Pessimism about democracy is pervasive. Freedom House's most recent survey of the state of democracy in the world is entitled “Democracy in Retreat”. Even in the West, where democracy has long been taken for granted, scholars and observers wonder whether it will survive assaults from within by populists and from without by resurgent authoritarianism. Reflecting these trends, scholarship and commentary is consumed by debate about illiberal democracy, global authoritarianism, and democratic backsliding. Summing up what has become a widespread view, Viktor Orbán, Hungary's current prime minister, recently proclaimed: “The era of liberal democracy is over.”

How can we understand the state of democracy in the world today? What makes liberal democracy work well in some places and times and not others? These are questions of the utmost theoretical and practical import. But as I found when writing Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day (Berman 2019), studying Europe is the perfect way to begin answering them. European history makes clear that much contemporary commentary on the state of democracy is implicitly based on mistaken assumptions about how political development unfolded in the past as well as a warped understanding of what it takes to make democracy work. If we do not study democracy's past, it is hard to fully understand its present.

Painful transition, difficult consolidation

An examination of European history reveals, for example, that quick, painless transitions to democracy are extremely rare. Europe's struggle for democracy began in 1789 with the French Revolution. During the next 150 years, many transitions to democracy occurred in France and other European countries. Most failed, many spectacularly and violently, as in Italy, Germany and Spain during the interwar period. Even the few European countries that had relatively peaceful paths to liberal democracy – Britain being the prime example – took an extremely long time to get there, from the 1688 Glorious Revolution until the extension of universal male suffrage in 1918. (The same could be said of the United States, by the way, which required an immensely bloody civil war and then another hundred years of struggle before it could be considered a full liberal democracy where all citizens had access to their political rights.)