A Start

By Maya Schmidt

I’m writing to share a story of mine, and I have been inspired by someone else who did the same. As a student in Geneva, I’ve found myself with a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the inability of traditional political mechanisms to adequately address my experiences, of those I remember from home, and of many of my friends around me. I’m hoping that by sharing this story, I can contribute to an environment in which it may become more possible to hear your stories as well.

Democracy, and democratic values, are often taken in the West as positive and good. The defence of democracy is frequently considered permissible without any consideration of the mechanisms by which democracy is promoted. The spoken value here in the West, where I grew up and continue to live, is that the governed have an undeniable agency over those who govern them. This is a belief for which I hold a deep respect, and the tendency of governance to demand continuous redirection from oppression has embodied me with a sense of antinationalism, perhaps even anti-national, solidarity.

For a long time, I was oblivious to the mechanisms by which the West has violently approached the dissemination of the democratic ideal, but the more I unpack my militarised and imperial conditioning, the more dissonance I felt. 

My fellow Westerners: our words have not matched our actions. 

We cannot continue to measure the world by our own metre stick while simultaneously claiming that it is for others’ good. This is not to say that we shouldn’t continue to challenge violent practices, regardless of the culture they originate from, rather it is to identify the violence we commit as we continue to rank and measure other States from a position of privilege and power by their adherence to imposed metrics. We must convince ourselves, we cannot impose, at least not without losing all that we claim and aspire to be.

When we consider organisations like Freedom House, we often fail to recognize how our imposition of democratic practices pushes those who might pick up the democratic gauntlet for themselves into a rejection of democracy itself. Western democracy has become synonymous with the hypocrisy and imperialism through which it has been imposed, and we find ourselves adrift as we watch the world, and watch ourselves, move away from our faith in people and their capacity to behave as responsible agents.

I write to you, like Bell Hooks has, because I am in pain and because I know that I am not alone in this pain. Because I choose to believe in people, and because I choose to believe in people I am required to also believe that people are their most violent, destructive, inhospitable selves when they are disempowered. If this is true as well, I am left with one conclusion: that despite my rage, my despair, my self-criticism, and my fear I must maintain empathy and hope for the future.