Crisis of Democracy or Crises in Democracies?

Abstract It is a disabling error in political interpretation to conceive regime forms as displaying causal characteristics which extend determinately beyond the preconditions for applying them to the world or identifying them within it. Western democracy can reasonably be thought of as a regime form at all only insofar as it is recognized now to be as clearly instantiated in East, South East and South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and South America, as it is in Europe, North America, or Australasia. It has migrated from Europe certainly, but by now it has migrated far and wide. Across all these regions except perhaps Australasia, as very conspicuously within North America at present, the domestic regime is evidently in some degree of crisis, as are very many other regimes which make no pretence to be democracies and have at best tenuous claims to be representative. To put this in perspective, monarchy was the dominant regime form across the European continent for a millennium, from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, not least because few if any of its inhabitants had any clear conception of what might still be put in its place. Within this horizon of legitimacy most individual monarchies were permanently in some degree of crisis, not in the strict medical sense of an interlude which must resolve itself speedily in death or cure, but in conditions of acute and fraught instability which were far likelier to end in the clarity of the former than in the specious calm of the latter. So too we should reasonably expect it to prove for democracy. In the meantime, crisis for any particular democracy will inevitably prove to be heavily contextual. Much of its relevant context is certain to be local and densely particular, even if the crises themselves occur in an external setting with prominent epochal characteristics and their diffusion is accentuated by transnational incitement or geopolitical adventure. Welcome to the New World Order.