Democracy: History of a Crisis Without End

Abstract

Over the last years it has been increasingly discussed about the crisis of democracy, a process that does not only concern the new realities, but also and perhaps more surprisingly the Western world. This crisis of the Western world seems to be at the root of the weakness of the democratic principle and the principles related to it. In particular, the following three seem to be the events of the new millennium that led to the crisis of democracy, intimately connected to the loss of the cultural supremacy of the West, the cradle of democracy: the globalization; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the economic crisis that began in 2008, which further weakened the West to the point of pushing the non-Western countries, all aiming at pursuing a health unprecedented material, to favor new political solutions than the classical liberal democracy. Accepting democracy as a concept semantically always open and, therefore, always in crisis, is the challenge awaiting the community of political scientists.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n6p402