Roman Republic and contemporaneus democracy (I)

From our current historic perspective, we use to think the values that inspire our juridical legislation came from French Revolution. However, that statement is not exactly true due to the outbreak of French Revolution was the performing of values which origins and development were situated many centuries before.

We are talking about values borned in the Ancient Greece, being aplicated at the end of sixth century before Jesus Christ and taking end with the invasion and victory of Filipo´s soldiers above Athenian army. Nevertheless, the Athenian democratic seed come back and blossomed many times in the History with better or worse luck; that´s why Democracy was tried at every time.

The Roman republic was inspired on those values, becoming a rather advanced form of political organisation for the epoch. Evidently it wasn´t a perfect democracy; in fact, the system vote and the magistratures access were conditioned by an aristocratic character. Apart from that situation, Roman republic can be considered as a perfect precedent of our contemporaneous democracy, sharing the basic and intemporal nucleus: the politic power must be subject to the laws voted by citizens.

Focusing on the formal and material perfection of Republican conception, institutions of our current democratic system are being affected by troubles that Roman institutions never had. Therefore, justice, power distribution and sovereignty thinkings that head this first democratic formulation have been valid for all time and all places. Those ideas are kept as universal values that must be object of respect, lauding and veneration.

However, the republican regime disappeared formally centuries later since the proclamation of Absolute Empire by Dioclesiano in 284 after Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, the truth is that republic began to descompose materially many years before, with August´s populist government and his power play. August known how to camouflage his personal ambitious and achieve an ilimitated power and influence. He claimed himself as the institutions guardian while he was destroying astutely the republican constitution; that´s why nobody wasn´t able to thwart his authentic purpose.

From critic spirit and Law student perspective, the disappearing and sustitution of the republican regime for the Principality due to the August´s populist actions it´s a recurrent historical image. In that way, it´s usually to say the people who doesn´t know his History is condemned to repeat it, specially those traumatical events which people was not able to extract learnings.

Stressing on that idea and from a general position, it seems to me that if Occident isn´t concerned about democracy troubles during the History, we will take the risk of trivialise and situate it in a second place.

The biggest challenge of democracy system is fight against those bads wich try to destroy it from inside. In order to manage this achivement, democracy needs to have all the necessaries instruments which let discover false messiahs and disguised menaces; but first at all, we should to work out the citizens confidence in the political system.

Currently we´re in a deadlock, it means we are trivialising ethic values and the Right State. We have fallen in the mistake to think the borning of a democratic regime in Spain and the hegemony of representative system in Europe are achievements reached without effort. We have taken for secure democracy is inherent ourselves and immune to any social or economical event.