KARACHI, Sept 20: One of the lessons to be learnt from Europe is that we need to nurture democratic culture and not just the system of governance for progress and prosperity, said international relations experts during an academic discourse at Karachi University on Wednesday.

“Democracy does not only refer to a political process but also to the economic and social development of society,” said Dr Adnan S. Khan, the chairperson of the international relations department at Peshawar University, while speaking at a workshop organised by KU Area Study Centre for Europe (ASCE) in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Islamabad.

The title of the workshop was “The Challenges of Democracy in South Asia: are there lessons to be learned from Europe?”

Dr Khan traced the origins of modern democracy to the time of ancient Greece. He referred to the grand assemblies of the city states where residents were members of the assembly and actively participated in the city’s affairs.

Prof Dr Mohammad Waseem, a professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), said that there was an institutional imbalance in the country. He said the trouble with Pakistan’s democracy could be attributed to the conflict between primary and secondary institutions.

He said: “Democracy did not get its due time to ripen and the system was elaborated, because the people could not access it. We inherited the state constitutions but since the whole paraphernalia was planted we moved backwards, from geography to history. Before the British came to India, the subcontinent was a traditional society. When they left, the state institutions remained, hence, the governments here had to elaborate the democratic system so that the common man gets representation at state level.”

In this situation, he added, a new kind of nationalist sentiment grew in which politicians acted as brokers between the nation states and the government. “The weakest aspects were where the colonial states met the traditional society,” said Dr Waseem.

“The people have to be acquainted with the institutions and this does not happen in Pakistan,” he said, adding that this was why when someone made it to any state institution they wanted to benefit people by appointing people from their own community.

He said another problem was that the urban middle class — the wheels for change in any society — had remained inactive so far. “They hate politics and mere thought of it,” he said. “Whereas the people in backward areas who don’t have opportunities of facilities are politically active and use their right to vote in hopes of bringing change in the way they live.”

According to Dr Waseem, there are two major power centres in Pakistan: the traditional political elite who hold sway at the grassroots level and the state elite who make decisions at the top level of government. “Almost all of the politics practised in the country is adversary politics,” he said. Since when Pakistan came into being, 160 members of the constituent assembly out of a total of 300 were from India and did not have any constituencies, they did not have a chance to be selected by the people they represented, he explained. Hence the elections became a cut-throat game, he added.

The professor of political science said that since the institution of the army had been in existence longer than parliament, it often took the reigns of power. Yet the bone of legitimacy, present in the constitution, remained, he said.

“Even though Pakistan saw four military dictators, they all had to hold elections to legitimise their rule,” he noted. Dr Waseem was of the opinion that the present government had ‘entrance legitimacy’ though it failed to obtain ‘performance legitimacy’.

Talking about the Indian model for democracy, Dr Farhan Hanif Siddiqui, an assistant professor at the international relations department of Karachi University, said: “What is unique about their system is that the government has been able to consolidate democracy, despite a multitude of cultures in the country, partly because they have been able to successfully hold periodic elections.”

He was of the opinion that India was not a ‘nation state’ but a ‘state nation’. In nation states, he explained, one national identity had hegemony over the system at the expense of others but in India power was shared.

The last speaker, Muhammad Salman, also a teacher of international relations, talked about the Bangladeshi model of democracy. He said the main difference between the roles of military in Pakistan and Bangladesh was that here the military exerted power at the expense of the political system, whereas in Bangladesh it was incorporated in the democratic process by its president Major General Ziaur Rehman who combined nation-building and defence.