SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Well into the twenty-first century, it is difficult to find a major country in which democratic institutions are not under stress, in many cases under aggressive attack. In the United States, the government has fallen under the control of a profoundly antidemocratic regime. In Europe, long-standing authoritarian tendencies have enjoyed a quantum leap under the neoliberal austerity regime fostered by the German government with the cover of the European Commission. This paper discusses the source of this near universal twenty-first-century tendency to authoritarianism.