Democracy and Its Discontents

Charles S. Maier

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1994

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Summary:  The malaise that currently sours public opinion in Europe, Japan and North America is a manifestation of a crisis, not economic or political, but moral. The Gilded Age that accompanied the rise of new nation-states in the late nineteenth century ushered in a similar era of civic discontent. Today, exhausted by the end of the Cold War, people are disillusioned with great projects, skeptical of reform and distrustful of politicians. Populists fuel old resentments and xenophobia as they promise national renewal. This crisis of the democracies could lead to either an era of reform or disintegration. America can help prevent the latter.

Charles S. Maier is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University.

MORAL CRISES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

How should one make sense of the malaise that currently sours public opinion in the countries of Europe, in Japan and North America? It reveals itself most saliently in tremendous electoral volatility as political parties are deserted for new formations and leaders. Consider the disintegration of Japan’s Liberal Democrats; the obliteration of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives; the populist appeal of Ross Perot; the attrition of the mainstream German parties for Greens on the left and xenophobes on the right; the willingness of voters in Poland and former East Bloc countries to vote for recycled communists; the Zhirinovsky phenomenon in Russia. Most recently Italian voters turned sharply toward the unconventional electoral formations of the Italian "Freedom Alliance": the refurbished neo-fascists, the plebiscitary fan clubs of television magnate Silvio Berlusconi, and the pugnacious regionalists of the Northern Leagues.

Elections provide only the most spectacular index of public impatience. Political leaders have found it difficult to follow through on laboriously negotiated national pledges such as Meech Lake, Maastricht or the North American Free Trade Agreement. Great breakthroughs become mired in complexity: How many outside Brussels still retain the 1992 vision of the European Community as a transforming venture? And social cohesion apparently frays at a level even more basic than politics. Citizens become uneasy at the noticeable presence of the foreign-born, worry about the burdens on welfare and the pool of jobs, and view imported mores, languages and religious manifestations as a threat to national identity. Casual resort to deadly force seems to have become more acceptable, whether among American gangs or German skinheads. Commentators point out, and everyday life seems to confirm, a general erosion of civility, which has taken on "an ideological edge."1 Only a few years after Eastern Europeans sought to recover the autonomy of civil society, the quality of civil society, Western and Eastern, seems significantly degraded. No wonder that the common exhilaration that attended the collapse of communism has largely dissipated. How difficult it is today to recover the spirit of the crowds in Leipzig or Wenceslaus Square.

Do these manifestations mean that democracies, as some might propose, have become ungovernable? Are they more unruly? Certainly they are not in comparison to 15 or 20 years ago. There are probably fewer public demonstrations, fewer bombings, fewer assassinations, fewer strikes, more moderate wage claims than during the 1970s. (To be sure, the record may yet deteriorate further.) In the 1970s, too, critics discerned a crisis of governability. What they usually referred to, however, were excessive demands on the state and economy, as postwar growth deteriorated into stagflation. The crisis then was purportedly the result of "overloaded democracy," shortsighted mass pursuit of present entitlements at the expense of saving for the future. Whether or not this analysis is accepted for the 1970s, today’s discontents are different. Citizens do not so much confront their states with demands as they back away in disillusion. If there is a crisis, it is of a different sort.

WHAT KIND ...

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