From Democracy Digest

Modern Europe’s political structure is based on the supposition that capitalism and democracy can be compatible – so the most urgent challenge of our times is reconciling the two, argues Mark Mazower, director of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and author of “Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century”.

It is striking that the single most urgent challenge facing Europeans today is the same conundrum that has faced them for the entire preceding century: how to reconcile capitalism and democracy, he writes for The New Statesman.

“While the existence of Soviet communism raised the stakes in European democracies,” he adds, “when Europeans waved goodbye to parliamentary democracy between the wars they were mostly heading right not left. …….By 1940, the only democracies left in Europe were in the UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland and Finland.”

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