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ARTICLE TITLE: Europe’s
death-penalty elitism. Death in Venice
DATE: 31 July 2000
AUTHOR: Joshua Micah
Marshall
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Joshua Micah Marshall (born February 15,
1969 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a liberal American Polk Award-winning journalist who founded Talking Points Memo,
which The New York Times Magazine called "one of the most popular
and most respected sites" in the blogosphere. He currently presides over a
network of sites that operate under the TPM Media banner and average
400,000 page views every weekday and 750,000 unique visitors every month.
Marshall and his work have been profiled by The New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, the Financial Times, National Public Radio, The
New York Times Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill
Moyers Journal, and GQ. Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The
New Yorker, compares Marshall to the influential founders of Time
magazine. "Marshall is in the line of the great light-bulb-over-the-head
editors. He’s like Briton Hadden or Henry Luce. He’s created something
new."
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Joshua Micah Marshall
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Europe's death-penalty
elitism.
Death in Venice
By JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL
Issue date: 07.31.00
Post date: 07.20.00
You
seldom hear conservatives note, disapprovingly, that "America is the only
industrialized country in the world that doesn't have X." It's not hard to
figure out why, since X usually involves European (or Canadian or Japanese) big
government. But liberals sometimes imagine that America's peculiar lack of,
say, nationalized health care, tough gun control, decent child care, widespread
mass transport, or substantial arts funding is a sign of political
underdevelopment. And so they bemoan America's uniqueness.
Particularly
on the death penalty, and particularly now. The old taunt--"The only other
industrialized country with the death penalty is South Africa" (recently
amended to include "and now even they've abolished it")--has been
hurled with particular force in recent weeks. The flood of capital punishment
horror stories, combined with partial or full recantations by conservative
luminaries George Will and Pat Robertson, has left anti-death-penalty liberals
more convinced than ever that, on this issue at least, American political
culture is inferior to its counterparts across the Atlantic.
If
only it were that simple. It's true that all of America's G-7 partners, save
Japan, have abolished capital punishment, but the reason isn't, as
death-penalty opponents usually assume, that their populations eschew
vengeance. In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave
executions almost as much as their American counterparts do. It's just that
their politicians don't listen to them. In other words, if these countries'
political cultures are morally superior to America's, it's because they're less
democratic.
Seen
through American eyes, Canada seems almost comically nonviolent. And it's true
that Ottawa administered its last execution in 1962 and formally abolished
capital punishment for civilians in the mid-'70s (a ban on military executions
came in 1998). But public support for the death penalty runs only slightly
lower in Canada than in the United States: polls consistently show that between
60 percent and 70 percent of Canadians want it reinstated.
Differences
in the way survey questions are framed complicate direct comparisons with
Europe. (European polls sometimes pose the question in terms of the death
penalty for terrorism, for genocide, for depraved sexual crimes, and so forth.)
But, even if you ask the death-penalty question in the more restricted sense
that Americans generally understand it--"Do you support the death penalty
for aggravated murder?"--you find very few European countries where the
public clearly opposes it, and there are a number where support is very strong.
In Britain, the world headquarters of Amnesty International, opinion polls have
shown that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the population favors the
death penalty--about the same as in the United States. In Italy, which has led
the international fight against capital punishment for much of the last decade,
roughly half the population wants it reinstated. In France, clear majorities
continued to back the death penalty long after it was abolished in 1981; only
last year did a poll finally show that less than 50 percent wanted it restored.
There is barely a country in Europe where the death penalty was abolished in
response to public opinion rather than in spite of it.
How
could this be? In a few cases, the reason is constitutional: Germany's and
Italy's postwar constitutions abolished capital punishment outright, thus
placing the issue effectively beyond public reach. Another factor is the
centripetal pressure created by European integration, as cornerstone EU states
like France and Germany compel smaller newcomers to adopt "European"
norms. Still another factor is the lack of some equivalent to American-style
federalism, which in this country allows ardently pro-death-penalty regions
like the South to proceed without regard for opinion in other parts of the
country.
Differences
between European parliamentary government and the American separation-of-powers
system also play a role. Parliamentary government may provide voters with more
ideological variety, but it is much more resistant to political upstarts,
outsiders, and the single-issue politics on which the death penalty thrives. In
parliamentary systems, people tend to vote for parties, not individuals; and
party committees choose which candidates stand for election. As a result,
parties are less influenced by the odd new impulses that now and again bubble
up from the electorate. In countries like Britain and France, so long as elite
opinion remains sufficiently united (which, in the case of the death penalty,
it has), public support cannot easily translate into legislative action. Since
American candidates are largely independent and self-selected, they serve as a
much more direct conduit between raw public opinion and actual political
action.
Basically,
then, Europe doesn't have the death penalty because its political systems are
less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist impulses, than the
U.S. government. And elites know it. Referring to France, a recent article in
the UNESCO Courier noted that "action by courageous political
leaders has been needed to overcome local public opinion that has remained
mostly in favour of the death penalty." When a 1997 poll showed that 49
percent of Swedes wanted the death penalty reinstated, the country's justice
minister told a reporter: "They don't really want the death penalty; they
are objecting to the increasing violence. I see this as a call to politicians
and the justice system to do more."
An
American attorney general--or any American politician, for that matter--could
never get away with such condescension toward the public, at least not for
attribution. Pundits and rival politicians would slam him, and, on most issues,
liberals would be first in line. After all, liberals are rightly attached to
the idea that they speak for the "little guy," the "working
family," or, in Al Gore's recent phraseology, "the people, not the
powerful." But, all over the industrialized world, it turns out that the
men and women on the street like the death penalty. It's just that in Europe
and Canada elites have exercised a kind of noblesse oblige. They've chosen a
more civilized and humane political order over a fully popular and
participatory one. When American liberals invoke Europe's abolition of the
death penalty, that's the choice they're essentially endorsing, whether they
know it or not. It's a perfectly defensible position--but it might not go over that
well on "Crossfire."
JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL is the Washington editor of The American
Prospect.
