Civil Disobedience

Recently the Seattle Times published an article on the WTO demonstrations in 1999.  There was a group called Rucus that set out to shut down the WTO conference.  I view this as being troubling.  When elected government officials can't use their legitimate authority to carry out the functions of government, can democracy survive?

I should disclose that I am not sympathetic to the protesters.  I believe that free trade benefit us as well as people in the countries that we trade with.  The best system of tariffs and trade barriers would be none at all as far as I am concerned.  However, since not all people agree with this point of view we have to have a procedure that enables each side to express its point of view and allows some policy to be implemented.  Both sides must have some possibility of persuading the public to adopt its viewpoint, and the public must be able to have its policy implemented.

Suppose that we allowed every minority to use passive resistance to prevent the government from carrying out the functions of government necessary to implementing its policies.  Adherents of free trade could prevent the government from collecting tariffs.  Is this really what the supporters of "fair trade" want?  I don't think it is.

However, there is a case to be made here.  Minorities have traditionally protected their rights by civil disobedience.  They will succeed so long as the minority cares about having their rights respected more than the majority is interested in violating them.  However, the same system that enables minorities to secure their rights can be used to enable minorities to obtain preferential treatment.  People might shut down functions of government in order to receive subsidies, for example.  The subsidies make the country as a whole worse off, but benefit the minority who receive them.  In practice I know of no campaign of civil disobedience used for so selfish a purpose.

People are only likely to use civil disobedience if their is a large proportion of the population that believes that their cause is moral.  This is the case with campaigns for racial equality, peace and both sides of the trade debate.  In some of these cases we have a situation where our democracy has undemocratic features.  With democracy we need to ask what people are included when we take a majority.  People who live in other countries are excluded.  For this reason, when a democracy chooses to wage war, the interests of people in other countries will not be given sufficient weight.

Civil disobedience might push a government toward inaction, since it has the effect of preventing the government from carrying out certain activities.  From my point of view that would not be such a bad thing.  Maybe I worry too much.