{"id":12301,"date":"2011-11-29T09:09:49","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T14:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12301"},"modified":"2017-11-02T12:01:11","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T16:01:11","slug":"european-democracy-is-now-the-preserve-of-right-wing-populism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/11\/29\/european-democracy-is-now-the-preserve-of-right-wing-populism\/","title":{"rendered":"European democracy is now “the preserve of right-wing populism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frank Furedi<\/a> on the urge to omit democracy from European government:<\/p>\n

\n

Over the past month, it has become clear that the European Union doesn\u2019t simply suffer from a democratic deficit; rather, it has decided that in the current climate of crisis and uncertainty, the institutions of government must be insulated and protected from public pressure. In Brussels, and among an influential coterie of European opinion-makers, the idea that ordinary people have the capacity to self-govern is dismissed as at best a naive prejudice, and at worst a marker for right-wing populism.<\/p>\n

As we shall see, this desire to renounce the politics of representation is by no means confined to EU technocrats. To no one\u2019s surprise, many businesspeople and bankers also prefer the new unelected governments of Greece and Italy to regimes that are accountable to their electorates. And such elitist disdain for nations\u2019 democratic representative institutions is also shared by sections of the left and the intelligentsia, too. So in his contribution on the crisis of democracy, J\u00fcrgen Habermas, the leading leftist German philosopher, writes off national electorates as \u2018the preserve of right-wing populism\u2019 and condemns them as \u2018the caricature of national macrosubjects shutting themselves off from each other\u2019.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it isn\u2019t the old-fashioned conservative detractors of the multitude who are at the forefront of the current cultural turn against democratic will-formation — no, it is liberal advocates of expert-driven technocratic rule who are now the most explicit denouncers of democracy. The current political attack on the principles of representative democracy is founded on three propositions. First it is claimed that the people cannot be trusted to support policies that are necessary for the preservation and improvement of society. Secondly, it is suggested that there is an important trade-off to be made between democracy and efficiency, and that in a time of crisis the latter must prevail over the former. And finally, anti-democratic ideologues believe that governments, especially democratic governments, have lost the capacity to deal with the key problems facing societies in today\u2019s globalised world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frank Furedi on the urge to omit democracy from European government: Over the past month, it has become clear that the European Union doesn\u2019t simply suffer from a democratic deficit; rather, it has decided that in the current climate of crisis and uncertainty, the institutions of government must be insulated and protected from public pressure. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,84],"tags":[86,766,337,1171,217],"class_list":["post-12301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-government","tag-criticism","tag-democracy","tag-eu","tag-populism","tag-rights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3cp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12302,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12301\/revisions\/12302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}