Between Authoritarianism and Identity-stressing Sovereignism: “Illiberal Democracy” as a Model

Giampiero Bordino
Professor in Contemporary History and Political Analyst. President of the Einstein Center for International Studies

In Western history, democracy as a political system arises from the root of the liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English, American and French ones, through the overcoming of the wealth-based and oligarchic limits of political rights, above all the electoral ones, and through a growing popular participation in political life.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in a context of struggles and conflicts, the model of liberal democracy was born, which unites the masses' political participation, mediated by political parties, trade unions and all other possible forms of association and universal suffrage, to civil rights and to the system of guarantees provided by the rule of law, as inherited from those liberal revolutions. The division of the legislative, executive and judicial powers,  gained in the liberal era, is a cornerstone of this political model, aimed at ensuring limits to political power and the respect for the rights of minorities; in short, it aims at preventing a new form of tyranny, that of the majority. It should also be remembered that federalism, conceived and experimented for the first time in the American liberal revolution, falls essentially within this perspective of division of powers, in this case not an institutional but a territorial division.

This model of liberal democracy, as well known, was weakened and threatened by the authoritarian nationalisms of the late nineteenth century, and entered a crisis and collapsed in many Western countries during the first half of the twentieth century after the First World War, with the rise of the totalitarian fascist and Nazi political systems and, albeit in another context, also with the failure of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the birth of the Stalinist totalitarianism.

Liberal democracy was restored in the West, and not everywhere, only after the Second World War in the new context of the bipolar world dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. In the European West, the rebirth of democracy is also a result of the process of European integration which took off in the early Fifties, confirming the link between the federal and the liberal-democratic perspective.

This brief historical reconstruction may enable us to better understand what is at stake today, in the new context of the globalized and multipolar world in which we live. For the first time explicitly, the opposite model of an “illiberal democracy” is proposed today by the Hungarian leader Orbàn, and more recently also by the adviser to the American President Trump, Steve Bannon, a supporter of a nationalist and anti-European perspective and now “adviser” also to the new European neo-nationalist politicians like Orbàn himself, the Austrian Sebastian Kurz, the Turkish Erdogan, the Polish Kaczynski and the emerging Italian leader Matteo Salvini. Illiberal democracy is understood as a political system in which the political leader, legitimized by the majority of voters, presents himself as a direct expression of “the people” (an undifferentiated entity without significant internal articulations) without the need of intermediating associations (political parties, etc.) or significant counter-powers to guarantee individual and minority rights.

In this framework, division of powers, constitutional courts, judges, press organs, technical-consultancy bodies, etc. are essentially seen as obstacles to the decision-making processes, potential “enemies of the people” and their leaders, to be limited or removed as far as possible. There follows, to use an expression proposed by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and also used by the Croatian essayist Predrag Matvejevic, a model of “democratura”, democracy and autocratic rule at the same time. The idea of illiberal democracy or democratura is based on a narration of the world able, in the context of ungoverned globalization in which we live, to intercept, involve and “seduce” (in the etymological sense: to lead to oneself) the expectations and emotions of more and more vast popular masses. People are presented as victims of “the elites”, understood not only in an economic or political-institutional sense, but also in a cultural one, as made apparent by the increasingly frequent criticism against “competences” and competent people. 'People against the elites' is the winning formula of this narration. From this point of view, the elites are also seen and “denounced” as global elites and, before that, European and pro-European, not only local and national. So, the elites are in some way “foreign”, distant from the interests of the people, unable to interpret their identity and interests. In this vision, the polemic against the elites as global entities, and the polemic against migrants, refugees, foreigners and so on (one of the great themes of the supporters of illiberal democracy, from Trump to Salvini) tend to be looked as one, and merge together. The people, through their leaders, have found the “enemies” to single out and fight, those responsible for all the evils that afflict them, those at which they shall direct fears, resentments and rancor. These enemies, despite their diversity, have in common their “remoteness”, that is, their distance from the people, from their identity, from their interests and their emotions. It matters little if the new leaders of the people, their new “lawyers”, from Trump to Bannon to make only American examples, have long been authoritative members of the ruling classes, globalized businessmen and billionaires, or are anyway, in other cases, rising exponents of new power elites now endowed with all the resources and attributes of their role, and also very able to use them. The narration of the “chanters” of illiberal democracy and identity-stressing sovereignty (in short: America First, Russia First and so on, in a zero-sum game in which all are inevitably losers and lost) represents its “heroes”, from Trump to Putin, from Orban to Erdogan, as incarnations of the people, an authentic voice of their needs and imagination. Demagogy, already present and recounted in ancient Greece, is reborn in new forms in the 21^st century. And with all the tools and resources made available by the global-age technology revolution, primarily in the world of communication.

The present ungoverned globalization is, as already mentioned, the fundamental frame of this great transformation, and it is in this framework that the identity-based sovereignty that accompanies illiberal democracy is situated and can be interpreted. With the globalization of finance, economy and markets, and more generally of all the flows (of signs, images, values, etc.) made possible by the technological revolution and favored by the neo-liberal policies of the ruling classes in the last decades, the States have actually lost a large part of their governing capacity. The problems have become predominantly global, while political power has remained enclosed within the borders of states, however large they may be. The impotence of states to guarantee public goods (peace, security, social protection, fiscal justice, jobs, environmental quality, etc.), for which statehood was born and developed in the last centuries, has become ever more evident. States, in fact, do not have even the traditional “monopoly of the legitimate use of force”, their decisive resource of last resort, given that new transnational private actors such as mafias, criminal organizations and terrorist movements are able to strike everywhere and everyone, as do know by experience even the world superpowers, from the United States to Russia to China.

In this frame of reference, the identity-based sovereignty was born or reborn, and the supporters of illiberal democracy, from Trump to Orbàn, are at the same time supporters of that sovereignty too. In a world that seems to elude any control and in a context in which the “people” are clamoring for getting back the guarantees of lost public goods (security, jobs, social protection, etc.), the new leaders propose, for reasons on the one hand opportunistic (it is better to do so in order to obtain consensus) and on the other cultural (they cannot or do not want to look for any other way), the recovery of their lost sovereignty, the closing-in in their own borders, and the reaffirmation of their identity against the others. “Us” against “them”, and every man for himself. As if it were possible to see to it on one's own, in a world in which interdependence has been intertwining and mixing things and people for a long time now. In fact, as our daily experience teaches us, the world's ills, the insecurity factors such as wars, environmental and social disasters, or financial crises, do not stand still, they “walk” fast and pierce any frontier and any wall.

But is there really another way out, an alternative to the illusory and self-destructive illiberal democracy and identity-based sovereignty, to face the evils of the world and at the same time  guarantee democracy as a political model? How is it possible to give back to politics, and therefore to the will of the people, the control of the economy and the ability to produce the fundamental public goods, from peace to jobs, which national, and to some extent now also continental statehood has lost a long time ago? It is evident that, in the context of planetary interdependence and globalization, the only realistic way to successfully tackle global problems and thus guarantee fundamental public goods is to build institutions and policies at all the levels at which such problems arise: from local to national to continental (the level of the United States, China, Russia or India, and in a still embryonic form also the European Union), to the global one (the level of the UN and other world institutions).

Basically, it is a matter of really recovering one's lost sovereignty by sharing it with others, at the various levels where problems arise and must be addressed. Sharing sovereignty in a multilevel democracy, from local to global: this is the formula that a new narrative of the world, alternative to the illusory and suicidal one of an identity-stressing sovereignism and an illiberal democracy, should propose and try to make seductive. It should also be noted that the national level, in this perspective, does not disappear at all, but in some ways legitimizes itself again, because it is exercised on the problems and challenges in which it is able to act effectively, and in a constitutionally regulated context of cooperation with all the other actors: “below”, the local and regional ones, and “above”, the continental, like the European Union, and the global ones, the international level. This also means, in a new narration of ourselves and of the world, to embrace the perspective of multiple identities and belongings, of plural citizenships, not conflicting with each other; in sum, a new  shared and common feeling of humanity.

To do all this, and to concretely build this perspective, there is not much time left. The “mole” of  ungoverned globalization is burrowing and eroding, since many years now, the very foundations of our coexistence and of civilization itself, and is daily nourishing the seductive capacity of illiberal democracy and identity-stressing sovereignty. If we want to safeguard our future, and especially that of the coming generations, it is no longer possible or legitimate to stand idle and just watch.

Translated by Lionello Casalegno