Genghis Khan, Father of Mongolian Democracy

by

Paula L.W. Sabloff

Chapter 4 in Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan. (Paula L.W. Sabloff, ed.). University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2001.

To order, go to www.upenn.edu\pennpress\book\13711.html until June 30, 2003. Starting July 1, 2003, you can order the book at www.museum.upenn.edu\new\publications\index.shtml.

I became involved with Mongolia through good luck and good friends when the country had already become an independent democracy. The more I experienced Mongolia, the more interested I became in two questions: Why did Mongolians take to democracy so easily after centuries of oppression followed by seventy years of Communist rule? And why do I feel so at home in Mongolia? In other words, what is there about Mongolians that makes an American feel that we easily understand each other?

I think these questions are very much linked together. I have been working as a cultural anthropologist in Mongolia since 1994, living many months in Ulaanbaatar and spending several weeks in the western aimag [province] of Hovd. As an anthropologist, my job is to live the way Mongolians do, observe their behavior, ask them questions, and listen to what they say. As an anthropologist, I am curious about (a) how they manage different situations–how they obtain and prepare food, how they earn a living, how they educate their children, how they relax; and (b) what do they think about the world around them–their families, their history, their government, and their place in the world.

My impression of Mongolians is that they are very much like us, for Mongolians and Americans have the same ideal of what a man should be–a rugged, independent, resourceful, self-sufficient loner. The Marlboro Man. The difference is that the Mongolian Marlboro Man is connected to a mother–to family and friends–while the American version revels in his isolation from society.

Mongolians have a wonderful sense of humor, something we Americans pride ourselves on also. I have often been with a group of Mongolians–a family, a group of friends, or people who work together–and noticed that they are always talking, telling stories, or relating what happened to them yesterday. But when they tell these stories, they always tell them in such a way that everyone gets to laugh at the end. Mongolians bond through laughter.

Mongolians and Americans also share similar histories. For varying periods, we both have been underdogs fighting off powerful colonial masters to build free, democratic nations. We are both tremendously proud of our traditions of freedom and democracy.

How did independence and democratic principles take root in Mongolia so early in the world’s history, and how did these ideals survive through such a brutal history? We start with Mongolia’s greatest leader, Genghis Khan, although we will see that the story of Mongolian democracy really precedes him.

Many Westerners think of Genghis Khan as a marauder who burned and pillaged Europe, Asia, and Persia.¹ He was born in 1162 CE along the Onon River in present-day Hentii (Khentei) Aimag. By 1189, when he was only twenty-seven years old, he had united the Mongol peoples into an independent nation instead of separate clans and tribes. Between 1189 and 1206, he expanded Mongol territory to roughly the territory of Mongolia today. At that point, he was elected Genghis Khan of All Mongols.²

Genghis Khan’s soldiers were famous for their fierceness and skill in riding and shooting arrows. Their armor and stirrups were constructed to allow maximum freedom of movement on a horse, and this enabled them to shoot arrows with deadly accuracy while riding at full gallop. They could even hit their targets when shooting backwards from a galloping horse.³ The range of their composite bows–made of wood, sinew, and antler horn –exceeded that of European bows of the time. Genghis Khan built a military organization that enabled him to incorporate whole units of foreign soldiers, thus assuring himself a limitless number of troops for further conquest. But his real secret weapon may have been that they were eating a high-protein diet of meat, milk, and cheese while China and Europe were falling asleep on their diet of rice, pasta, and porridge! Of course these pasta-eaters were easy prey for the meat-eating Mongols!

By the time of his death in 1227, Genghis Khan had captured and controlled the Silk Road. He had conquered all the way west through Central Asia and Russia to the Caspian Sea, south past Beijing to the Yellow River, and southwest to Persia. It is still the largest empire ever conquered under one man’s rule (see Map 4, Chapter 1).

Westerners evaluating outstanding achievement during the last millennium are only now recognizing his incredible accomplishment in a positive light. Some have even awarded Genghis Khan first prize for Greatest Achievement in the Category of Conqueror.⁴ Despite this revisionist view, most Westerners still see him as a terror. But Genghis Khan has a different reputation among his descendants, the people of modern Mongolia. To them, his greatness lies in the fact that he gave his people the gifts of independence and the basic principles from which they could eventually build a modern democratic state.

Please note that I am not saying that Genghis Khan actually led a democratic government. There is a big difference between establishing democratic principles and running a democratic state. While some democratic principles can exist in a society that is not democratic, a democracy cannot exist without a basic cluster of democratic principles. So Genghis Khan may be considered the father of Mongolian democracy even though he ran a military state. After all, no one credits King John with establishing a democracy after he signed the Magna Carta, yet we trace the beginning of Western democracy to his relinquishing some authority to his noblemen. Genghis Khan preceded the Magna Carta (by nine years), and he instituted democratic principles willingly rather than under duress. In redesigning Mongolian government, he codified several key elements of democracy that became part of Mongolians’ memory. Anthropologists would say that Genghis Khan established the political culture that is still in the minds of Mongolians today.

Political Culture

What is political culture and why is it so important to a nation? Simply put, politics is about different ways of organizing the distribution of resources. Some examples are monarchy, totalitarianism, consensus democracy, and majority-rule democracy. Political culture is a people’s preference for one way of making decisions about how resources are distributed over another.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who visited the United States when it was a young democracy, characterized American political culture as guided by love of equality and individualism, civil society, a belief in the sovereignty of the people (through majority rule), and distrust of government.⁵ Many would argue that the political culture he observed nearly two centuries ago is still intact today. If anything, we are at a point where we are even more distrustful of government, for our love of individualism and capitalism seems to be even more extreme than it was in the 1830s.

I went to Mongolia in 1998 to discover Mongolian political culture. And in the process, I stumbled across something bigger–namely, the roots of their political culture today. These roots are their traditional nomadic lifestyle and their ancient ruler, Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan’s Democratic Principles

The stories, legends, and history of Genghis Khan reveal certain democratic principles that Americans consider to be the core of a democracy. Political scientists have counted more than 200 definitions of democracy. The American definition is built on four pillars: participatory government, rule by law, equality under the law, and basic personal freedoms and human rights. If we examine the history of Genghis Khan through historical accounts, we can see that he established some form of all four pillars for the Mongolian people during his rule.

We know of Genghis Khan mostly through one book, The Secret History of the Mongols. No one knows for sure who wrote it, but several historians believe its author was Shigi-hutuhu, adopted son of Genghis Khan, which means it was probably written thirteen years after Genghis Khan’s death in 1227.⁶ The Secret History starts with the legend of the birth of the Mongol tribe and continues through Genghis Khan’s successor, his son Ogedei.

Other accounts come from Rashid ad-Din, a doctor turned chief minister and historian of the court of Ilkhan Ghazan, the Mongol ruler of Persia and Iraq. This account, written at the end of the thirteenth century, was based on the official Mongolian history, the Altan Debter (The Golden Notebook), which has been lost. Other Western writers have written about Genghis Khan from the Western, or conquered perspective.⁷

If we treat The Secret History as text, we can see that Genghis Khan practiced certain democratic principles, even if he did not invent them. And he provided the two key conditions necessary for establishing democratic principles.

Conditions Necessary for Democracy

Independence and sovereignty

Genghis Khan’s first gift to his people was to unite them into one independent nation, a nation that had the right to make its own laws. First he united the various tribes in the area (Naiman, Kereit, Tatar, Merkid) together into one big political unit, the Mongol nation. Then he fought neighboring groups such as the Tanggut and the Chinese (Chin Dynasty), freeing the Mongols from paying tribute or serving at the pleasure of foreign rulers. Eventually he conquered these groups, placing them under Mongol control. The conquest of the Chin Dynasty meant the conquest of Beijing and control of the Silk Roads.⁸

Independence and sovereignty were the first conditions for developing democratic principles. If democracy means a people rule themselves, then they cannot have a democracy if some other power makes their laws.

Literacy

Genghis Khan had one of his captives adapt the Uighur script to the Mongolian language and had his sons and officials learn to read and write in this new form. The Naiman tribe, which had ruled western Mongolia before him, had adopted the writing system of the previous rulers, the Uighur Turks. But the Naimans wrote in the Uighur language. By modifying the Uighur script to fit Mongolian sounds and words, Genghis Khan freed his people from dependency on foreign scribes and assured that his rulings would be preserved.⁹

The Pillars of Democracy

Genghis Khan included some form of all four pillars of democracy in his government. Some, we know, were traditional parts of Mongolian nomadic culture, predating his rule. Others were parts of surrounding cultures. Genghis Khan contributed additional components, and he combined the various principles into one government structure, which was unique for his time.

Participatory government

Genghis Khan had several ways of including people in setting policy, although he was the one responsible for final decisions. He took the tribal tradition of electing a leader in mass assembly, a hural (khural), to the next step by having a Great Assembly (Ih Hural, or Ikh Khural) of Mongols meet periodically. The usual topic was the matter of war and peace, but they discussed other policy issues as well.¹⁰

Genghis Khan also maintained a Council of Wise Men that met with him regularly. Acting as his cabinet, they helped him think through major policy decisions. While he started his council with Mongol supporters, he eventually included men from other tribes and nations in the council.¹¹

One of the three pillars of Western democracy is participatory government. The other two are human rights/freedoms and rule by law.¹² While true participatory democracy includes all adults–men and women, rich and poor, the Great Assembly and Council of Wise Men are good starting places for participatory government. After all, we consider ancient Athens to be the first democracy, yet only men who were not slaves could take up citizenship responsibilities and vote. Women and slaves were not allowed to participate in the democratic process.¹³ Americans trace the beginning of our democracy to the notion that participatory government meant only the king and the barons in England.

Mongolian participatory democracy preceded Genghis Khan; it was already part of the nomadic tradition, as the hural preceded Genghis Khan’s Ih Hural. But Genghis Khan extended and regularized participatory democracy when he formalized the meetings of the Great Assembly and Council of Wise Men.

Rule by law: the beginning of equality

In 1206, Genghis Khan appointed Shigi-hutuhu to write down Genghis Khan’s legal decisions as well as the rewards (titles, responsibilities, and material goods including captives) he granted his loyal followers. By establishing the rule of law, Genghis Khan lifted his people from fractious tribal groups to law-abiding citizens.

Genghis Khan also made Shigi-hutuhu the first judge. In that capacity, Shigi-hutuhu listened to disputes and transgressions of the law, imposing sentences ranging from fines to death for robbery, deception, adultery, etc. He was also made responsible for the judiciary system throughout the empire.¹⁴

The second pillar of democracy is the rule by law. When Solon established rule by law in ancient Athens (594 BCE),¹⁵ he changed government from forcing people to obey the whims of a single person (king, ruler) or group of people (oligarchy) to obeying laws that apply to everyone, or at least to whole groups of people. By adopting the rule of law, Genghis Khan placed the Mongol nation in the position of a fair and just society, one ruled by laws that everyone had to obey. However, in granting favors to his loyal followers, one of his rewards was to exempt them from punishment for up to nine transgressions.¹⁶

Equality of citizens

Genghis Khan initiated the concept that all citizens are equal in two different ways.

1. Equality through meritocracy. When Genghis Khan built his army, he organized the soldiers into units of 10. Their leader reported to the leader of 10 units, or 100 men. The next leaders were of 1,000 and then 10,000 men (actually, the words and concept came from the ancient Hunnu). Genghis Khan appointed the leader of each unit, for he knew his men well. The Secret History of the Mongols