Dear participants of the conference,
It is a great pleasure to have been invited to this conference. This is already my second ‘Formula of Latvia 2050’ conference and I would like to underline the significant role of the Association in raising issues important for society and future of Latvia. As far as political culture is concerned, this conference and the Association with its vision belong to Latvia’s political culture.
There are different definitions of ‘political culture’ and, if you put them all together, the main elements of political culture are people, their attitudes, values and views on social affairs and issues. In other words, political culture primarily is an objective reflection of subjective perceptions. Subjective in the way I behave and how I treat my country, dialogue, other citizens and how my subjective attitude manifests itself in my actions. For an outsider such actions may seem like, for example, inertia. I am just not involved in political dialogue or, let us say, some sort of political activism. That is how I show everyone that I am not interested in politics. That is what political culture may be, or what one of its traits can be. That is why we should focus our further discussion on two aspects of political culture.
One of the two aspects is what kind of political culture do we have in Latvia, which is more of a question from the field of political sociology. We can study our political culture and look at it from ‘somewhat descriptive’ perspective. What do we see in Latvia, Germany and other countries? Globally speaking, if we would make such a comparative study, we would most probably conclude that our political culture is quite, and I would even say, very similar to Lithuanian and Estonian ones. Slightly different from Nordic or Polish. Even more different than German, but altogether, if we would compare all of these political systems, we would see that all democracies have rather similar political culture. Whereas, if we take political culture of Burkina Faso and compare the same criteria, we will see obvious differences. That only shows that political culture is strongly linked to the existing political system.
Political culture influences political system, and political system has impact on political culture. All of that is part of the objective domain. We can, let us say, simply try to identify what our political culture represents.
Then there is the other aspect which we should discriminate from the other when discussing because I see that often it is not emphasised enough. What kind of political culture do we want? And that is a different, a regulatory question. We have sociological approach that describes the political culture we have. And then there is the political culture that we want or are trying to build by creating a regulatory framework. On many occasions, when discussing these aspects, they get mixed up. Let me, therefore, focus on what we must have, i.e. the kind of political culture we should build. I will not focus so much on describing political culture from the perspective of political sociology. I will describe it only to the extent necessary to understand what issues we need to address first to get to desired outcome. Whereas these must-haves or desired outcomes must be discussed, they have not been fully defined yet. That requires discussion and will. It is a matter of paradigms – opinions on what kind of political culture we want.
I should also probably emphasise that any efficient political system must be rooted in appropriate and adequate political culture, and gradually both of them converge to some extent. Political culture of democratic countries is more or less aligned with democracy, whereas in countries that have chosen other forms of government, political culture is aligned with specific elements of particular political system. Take, for example, corruption. In democracy and democratic political culture corruption is perceived as something negative – corruption, let us say, in objective sense. However, there are also ‘traditional countries’ where taking care of your own is perfectly acceptable. For example, when a new president is elected, he, of course, replaces all clan and family members, relatives and supporters of the previous president and appoints his own. That is what is expected of them. If they would not do that, they would become outcasts. That is what a different political culture looks like. This just underlines that different political systems have different political culture.
With time, of course, political culture becomes less distinct. As it subsides, it converges with political system until such system is replaced due to some reason. Whether it is replaced in evolutionary or revolutionary way is a different question. And the relationship between political culture and political system becomes most obvious when political system changes or is replaced.
Political systems can be replaced rather quickly, whereas change of political culture takes considerably more time. Such times of change are usually called transformation or transition periods because that is the time when political culture contradicts the new political system. Previous culture that formed under previous system is still strong for some time due to inertia. That is something that Latvia knows all too well. We transformed our political system 30 years ago and we still see some traits of the previous political culture that suited the old political culture but fail to fit into the current political culture. On the other hand, we can say that the transition of Latvia to new system has almost been completed and in my estimation, in quantitative and hypothetical terms, 90% of our political culture correspond to democratic principles and there are only 10% of, let us say, legacy that holds us back. New political culture allows us to identify these bottlenecks and tackle them in more targeted and appropriate ways. That is how political culture and particular forms of government relate to each other.
I should also clarify that when speaking about Latvia going through a period of transformation, I meant any country that has gone through sudden and comprehensive change of political system. Germany is another good and vivid example. At one point Germany had two parallel political cultures that eventually merged into one common political culture. Meanwhile, other countries require more time for transition. Therefore, I believe we should be discussing two kinds of must-haves of the political culture.
Any political culture, including democratic political culture, grows together with society. That is the rule. And, as Mr Auziņš outlined, it is important to discuss that, and in some special cases even have a deeper dialogue. Political culture will always be the element of political system that requires constant attention. Both in terms of its current characteristics and must-haves.
For example, when it comes to political culture, we should also consider the influence of new technologies on public opinion. That is a new challenge faced by all democracies, the United States, Germany, Greece and Latvia. This is a common challenge and no country has found a solution yet. Political culture is about to make a major leap forward, but our democratic systems have not changed. We are faced with an interesting phenomenon. A moment ago, I said that when political system of a country changes and it transitions, for example, from authoritarian to democratic regime, political culture gradually ‘pulls up’. Political system advances and after a while political culture also ‘catches up’. However, in normal circumstances political culture changes depending on what the existing political system is, but it also changes along with the society. New phenomena, new trends appear, and we must embrace them. We need to formulate our attitude and views and define value of new developments. But the political system remains as it was, with all its key characteristics enshrined in the constitution. That is what we can expect under normal circumstances. Revolution is different. Moreover, in normal circumstances we can also observe a reverse phenomenon. Political culture may change faster than political system. That is where the tensions between political culture and political system may appear, and we need to eliminate them. As any other democracy, we are faced with the same political culture issues and dilemmas. We, let us say, owe those answers to ourselves and the rest of the world. As any other country, Latvia, of course, has its own unique political culture and issues that we deal with ourselves. There are certain similarities with other political cultures, yet there are certain sides that you can only find in Latvia. And I think it is again quite plain that to a large extent, but not completely, these unique issues stem from our legacy or the inertia of the previous system with its political culture. We often refer to it as the ‘soviet legacy’ and so on. Sometimes we even use it as an excuse for other failures.
Going back to what I said about all democracies facing the situation where societal developments have evoked change in political culture and, let us say, political culture, as this one element or representation of society, or its attitudes, values, opinions, has changed due to reasons not linked with government. New situation has developed. There are tensions between political culture, which has changed in all democratic countries, and political systems. Let me mention several examples of common characteristics shared by all democracies.
Technologies have changed the public thinking. We all know that the core element of democracy as a system is public opinion of the citizen. It is the central element. Until now public opinions formed in a certain way. It did not happen haphazardly. There was a clear pattern for what we call the forming of the so-called public thought which determines how government acts. There has been a profound change. To put it simply, we all know that in the past public opinion was shaped by, let us say, established political parties, political figures, press and opinion leaders. To become an opinion leader in a mature democracy, you had to go through certain selection procedure. If you were somebody, let us say, with rather basic and primitive views, you had little chance of becoming an opinion leader. You needed university degree or do something for the society to grow into a public figure whose opinion is respected. That is how meritocratic pyramid worked. The short definition of meritocracy is political system based on abilities. Meritocracy shaped the public perceptions and thus determined the role of government. It reconciled two previously conflicting or almost incompatible objectives that have always created tensions. On the one hand, have political will, people’s will, citizens will. On the other hand, have quality, including the right will, goodwill and ethical standards. These objectives are not always aligned. People may want something that is not right or ethical, or professional. That is why special tools are used to reconcile these objectives.
Primitive democracies are driven by will. For example, Athenian democracy was based on will. It was enough to have direct will to decide something. In mature democracies, at least that is how it was until now, will is counterbalanced by a number of constitutional arrangements. For example, state must be governed by rule of law. Rule of law is the element that balances out the democratic element in institutional democracy that aspires to give citizens guidance on what is right and acceptable. We can, of course, debate about what we understand by right and acceptable. We should most probably not go into a philosophical debate here. We can at least agree that by right and acceptable we mean something more or less aligned with values shared by the society. Let me give you a simple example. Everyone wants to live better, earn more, etc. In capitalist societies it is one of the highest values, everyone wants that, and 99% of people will support it. But their proposals on how to achieve it can contain both productive and counterproductive solutions. Therefore, their will must be reconciled with greater value. So, these meritocratic principles gradually found their way into traditional democracies and policies and began acting as balancing force between will and quality.
We can see that the size of politically active population with constructive opinion has grown considerably mainly due to technological development. In terms of values, society has become truly inclusive. Almost anyone can join the debate. Various technologies, for example, social media are playing a more important role in forming of public attitudes, and thus also indirectly influence government actions. The tension between quality and will has increased under these circumstances as we can see. The importance of will has begun to slightly dominate over receding quality in our modern political system where this second, or meritocratic element or quality, has become secondary. In other words, we have made a step back towards the Athenian democracy. We have gone back to Athenian democracy where will was paramount. I would say that it is a matter of political culture. We need to decide how to treat it, what we want to achieve and how government should react to this. Should state decide what is right and acceptable? And we will follow its lead. Or do we follow the logic of political process and quality and decide that we need to further analyse the will with new tools that we are probably not fully aware of yet in terms of their close coherence with meritocratic principles.
Obviously, populism is also a key issue here. Populism is an interesting phenomena which indicates that political culture trends are changing. There are two ways we can treat it. One would be to say ‘Yes, that is good and right.’ And we do as populists say. And we can also say ‘No. We determine what is good and right from our perspective, but we also have other criteria, other ways of curbing populism.’ That is what all democracies do.
Dear colleagues,
In my today’s remarks I wanted to underline that political culture is linked to our views, values, subjective attitude towards public processes. Secondly, I urged you to discriminate between sociological approach, or descriptive approach, to discussing and approach where identify the essential characteristics of what needs to be done. These are two distinctly different approaches. I also tried to explore the link between political system and political culture. Political culture usually adjusts itself to political system over time. However, when a society goes through a phase of more rapid development, political culture may change faster than the political system. And this tension between these two elements of democracy may increase. It may get harder to align people’s will with reasoning.
Thank you!
