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Americas

From a ‘democratic Florentine’ a question on the state of democracy in the “West “

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06Mazzei
Today I want to remember an historic figure to who I look up to as a champion of democracy and humanism, another ‘democratic Florentine’ who emigrated, like me, from Florence to Virginia at his middle age, in order to reflect on the state of democracy in the US and the Western world nowadays.
Filippo Mazzei born near Florence the 25 of December 1730 and died in Pisa the 19 of March 1816, but he didn’t spend all his life in Tuscany. He was an Enlightenment thinker and a philanthropist who after many years abroad, as a physician in the Middle East and a businessman in the UK, at the age of 43 moved to Virginia and became a close friend of Tomas Jefferson. He bought an estate near Monticello and named it Colle, “Hill”, as it remembered him his dear hills of Tuscany. There he cultivated oil, wine and other Tuscan products but he also started to ‘cultivate his spirit’, influencing the spirit of Jefferson too and at the same time the spirit of his old fellow citizens in Florence and his new fellow citizens in Charlottesville. He started to write for a Florentine and a Virginian Gazette about the new values of freedom and democracy that were generating in the British Colonies, with him as an active contributor to that ‘new humanism’.
It is known that Mazzei influenced the future President Thomas Jefferson in the draft of the Declaration of Independence and in shaping some principles of the new Constitution. As some letters to Jefferson conserved in the Archives of Monticello show and also President JFK remembered (Kennedy, John F. A Nation of Immigrants, pp. 15-16) he played a role in shaping the American democratic values with his knowledge of tolerance, freedom and respect of diversity. Besides this fundamental contribution he also spread and publicized the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution in Europe (with translations and presentations) becoming one of the most famous Italo-american patriot. In 1779 he went to Florence and Paris, where for some years he worked as a secret diplomatic agent to purchase arms for the state of Virginia and in 1785 he left Virginia for good, going to France, where he participated to the fervors of the French Revolution and also to Poland, where he became a privy councilor at the court of King Stanislaus II. He wrote a political history of the American Revolution, the “Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l’Amerique septentrionale”, and at the end of the century he returned to his country, where he went back to cultivate the land in Tuscany, this time in a small vegetable garden, and write his memories.

 
Mazzei is remembered as an Italo-American patriot and a fighter for democracy and tolerance wherever he went. This ‘cultural mediator’ had the lucky and the leadership talent to become an active participant to the main political events of the end of XVIII century that would have shape the future of democracy and of the western world as we know it today. But in his memory, and in the memory of all who participated to the building of those ideals it worth to ask today how is the health of those high human democratic principles, both in the US and in general in the Western world: do we currently follow and put in practice those canons of civil life and citizen empowerment today? Or it is needed to go back to those values that shaped American and French constitutions in this period of our history as the Renaissance did with the Roman classics times in order to come out from Middle Age? I think that to help our ‘mature democracies’ to overcome current critical moments we really need to return to the core of the values of democracy, freedom and tolerance, more than two centuries after the draft of those enlightened texts and see how to improve their application. Some scholars in the US, from both left and right political spectrum, are actually calling since some years for a Second Constitutional Convention towards a substantive effort to reform politics in this country. I don’t know if this is what the US need to do right now but for sure the US and the West in general have to reflect on the challenges that its democracies are living today.

 
Democratic transitions are never fast. The American democracy for example took almost 100 years before the values of the American Constitution would start to be applied to everyone with the abolition of slavery and political equality for African-Americans took another hundred years (with the Civil Rights Act). And a real economic equality still has to happen in our countries, actually today we are experiencing a trend of reduction of it with an increasing gap between rich and poor in the US as well as in other Western democracies. So democracies can also draw back and regress, as the challenges of our ‘mature democracies’ today demonstrates. The rights of freedom, equality and justice are threatened nowadays in the US (from the NSA surveillance to the Guantanamo prison to the block to immigration reforms by the polarized political parties) as well as in Europe (look for example at the citizens exclusion from the decision making on austerity politics that are destroying the economies and the social fabric of countries like Italy, Spain or Greece). So democracy today need to reflect on a more direct participation of the citizens in the Res-publica, the “public thing”, and even if participatory democracy seems a ‘natural law’ of the politics in the future, the path to go towards more grassroots and individual participation without falling in populism or inefficiency seems still long and full of obstacles. We know that democracy is a never ending process, and even if political parties corruption, crony capitalism or economic inequality are often blocking the path of world communities towards better life and more just societies, we also see improvements in the transparency of information and the empowerment of civil society actions.

 

So from the Virginian motto Sic semper tyrannis come to us today a call, a call for a step forward on the path of democracy, not only to fight against the tyrants but to fight in favor of the citizens, toward a tipping point in which empowered citizens can participate in the construction of better political and social systems in their country, from the West to the East, from the North to the South. Remembering how Filippo Mazzei did, with his Florentine spirit of Enlightenment and his planetary attitude of Humanism.

For an interesting analysis on current democracies around the world: http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do

Americas

My first post, Obama in the State of the Union 2014: “remaining true to our Constitutional ideals”

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Hallo blogonauts!

As Ugo from S. Vittore (a theologian of XIII century) said: “Who finds sweet his own homeland is no more than a tender beginner, who feels every land like his own is already strong, but is perfect only the person for who the entire world is only a foreign country”.

Perfection is only for the saints but at last let’s try to feel sometimes strangers at home…feel that the geography of our mind is not necessary the truth, that democracy in a place can mean arrogance in another, that the points of views matters as cultures do and that moral rules are relatives to tolerance. So here you can read some thought of an Italian man, living currently between the US and Italy, but who traveled for long time and felt at home and stranger in places where he would never expect.  Now I feel at home in Virginia, the state of Jefferson, one of the fathers of modern democracy, an American President that taught us the highest ideals of humankind (even if he himself had slaves, deciding to give future generations the burden of solving this savagery). But I consider myself also a citizen of the world and I want to challenge our mindset and mental securities commenting current facts of different parts of the world, but mostly US, Italy and Southeast Asia, where important things are moving up, and trying to give a different perspective from mainstream thought. I will start my first post than with few sentences President Obama said in his State of the Union 2014:

“Our leadership is defined not just by our defense against threats, but by the enormous opportunities to do good and promote understanding around the globe – to forge greater cooperation, to expand new markets, to free people from fear and want. (…) We do these things because they help promote our long-term security (…) And we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action, but by remaining true to our Constitutional ideals”.

We are not in the cold war era anymore as we know, and we understood that national interest, and moreover national security, is not something that can be defined only in absolute terms. How far can go a state in a war against an enemy that is not recognizable as another country for example? Can US security really increase with Guantanamo, NSA surveillance and the Drones attacks or will it be on the contrary reduced? Obviously one thing is the President rhetoric during a State of the Union and another thing are his actions (actually Obama has been criticized exactly for increasing the use of Drones and not closing Guantanamo). But if we look at the international system now (in Middle East in particular with the cases of Syria and Iran) it seems that after failing with the military intervention, and similarly to one hundred years ago, American foreign policy is rediscovering today some spirit of diplomacy like in the Wilson’s times. Also some political analysts belonging to the so called “Realist” school (the one that looks at the international system through the lens of power politics and that have been influencing most of the time the American foreign policy in the past) like John Mearsheimer, are shifting their ideas against the need of hegemony and the acceptance of imperialism (see on this the article of Mearsheimer, “American unhinged”: http://nationalinterest.org/article/america-unhinged-9639).

Also, in the world, other powers are on the rise, in particular China, the “Middle Kingdom”, but also India, Indonesia, Brazil and others. So new approaches to international politics (besides domestic one, with different approaches to ‘democracy’ and democratic values) are opening to the world. This will bring change in the world, more than what we expect now: cultures matter and the future international system will have to take that into account.

So let’s keep searching, exploring and learning from diversity of political opinions and cultures and let’s see where globalization, post-modernity and the democratization processes will bring us. We don’t know where we are directed but we know that we need to reduce the polarization not only in fledgling democracies but in mature ones too if we want to increase the dialogue among conflicting parts. This is the only path for the future of humankind: if we want to harvest peace and democracy we need to plant dialogue and tolerance. To say it with Mahatma Gandhi: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree……..We reap exactly what we sow.”

Ad maiora!