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Topic Discussion I
Politics of Hard Choices
Political Transition and Economic Restructuring
Room 5
(8 of 22 pages)
Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Minister. Thank you to both our presenters
for framing in an excellent fashion the Politics of Hard Choices. Now I would like to open it up for your comments.
Let me just as the moderator present one devil's advocate position. As you know the opponents of democracy argue
this in terms of talking about this dilemma and specifically they argue that new democracies will given their fragility
given the fragility of the political coalitions, will not be able to muster the political will to truly implement
and to design a very real economic reform package. On the other hand these skeptics and opponents of democracy
also argue, if you are lucky enough to must the political world to do so, then they will because of the pain, they
will inflict on the losers of the economic reform package, the short term losers, those losers will mobilize the
enemies of democracy to overturn and to destroy that new democratic fragility. So, in responding to these two very
excellent presentations I would also you like to use your own experiences to respond to that argument of the skeptics?
Now, we have roughly half and hour to forty minutes as we started fifteen minutes late so I would like to use the
position of the chair to propose that we go fifteen minutes late since we started fifteen minutes late. I would
roughly divide that up to about half just sharing experiences in a very concrete way in reflecting on the two presentations,
and then in a more disciplined way for the last forty-five minutes to begin drawing up a list of recommendations
we might make coming out of this conference.
Yes sir, if you could please identify yourself and if you could limit your comments to just a few minutes it will
give everybody a chance to speak.
Speaker: [not available due to technical difficulties]
Chair: The delegate from Morocco please.
Speaker: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to go back to the first question that I posed, will we be following
up by presenting country experiences one by one, that won't be of much help to us I believe. I suggest, if it is
possible, that we determine or define what we mean by emerging democracies first, for this is the first official
broadscale meeting to conduct such a dialogue with not discussing absolute democracy or abstract democracy, we
are discussing a new concept, emerging democracies, so what do we mean by emerging democracies? What are the standards
that we will adopt in order to say that this is a country with an emerging democracy, and this is a country that
doesn't have an emerging democracy?
From my point of view as a team producing ideas we should define these ideas, these concepts. After this we could
address the problem as it relates to the problems related to the difficult options, the unpopular options that
governments are in some cases obliges to take for economic reform and so on. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair: I am going to call on the man in the corner next, but I would ask you to address your own question
and please share with us your view of what is an emerging democracy and what is not, but I appreciate that question,
thank you. Oh I am sorry, I asked the delegate from Morocco to address his own excellent question about whether
his view about what would constitute an emerging democracy and what would not.
Speaker: As I said I do not want to monopolize the speech here. I would like to hear everyone of this team
to present an idea on this subject so that it could be recorded and the outcome we can identify the list of concepts
that were brought up.
I could say that an emerging democracy is that democracy which was transformed from one certain system to a system
of popular participation on grass roots participation by various means after transition be it through local elections
or parliamentary elections or development, opening up of civil society, opening up to the media. Opening up by
giving the political parties the possibilities to mobilize the youth and the citizens. All this would take place
in an organized manner for my view point democracy does not mean [inaudible]. Thus we should agree on the concept
that we can identify as those which define emerging democracies and start out from that point. Thank you.
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