Democracy

The life of Juan Carlos I, Spain’s 88-year-old former king, who reigned from 1975 until his abdication in 2014, falls into two parts: richly deserved triumph followed by richly deserved disgrace. Building on his 2004 biography, Juan Carlos: A People’s King, Paul Preston’s account of this extraordinary life is magisterial. The son of Don Juan de Borbon, the exiled heir to the Spanish throne, Juan Carlos was born in Rome in 1938. With a view to the eventual restoration of an authoritarian monarchy, he was sent to Spain, aged ten, to be indoctrinated in General Franco’s political tenets. He also had to endure the dictator’s long lectures on the mistakes made by previous Spanish monarchs.

Many political scientists are oddly uninterested in politics. Their fascination is at a level of theory; but the means through which decisions are made in practice, through specific conversations and arguments and accommodations between actual people, strike them as so much gossip – or, worse, journalism. Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, best known to general readers for his trenchant, well-timed and comfortingly short What Is Populism?, here wanders like a niche flȃneur through the territory in between the personal and the theoretical: the ways in which people and politicians are variously welcomed, channelled, liberated and constrained by their concrete environments.

The British state seems perpetually befuddled. Every international crisis catches it in its sudden glare like so many headlights trained on a nervous rabbit hopping hopelessly around a motorway. One moment Russia is invading Ukraine, then Hamas attacks Israel, Israel flattens Gaza, America knocks out Venezuela, then attacks Iran, while all the time China leers over Taiwan. Each new event leaves us spinning. Whose side are we on? What do we want? How do we get it? We use grand words to navigate our way in the confusion: ‘the special relationship’; ‘the national interest’; ‘the rules-based order’. But if these once signified some grand story we could all relate to they now feel empty and confusing.

After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by promising to tackle the inequality that scarred it so badly and take on the oligarchs enriching themselves through favours and nepotism. Western celebrities, journalists and politicians, from Sean Penn through to Jeremy Corbyn, started flocking to South America to hail their new progressive hero supposedly fighting for social justice.

On 25 July 1947, in the searing heat, almost 100 princes bedecked in jewels gathered in a circular room in New Delhi. Some of them ruled over principalities of less than a square mile; others over an area larger than Korea. All of them had been Britain’s close allies for more than a century and, now that the British were leaving India, many looked forward to regaining their states’ independence. But on that fateful day, as Lord Mountbatten swaggered around in his ivory white uniform, anxious murmurs rippled through the throng. A cousin of George VI, and related to virtually every royal in Europe, the viceroy was no republican; yet he was about to set in motion one of the great revolutions in world history.

‘Thirteen wasted years’ bellowed Adolf Hitler at receptive audiences in the spring of 1932. He was talking about the first full German democracy, the Weimar Republic. Proclaimed in November 1918, it was born out of a desire to do things better after the horrors of the first world war and was an ambitious attempt to establish one of the most progressive states in history. ‘Democratic chaos,’ sneered Hitler, ‘unmitigated political and economic chaos.’ Much of the electorate agreed. Less than a year later, Hitler became chancellor and immediately set about fulfilling his electoral promise to destroy democracy. The short and tumultuous story of the Weimar Republic continues to fascinate.

After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory MPs to lose his seat in 1992. Had he been re-elected he would probably have become chancellor of the exchequer. Instead, he found himself in the wilderness. But not for long. Within months he had been appointed governor of Hong Kong, tasked with the tricky business of presiding over the transfer of the territory to communist China. It was a lucky break. Had he been chancellor, the odds are that his political career would have come to a sticky end the following September, when the pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Instead, it was Norman Lamont who drew the short straw. By the time Patten arrived in Hong Kong the clock was ticking.

Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating hope, the apprehension, the illusion. For everyone else it is a distant echo. Russia was always likely to lose the Cold War competition with America. It was unmanageably large, too poor and too reliant on too few products. Stalin’s bloody grip had enabled the Soviet Union to defeat the Germans at a terrible cost to his people. When he died in 1953 his system entered a protracted agony. Over the next decade Nikita Khrushchev tinkered with half-baked solutions. They misfired, and he was overthrown by the hard men in the party, the KGB, and the army. His more cautious successors managed to equal America’s military might.