Abstract
This chapter traces the basic classical democratic principle of a sovereign people that elects its representatives and decides its laws. Laws are society implemented by the executive authority and by the government and its administrative apparatus. A judiciary body (the courts of law) furthermore interprets laws and monitors compliance. Parliamentary surveillance of decision-making in unitary states such as the Scandinavian countries is political. The Supreme Court is the judiciary and is entrusted with this task in federal states such as Germany or the USA. The Supreme Court is responsible for preventing the legislative authorities from making decisions that violate the Constitution, the Constitution limiting both judicial and government authority. Post-national democracy and its governance structure are founded on steering by regulations and objectives, as practiced by the EU, and are suffering from democratic deficit.
Whatever form it takes, the democracy of our successors will not and cannot be the democracy of our predecessors. Nor should it be. For the limits and possibilities of democracy in a world we can already foresee are certain to be radically unlike the limits and possibilities of democracy in any previous time or space (Dahl 1989: 340)
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Notes
- 1.
Demos is the Greek term of “a people.” Ethnos is the Greek term for a culturally unified people.
- 2.
The social order at the time was one in which only free Greek men were represented, not women or slaves.
- 3.
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 demonstrates that such order is difficult to create. The problem of climate change is another example.
- 4.
Charismatic power is exercised by personal projection and is the prerogative of persons in positions of power.
- 5.
The emergence of totalitarian national regimes since 1648 has certainly not been an unknown phenomenon in European nation building.
- 6.
In many countries in Europe, among them Norway, the period of the nineteenth-century national romance was very important in this context.
- 7.
In the mid-2000s, the EU tried to adopt a “Constitution Treaty,” but France and the Netherlands voted against it following referendums.
- 8.
For some member states in federal states, exceptions are made for constitutional reasons.
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Veggeland, N. (2020). Democracy: A Changing Term. In: Democratic Governance in Scandinavia. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18270-0_5
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