Introduction

"...and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Africans must speak for Africa. The four Africans that contribute to this issue speak for themselves, and other Africans must judge how far they speak for them as well. But if anything is clear from their articles, it is the sheer difficulty of (in EM Uka's phrase) establishing and entrenching democracy in Africa. As a westerner, I may perhaps add a word on this from, and to, the West.

On a cool November morning in 1863 they gathered near Cemetery Ridge to remember the Gettysburg dead. It was not yet the age of the sound-bite: Edward Everett, the celebrated New England orator, spoke for two hours. Then Abraham Lincoln came forward, to read in a high, thin voice a speech he had scribbled on a sheet of paper the night before; it lasted less than five minutes. Secretary of State William H Seward whispered to Everett, who was seated beside him, "He has failed, and I am sorry for it"; but history disagreed with the State Department. Fortunately for all of us, it frequently does.

Casting around for a way to summarize the foreign policy of the current incumbent of the White House, with its twin themes of strengthening democracy and promoting free markets, Jeremy Rosner, a speechwriter at the National Security Council, came up with the term, "democratic enlargement". Clinton liked it. Neither he, nor Rosner, nor anyone else in the administration seemed to notice that there is no automatic fit between fostering democracy and promoting market economies. John Gray, indeed, argues powerfully that deepening and extending democracy is ultimately incompatible with the still fashionable goal of a single global market, which can only be imposed by "strong" governments over the objections of their restive populations.¹

Africa, beset by debt, burdened by its Cold War legacy of civil wars and rapacious tyrannies, marginalized, excluded, and largely ignored by the "democratic enlargers", may well prove the best testing ground of the Gray thesis. Is a worldwide free market compatible with government by the people? Is it compatible with government for the people? Africa, her peoples and her states, will need to decide. And the rest of us will need to decide with her.

Páraic Réamonn

Notes