Good Government
For a long time after World War II—those “Glorious Thirty Years” up to the end of the 1970s—these relations, and the rules and institutions thereby engendered, saw extraordinary levels of well-being for the major advanced capitalistic countries, the countries we are mainly concerned with here.
There is more than a grain of truth in the idea that nostalgia for the political systems of those times (and thus also for the great, stable mass parties that were prevalent then) was due more to the well-being that came with the spectacular economic growth than to their democratic quality, certainly far from perfect in many nation-states.The turbulence of the 1970s was, however, followed by a very different phase at the international level, which saw growth slowing down in the advanced capitalistic countries. As from the end of the 1980s, this phase was destined to develop into the globalized capitalism we know today. At the national level, a great many countries tried to react with reforms to enhance the competitiveness of their economies and the efficiency of their public institutions, and all too often the reforms aggravated the living conditions of the less privileged classes, contributing in no small way to the unpopularity of the governments that implemented them. Again, there is quite a strong element of truth in the idea that part of the discredit befalling the democracy of our times is due more to these difficult external conditions than to a drastic deterioration in the quality of the democratic processes—more to the output than to the input of democracy The basic reasons for the highly topical “crisis of democracy” are to be seen in a range of issues: lagging economic growth, unemployment and precarious employment, increasing inequality, disappointed hopes of continuous social progress, waves of immigration that wars and poverty in the less developed countries are driving onto the shores of the richer nations—all negative phenomena that the single nation-states are unable to cope with.
Thus, to the two broad causes of the difficulties of democracy, on the input side and on the output side, we should also add a condition of context, which lies at the origin of the difficulties that the single nation-states come up against in satisfying the aspirations of their citizens and guaranteeing them “good government.” Many critics lament the loss of sovereignty of the single nation-states in the face of international finance, the great multinationals and even the supranational institutions themselves.
Even where these external influences are most evident—and we will take a look at the state of affairs in the eurozone countries, where they are most felt—the difficulties that some national democracies are experiencing today are not due to a loss of sovereignty: they had not enjoyed greater sovereignty in the boom years, when it was easier for them to satisfy their citizens’ aspirations. Today the individual democracies are troubled by two other phenomena. To begin with, there is the international economic policy regime, while at the same time in some cases they have inherited internal economic-institutional structures from a less complicated past, unsuited to international competition in a neoliberal, globalized context. In the case of the international economic policy regime there is little that a nonhegemonic country can do, while modifying the internal conditions of competitiveness is a formidable task that takes a very long time. However, democracy being a national matter, individual citizens focus their dissatisfaction on the governments of their countries, unable to recreate the more favorable conditions of the recent past. And democratic political competition often generates parties and movements that channel this discontent toward illusory objectives, accentuating the populistic-demagogic features that the critics of democracy have decried since the times of the ancient Greeks.4.