Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet a democratically-elected government made a decision in the name of the people to replace this park with a shopping mall. People protesting against that by blocking the construction process (i.e. stand in front of bulldozers etc.) are effectively overturning democracy in order to protect their personal interests. This is a general problem I have with such active counter-protests, be they to stop a station from bei…
> People protesting against that by blocking the construction process (i.e. stand in front of bulldozers etc.) are effectively overturning democracy in order to protect their personal interests. I think this is getting at the heart of civil disobedience : the violation of laws or decrees considered unjust. I know nothing about the Turkish protests, but another example of civil disobedience is Martin Luther King, Jr.…
Then, as I said, the matter is difficult – essentially you have to weigh the predictable functioning of the democratic process against the damage that can be done to people if this process ‘goes wrong’. Unfortunately, this has a whole bunch of problems:
- we do not have a universal definition of when a democratic decision is so wrong it is acceptable for someone to stand up against it
- that someone has to judge objectively whether his rights were violated in such a way that he is justified to stand up against the democratic will
- in many cases, we do not know what the majority ‘really’ wants
- even if a given system/constitution has securities that allow people to stand up against democratically made decisions, these might be seen as either too lax or too restrictive.
For example, the German constitution would allow the people to overthrow a democratic government that wants to cut back on social security in such a way as to violate article 20 of the Basic Law[0] – in the US, on the other hand, people apparently sometimes feel obliged to oppose a government that wants to introduce such social security. If even two relatively similar western societies cannot agree on when it is acceptable to overrule a democratic decision, how can we expect to find universal rules for that on a global scale?
In essence, it is a philosophical discussion on how much you respect democratic decisions as compared to the rights of individuals, and whether or not you only accept positive law or also include some ‘natural’ law in your decision-making.
I tend to like both democracy and positive law, but YMMV, of course. :)
[0] It defines Germany as a ‘social federal state’, does not allow to change that definition, and allows everyone to take up arms against those trying to change it, provided that all other means have been exhausted.