The Emergence of Illiberalism

Understanding a Global Phenomenon

Boris Vormann, Michael D. Weinman, Boris Vormann, Michael D. Weinman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000079180
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As illiberal and authoritarian trends are on the rise—both in fragile and seemingly robust democracies—there is growing concern about the longevity of liberalism and democracy. The purpose of this volume is to draw on the analytical resources of various disciplines and public policy approaches to reflect on the current standing of liberal democracy. Leading social scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds aim to examine the ideological and structural roots of the current crisis of liberal democracies, in the West and beyond, conceptually and empirically.

The volume is divided into two main parts:

• Part I explores tensions between liberalism and democracy in a longer-term, historical perspective to explain immanent vulnerabilities of liberal democracy. Authors examine the conceptual foundations of Western liberal democracy that have shaped its standing in the contemporary world. What lies at the core of illiberal tendencies?
• Part II explores case studies from the North Atlantic, Eastern Europe, Turkey, India, Japan, and Brazil, raising questions whether democratic crises, manifested in the rise of populist movements in and beyond the Western context, differ in kind or only in degree. How can we explain the current popular appeal of authoritarian governments and illiberal ideas?

The Emergence of Illiberalism will be of great interest to teachers and students of politics, sociology, political theory and comparative government.

PART I
Democracy, Contested

Causes of Illiberalism

1
FROM A POLITICS OF NO ALTERNATIVE TO A POLITICS OF FEAR

Illiberalism and Its Variants

Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

Introduction¹

Liberal democracy is in crisis. This much seems undisputed in the literature and media comments that have proliferated since 2016, when the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump ignited new debates about the meaning and limitations of liberal democracy. If anything, this verdict has been consolidated by subsequent electoral successes of populist parties in other European states, such as France, Austria, Italy, and Germany, as well as similar tendencies in Australia and Ontario, Canada’s most populous and globally connected province. The dissatisfaction with the status quo was equally expressed in the initial shift toward the left in Southern European countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal—and the rise of right-wing parties that followed. Beyond the West, the election of Jair Bolsonaro as the President of Brazil, turmoil in former Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and an autocratic reinterpretation of democracy under Abe, Erdogan, Modi, and Putin only reinforce the sense that the triumphant era of liberalism is over.

The engines of neoliberal, market-led globalization, which appeared unparalleled in power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seem to have come to a screeching halt. So, too, has the confidence or at least the hope that democracy, in tandem with markets, was on an inevitable course to expand happily ever after. In the West, what is common across otherwise wildly different cases is a distrust for existing parties, deep inequalities coupled with extreme polarization of the political spectrum, and the desire for anti-establishment politicians to clean up corruption and restore responsiveness to their constituencies. On both sides of the Atlantic, opponents of free trade and critics of globalization are organizing; so are ethnic nationalists, who see an opening for more authoritarian politics. More often than not, elections turn into tribunals on the establishment, with the judgment turning against the elites and the status quo.

On a global level, liberalism and theories of democratic peace seem to have lost explanatory power and normative appeal. Hopes for global convergence and integration are thwarted as the divide between the global north and the global south deepens further. Humanitarian interventions are being refuted as thinly veiled geostrategic maneuvers and the West seems to have lost its lure—a process accelerating as its core countries seem to be themselves turning away from the liberal creed. National interests are again dominating international relations (IR), while more normative approaches seeking cooperation and integration tend to be rejected as naïve do-goodism. Supranational institutions of the post-World War II era—the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—are eroding under the pressures of protectionism and neo-mercantilist trade conflicts. In short, Realpolitik is back. And so are great power politics, weapons races, and zero-sum politics.

Illiberal forces quickly seek to fill the ideological vacuum left by a hollowed out liberal idealism. Once in office, however, demagogues not only fail to deliver most of their promises, but also and perhaps more importantly, alter the structures of the state and civil society in ways that are likely to inflict long-term damage. Undoing checks and balances, in particular through intervention in the judiciary, public officials’ conflicts of interest, and the defamation of the media, they put essential pillars of democracy and core ideals of the enlightenment under attack. In the absence of meaningful reform, strongman leaders distract attention from their bankrupt political vision with xenophobic appeals and a politics of indignation, further unraveling prior commitments to liberal democracy. Meanwhile, they revise institutional and procedural pillars of democracy, indicating that illiberal politics—a fear-driven, authoritarian reorganization of the state around exclusive and patriarchal notions of an ethnic demos that seeks to undo the norms and institutions of political liberalism—will not be effaced easily with the next election, impeachment, or vote of no confidence.

We contend that the variegated forms of illiberalism—much like variegated neoliberalization patterns (Brenner et al. 2010)—materialize in otherwise very different contexts at the same historical moment because they have a set of common denominators. Illiberal tendencies seek to partially reshape neoliberal practices and ideas of the past half-century—the politics of no alternative that posited the inevitability of globalization and the superiority of market solutions—at a moment where these practices and ideas no longer seem legitimate in the core countries of the North Atlantic. While progressives have been criticizing neoliberalism for a long time, it is the right-wing critique of neoliberalism that is much more successfully redoing neoliberalism, and, potentially, undoing liberal democracy in the West and beyond.

Unlike the left, which argues for reform through redistribution and decommodification to address the consequences of welfare state retrenchment and deep inequalities, right-wing critiques operate from the understanding that the demos—defined in exclusive, ethno-nationalist terms—is under attack by overwhelming outside forces, while the state, corrupted by naïve or deluded elites—the much-scolded establishment—is unwilling or unable to protect its citizens. Calls for law and order, stricter security, and a reassertion of popular sovereignty are at the heart of this politics of fear.² From that perspective, reform won’t do and the institutional safeguards of democracy, above all the separation of powers and the protection of minority rights, become viewed as hindrances to the defense of the “true” demos. Liberal democracy seems to stand in the way of “true” democracy.

How does this challenge to liberal democracy compare across contexts? How does the perceived failure of liberal policies and institutions in one region impact the global standing of liberal democracy in others? How far has the politics of fear progressed? And has a liberal vision of democracy been unseated? The chapters that follow explore the current crisis of liberal democracies conceptually and empirically, putting into perspective a wide range of country examples in the Western and Non-Western context, to seek answers to these questions and develop a vocabulary to better fathom illiberal tendencies. As they show, democracies around the world are facing a two-pronged crisis. One part of the crisis brought figures such as Trump, Johnson, and Orban into office in the first place. This is very much a crisis emerging from within the neoliberal paradigm. The second part of the crisis is currently unfolding as such political figures capture state power.

Comparing Global Variants of Illiberalism

Integral to the new illiberal international, understood as an internal outgrowth and not simply as an emulation of anti-Western autocrats such as Vladimir Putin, are the antipluralist, often demagogic, politicians who come to wield almost unchecked state power in both longstanding and emerging democracies (see also Galston 2018). Responding to recent electoral successes by non-establishment parties in very different contexts—from Brazil to the US, the UK to Israel—recent literature in the burgeoning field on “populism” is often written for a broad audience and, given the focus on one or another national readership, can lack the comparative scope and empirical depth for which this volume aims. To be sure, political context matters both for outcomes and potential ways of addressing crisis tendencies. Political cultures, institutional path dependencies, the role of a state in the international order as a hegemonic or peripheral power, are crucial for how the crisis dynamics play out in different settings. But because it tends to ignore important parallels that transcend, for instance, the specificities of a given party system—e.g. polarization in the US two-party system—or national context—e.g. Germany’s divided past—existing work undertheorizes commonalities.³

There is, of course, a risk of treating all these cases—Brazil and the US, Germany, and India—the same. They are not. And we are not aiming to do that. The danger of such an endeavor would be to misunderstand common developments as though they naturally evolved in tandem developing such internal propulsion as to become almost inevitable—a wave of autocratization. What is the added value of bringing all these developments into one perspective, then? Above all, it enables us to explore the global scope of related phenomena and to stress parallels and potential pathways. This, in turn, helps us to theorize certain patterns that we otherwise would not see because they might appear conjunctural or coincidental in an individual context where they are not. Trump, for instance, is not simply chaotic even though he is often portrayed as such. Viewing him in comparison helps to outline what is actually a rather coherent pattern of policy visions.

While too much of the work on populism focuses only on state-by-state unit-level idiosyncrasies, we also hope to identify a broader context in which all this happens, common preconditions that facilitate the rise of autocrats, and certain strategies that they use to mobilize their voter base, seize state capacities, and act while in office. Although the empirical cases examined in this volume reflect a wide range of political systems, different democratic traditions, and economic contexts, the paths toward autocracy are contiguous. As such, we can sketch out something like an ideal-typical trajectory of de-democratization that we can witness in otherwise very different places—even if the starting point and (therefore) the end results differ in important ways.

The Problem with the Term Populism

Before we sketch these broader global patterns, an important terminological caveat is in order. Notwithstanding Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) recent explicit call for a “left populism,” it is difficult to find voices that self-identify as populist within the circle of those hoping to sustain liberal democracy through its current moment of crisis. The term is usually used in a pejorative manner to discredit different movements. This creates a series of problems. Populist critiques might well voice true grievances that should be taken seriously and surely not be rejected out of hand. Worse, knee-jerk reactions against populist movements ignore the democratic potentials of binding recently politicized populations back into actual politics (Eichengreen 2018; see Calhoun in this volume).

As such, the common deployment of the term “populism,” both within social science and by political actors associated with liberalisms of the left, right, and center, only aggravates the well-known crisis of legitimacy. As Jan-Werner Müller crucially points out, “[n]ot everyone who criticizes elites is a populist” (Müller 2016, 101). But oftentimes, in practice, this distinction is blurred so that many public discussions do fall into a by-now familiar dichotomy: either you are with the status quo or a populist. The simple derogatory use of the term populist equates all such movements regardless of political ideology and direction, playing down actual fascist groups and aggrandizing fringe movements, placing anyone skeptical of liberalism into a single category: enemies of democracy. This is hampering an already fraught political discourse. We use different terms to refer to critics of liberalism, (civic or ethnic) nationalists, and fascists, and there are reasons for that.

From an analytical perspective, another crucial problem with the term populism is that, if used uncritically, it ignores the more structural and discursive factors that have given rise to widespread discontent in the first place. This, of course, has far-reaching implications. If one interprets the rise of illiberalism simply as the outbreak of a contagious craze at the populist fringes, the status quo ante, that is, a return to neoliberalism, might suddenly appear quite appealing. But “global Trumpism” (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume) has its roots precisely in neoliberalization processes. It is not simply the result of an irrational aberrance. This is why simply returning to the politics that paved the way for illiberalism would do little to resolve the more fundamental problems at stake that emanate from an internal crisis of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism’s Implosion

Deep are the roots of those thinkers who advocate for free market capitalism. But Adam Smith (particularly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments), John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville would all have agreed that homo economicus—as someone who only strives for the maximization of their self-interest in a competitive struggle for survival of all against all—is not enough; for liberalism to thrive, the ideal subject would also have to be someone who can take informed choices and sometimes prioritize the common...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Part I Democracy, Contested: Causes of Illiberalism
• Part II Democracy, Distorted: Cases of Illiberalism
• Part III Epilogue: Persevering through a Crisis of Conviction
• List of Contributors
• Index