On Disasters and Democracy by David Alexander
In his book Democracy and Disaster, Rud Platt (1999) did a superb job of
analyzing the democratic imperatives and shortcomings of the American system of
emergency preparedness and disaster mitigation. However, I believe the issue is much
wider than his scope would suggest.
To begin with let us distinguish between participatory and representative
democracy. The phenomenon was invented in Ancient Greece as the former and has
since undergone the transition to the latter, while retaining forms of direct participation
at the grass roots level. The transition has brought problems of isolation of the
represented from their representatives, together with depoliticization of the former and
corruption of the latter.
Perhaps the contemporary problems of democracy deserve to be listed more fully
before they are considered specifically in the light of disasters.[Endnote 1] One aspect
is globalization, or the loss of sovereignty by governments and its gradual accretion to
multi-national corporations, that represent only their own interests, usually the making
of profit. Given the present-day dominance of capital over labor, governments are held
hostage to the private sector, owing to the political imperative to protect jobs. On the
other hand, the excesses of globalization have at least resulted in spontaneous forms of
participatory democracy (recently in Seattle, Prague and London, for example) by way
of reaction.
Secondly, there has been phenomenal growth in the size and clout of
underground economies. These are thought to represent about 20 per cent of world
trade and drugs alone may account for 12-13 per cent. By and large, underground
economies exploit people and create situations of harm, danger and illegality. They
remove people from the protection of the law, and in fact usually pit them against the
law. Revenues are not taxed, but the recycling of profits makes illegal economies
thoroughly intertwined with legal ones. The "black" and "grey" (partially legal)
economies are in no sense democratic.
Thirdly, at least in the Western countries and Japan, we are seeing the gradual
isolation of populations from democratic processes. Clear mandates to govern are
obtained on the basis of minority support. Factions are played off against one another,
while political debates become too schematic or superficial to mean very much.
Fourthly, politicians spend much time trying to convince their electorates that they
can pay fewer taxes and have more services. In this impossible equation, tax reduction
wins, with the inevitable consequence of fiscal stringency. Services have declined as
they have become more expensive and taxation has failed to cover them.
These issues are perhaps self evident, but I have listed them as a basis for
discussion in the context of disaster. Fundamentally, one can ask whether catastrophes
boost the process of disempowering people. Do they form part (perhaps fortuitously for
the victors) of a subterfuge to consolidate the power of the rich over the poor? Here are
some reflections.
With respect to globalization, labor has not internationalized as fast or as
successfully as capital and, despite any impressions to the contrary, neither has
disaster relief. Although the end of the Cold War led to a temporary boom in
international aid, by 1995 this was already winding down. International disaster relief is
strongly tied to development aid, which has not only failed to reach the target (0.8 per
cent of the GNP of donor countries) set at Rio in 1992, but has been cut repeatedly as
part of fiscal stringency. On the other hand, one cannot look to the private sector for
solutions: the globalization of capital and production does nothing to reduce basic
vulnerability to disaster. Western companies hold their manufacturers rigorously to
prices and production targets so that there is no opportunity to develop responsibility for
social progress, including resistance to or recovery from disaster.
Some economists view disaster as a form of accelerated consumption of goods.
Others regard it as a "zero-sum game" in which there are no net losses. Be that as it
may, there are obviously net losers and people who are forced by the brute
circumstance of catastrophe to "consume" what they cannot afford to replace. The two
ideas, however, are interconnected. Disaster stimulates the production-consumption
function of society, which thus compensates for losses. The strong distinction between
winners and losers in this process tends to reinforce globalization. In the usual pyramid,
capital and profit are further concentrated in the hands of the producers--the few--and
the losers are the consumers, the many. The only mechanism that counteracts this is
government intervention in market forces. But governments are now caught up in a
nineteenth century-style free-trade binge, with economic, if not geopolitical, excesses
comparable to those of the heyday of colonialism. As governments weaken in the face
of trade imperatives, they become less and less able to guarantee the sort of welfare
functions that people demand in the wake of disaster.
Turning to the second aspect, the relationship between disaster and underground
economies is largely unknown and unresearched. There have been attempts, some of
them successful, by criminal organizations to take over post-disaster recovery and
reconstruction or to pervert it. Disaster commonly fosters a black market in certain
goods, such as foodstuffs, roofing materials, and cement. Clearly, the boom that ensues
after disaster with full-scale reconstruction is ripe for intervention by criminal
organizations and their "alternative economies." In other cases, stagnation results from
the intertwining of disaster impacts (usually repetitive ones) with perversions of the local
economy caused by elicit economic activity. In either case, the underground economy is
an undemocratic force in disaster.
For Afghanistan, Clausewitz's famous dictum has been altered to state that
warfare is economics (rather than politics) carried on by other means (Cliffe and
Luckham 2000). In this extreme case of the isolation of a population from its democratic
rights, democracy is suspended or abolished (if it ever existed in the afflicted area), it
become subsumed by ideologies fueled for convenience sake by illicit economic
interests. More generally, the complex emergency, characterized by breakdown in
politics, economics, society, environment and security is one of few models of how
warfare and disaster interact. The principal victims are women and children and the only
antidote is stability. But stability on its own does not usher in democracy, mitigate
natural catastrophe or ensure democratic forms of recovery from disaster. Everything
depends on the ability to build institutions, on how they are built and on what forces,
internal and external to the society in question, act upon them.
With respect to disaster, in societies classified as stable democracies, the
question of peoples' relationships with democratic processes (our third issue) is strongly
related to the fourth question, that of taxation and fiscal stringency. Disaster prevention,
mitigation and relief cannot easily be privatized, as they usually offer either no
expectation of adequate profits or a long and uncertain gap between investing and
reaping the returns. In point of fact, catastrophes represent a counter-tendency, an
occasion for fiscal profligacy in order to satisfy the electorate. Governments that refuse
to grant aid to those of their citizens who fall victim to disaster become unpopular and
this induces many administrations periodically to break their own rules on fiscal
stringency. For example, the number of US federal disaster declarations has virtually
doubled in two decades, not necessarily because there are more disasters, but because
such declarations are one way to obtain influence over the electorates of affected
counties. If this is so, there is little incentive to involve the electorate in an open debate
on the ethics, morals or efficacy of heaping aid on victims.
These observations are somewhat bleak, but one can also be more optimistic.
Disasters are, or ought to be, opportunities to involve people in new or reinvigorated
forms of participatory democracy. Even in the most individualistic places, emergencies
are dealt with by socializing them. Disaster cultures and subcultures, forms of
therapeutic community, and emergent groups are all forms of grass-roots democracy in
action. We need to learn to build on them and turn transient responses into healthy
forms of permanent participation.
Further thoughts can be read in my recent book (Alexander 2000).
References
Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe. Terra, Harpenden, UK, and Oxford
University Press, New York, 280 pp.
Cliffe, L. and R. Luckham 2000. What happens to the state in conflict? Political analysis
as a tool for planning humanitarian assistance. Disasters 24(4): 291-313.
Platt, R.H. 1999. Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events.
Island Press, Washington, D.C., 320 pp.
[Endnote 1]: The setting of modern democracy includes the following four paradoxes of
modernity
1. Ninety per cent of international money transfers are speculative, 80 per cent with
return time of less than 1 week. Collectively, 358 billionaires are richer than 45 per cent
of the world's population. 'Income redistribution' is thus a very relative term.
2. Income differentials more than doubled in the second half of the 20th century and in
the final decades 89 countries experienced decline in national wealth. 'Equity' is thus a
very relative term.
3. Since 1945, between 25 and 50 million people have died in about 300 conflicts. In
recent wars about 84 per cent of casualties have been non-combatants, especially
women and children. In all of this period there have been only 126 days of global peace.
'Security' is thus a very relative term.
4. Half of the people in the world have never used a telephone and more than 90 per
cent are not Internet users. 'Information technology revolution' is thus a very relative
term.
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David E. Alexander, PhD
Professor of Geography
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
Editor-in-Chief, Environmental Management
Editor, Springer Book Series on Environmental Management
Current address:Borgo Sarchiani 19, 50026 San Casciano in Val di Pesa, Firenze, Italy
Tel: (+39) 055 822-9423 / (+39) 0333 432-8832
E-mails: catastrophe@tiscalinet.it / davida@geo.umass.edu