The ideal of equal representation for women in democratic
governments around the globe sounds praiseworthy. But its
implementation has little to do with "equality" or "democracy."
Instead, it has become a policy of privilege and quota, driven
by elite powers that disregard the wishes of "the people" in
regions where it is applied. It is affirmative action applied to
the political realm.
The Afghan Women's Summit for Democracy ended last Friday
with a demand that women be included in the post-Taliban
government, including its grand assembly, the loya jirga. The
demand goes well beyond Afghanistan's pre-Taliban 1964
constitution that included universal suffrage and equal rights
for women. Women voters generally prefer male candidates. Even
in Western nations like the United States, the "ideal" of equal
representation has not been achieved.
To ensure that women become government officials in
sufficient numbers, organizations such as the United Nations and
the Feminist Majority, an American group, are basically trying
to rig the election. They're not trying to control the voting —
just the nominations. In the 19th century, Boss Tweed — possibly
the most corrupt politician America has produced — declared, "I
don't care who does the electing just so long as I do the
nominating."
This affirmative action "rigging" system is already in
operation in Kosovo, where the parliament functions under a
U.N.-mandated quota guaranteeing women will constitute close to
a third of its members. Every third candidate in the 2001
election had to be a woman. The gender quota system was combined
with a system of "proportional representation," which basically
meant that seats were allocated in proportion to the votes each
party received. Many European nations embrace a quota system in
nominating candidates, but Kosovo "guarantees" a high election
of women whether or not people would have voted for them
otherwise. In the November 2001 election, 28 percent of offices
went to women.
The system has stirred a backlash of criticism, including
from Kosovo's women's movements. In response to the charge that
rigging a "free" election gave only the appearance of
representing women, Liz Hume, a legal adviser to OSCE — the U.N.
organization that oversees elections in Kosovo — offered a
strange defense. "You could say that they [elected women] are
the pawns of their parties, but so are the men," a
BBC News
report quotes Hume as saying.
The appearance is clearly important as the United Nations
wishes the system to spread. "Kosovo is blazing a trail, many
democracies are lagging behind on this," Kosovo's U.N.
administrator, Bernard Kouchner, has declared.
Indeed, the call for quota systems within government has been
foreshadowed for some while on the United Nations' Web site. In
the women's section of the site, Section Two of the Conference
of Women Members of South Eastern European Parliaments — Women
in Electoral Campaigns — is a call for a quota system along the
lines used in Argentina, and now in Kosovo.
Cries for political quotas are becoming more common. In the
West, quota-advocate feminists speak euphemistically of
"including the voices of women in government." But the goal has
shifted from giving women the vote on an equal footing with men
to enforcing the presence of women in governmental bodies.
According to their theory, the lack of female officials is the
direct result of discrimination that must be rectified by
government policy.
Those who argue for a political quota system to secure
equality within a democratic process must answer two questions:
What is your definition of "equality?" Of "democracy?"
Feminism is the belief that women and men should be treated
as equals, but the definition of "equality" can differ widely.
To individualist feminists, or ifeminists, equality means
identical treatment under laws that protect person and property.
It is an equality of rights, not of results. If women cast a
ballot as men do, then women's political will has been
actualized even if no females are elected.
Because gender feminism defines equality in socio-economic
terms, it seeks to reorganize society to redistribute political,
economic and cultural power from men to women. This equality of
results, not rights, leads to legal privileges for women, such
as mandatory placement on ballots.
In Europe, the term "affirmative action" is publicly applied
to political representation. In America, the discussion usually
occurs within gender feminism or academia. An example is the
1998 Harvard paper, "Women in Politics: The Quota System," by
Mala Htun. Htun looks to Latin American countries like Argentina
for inspiration. In a manner similar to Kosovo's, Argentina has
dramatically increased the number of women "elected." The United
Nations was instrumental there as well.
The second question for these advocates is, "What is your
definition of 'democracy?'" The standard definition is
"government in which the supreme power is vested in the people
and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under
a free electoral system."
Yet the "Boss Tweed" version of controlling nominations is
designed to override the will of the people. Political elites —
most prominently, the United Nations and gender feminists — want
to dictate who can be a candidate specifically because the
common people do not elect the "right" people in the proper
ratio. This is profoundly anti-democratic.
A brief column, like this one, can only touch on an issue.
But I offer a question that has haunted me during my research.
Since when has North America started looking to Argentina for
lessons on good government?
