Democracy and the Challenges Imposed by Freedom

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/world/europe/democracy-and-the-challenges-imposed-by-freedom.html

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Western democracy always seems to be in crisis — which may be its greatest strength. When the dizzying velocity of change seems the only constant in the world, democracy has proved supple and stable enough to respond, adapt and evolve and, thereby, endure.

Among the challenges Western democracies face today, none are more surprising and complex than that posed by their steadfast bedfellow: freedom.

Unlike authoritarian and repressive forces, the problems posed by freedom are especially tricky because they stem from democracy’s deepest values and highest expression. They represent a bottom-up revolution led by the choices people are allowed to make rather than those they are forced to.

Thanks to powerful and plentiful new technologies as well as deepening commitments to universal human rights, individuals around the world are enjoying an explosion of freedom.

This phenomenon is apparent across the landscape, but nowhere more profoundly than in the far freer flows of people (immigration), goods (the global economy) and information (social media and the Internet).

The popular tools and ideas empowering individuals to chart their own course, however, are weakening the ties that have long bound democratic communities together. In myriad ways they are rattling the foundation upon which Western democracy has long stood — the common purpose and identity that has inspired what John Stuart Mill called the necessary sense of “fellow feeling.”

“Something has fundamentally changed at the foundation of society, in how we relate to one another,” said Marc J. Dunkelman of Brown University, whose books include “The Vanishing Neighbor.” “The truth is that you can’t expect the institutions that existed and worked well in one context of community to continue to operate as effectively when the ground is shifting beneath them.”

Start with immigration — a timeless phenomenon that presents new and contemporary problems. It is easy to forget that until the 1960s Europe was a source, rather than a recipient, of immigrants. And although the United States has long been known as a nation of immigrants, restrictive policies limited the flow until 1965, when policy changes helped introduce a new era of legal and illegal immigration.

The challenge of absorbing these newcomers has increased in recent years because of the increased ability of people once trapped in poor and distant lands to seek a better life in the West. “For all its hardships, migration is an enormous exercise of freedom by people to have better lives,” said Peter H. Schuck, a professor at Yale Law School who has written extensively on immigration.

“Managing that flow is increasingly difficult because governments are rightly sensitive to human rights concerns, so that they cannot simply turn these people away without affording them some procedural rights.”

As advances in transportation have helped make migration less expensive, new communication technologies are giving people a greater ability to stay in touch with their homelands and maintain their cultural distinctiveness. This, combined with larger critiques of assimilationist pressures and a greater respect for multiculturalism, diminishes the pressure on immigrants to adopt the beliefs, values and assumptions of their adopted countries.

Numerous studies have found that, instead of bringing people together, diversity can alienate people from one another, leading to breakdowns in social trust. Robert D. Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, has argued that diversity often leads people toward “hunkering down,” or self-segregation.

So too does the freer flow of goods and ideas represented by globalization. That is what Gal Ariely of the University of Haifa in Israel found in a study of data from 63 countries. “On average, in those countries that benefit from a more relatively free spread of ideas and information, flow of goods and capital, people are less likely to be very proud of their country, less willing to fight for their country and less likely to support ethnic criteria for national membership,” Mr. Ariely wrote. “Therefore, these results support the argument that globalization is related to the decline of national identity.”

Even as new technologies are empowering some people to see themselves as parts of larger communities, the Internet provides others with the freedom to create their own identities.

As a result, society is becoming more compartmentalized, said Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist whose books include “The End of History and the Last Man.” He noted that “technology allows people to organize better and share so that you have, for instance, many online communities that did not exist 20 years ago. You used to have to share things with people you didn’t have much in common with, except that they lived on your street.”

Mr. Fukuyama said this belied the notion that we are witnessing the wholesale breakdown of community and the social fabric. Instead, our social ties are evolving into new types of relationships and associations.

Because it represents profound change, this trend poses threats to the traditional foundations of democratic societies. Dovetailing with other powerful forces emphasizing individualism and anti-authority stances, it has been linked to remarkable declines in trust — in most major institutions as well as in fellow citizens — throughout much of the West, and especially in the United States, since the 1970s.

Advancing freedom is far from the only challenge to Western democracies, and its effects are amplified by other forces. Chief among these are the perceived failure of European and American leaders to respond effectively to various crises, including income inequality and economic stagnation.

The irony is that bonds that tie citizens to their communities, the shared sense of purpose and identity that greases the wheels of collective action in democracies, are fraying at a time when people are increasingly dependent upon ever more powerful states to solve difficult problems.

In the short run, this could have anti-democratic effects, especially through the rise of reactionary political groups that seek to limit freedom or the continued efforts of entrenched elites to impose their policies on a recalcitrant or tuned-out public.

If the past is prologue, however, democratic societies will evolve to meet the needs of an ever-changing world. “I think we’re in a period of epic lag where the foundation of democracy has shifted and the institutions haven’t shifted to reflect that new reality,” Mr. Dunkelman said. “The miracle of democracy isn’t that it somehow solves all the challenges facing the people that it governs but that it has proven malleable enough to develop new institutions calibrated to new norms.”