Permanent Crisis in Complex Political Communities: Further Involution or Democratic Resilience (Examples of the European Union and the Former Yugoslavia)?

The crisis of democracy has become a common condition that no one disputes anymore. A general transformation of democratic communities is taking place, including those belonging to the European Union. This inevitably affects relations within it and threatens various scenarios. The EU crisis began with the so-called Great Recession (2008) and has since changed its forms, i.e. it has turned into a permanent crisis that applies almost equally to the EU and its nation-states. A similar situation existed in the federal Yugoslavia and its republics in the 1980s. At that time some authors, for example, Zoran Đinđić, a Serbian philosopher, refered to O. Spengler, who used the term pseudomorphosis to “designate the discrepancy between ‘content’ and ‘form’ in some phenomena of cultural history” (1988, p. 6). Spengler referred to mineralogy and claimed that within the old crystalline form that is empty, “new minerals that are also driven to crystallize by internal growth do not have their own crystalline form but spontaneously fill the existing empty structure, accumulate in it and adapt to it” (ibid.). Applied to today's relations in the EU, this would mean that the relations between its basic structure and its member states are maintained without the realistic possibility of their occasional 'mismatch' being resolved in "some higher synthesis" (ibid., 11). Although the EU as an external form "became part of the minerals" (or its member states), the question is how close it has become to it (ibid.). As we know, Yugoslavia broke up into its parts. Others, such as, Croatian sociologist Z. Lerotić, to interpret the crisis of Yugoslavia, referred to the theory of S. Eisenstadt, who said that society "when faced with its own products as insurmountable contradictions, moves back to the state of old structural relations" (Lerotić, 1989). Lerotić proposed that the crisis should be called „a set of social and political processes by which society adapts to a poorer and lower civilizational level of development" (ibid., p. 79). Thus the idea of 'involution' appeared in the debates about the crisis in Yugoslavia (ibid.). What are the consequences of involution? It is primarily about the fact that "involution turns the political vanguard into a retroguard, democracy into a dictatorship, decentralization into centralization, conflicts of interest into sharp political and ideological antagonisms, the national question into an insoluble problem" (ibid.). Almost all of this is present in the EU, although it is expressed in a different political language. The EU, and particularly its nation-states, has a democratic order that, despite all its problems, still functions. Yugoslavia failed, among other things, because it failed to develop democratic mechanisms capable „to absorb external challenges and internal stressors and to dynamically adapt to the changing functional conditions of democratic governance without falling into regime change ... “ (Merkel, 2025, p. 3). The future will tell whether democratic resilience, as defined in this way, is sufficient to maintain the EU and democracy.