July 2015: the Greeks – no strangers to the art of “extreme politics” in their long history – took part in an experiment which tested the limits of democracy in their own country and the functioning of European Union institutions. The then radical leftist government, in a bid to evade a difficult compromise with Athens’ partners and creditors, in which Greece would continue to receive assistance in exchange for austerity and reform, urged the people to reject a deal in a referendum. Exercising their democratic right, the people voted overwhelmingly against the deal. And then, at the moment of this political triumph, with the people giving him the support he wanted, the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, realized that if he honored the people’s will, he would be acquiescing in the country’s ruin: without a deal, there would be no money to pay state loans, wages or pensions. Greece would have gone straight into a disorderly bankruptcy, social upheaval and, as our partners made abundantly clear in an ultimatum, an exit from the eurozone and possibly even from the Union itself. This was the greatest challenge that the EU has faced – and it forced a weak member state to remember that democracies are neither all-powerful nor infallible. They are practices and methods for survival, liberty and prosperity; they demand constant attention, inspired intervention and flexible institutions to cope with a world that is difficult to control. The Greek people’s democratic will collided with the will of voters in creditor countries and with the rules and interests of collective institutions such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Most significant, perhaps, was the fact that direct democracy as expressed in the referendum had pushed Greece into a dead end. The prime minister was forced into the sudden and belated realization that democratic government entails a lot more than counting votes – it is the institutions which safeguard against folly and excess, against the dictatorship of the majority, which impose the accountability that allows democracy to function. The prime minister had a responsibility to change course in order to protect the national interest, even if that meant clashing with voters and with much of his own party.

Institutions – from the Constitution and laws to free news media – try to control the brute power of the mass will; they absorb tension between society’s groups and their often conflicting interests; they are the quiet rooms in which change is fashioned so that the country and its political system can adapt to challenges that never stop coming. From ancient Athens to today, institutions are established, or adapted, to protect the interests both of the many and the few, creating systems of checks and balances that produce the best results, contributing not only to the smooth functioning of the state and the economy, but to a nation’s very survival. Amartya Sen noted in a revelatory study that no famine has occurred in a country with democracy and a free press. “Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence… they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press,” Sen wrote in Democracy as a Universal Value in 1999 (1). It is worth noting, also, that India is one of the countries which successfully adapted to democracy after being freed from British rule because it had credible state institutions that allowed it to function as a democracy, when countless other countries (right up to the recent “Arab Spring”) have seen the old regime replaced by another which undermines constitutionalism and an independent judiciary, while exploiting power to consolidate its position.

Institutions can contribute towards untold good, just as they can cause immense damage when undermined by specific interests or destroyed. In 2003, in the American-led invasion of Iraq, the world witnessed an experiment that combined imperial hubris with political primitivism. The thoughtless scrapping of the authoritarian Baath Party’s state apparatus and military, without anything taking its place to provide a functioning state and basic security, prompted the chaos that still threatens the whole region. Instead of adapting, co-opting or replacing institutions, the American governor dismantled every semblance of order as if expecting credible new institutions to spring up automatically. Instead, we saw collapse and seemingly perpetual war. Going by Sen’s observation on famine, we can see how short of democracy the new Iraq fell.

South Africa presents a striking lesson in the beneficial power of democratic institutions when combined with people of bright mind and good will. The country made a miraculous transition from a white-dominated, racist, authoritarian state to a multiparty democracy. Part of this was the doing of Nelson Mandela, a rare kind of leader who combined the credibility of a martyr and freedom fighter with the wisdom of a statesman who wanted to see his country succeed without revenge and bloodshed. Credit goes also to the many men and women who worked to create a remarkable constitution (adopted in 1996), who established and ran the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (in which amnesty was provided in return for revelations and admission of involvement in Apartheid-era crimes) and to those who held high the flag of justice both during the Apartheid years and afterwards. In February 1995, Mandela, the country’s first freely-elected president, said that the Constitutional Court was a “court on which hinges the future of our democracy.” When the court ruled that the president had exceeded his authority by attempting to amend a provincial government order, Mandela responded that “the judgment of the Constitutional Court confirms that our democracy is taking firm root and that nobody is above the law. This is something of which we should be proud and which the whole of our country must welcome.” This, noted South African Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs, was “the moment when South Africa’s new democracy was baptized in the font of constitutionalism” (2).

In South Africa, institutions managed to maintain the credibility that allowed both blacks and whites to believe that their interests were being protected. As George Bizos, the great Greek-South African human rights lawyer and friend of Mandela noted, it was partially thanks to efforts within the Apartheid-era legal system that this difficult task was accomplished. “We in South Africa, by opposing the laws of the Apartheid regime, defending those accused of offences against those laws, and exposing the excesses of their security forces, were accused even by some of our friends of doing nothing more than lending legitimacy to an illegitimate regime. Our answer was that… it was for the accused and their loved ones to decide whether they wanted to be defended or not,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Odyssey to Freedom” (2007).

This policy not only saved some defendants but also saved the honor of the legal profession, allowing it to play a role in the smooth transition to democracy. “It has been authoritatively stated that the survival of the system assisted in bringing about the transition… and the settlement between the adversaries who did not trust one another. This was achieved by the establishment of a Constitutional Court to guarantee the freedom of the fundamental rights of every individual, even against a majority of the voters and the members of the Parliament,” Bizos wrote. “The Constitutional Court is now generally accepted among the vast majority of the South African people of whatever race, color or creed, as the upper guardian of the rights of all of us.”

In South Africa, as in India and other recent democracies, strong democratic institutions opened the way to democracy and it is through maintaining the credibility of institutions, the rule of law and civil society that democracy will survive. In Greece, where democracy has prevailed for most of nearly 200 years of independence, and where it remains robust, we can argue that the undermining of crucial institutions by political clientelism, cronyism, a general slackening of discipline and the devaluation of gravitas in public life, contributed to the current crisis. In a word: if either the politicians, the judiciary or the journalists had done their job well, we would have avoided economic collapse and continuing crisis. Today, all democracies face challenges from populism and extremism; from the uncontrolled use of technology to violate privacy, even as the fear of international terrorism drives a need for greater surveillance; from economic inequality and the social strains that this causes; from economic constraints on social spending even as a global economy makes competition ever more difficult. Clearly our economic models are no longer adequate.

Our political systems, however, also demand a radical rethink, a reformation focused on the understanding that personal freedom and prosperity can be provided only by laws and institutions that work for the good of the many as well as the few, within each country and between every group of nations. Thinking and working toward this goal must never stop.