On the crisis of democracy (XXIII Aranguren Lectures)

Abstract

Democracy and globalisation: Democracy is currently defined as the political selfgovernance of human’s based on freedom and equality. As such, it is of recent implementation and presents limitations, both geographic and thematic. Throughout a long period of time, its effective realisation has found tremendous obstacles, related to gender-female vote was mainly established after World War I and II; —social class or race— decolonisation is a 20th Century phenomenon. Today, representative democracy has reached new areas within its traditional Statenation framework, such as new technologies and economic globalisation, which have also contributed to its crisis. The unlimited expansion of capital– similar to that of the Universe – has not had an equivalent in the political domain, even in modern democracies, which are still trapped in the narrow limits of the State. These limits will only be surpassed when democracy, as well, expands. II. The Spanish case: The Spanish democratic subsystem, as part of the European democratic system, is young and is a result of a particular balance of power built throughout a convulsed historical process in which dictatorial regimes have been very present. Nowadays, even though the Spanish political regime is a democracy, insufficiencies or limitations are evident and must be specified. These limitations or insufficiencies are shown, amongst others, by a certain geostrategic dependency; a poor productive system not based enough in innovation and science; a lack of social cohesion and excessive economic power; an unresolved territorial problem and a State that finds it hard to be secular. Therefore, there is enough field of action for a new democratic impulse that faces all these challenges and finally turns Spain into a truly advanced Democracy