Here we are, one year short of the 100th anniversary of the Sette Giugno uprising. In the Maltese State’s iconography it’s a milestone in the achievement of democracy. And yet it’s hard to come across anyone – least of all online – who doesn’t suspect our democracy’s being stolen bit by bit.
By whom? Well, this is where opinions part ways.
Some say the thieves are a cabal of elite globalists in Brussels; they are an envious lot of continental nationalists in another version. Either way, they’re aided and abetted by traitors in the European Parliament and parts of the media that can’t put country above party.
Others identify the thieves as the Baku mafia – with the Panama gang as their inside men, unable to choose democracy over kleptocracy.
A third plot may be being hatched in some Islamic capital, eyeing the occupation of Europe as a grand prize, and Malta as a stepping stone as convenient as it was in 1565.
Or maybe it’s left-wing liberalism, intent on capturing the last village in Gaul that still resists its empire.
If you subscribe to any one of these conspiracies, you’re not alone. It’s not just that there are others like you here. It’s that all mature democracies these days – not just the post-Trump US and post-Brexit UK, but those on continental Europe too – are rife with conspiracy theories. And the choice villains are pretty much the same: Russia (instead of Azerbaijan), the establishment, globalists, liberalism and the Islamic peril.
Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian MEP, made the news here last week by referring to Malta’s political system as being – like Poland’s and Hungary’s – not quite European. Or at any rate, a liberal democracy suffering rapid erosion.
But how solid is liberal democracy elsewhere in Europe when everywhere populism is on the rise and traditional political parties are seeing their support crumble away?
Italy has just ushered in its first populist government, led by two movements that now command around a 60 per cent approval rating. France has a President whose party was founded a year before the election that gave him power; in that election he faced off a far-right populist. Germany’s main opposition party is the non-traditional, right-wing Alternative for Germany.
If we turn from the crisis of political parties to how dissent is addressed, we’ll find a spectrum rather than black-and-white differences.
Yes, in the illiberal democracies of Hungary and Poland, dissenters had better watch out. In Malta, the ruling party organises online rottweiler squads to savage the chosen targets.
However, in the US and Europe diverging opinions are treated savagely online as well. The non-trivial difference is that the enforcers are not mainstream political parties but movements – Corbynites (distinct from the Labour Party), the alt-right in the US (distinct from the Republican Party), etc.
In thinking about the state of Maltese democracy, therefore, we need to keep in mind the real similarities with developments elsewhere, not just the real differences.
The most helpful recent thinker on the subject is David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge, and whose book, How Democracy Ends (Profile) was published last month. His diagnosis of mature democracies is that they are passing through a midlife crisis – the election of Trump and Brexit being the closest thing to extramarital flings that democracies can have.
We will become a tiny country where half the population, largely ageing, has political rights that others, largely younger, don’t; even if they pay their taxes
Runciman looks at the widespread populism and the crisis of traditional political parties, but he doesn’t see a return to the 1930s nor lurking coups. Ageing societies just don’t have enough young people for violent coups; and societies with a per capita income of over $8,000 have too much to lose.
He thinks the real parallel lies in the American and European 1890s – a period of sharply rising inequality, where violence and war were absent, but economic distress and technological change took their toll.
For Runciman, the real pathos of our time is that mature democracies can tame violence but not inequality. Maturing democracies and rising inequality go hand in hand. Why? Because historically only violent shake-ups rectified sharp inequalities. By taming war, democracy freed its peoples from violence but left them vulnerable to the injuries of inequality.
In earlier decades, all this was disguised because younger democracies have a lot of slack: there’s a lot of ground to cover, plenty of people to enfranchise, and institutions to build up. But a mature democracy does not have this slack.
Hence the problem, for which Runciman sees no immediate solutions: mature democracies are stuck. People, in western Europe at least, are too risk-averse to experiment with alternatives to democracy; but it’s currently impotent before the short- and long-term challenges.
The plight of political parties is an icon of the problem. Parties seem a shell of their former self. They seem hollow. But political movements, on their own, cannot address the real challenges of economic, environmental and military security.
Movements are too purist for the compromises necessary for politics. The rash of conspiracy theories is a symptom of their sectarian Manichean view of the world.
This diagnosis was developed to explain the plight of mature democracy, which Malta is not. But it does help us home in on two issues which, as we debate the state of our democracy, we would otherwise miss.
First, since we are not a mature democracy, we do have room for expansion and a sense of purposeful direction. Unfortunately, however, it’s the wrong kind of room.
Our democracy inherited a State apparatus designed for colonial rulers, with a concentration of power, and wide latitude for elected leaders to blur the lines between ruling party and State. To develop our democracy we need, so to speak, to build up state institutions with strong separation of powers.
But to say that is practically to say that we need to build an ‘establishment’. Fat chance in anti-establishment times.
Second, it’s thanks to Runciman that we can see that we may have just possibly replaced one ticking demographic time-bomb – the economic one of an ageing population – with another demographic time-bomb, a democratic one.
For we are effectively importing, at a rapid pace, a younger population from elsewhere, mainly Europe and Africa. At this rate, in a few years half the population will be foreign and with no vote.
That is bound to change the complexion of our democracy. We will become a tiny country where half the population, largely ageing, has political rights that others, largely younger, don’t; even if they pay their taxes.
At a minimum, that’s not a pleasant democracy. Having developed under conditions of rapid economic growth, it’s unclear how it could handle an economic downturn. It’s not even clear that it could still tame violence.
ranierfsadni@europe.com