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May 28, 2012 6:01 AM GMT+0800 Europe s citizens are turning the tables on their ruling elites asausterity bites. In election after election, they send theirgovernments packing and turn instead to fringe parties, some ofwhich evoke the ghosts of Europe s authoritarian and racist past. Yet there are good reasons to believe this is not the 1930s, redux.Something else is going on in Europe that is quite profound: Theshape of European democracy is changing. It is fragmenting andopening new channels for protest and political action that make itless likely some new Hitler or Mussolini will suddenly ride a waveof support to power. It s becoming clear that the political transformation acceleratedby the financial crisis will need to be at least as deep as theeconomic one, and this means the end of mainstream politics. Therewill no longer be a once-per-generation societal consensus, as wasthe case throughout the post-World War II period. Instead, Europewill see a continual process in which governments, voters and civilmovements renegotiate their social and economic contracts. The result, by definition, will be less predictable and moredisorienting. There will also be much more uncertainty about thelevel of entitlements and the extent of provision of publicservices. The rise of boutique parties, including extreme ones,reflects this trend of fragmentation and will be crucial to itsunfolding. Neo-Fascists to Pirates There is hardly a European country that has been spared thephenomenon. It s not only in Greece where we see new entitiesemerging, such as the hard-left Syriza coalition or the neo-NaziGolden Dawn. Also in Germany, a country with strong mass-membership parties, the Pirate Party, sometimes dismissively calledthe cafe-latte and laptop-generation party, has now made it intothree German state parliaments, polling around 8 percent of thevote each time. In the U.K., the fringe Respect party won aparliamentary by-election on a platform of opposing the country spolicies on the Middle East. The U.K. Independence Party scoredunexpectedly well in local elections. It advocates the U.K. swithdrawal from the European Union. These niche parties are filling the gap that has been left bymainstream politicians, with social media their natural territory.When government policies fail, populists call things by their name,attracting support. The anti-immigration sentiment that theNational Front in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlandsor Golden Dawn in Greece are riding, for example, hasn t primarilybeen about the dislike of foreigners. It has been about the lack ofcredible immigration policies. Much of the recent fragmentation and radicalization of politics inEurope is a direct result of the financial crisis and itsmishandling. Europe s political elite failed to explain to peoplethe scale of the economic adjustment that s taking place. But evenbefore the crisis many of these parties were gaining ground, aslarger mainstream ones saw membership bases fall. This longer trend has several causes. First, we now have lowerbarriers of entry into the political system, mostly as a result ofnew communication technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter and othersocial media. Increased transparency can help new movements to growmore quickly, and bring down established actors in cases of abuse.The Arab Spring offers ample testimony for the power of thistechnological accelerator. Impenetrable EU The growing complexity of decision making, especially acute in theEU with its multilayered institutions and shared sovereignty, isanother factor. The conclusions of EU summits, for example, can beimportant, but even for those who are interested, they areimpenetrable. National leaders have fewer and fewer levers left intheir hands to control their economies. Financial markets,meanwhile, are anonymous: They have no phone number to call and nodemocratically accountable representative to invite toparliamentary hearings for direction. All of this increases theattractiveness of single-issue parties because they are more easilyunderstood. Democracy is changing also because its representative version isweakening, while the empty space is filled by new forms of activismand expression such as plebiscites, whether through referenda orpoll taking. People get mobilized directly, for one cause at atime, rather than by the cross-cutting ideologies that definedmainstream political parties. What s more, people have diminishing stakes in the durability ofthe system. One example is the shift from defined- benefit todefined-contribution pensions, which transferred risk fromcompanies and the state to the individual. The role of the state ischanging to that of an insurer of last resort. Citizens feel lesslike stakeholders in the state because they feel their vote nolonger has any real impact on outcomes, while their tangible gainsfrom the system become less certain. This contributes todisaffection. Much of this is reminiscent of the 1930s, a period in which peoplealso felt that their governments were unable to offer solutions, asthey suffered severe economic and social dislocation. Thedifference with the 1930s is that, whereas the only alternativethen appeared to be a radical new party that would seize control ofthe state and put everything right, today people have morealternatives and more channels of expression. That s important because it means people are not helpless, even ifthey are frustrated. So they occupy Wall Street; or drum upFacebook-led campaigns; or, as happened in Italy last year, theyforce a referendum to block the government from launching anuclear-energy industry and privatizing water utilities. The flip side of that coin is that for radical parties, the allureof being in power is much tainted today. Populists are even moreanti-establishment, but they are shrewd enough not to seek powerbecause accepting responsibility doesn t work for them in the newera. So, when Geert Wilders brought down the Dutch government byleading his Party for Freedom out of the coalition recently, itwasn t a sign of strength but of weakness. His support in opinionpolls had been dropping. The anti-austerity agenda was beingexploited by other actors on the country s political scene. Out of Power None of this means people should be less vigilant in opposing therise of neo-fascist politics. But notably, despite all theradicalization of popular feeling in the past few years, with thedeparture of Wilders there is currently no extreme right-wingpopulist party in any governing coalition in the EU. Winston Churchill s dictum that, while imperfect, democracy is thebest of all available political systems remains true. But it sbecoming clear that institutions will have to be reshaped tonegotiate a path between our ever-more-polarized interests and theminimum common denominator catering to society s fundamentalneeds. This will mean a more prominent role for the grassrootsmovements, alongside stronger, more inclusive institutions. There will doubtless be turbulence in the years ahead, and times inEurope when everyone holds their breath for fear of the worst. Yetrepresentative democracy isn t under an existential threat. Thereare new safety valves in the system alongside the old ones, andthey are proving to be surprisingly effective. I am an expert from tinplatesheet.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Tin Plate Coil Manufacturer , China Tin Plate Sheet, Hot Dipped Galvanized Steel Coil,and more.
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