Although much has been said of democracy by practically all sections of the people, from intellectuals to lumpens, there is one area which has not seen much articulation – democracy, arguably above all else, is also a finely tuned intuitive conflict resolution mechanism. This may sound like a hyperbole but it is not. The fact that practically all, if not all, nations which have absorbed and internalised democracy and its values, have ceased to see war as a method of settling dispute. As the UNDP annual Human Development Report, 2003 pointed out, after World War-II, no two democratic countries have ever gone to war with each other. It is also more and more unlikely that any two democratic countries would every again go to war. The case of Western Europe is an example. It is today inconceivable that any two of these prosperous countries, which together have today joined and formed the awesome supra-national political and economic institution called the European Union, would choose to settle any of their issues by war. And democracy, nobody will dispute is an ideology which is spreading, and by the sheer compulsion of its natural Catholicity, continue to spread till it becomes a universal, political practice and faith. Its aesthetics and symmetry are formidable if not irresistible.
This however will understandably have other little imagined consequences. The most dramatic of these is predictable. If wars become redundant, what exactly would happen to the military? Almost as a matter of necessary ritual to qualify to be a “nation state” practically every nation, with one or two exceptions like Poerto Rico, has one. Even the tiny Himalayan kingdom, Bhutan, wedged between two giant rising superpowers of India and China, with whom it can never ever think of fighting a war, has an Army. Nonetheless, in a perfectly democratic environment where wars have become history, the military’s role against the new paradigm of postmodern nationhood, would have to be sooner than later redefined. The options are, one, it would be reduced to a ceremonial and symbolic organ of nationhood. We also know symbols, when it is not pegged to reality, seldom carries enough steam to pull on for long. Two, there would be a gradual but inevitable convergence between the traditional role of the military (that of fighting foreign wars) and policing (that of maintaining internal security). Something like this is already happening in the notion of the UN Peace Keeping Force. It is also happening in the increasing deployment of the military in what are essentially internal security matters in India, in particular fighting insurrections in Kashmir, Northeast and now the Maoist heartlands. The third futuristic role of the military, as men like Terry Eagleton predicted, would be to fight global terrorism, as opposed to regional insurgencies and much more cynical too. India too is learning how true this is by actual experience. This new paradigm cannot just be wished away and hence the best approach would be to begin accepting and absorbing it without delay.
ironically, india is hardly a democracy and China hardly a communist!