Crisis, Polycrisis, Anthropocene. Liberal Representative Democracy Under Pressure

In the last two decades, crisis diagnoses for liberal representative democracy have been aplenty. The term “liberal representative democracy” is important in this context. What has commonly come to be associated with the label “democracy” is the liberal representative subtype that figures elections, parliaments, parties, a comprehensive catalogue of citizen rights, representative governments, and a system of checks and balances between legislative, executive and judicative. Liberal democracy is per definition a way of government of, by and for the people (Lincoln). he dimensions “of”, “by” and “for” indicate that the ways and practices of self-government of the people are at stake. Liberal representative democracy has never been without internal pitfalls and internal contradictions, as power relations both within nation states and in a global scale have been present in both its mechanisms and institutions, leading to inequality and exclusion. Despite these shortcomings, it is this model of liberal representative democracy that has been considered the winner in history for some decades. These days are over. The presentation discusses the current challenges liberal representative democracy faces. While these challenges are currently often discussed as a crisis of democracy or, more profoundly, as a crisis of liberalism (see below), the argument of the presentation is based on the thesis that the crisis is more profound. In the age of the Anthropocene we are facing a crisis of liberal modernity and its principles, and the crisis of liberal representative democracy is one symptom of this constellation. Accordingly, the current crisis symptoms of liberal representative democracy are an outcome of the crisis of late modernity and the current Anthropocene condition. The paper briefly reviews the current crisis symptoms of liberal representative democracy, to be then discussing what the “crisis of modernity” entails and to what extent the term “polycrisis” captures the current changes. On this basis, it will be argued that and how the current crisis of democracy is linked to the Anthropocene.