Is the western world with its freedom and democracy an obsolete model?” The political scientist and sociologist Ulrike Ackermann confronted her guest Udo Di Fabio with this provocative question at the opening event of the new series “Forum Demokratie im Frankfurter Bürgersalon”.

Di Fabio is a former judge of the Federal Constitutional Court and founding director of the Research College Normative Societal Foundations at the University of Bonn.

Mechthild Harting

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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There was no simple answer from him that evening, when he accepted the invitation of the Frankfurt Citizens' Foundation to the Holzhausenschlösschen.

His was "in need of explanation".

Because for him there is obviously not one straight line of development for freedom and democracy that "became a political program" during the Enlightenment and then manifested itself in the liberal constitutional state.

"The principles never asserted themselves linearly, the constitutional state had to assert itself again and again," said Di Fabio.

Di Fabio sees the hour of birth of the Western world, which is much cited today, in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, when American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill formulated their principles of international politics.

In fact, according to the lawyer, "this model seemed to triumph" in 1990 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ackermann shares this view.

She spoke of the optimism of the time, "to be a world in which freedom and democracy had triumphed".

Today, according to the political scientist, "we no longer have this optimism".

The idea of ​​being able to export democracy to the world like the USA did to Germany in 1945 failed not least because of the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Ackermann, "this narrative of progress" - as she said - "has crumbled step by step".

Udo di Fabio did not accept that.

That “freedom has never worked like this” “due to the implosion of dictators”

The idea that the world would one day live in freedom has suffered repeated setbacks, Di Fabio said, referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in June 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But these setbacks are not a “history of failure”.

He believes "in the idea of ​​people who want to realize themselves and have the power to do so".

"Democracy and freedom are not natural states"

The project of freedom and democracy is constantly threatened, said Di Fabio, from the outside but also from the inside.

"Democracy and freedom are not natural states." Ackermann pointed out that democracy and freedom are currently threatened primarily by Russia.

Russian propaganda aims to fight against the liberal world, emphasizes that the western world is doomed and wants this radical criticism "to catch up with us too, on the right as well as on the left".

Di Fabio confirmed that Russia is attacking the West head-on, but not from a position of strength.

Economically, Russia is on par with Spain, not Germany.

The basis for Russia's actions is the idea that the West is deeply divided.

The fact that Germany, as the strongest economic power in Europe, is so poorly positioned that the Bundeswehr does not have ammunition for more than two days shows, according to Di Fabio, that "something has gone seriously wrong".

The guarantor of western values ​​is the USA.