I’ve spent the past two days in Northern California playing host to a group of two dozen foreign scholars and practitioners. They are early arrivals to a free, public event that starts Friday night in San Francisco, the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy. (Full disclosure: I’m co-president of the event with a Swiss-Swede journalist named Bruno. Long story).
Listening to the Germans in the group is a trip. Initiative and referendum – previously discredited because of the Nazis’ use of the plebiscite – have made a comeback in Germany since the end of the Cold War. Now, all 16 German states have popular initiative and referendum.
There is even talk of establishing the process on the federal level.
What’s trippy is the politics. When it comes to initiative and referendum, the debate in Germany is a mirror image of California. While the initiative process is broadly popular in California, liberals here tend to express the most doubts and strongest skepticism about initiatives; those on the right are quicker to embrace the process. In Germany, Greens and Social Democrats – many of them more liberal than U.S. Democrats – are embracing direct democracy as a way around political elites they see as resistant to change. It is the Germany’s conservatives who are resisting direct democracy.
What explains this? Distrust of government. The American right, having developed a critique of government as the enemy, sees the initiative process as a tool to fight back. The European left offers a related critique: They see threats in big things – international corporations and big transnational governing institutions – that seem beyond the reach of democracy and the judgment of ordinary people. Thus, they see direct democracy as a counterweight to such institutions. And so they have embraced it, not only in Germany but also across the continent.
So if you join us in San Francisco this weekend, you may see something strange: lots of agreement between American conservatives and European liberals, at least when the subject is direct democracy.