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Topic Discussion I
Politics of Hard Choices
Political Transition and Economic Restructuring
Room 5
(11 of 22 pages)
The social and economic concept of democracy is basic and important. In order
to build up a democratic political system with all its foundations be it parliaments, legal frameworks or liberty
or freedom of expression, freedom of press, if they are not supported by a social and economic democratic regime,
then I agree with what the President of said, he has mentioned the risks and hazards that endanger emerging democracies
in the third world. I would like to note the role that the major powers can play, because we know that they are
supporting democracies, they are seeking the building of political democracies. They should also seek and look
very seriously into this idea of supporting emerging democracy efforts and setting up economic and social democracies
so that they do not go back on their efforts.
After the French Conference in Labor (ph) which has programs of political democracy but which were not supposed
to by financial packages of the report from France led to the failure of those recommendations emanating from the
conference. This is indeed a very high risk to emerging democracies. The questions I would like to refer to that
the Minister has raised is the economical globalization, will this globalization or can we say that this globalization
is a danger, represents a threat to emerging democracies in the third world given the negative implications on
their economies? Hence we underline the need to undertake efforts to support social and economic democracies of
our emerging democracies. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair: I know there are a lot of hands up and I will turn to each of you as we begin turning specifically
to the concrete recommendations section of our discussion, let me again urge you to address those seven questions
in the terms of reference and other questions and also to the very concrete proposals raised by Minister Soofan.
In particular to talk about very concretely how in your societies your successes and failures in using democracy
to promote economic reform. How from each of your different sectors how as a government representative you would
try to do it, how if you tried to do it in a politically participatory way, how have civil society actors tried
to represent the views of their members and constituents and their sectors of society, how political parties try
to be part of the negotiations of social facts. I urge all of you to be concrete as we move into the last stage
of this discussion. Could I just again see everybody whose hands are raised? I am going to you two first and then
third and then four and five there. So please the delegate from Guyana.
Speaker: Mr. Chairman, I am the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament so maybe what I see is prejudice
just to warn you. It seems that in our paper it is assumed that the political transition is okay we dealt with
that and we want to add to use it, to mobilize the consensus from transition. We have problems with political transitions
and economic transitions. To give you a little bit of a background our present leadership ceased bar (ph) by force
in 1981. They proceed to carry out a revolution that meant breaking down the established institutions of society
and law, administration, government policy and everything. After a year and a half of this excitement the economy
was on its lease. They had to turn to the IMF and begin an economic reform program long before they gave up the
political framework. Ten years later we had something of a transition. It was not a political transition, but a
constitutional transition, and I will come back to that. The western countries who had bank rolled this economic
reform program for ten years decided that it was necessary to axe the political element. We got a reluctant transition
because the people have power. They did not choose political transition; in fact they resisted because public pressure
on the one hand and external pressure on the other hand that pushed them into brining in a constitution. This constitutional
transition is difficult to turn into a democratic transition because the practice of government is not democratic
enough.
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