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Democracy's many guises and challenges

By Nick Malkoutzis

The wilting Arab Spring, conflict in Ukraine, slaughter in Iraq and Syria, citizens not trusting their governments and Europeans losing their enthusiasm for the Union most places you look you will see democracys durability being tested. Understanding why this is happening and how it could be addressed has become the most pressing question of our time.

This was the predominant issue debated at the Democracy under Pressure forum hosted by Kathimerini and the International New York Times in Athens for the second year running on Monday to mark International Democracy Day. The Acropolis Museum provided the setting for panel discussions that delved into how our assuredness that liberal democracy would ultimately become universal turned into complacency, which then became seemingly helpless alarm about the way the world is turning.

Democracy should be a verb, not a noun. We cant take democracy for granted, its something were losing sight of in the West, said Chrystia Freeland, an MP with Canadas Liberal Party and one of the panelists in the Setbacks and Advances morning discussion.

The idea that democracy is something that needs to be tended to, like a growing but vulnerable sapling, became a recurring theme on the morning panels as the cases of incomplete revolutions in the Arab world were cited alongside the examples of the growing fractures in the European Union, where an average of some 80 percent of citizens said they do not trust their national governments, according to a Eurobarometer survey published in May.

Complacency

Complacency is the greatest threat to democracy, said Kathimerini English Edition editor Nikos Konstandaras, drawing parallels between the ways in which South Africa ran into problems after apartheid and Greece foundered on the rocks in the years following the collapse of the military dictatorship.

Russians' first experiences of democracy were weakness, the absence of the state and international humiliation, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to the way in which political and economic reformers lost control of the country in the 1990s due to their blinkered approach.

We became too timid, too compromised in the way we tended to democracy, argued former Prime Minister Costas Simitis on the second panel of the day: Money and Votes.

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Democracy's many guises and challenges