Conceptualizing Politics

democracy – was used to argue the superiority of the socialist system. The countries 
allegedly ruled by the working class through its Communist (or, as in the Ger-
man Democratic Republic, Socialist) party were deemed to be truly in the service 
of the people instead of only granting citizens civil and political rights that must 
remain empty in the absence of social policies and power allocation capable of 
making them real. This was hardly anything more than an ideological cover for a 
privileged party bureaucracy’s often incompetent management of a society under 
authoritarian rule and with bogus elections. The problem of what social condi-
tion can make democracy work existed and will continue to exist,
18
 but the only 
acceptable, if problematic, solution has turned out to be historically the welfare state 
established within pluralist and liberal democracies: social policies such as the crea-
tion of a national health service can only complement the full respect of procedural 
democracy, not replace it (see Figure 5.1). What has proven wrong is the belief that 
FIGURE 5.1
   The creation of the National Health Service in the UK (1948) - here as 
it was remembered in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics  
2012 - was a major step in the transformation of the liberal-democratic state.  

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Government and democracy  95
cutting down on the free procedures of ‘formal democracy’, or undervaluing them, 
is conducive to more ‘substantial’ results.
‘Substantial democracy’ as superior substitute for ‘formal democracy’ was a for-
mula quite similar to the ‘brotherly help’ by other Communist parties, which in 
the ears of the Austrian writer Ernst Fischer (1899–1972), a former Communist, 
sounded – he said – very much like the caterpillars of the tanks sent under that 
alleged rationale by other Soviet bloc states into such unruly places as Budapest in 
1956 and Prague in 1968. In hindsight, the systems of government based on ‘sub-
stantial democracy’ (or ‘real existing socialism’, as the USSR and its allies loved to 
be called) have been a nearly total failure, since they have either collapsed, giving 
leeway to a democratic rule that is not free from authoritarian temptations, or led 
to a satrapy with dynastic government, or – the more puzzling and mixed outcome 
indeed – established a technocratic party dictatorship while substituting a commu-
nist economy with a mixed one, in which aspects of ultra-capitalism seem now to 
prevail (more on China in the next section).