The introductory chapter explains and legitimates the approach of the book: why does it make sense to write the long-term (pre)history of democracy as a history of two distinct phenomena – pluralistic participation and individual equality – and of their convergence? Why can it be argued that this convergence was not unavoidable and is not irreversible?

In this chapter the medieval history of political participation is summarised both in more general terms (such as the emergence of the concept of ‘representation’) and in the form of some of the most important individual examples, from Spain, Sicily and Hungary to Scandinavia and England.

The development of institutionalised political participation is shown for nine of the most important early modern European states – or else those, such as Switzerland, that figure prominently in the history of democracy. The focus is on not only the ‘long’ seventeenth century and the ruptures it created but also the general continuities in essentially all early modern states: they all featured some mode of institutionalised central political participation, but it was always geared towards the participation of the top social elites only.

This chapter asks: how did institutionalised political participation, individual equality and, in particular, their fusion survive into and develop during the nineteenth century, and what can we learn from the historical genesis of democracy as a composite of two different elements, as sketched in this book, for the predicament of democracy today?

Urges psychiatry to get back to human nature because the concept, together with the idea of human freedom and classic and romantic perspectives, is required to calibrate the normal and the pathological in psychiatry. Highlights balance by showing how ‘sickly’ (Goethe) pictures of human nature and human freedom have adverse effects on psychiatry, including its interface with political life. Revisits the classicl and romantic perspectives, considering them in and out of balance in different ways. Distils a tripartite picture of the relationship between human nature, human freedom and mental disorder relevant to future research and teaching on psychiatric formulation and psychiatric ethics.

Affected by the financial crisis and in order to receive financial assistance, several EU member states had to adopt structural adjustment programmes aiming at the reduction of public expenditures. Despite their differences, common feature of all financial assistance schemes was the combination of supranational and international legal instruments and institutions. Newly created financial assistance mechanisms, such as the EFSF and ESM, were created under international law and all financial assistance packages included the participation of the IMF. This hybrid nature of European financial assistance raises the question of whether the actors involved in the award of the assistance are bound by EU human rights. Against this background, this chapter first exposes the doubtful legitimacy of European financial assistance. Second, it analyses the CJEU case law on financial assistance conditionality from a human rights perspective, aiming to respond to the question of whether European actors were and could be bound by human rights when preparing financial assistance conditions. Third, it investigates the possibility of conceiving a legitimate role for courts in applying the procedural and substantive dimension of human rights accountability in times of crisis.

In the Spring of 1848 waves of liberal revolts roll over the Europe (the Springtime of Peoples). The insurgents demand more (guarantees for) freedoms and liberties cemented in new and liberal constitutions. And most of them want a parliament (parliamentary system) as well, with democratically chosen representatives at the helm instead of non-elected, autocratic leaders who are not politically answerable to anyone, lest to a parliament. Many of the authoritarian governments of the day initially give in to the demands of the people: a new fourth generation of liberal constitutions sweeps over the European continent (much of which are rolled back after a short while). This constitutional wave also ushers an era of new nations and the rise of nationalism.

This chapter documents the effect of Muslim military conquest on democratic governance after the initial expansion of Islam (from 632 to 1100). Whereas the previous two chapters established how Muslim conquest helped generate an equilibrium of centralized autocracy in conquered territories, this chapter traces the institutional legacy of the Islamic equilibrium through to the present. The statistical analysis in this chapter demonstrates how Muslim conquest slowed the adoption of representative assemblies in medieval Spain and then examines how territories conquered by Muslim armies tend to less democratic today. The latter analysis is careful to evaluate how Muslim conquest affected European colonialism. Finally, the chapter uses survey responses to show that Islamic culture does not explain the lack of democracy in many contemporary Muslim societies.

In this and the following chapters, we examine how IIAs have featured as an argument in national lawmaking. Our focus has been primarily on the general legislative bodies with the power to issue laws applicable to the whole state, that is, national parliaments. We open the chapter with a discussion on the general parameters of the selected countries’ IIA-compliance review mechanisms in lawmaking. In the second part of the chapter, each state in our case studies is presented through a snapshot of an illustrative use of an IIA argument in lawmaking that is typical of that state’s experience with the IIA regime. As these snapshots are often related to contingent historical events and processes, we do not suggest that these uses are somehow essential to that state. Instead, they significantly overshadow the other instances of using an IIA argument in lawmaking in that state.

In this second chapter dealing with the IIAs’ impact on lawmaking, we analyse and categorise other identified instances in which an IIA argument was used in the lawmaking processes. Here, we discuss invocations of IIA arguments in the lawmaking that appeared in a similar shape or form across the studied countries. We also documented cases that, while politically less significant, demonstrate curious intersections between IIAs and national lawmaking. First, we centre on four specific subject-matter areas in which the IIA argument has featured. Those relate to potentially discriminatory regulations, transparency of the public administration, fundamental rights, and expropriation and nationalisation measures. Then, we close with a section highlighting a miscellany of somewhat unexpected uses of the IIA argument. We bring attention to the attempts at influencing IIA obligations through national legislation, ambiguous examples of regulatory chill, and instances of vague and complementary uses of IIA arguments in lawmaking. The chapter presents general conclusions and broader insights on the IIAs’ impact on lawmaking, especially regarding the regulatory chill and positive spill-over theses.

The transition to globalized knowledge economies in recent decades have accelerated economic and social change across the globe.1 European democracies have been no exception to these developments. They have experienced rapid structural changes to their economies, increased social inequality, new social cleavages (see, for example, Chapter 11) and growing ethnic diversity resulting from migration. These changes have had political repercussions, including growing support for politically extreme challenger parties and the rise of populist political entrepreneurs in many countries (Iversen and Soskice 2019; Proaño, Peña and Saalfeld 2019; de Vries and Hobolt 2020). Some authors have even argued that the nature of partisan conflict itself has changed. While traditionally most European party systems were dominated by a socio-economic conflict between left-wing parties supporting tax-funded expansion of the welfare state and Keynesian economic policy and right-wing parties advocating a free-market economy (Laver and Hunt 1992), new voter coalitions have emerged (Hillen and Steiner 2019) and, in some cases, new challenger parties have been found to exploit a new ‘universalism-particularism’ dimension in political conflict (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). Where it has become politically relevant, this additional dimension of conflict has added further complexity to political competition in European democracies.