The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences discusses democracy, populism, and Ong

“Towards a participatory society” is the theme of the Plenary session at Casina Pio IV. The Middle Class Crisis, the role of Social Media, Brexit and French Elections

May 03, 2017

By Iacopo scaramuzzi
The crisis of the representative democracy, the risk of raising populist movements, the possibility that the United Nations and the NGOs address today’s transnational problems, from terrorism to the environmental crisis to the increase of migratory flows. These themes emerged during the plenary session of the Pontifical Academies of Social Sciences, which – upon events such as Brexit and the upcoming French presidencies – is taking place in the Casina Pio IV, in the Vatican premises, from Friday, April 28, to date.

The plenary session, titled “Towards a participatory society: new roads to social and cultural integration”, sought to deepen, in accordance with Pope Francis’s Magisterium, “the concepts of participation, combating exclusion and social and cultural integration, and then considering the empirical phenomena, their causes and possible solutions.” To the event participated, among others, the Nobel Prize for Economics, Joseph Stglitz and Princess Charles of Monaco representing Amade, the World Association of Children’s Friendship.

Economist Pierpaolo Donati spoke on “The growing social inequality between the narrow elites and the mass of the population.” during a Vatican press conference hosted today at the University of Bologna, “It is necessary to raise participation, counteract exclusion and promote integration”. The world scenario, the professor summarizes, is that of “social fragmentation” along with “the inability of political systems to govern society”. Phenomena caused by various reasons such as the “crisis of representative democracies”, “growing social inequalities” between countries and within countries, the “growing migration and the high number of refugees”, the “ambivalent role of information technology and communication “that, in particular because of social media, on the one hand, increase participation, on the other it crumbles public opinion, and finally “religious and cultural conflicts “that show the failure of the multicultural model, suggesting the need to move to a new model of inter-culturalism”.

In particular in the United States and Europe “Within a decreased middle class, which tends to be depleted, participation “goes wrong” favoring populist movements.” Instead, there is a need for “genuine subsidiary cooperation between a political system sensitive to the voice of those who are not represented, a civilized economy and associative forms of civil society based on networks of reciprocity.”

The Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Msgr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, recalled the message sent to the plenary session by the Pope, “Where other lines of thought speak only of solidarity, the SDC speaks instead of fraternity, since a fraternal society is also typified by solidarity, while the opposite is not always the case, as so many experiences confirm”. It is necessary, the Pope writes in the message quoted by Sanchez-Sorondo, “to look for a way out of the suffocating alternative between the neoliberal thesis and that neo-state-centric thesis” In this sense, “the key word that expresses better than any other the need to overcome this dichotomy is “fraternity”, an evangelical word, taken up in the motto of the French Revolution, but which the post-revolutionary order then abandoned, for well-known reasons, up to the point of its deletion from the political-economic lexicon”.

During the press conference attended by South African Professor Paulus Zulu, at the Vatican convention with two students whose trip expenses he had personally paid, the President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Margaret S. Archer, emphasized that “the days of old-fashioned social movements are over” and the solution is not through “protest movements facilitated by social media.” The British scholar, more in detail, has indicated two positive examples: the green ecological movement, a minority in politics but capable of positively influencing the coalitions of government it joins, and realities such as the United Nations and the international NGOs with which the Church has had the “wisdom” to interact, Archer stressed, citing the inclusion of the fight against human trafficking among the new development objectives adopted by the UN, (and supported by the Holy See) and the Paris climate agreement for which Pope Francis has personally out spoken. Archer noted that both the vote on Britain’s exit from the European Union and the first round of French presidencies “increased the rate of participation in the vote” because “people understand that important things are happening.” But, he noted, many people have also regretted voting for Brexit when, for example, they saw the Pound drop against the Euro and the Dollar outside the UK. “Nobody at this time can act alone at the national level because the problems are global. And international NGOs are tackling issues like terrorism, environmental crisis, the rising of asylum seekers, issues that affect all of us.”--La Stampa

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