Produced in collaboration with the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, “Global Challenges” analyses in its second issue “the rise of illiberal democracies” through seven case studies complemented by a series of video interviews, cartoons, maps, timeline, photos and infographics.
While the 20th century has been marked by the generalisation of democratisation processes, the 21st century has opened with the opposite trend: a multiplication of authoritarian and populist turnabouts, including in countries considered until recently to be firmly democratic. Agitating contemporary scourges such as insecurity, loss of identity, mass migration and corrupt elites, a new generation of leaders is revisiting the notion of democracy. Once elected, they consolidate power in the executive, set up laws and political mechanisms to harness civil society, repress and intimidate political opponents and, ultimately, emasculate the electoral process. In the name of an electoral majority, which they constantly seek to (re)mobilise, they discriminate minorities and conflate specific and nationalist interests.
Will the rise of these new forms of elected but authoritarian governance become a permanent fixture of geopolitics in the coming decades? What forces and safeguards, on the contrary, are currently working in liberal democracy’s favour and what is needed to preserve it for the future? To answer these questions, seven contributions offer insights from case studies around the world:
- Ivan Krastev (in Russia: Haunting Western Democratic Imagination) shows that the cause of anxiety in the liberal West is not that Russia will run the world, but that much of the world will be run the way Russia is run today.
- Shalini Randeria (in Orbán’s Lawfare against Liberal Democracy in Hungary) warns that whether illiberal democracies will continue to take root in Europe depends in large measure on the European Union and the European People’s Party’s continued toleration of Prime Minister Orbán’s undermining of civil and political liberties.
- Exploring the paradoxes between Erdoğan The Authoritarian and Erdoğan The Democrat, Jean-François Bayart (in Turkey: Erdoğan’s Authoritarian Turn) argues that while Erdoğan draws on the resources of Muslim conservatism to underpin his legitimacy, he relies above all on the old methods of the Kemalist regime to consolidate his power.
- Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou (in Reinventing Authoritarianism in the Middle East) argues that the new-old authoritarian regimes of the Middle East have reasserted themselves in at least three innovative ways: by appearing to embody change while crushing it; by securing international support for, or tolerance of, their campaigns; and by sowing doubts amongst their populations about the value of democracy.
- In Uganda: Managing Democracy through Institutionalised Uncertainty, Rebecca Tapscott investigates the situation of democracy in Uganda, a hegemonic party-state that relies increasingly on patronage and violent coercion. Uganda exemplifies how illiberal democracies produce uncertainty to formally manipulate liberal governance for the pursuit of illiberal ends.
- Venezuela’s Chavist regime seems to be a good example of an illiberal democracy. For Rafael Sánchez (in Post-Truth Populism in Venezuela), however, Chavism has less to do with democracy, understood as majority rule, than with factors that such an understanding occludes.
- David Sylvan (in The United States and the Trajectory of Democracy) considers that the jury is still out on whether or not the United States, under Trump, will become an antidemocratic model. What matters is not so much what President Trump does as what his fellow citizens do in response.