Vote: A European Story

Europe has come a long way in terms of how democracy has developed. For some, the roots of that democracy go back to Classical Athens. For others, the freedoms of the contemporary era are fundamentally different from those of the ancient world because they apply to a whole society, rather than just a segment of it. While in antiquity, democracy was deemed compatible with keeping large groups of people disenfranchised, the Enlightenment’s most advanced ideas stress that democracy must be inclusive. 

This beautiful notion, though, has often been applied more in theory than in practice. Since the late 18th century, the progress of democracy has been associated with other important causes on the road to greater equality, from the abolition of slavery to the extension of civic rights to both men and women. In the 19th century, nascent democratic legitimacy had to coexist with autocratic regimes. Although multilateralism between autocratic regimes made lasting peace among nations possible on several occasions (Münster/Osnabrück in 1648, Utrecht in 1713, and Vienna in 1815), it would ultimately be at the expense of the people’s fight for greater civic freedoms, such as in the repression that marked the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna in 1815). As the 19th century progressed, the codification of international law and the creation of broader stable international organisations created the conditions for the international spread of the democratic standards that some countries were already testing in the domestic arena. The world was ready for a paradigm shift, where democratic values would take the lead in international systems. Unfortunately, Europe would have to wait for the aftermath of yet another war – World War I – to see most of its countries become democracies. 

If one thing is clear today, it is that no election is fully democratic without universal suffrage. In Europe, elections by universal suffrage were first held in the early 20th century, mostly in Scandinavian and other northern European countries. In the rest of Europe, there was sometimes a very long quest for women’s suffrage: in Switzerland it did not become a reality until the 1970s, whereas in Spain and Türkiye it was introduced in the 1930s. The heyday of liberal democracy was also the moment its most serious challenges were unleashed: Nazism and Stalinism thrived on their criticism of the spread of individual freedoms. Thus, the long evolution of democratic elections is also the story of how they incorporate some of societies’ most important causes: women’s rights, the rights of the disenfranchised and, especially after World War II and thanks to the architects of European unity, the promotion of international peace.