Introduction: Professor Martin Palouš

What does democracy mean to me? A collection of essays by Florida International University students

INTRODUCTION

For the last several years, during each spring semester, I have taught CPO 4737, a course with a long name: Democratic Transitions and Human Rights: The Basic Ideas and Concepts in Historical Context.

It has three main objectives:

1. The students should realize that ideas put into action in concrete circumstances have their own past— it is in the field of spirit and its “life” in the span of millennia where these ideas originated and from where they until today draw their enlightening and mobilizing power.

2. The students should also appreciate the following “triviality”: academic and practical approaches to political processes differ substantively, and observing those processes is quite different from being involved in them as an actor! What is at stake here is not just a comparative political “science” or historically informed political “theory” but also the following: a contemporary classical philosophy that is actively engaged in political matters; a political anthropology that is aware, first and foremost, of human limitations, incompleteness, and deficiencies; a political conception stemming from the elementary existential reality that human deeds, no matter whether big or small, futile or successful, always correspond to the nature of humans as finite beings and are based on “situational,” “experience-driven,” and “action-oriented” human understanding!

3. The students, at the end of this course, should understand better the dynamic role of human rights in democratic transitions, be able to differentiate among their various actors and their specific goals and strategies (relating to international society and its institutions and mechanisms, governments, and civil society), and be able to articulate with greater precision their own opinions about the future of democracy in their own country, region, and globally.

The final assignment is to write a personal essay answering a simple question: What does democracy mean for me today?

I asked one of my brightest students in my 2021 course, Prachi Lalwani, an international student at FIU from Venezuela whose family is from India, to work with me on the following project: to select from the more than 150 responses to this question that I received over the years a dozen or so of the most interesting ones and prepare them for publication. I would like to thank her for excellent work on this project.

It is a great pleasure for me to present these contributions of my students to the debate on the state of democracy in our world. These do not reflect their academic analyses of this topic but rather their personal opinions based on their unique experiences. I am proud of them and strongly convinced that they can provide some reasons to be hopeful that democracy, whose roots are deep indeed, has a chance to resist all the current challenges and be resilient enough to remain the main political power in our world—to be able to secure human freedom in our national societies and to lead humankind, who are ever more and more interconnected and interdependent, to our open and thus principally unknown future.

Martin Palouš Director, Václav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy, Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs Florida International University

Václav Havel Program for Human Rights & Diplomacy Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs

Selected Readings from CPO 4737

The main sources for the course are two classic books in the field of democratic theory: Robert A. Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century by Samuel P. Huntington (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

Additional texts were assigned for each class; the ones below were cited by several students. All these works informed the students’ essays. For the full reading list, please contact Prachi Lalwani at plalw001@fiu.edu.

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,.

Morris, I. 1996. “The Strong Principle of Equality and Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy.” In DEMOKRATIA. A Conversation on Democracy, Ancient and Modern, edited by Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, 19–48. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ober, Josiah. 1998. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ober, Josiah. 2005. Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going on Together. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Palouš, Martin. 2002. What Does Democracy Mean Today? Brussels: International Debate Education Association, 2002.

Palouš, Martin. 2021. Once upon a Time of Transition. Washington, DC: Academica Press.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2000. Democracy in America, Vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000

Wallace, R. W. 1996. “Law, Freedom and the Concept of Citizens’ Rights in Democratic Athens.” In DEMOKRATIA. A Conversation on Democracy, Ancient and Modern, edited by Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, 105–19. Princeton: Princeton University Press.