Democratic Europe is constantly being tested: legitimacy and efficiency. Efficiency also determines the bet of legitimacy. Populist leaders (such as Boris Johnson and Bolsonaro) fail to manage the pandemic, losing legitimacy.
Conversely, authoritarian leaders, deprived of democratic legitimacy, demand its replacement in the field of effectiveness. At a recent meeting of democracies convened by President Joe Biden, the democracies’ unspoken fear of China’s authoritarian system is not just a Cold War confrontation that will be judged on tough power and economic and technological excellence.
Concerns are running high that authoritarian China will become more effective in crisis management, and thus claim legitimacy in the eyes of international public opinion.
Two trends of the time raise the bar of difficulty for open democratic societies:
1. The deep international interdependence, as a factor of strength but also of weakness. Dependence of states on the global value chains and vulnerabilities of open economies (such as European ones) to protectionist policies. Inflation in the West is rising and goods are crowded in ports because China has imposed restrictions.
Even more so, interdependence as an offensive weapon: trade, financial flows, energy, immigration. Chinese sanctions affect Lithuania’s trade, with implications for third countries involved in value chains. The West is threatening to impose sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine, using the international Swift payment system – the same tool that Donald Trump used to hit European companies working with Iran.
We are still seeing the aggressive instrumentalization of immigrants by regimes like Lukashenko or Erdogan. Globalization as an offensive weapon. Even more obvious, the interdependence in the face of global challenges and threats: jihadist terrorism, pandemic, climate change, bring the US, China, Russia closer to the ultimate common adversary. Interdependence divides, but also unites.
2. The rise of new collective subjects, outside and against the institutions of representative democracy. The unmediated entry of citizens, as subversive mob units, into the social and political foreground. This connects Donald Trump and the invaders of January 6, 2021 with the international movement against science, with the fake news, the anti-vaccinators. It is the rise through the social media of the extreme, the inflammatory, the outrageous.
And the multiplication of the message, in the greenhouse of “reverberation chambers”, where marginal elements meet their peers and turn into a popular movement. It is the weakening of the ombudsman institutions of democracy. Fake news against the valid media. Authoritarian demagogues against representative Institutions (coordinated parties, parliaments, independent judiciary).
Great importance of the powerful parties, with processes and roots in society: they make the difference between the mature German republic of co-operative governments and the discount of the US Republicans to an invertebrate watching Trump.
Authoritarianism and freedom against the achievements of liberal democracy. The threat is summed up by the dark saying of the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban “once we believe that Europe is our future. Now we know that we are the future of Europe”. The negative effects of globalization are an urgent external challenge, and the weakening of representative institutions is an insidious internal threat to European liberal democracies.
To this dual threat, Europe is responding: by upgrading the EU to a global “strategically autonomous” geopolitical entity that can assert its power internationally, to defend Europe’s common interests and values. And within the field it responds by enhancing efficiency and legitimacy. This marks the search for better policies with an emphasis on a Europe that protects and the enrichment of democratic institutions with greater citizen participation in the European dialogue, as the conference on the future of Europe seeks.
