Not more than two decades ago, democracy was seen as an expanding phenomenon throughout the world, an almost inescapable destiny. Today, however, democracy appears to many observers to be in much more trouble, threatened by risks and setbacks of various kinds.
The democracy we live in today arose several centuries ago, from the development of principles conceived as a system of ideas useful for countering historically existing despotic (those, for example, based on the rule of narrow oligarchies) or totalitarian political systems. To achieve these results, it was necessary to struggle vigorously in an oppositional way, against something or someone. In short, it is a strong idea that is the result of well-determined conscious choices.
Democracy was born to affirm political pluralism in the sense of party pluralism and not simply of existing opinions or specific partisan interests. The regimes that democracy was intended to combat were one-party regimes that held back economic and civil development by forcing society into permanent poverty. A condition from which only a privileged few were saved. Democracy promoted a vigorous expansion of the sphere of civil and political rights. The expansion of the right to vote to include even larger sections of population, together with freedom of thought, expression and association, has been, and still is one of the most significant elements.
After the collapse of the Soviet regime, to which the democratic system had been proposed (and opposed) as an alternative model, it was believed that there was a reasonable expectation of a natural extension of the democratic system to all societies on planet earth, considered as the only possible model for all the legal systems of the planet's states. The renowned historian Francis Fukuyama even catchily announced that “the End of History” had come.[1] However, this idea of development, of history, has in fact proved to be unfounded. There are no unstoppable mechanisms of history that can proceed 'motu proprio' in a predetermined manner.
Conflict is one of the most characteristic elements in the development of democracies. A true lifeblood that today seems to be taking on forms and dynamics that seriously risk to undermine its fragile balance. Modern democracies are able to unite a huge number of citizens with different social, cultural and ideological connotations. Our societies can certainly be identified as pluralistic societies. Through the mechanisms of representation, in mass democratic systems, citizens choose their representatives within a political competition that is based on the sharp opposition of different ideas and visions. Conflict is thus widely expected and concretely hinges on a multitude of socio-political bodies; first and foremost, trade unions and parties, which have helped to delineate the ideological positions in the field and have strongly favoured the education and socialisation of citizens in politics.
It was the idea of participatory democracy resulting from a mediation between different and often opposing political cultures. The quality of this declination, among several possible ones, of democracy went far beyond the limited electoral period with the choice of political representatives in government. Citizens were educated to participate in political life, to look after their own interests not before informing themselves through the independent press and party organs about the positions taken by their party on various issues of public interest. Fort to express their opinion by participating in public demonstrations, assemblies and to vote for the choice of leaders of the party's various governing bodies. The conflict requires citizens to know the political positions not only of their own political self-identification, but also those of their opponents operating in the polis.
Conflict, thus conceived, had fairly simple mediation mechanisms and was governed in such a way as to keep the interest of citizens active by educating them about collective life and the general interest. It is a participation that is by no means incidental, but reflects the individual citizen's positioning with the line up in which he or she identifies. It builds identity, nurtures the birth of long-term passions. Conflict to be a harbinger of positive effects on the social body must be organized.
There is a public place of confrontation, a defined position of the individual and the organization, a stated goal. Public space allows conflict to unfold.
In a democratic society there have always existed various modes of conducting political activity outside the organizational scheme just described, including modes of participation in politics traceable to rebelliousness, mere contestation. These modes of political participation should be regarded as real alarm bells that deserve the full attention of those involved in analyzing relevant social phenomena and political movements.
These are, often, movements against and in opposition to something or someone. The problem arises when these oppositional movements come to power ousting the traditional parties from the political scene that, in the specific case in Europe, were consolidated after World War II.
In recent times, we have witnessed crises of considerable impact on the lives of people in democratic countries. These have either been phenomena never experienced before, such as pandemics, or economic and financial crises that have put considerable parts of the population under stress, calling into question certainties established over generations. These collective experiences, some of which are still ongoing, have convinced many citizens that the system of organised political representation is now suffering from a serious crisis. The electoral behaviour of citizens reveals growing disaffection with politics by not participating in voting, drastically reducing their participation in the political life of political parties’ organizations because of repeated and blatant scandals, hence to consider the democratic system in deep dysfunctional crisis. In short, the idea seems to have collapsed that politics is no longer the useful instrument for bringing about decisive changes that would relieve the suffering of the majority of citizens.
This widespread feeling of disaffection, this discrepancy between the formal reality of what is solemnly stated in democratic constitutions and the reality of concrete everyday life opens wide spaces for deep threats coming from domestic and foreign political actors who, exploiting an extremely advanced knowledge of the digital universe, seek to subvert democratic society, its rules, and its achievements. The threats come from individuals and organizations (sometimes foreign states) inspired by extremely diverse ideological motivations.
Propaganda is certainly not a recent invention, it has always existed; to trace its origin we could go back in history to the forms of government of antiquity where the rulers needed to credit themselves in the eyes of the peoples as legitimate holders of power. The politics of democratic states is also historically steeped in propaganda.
What characterizes our contemporaneity is the extreme importance of new digital technologies in the political struggle. Observing the political electoral events of recent years, one cannot deny the strategic role of the Internet and social media in the election of heads of state and in the unexpected and impetuous increase of political movements, until then numerically irrelevant, capable of winning the majority of parliamentary seats in established democracies.
The Internet is an ecosystem in which you can make policy in completely new ways and with completely new effects; those are the effects and modes that represent the real scenario to be investigated. Neuroscience can already unravel the complex psycho-cognitive mechanisms that can be activated through the skilful use of digital spaces. One can easily distort reality by feeding fears, inducing and consolidating specific ways of thinking. It is an extremely refined and pervasive mass tool that ostensibly presents itself as free of intermediaries, producing an infinite amount of information, admittedly only seemingly free, directly available. With ease, web users are induced with the impression that they can take action on any topic even in the absence of well-founded scientific knowledge.
There would seem to be an increasing tendency to rely on virtual narratives that quickly become widespread but sadly often-times happen to be far removed from the reality of the facts. Furthermore, there would seem to be a lack of ability to discern between credible sources and the ones that are completely unreliable, deliberately constructed with false informations.
The mechanisms within which stories develop often take place very spontaneously. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for these processes of disinformation, the production of fake news, to be designed with the intention of gaining economic advantage or to gain utility in the realm of political consensus by intervening in normal democratic processes. Unscrupulous use of these tools is now an important part of hostile efforts in the struggle between states with the aim of influencing public opinion in other nations.
The Internet continues to be perceived by a substantial part of the population as a phenomenon shrouded in an aura of magic that is difficult to decode all the way through, this is a good premise for a distorted use of a technology with extraordinary potential and unambiguous power.
This condition, together with the characteristics of the tool's cheapness and accessibility, puts in the hands of particularly structured organizations enormous manipulative power able to inflict extremely serious damage on the civil and political body of democratic societies. In order to avoid this drift, it is necessary to activate the antibodies of science: Study the phenomena that develop before our eyes, understand them in order to be able to intervene and govern them lucidly and make corrections. The insights must then be skilfully disseminated with the aim of making the citizens of democratic societies aware of the risks they face in their daily digital lives. This is at the heart of the EU-funded FERMI project that attempts to grasp the causes, circumstances and consequences of disinformation and fake news.
[1] Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest, 16, 3–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184