The term democracy, meaning “rule by the people”, was coined by the Greeks of ancient Athens to describe the system of self-rule of their city-state, which reached its golden age around 430 BC under the talented orator and politician Pericles. It is likely that the Athenians were not the first group of people to adopt such a system (a few places in India have traditions of local democracy that claim older origins), but because the Greeks named it, they had good reason to claim to be “democracy first”, even if a large part of Athenian society – notably women and slaves – could not participate.
The title of oldest continuously functioning democracy is more hotly contested. Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the Isle of Man all have local parliaments founded in the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Vikings were raiding and settling legislatures on the sea islands of Europe’s far north. Iceland’s national parliament, the Althing, dates back to 930 AD, but it spent centuries under Norwegian and Danish rule. Meanwhile, Man and the Faroe Islands remain dependencies of the United Kingdom and Denmark respectively.
The United States is among the oldest modern democracies, but it will only be the oldest if the criteria are refined to disqualify candidates from Switzerland to San Marino. Some historians suggest that the Six Nations (Iroquois) Native American Confederacy, whose tradition of consensus-based government spans eight centuries, is the oldest living participatory democracy. Others point out that true democracy did not emerge at the national level until 1906, when Finland became the first country to abolish race and gender criteria for voting and being in government.
