Content area
Full Text
Although the Journal of Democracy, during its more than two decades of publication, has focused principally on the struggle to establish and maintain democracy in developing and postcommunist countries, we have also occasionally assessed the status of democracy in the countries of Western Europe and North America. The situation in which Europe currently finds itself seemed to present a particularly compelling case for coverage in our pages. That, at any rate, was the consensual judgment of our Editorial Board at its annual meeting in September 2011. As one of our Board members stressed, this is a function not just of the importance of Europe and the severity of the difficulties that it has been experiencing, but also of the extent to which the world's newer democracies (many of which have complicated relationships with the United States) have looked to Europe as the exemplar of the political condition that they were seeking to attain. During the subsequent year, Europe's trajectory has had its ups and downs, but its troubles have certainly not gone away. If anything, they have become more acute.
We decided that the best way to address the issue would be to organize a symposium featuring short essays by a range of experts on Europe. In extending invitations to our authors, we sought to frame the discussion by presenting them with the statement and set of questions below:
For many of...