Читать книгу Post-Democracy After the Crises - Colin Crouch - Страница 9

Democracy thrives when there are major opportunities for the mass of ordinary people to participate, through discussion and autonomous organizations, in shaping the agenda of public life, and when they are actively using these opportunities. This is ambitious, an ideal model, which can almost never be fully achieved; but, like all impossible ideals, it sets a marker. It is intensely practical to consider where our conduct stands in relation to an ideal, since in that way we can try to improve. It is essential to take this approach to democracy rather than the more common one, which is to scale down definitions of the ideal so that they conform to what we actually achieve. That way lies complacency, self-congratulation and an absence of concern to identify ways in which democracy is being weakened.

Societies probably come closest to democracy in my maximal sense in the early years of achieving it or after great regime crises, when enthusiasm for democracy is widespread and concern for political developments intense, as people feel their lives are being touched by them; when many diverse groups and organizations of ordinary people share in the task of trying to frame a political agenda that will at last respond to their concerns; when the powerful interests that dominate undemocratic societies are wrong-footed and thrown on the defensive; and when the political system has not quite discovered how to manage and manipulate the new demands. These are democratic moments.

In most of western Europe and North America, we had major democratic moments at some point between the 1930s (in the United States and Scandinavia) and the years immediately following the Second World War (the rest of us). Until those points, few countries had had extensive periods of full male adult suffrage – in even fewer did women enjoy political citizenship. Masses of ordinary people then discovered they had a political voice, and formed parties and other organizations to express their concerns. There had been earlier rumblings of democratic moments, especially around the turn of the century and the time of the First World War, but in several European societies the elites who had been accustomed to having political life serve their interests alone were simply not prepared to accept this invasion of their privileged space. Many of them threw their weight behind fascist and Nazi parties, which, despite speaking a populist rhetoric and making use of mass mobilizations, were deeply hostile to democracy and, once in power, suppressed it with ruthless violence. The defeat of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other fascist leaders in the Second World War and the devastation of their countries led these elites to accept not only the election of governments, but also the pursuit of political agendas promoted by groups from outside their own ranks.

We see this most clearly in the themes that the social democratic and socialist left had been trying to bring to the table since the late nineteenth century: workers’ rights, a welfare state, free or heavily subsidized education and health services, redistributive taxation. But it was not only the left that now adopted these policies. One can, for example, see the impact of democracy on the politics of Roman Catholicism. The church had set its face against all dilutions of aristocratic and other forms of elite rule ever since the French Revolution, and in the twentieth century had supported the fascist suppression of infant democracies in Italy, Portugal and Spain. There was however a Christian democratic wing to Catholic politics, struggling against the prevailing authoritarianism. After the Second World War, this moved from being marginalized by Catholic elites to become the dominant form of Christian politics, for several decades being the most successful group of parties in western Europe. This was all part of the democratic moment.