QUOTE : Slovenia may be a small marginal country, but the decision of its Constitutional Court was the symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today’s, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide—they just want to keep their privileges intact, unaware of the catastrophic consequences which would ensue if their demands were to be met. This line of argument is not new. In a TV interview a decade ago, the theorist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a ‘valley of tears’.