I wrote this in 2008; since then the Donalds, BoJos and Orbáns have sadly proven it right. Democracy is vulnerable.

With democratisation increasingly topping a turbulent U.S. foreign policy agenda, the question of what makes democracy work is becoming all the more acute. Drawing on the pains and gains of its unification, Europe has valuable insights to offer.

We Europeans are a cautious bunch. History has instilled in us a sense of doubt, an awareness of how vulnerable the ideals of liberty and reason can be against the power of persuasion and fear. In the 2,500 years since Cleisthenes reformed the Athenian constitution, we have been through Nero and Attila, Machiavelli and the Borgias, Hitler and Stalin — to name but just a few. As if suspended on the strings of a monstrous puppet show in the hands of cold-blooded tyrants, we have become almost physically aware that democracy can often be fragile — as fragile as the pottery on whose shards the men of Athens carved the names of their political foes.

Freedom’s unpleasant aftertaste

In 1989, the Iron Curtain fell and freedom finally triumphed in Europe. Yet almost twenty years after communism collapsed, a large part of the continent is still haunted by the spectre of its authoritarian past.

A revealing example comes from Hungary, where the reburial of Imre Nagy, the country’s prime minister during its 1956 uprising against Soviet rule, was the single most important symbolic event of the transition to democracy. Eighteen years and five free elections after the regime change, János Kádár, whose pro-Soviet puppet government executed Nagy for his role in the uprising, was rated as the greatest figure in the country’s modern history in a survey carried out by the education ministry — another symbolic burial for Nagy and an indication that democracy’s growing pains can be unbearable even for relatively homogeneous societies that lack the racial and religious tensions tormenting emerging democracies in Asia and the Middle East. Understanding the reason why there is a mounting backlash against democratic ideals in a free, politically stable and economically viable eastern Europe will have implications in removing the stumbling blocks to democratic development in other parts of the world.

‘The essential trouble’, Robert F. Kennedy wrote in 1964, is ‘poverty — poverty of goods and poverty of understanding’. In eastern Europe, democracy has been effective as a framework for eliminating the poverty of goods. There is a strong (but by no means direct) correlation between economic and political progress, with the corollary that democratic development is increasingly being defined in economic terms. Come election time, voters are encouraged to ask themselves if they are ‘better off than four years ago’ — a slogan that has long outlived the Reagan era as the litmus test of democratic leadership and political legitimacy.

The by-products of equating democratic evolution with free market growth are in evidence throughout eastern Europe. With widening income gaps and laissez-faire leaving significant parts of the population in need of state assistance to make ends meet, many feel excluded from the rule of law and frustrated at their diminishing capacity to seize the rising number of opportunities supposedly available to them. Frustration, in turn, gives rise to apathy and anger, which are manifested in growing intolerance and a lack of initiative that further impede democratic development and locally generated economic growth.

Democracy: futures or forwards?

East European countries are democracy’s ‘purple states’ — demilitarized battlegrounds of political development where democratic institutions are already in place but their workings inadequately reflect the ideals democracy promises to fulfil. But the moral mortgage this inflicts on ‘flawed democracies’ (as the majority of east European regimes are classified in The Economist’s 2007 Democracy Index) is by no means unique to countries grappling with a totalitarian past.

In Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, Uncle Sam’s powers are commensurate with the amount of faith people have in the ideals that America stands for. If people’s belief in freedom wavers, Uncle Sam’s strength and stamina decline. Perhaps it is not just in comic book miniseries that democracy functions as a reciprocal link between practice and principle. Democracy’s fundamental promise is that what is right is, in principle, also what works. In practice, this also means that a democratic society’s definition of what is right is determined by a consensus on what works — a thought utterly alien to totalitarian regimes, which are built on the idea that atrocities against individual rights and common sense are justifiable on the grounds of the greater good. Obviously, this idea is not only immoral; it is unworkable, if only in the long run.

As totalitarian streaks appear in full-fledged democracies with lies and torture entering the arsenal of democratically elected leaders and market fundamentalism substituting for genuine economic policy measures, the growing gap between democratic principle and practice is emerging as the biggest threat to democracy today. What makes democracy vulnerable more than any outside political, economic or military threat is the inherent hazards of its failure ‘to live out the true meaning of its creed’.

Such discrepancies between democratic ideals and their implementation are symptomatic of a leadership crisis. They demonstrate a poverty of understanding that pervades the overwhelming majority of governments in the world and is gradually ‘trickling down’ to every layer of democratic society. Thinking in terms of four-year election cycles, democratic leaders exhibit a thinly veiled shortage of vision and brush aside problems of real consequence in order to maintain sufficient levels of euphoria until the next election. Present-day politics has built up a long-term responsibility deficit with the result that few people actually have a clear picture of where the democratic world is headed in the next few decades and how it intends to get there.

Nowhere is the yearning for a change in leadership more apparent than in the United States of America. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the current presidential campaign is that, whichever candidate American voters decide to elect in November, the next U.S. president will be a vulnerable one — not because of age, race or gender; rather, because of the host of issues that democratic leaders have been failing to discuss with voters over the past few decades. Given that these are the issues that will define our future, perhaps it is high time we got started.