WE are confronted with a Western-sponsored force of crusaders on a vigorous campaign to spread standardised (Western) democracy, and this force comprises NGOs, Western-sponsored political parties, misguided young people, and the self-applauding "pro-democracy movement", whatever that really is.

The US-led Western alliance is currently engaged in what is purported to be a planned reordering of the world, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are part of a supposedly universal effort to create world order by "spreading democracy".

While the majority of the world population are evidently appalled by US military hegemony and cannot stand Western aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are minority sections of the global community that have openly admired the suffering of Iraqis and Afghanis under US-led occupation — of course in the name of democratisation.

Some supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T party have for example openly supported the invasion of both Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope that the US could do the same in Zimbabwe — if only to make Tsvangirai president of the country.

These are part of the very few people that consider as legitimate the sham trial that traversed all basic principles of the law just to see Saddam Hussein murdered by the Americans — murdered in the name of a purported legally binding death sentence.

Saddam was undoubtedly a nasty piece of work that was created by the Americans, but that does not make his murdering by his creators any act of decency.

In fact, one overzealous London-based MDC-T political activist went on to invite the Americans through a song to descend on Zimbabwe and hang President Mugabe in the very barbaric manner Saddam was hanged. The song is not only a sad reading of how effective US-led white hegemony has become on the young black mind, but also a clear measure of the intensity of self-hate among our people.

The idea of spreading democracy by the West is not only quixotic, but also very dangerous. The political and media rhetoric surrounding this crusade implies that the system is applicable in a standardised Western form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it is the panacea to today’s transnational challenges, and that it breeds peace rather than sow disorder. The opposite to each of these attributes is the undeniable reality in the world we live in today.

In 1647, the English Levellers rightly popularised democracy by broadcasting the powerful idea that "all government is in the free consent of the people". This meant votes for all, and the idea was great and popular.

Universal suffrage is an applauded idea, but it does not necessarily guarantee any political result, and elections cannot even ensure their own perpetuation. Electoral democracy is also unlikely to produce outcomes convenient to Western hegemonic or imperial powers.

Zimbabwe’s post 2000 elections (four of them), the elections that brought Hamas to power in Palestine, the Chavez win in Venezuela, and the 2009 Iran elections are just but a few examples where the expectations of hegemonic powers were not met by election results.

In fact the expectation of the US and its allies on an election over whether or not military action was warranted over Iraq was not met in 2003. If the Iraq War had depended on the freely expressed consent of "the world community", it would not have happened. The US lost the vote, but went to war regardless.

The appeal of electoral democracy is hardly diminished by any of these uncertainties though. It is the popularity of electoral democracy, together with other related factors, that explains the dangerous and illusory belief that the propagation of democracy by foreign powers and armies may actually be feasible.

Africans migrate to or visit Western countries and they come back obsessed with Westernising the political system back home. Globalisation suggests that human affairs are evolving towards a universal pattern. If mobile phones, iPods, and computer geeks are the same the world over; why not political institutions? This question makes a lot sense to an average young African today.

But the whole question underrates the complexities of the real world. Many people are simply motivated by the need to put to an end to the relapse of the world into bloodshed and anarchy, and they naively believe liberal electoral democracy can be the stopper they so wish for.

Many writers have cited the Balkans as having proved that areas of turmoil and humanitarian catastrophe require the intervention of strong and stable states, military if need be. It is in this context that some humanitarians in the civic society have tended to support a world order imposed by US power.

We need to analyse the deception that says military powers can do favours for their victims and for the world by defeating and occupying weaker states. Both Afghanistan and Iraq have not in any proven way benefited anything from the Americans since they were invaded and occupied in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Democracy by force is democracy denied. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan know this very well.

The US is always ready with the necessary combination of megalomania and messianism, derived from both its revolutionary origins and its imperial doctrine. Since 1989, the US has not been reminded by a competing power that its material power has limits, and it is this scenario that makes US presidents assume they can run the world the US way.

Like President Woodrow Wilson, himself a spectacular international failure of his time, many believers of liberal electoral democracy see a model society at work in the US. This is why the election of Barrack Obama is supposed to be treated as a universal shining example of the wonders of liberal electoral democracy.

The ideologues of today see in the US a combination of law, liberal freedoms, competitive private enterprise, and regularly contested elections with universal suffrage. For the admirers of this system, all that is left is to allow the Americans to lead the world into this marvellous image of a "free society".

This is the dangerous whistling in the dark that has propounded and sustained the regime change crusade in Zimbabwe. We have gangs of youngsters that spend all their energy screaming endless about democracy with absolutely shut minds.

It may be attractive or even strategic for a political party like the MDC-T to align itself with a great power like the US, and it may be politically desirable to do so, but clearly identifying with such an imperial force like the US is perilous, if only for the fact that the logic and methods of state action are not those of universal rights.

All established states, the US included, put their own selfish interests first. States are not human beings and they do not understand morality and humanity. States only understand their own survival.

It is therefore absolutely misplaced and stupid for anyone to believe for a minute that the US or the UK are worried an inch about universal rights in Zimbabwe — that they have a moral burden to better the life of the common man in Zimbabwe. It takes breathtaking naivety to believe that Obama is in fact "heartbroken" over the suffering of the masses in Zimbabwe.

This is the same Obama who is fighting his own Senators who want the US sanctions law on Zimbabwe, ZDERA, repealed for its ruinous effect on the same masses Obama says he is heartbroken over.

States use the power they have to justify the means of achieving any end that they consider vital, especially when they think they are the "civilised" ones, or that God is on their side.

Empires have always barbarised humanity, and today’s "war on terror" is largely contributing to this tradition. No sane person believes that the US army is looking for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; even the young men in the US Army do not believe that tired rhetoric.

The campaign to spread electoral democracy has threatened the integrity of universal values, but there is no chance that this campaign will ever succeed.

Attempts by hegemonic powers to remake the world in the 20th century all went futile because it is simply not possible to abbreviate historical transformations, or to effect social change by transferring institutions across borders.

The conditions for effective democratic governance largely exist outside the ranks of territorial nation states – perhaps they do in lecture rooms and in text books.

It is not easy to find a nation state enjoying legitimacy, total consent, and the ability to mediate conflicts between domestic groups. Without such consent there is really no single "sovereign" people, in the strict sense of the word. This really means there is neither legitimacy nor justification for arithmetical majorities. Democracy achieved by arithmetical exercises does not produce the consent required to create a sovereign people.

It is the absence of this consensus that suspends democracy today in the institutions of Northern Ireland — the purported "democratic institutions". It is the absence of this consensus that split the state of Czechoslovakia into two, and it is the absence of this consensus that created a society of permanent civil war in Sri Lanka.

It is the spreading of liberal electoral democracy that aggravated ethnic conflicts and produced the disintegration of states in multinational and multi-communal regions after 1918 and 1989. Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Indonesia, Nigeria and China all have had long standing problems with separatists and secessionists.

The futile effort to spread standardised Western democracy suffers from a fundamental paradox. In no small part, the crusade is conceived of as a solution to the dangerous transnational problems of our day — the purported panacea to the menace of dictatorships and tyranny.

A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the influence of voters, in transnational public and private entities that have no electorates — organs such as the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme that for a while was used by the US, Canada and Australia to stand against the interest of the entire Zimbabwean electorate when the three Western states vainly attempted to abuse the KPCS to block the sale of Zimbabwean diamonds, for their own ends and interests.

Outside political units such as nation states, electoral democracy hardly works anyway, and Western countries are more than aware that they are spreading a system that does not work, and largely the effort to spread liberal electoral democracy (Western style) is motivated by the popularity of the idea more than its effectiveness.

The recent inconclusive elections sanitised as hung parliaments in Canada, Germany, the UK and of late Australia do show the ineffectiveness and shortcomings of liberal electoral democracy.

The West is not even using electoral democracy to sustain the EU. The EU is a powerful and effective structure precisely because it has no electorate other than a small symbolic number of governments.

It is the EU’s democratic deficit that is its greatest strength, and the EU parliament’s future is secure because there are no European people to elect it — only a few individuals calling themselves "member peoples", less than half of whom bothered to vote in the 2004 EU parliamentary elections. Europe is now considered a functional entity but it enjoys no popular legitimacy or electoral authority, unlike its member states.

Once member states decided to take some EU matters as subjects of democratic campaigning within their own territories there were serious problems in the smooth running of the EU. This is because democracy, however popular or desirable, is not an effective device for solving global or transnational problems.

The effort to democratise other states is quite deceptive in many ways — not least in that it conveys to those who do not believe in this form of governance the illusion that it actually governs those who do. Of course this is not true.

If we look at how the decision to invade Iraq was made for example, we will see that two states of unquestionable democratic bona fides, the US and the UK, were made to go to war on the basis of the decision of a handful of people.

Other than creating complex problems for deceit and concealment, electoral democracy and representative assemblies had practically nothing to do with the decision to invade Iraq — decisions taken by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, surrounded by a tiny gang of handlers — not in any way different from the way the decision would have been taken in a non-democratic country, except the later would be more open and honest.

When our young people are crazed about electoral democracy and the so-called "free and fair elections", what they admire is nothing more than a system that does not even work for the model states that today fund the indoctrination that preaches an abstract doctrine of the so-called "change".

Fortunately, the inclusion of the MDC factions in Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government has already proven to many that there isn’t much change to expect from the Western sponsored politicians that campaigned for so long for what was called "a new Zimbabwe".

Most of them have created their own new Zimbabwe, where they now enjoy luxurious privileges in the corridors of power, while others are exploiting every opportunity they can get to corruptly amass as much illicit wealth as they can.

The electorate can evidently see a new Zimbabwe through the changed lifestyles of the people they elected into office, be they councillors, parliamentarians or Cabinet Ministers.

Electoral democracy often produces rags to riches politicians across Africa, and the electorate has for decades hopelessly watched in anger as this betrayal of the vote has patently become part of the African political culture.

In fact, the most positive achievement provided by electoral democracy for the electorate is the opportunity it gives for the ousting of unpopular governments and politicians, not much for the betterment of the people’s welfare.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on wafawarova @yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova. com

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