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W hen Karl Marx famously proclaimed in 1848 that "a specter is haunting Europe," he immediately gave it a name-the specter of communism. Today a specter is again haunting Europe, but (as perhaps befits a spectral presence) it does not have so clear an identity. The political tendencies that today seem to be threatening liberal democracy in Europe are described by a variety of terms: populism, nationalism, nativism, illiberalism, xenophobia. Found on both the right and left, they are typically anti-establishment, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization, anti-EU, anti-American, and sometimes openly anti-democratic. These forces are not new in Europe and their influence has been growing for some time. (We addressed in these pages in October 2012 the prospect of "European disintegration" and in October 2014 the rise of Euroskeptic parties.) But the urgency of the challenge they present has been underlined both by the election in late 2015 of an illiberal government in Poland and by the June 2016 British vote in favor of leaving the European Union.
The Journal of Democracy was launched in January 1990 as the "third wave" of democracy was nearing its height. Although we always have sought to pursue a global and comparative approach to the study of democracy, we also made a conscious decision to focus primarily...