la fabula feliz de la democracia

This essay aims at developing a twofold criticism about the concept of procedural democracy and the actual political regimes in which democracy has taken place in Western countries, so-called “advanced democracies”. On one hand, this paper highlights the recurrent turning of a procedural democracy into an elective oligarchy, a regime in which both real political debate and competition are essentially missing. On the other hand, it challenges the idea of restorative democracy —proposed by influential theorists like Kelsen, Schumpeter, Popper, Bobbio and Ferrajoli— as an appropriate way to tackle the perils of “massive threats” already known, at least, a half century ago (namely, the risks of an ecological catastrophe, increasing levels of world inequalities, global financial crisis, terrorism, etc.). These threats keep rising since the fall of the Berlin Wall and we are all, one way or another, expose to them. Advanced democracies have tried to overcome these threats by promoting the idea of “development” amongst other nations. Such development would be supposedly reached by sharing one basic model of economy, politics, science and technology. However, as the Meadows Report points out —a report for the Club of Rome’s project—, there are indicators that evidence that we are heading the opposite direction; and recent studies conducted by authors like Jonas, Rist, Latouche show the same tendency. Although democratic regimes have their theoretical grounding in Enlightenment, they have been unable to fulfill the Enlightenment ideal of raising responsible citizens; and quite the contrary —as Barber puts it— today they are totally surrendered to the superfluous logic of markets, and are also incapable of making people aware of the global threats we will have to face in the near future.