The third-party funded project “Democracy as Concept and Cultural Performance” is dedicated to questions and problems connected to the so-called “delimitation crisis” of political development in the Federal Republic of Germany as well as other EU countries from the 1970s to today. By “delimitation crisis” what is meant is the lack of cultural willingness and ability to undertake and acknowledge essential limitations for every liberal regime.

Issues examined are:

• the dominating orientation of all political action to ensure economic growth
• the ability of democratic governments to catch developments that have been thrown off balance and push through necessary change to existing political priorities, as well as
• possible repercussions to democratic states if discovered that autocratically controlled states are more in the position to push through necessary limits than the western democracies increasingly influenced by protection of vested rights.

The goal is to determine whether the ability of democratically formed states can be empowered to containment. In order to reach this goal, besides social systems other areas are examined (for example, barriers to innovation in the social area, in economics or governance structures) that thanks to their orientation toward vested-rights make change difficult or hinder it altogether.