Polycrisis and the Sustainable Democracy: Focusing on the effectiveness and the efficacy of Democracy

Abstract

Nowadays, the world faces the ‘Polycrisis’ which may be called as the systemic risk. The climate crisis, the geo-political crisis, and the risk of the stagflation etc., which are universe not to be limited to the specific country but to impact to all the countries which exist in the global system. However, all the countries have the accumulated but not-solved problems in accordance with their social condition in them. Those can be appeared as the special crisis combined with the global polycrisis. In Korea, there are the most critical three problems. One is the inequality problem which makes the political, economical and social polarization more serious since the financial crisis in 1997. The other is the population extinction, which leads the province extinction and the hyper-aging society. Those problems combined with the global polycrisis, construct the Korean special crisis. But the populistic political trend, which is the last critical problem, makes the Korean special crisis more difficult to overcome. The populistic political trend only focuses on the political attack to the rival party for the political interest. And what is worse, they attack the rival party even with the fake news. Some of those crises result from the Neo-Liberalism paradigm. Or Neo-Liberal paradigm exacerbates some of those crises. Thus to overcome the crises, at first, we need the transition from the Neo-Liberal paradigm. And if we do not overcome through the effectiveness and the efficacy of democracy, the threat to the democracy itself like the emergence of populism will be strenthened. The direction to overcome the crises coincides with the accomplishment of SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) which was resolved at UN General Assembly in 2015. Therefore, we need the ‘Sustainable Democracy’ paradigm as the new paradigm to overcome the crises and for the sustainability of the democracy.