Once upon a time, there was a civilization that sat comfortably in an armchair. The West. At the dawn of the 21st century, she lived in the cozy certainty of “the end of History”: it was written, our principles would spread throughout the world due to the attractiveness of the rule of law of on the one hand, and the consumer society on the other. But in recent years, History seems to be blowing in gusts at our windows again.
Geopolitical storms, first: the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the Hamas pogrom in Israel, the spectacular rise to power of China – the seesaw of which we have not yet measured -, the rantings of the “Global South” etc. These multifaceted pressures exerted “from outside” attest that liberal societies had taken their dreams for realities. On a global scale, democracy is not doing well and is not on the rise: the undeniable attraction that we offer from a material point of view is now counterbalanced, in anti-West propaganda, by the ahead of our political weaknesses and the repulsive effects of “postmodernity”.
To the exogenous threat is added an endogenous threat: for four decades, the rise of globalization – which imposes its constraints from the outside – combined with the advent of individualism – whose limitless aspirations have blurred the benchmarks since the interior – put our societies under great tension.
The West as a whole is going through a crisis of democracy, the consequences of which are difficult to predict. It’s the philosopher Marcel Gauchet who sums it up best: “No one really questions the regime itself anymore but, at the same time, almost no one understands what it takes for it to work.” We live in a democracy without democrats We no longer accept the ‘knot’ which closely links things which coexist with difficulty and which must nevertheless go together, the freedom of people, with the contradiction of points of view which it implies and. the need to make decisions together that are binding on everyone We realize that democracy is not only ‘the worst regime except all the others’ to use Churchill’s famous phrase, but above all the one. harder to operate.”
Dismaying spectacle
Can this crisis in democracy be resolved by a mechanism of adjustments spurred by the ballot box? It’s a scenario that involves decades of electoral gamesmanship – basically: alternating between “populist” attacks and corrections, in response, from the liberals. But will the various emergencies that beset us leave time for these long-term adaptations?
There remains a more optimistic scenario: the emergence “out of fatigue” in the face of the dismaying spectacle offered by public life in all our countries, of a generation of political entrepreneurs such as existed in the past, who knew how to become aware new problems that presented themselves to them. Once upon a time, there was a civilization that was going to have to get up from its armchair, shake its legs, mobilize its sense of history and its intelligence.