On Tortoises, Nutella and Democracy

Democracy is fragile and delicate. The first one, the Athenian, was the hardiest: it lasted a good two hundred years, until it was brought down from within by oligarchs—with the help of the wicked Spartans from outside. A story not without lessons for our time.

Then it was dark for a very long time. Until the Enlightenment, which did not bring democracy but paved the way to it—via the beginnings of modern constitutional order in England at the end of the 17th century, to the American Revolution, which brought the first modern republic, and the French, which a few years later added human rights and freedoms.

In the second half of the 19th century, quite a few countries already had at least the outlines of some institutions of modern democracy, but the real breakthrough came after the end of the First World War, when constitutional republics sprang up like mushrooms after rain on the ruins of the collapsed empires across Europe. A good 2,300 years separated them from the end of Athenian democracy. Twenty years later most of them had gone down the drain, at least as far as constitutional republicanism is concerned. With rare exceptions, they all reached the Second World War in various forms of experimentation with more authoritarian models of government.

The end of the Second World War brought a new era of modern democracy and a European model based on social security, respect for the paramountcy of human rights and political freedoms, the democratic rule of law, and free and fair elections. For some, the democratic flowering began after the end of the hot war; the other part of Europe had to wait until the cold war that followed had ended too.

Today we are where we are. To those who believe that democracy represents a historically logical, inevitable, final and irreversible stage in the development of human society, I would point out that democracies in the modern era have not managed to survive, all told, even a hundred years. In the Seychelles you will find tortoises that live considerably longer.

One of the most fascinating chapters in this story is the fate of liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe—in the part that had to wait for it the longest. After long decades of longing, enthusiasm for democracy quickly began to wane, until in many cases—as most recent elections show—it has almost completely fizzled out. More and more people swear by changes in which not only human rights but also the other safeguards that protect individuals and social groups from mistreatment and the arbitrariness of executive power will no longer be paramount. Changes that, after this brief excursion into a society with more freedom, will return us to the state from which we wanted to escape for so long.

Why enthusiasm for democracy in this part of Europe was so short-lived is particularly hard to understand, since at least by material indicators it can be argued that living standards have improved substantially—perhaps not for absolutely everyone, but at least on average.

There are several explanations. Here I will mention only some that I find particularly interesting and that, in my opinion, together with others make up the mosaic of reasons why, after waiting so long for it, we so quickly stopped caring about liberal democracy.

One of them is the theory of relative deprivation, which says that people feel deprived not because they actually don’t have enough, but because they have less than others (especially those they think really don’t deserve it)—or less than they think they should have.

In the context of the arrival of democracy in the former socialist countries, we can add disappointment at what they actually got compared with what they believed they would get when they watched Western advertisements across the Iron Curtain.

Among the many who worked on the theory of relative deprivation was the American political scientist Ted Gurr, a member of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In 1970 Gurr published the book Why Men Rebel, in which he argued that relative deprivation causes frustration, which turns into anger, which can turn into physical violence. The cycle need not always run to a violent end; frustrations can also be expressed differently—at elections, for example.

While Gurr places his theory within a given community, the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, with his thesis on the impact of Nutella on attitudes toward Europe and the Western model of democracy, placed the theory of relative deprivation in an international context.

When, years ago, the claim emerged in Eastern Europe that Nutella there was of lower quality than in the West, Krastev pointed out that the reaction went beyond a question of taste or recipe. The affair of the inferior Nutella is not a story about a hazelnut spread but about dignity. People saw in it a message that they were being treated as second-class—as proof that the promised equality between East and West had still not been fully delivered.

But it was the British historian Mark Mazower who, in my opinion, came even closer to understanding the most elemental reasons for the rapid disillusionment with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. In his book Dark Continent (1998), he writes about the mistaken belief that the fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by a flowering of democracy in this part of Europe.

In reality, Mazower argues, after 1989 these countries were exposed to the crudest form of market economy, while democracy still had to be built. And because we mistakenly believed we already had it, we shaped our attitude toward democratic values as a reaction to a system that, with economic shock therapies, growing inequality and social disorientation, quickly undermined any serious prospects for democratic development.

Mazower advances a thesis that makes it possible to explain at the same time the causes of the crisis of democracy we feel today both in Eastern and Central Europe and in Western countries with a longer democratic experience. The latter arrived at the zero point of today’s dissatisfaction with democracy from the opposite direction, after gradually dismantling the postwar model of the welfare state, which after 1945 stabilized democracy by reducing uncertainty.

After 1989, the turn toward deregulation and cutting social protections led them into a situation similar to that of the newly minted Eastern democracies—with similar consequences for the social foundations liberal democracy needs in order to survive at all. The West lost these foundations after 1989; the East never really established them.

If we want liberal democracy to survive, we must draw an important lesson from this: people will support and trust it if they have material proof that politics that invokes democratic values is willing and able to recognize and respond to their legitimate expectations. A functioning democracy needs a sense of personal and social security to survive, because without it there is no confidence in the future. And when confidence is gone, frustration sets in, then anger, and then the mess we have.

I don’t believe we will ever reach the end of history, but we could at least try to make democracy survive longer than the tortoises of the Seychelles. Perhaps at least half a millennium, like the Greenland shark. But that will take a lot, a lot of Nutella.