Authoritarian Trends and Parliamentary Democracy in Europe

About the book chapter:

The global financial crisis, Covid, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine: against the backdrop of major crises, European societies are looking for security, and many find this security in the longing for strong leadership without elections and parliaments, as in Italy and France, for example. The growing dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy is the key finding of a study commissioned by Oliver Rathkolb for the Institute of Cultural and Contemporary History at the University of Vienna: People in eight European countries were asked about their views of history and democratic dispositions in 2022 and their responses were compared with a survey from 2019 before the Covid pandemic. Based on the results of this comparison and the analysis of the causes, renowned scientists develop models and strategies in this book to raise democratic awareness in an attempt to reduce the trend towards an authoritarian age – an age that sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf predicted back in the 1990s as a consequence of social crises caused by neoliberal turbo-globalization. These scientific findings are deepened by literary reflections on the themes of democracy and authoritarianism by European writers.