During Recent Years, The Notion of The Democratic deficit has become, together with subsidiarity, or transparency, one of the most popdar subjects for conferences on European Union. While almost everyone seems to agree that a democratic deficit exists, it is far from certain that there is a general understanding of what is meant by it.

The most radical meaning would be that the European Union (EU) as such is undemocratic and that its decision-making does not correspond to democratic norms. Quite often when national governments have to explain unpopular decisions of the EU, responsibility for these uncomfortable situations is attributed to a faceless monster, the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’. The assumption is that a very strong central authority exists which embodies the power of decision-making and that democratic accountability of this central authority either does not exist or at least is not sufficiently guaranteed. In other words, the EU institutional system does not comply with democratic norms. This is by far the most extreme definition of a democratic deficit.

The Classical Model for Broadcasting Structures in Europe is one based on national autarchy and linguistic exclusivity. The model derives from the introduction of radio broadcasting in the 1920s. As always in the field of communications, developments art supply-led rather than demand-led. Thus the early radio manufacturers established local radio stations to demonstrate their new equipment at a time when governments had not formulated any policies to deal with the new phenomenon.

FREQUENTLY IT HAPPENS IN HISTORY THAT REVOLUTION is followed by restoration or sometimes by reaction. The events that have convulsed Italy for the past two years can be described as a legal revolution. The Italian elections of 27 and 28 March can be seen as forms of restoration, or reaction, or continuation of revolution by other means. From 1992, the enthusiastic popular acclaim which accompanied the thundering clang of prison doors and the scandalous tumble of famous heads resulted in an unexpected final conclusion: the victory of an assorted coalition of rightist and moderate forces, the Freedom Alliance, led by the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, which gained an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies and a qualified majority in the Senate. It was the most important Italian election since 1948, when, after the abolition of the monarchy, Stalinists attempted to seize power democratically.

More Than Four Years Have Passed Since The Uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. If the revolt of the Romanians, after years in which Ceausescu encountered practically no opposition to his personal harsh dictatorship, surprised the entire world, the subsequent evolution of Romanian society seemed to return to the sad pattern of old: a country with little democratic tradition and maybe the most damaged by communism of all Eastern European countries would be expected to meet great difficulties and take more time to become a freemarket, liberal-based democracy. What is left of this prognosis more than four years after Ceausescu's fall?

Communism is dead, but the communist spirit continues to hover over Eastern Europe. In most of the states there is a peculiar resilience of the class structures imposed by the previous regime. This is not a new situation, which could explain in part the relative popularity of that system even in the countries where it was imported from abroad by Soviet military occupation. To speak nowadays about the popularity of communism, however relative, may sound like an affront to the numerous people who either perished in gaols and camps or barely survived after almost fifty years of political homogenization and isolation.

Spanish America Has Moved From The Status of Debt crisis region to that of emerging market in the past few years, and has done so without great political upheaval. So can economic liberalism and democratic institutions work together in the region? Neither phenomenon is really new in Spanish America. However they have often been regarded as potentially antagonistic or even mutual exclusive. Indeed there have been times when the two concepts seemed to be competitors rather than allies. If they are now (mostly) allies, this is not primarily because old-fashioned modernization theory has been proved right all along, but because of changes in both the internationalenvironment (political as well as economic) and in the character of democratic politics in much of Spanish America.

The First Chapter of Book xx of L'esprzt Des Lois, entitled simply Du Commerce, begins by contrasting the Old and the New, that is virtue and moral purity on the one hand and commerce on the other: