Does democracy in Europe still have a chance?

Abstract

The theory of the volonté générale still is the valid normative theory of democracy. It is an effective normative reality within modern constitutional law, and for political sociology it represents the actual theory of deliberative democracy (I). However, its first realization in the French parliamentary system of 1848 failed due to the persistence and arbitrariness of the capitalist system and the capitalist state (II). The realization of parliamentary democracy –first social and then also sexual and cultural– only begun a hundred years after the 1848 revolution (III). Class compromise and the systemic equilibrium of the contradiction between capitalism and democracy failed because of technically induced problems of development (“post-industrial society), as well as due to hegemonic class interest and the self-conservation of the state and the economy. As a consequence, the great cultural, political-sexual and feminists achievements of democratic capitalism (“rights revolution”) (IV) became class privileges (V). This regressive development, triggered by nation-states themselves, could not be stopped by the European Union; so the Union’s rapid expansion and increase of power acted counterproductively by amplifying rather than softening the negative consequences of globalization (VI). The way out of this deadly mix of authoritarianism and self-regulated market economy is the resumption of the program of democratic socialism (VII). This program can never take place in one country only but, as Marx correctly observed, in all countries at the same time. This would involve a risky but inevitable first step, namely: a broad parlamentarization of the EU and the Eurozone (VIII).