BRUSSELS DEMOCRACY PAPER 3/25 How to Transition to Sustainable Democracies? Why European Leaders Should Craft Inclusive Nationalisms by Maya Tudor AA titanic battle is under way between the peddlers of exclusionary nationalism and the defenders of individual liberal rights. Globally, populist leaders have swept to power in every corner of the globe over the past dec­ade, winning elections by targeting so-called ‘corrupt’ elites in the name of a supposedly ‘pure’ people. Once in power, such populist leaders, from Erdoğan to Modi, Orbán to Trump, have sought to undo democracy by means of an increasingly familiar playbook: defanging legislatures, packing courts and undermining academia and the media as agents of independent thinking and finally moving directly to target political opponents. Besides instigating successive stages of democratic erosion in the name of the national community, populist leaders have also undermined social cohesion by drawing battle lines within the national community, between groups of citizens portrayed as central to the nation – the supposed‘we the people’ – and groups of citizens who are regarded as other. One way of developing democratic resilience is therefore to fashion an alternative, inclusive nationalism. After all, nationalism is a powerful force that legitimates the use of state power. It is worth remembering that just three decades ago deep ideological conflict over the very desirability of democracy seemed unthinkable. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama argued that‘history’, in the sense of successive Hegelian ideological battles over the best social and economic ways for societies to organise themselves, had come to an end because the commitment to individual liberty that had come to define democracy and capitalist organisation of the economy had definitively won. 1 Political developments during the 1990s appeared to prove Fukuyama correct: the Soviet Union disintegrated, legitimating capitalism; India turned away from substantial government-led 1 Fukuyama, Francis(1992)‘The End of History and the Last Man’. 1