Taiwan imported a crucial concept from Europe, which is at the core of its current internal conflict. Democracy arose in the Agora of Ancient Greece and has become entrenched in today’s cyberspace, where knowledge can now be shared by all. Yet the wisdom of Plato is not always so easily found.
Hence, with the digital “death of distance,” direct democracy — by ubiquitous and real-time clicking “of the people, by the people…” — has become technically feasible at all levels from local to global.
However, does such direct voting always result in decisions “for the people” — which is the third element of former US president Abraham Lincoln’s democracy? Or would the outcome rather be an ad hoc “tyranny of the majority, as coined by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, following each and every short-lived shift in popular preference?
Technology has rendered sharing the de facto “norm” on the borderless Internet, where information and knowledge are shared in ways that earlier generations from the time of the enlightened French philosopher Denis Diderot could only dream of. This newly gained incremental transparency of the political sphere likewise increasingly impacts and limits tolerance of traditional top-down governance of claimed representation based on elections every four or so years. Consequently, calls come from the bottom up for more direct democracy.
However, while its technology exists, a legitimate process has not been implemented to make this “normal,” neither upstream toward globally nor downstream toward locally established political strata to deal with societal changes.
The cleft only seems to be widening further between the faster advances of civilization through individualizing technologies and the slower progress of culture by edification toward omnilateral sharing.
Perhaps, one-directional data, information and knowledge do not suffice and more multidimensional networking and wisdom are required to deal with the limits of the assumed abundance of material people still enjoy.
However, where are the politicians and parties that properly function to channel the will of the people into parliamentary debates that enlighten the public in representative democracies? These crucial questions remain the same for civic groups, from the German Einziger Parlamentarische Opposition (APO, extra-parliamentary opposition) of the 1960s to the Sunflower movement.
Norms are necessary to let these groups grow into proper political parties and guarantee their internal democracy and fair funding. If parliamentary systems are to be enhanced while people mature as voters to allow more direct democracy, new parties will have to deal with new issues at all levels of the government.
It was not by accident, but clearly through a causal contribution by the APO that the German parliament — one of the first in Europe — in 1967 started producing legislation to regulate political parties.
By the 1980s, it had developed into a more comprehensive regulatory body than in most other established democracies and significantly helped to integrate new political forces ranging from the environmentalist Greens to the former communists in the East after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Even in Russia, the Duma adopted a party law in 2012, very much in reaction to growing opposition forces outside its official political groups.
Differing significantly from the much looser legal acts in the US, Europe since the 1990s has seen a proliferation in party laws overcoming the liberal principle of non-intervention in internal affairs of such political organizations.
In view of their dominant role as main vehicles in the democratic process, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Commission for Democracy through Law in 2010 adopted guidelines to allow for the development of common principles for the regulation of political parties. The boom in state intervention on the other hand has provoked liberal critiques to degrade them as “public utilities.”
A major issue is, of course, the laws’ determination if we see many or few new entrants in the political arena and the nature of competition (less antagonistic than in the Asian understanding of 競爭) among them. European experiences show rather open systems of party registration that guarantee wide plurality of representation, while the control over them is preventive by the government and successive by the courts in most cases.
In the post-World War II period, about 20 independent and democratic European states have laid down formal rules defining and shaping the processes for their parties. This development peaked in the 1990s when with the end of the Cold War the former communist countries had to demonstrate their democratic credentials to the EU to fulfil the so-called “Copenhagen Criteria” for membership in the bloc. Germany’s party law, with its 30 years of service, was a model used by many of them.
The parallels between the APO and the Sunflower movement might be far apart in time and content, but they have more in common than a devotion to flower power. Both sides of the often emotional political divide in Taiwan might learn some lessons from the history of democracy abroad. There are no custom tariffs on intellectual imports, and even arbitrary non-tariff barriers can hardly limit learning.
Since World War II, the number of countries generally recognized as democracies has tripled from about 40 to more than 120. However, the quality of their accountability, transparency and good governance in general has deteriorated. Perhaps, the introduction of a just and fair party law can help at least to slow down the deterioration in Taiwan.
Wolfgang Pape is a visiting academic at the Academia Sinica.
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