Cross Currents of Democracy
Paul Cartledge on democracy - from ancient Greece to modern Eastern Europe.
Rarely can the refrain 'We are all democrats now' have resounded more loudly or insistently through the global village than in AD1989. From Tiananmen Square to Santiago by way of (for instance) Moscow, Prague, Bucharest and East Berlin, the cry for democracy is confidently voiced, making a defiant mockery of such hollow tropes as 'German Democratic Republic' or 'People's Republic of China'.
Even here in Britain there are signs that the people may be about to awake from its long post-democratic slumber beneath the wet blanket of ever-more centralised and Death to tyrants – a 4th-century BC Athenian stele legitimising resistance to totalitarian rule. presidential government. The televising of the Commons has been hailed, perhaps justly, as a renewal or extension of democracy, with obvious relevance to the 'active citizenship' that is being promoted outside as well as inside the House. And the National Curriculum History Working Group, in its recently published Interim Report, has nailed its colours unambiguously, indeed almost provocatively, to the democratic mast:
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