort that was not justified by the outcome.
Mediapart: Aren't you worried by the rise of so-called populist parties as a result of this abstention?
D.VR: Of course, when it involves a hard-line fascist party like Golden Dawn in Greece, I am worried. But I do not think we are in the same situation as in the 1930s. I wrote a book, which has not been translated into French, called ‘A Plea for Populism’ [Pleidooi voor populisme’] which, broadly, calls not for less populism but a better populism. The vote for the parties we call populist does indeed seem to me to be worrying from certain points of view – when these parties have xenophobic positions. But it also reveals a desire to be involved in the affairs of the state, particularly among dominated social groups with less formal education, and I find that significant. In the Netherlands, the paradox is that good results for the populist leaders Pim Fortuyn or Geerts Wilders finally brought a lot of people out to vote.
If you treat people like adults, they behave like adults. The social-democratic state has for a long time conceived of its relationship with the people as a parent-child relationship. In a neo-liberal state, you don't have paternalism, but the citizen is a client who must be served and exploited. I think it is urgent to invest in a society where the relationship between the state and the people would be an adult relationship, which is more difficult to do in hierarchical, centralised states like France, even if there are interesting local initiatives.
Besides, when you do manage to set up deliberative processes, you often see that it is not because people vote populist that they think populist. When I think of my grandparents, who were modest agricultural workers, in their time they voted for the major parties because they felt represented. I think today they would vote for so-called populist parties. But I also think that if they were here in 30 years' time and were invited by a random selection to a deliberation on migration, they would not express xenophobic opinions.
Mediapart: How can one be, to coin the title of your recently-published book, 'against elections'? Are they not a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition of democracy?
D.VR: I am against elections if democracy is limited to just that. It is obvious that elections are not sufficient for democracy. I am not certain that they are necessary either. In the Greece of Pericles, elections existed but in a very limited manner.
I also evoke the scenario of an American researcher, [Terril] Bouricius, who imagines the functioning of a very democratic state without elections. Of course, if a head of state said to me today “I like your book a lot, we’re going to scrap elections”, I would be very unhappy.
What I advocate now is an electoral system that enriches itself with participative procedures founded notably on sortition [a random selection of citizens for decision-making tasks], firstly for one-off events, like we saw in Ireland for the re-writing of the constitution, and then in a more structural manner. In Belgium, the Senate never stops losing many of its functions. Ideas are bounced about to transform it into a chamber of reflection that would invite citizens chosen at random. I think that in the longer term, it could well become, in the framework of a bi-representative system, the Chamber of Citizens Chosen at Random, alongside the Chamber of Elected Citizens.
Mediapart: Can a system of random selection, or sortition, be a true solution to the democratic deficit?
D.VR: When I’m told that random selection is a farcical solution, I take the liberty of reminding people that it already exists, but is very badly used, in public opinion surveys, which determine part of public policy making. Wasn’t the choosing of your new [French] Prime Minister [Manuel Valls] made for reasons of his supposed “popularity”?
Opinion polls are nothing but random draws of a few thousand people, made by organizations that are not looking to serve the public good. We could re-appropriate this practice. The state must do better than opinion survey institutions who, with a few hundred email addresses and phone numbers, feed public debate. And, as Fishkin said, in a typical opinion survey people are asked what they think when they are not thinking. Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask them what they think after they have thought?
Sortition would also allow us to emancipate ourselves from electoral constraints, from campaigns full of invective, and to think about the long-term without being fixated on the next election. If one considers that society functions as a triangle – the government, civil society, the [financial] market –we can see an ever greater imbalance. A large part of power has migrated to the market and it is therefore urgent that the two other poles recreate their ties in order to invite the mercantile power to a new form of balance.
While the government is wary of civil society and civil society is wary of its government, true power goes elsewhere. Which is the reason for the necessity of a new alliance between governments and the governed, which requires new procedures. The real key matters at stake move off in silence, leaving the democratic arena for a tranquil spot, distant from public life. So we must reactivate this public life.
Mediapart: What successful examples of deliberative democracy can you give us?
D.VR: I am very impressed with what happened in Ireland and notably the manner of functioning of the Irish Convention on the Constitution , which was given the responsibility of proposing amendments to eight articles of the constitution, notably on the question of marriage [rights] for homosexuals. The convention was made up of 33 elected politicians and 66 citizens chosen by random selection. The citizens selected at random were not the only ones to have the right to talk on behalf of society, because hundreds of files were submitted by the Church, associations [etc]…In the end, the Convention questioned lots of experts, lots of citizens, lots of spokespeople, and finally approved by [a majority of] more than 80% a constitutional modification making marriage [rights] for homosexuals possible. What seems to me to be important is not so much the conclusion but the serenity of the debates which allowed such a change in an Ireland that is much more Catholic than France. In your country [France], you can vote or demonstrate, but there’s not much in between. In the voting booth, one keeps quiet, in the street one shouts. Yet between silence and shouting there is exchange and debate.
The serenity of the organised debates was also striking in the manner with which Northern Ireland managed to bring together Catholic and Protestant parents, who never spoke together, to talk about a very emotional topic, namely the education of their children. In this manner they succeeded in putting into place practical and pragmatic solutions, thanks to innovating procedures for establishing relations and for debating, which until then could never have been envisaged.
Mediapart: You have written a major work on the history of the Congo, a former Belgian colony. How do you compare the manner in which Belgium and France handle their colonial past?
D.VR: I find that the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the Congo gave rise to pertinent questions in the Belgian public place, [as illustrated with] books, exhibitions, talks organised in schools. That’s still insufficient if one compares [it] with Britain for example, but there was a real reflection about the colonial past.
France seems to me to be lagging behind, and that stops it projecting itself towards the future. Belgium has apologised on two occasions for what happened in Rwanda, whereas France still has a lot of difficulty in assuming its responsibilities. One must, however, take hold of one’s past to be able to progress.
Last year, I took part in the festival ‘Étonnants voyageurs’ [Astonishing travellers] in Brazzaville, a wonderful event which mixed Western, African and Asian writers. One day, I was invited to the French ambassador’s residence for lunch. There were about 20 of us there. Apart from Alain Mabanckou, the festival organiser, there were only white-skinned artists. There were two Congolese ministers, one of whom was wearing an African shirt; “Who is the Minister of Culture?” I asked my neighbour, a French diplomatic advisor. “The one with the pyjamas,” he sarcastically whispered back to me.”
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David Van Reybrouck's book 'Congo. The Epic History of a People' is published by HarperCollins (April 2014).
Van Reybrouck's 'Contre les élections' is published in France by Actes Sud, priced 9.50 euros.
Another of his works published in English is 'From primitives to primates. A history of ethnographic and primatological analogies in the study of prehistory', published by Sidestone Press (2012).
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- The French text of this interview can be found here.
English version by Sue Landau and Graham Tearse