Listen to my podcast interview with Rashunda Tramble of the International Relations and Security Network on Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having the Vote as part as ISN’s special series on Democracy.

The idea of democracy may make for good intentions, but whether it is a good solution for every society is up for debate, Humphrey Hawksley, BBC correspondent and author of ‘Democracy Kills,’ tells the ISN.

INTERVIEW   Click here: The Devil in Democracy

I asked Rashunda at the end whether she agreed with my argument. But I won’t repeat her answer without her permission.

Click here: Democracy Kills

HSBC has outsourced its car insurance to a company called BISL. I renewed mine through a call centre reading a credit card over the phone. A few days letter instead of getting the renewal policy, a letter arrived declaring that  BISL will keep my card number on file and ‘any future payments’ will be deducted it.

I have now told BISL to delete my card record.  They thought the system was just fine and that I was an awkward customer.  It is little wonder that the financial system collapsed when basic checks, balances and corroborations are not used as standard practice. And, it seems, there’s no plan to.

I was caught on the hop in an incisive interview with Rashunda Tramble of the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) on the issues raised in Democracy Kills.  She raised the question of democracy being suited to certain cultures and asked about the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the US — when the Federal Government overruled state policies that blocked African-Americans from voting.  What I hadn’t realised was that it took a full one hundred years to pass that legislation since the end of the Civil War  that was fought over slavery, equal rights and democracy. 

I recommend Travel’s with Charley by John Steinbeck on his 1960s journey around America ending up witnesses school segregation in New Orleans and being accused of being a ‘nigger-lover.’  His closing thoughts: “I do know it is a troubled place and a people caught in a jam. And I know that the solution when it arrives will not be easy or simple……It’s the means — the dreadful uncertainty of the means.”

If it took a hundred years in the US and it’s still not fully fixed — how long for the Sri Lankas, Iraqs and others?

From The Sunday Times review of Democracy Kills by Robert Cooper, acclaimed author of The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the 21st Century.

The stories told are enough to deal with the notion that all we need is a free election and everyone will live happily ever after….In the end, it has to do with our conception of man. It is not just what people want that matters, it is what serves human dignity.

Click here: Democracy Kills

What if Eisenhower hadn’t forced the cancellation fo the 1956 Vietnamese elections and Ho Chi Minh had won?

Mel recommends Mikael Sigouin’s hand-crafted Californian called “Hapa Blanc” (a blend of white grenache and roussanne).”

Aparna recommends: black oystercatcher , boutique wines from SA
DIVINE

Any others to improve the list in Fortune, West Kensington? 

I was at the totally superb Fortune Restaurant in West Kensington when a heated debate broke out about which white wine went best with spicy Sichuan food. Any suggestions most welcome.

London Evening Standard comment September 1st 2009  

Once the election results in Afghanistan are finally in, Western governments need to draw up new and detailed initiatives on how to deal with failed states. In the coming years, many other countries will begin that treacherous transition from dictatorship to democracy, and we need to find a way to try to avoid the violence of recent years that has dominated our TV screens.

In Iraq, Western governments had no detailed plans on how to deal with the country once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown. Six years later, Iraq is still racked with violence. Afghanistan was neglected after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. There was no urgency to build the strong institutions needed to modernise the country. The result is the conflict that is taking the lives of British soldiers today.

In the previous generation, too, the West neglected Pakistan after its role in expelling the Soviet Union from Afghanistan ended in 1989. Pakistan swung from appalling democracy to appalling dictatorship and is now branded as one of most dangerous countries in the world.

Over the next few years, Western democracies may be asked to mentor transitions in countries that could either go smoothly or erupt into global crises. They include Burma, which has been under military rule since 1962 and is made up of ethnic communities often at war with each other. Aung San Suu Kyi, its symbol of hope, has spent much of the past 20 years there under arrest. But what would happen if the generals were suddenly overthrown and full and open elections held?

As the relationship between Cuba and the US thaws, Castro’s regime will come under pressure to hold full elections. Cuban exiles will try to win back their country, possibly sparking off massive instability.

How will democratic South Korea and autocratic China carve up the spoils of North Korea when it dissolves, and how should its brutal institutions be democratised?

As of yet, there are no clear policies on these questions. What is now known, however, is that the holding of full sovereign elections while institutions such as the police and the judiciary are corrupt and weak and infrastructure underdeveloped is highly risky, often leading to violence between ethnic, tribal and religious communities. If this were not so, the type of government that democracy is meant to create would not have left so many Africans poorer and caught in cycles of disease and violence.  

There are formulas that have been proven to work, including those used in Europe, which just over half a century ago was itself an amalgam of warring and failed states. The Allies waited 10 years before returning sovereign power to Germany after the Second World War, and even now the international community retains control of Bosnia, whose ethnic civil war ended almost 15 years ago. 

In East Asia, Japan was under American control for seven years and since then the region as a whole has forged ahead economically under mainly authoritarian and not democratic governments. Taiwan and South Korea have shown the way globally on how to move from dictatorship to democracy without violence – but it has taken them decades and not years to get it right.

Some of the concepts may be hostile to conventional thinking. But if they are taken on board, the next time the West embarks on a democratic mission it will be armed with fresh ideas on how to avoid bloodshed that creates trauma and hatred that can last for generations.

Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC world affairs correspondent. His book Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having The Vote is published by Macmillan on Friday.