A Blueprint for Europe

As war returns to Europe, the region's politics has acquired a grandeur that was lacking in recent years. The David-versus-Goliath struggle between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenksy, has given a human form to the competition between democracy and autocracy, between open and closed societies.

Just as September 11 fundamentally changed America, February 24—the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine—upended the politics of many European countries. In an astonishing February 27 speech to the German parliament, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, tacking away from his country's historically cautious global stance, announced the arming of Ukrainian fighters—ending a ban on exporting weapons to active conflict zones. He also committed to increasing military spending to 2 percent of GDP and to reducing dependence on Russian gas. Denmark pledged to hold a referendum on the country's EU defense policy opt-out, while nonaligned Finland and Sweden are considering joining NATO. Those that had refused to open their borders during the 2015 refugee crisis, such as Hungary and Poland, have welcomed millions of Ukrainians fleeing the invasion. And the West is taking aim at Russian oligarchs and their dirty money in an astonishingly tough set of sanctions against the Putin regime.

The war in Ukraine has also strengthened the position of many of Europe's mainstream leaders while depriving Kremlin-backed populist parties of legitimacy. This political shift could strengthen a trend—already in evidence before Putin's fateful invasion—that populism may have peaked as prodemocratic parties fight back. The green shoots of democratic recovery have begun to sprout around the world. Much attention went to Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump; more recently, democratic oppositions triumphed at the ballot box in Honduras and Zambia. And in Europe there also are signs of democratic resistance and renewal. After the drama of Brexit, politics have turned toward the mainstream. In 2017, French voters elected pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron to the presidency. The popularity of the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany has receded among Germans, and Scholz's centrist "traffic-light" coalition formed in 2021. After a chaotic government comprising the far-right Lega and protopopulist Five Star Movement, Italians are now in thrall to the pragmatic technocracy of Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

Richard Youngs has written a volume that serves as the intellectual underpinning for this unexpected revival of European democracy. It is a thoughtful challenge to the pessimism of the last decade that anticipated the death of democracy in Europe.

Youngs begins with a survey of several reasons for that pessimism. A plethora of indices measuring the quality of democracy—such as those of Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Varieties of Democracy, and International IDEA—signals that freedom is increasingly threatened in Europe. Underlying these pessimistic rankings are a series of crises concerning crackdowns on civil liberties, disrespect for the rule of law, populism's rise, declines in popular trust in politics and political parties, and falling democratic participation. And perhaps the most worrying long-term concern is a shift away from democratic values, particularly among younger Europeans. Strikingly, 42 percent of Germans possess authoritarian views according to a 2018 University of Leipzig report (p. 26).

But Youngs claims that these pessimistic headlines capture only part of the story about democracy in Europe. Scholarly focus on the taxonomy and theory of democratic recession and deconsolidation has obscured the past decade's positive trends. Trying to correct this, he identifies two positive trends from this period: First is a general spirit of resistance to illiberalism; and second is a self-conscious set of projects to "renew" democracy by supplementing traditional representation with popular deliberative forums, by forming new parties, and by introducing new mechanisms to make politics more responsive. The book, offering an alternate taxonomy to that of the democratic pessimists, describes these forces of resistance and renewal at six levels—from the grassroots to the EU.

The first level of optimism concerns the activities of citizens themselves. The...