This volume—edited by Leonardo Morlino, with contributions by Daniela Piana, Mario Quaranta, Francesco Raniolo, Cecilia Emma Sottilotta, and Claudius Wagemann—investigates the extent to which the Great Recession has changed the way in which the fundamental values of equality and freedom have been upheld in Europe, both concretely through policy measures and in the aspirations of European citizens and political elites, in a period of crisis. Europe is represented here by France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the UK, which constitute a representative sample of northern and southern, western and eastern member states, and are also the six largest EU democracies. The sample, moreover, contains both consensus (Germany) and majoritarian democracies (France and the UK); parliamentary systems (Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK) and semi-presidential systems (France and, to some extent, Poland). It also includes coordinated (France and Germany), liberal (the UK), mixed (Italy and Spain), and emerging (Poland) market economies to allow for a greater exploration of the effects of different economic, institutional, and political systems on the preservation of fundamental democratic values in hard times. The analysis spans mostly the period 1992–2019 but contextualizes eventual changes by going back to the political development of these countries since the immediate postwar period (1945–1990). The analysis is based on an impressive wealth of data and grounded on a massive twenty-page bibliography. As such, it offers the reader an almost encyclopedic overview of political, economic, and social policies implemented in these six countries across a significant time period.
The volume starts with a theoretical reflection on how the fundamental values of equality and freedom are related to one another and why they should be kept at the core of any democratic system, however shaken it may be during a crisis. The reflection is grounded on the work of a number of well-known philosophers whose arguments are reproduced without, however, further elaborating on them to discuss the relationship between these values. Freedom is said to be central for democracy and equality is argued to be implicit in freedom, but the relationship between equality and democracy is deferred to the penultimate chapter where they are postulated to be complementary. It would have been better to carry out the full theoretical discussion in the introductory chapter since the actual meaning and implementation of equality and freedom was questioned during and after the Great Recession, when the economic crisis led some European citizenries to doubt the quality of their democracies. This seems particularly important since, as the authors say, “people are prepared to accept unequal societies but are much less or totally unwilling to tolerate injustice understood as unfairness” (p. 9). A fourth value—solidarity or fraternity—surfaces here and there but is not discussed in any depth.
However, the reader soon discovers that the volume is not a philosophical exploration but is mostly an empirical endeavor meant to offer insights on some of the measures of the stated values before and after the Great Recession, and to discuss how the crisis impacted them. The following chapters examine how (in)equality and freedom can be measured and how they have evolved over time (Chapters 2 and 3); analyze whether the popularity of these values has waxed, waned, or remained the same as a consequence of the Great Recession among citizens and leaders of the six countries (Chapter 4); and address the explanations for what has been done or could be done to uphold these values by looking at domestic political factors (Chapter 5), domestic economic factors (Chapter 6), and external institutional factors (i.e., being a EU member or not; Chapter 7). Throughout the analysis, the timeframe changes from chapter to chapter, as different periods are analyzed depending on the relationship being investigated and the availability of the data; the volume thus loses a bit of its focus on the pre/post Great Recession contrast and morphs into a long-term assessment of democracy in the six countries. Chapter 8 goes back to theory, and Chapter 9 tries to answer the initial question of how changes in these values during the crisis have affected European democracies and presents some conclusions.
Many thorny issues are tackled in this book: of measurement (particularly evident in the chapter on equality); of causality (whether internal to the individual political systems and the politico-economic variety of capitalism or to the external institutional structure of the EU); of agency (who determines whether or not democracies survive crises, whether citizens or leaders, institutions or actors—or both). When it comes to measurement, the chapter on equality analyzes how this complex notion can be dissected into economic, social, and ethnic (or, better, cultural) inequality and plentiful measurements are offered, while that on freedom records how this value is now mostly understood in terms of security.
The empirical analysis eventually yields a rather simple picture: Italy and Spain suffered most from the Great Recession because they were economically more vulnerable and lacked the institutional structure that could buffer their economies against a period of dramatic downturn. Germany weathered the crisis because of its strong politico-economic structure and managed to contain damages on economic inequality while still registering a certain enfeeblement of democratic values amongst some parts of the electorate. France, while being impacted by the crisis almost on a par with Italy and Spain, kept inequality in check by investing a lot more in social policies than the other two southern European countries while registering a significant backslide in ethnic equality principles. The UK also weathered the crisis rather well, but decidedly backed down on its universal principles by deciding to exit the EU and curtail social rights for both natives and immigrants. Poland, finally, stands out as a country that thrived economically through the crisis mostly thanks to its continuing developmental catching up, but receded most of all in terms of political values and institutional safeguards to the point of jeopardizing the quality and resilience of its democracy. The volume concludes by offering a synthetic overview (refer to the figure on p. 226) assigning the six countries to the categories of balanced democracies (Germany and the UK), protest democracies (France, Italy, and Spain) and unaccountable democracies (Poland), with Italy and Poland featuring as the most endangered democracies of the bunch.
In conclusion, this is an ambitious book by a set of highly qualified scholars who drew on years of engagement with some of the most fundamental questions about democracy and its fundamental values to put together a volume that asks how resilient European democracies really are in hard times. Although the scholarship mobilized is impressive, I wonder whether these scholars—and probably most of us—are not excessively captive of established notions of democracy, institutional formats, and politico-economic models to the point of not being able to fathom that perhaps something more fundamental is at work: a redefinition of democracy in times of heightened interconnectedness.
