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Qaddafi's Theory and Practice of Non‐Representative Government *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. Davis
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Extract

QADDAFI'S THEORY OF POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION amounts to the assertion that all forms of representation in fact result in unrepresentative government; that therefore they must be unjust; that therefore they must be replaced by nonrepresentative government. The Green Book describes the institutions of such government but is by no means utterly explicit about the relations between institutions, or about the way personnel are recruited to them. To examine what happens in practice at elections, surely critical events in a nonrepresentative system, suggests that Qaddafi is less a Periclean Legislator than an interpreter, casts some light on the theory, and hints at the nature of the concept of political community underlying both The Green Book and contemporary Libyan society.

Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1982 , pp. 61 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1982

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References

1 The Green Book was issued in chapters at irregular intervals. The first ‐ which is subtitled ‘The solution to the problem of democracy’ ‐ appeared in 1973. A second and a third chapter, on economic and on social affairs, appeared in 1977 and 1979. In the case of the later chapters the press announced that they were completed some months before they were published: there was a period in which the author consulted his colleagues and, in the case of Chapter Three, various other experts. Estimates of the author's openness to criticism of his original drafts vary widely, but there is no reason to doubt that the chapters as published are substantially ‘from the pen’ of Col. Qaddafi.

2 This, and all other quotations from The Green Book, comes from the first thirty pages of Chapter One. The pages are small and are not densely printed: it does not seem necessary to provide precise page references to a short text which has appeared in a number of editions.

3 The question whether or not Qaddafi is aware of his relation to some currents of European political thought is shortly to be treated by Taufiq Monastiri in the Annuaire de l'Afrique du Nord. Monastiri has with customary generosity indicated that his article will be an empirical one ‐what Qaddafi reads, and in what form. As such it will be an advance on the intuitive ‘The Jamahiriya experiment in Libya. Qaddafi and Rousseau’ by Hajjar, S. G., Journal of Modern Africa Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1980, pp. 181–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The National Congress is composed of members of district popular committees, of members of district popular congresses and members of professional and occupational organizations. Its agenda is sent, some weeks before the annual meeting, to the districts, where it is discussed with variable thoroughness. The district Basic People's Congresses do not draw up their own agendas.

5 Ajdabiya is the setting for the events described in this paper. It is about 150 km south‐south‐west of Benghazi, an important junction of the routes leading cast‐west and south. In 1978 a signpost there indicated the directions to Tripoli, Alexandria, Khartoum (via Kufra).

6 In a total population of 38,000 in a developing country some 15,000 are likely to be of voting age.

7 Qaddafi's references to the early Islamic community are few, and are usually critical. Monastiri (see note 3) points out that the period of Umar is characterized by Qaddafi as ‘despotic’.

8 This has consequences in the smaller settlements for the style of interaction between office holders in the committees and those citizens, particularly elderly ones, who have business with them. The young administrators, educated in a traditional system, with no long‐established revolutionary credentials to give them the self‐assurance to ride rough‐shod over their seniors' susceptibilities, behave with diffidence and affection. The same tenderness characterizes those interactions between, say, a headmaster and his doorkeeper who are son and father. Such multiplex relations, by no means uncommon in the smaller settlements, are one of the relatively few charming structural consequences of the revolution.