120 Days of Nobels Literary Pilgrimage

and democracy's troubled family

The Nobel Prize for Literature is announced in October. Would you like to walk the ultimate literary pilgrimage and visit the great books of 120 Nobel Laureates?

Also, this week, democracy’s troubled family. Events around the world over the last week have given uncertain signs about the prospects for democracy. In India, over 600 million people voted in the Lok Sobha election that was seen in the West as a test of Indian democracy. Some Indian intellectuals, however, claim India is the Mother of Democracy, and the West should reflect on its own democratic weaknesses. Where does the truth lie?

But first, let me announce a new series for the Saturday essay of the Burning Archive.

The 120 Days of Nobels Literary Pilgrimage

Since 2021, on the Burning Archive podcast, I have covered the Nobel Prize for Literature. This year I am bringing this tradition to my Substack and YouTube channel as a four-month literary pilgrimage to the sacred texts of modern world literature honoured by the Nobel Prize.

Can you and I, dear reader, sample the writing of all 120 Nobel Prize for Literature winners since 1901 over the next 120 Days of Nobels?

Why do this over the next four months? The 2024 Nobel Prize is announced in Stockholm on 10 October 2024. We have just over 120 days then to get to know world literature, history, and culture through this unique pilgrimage tour.

Every Saturday I will give you a quick guide to seven Nobel Prize Winners.

• Who were they?

• How can you read even a fragment of their best work?

• Do their stories connect to our histories and concerns today?

Together we will recover these texts from the burning archive and learn a surprising amount about world culture and history since 1901. There are even a couple of historians, and certainly a few writers of historical fiction, among the 120 winners.

I hope you enjoy this shift in direction for the Saturday post. It will be a little cultured relief from all the gloomy news in the world right now. Let us hold a virtual salon in our cultured homes, while the great powers of the world slog it out, at least until October. At the end, you will be among the best-read people on earth - or at least you could make that claim credibly at a dinner party.

I will focus the Saturday post on the 120 Days of Nobels Literary Pilgrimage, but the historical essays on broader themes will still be coming every Wednesday as well.

I will have more about the 120 Days of Nobels Literary Pilgrimage next week, including how you can participate, and the first guide to seven winners starting from 1901.

Back to Democracy

OK, back to the uncertain signs about the prospects for democracy around the world.

India has not been the only place where people have explored the boundaries of democracy over the last month.

In Europe, voters choose the members of the European Parliament on June 9. The campaign has seen proposals for “pre-bunking” information and erecting a “democracy shield.” There are worries about far-right resurgences, an enormous peace march organised by the Hungarian PM while the EU President celebrated air-raid shelters in the new NATO state of Finland. There have been violent attacks on candidates and political leaders across the political spectrum. The most serious event was the assassination attempt of Robert Fico which I covered in this article. All this sturm und drang is occurring despite this parliament having little effective control of its executive. Ursula von der Leyen, the current EU President is appointed to her office, not elected through the European Parliament. There is a possibility that she may be replaced by manoeuvres by some European states including France, Hungary, and Italy.

In South Africa, national elections trimmed the sails of the African National Congress (ANC) that has governed for 30 years in a de facto one-party state, like some feared India would become under Modi. The ANC has lost its parliamentary majority and will need coalition partners to form a government. South Africa uses a form of proportional representation in its electoral system, and the ANC received a little over 40 per cent of both votes and seats. Governing in a coalition may be a blessing in disguise, since it demands the ordinary virtues of governing well. But it will demand a change in political culture in South Africa; while this core BRICS nation is also playing a major role in world affairs by taking the Gaza case to the International Court of Justice.

It may be worth reflecting that the ANC political party was forced to govern together with others despite receiving approximately one-fifth more votes than the Australian Labour Party, while still being able to govern alone if with a slim majority. Comparing democracies is a hazardous thing: preacher, heal thyself. The disparity between votes received and seats held will be even greater in the so-called “mother of parliaments”, Westminster in Britain when Britain holds its election in July. Britain runs a ‘first past the post’ system that amplifies parliamentary majorities. Most polls predict a massive parliamentary majority for the British Labor Party, even a wipe-out of the Conservative Party. Such a landslide, and near ‘one-party state’, is what British pundits feared would occur in India, and American commentators think may be occurring in Mexico.

In Mexico, a new left-wing woman President was elected. She is an environmental engineer, and her mandate is bolstered by strong parliamentary majorities in both national and regional assemblies. Of course, to the great nation to the north, which fought wars against Mexico and conquered its territories, too much democracy in Mexico troubles the Washington Consensus. Mexico has been beleaguered for decades by oligarchic families, criminal cartels, and American interference. In American eyes, a strong democratic mandate becomes, not the audacity of hope, but the fear that Mexico is “backsliding” away from democracy into a “one-party-state,” just like they said about India and keep mum on about Britain. In a Politico interview, one American analyst from its army of foreign policy think tanks commented that:

So it really is a testament that Mexico’s democratic system is reversing into a single, dominant hegemonic party. Why is this important to the United States? Because if Mexico doesn’t have a democracy, forget about security cooperation, forget about nearshoring, because companies are not going to want to invest in a country where there’s no separation of powers, where there’s not an independent, autonomous judicial branch, where there’s no clear rules of the game. All of this could affect all aspects of the bilateral relationship and that is something to keep an eye on.

Politico 5 June 2024, Lila Abed, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute

These insinuations come with complaints that Mexico is “cosying up” to Chinese investors, and without any questioning of America’s bizarre two-party system that has been frozen in place by big money since the mid-nineteenth century. Some call it the “uniparty” which repeats an old theme of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in the party systems of liberal democracies. But these two parties conduct vicious lawfare with each other and against any dissenters from the consensus foreign policy. Over the last week, Donald Trump, the main opposition candidate for President was convicted of a charge, which his supporters claim is without merit, and the President’s son went on trial for gun and deception charges that could land him in prison for 27 years. The US State Department seized the passports of Scott Ritter (former UN weapons inspector) and Joe Napolitana (former judge and independent news host), and then marched them off a plane that had been destined for St Petersburg. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented on the incident with acidic irony,

“This is just another example in addition to many that confirms that the United States, which calls itself the leader of democracy throughout the world, has long become a police state”

(Sergei Lavrov, 2024)

But it is in India that democracy was most spectacularly on display in all its grandeur and pettiness. 640 million people voted over seven weeks in both national and regional assemblies. They voted amidst a deadly heat wave, with temperatures of 50 degrees in Delhi, which killed both voters and election officials. And they voted in a way that defied predictions of landslides and one-party states. Politics in all its patient compromises returned to Indian democracy, if indeed it had ever gone away.

India, Mother of Democracy vs West, Liberal Oligarchy

Some of the critics of Modi’s ‘authoritarian’ turn have been over-excited by the muddy outcome. John Keane, historian of democracy, fired off a tweet dismissing elections as pseudo-democracy. How else could Modi, the ‘despot’, remain in power? Priya Satia, who is a fine historian, tweeted out this assessment of the election.

But there was a paradox in this restoration of the possibility of politics. Only a year ago, George Soros and a bevy of Western and Indian commentators had claimed India was no longer a democracy. How could this non-democracy suddenly restore the possibility of politics? Does democracy only live when the candidates you favour, the Congress Party and its “secular, liberal” traditions, are in power?

A quirk in this tradition, however, was pointed out by Salvatore Babones, the American political sociologist who chairs the Australian-India Roundtable. The Congress Party is controlled by a family dynasty, the Gandhi family. For decades, this family has dominated the Indian state: Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and now Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. The family controls the Congress Party. Is Indian democracy only safe when in the hands of a dynasty?

I was intrigued to learn from commenters on my YouTube channel (where I did a live stream on the outcomes of the Indian election) how diverse Indian opinion is about Modi, the strength or weakness of Indian democracy, the factors contributing to the result, and the range of external players who may or may not have wanted to steer the result. It seems you cannot convert into one 24-hour hot-take the myriad expression of political emotion and thought by 640 million people.

And that is the ultimate result of this test of democracy. Politics is always a messy reality of confusing opinions. Politics is never extinguished or redeemed by a mere election. The signals and noises of this election outcome are well discussed in this In Focus podcast from The Hindu. I recommend it, and more generally tuning into domestic Indian media to understand domestic Indian situations.

More generally on the prospects for democracy, India is a mix of pre-democratic, democratic and post-democratic political processes. In that, India is no different to the Western democracies, and their BRICS rivals that Western actors always present as sliding inexorably into political barbarism.

Democracy may be best understood as a process, and modern political systems as a “mixed polity”, just as we used to describe the “mixed economies” of the West with a combination of free market and state planned activity. I view ‘democracy’ as a process that works with varied results in nearly all modern states, rather than as a category of states to be rated as superior to other less civilised polities. I draw a parallel to the approach to civilization taken by the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.

When understood in this way, we can see how democratic processes have historical sources in many parts of the world other than Britain and America. And that nations outside the West may be able to adapt their own and Western processes of democracy to suit the challenges of today’s world, without sacralising English liberalism or the original slave-owning Athenian democracy. Democracy is not the exclusive patrimony of Ancient Greece, the West, Westminster, and the American Founding Fathers. Other countries, including India, have a fair claim to find democratic statecraft and ethical traditions in their own history. This is the basis of India’s claim to be the mother of democracy. I did a series of podcasts on the troubled families of democracies in India, China and the West - which you can listen to right here on Substack or preferred player.

The West often judges the democracies of the Rest, and finds them wanting. But it is surely time for Western democracies to look in the mirror. Emmanuel Todd makes a compelling argument in La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) that the Western “liberal democracies” are now “liberal oligarchies.” At a time when the rhetoric of democracies vs autocracies is reprising the disastrous dualism of ‘civilised vs barbaric’. It is bringing us to the brink of a nuclear war. I favour a different approach in which we imagine the political cultures of the world with more generosity of spirit as one extended and troubled family.

I will be returning to this theme in my reading from Rabindranath Tagore’s essay, Nationalism (1917) on the podcast and YouTube channel on Monday, and in the next few essays that will come out on Wednesday evenings.