Biennial colloquy on the state of Democracy

Closing remarks by Claudio Lodici

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

We have reached the end of the Biennial Colloquy on the State of Democracy, and it is my task to provide some closing remarks. It is a sad task, because we shall be closing the door on lively and stimulating debate, as well as bidding farewell to friends and associates. However, it is also a privilege and an honor to be entrusted with such an undertaking, at a gathering of such an eminent community of people from different parts of Europe and the US, in the fields of government, academia and the media.
As with all such events — and this conference has been an outstanding example — our minds have been assailed by a torrent of ideas, information, statistics, interpretations and visions, and it will probably be a day or two before we can sift through them all and consolidate our own personal perspectives. There is, indeed, plenty to reflect upon and, if this in any way enhances our individual and collective contributions to grasp the nature of the challenges for a 21st century democracy, then the seminar can truly be adjudged a success.
Democracy constitutes a uniquely legitimate type of political regime, and that said, it is the only type of order that can tackle the problems which have arisen in the 21st century.
I would like to make five points about democracy:
1. The rise of democracies has been an uneven process; progress has not been gradual, but democratization has come in several waves.
2. Democracy as “the rule of the majority” is not sufficient; that system needs to be tempered by means of legal and institutional mechanisms, such as rights and freedoms, but also constitutional checks and balances (and therefore the division of powers), in order to avoid populism and demagoguery. Now we see the use of democracy to undermine such safeguards and in the end liberal democracy itself. Illiberal vs. liberal democracy, as we noted in yesterday’s first session.
3. We cannot predict when a country will become democratic, but we know (or used to know) the chances of a country remaining a democracy, which were linked to a minimum per capita income. However, what is now happening in Turkey and in Eastern Europe is challenging such findings.
4. Democracies need a congenial international order to thrive. The great expansion of democracy in East Asia and Europe was supported by the US and the EU. In Asia, the alliance system centered on the US played a role in democratic transitions; EU and NATO provided frameworks for Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
5. Liberal democracies have a unique capacity to build international order. There are liberal accomplishments that need to be remembered; there is a long list of accomplishments in all fields, from disarmament to the environment, from international law to peacekeeping, which should never be forgotten.
Why has all this come to a crisis? First, there is an economic story: within the Western world, there are numerous citizens who are not doing well. Many have been particularly penalized in the past few decades; inequality is growing, especially because of technological change. 100% of economic gains have gone to the top 20%. There is then the complex question of global equality, albeit studies show that globally, inequality is going down. This background of uneven economic growth is the breeding ground of hostility towards immigrants and a general sense of suspicion against the elites, which allow phenomena like Trump. Secondly, there is a political story, namely the constant erosion of public confidence in the press, the experts, science, and the elites. This has been occurring for a number of decades, visibly in the decline of political parties, but had a great acceleration in recent years. The party system of France and that of Italy have been literally brushed aside. And that is partly true in the US as well, where one of the two major parties has been hijacked by Mr. Trump and the other was nearly taken over by an outsider, namely Senator Sanders. There is also far less regard for the idea of democracy as a value, particularly in the younger population in the West. Narratives which try to sideline democracy have to be monitored, and they are a particular source of concern.
In late-December 2016, Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa published a study, which looks at decades worth of data on attitudes towards democracy and reveals some alarming results. Their work shows a systematic decline in the percentage of people who think that it is essential to live in a democracy, depending on what decade they were born in. It shows that those born in the 1930s believe in democracy much more than those born in the 1980s.
Young people were also more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.
43% of older Americans do not think that the military should be allowed to take over when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job.
Amongst younger people the figure is much lower at 19%.
In Europe, the generation gap is somewhat less stark but equally clear, with 53% of older Europeans and only 36% of millennials strongly rejecting the notion that a government’s incompetence can justify having the army “take over”.
Thirdly, there is an international story, to be articulated in the following points: a) we are in the presence of a power transition from the Western world to Asia. The traditional patrons of the liberal order are losing ground and weakening compared to the non-Western states, and there is not much that can be done about that, but it entails numerous challenges: can order designed by the West be maintained by non-Western countries? It is possible, but historically this has never occurred before. b) There are new issues and instances of interdependence: environment, health, finance. Some of these problems are incredibly difficult to solve. c) We have to deal with an unprecedented diversity of states; democracies now come from very different cultural and historical backgrounds. Cooperation is difficult, and forums like the G-20 (where some states are not democracies though) struggle to become truly productive with a view toward a liberal order. d) The geostrategic rivalry between the US and China can pose serious threats to peace in the long run. e) The liberal internationalist project has weakened, and the path forward is much less clear today than it was in the past, which is also reflected in the fact that the US and other democracies are less and less attractive models for others to follow. Even across the liberal democratic world something has been lost, namely the sense that the future will be better than the present and the past, a very common feeling in the last few generations, which it seems will not extend to the next one.
Finally, the convergence of all these factors has led to a situation where nationalism is returning, while paradoxically internationalism is now defended mostly by elites (for instance at Davos) who are losing political ground, while on the other hand, China’s president, Mr. Xi Jinping, champions free trade. Over the last 200 years, liberal internationalism was tied to a progressive movement within liberal democracies; what happens when the connection is broken, or when progress in the old sense of each generation doing better than the last, ends? These are disturbing questions. Liberals have the duty to remain relatively optimistic, and work towards a renewed liberal international project, more inclusive and social, both at home and abroad.
Before concluding my remarks, it will be not out of place to mention three critical issues.
We will not be able to come out on top of the threats we are facing unless we find ways of selecting good leaders. The leadership selection process at national level must be very high on our agenda.
Secondly, when I first thought about this Colloquy two years ago, it became immediately clear to me that it was not simply supposed to be an academic achievement but rather a tool to be offered to the policy-makers. Next year we will publish a book with the proceedings of this event and will disseminate our findings in order to spread awareness of a new political cleavage. Leaders and voters will have to choose what side of the fence they want to stand on the liberal or the illiberal side.
Thirdly, I am finally glad to share a positive thought. We all remember several evil fools who thought they could ultimately defeat the world’s democracies over the last 100 years. None of them succeeded. At first glance, democracies may appear to be weak but they are not. As long they are aware of their promise and their nature, they can successfully tackle the most difficult problems. In his March 22 report, Charlie Cook noted that “…we will likely survive this. A country that can get through a revolution, slavery, a Civil War, reconstruction, a Great Depression, two World Wars, a Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, and 9/11 among other things, is awfully resilient.”
Cook wrote about America, but the same holds true for democracy in general. It is awfully resilient.
In conclusion, on behalf of everyone, I should like to thank the speakers and panel members. Their presence has been invaluable and, without any doubt, has helped make the event a great success.
We greatly appreciate the support we have received from the people with our press office who have covered our activities. Thank you Daniele Brunetti and Filippo Pompili. It is very important that the views expressed here are disseminated to a wider readership and audience, and clearly this task has been in very capable hands.
We are also grateful to all those who have been involved in the organization of the event. While they are too numerous to name individually, prominent among them are Dr. Patrick Boyle, Dr. Michael Andrews and, particularly, Dr. Sander Evers. He has been the true friend I could be lean on over the last two years, and whose enthusiasm and positive thinking has really made this Colloquy possible.
And finally, of course, we cannot fail to thank our hosts, the Center for American Studies, whose contribution we highly value.
Since this is a biennial event, we look forward to seeing you again in 2020, when we shall reconvene to discuss the State of Democracy topic.

Thank you.

Closing of Biennial colloquy on the state of Democracy - Claudio Lodici and Alexander Evers.
11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

Opening remarks by Claudio Lodici

Good morning everybody.

Leaders like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Heinz-Christian Strache, Geert Wilders, Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland are prominent today in many countries, including Italy, and they are altering established patterns of party competition in contemporary Western societies.
Quite a few recent books analyze the current travails of liberal democracy: “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; “On Tyranny,” by Timothy Snyder; “How Democracy Ends,” by David Runciman; and “The People vs. Democracy,” by Yascha Mounk. As James Traub writes, “You’d have to go back more than a century, to the 15 years before World War I, to find another moment when so many leading thinkers – Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, Nicholas Murray Butler, and others – questioned democracy’s future. But at the time, nations had not yet surrendered to ideological totalitarianism. Whatever America and the West might have been plunging toward then was much less terrifying than it is today.”
Perhaps the most crucial problem of this day and age is the failure of political elites, liberal and conservative, hyper-educated, ambitious and well rewarded, who are busy engineering and merchandising their indistinguishable political “products” and failing to predict the challenges lying ahead.
Meanwhile, rapid change and globalization have come to dominate more and more sectors of our societies and the rest of the world, creating winners and losers.
The world of the twenty-first century is changing at a more rapid pace than at any other time in history.
Interdependent globalization has reduced states’ ability to govern their affairs. Mutual vulnerabilities have reduced states’ autonomy by curtailing their control of their own national fates, and globalization has erased the traditional distinctions between what is national and what is international, what is private and what is public, and what is domestic and what is foreign.
From one perspective, an awareness of the common destiny of all, alongside with the declining ability of many sovereign states to cope with global problems through national means, will energize efforts to put aside interstate competition.
From another, more pessimistic perspective, the irreversible process of globalization will not lead to transnational collaboration, but to competition.
We have a brand new world, and I don’t think we will ever return to the same place we were before.
Uncertainty amid massive economic disruption isn’t a new phenomenon. As people left farms for factories, their lives were turned upside down. To help people cope and then thrive, states didn’t pass one bill or tweak one law – they pulled dozens of levers to create workers’ protection, rules of the road for capitalism, and a social safety net.
But yesterday’s rules are unfit for tomorrow’s economy, which is reverberated by the top ten emerging technologies: Robotics, 3D Printing, Gene Editing, Mobile Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Nano Technology, the Internet of Things (such as quality point tech), Virtual Reality, Bio-Technology, and Solar Technology.
The Economist’s Intelligence Unit recently noted: “There has arguably never been a greater disconnect between the apparent strength of the global economy and the magnitude of geopolitical, financial and operational risks that organizations are facing.”
Of course, democracy means much more than the process of free and fair elections. It is a system for accomplishing what can only be achieved by citizens joining together to further the common good. But, even though free markets have brought unprecedented prosperity to many, they have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming.
This is why democracy is under attack.
In their seminal work, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have attempted to explain the causes for rising support for populist parties, which have disrupted the politics of many Western societies. They examined two theories. Perhaps the most widely-held view of mass support of populism – the economic insecurity perspective – emphasizes the consequences of profound changes transforming the workforce and society in post-industrial economies. Alternatively, the cultural backlash thesis suggest that support can be explained by a retro-reaction by once predominant sectors of the population - older generation, men, the less educated, ethnic majority populations, and the religious - to progressive value change – social tolerance and trust, secularization, and acceptance of diversity, including gender equality and interchangeable gender roles.
In the end, populism could be interpreted as liberal democracy devouring itself, or perhaps ‘democratic’ turning against ‘liberal’.
Moreover, an existing external threat from authoritarian countries like Russia and China - large non-democratic entities - which in different ways are challenging global order and also trying to interfere (particularly the Russians) in the internal politics of democracies. We also have the aforementioned internal challenge that expresses itself in terms of populist nationalism, where we have democratically elected leaders who want to undermine the liberal part of liberal democracy, challenge the rule of law, the independence of the courts and the independence of the media, and try to delegitimize opponents who get in the way of their agendas.
We need to investigate why the institutions of liberal democracy seem unable to successfully mobilize against forces they were designated to manage, and why, crucially, it matters.
Our aim is to explain why the concept and the actuality of “liberal democracy” emerged, what its justification is, what has gone wrong with it, and how it should be fixed.
As noted before, we are experiencing an organic crisis of democracy that is international in scope. In response, Loyola University Chicago and its partners has launched this multi-year, bipartisan initiative. The Biennial Colloquy on the State of Democracy is being convened to explore different dimensions of that crisis, and venture into a deeper analysis of the political forces and dynamics at work, with a focus on identifying opportunities to strengthen democratic institutions and democratic practices.
Giving political leaders tools for understanding the complex, rapidly changing circumstances around us is the ultimate goal of this conference.

Thank you.

Opening and “Illiberal vs Liberal Democracy: The Internal threat” - Gianni De Gennaro, Patrick Boyle, Michael Andrews, Claudio Lodici, Alexander Evers, Adrian Blau, Matthew J. Goodwin, Tonia Mastrobuoni, Yves Meny.
10 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

La secoda giornata del "Biennial colloquy on the state of Democracy - Democracy under attack" trasmessa da Radio Radicale. Oltre ai panel “Is the Global Economy Eroding the Power of Democracy?” e “The Liberal Democratic Order in Crisis: The External Threat”, i discorsi di apertura e di conclusione dei lavori.

Biennial Colloquy on The State of Democracy: Democracy Under Attack - seconda ed ultima giornata dei lavori Evento organizzato in collaborazione con l‘Università di Oxford, il King’s College London e con l'Università di Bologna (10 e 11 Aprile 2018)

RadioRadicale.it ha seguito l'intero programma della prima edizione del "Biennial colloquy on the state of Democracy - Democracy under attack". Di seguito gli interventi di apertura del 10 aprile e i panel: “Illiberal vs Liberal Democracy: The Internal threat”, e “The Age of Post-Truth Politics”.

Biennial Colloquy on The State of Democracy: Democracy Under Attack - prima giornata dei lavori organizzato in collaborazione con l‘Università di Oxford, il King’s College London e con l'Università di Bologna (10 e 11 Aprile 2018)

Closing of Biennial colloquy on the state of Democracy - Claudio Lodici and Alexander Evers.
11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

Closing of Biennial colloquy on the state of Democracy - Claudio Lodici, Professor of Comparative Government, LUC, JFRC, and Alexander Evers, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, LUC, JFRC.
11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

“The Liberal Democratic Order in Crisis: The External Threat” - William T. Loris, Joerg Forbrig, Will Marshall.
11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.
Introduction: Anne Wingenter, Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Loyola University Chicago John Felice Rome Center.

“The Liberal Democratic Order in Crisis: The External Threat”.
Moderator: William T. Loris, Program Director/Senior Lecturer, PROLAW, Loyola University Chicago John Felice Rome Center. Former Director General, International Development of Law Organization (IDLO).

- Joerg Forbrig, Director, Fund for Belarus Democracy; Senior Transatlantic Fellow, Central and Eastern Europe, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, Berlin;

- Will Marshall, President, Progressive Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.;
Dalibor Rohac, Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C.

“Is the Global Economy Eroding the Power of Democracy?” - Ernst M.H. Hirsch Ballin, Marshall Langer, Michael Tomasky, William A. Galston, Leonardo Morlino, Kateřina Vráblíková.
11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

11 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.
Keynote Address
Ernst M.H. Hirsch Ballin, President of the Asser Institute – Centre for International and European Law, The Hague; Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, Tilburg University; Professor of Human Rights Law, University of Amsterdam; Former Minister of Justice, Former Minister for Suriname and Netherlands Antilles Affairs, and Former Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, The Netherlands.

“Is the Global Economy Eroding the Power of Democracy?”.
Introduction: Marshall Langer, Professor of Economics and Monetary Relations, Loyola University Chicago John Felice Rome Center.
Moderator: Michael Tomasky, Journalist, Columnist, Author, Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Correspondent of Newsweek/Daily Beast.
- William A. Galston, Ezra K. Zilkha Chair and Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.;
-Leonardo Morlino, Professor of Political Science, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali “Guido Carli”, Former President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA);
-Kateřina Vráblíková, Research Fellow, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University.

10 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

Panel introduced by Paolo Messa, Director, Centro Studi Americani, Rome
• Moderator: Salvatore Vassallo, Professor of Comparative Politics and Public Opinion Analysis, University of Bologna
• C.H. (Claes) de Vreese, Professor and Chair of Political Communication and Program Group Director of Political Communication & Journalism, University of Amsterdam
• Rachel Gibson, Professor of Politics, Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester;
• Cristiano Vezzoni, Associate Professor Quantitative Social Behaviour, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano.

Opening and “Illiberal vs Liberal Democracy: The Internal threat” - Gianni De Gennaro, Patrick Boyle, Michael Andrews, Claudio Lodici, Alexander Evers, Adrian Blau, Matthew J. Goodwin, Tonia Mastrobuoni, Yves Meny.
10 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

10 April 2018. Credit: Filippo Pompili.

09:30 – Opening and Welcome.

- Gianni De Gennaro, President, Centro Studi Americani;

- Patrick Boyle, Vice-Provost Global Initiatives and Academic Centers, Associate Professor of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago;

- Michael Andrews, Director of Loyola University Chicago John Felice Rome Center, Professor of Philosophy;

- Claudio Lodici, Professor of Comparative Government, Loyola University Chicago John Felice Rome Center.

10:00-12:45 – “Illiberal vs Liberal Democracy: The Internal threat”.

Introduction: Alexander Evers, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Loyola University Chicago John Felice Rome Center.

Moderator: Adrian Blau, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of Education, Department of Political Economy, King’s College, London.

- Matthew J. Goodwin, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Director of Graduate Studies, University of Kent & Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House;

- Tonia Mastrobuoni, Correspondent for La Repubblica, Berlin;

- Yves Meny, Professor of Political Science, former President of the Scuola Universitaria Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, and Emeritus President of the European Institute, Florence.

"Le credenze cospirazioniste sono legate anche a un orientamento politico di destra e al sostegno al Movimento 5 Stelle"

Durante il panel “The age of Post-Truth Politics”, Cristiano Vezzoni, professore di sociologia politica dell’ Università degli Studi di Milano, ha illustrato i risultati dello studio “Believing in Conspiracy Theories: Evidence from an Exploratory Analysis of Italian Survey Data” (https://bit.ly/2qm0kNq).