There is unanimous agreement about the growing discontent vis-à-vis liberal democracy. Despite a considerable diversity of its manifestations, the disenchantment with democracy, its institutions as well as its policies is universal. The disease has contaminated every democratic system: those recently set up as well as consolidated democracies such as the UK and USA; rich countries as well as less affluent ones; social-democratic regimes as well as neoliberal ones; federal as well as centralized states. This new trend is well consolidated. Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet regimes, the naïve belief that there was no alternative to liberal democracy has faded away. This chapter argues that the crisis is not a mere effect of the post-2008 financial collapse but rather a consequence of three processes. First is the incremental but deep transformation of what we call democracy over the past 50 years. We have a single word (democracy) to label systems which have gone through a profound transformation and which, at the end, do not fit with democracy’s ideals, hopes, and expectations. The second process is the shaking of the very foundations of the past equilibrium based on a compromise between two conflicting values: the power of the people, on one hand, and the liberal limitations on the people’s capacity to act, decide, and control, on the other. The new equilibrium reached after many years of slow evolution is characterized by a serious imbalance between the popular input and the checks and balances, contributing to the frustration of those who are, in theory, the ‘sovereign’. Third is the increasing discrepancy between democratic systems and institutions that have developed exclusively within the Westphalian nation-state, and policies that are more and more framed by or dependent upon global actors. Finally, the failure of the European Union to tackle the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ has disillusioned those who had dreamed of reconciling democratic processes and policies with supranational institutions, flows, and actors. The populist outburst in both its anarchic and authoritarian versions, while fuelling discontent, might become a mere ‘impasse’. There is, indeed, ‘only a single bed for two dreams’ and some new balance between the contradicting values of democracy and liberalism has to be established for the future.
Psychiatry in Shetland
