Governance as a Strange Elephant Past Legacies, Current Complexities and Future Challenges On Navigating Troubled Waters (Ferenc Miszlivetz and Attila Pók eds., iASK 2020)

Abstract

The other night, as I was reading a book with a poetic and tragically apt title, the TV showed a crowd of rioters raiding the Capitol building in Washington DC. It was as if everything on the pages came to life in front of my eyes in the form of emblematic visual images: the crisis was visible, the tension palpable and never before have I felt a greater need for the return of common sense, rationality, solidarity and faith in institutions and shared values that societies have been trying to perfect and expand since the Enlightenment. Just like in a bad, sensationalist CIA-movie, I saw an example of the worst of our current civilisation: a deep crisis of not only political legitimacy but of democracy. The power of the past, the terrible ghost of the twentieth century came back to haunt, leaving me and many sleepless. What is going to happen? What is the way out of this? (...)