A Footnote On Democracy

In researching this week's column for Antiwar.com, I stumbled across this piece, which I may or may not have noticed last year when discussing the Serbian elections. Philip Cunliffe of Spiked argued that the Serbian vote wasn't really relevant, because the great powers would decide its fate anyway. And that much turned out to be true - although having a client regime in Belgrade certainly helped.

Here is the passage that caught my attention, and prompted this post (emphasis mine):

The Western response to the election results was best articulated by Javier Solana. Solana welcomed the results by flagging up the fact that the Radicals did not win the majority of votes: ‘the majority of Serbs voted for forces that are democratic and pro-European.’ (4) But even the most ardent EU election monitor would be hard-pressed to use Solana’s new measure as a way of uncovering the difference in democratic value between votes cast in the same election. What Solana really means is that what counts as democracy is what the EU decides is democratic, and the democrats are those who are anointed by the international community, regardless of who actually receives the votes.

I cringe every time the present quisling regime in Serbia, but even the so-called opposition, try to argue that Serbian rights (e.g. sovereignty, territory, etc.) should be respected because Serbia is a democracy. First of all, because they don't get to define democracy - their tormentors do. And secondly, because those rights bloody well should be universal, whether the country in question practices democracy or not. Otherwise, one implicitly recognizes the "right" of the Empire to commit aggression against "undemocratic" countries - and therefore to define "democracy" as it sees fit!