The Times recently reported that an open letter had been written by religious leaders urging the heads of the G20 countries to honour commitments made to the world’s poorest people. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, called upon world leaders to “reaffirm their moral commitments” with regard to helping the world’s poor.
The concern expressed in such a letter forms part of a larger issue regarding the relationship between the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries and their citizens. Large-scale protests are expected at the G20 summit. Add to that trends towards direct action over issues like climate change, and the recent attack on the home of the banker Sir Fred Goodwin, whose huge pension has incensed people struggling to find jobs and pay mortgages, and we seem to be left with a disconnect between those in charge and those they have been elected to govern.
The question we have to ask, therefore, is whether world leaders do indeed understand and govern on behalf of all their citizens?
The relationship between government and citizens inevitably raises questions about the nature of democracy itself. There is a principle regarding democratic governance that is often taken for granted, namely that democracy as a system is intended to be both by the people and for the people.
With regard to the first, Gordon Brown would struggle to argue that he had fulfilled the criteria, having inherited the Prime Ministerial position rather than winning it in an election. With regard to the second, the recent financial crisis has raised serious popular doubts about whether government has indeed been for the people. Is this a credible position?
A good example to use here would be the state of banks and lending, both leading up to and during the financial crisis. We have often heard over the past few months that in the lead up to the crisis banks were lending money far too easily, and were not subject to strict enough regulation imposed by financial authorities. As a consequence of such liberal lending practices, the financial crisis would see many banks either collapsing or requiring cash injections from the government in order to survive.
A popular critique here is that during the financial crisis the government’s first action was to help those who had been partly responsible for bringing about the crisis in the first place, i.e. banks and lenders. The perception has thus been that bankers have been rewarded for failure. This criticism is often coupled with the fact that deregulation had given banks the freedom to take risks in the first place. So what we have seen, understandably, is a public outraged at the notion of taxpayer’s money being used to prop up banks who have failed because of their own irresponsibility.
There are counter-arguments. Deregulation was used as a means of generating revenue for the economy, and thereby taxes that would be used to improve the public sector. Similarly, bailing banks out was not so much a question of looking out for those who had generated the mess in the first place, as it was in shoring up the foundations on which the entire economy was built.
Such counter-arguments do not go far, though, in allaying the fears and anger of a public worried about its own finances and jobs. Inevitably, as the aforementioned incident at Sir Fred Goodwin’s home highlights, popular opinion will lead to popular action. It will be interesting to see, therefore, not only the outcome of the G20 summit, but also the longer term effects of the financial crisis with regards to popular opinion.
Talk of Karl Marx’s resurgence is somewhat in vogue at the moment, but one thing worth considering is whether popular disgruntlement will leave a vacuum that may be filled by other ideals or systems. Whether that constitutes, among others, violence, the further rise of militant religion, or socialism, we will have to wait and see.
Ramsen Warda is an MA International Relations student at King’s College London.
