Transcript from the Symposium on the Crisis of Liberal Democracies

Transcript from the Symposium on the Crisis of Liberal Democracies

In 1974, the Portuguese Revolution suddenly caused the country to undergo a democratic transition via the unusual fashion of a military coup. Since that time, there has been from 85 to 90 countries, including Taiwan (ROC), which engaged in transitions from different forms of autocracy in an attempt to consolidate democracy. In every one of these cases, the objective was to imitate the institutions of Western liberal democracy. At the same time, however, the countries that I call ''real-existing democracies'', where Western liberal democracy had already been established, began to enter into a profound crisis in their own institutions. In other words, some 85-90 countries were trying to imitate 25 or so countries which are themselves entering into a period of very severe difficulty, if not crisis. This is the paradoxical situation we now find ourselves in. What’s more, to make it even more serious, the symptoms of this generic crisis of Western liberal democracy are beginning to appear in the newer democracies as well.