What is democracy?

Oh god. What the hell is democracy? It’s one of those words that you hear almost every day, whether it be on the news when you’re eating your breakfast or in a lecture that you didn’t think had anything to do with democracy, be it The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics or The Wave Nature of Electromagnetic Radiation.

Especially with Brexit looming, the word has become a buzz-word, bounced back-and-forth between politicians, many of them roaring that our democracy is being prized away from us by the likes of Dominic Cummings, or even worse… the dreaded… CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA.

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So, what actually is it? As a fourth-year university student, I’d like to think I have at least a basic understanding of the word, that we the people elect people to represent us, and that through the checks and balances adopted, we can live in a free society where we trust the elected government. Although the latter may be a bit of a stretch (shouldn’t Boris be dead in a ditch by now?), the U.K., in principle, is a democratic country.

Despite this description of mine, however simple, it turns out that democracy has very different meanings for people across the world and packaging it all into this nine-letter word brings a lot of complications. Come on, George Orwell wasn’t going to complain about it in his Politics and the English Language for nothing.

So here I was, embarking on my discovery of the what democracy is, just to soon find out that it’s more complicated than my slightly frazzled Monday brain had been prepared for.

What is democracy? is directed by Astra Taylor and was screened as part of Bristol’s Festival of the Future City at Watershed. It is described as:

‘provid[ing] a philosophical journey about democracy which spans millennia and continents: from ancient Athens’ ground-breaking experiment in self-government to capitalism’s roots in medieval Italy; from modern-day Greece grappling with financial collapse and a mounting refugee crisis to the United States reckoning with its racist past and the growing gap between rich and poor.’

 It promises to provoke and inspire its audiences by asking this question to people across the world, from celebrated theorists to asylum seekers. And why is this an important question you might ask? Well, as Taylor herself responded when one brave soul at the panel debate afterwards essentially asked her what the point of her project was, ‘If we want to live in a democracy, we must first ask what the word even means.’

Now I must be honest, I can’t say I left the screening having a set definition of what democracy is. If anything, it confused my own definition and I left with more questions than I had entered with.

But what I did learn is how deeply rooted democracy is in our society and institutions, not just our government, and how this must be protected at all costs. Despite there being criticisms of democracy, in the most basic sense of the word, it’s about as good as we’ve got at the moment.

It is also important that for some, the thought of electing a person to represent them in their parliamentary institutions is inconceivable, but they still have their own, personal, idea of democracy. This is perhaps best said by a Syrian refugee, currently held limbo in Greece awaiting news of whether she can go on to meet her brother in Austria, who features in the film: ‘To me, democracy is going to sleep at night knowing that I’ll wake up safe the next morning.’

So, in light of this, maybe we should stop focusing on what is democracy is and instead, what it does.

Ellie Caulfield