The opening of Renzo Piano’s Parliament House inevitably brought with it the speeches that spoke of a continuous story of progress and improvement in the robustness of our democracy. Back in 1964, however, when our past 50 years were once the future, things weren’t so clear.

One of the main arguments against independence, then, was that the country was not prepared for Dom Mintoff. Democracy would not survive him. Therefore, the country first needed to wait and mature. It wasn’t too different from the arguments made, four decades later, for postponing joining the European Union.

In both cases, however, there was a majority for thinking that the time had come and in both cases that majority included the leaders of the Nationalist Party. They were in the majority but were they right?

Nowadays, the consensus, on both cases, is that they were. For a long time, however – for at least 10 years, between 1977-1987 – it seemed that Giorgio Borg Olivier and his followers had been overconfident. As Maltese democracy degraded in the 1970s and 1980s, it appeared that people like Borg Olivier’s old Nationalist rival, Herbert Ganado, had been right.

For them, 1981 would have been one moment of truth. Another would have been 1986, with the political murder of one man and the police frame-up of another.

But then came 1987, with a change of government and a return to a working democracy. Wasn’t that a moment of definitive shining truth breaking out from behind the clouds?

Didn’t it mean that Borg Olivier had seen through the momentary hiccups and had had justified faith in the long-term future? Sixteen years of increasing autocracy is one person’s entire youth but only a blink in the life of a nation.

These questions are still alive today. Even as the bright future career of our democracy is extolled, there are reasons to pause. Democracy comes with separation of powers and lines drawn between the public and private sector. But we are seeing backbenchers co-opted into the executive, the private sector co-opted into parastatal activity and, now, even the judiciary punishing a poacher for obliging the Prime Minister to take a punitive political decision.

Capitalism is alive and well. But our liberal democracy? For the pessimists, the warning signs are all there and the cause is clear: democracy was never a sturdy plant in Malta, which is why we’ve lurched from crisis to crisis and never learned a single lesson.

There are two problems with this view. First, there is the implicit contrast drawn with the real democracies of western Europe and the US, which are presented as the mature foil of immature Malta. Next, there is the idea that the lurch from crisis to crisis means that democracy has not taken real root.

Both those assumptions are seriously mistaken, at least if we follow the arguments made by one of the most eye-opening books on 20th-century democracy: David Runciman’s The confidence trap (Princeton). The lurch from crisis to crisis, each new crisis a surprise, is the staple scenario for the 20th century. Runciman analyses seven of them in detail – from 1918 to 2008 – and, for reasons of space, he had to leave out a few more.

Are election fevers, do-or-die elections and leaders who just won’t go away unique to Malta?

To democracy, crisis is the known unknown. It’s inevitable given the nature of the political system. Democracies have short political cycles and fickle electorates – a democratic leader like Willi Brandt, in 1973, could see his 76 per cent approval rating halved in six months. Democracies live in the moment and are reluctant to make painful changes – until things get so bad, they must.

Are election fevers, do-or-die elections and leaders who just won’t go away unique to Malta? Election fever was first described in the 19th century by Alex de Tocqueville and continues to this day in the US and elsewhere.

The sense of a watershed election has haunted most UK elections from 1964, including the one taking place today.

Leaders who hang on to power, to the frustration of their own political party, can point to statesmen and democrats like Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl.

No democracy ever really learns from other people’s mistakes.

Stability, says Runciman, creates the conditions for complacency and recklessness.

Democracy’s real advantage lies in the long term.

The lurch from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal, is one of the distinguishing features of democracies. Autocracies have to repress them or be swept away. Democracies can live with both.

Since the 1960s, democracies have also lived with satire and stand-up comedy. But “mockery and carping are one of the ways in which democracies cope… It’s how they make molehills out of mountains”. Along the way, there is the blundering improvisation by politicians and the easily distracted attention of the media.

Issues of real principle easily disappear into a cloud of gossip – in staid Germany and the pragmatic UK as much as in Latin Italy and the entertainment-thirsty US.

It turns out that crises – the ability to muddle through them – turn out to be a sign of democracy’s strength. Autocracies are better at taking short-term decisions but bad at making necessary long-term changes, if that means weakening their power-base.

Where does that leave Malta?

In the same danger as all other democracies: of falling into the trap of overconfidence.

Democracies, aware of their long-term robustness, are always in danger of thinking the problems are never too bad.

In the US, Republicans sound the alarm about economic catastrophe and democratic collapse, however, they act as though the problems can wait till 2017.

In the UK, both David Cameron and Edward Miliband say they’re worried about the future of the Union and the economy but not enough, so far, to be prepared to work together.

We’ve always muddled through but is that a guarantee for the future? Looking at the four major challenges facing democracies today – unwinnable wars, financial crises, climate change, and the rise of China – Runciman isn’t so sure.

He reminds us that politics – with its dilemmas, difficult trade-offs and flawed heroes, whose careers always end in failure – is the tragic mode of life.

It’s certainly like that for autocrats, for whom any crisis is a threat to their authority, perhaps even their lives. But what about democracy? It breeds satire and stand-up comedy. Doesn’t that say something about its safe environment for experiment and failure?

Runciman doesn’t quite put it this way but, in his hands, democracy ends up looking like stand-up tragedy. Its participants think of themselves as catcalling observers. Its repeated crises are punchlines, not moments of truth, thriving on surprise. They generate bestsellers about change but not enough energy for actual change.

So, there’s another reason for Maltese complacency: we’re not too different from the rest.

But that means we share their same challenges. Unwinnable wars are destabilising our immediate neighbours. Climate change is a cause of massive migration from Africa. Financial crises in Europe are leading us to make pacts with autocrats (like other European countries), which only means that our stability will depend on theirs (and, in the long run, their stability might be more precarious than ours).

Here’s a final reason for complacency. Europe’s 20th century was full of commentators anxious about the long-term prospects of democracy in their country.

ranierfsadni@europe.com