Editors' Introduction

Abstract

There is no doubt that, for better or for worse, popular mobilisation always revels a significant, or even highly significant, transformative power. It can express itself as a sublime and magmatic power that, as historia docet, does not necessarily bring chaos and destruction, even when it shakes the institutions to their foundations. It generates and nurtures the crisis; and, as French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur remarks, ‘la crise de la démocratie est une crise double où se conjuguent un mouvement ascendant et un mouvement descendant, des menaces fécondes et des menaces ruineuses’. In short, the crisis generates and nurtures new energies and ideas, a fusion of horizons, refoundation and new impulses, which all pervade, however, a time of uncertainties where that fecundity of crisis and that possibility of ruin and fall inhabit half walls. After all, as a possibility, popular mobilisation is in itself a cornerstone of democratic life. Ricœur again underlines that ‘La démocratie est une idée en devenir et en combat. C’est une histoire commencée que nous avons la tâche de continuer. La crise (...) est un moment dans une histoire dont il faut retrouver l’élan’. It is the People who are primarily responsible for what happens in a democratic state.