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the right of the people to a safe homeland. So here we have a potential conflict of rights: if citizens were to be allowed to leave the country, the prosperity of Romania would be threatened and theywould have endangered their right to a safe homeland. In such a conflict of rights then, one has to make a choice, and here the right to a prosperous and safe homeland enjoys the clear priority …
    This same spirit of Stalinist sophistry remains alive and well in my own country, Slovenia, where on December 19, 2012, the Constitutional Court ruled that a proposed referendum on legislation to set up a “bad bank” would be unconstitutional, thus in effect banning any popular vote on the matter. The idea of the legislation was to transfer the bad debts of the major banks onto a new “bad bank” which would then be salvaged with state money (i.e., at the taxpayers’ expense), preventing any serious inquiry into who was responsible for the debts. The measure had been debated for months and was far from being generally accepted even by financial specialists.
    The popular vote on the issue had been proposed by trade unions opposed to the government’s neoliberal economic policies, and their proposal had received enough signatures to make it obligatory. In the judgment of the Slovene Constitutional Court, however, such a referendum “would have caused unconstitutional consequences”—how? The Court conceded that a referendum was a constitutional right, but claimed that its execution in this case would endanger other constitutional values which, in a situation of deep economic crisis, should take priority—values such as the efficient functioning of the state apparatus, especially in creating the conditions for economic growth; or the realization of human rights, especially the rights to social security and to free economic activity … In short, in its assessment,the Court simply accepted as undisputed fact the reasoning of the international financial authorities exerting pressure on Slovenia to pursue more austerity measures. A failure to obey the dictates of those authorities, or to meet their expectations, the Court argued, would lead to further political and economic crises and would thus be unconstitutional—in other words, since following those dictates is a condition for the maintenance of constitutional order, they take priority over the constitution (and
eo ipso
over state sovereignty).
    Slovenia may be a small marginal country, but this decision of its Constitutional Court is symptomatic of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation such as we have today, the majority of people are not qualified to judge—they just want to keep their privileges intact, and are ignorant of the catastrophic consequences which would ensue if their demands were to be met. This line of argumentation is not new. In a TV interview a few years ago, Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity will lead through a “valley of tears”: with the breakdown of socialism we cannot pass directly to the abundance of a market economy—the limited, but real, socialist welfare and security systems will first have to be dismantled, and these initial steps will inevitably be painful. For Dahrendorf, the key problem is that this passage through the “valley of tears” will invariably last longer than the average period between democratic elections, thereby creating an irresistible temptation to postpone the difficult changes forshort-term electoral gain. But if the majority are likely to resist the necessary restructuring, would the logical conclusion not then be that, for a decade or so, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, in order to enforce the necessary measures and thus lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy? When developing countries are