ILLIBERALISM IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

Abstract

Illiberalism can be understand as a critical reaction to liberalism. The subject of illiberal criticism are both liberal theories and liberal societies. As Stephen Holmes argues, illiberals or antiliberals are unwilling to examine liberal theories and liberal societies separately, because they assume that liberal societies perfectly embody liberal ideas, therefore failing of liberal societies follow directly from the inadequacy of liberal principles. This paper will discuss the current state of play of both illiberal theories and illiberal societies in East Central Europe.

Also, illiberal critics of liberalism portrays and demonizes liberalism as a single coherent phenomenon. But for instance conservative liberals have little in common with social democratic ones, or neo-liberals with classical ones. As Ralf Dahrendorf has rightly pointed out, Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper may well both be seen as liberal thinkers, but their views are quite different from each other.

The main object of illiberal critique are the values of political liberalism: human rights, justice, equality and the rule of law, its commitment to multiculturalism and tolerance, ideas of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘negative liberty’, Karl Popper’s ‘open society’, John Rawls’ ‘overlapping consensus, or Ronald Dworkin’s equality as the ‘sovereign virtue’. From an institutional point of view, illiberalism challenges liberal democracy, which isn’t merely a limit on the public power of the majority, but also presupposes rule of law, checks and balances, and guaranteed fundamental rights. This means that there is no democracy without liberalism, and there also cannot be liberal rights without democracy. In this respect, there is no such a thing as an ‘illiberal or anti-liberal democracy,’or ‘democratic illiberalism’ for that matter. Those who perceive democracy as liberal by definition also claim that illiberalism is inherently hostile to values associated with constitutionalism, as an institutional aspect of liberal democracy: separation of powers, constraints on the will of the majority, human rights, and protections for minorities. Therefore, the also oxymonoric ‘illiberal’ or ‘populist’ constitutionalism is necessarily authoritarian in character.

For the same reason, I find it misleading to distinguish between antidemocrats, nativists and populists, as the main challengers of political liberalism and liberal democracy. The illiberals are all antidemocrats, who delegitimize representative democracy’s normative foundation, nativists, who protect the interests of the native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants, and they are populists, referring to the ‘pure people’ against the ‘corrupt elite’.

Another highly discussed issue of the illiberal turn in East-Central Europe started in the 2010s is to what extent was the liberal democratic revolution of 1989-1990 responsible for the illiberal counter-revolution two decades later. Francis Fukuyama in his famous essay written at the dawn of the 1989 liberal democratic transition predicted the ‘ubabashed victory of political liberalism’ and ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1989). In their book, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the fact that liberal democracy had no alternative in 1989, and East- Central European countries had to imitate the Western model, contributed to the success of illiberalism in the region11. They also claim that illiberalism in the region is deeply rooted in the outlow of people, especially young people from these countries and the demographic anxieties that this ‘expatriation of the future’ has left behind.

In my view, there was both a rightist nationalistic and a leftist democratic socialist alternative during the post-communist transition, and copying the West could only be harmful if there would have been equaly promising scenarios available, and the two mentioned ones were not such. After all, the imitation of liberal democracy in Germany after WWII and in Spain, Portugal and Greece did not result in illiberal regimes. Also, the ’demographic panic’ has intentionally been caused by the illiberal leaders themselves discouraging liberal minded people to stay in the hostile political, religious and cultural environment of their home countries as more or less enemies of the regime. Krastev and Holmes assert themselves that the contemporary illiberalism is directed at post-national individualism and cosmopolitanism, and the gravest threat to the survival of the white Christian majority for illiberals in East-Central Europe is the incapacity of Western societies to defend themselves. One visible sign of the defense of Christian majorties is the establishment of “The Hungary Helps Agency” by the government of Viktor Orbán in April 2019. The Agency’s task is to coordinate programs to help persecuted Christians.

Contrary to many contemporary theorists Krastev and Holmes also argue that multiculturalism is not the main target of illiberalism, therefore it cannot be combatted by abondoning identity poitics, as those theorists suggest15. But for instance Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s emphasis of ethnic homogeneity of the Hungarian nation proofs that illiberals fight against the concept of a multicultural society: „We do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed... We want to be how we became eleven hundred years ago here in the Carpathian Basin”.

Distinct from illiberal theories, the second part of the paper discusses three main relations of illiberal societies: the social, the economic and the political ones. Among other things, I want to figure out, whether the backsliding of liberalism in East-Central Europe is a proof or consequence of failure of liberal ideas.