The Honesty of Not Calling Yourself a Democracy

There is a short list of countries that have never bothered to describe themselves as democracies, and the list is more interesting for its candour than its contents. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is an absolute monarchy and says so plainly. Vatican City is an elective monarchy run by a pope. Brunei's sultan holds essentially all executive authority. Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar — a cluster of Gulf states that have simply declined to dress up their systems in borrowed language.

The peculiar thing is that this makes them the honest ones. The word "democracy" has become so desirable, so thoroughly the default currency of political legitimacy, that even governments with no interest in the practice want the label. Which produces one of the more reliable rules in international nomenclature: the more democratic words a country stacks into its official name, the less democracy you can expect to find inside.

Consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which is neither democratic, nor a republic in any recognisable sense, nor especially concerned with the people. It manages three misleading words before you even reach the geography. The German Democratic Republic — East Germany — built a wall to keep its citizens from voting with their feet. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has spent much of its independence under one strongman or another. The pattern is consistent enough that "Democratic Republic" in a country's title functions almost as a warning label.

This wasn't always the going terminology. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "democracy" was frequently a term of abuse — mob rule, the tyranny of the unwashed majority. The American founders preferred "republic" precisely because it sounded more orderly. The rehabilitation of the word into an unqualified compliment is largely a twentieth-century achievement, cemented after two world wars fought, at least rhetorically, to defend it.

Once a word becomes universally admired, everyone claims it, and the claim stops meaning anything. The Gulf monarchies opted out of the linguistic arms race entirely. They are absolutist and they say so, which turns out to be a rarer form of transparency than the ballot box.