Central Europe on the Way to Democracy
Everybody is so much now for democracy that it's perhaps about time to say something against it [chuckles]. What I mean is there is freedom consisting in the protection of personal rights and there is freedom consisting in the participation in power. This distinction goes back to Benjamin Constant. It's an art stuff, of course. These two kinds of freedoms, not only they are not identical but they limit each other. Therefore, there is always something dangerous when only one of them is stressed, namely, participation in power, that is to say, the rule by majority or consensus because rule by majority is compatible, as we know, with despotism. We can imagine and we have historical examples of it, the consensus of majority ruling despotically over minorities. Is there such a danger now in Central Europe? Well, I wouldn't exclude it. The obvious ideological form, which around consensus or anti-democratic consensus of majority would take is, of course, nationalism.
