This study explores the contemporary democracy in South Africa three decades after the end of Apartheid. Based on the classical study provided by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996), the challenges to South Africa’s democracy are analyzed in the political, judicial, bureaucratic, economic and civil societies. Each society is important as a single-case study analysis, but they are also interrelated societies, together bringing deepened insights to the quality of democracy. It is argued that although the African National Congress (ANC) was once the promoter of democracy, its long-term political dominance has resulted in major hindrances for further democratization in the political, bureaucratic and economic societies, but with positive signs in the judicial and civil societies.

Fully embracing the wide range of challenges liberal democracy has faced in recent years, this book offers a deepened understanding of contemporary changes and challenges to liberal democracy.

There is an on-going scholarly debate on European (dis)integration. Research (Cross, 2017; Jones et al., 2021; Vollard, 2018; Webber, 2018) has addressed how historical European crises often led to deepened European collaboration (Cross, 2017). The scholarly work has mentioned how severe crises in EU member states' reluctance to stay as member-state or include new member-states, obstruction to integration in certain policy areas (the Euro, CFSP, SEM and Schengen), right-winged populism and anti-EU rhetoric in most cases not resulted in expected disintegration, but rather in new negotiations and policy-making. In such context, the European Commission plays an important role to promote European interest beyond individual member-states' national interests. The climate change challenge provides one of the most contemporary global crisis. The Agenda 2050 on sustainable development is a bold and ambitious vision by the European Commission for a climate neutral Europe and may serve as a normative model globally. This study explores the recent role of the European Commission to promote sustainable development. It is argued that in times of serious European crises, the European Commission has acted as a normative power and transformed crises into a window of opportunity.

This chapter addresses the challenges to liberal democracy in Europe and how a questioned liberal democracy has become a threat to the European Union (EU) and European integration. This chapter reviews the research on democratization and autocratization and explores the democracy status among EU member states. It further discusses how previous decades of democratization provided for EU enlargements and an expanded democratic peace order, but how recent years of democratic decline has become an existential threat to the EU. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what the EU should do if some member states further declines into populism, illiberalism and autocracy.

This study deals with the European Commission Communication Europe 2020, which was a direct result of the global economic crisis that began in 2007-2008. The focus is to explore how the Commission gained an extended role as political entrepreneur by launching the Europe 2020 Strategy and turning crisis into a window of opportunity. Europe 2020 was a Commission initiative to deal with the crisis by promoting smart, sustainable and socially inclusive development beyond the narrow scope of economic growth. The Commission addressed the economic crisis as an existential threat to European economy, but also to wealth, health integration and stability. It is argued that the crisis management of the Commission, was, in times of weakened member-state capacities, a result of political entrepreneurship.