There are a lot of questions that the OTAN attacks over Kosovo make emerge
and the most of them are deeply concening. One of them lies in the
relations between democracy and institutions. In times of globalization,
and when the national states loose their power, becomes even more and more
obvious that the emerging institucions of power are walking ways where
democracy and citizen participation in decisions have no real significance.
Here in Portugal, by example, the parliament has not had a previous
discussion about participation in the OTAN attacks and, worse than this,
didn't have after the beggining of the attacks. At the same time, the
decision of attack Serbia has been taked without ONU, the institution who
really should take the front of decisions in a logic of democratic
representation of countries and people.
One of the more concerning things is the enormous "noise of silence" of
public opinions, what shows, in my point of view, three things: the absence
of a real pluralism in the media, controlled by a few number; the deficit
of democratic participation and ideologic convictions; and the effects of
these two things in the representative democracy. We have today "leftist"
goverments in Europe and in USA (theoricaly speaking, of course), and are
those goverments who are leading politics clearly adressed to goverments of
right parties. What I mean is that one of bigger problems today is the lack
of people exigence about the political power (permiting left governments
act like they act has the same time people elected them), and this absence
of exigence creates a big pessimism about the power of public opinions and
citizen participation in order to change societies for a more democratic
and justice nature. The question is how, how can we change this situation,
how can we improve processes of a more critical, concienseness, pluralistic
and active public opinion? What is the role of geography and geography
teaching in this question? What can we share from our experience to achieve
this?
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