With two colleagues from South Africa and Paris, I am here on behalf of the BBC. This is a bold project conceived six months previously on a bright day near a Cape Town beach in a moment of collective enthusiasm.
?A squat Chinese filmmaker with the confident manner of the young Orson Welles gets to his feet. He explains to us that there is no point in looking for definitions of democracy in a country where it isn't allowed to flourish. "Bureaucrats rule in China," he says. "To be a bureaucrat you must be a Communist, and this is why every child wants to be a Communist." He propose s to film in a schoolroom, where children will be given basic rules and encouraged to formulate their own democracy. "We have elections that are organised by the Party," he says. "This will be the first real election—in which children choose their own class monitor. And this way we'll see what democracy in China could be like." The idea instantly appeals to us (see right).
May 2004. At pitches, we are asked whether we employ democratic methods when selecting films. Within Steps International, our tiny NGO based in Denmark, we do not make decisions by majority vote. The old anti-democratic habits of editorial individualism die hard, and for some colleagues, my own excessive use of the first person appears inappropriate, if not offensive. Meetings sometime descend into procedural wrangling; and as chairman I periodically despair of my own lack of political skills.
A meeting with London producers reveals a high degree of cynicism. We try to explain that this is not a Unicef Christmas card venture celebrating democratic good feelings. The question of whether the world is becoming more democratic is an important one. We have received more than 500 proposals online, but few seem viable. We fret over the poor quality of the projects received from so-called "mature" countries. No one wants to watch another film about elections in Switzerland.
On long flights I catch up with Plato, Hobbes and the Federalist Papers. Constitutional law is about as interesting as plumbing manuals. However, writing about the reality of democracy is more appealing—because it appears to involve subjecting oneself, often with reluctance, to the most basic propositions about human nature. Surely men must be of a certain level of intelligence to rule themselves. What happens when they prove wayward or murderous? Can one improve mankind, or is it enough to install checks on power, making democracy less dangerous? For many gurus, democracy is a hazardous notion, doomed to provide disappointment when it doesn't lead to anarchy. Alexis de Tocqueville went in search of America because it seemed to be the sort of place where men might live relatively uncorrupted, and democracy could thus take root. It comes as a shock to find Tocqueville walking amid the barricades of Paris, reacting as a contemporary writer might in Cairo or Lahore. But in Europe the fears of Tocqueville were finally proved baseless. Tocqueville's vision of a rational, comfort-seeking populace advised and restraine d by a class of "notables"—liberal gents like himself—finds contemporary expression in the European Union. However, it is not clear that democracy is making Europeans happy.
At the decaying campus of the Satyajit Ray film school near Kolkata, a professor asks me whether it would be a good idea to remake Orwell's Animal Farm in the context of the Indian constitution. This appears to be a serious question. In Japan, projects include an attempt on the part of a filmmaker to recount the Japanese obsession with the imperial family by posing as a gardener, tending the emperor's flowerbeds. The suited and very proper contingent from Japan's NHK, Japan's equivalent of the BBC, imply by their body language that such a film is out of the question. Over sushi, a Japanese broadcasting executive helpfully explains to me that the word "democracy" in Japanese has a history that pre-dates the American occupation after 1945. I begin to understand the significance of some of the projects we have been offered, including one picturesquely titled Donald Rumsfeld and the Dugongs, an account of the battles fought by a community to prevent the expansion of a naval base threatening the survival of these much-loved sea creatures.
May 2005. There is progress of sorts. We began with three broadcasters from western Europe and one from Australia, and now we have a dozen. Films from Latin America and Russia are under way. In Doha, amid palms and air-conditioning, a colleague and I attend what turns out to be a catastrophic meeting of Arab broadcasters sponsored by Al Jazeera. These mostly elderly, leftish servants of state broadcasting institutions treat us like CIA emissaries come to impose our western views. When I suggest that they might commission on our behalf short films criticising the western view of democracy, they look blankly at me. "You are criminals," one of them says afterwards, jabbing his finger. "George Bush is a criminal."
June 2005. In a Washington DC hotel, I meet a portly, ponytailed man, who until recently ran Saatchi & Saatchi's operations in the middle east from Lebanon. Elly is now a political consultant. Among his clients are the US state department and the Saudi royal family, who are interested, he explains, in a campaign to rebrand Islam. He has developed a complex graphical sequence that tells how democracy should be introduced. It's best to start with the notion of fairness, he explains. Once people are won over, one can begin to talk about markets. "I am a warrior in the war of ideas," he explains. We sign him up. A few weeks later, however, he calls back to say that his clients won't let hi m do the film.
October 2005. We are obliged to postpone transmission of our films because of the French presidential elections in early 2007. Although we are not carrying a film about France, it is thought by the French broadcasting authorities that we might prejudice the outcome. The delay is convenient because we have only found seven films, and none is ready.
January 2007. Despite 20-odd broadcast partners, we have a serious cash crisis. This is because, as any producer will tell you, broadcasters are so slow to pay. We have some American money from ITVS, an organisation set up to spend public money on documentaries, but as yet no decision from an American broadcaster. We are told that executiv es are nervous about our project because it "seems too European." But we are also having trouble finding money for a website and marketing costs. It seems that most foundations, slogans notwithstanding, are not yet ready to invest in global projects. I have dinner with a friend who tells me that it can take years to get money from foundations, and that they employ people to keep supplicants from the door. Swiftest to commit are content-hungry new media ventures like Joost, an online system that allows consumers to create their own networks, or MySpace. They are prepared to post our films; but they don't have the cash we need. I return home feeling anxious. Under Danish law we will be responsible for debts, but it is not clear whether any bank will lend us money.
May 2007. At the programme market in Cannes, a colleague and I back the director-general of a particularly slow and stodgy European broadcaster into the corner of a stand, holding him captive until he agrees to invest. We have raised the number of public broadcasters ready to show the films to 30 (including, most recently, Israel and Armenia) with a potential audience of many millions. BBC World wishes to broadcast them globally. But we are still short of cash. Ultimately, a fresh round of emailing and phone calls persuades the Japanese to pay earlier, and this proves to be our salvation. Money has also been promised from the Ford Foundation and the Danish and Finnish foreign ministries. In a flush of optimism, we decide to enlarge the scope of our project, staffing a Democracy House in Cape Town to create our website with graduates from all over the world. Laboriously, with much democratic huffing and puffing, we formulate ten questions to go with the ten films. Are dictators ever good? Is God democratic? Are women more democratic t han men? The famous and not so famous will answer these posers. Cornered at a press conference in Cape Town, Pelé tells us that he would vote for God as president of the world.
August 2007. On holiday in France I wait amid dusty vines at the end of a drive for more DVDs. I have more respect for democratic politicians because I now realise how difficult it is to secure assent if you don't have power over people. Managers have this sort of clout, but politicians, on the whole, do not. Perhaps the notorious power hunger of politicians is explained by frustrations accumulated over the years.
Contemporary writers are divided in relation to the prospects of democracy. It is hard not to be impressed by the motives of Amartya Sen, for instance, who has excavated a lost tradition of Indian free speech predating not just the British empire, but Athens too. However, the views famously expressed by Francis Fukuyama 15 years ago, in which mankind could be assumed to have reached an end of history in the liberal state, now appear distinctly premature. Among British writers, as one might expect, scepticism prevails. But I enjoy the musings of John Dunn, a saturnine 18th-century sensibility moored in contemporary Cambridge. Dunn believes that we have created under the guise of democracy a "new world order of egotism." The spirit of rationality is only fitfully present in contemporary political discourse, even among those who think of themselves as rationalists. Of the Enlightenment promises enshrined in the French revolution, only liberty has any true contemporary significance—and liberty has come to mean the freedom to consume, plunder or own. We will most likely be made to pay for our lop-sided interpretation of what we proclaim to be our inheritanc e.
I suspect that for most citizens of stable, western democracies, democracy is in practice no more than an item of convenience. It has in the past perished of indifference. Why should the same thing not happen again? Ho wever, the films tell very different stories. For every frustrated devotee, or cynic, there is a true believer. In places where it hasn't existed for long, democracy is valued. People believe passionately in the ideals of fraternity and equality, even if they are never fully realised.
Among many teasing aspects of the contemporary world is the great trust placed in the notion of a democratic world. Not just our international institutions, such as the UN, but also the nation states that define our political identity appear to be in some state of disrepair. Widespread cynicism about politics is found almost everywhere. But we tell ourselves that the world would be a better place if everyone learns to be democratic. The dream of a democratic world isn't new, and in two previous decades—the 1920s in Europe and postcolonial Africa—many democratic states were created, only to fail. But hopes are higher now, and perhaps more carefully cultivated.
September 2007. Forty-two broadcasters will show our films simultaneously. (Our films will not be shown in Russia or China; more surprisingly, only one of them will immediately appear on American television.) Our website is starting to look great. It's time to retrace our steps around the world, and we find ourselves on platforms, making spee ches about democracy. I feel elated, and hopeful. The contemporary hopes of democracy may be easily dashed—no doubt they will be in the years to come. But they must also be made to endure, helping us survive whatever terrors we inflict on ourselves. So I, too, have become a believer.
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