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The Future of Europe's Democratic Way of Life

Review products

MartinConway, Western Europe's Democratic Age: 1945–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)
Tillvan Rahden, Demokratie: Eine gefährdete Lebensform (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2019)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

Peter J. Verovšek
Peter J. Verovšek*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Sheffield
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In 2016 the democratic world experienced two major shocks. Although support for illiberal nationalism has been on the rise for at least a decade, the events of that year, starting with the narrow victory of the Leave campaign in the United Kingdom's 23 June referendum on its membership in the European Union (EU), followed less than six months later by Donald J. Trump's election as president of the United States on 8 November, constituted a clear break. In contrast to the postwar liberal democratic order, which legitimized itself through the provision of welfare benefits and effective management of competing interests, these two developments seemingly signaled a return to the more rough-and-tumble, unstable politics of the interwar period.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 638 - 648
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 See Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash,” Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Aug. 2016.

2 For example, Mouffe, Chantal, For a Left Populism (London, 2019)Google Scholar; Stanley, Jason, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York, 2018)Google Scholar; Müller, Jan-Werner, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel, How Democracies Die (New York, 2018)Google Scholar.

3 Mounk, Yascha, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berman, Sheri, “The Pipe Dream of Undemocratic Liberalism,” Journal of Democracy 28/3 (2017), 29–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Citations of both of these works appear parenthetically. When necessary to avoid ambiguity, citations of Conway will be marked MC and those of Van Rahden TvR. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Van Rahden's original German to English are mine.

5 Rahden, Till van, “Clumsy Democrats: Moral Passions in the Federal Republic,” German History 29/3 (2011), 485–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 In an earlier piece, Conway dated the fall to 1973. Conway, Martin, “The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945–1973,” Contemporary European History 13/1 (2004), 67–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bundesrepublik: Eine Wahlmonarchie?” Magnum, 1961, 26–9.

8 Aron, Raymond, “The Situation of Democracy: Western Political Institutions in the Twentieth Century,” Daedalus 90/2 (1961), 350–70Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 361.

10 See Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA, 2014)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Streeck, Wolfgang, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, trans. Camiller, Patrick (London, 2014)Google Scholar.

11 Aron, “The Situation of Democracy,” 360.

12 Verovšek, Peter J., Memory and the Future of Europe: Memory and Integration in the Wake of Total War (Manchester, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Verovšek, Peter J., “Memory, Narrative, and Rupture: The Power of the Past as a Resource for Political Change,” Memory Studies 13/4 (2020), 208–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verovšek, “Collective Memory, Politics, and the Influence of the Past: The Politics of Memory as a Research Paradigm,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 4/3 (2016), 529–43.

14 Moses, A. Dirk, “The Forty-Fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy,” German Politics & Society 17/1 (1999), 94–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

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17 This study has recently been released in a new edition after being out of print for many years. See Adorno, Theodor W., Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, Levinson, Daniel, and Sanford, Nevitt, The Authoritarian Personality (London, 2019)Google Scholar. For a wonderful example of its new salience see Gordon, Peter E., “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” Boundary 2 44/2 (2016), 31–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Crouch, Colin, Post-democracy (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

19 Examples of these comparative inquiries include Mark Mazower, “Weimar 2013?”, Project Syndicate, 31 Dec. 2013, at www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/austerity-and-the-fragility-of-democracy-by-mark-mazower; Daniel Bessner and Udi Greenberg, “The Weimar Analogy,” Jacobin Magazine, 17 Dec. 2016, at www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/trump-hitler-germany-fascism-weimar-democracy.

20 Peter J. Verovšek, “The Loss of European Memory,” Social Europe Journal, 12 Feb. 2019, at www.socialeurope.eu/the-loss-of-european-memory.

21 Rosanvallon, Pierre, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar.