Informant38

Guardian Unlimited | Karma Nabulsi | The struggle for sovereignty: "The most important lesson of our common history is that those organised political engagements against injustice are what created the political culture that ensured the stability of the democratic institutions that emerged.

It is not only after one possesses democratic institutions that one practices democracy, nor is democracy merely a set of institutions or mechanisms such as elections. Democracy only holds if it emerges by customary practice in the public sphere, and in the case of Europe this custom developed through organised resistance to unrepresentative rule over generations.

So the popular struggle for liberty has been, in the case of established democracies in Europe, the necessary route to gain those liberties, and to hold them. All the rights enjoyed today across Europe were hard won by political mobilisation, imprisonment and armed resistance, by organisational structures working underground for a common purpose at great risk over generations. "