Table Of Contentchallenges to democracy in the 21st century
Democracy under Threat
A Crisis of Legitimacy?
edited by Ursula van Beek
Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century
Series Editor
Hanspeter Kriesi
Department of Political and Social Science
European University Institute
San Domenico Di Fiesole, Italy
Democracy faces substantial challenges as we move into the 21st
Century. The West faces malaise; multi-level governance structures
pose democratic challenges; and the path of democratization rarely runs
smoothly. This series examines democracy across the full range of these
contemporary conditions. It publishes innovative research on estab-
lished democracies, democratizing polities and democracy in multi-level
governance structures. The series seeks to break down artificial divisions
between different disciplines, by simultaneously drawing on political
communication, comparative politics, international relations, political
theory, and political economy.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14889
Ursula van Beek
Editor
Democracy under
Threat
A Crisis of Legitimacy?
Editor
Ursula van Beek
Transformation Research Unit (TRU),
Department of Political Science
Stellenbosch University
Stellenbosch, South Africa
Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-319-89452-2 ISBN 978-3-319-89453-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89453-9
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We would like to dedicate the book to our dear friend and colleague, the
late Prof. Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, who had travelled with us on our
intellectual journey from the start and who thus made a major contribution
to the creation of TRU.
P
reface
Peeking cautiously from behind the erstwhile Iron Curtain, as this
author had done, democracy seemed an unattainable dream—the epit-
ome of individual freedom, political liberty and an enviable lifestyle. In
the relatively stable bipolar world of the time, definitions were simple:
black and white, with few shades of grey in between. When that world
collapsed, a host of new democracies sprang up, indicating a similarly
positive reading of democracy from other authoritarian vantage points
across Africa, East Asia and Latin America.
The Western liberal model was emulated by emerging democracies
since the onset of the Third Wave of democratization in the early 1970s
(Huntington 1991). However, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989
strongly reinforced the conviction about the model’s viability, so much
so that the demise of communism was described as “the end of history”
(Fukuyama 1992). The anticipated universalization of Western liberal
democracy was to be the final form of human government that would
mark the end of the ideological evolution of mankind. The legitimacy of
democracy had reached its global peak.
While it is true that the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc accelerated
the democratization process with the number of democracies reaching a
record height, Fukuyama’s bold assertion that liberal democracy won the
day globally did not materialize. Instead, what followed was not so much
the replication of liberal democracy in different corners of the world, as
the emergence of an internally greatly diversified new empirical category
vii
viii PREFACE
known as “young democracies” that have sprung up in widely varied cul-
tural contexts.
The Wall Street Crash of 2008 and the resultant global economic
recession underscored more clearly the fact that cultural relativism rather
than normative universalism had set in. The global crisis accentuated the
limits of Western-led approach to political and economic global devel-
opment and integration by exposing diverse modes of insertion into the
world system by individual countries and regions. The case in point has
been the upsurge in autocratic regimes and the strengthening of existing
ones, such as Russia and, most notably, China whose economic success
implicitly validates the authoritarian development model.
In the increasingly more fragmented world, the urge to identify the
“enemy” that defines us has once again surfaced, highlighting contrasts
between cultural and religious values and giving rise to a nationalist
brand of populism, which is inherently undemocratic. At the same time,
globalization—the single most profound source of international transfor-
mation since the Industrial Revolution—exerts ever-growing pressures
on democracy.
The key question this book poses is whether the legitimacy of democ-
racy has been compromised as a result of so reconfigured a global land-
scape. The question is valid because political legitimacy is the wellspring
of a regime to efficiently function and persist. The chapters that follow
make it clear there are no easy answers to this leading question. Besides
the impacts of economic globalization, digitalization and mass migra-
tion, which variably affect all countries, each national state is also subject
to their own internal political and social dynamics, history and regional
influences. The quality of democracy, and consequently its legitimacy, is
therefore affected by different sets of factors and diverges across coun-
tries and regions.
The opening theoretical section of this book sets all these issues in
context. It introduces the reader to the fluctuating fortunes of democ-
racy over time, it exposes the perplexing complexity of the world in
which we live today, and it explains what this complexity might imply for
democracy and its legitimacy.
The volume builds on a history of monitoring democracy for more
than two decades in several countries across all the major cultural
regions of the world. The consecutive projects on democracy were
PREFACE ix
first conducted by an international team of researchers known as the
Transformation Research Initiative (TRI) based at the Stellenbosch
University in South Africa. Since 2015, the informal team has been
institutionalized at the university as the Transformation Research Unit
(TRU).
Beginning with two comparative studies of South Africa and Poland
(van Beek 1995; Wnuk-Lipinski 1998), the sample was subsequently
expanded to include East Germany (later unified Germany), Chile, South
Korea and Turkey (Van Beek 2005, 2010; Van Beek and Wnuk-Lipinski
2012; Taiwan Journal of Democracy 2015). Three criteria guided the
original choice of the included countries:
• They had to have emerged from different types of authoritarian
regimes
• They had to be maximally diversified in terms of culture so as to fit
the “most different cases - most similar outcomes” research design,
and
• They had to be the success stories in democratization in their
respective geographical locations.
Poland, South Africa, Chile and South Korea were chosen on the basis
of Freedom House indicators, which in the early post-transition period
placed each of those countries as a democratization leader; Turkey was
added as an example of a successful democracy in the Islamic world.
Unified Germany and Sweden became the control cases.
The story of those countries since those heady days is first told by
combining macro-analyses with the analyses of micro-level developments
to identify factors that promote consolidation, are responsible for lack of
consolidation or contribute to democratic de-consolidation.
A closer look at the cases starts with Poland, Turkey and South Africa.
These three countries are examined individually because they have
become the most troubling ones in the sample and jointly illustrate the
divergent ways in which democracy can be, and has been, eroded to the
possible detriment of its legitimacy.
The four remaining countries are assessed within their regional con-
texts for two different reasons. The first two, Chile and South Korea,
remain highly rated democracies with no evident internal legitimacy
problems, but each one is located in a region where potential challenges
x PREFACE
to democracy are more likely to come from outside the two countries’
own borders. In Latin America, Chile is the exception rather than the
rule in democratic quality, whereas South Korea and other democracies
in the region, more specifically Taiwan, are under the shadow of their
giant non-democratic neighbour, China.
The two control cases of Germany and Sweden are also examined
in the wider Western European context. This is because the region as
a whole is affected by the same globalization-induced problems ranging
from financial crises to immigration, and from climate change to terror-
ism, all of which impede their problem-solving capacity as nation states.
The starting assumption here is that if a legitimacy deficit should be
observed even in the well-established Western democracies, then it can
be concluded that democracy as a form of government is in crisis.
Two aspects bearing heavily on democracy receive attention at the
global level. The first considers the nature and severity in which globali-
zation puts under pressure the sustainability of welfare states, linking this
discussion to the recent emergence of populism in a growing number of
middle-income and high-income countries. The other aspect reviewed is
the impact on the legitimacy of democracy of the global “screen culture”
embedded in Television and the Internet. The works of George Orwell
and Aldous Huxley provide the metaphorical context for this discussion.
No book exploring the long string of problems democracies face
today should end without offering at least a tentative suggestion at a
remedy that might help democracy overcome its current difficulties. The
final chapter does just that. It proposes for democracy to learn from the
long history of ideas and experiences of diplomacy. The lessons are badly
needed!
Stellenbosch, South Africa Ursula van Beek
references
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The end of history and the last man. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Huntington, Samuel. 1991. The Third Wave. Democratization in the late twenti-
eth century. Norman: Oklahoma University Press.
Taiwan Journal of Democracy. 2015. 11 (1): 1–162. This edition of the jour-
nal was dedicated entirely to publishing the findings of a research project
conducted by the Transformation Research Unit (TRU) focused on the
