This episode explores the tensions and contradictions of liberal democracy. What are some recent developments regarding opposing dynamics of economic globalization and the political sovereignty of the nation state? And why are universities, which have paved the way for upward mobility in most Western democracies, now under attack? Tune in to hear why there cannot be a free society without free universities.
Our guest: Michael Ignatieff
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, rector and president of Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the 10th and final episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. I'm very pleased to welcome back my colleague and friend, Michael Ignatieff, professor of history at Central European University in Vienna. He also proceeded me as rector and president of CEU between 2016 and 2021 during the turbulent years that saw our university being forced out of Hungary by Viktor Orban's regime.
Prior to joining CEU, he served as Edward R. Murrow chair of press, politics and public policy at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. Michael is a public intellectual, well known for his wide range of writings, including commentaries on contemporary issues. He's the author of numerous award-winning books, such as his biography of Isaiah Berlin[i], followed by, in 2000, the “Rights Revolution”[ii], in 2001, “Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry”[iii]. Then a decade later, an autobiographical reflection on his ears in active politics titled “Fire and Ashes Success and Failure in Politics”[iv]. More recently, “The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World”[v]. And finally, “On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times”[vi], a set of essays which can stand us all in good stead these days.
Michael also served in the parliament of Canada, where he was for some years the leader of the Liberal Party. So, I'll begin today by asking him to comment on the surprising electoral win, not only in Canada, but also in Australia of progressive candidates who have won against the odds. Two politicians who epitomized the antithesis of Donald Trump and his divisive politics.
I'll ask him to elaborate on the focal transition from liberal internationalism to a world in which national economic interests and sovereignty prevail over everything else. What does this shift imply for progressive liberal politics? Next, we'll turn to the United Kingdom in Europe where transatlantic relationships once marked by common economic interests, shared political visions, and taken for granted security architecture are now being fundamentally challenged.
I'm particularly eager to hear Michael's views about the threat of far-right breakthroughs on the continent in the context of a populist attack on elites. I'll also ask him to weigh in on the limitations of trying to stem the soft authoritarian tied by legal juridical means we'll discuss the importance of not giving in to the seductive, but self-defeating narrative of powerlessness that plays into the hands of the radical right.
Could liberalism reassert its promissory power by acknowledging, for example, the socioeconomic effects of unfettered capitalism on inequality, which it sometimes neglected for the sake of abstract principles of liberty? Finally, we'll conclude by turning from the wider world of politics to the academic realm, which both of us inhabit.
As recent developments in the United States have shown, universities may rapidly become the victims of arbitrary political whims. Universities are under attack today as spaces of privilege and autonomy, and the question is how could they connect to broader publics and be relevant in shaping the democratic imagination and democratic politics?
Welcome to the podcast, Michael, and it's a great pleasure to have you with me today. Thanks very much for joining.
Michael Ignatieff (MI): Pleasure to be here.
SR: In your commentary on the recent electoral results, both in Canada and in Australia, where candidates who admired and also imitated Trump suffered resounding defeats, you interestingly used the analytical lens of Newton's third law, namely, that actions trigger equal and opposite reactions, to explain the surprising last-minute victories of the liberal party in Canada and of the Labor Party in Australia.
Now, of course, Trump's fantasizing about annexing Canada as the 51st state of the U.S., but also rising American nationalism, seems to have triggered a strong mobilization of Canadian nationalism. But in your comment, you wanted to temper the optimism of those who might be tempted to celebrate these electoral successes as a resilience of the liberal or center left. And your Newtonian analogy reveals that we are in a world of reactive politics, which assumes a realist retreat to national priorities and to protectionism. And this would invite a sobering acknowledgement, not only of the weakening, actually of the shattering, we should say, of the liberal, international, economic and security architecture. So, if this is a fair summary of your argument of the Canadian and Australian elections, what would constitute a counter politics to the currently dominant ideology of national economic and political sovereignty? Where do we go from here?
MI: I think that the election result was a good one from my point of view. I'm an old liberal. I led that party, so I was delighted to see it succeed. So I don't want to take away from that or from the victory of Albanese in Australia, but I think it does lay bare a problem that liberal internationalism and cosmopolitanism have been slow to recognize, which is that there really is a tension (Dani Rodrik and others have pointed this out) between an open international economy and political sovereignty. Trump is leading a revolt against a liberal international order because he thinks that it is sustained by America providing free public goods that are costly defense and other guarantees. And it means that the United States loses manufacturing capacity.
But the same problem is true in Canada. That's the dilemma. We opened up our trade to the United States in 1988 after very serious internal debates about free trade. And the claim in 1988 is that free trade is going to menace our political sovereignty. And here we are in 2025, actually confronting the same reality again, but in a different form. Suddenly our neighbor to the south is saying we want a protectionist, mercantilist nationalist economic policy. And too bad your political sovereignty makes no sense because you really ought to be part of us. That shocked Canadians awake, and shocked Canadian liberals awake to the illusion that an open liberal international economy and our political sovereignty, we could have both.
Now, we're looking at a future in which we're going to have to do quite a lot of mercantilist economic policy. We have to diversify our economic markets and we're going to have to safeguard our sovereignty. And it's no accident that as we speak to each other King Charles III is in Ottawa to say: “We are a British parliamentary democracy.” To remind the Americans, and also remind the Canadians, that for 150 years we've run a different political system next door to the most powerful empire in the world. And we're proud of that, and we've managed it. But the tension between political sovereignty and economic sovereignty is not getting any easier. In fact, it's getting much harder and that's a real challenge to the way liberals think because we think one world is good for everything. Well, it turns out it isn't actually.
SR: So, let me turn to another essay of yours Michael, “Betrayal and Trust”[vii], in which you argue that proudly reclaiming sovereignty is, in fact, pretty much if not the only logical consequence of America's allies, once they have experienced this sting of betrayal. Once that happens, you write and I quote you: “Those betrayed never forgive and never forget.”
As you quite rightly point out, this also marks the end of any illusion about Trumpism as being just a temporary aberration. You are pointing to very deep structural problems and tensions of liberal multilateral internationalism. Liberal internationalists need to realize that there has been a long running isolationist strand in American public life that you point out to, and there's been a suspicion of the liberal elite that is deeply rooted in the U.S. American heartlands, which is very enthusiastically supporting the Trumpian kind of nativist authoritarianism. Now it's not very clear to me whether the isolationist strand is necessarily tied into the authoritarianism, but they seem to be intertwined. So, what would be the main implications of this analysis of yours for liberal internationalists, both within the U.S. and in Europe?
MI: I think that the starting point of betrayal is important. Relations between countries, particularly between Canada, the United States, or between the United States and Britain, and then with Europe are never just a matter of dollars and cents or pounds, they're never just economic. They're historical ties. And they're emotional ties. So, when they get ruptured, as Trump has done, it awakens feelings, and feelings become facts in politics, and it's going to be very difficult for the United States or Britain or Europe to restitch this, even if you get a different Democratic administration.
The fact about the Democratic administration, which people didn't notice enough, is that it was a strongly mercantilist administration under Biden. The Europeans were furious at the CHIPS Act and all the things that were meant to protect American technological and economic advantages. So, the Democratic administration was already rowing back from an open international economy with selective, much more intelligently targeted tariffs, much less crazy, much less, Tuesday, we do this, Thursday we do something else. It was much more consistent and well executed, but it was in the same line of travel.
If you jump back, also the Democrats were slightly more liberal, internationalist but the United States has always been a very reluctant partner in international justice, for example, it will have nothing to do with the International Criminal Court. Canada, on the other hand, has always been much more openly internationalist because we're a small country, vast in size, but small in population. So, we want to join any club that's going. And our sense is that multilateral internationalism ties the big guys down.
I think that world is now fragmenting. The world we're looking at is slightly like a kind of pickup basketball game in a municipal park. You never quite know who's going to show up, but you play together. And I think we're going to do a lot of that. There'll be pickup basketball games with the Danes or the Norwegians. But we may go increasingly to African countries, or we go to Brazil or whatever. This fragmenting international order is not going to disappear because small countries everywhere understand they have to have alliances. So, a certain kind of internationalism will survive simply because it's the way to put counter power against the big powers. But once the Americans withdraw, it is a permanent change.
We're no longer in Franklin Roosevelt's world. We're no longer in the world that held together really until 9/11 in a way. It began to disintegrate after 9/11. So, we're in a new world. What I want to avoid in talking to you is a sense of apocalyptic pessimism. That's just an easy way to frame the future. The future is unknown, and I do think that there are some stable motives for international cooperation that will survive. I also think there will be stable reasons built and baked into the international division of labor and into the supply chains that we all depend on for everything that will survive. I think that the tariffs regime of Trump will have to acknowledge that if you want your own domestic national economy to survive, you have to take the tariffs down, and if you don't, the international financial markets will punish you. So, I think there are some things here that are stabilizing to preserve most elements of the international global economy. And I think there are some elements that stabilize international cooperation at the diplomatic level. But as Bette Davis said, buckle up boys, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
SR: Let's turn to a few of the bumpy rides and look at them in greater detail. First at the United Kingdom. I'll go back to your Newtonian analysis. When you say, and I'll quote you: “In this new world, liberal democracies pretend to be coming together while jostling to get to the head of the queue of supplicants in Washington each courting the erratic king. It's every country. for itself with the United Kingdom trying to salvage its special relationship.” Now for Britain, it seems at least for the moment to have paid off with the historic trade deal with the United States, but on the domestic front Labor doesn't seem to be doing well because it has to contend with the meteoric rise of the reform party led by Nigel Farage, who not only is a Trump acolyte, but he was the mastermind of Brexit. After effects of Brexit are there for everyone to see in the United Kingdom, and nevertheless, he seems to be doing really well at the polls. So how do you see this populist threat from the right to democracy in the United Kingdom and what would be the fallout of such a kind of swing in the U.K. also then internationally?
MI: I think some of the surface elements of this are pretty obvious. One of them is that Farage is an absolutely supreme politician, like him, dislike him. He has an incredible ear. He picks up stuff on the ground. I think the disturbing challenge that Farage opens up is that you're looking at a British economy, society and culture where the elites having done so well, the capacity of the British state to deliver effectively, consistently seems to be eroding. You look at the National Health Service, you see just perennial difficulties of just delivering the basic thing that all British people want. You want to have safe streets, and many cities are not particularly safe.
I think the other deepest problem is a post-imperial society managing imperial decline and having a terribly difficult time finding a role. It pulled out of the European Union because it was tired of being one of 28, and it had some kind of fantastic illusory belief that it could be an independent player on the international arena, and it's discovering how small and diminished the British role is. Most European societies have had to get used to this. The Dutch had an empire, the French had an empire, the Germans had an empire. All of them are post-imperial societies dealing with the compression of their historic dreams and hopes. So, Farage picks that up, a sense that the elites have failed. The trains don't run on time, the hospitals don't work. The streets are dirty and dangerous. I mean, that kind of really concrete stuff and a sense of disappointment emerges with the political system as a result. And then the most dangerous aspect of the populist challenge is that they diagnose the discontent. They're doing what a good political system should do, which is to pick up people's unhappiness.
That's what politicians do. That's their job, is to pick up and hear this stuff. The thing that is worrying to me is nobody roots for democracy. The institutional system of a democracy doesn't have many fans. It's too abstract to ask people to care about the fate of democracy. And liberals constantly make this mistake because they think democracy must have a huge constituency. Well, it doesn't, weirdly. People want their side to win. That's what they understand by democracy. And when their side loses, that's when they have a quarrel of democracy. So, to the degree that Farage is a threat to democracy, it's a threat because democracy itself doesn't have the defenders that you would think it does. And that's certainly proven in the American case where people said, Trump is a threat to democracy, and Americans shrug their shoulders. What are you talking about? This is too complicated to me. Political theorists like me spend a lot of time caring, and we do care. And I do care viscerally about the Madisonian and Jeffersonian achievement in 1787 complicated and ambiguous as it was. It's a piece of genius, but it doesn't have a constituency. This, I think, is one of the fundamental challenges that the populist challenge is making to democracies everywhere.
SR: Michael, you make a very interesting point about the elites having failed to deliver. Sometimes I think when everyone is constantly pointing to the migrants everywhere as having failed in integrating themselves, I'm wondering if the elites are the ones who are not really integrated into their societies because they've carved out spheres for themselves. So, it's not just that the streets are dirty, the elites are living in localities, which are separate. They can be gated communities like in the U.S. but in the U.K., they will be living down private roads and mansions in the countryside. They have somehow got themselves out of paying taxes in the form that they should be paying. They send their kids to private school. They don't get treated under NHS. They all have access to private healthcare. So, it's not just that they failed, I think they've just walked out of a social contract, which was the basis of understanding, which was part of the liberal, social democratic understanding…
MI: I think that's true. The elites have seceded from society using their wealth to do so, but they don't profoundly identify with the United Kingdom anymore. There's that kind of sense of detachment. I think there's truth to that. But if I can be autobiographical for a second, I'm a pure product of another elite, which was the professional middle-class public-sector elite, of which there are millions around the world. My father was a civil servant and earned a professional salary. But we felt tremendously plugged in and attached to the national project of our societies. There are large sectors of the elites in most western societies who are as patriotic, loyal, plugged in, and dependent on public services as anybody. I went to Harvard, I had a middle-class upbringing, I'm supposed to be bent over double with apology for myself, when in fact what I'm being blamed for is the behavior of a class of the elite way above my head, who seceded, who walked away, and are cosmopolitan in the bad sense of cosmopolitan that is not attached to anything.
I think elites if they're elected or they're in the public services, they've simply got to deliver. Elites are not delivering. Governance needs to be better. They've got to deliver. But I think there's also got to be a reconnection of elites with their society, and they've got to have a message to the public that says, wait a minute, what is this? What is this anti-elitism? Look, for example, what's happening with universities at the moment. Universities are fantastically vulnerable. They're being attacked as being havens of elitism, entitlement. You wouldn't know, given this attack, that we have since 1960 seen the largest expansion of higher education in the history of the world. In other words, universities instead of being havens of privileged elite, have opened the door and created the possibility for people to enter the elite in ways that are unparalleled historically. So how did we get to a situation in which suddenly educated elites are under attack everywhere? Go figure.
SR: Well, I come back to the threat to the university in our conversation, but there is something that I want to pick up on where we were earlier in our conversation, which is the conundrum of the liberals as to how to deal with the far right, how to deal with people like Nigel Farage, but also with Orban with whom you have had the experience of battling while trying to save the autonomy of our university. Talking about democracy, which has few defenders in an abstract sense, how do you defend liberal values and institutions from the threat of the Far-Right, which uses the formal means of democracy elections to then get into power and hollow out all the liberal principles eroding democracy from within? Now, one way to go would be to use the courts, the judicial pathway, against the kinds of abuse of power which the Trump administration, for example, is showing us every day. We've seen two kinds of ways of using judicial power on the European continent. In France, court has judged Marine Le Pen to be guilty of embezzlement of public funds and has banned her from running for the next presidential elections. In Germany, the historical trauma of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism sits deep in the political consciousness of the elite and in some parts of the population as well, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution recently declared the AfD, the right-wing populist party, to be an extremist organization. And this was just after the electoral victory of the AfD in which it got 20 percent of the votes. Now, of course, this classification by the Federal Authority in Germany is not a ban. It would require then a request either from parliament or from the German federal government to execute a ban. And then this would have to go through the German constitutional court. And it's not very clear that that's the path that the German political elite wants to pursue because it is afraid that it could backfire and be counterproductive. So, the question here for me, is the legal or the juridical means a good way? Or could it be counterproductive because it'll really feed into this narrative of the victimization of the majority by the political elite? What should be the limits of tolerance within a liberal democracy for this kind of right-wing disinformation and campaigns of hate?
MI: Great questions, and they're terribly difficult to answer. Take the Le Pen case. I think it's profoundly dangerous for the French Fifth Republic to ban her from participation in presidential election. I think it's overstepping the judicial mandate. The judicial mandate is to find her guilty of embezzlement and then the public makes a judgment about what they want. I feel relatively clear about that. there was any evidence that the Rassemblement National, assisted and encouraged attacks on refugee hostels, for example, or encouraged or assisted any form of violence towards political opponents, then you come down like a ton of bricks. By extension, I would take the same position in relation to the AfD in Germany. I find their views hateful, that's not the issue. But a democratic system has to, in my view allow hateful views. They're free speech rights. I'm a free speech absolutist in that sense.
And I know it's controversial, I know it's difficult, but the second AfD intimidates a political opponent, engages in political rough stuff, is found silently applauding while a refugee hostel is torched in East Germany, or something like that. For me, the bottom-line criteria is violence, the threat of violence and overt intimidation of political competitors. I'm very worried about judicial overreach in principle because I think the experience we had with the multiple attempts by liberal Democrats to stop Trump's progress turned out to be almost completely futile. It, in fact, damaged the judiciary. It damaged respect for law. Let's be clear, Trump's failure to overtly condemn and actively restrain the people that invaded Congress on January 6, 2021. That in my view, is a clear, open and shut impeachable offense, impeachable by the Congress, not by the courts, but by the Congress. When Congress failed to do so, I don't see that you can then successfully, effectively use the law. That's then up to a democracy to make its judgment and incredibly wrongly in my view, the American electorate said we don't have any illusions about Trump, but we prefer him to the alternative, and they have the right to do so.
I'm very concerned about the ways in which liberals run to the law to secure what democratic consent has failed to secure. I know the story about Weimar. My position is a perilous one in the sense that it runs some risks, but I think there are much, much more serious risks to the future of German democracy, if a party getting 20 percent is banned from electoral competition.
SR: There is a real dilemma here, I think, because if you've been following JD Vance, the U.S. Vice President's speeches in the last couple of weeks, he has been saying that the courts are an impediment to the president's agenda because he's democratically elected and the court should just bow to whatever the president does because he has democratic legitimacy and the courts don't.
MI: Shalini, I hate the outrageous bullying of the judges that the Trump administration's engaged in. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And some of it is actually encouraging the public to take the law into their own hands, it's just disgraceful. But I would still hold on to the view that what Vance is saying is since the 1960s, since the passage of the U.S. Civil Rights Act, judges have stepped in and moved America in a certain way. And I, JD Vance don't like it. We're in the middle of a counter revolutionary, reactionary revolution of a kind that we saw after the French Revolution, for example. And so they're trying to push back against 65, 70 years of judicial activism, which in my view has made life better for gays, for Black Americans. So, it's raw politics. And I'm not clear on what the solution is. It is conceivable that, the Trump administration will disobey clear court orders. It appears already to be doing so in respect of detention and expulsion of migrants, and it may do the same in relation to the rulings on universities. And then we're into open and shut constitutional crisis, and the rule of law has to prevail then. And if they persist, this is where it gets scary, if the Trump administration persists in facing off against the federal courts and refusing to carry out their injunctions. This thing may be settled in the streets, which is everybody's idea of a nightmare.
SR: But that brings me to another essay of yours: “Power and Powerlessness”. You say the Trump regime's first month was designed to disempower all of us. The shock and the awe of permanent provocation was intended to make citizens and leaders alike forget that we too, make history and we too have agency. But we mustn't forget, and you remind us that European leaders can rediscover their capacity for independent action. The EU has coined this term for itself strategic autonomy in which they've been trying to rediscover their collective agency partially only successfully. But the question I have for you here is, the other path to resistance and counter politics to soft authoritarian regimes is the street. If it's not the courts. It's civil disobedience as Gandhi would've called it, it's the streets. Now, of course, in the U.S. with so many arms around, the streets are different question from Gandhi's totally non-violent civil disobedience against the British Empire. What kind of agency could citizens collectively then use to temper this kind of arbitrary power?
MI: Well, you mentioned Gandhi, and the immense influence that Gandhi's non-violence and Indian traditions of non-violence had upon Martin Luther King. I'm of a generation that was incredibly moved and affected for my whole life by the ways in which Black civil rights pioneers managed to confront really raw, lawless police violence with nonviolence. And it proved triumphantly successful. So that's an inspirational example.
You're right though that the United States of 2025 is not the same as the United States of 1965. And there’s a real possibility of vigilantism and armed gangs from the right. And so, the whole prospect of, a political situation in which Trump defies the courts, and the people come out in the street to say, you've gone too far, which we could be at a situation. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that elections get delayed. I think there is a moment when democracy actually breaks down. America is not Trump. America is much bigger than Trump. The traditions of American democracy are astounding in their possibilities of inspiration. But the question of whether this could be kept peaceful, the question also of whether police forces will do their constitutional duty, whether the military will do their constitutional duty, all of this is suddenly in question in a way that hasn't been in my entire lifetime. So, we're in uncharted waters.
On the other hand, let's also remember that there are midterm elections in 2026. There are some reckonings that will, I think happen in 2026. And the mobilization, the democratic mobilization of people to say, wait a minute, maybe we voted for Trump, but we didn't vote for this kind of stuff. We'll begin to peel off from his constituency and support moderate Republicans, on the one hand, or centrist Democrats, on the other. And you then begin to switch the power dynamics in 2026, and the system begins slowly to change its direction. I don't think we should exclude that possibility. I don't want to sound sentimental about American democracy, but we've had standoffs between presidents and the courts. Liberals need to remember that the last huge one was when the great hero of liberalism, Franklin Roosevelt, tried to pack the court and he had to stand down. His own constituency wouldn't go with him. And so, we need to look at that 1938 episode and draw some lessons from it because we may be in that situation in 2026.
SR: Let me come to one other aspect, which you've touched on very briefly, and that is, what would be the lessons for liberals to reinvent liberalism in this context? In your review of Tim Snyder's book “On Freedom”, you have a very interesting point when you argue, and I'm going to quote you on this: “The success of the conservative insurgency, which has captured the White House tells us that there is a political capital to be made in exploiting citizens' belief that the liberal state cost them more freedom than it gained them in equality. This doesn't make citizens right, but it is their verdict. And this being a democracy, it must be listened to. No politics stands a chance of resurrecting itself from defeat unless it pays close attention to citizens' belief that their freedoms have been diminished, and unless it offers them a new vision of how freedom and equality can be realized together.”
Now if that is a lesson to be learned, and I think you're absolutely right to point this out, I think we make the mistake of thinking that equality of opportunity alone, and it has brought a lot of equality of opportunity both to women and by positive discrimination in the U.S. It has made inroads into the discrimination, centuries of discrimination against Blacks as well. But it's not enough. What kind of a new social contract would we envisage? And in the 21st century under the economic conditions and political conditions that we are under, what kind of re-envisioning of liberalism would this entail?
MI: I think one thing I feel very strongly is that we've got to be very clear about the relative priorities we attach to liberty and equality. If you ask me what democracy is, I tell my students it's power, checking power to keep the people free. The purpose of democracy is freedom, right? The freedom for people to live their lives as they choose, even though the way they choose, they live their lives, strikes us as being bad news. Or vulgar. Or uninteresting, or just downright wrong. I think liberals have out of entirely understandable desire to promote equality sometimes backed us into a position where we start enforcing speech codes. We start telling people how to behave. We start telling people what's in their interest. We start telling people what's good for them, even if they don't agree. There's a kind of bullying side to liberalism, which I think has produced an absolutely cataclysmic counter-reaction. Liberalism ought to be associated with freedom, and it's become associated with coercion, in the popular version that Trump is selling, In Trump's attack on universities that's essentially what they're saying. They're saying, these people say they're in favor of academic freedom, but what they actually do is enforce a lot of coercive political correctness about this cause and that cause and the other cause.
This is a fantasy and a fiction and it’s just not true. It's not true at CEU. It's not true at Harvard where I was, it's not true where all the great places you've taught. But we do have a responsibility for the caricature of liberalism that emerged in the seventies, eighties and nineties. And I think part of it was that we, we felt so strongly that racial disadvantage, disadvantages of sexual orientation, disadvantages of class were so salient and so important that we had to do everything to promote them and I was fully signed up to that, but I think it led to a neglect of the toleration, humility, pluralism and commitment to liberty.
That seems to me to be the spine of what liberalism is. Self-evidently, you cannot have a free society unless you have baseline equality of a real kind. But, I think the universities have not understood what has been happening, which was that we used the universities to create our chief vehicle for equality of opportunity, for improving opportunity. We've created a new educated, credentialed elite. With the odd and unexpected result, that the chief polarization in every liberal democracy now is between those who have degrees and who don't. And universities bear some responsibility for this because we've created a situation in which there's a backlash of stupendous force against the privileges and entitlements of a credentialed elite. This connects with what we were saying earlier. We've got to get, a liberal elite that's unapologetic about its education, but has a deep sense of responsibility to do some healing, to reach out, to get on the road. And recover the ground that we've surrendered to populist right across the board.
SR: To ask you a more specific question on the responsibility of universities. A few months ago, you published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education based on your own experience of fighting Viktor Orban when you were president of CEU. One of your recommendations stood out for me when you said that universities need to forge much broader alliances with the public. Would you like to expound on that as a way of getting out of the ivory tower highly specialized, sometimes rather narrow disciplinary concerns with which we spend our daily lives as researchers, scholars in universities.
MI: I'm a proud and unapologetic academic and I think you are too. We love what we do, and we care about what we do, and we think it's important, but we speak a language that most people can't understand at all. So, we have to look very carefully at our language and begin to think about how we reach out to people who don't speak our language. It's literally a translation problem at that level.
We have to make alliances with all other universities. What's happening at the moment is that Trump is picking universities off one by one by one, and everybody hunkers down hoping that the storm will pass over their heads, when in fact, American higher education needs to stand up as a whole and say, you want to make America great again, the last thing you should be doing is devastating American higher education.
I think that the thing that's so puzzling is that the most ferocious attack on higher education in my lifetime has coincided with 60 years of unprecedented expansion of access to higher education. More people have university credentials than at any time in history, and yet the political constituency that says, don't touch universities, leave them alone, they were the ladder that I used to climb, they are the engine of productivity in our economy, , that constituency is being pummeled at the moment politically, and I don't quite know how to fix it. I mean, the constituencies we need are unions, civil society, philanthropies, the press. And we need to make the point. And the most controversial and difficult issue is that, we need to connect universities to the fate of democracy itself.
One of the things that makes a society free is independent institutions, independent, self-governing institutions. If you want a free society, you want to have a society where unions have their own charters and their own autonomy, professional associations have their own charter and autonomy, NGOs have, and universities. We're part of an archipelago of free institutions, who govern themselves. They have responsibilities to the public, but they are self-governing, and that's integral to what it is to be a free society. And we somehow lost that. We've lost the connection between democracy and freedom.
The other aspect of our connection to democracy is simply that we're the only institution in free societies whose job is to evaluate the truth claims in public policy, and we do it every day in class. We're training students to think, we're training citizens every day to do that kind of stuff, and we need to be proud, unapologetic and militant in defense of those roles. You want a free society, you have to have free universities.
When our university, CEU, was attacked and the citizens of Budapest, 80,000 strong, marched past our windows, they chanted in Hungarian: “Free universities in a free society.” That's the battle cry. This isn't about us, this is about you. This is about your freedoms, and if we can convince people that our battle for our freedom is a battle for their freedom, I think universities stand a chance. And the final point is: universities has been around for a thousand years and my strong conviction is that the Trumps of this world come and go, but universities will be there afterwards. The trouble is we'll have to rebuild from the ruins.
SR: Thank you very, very much, Michael for this optimistic view of the long-term future, both of democracies and of universities with lots of caveats and cautions thrown in. But I think that is in the nature of the situation we find ourselves in today. So, thanks so much for this wonderful conversation.
MI: Pleasure. Thank you.
SR: Michael Ignatieff and my conversation on the manifold tensions and contradictions of liberal democracy is the final episode of the 10th Season of Democracy in Question. This has been a perennial topic on my podcast in recent years as some of you may remember, and it's not lost its timeliness or relevance.
The first tension Michael highlighted arises from the opposing dynamics of economic globalization and the political sovereignty of the nation state. The actions of the new Trump administration, as well as the reactions of many countries to them have only made this tension more acute. The retreat from an open international economy may have already started earlier under Joe Biden, but the earlier lingering commitment to the United States to a more liberal internationalist framework of cooperation still partly compensated for that gradual shift for relations among countries are, of course never based merely on economic transactions, but also depend on reliability and trust.
As that trust erodes and the world fragments further amidst the many geopolitical turbulences that we are witnessing, it becomes urgent for especially smaller countries to search for new alliances or try to at least salvage and cement existing ones. While Michael tried to avoid giving into a deep pessimism, he nevertheless acknowledged that the diplomatic stabilization of the global economy would require formidable efforts to cope with the current uncertainties. He also pointed out that a retreat to sovereignty and to protectionism may seem to follow logically from the backlash against the neoliberal globalization of the last decades. Yet it is the diminished capacities of the state to deliver on its social promises that is proving to be really problematic, for it often results in Western democracies with a deep sense of societal disappointment, which right-wing populace have cleverly exploited. The populist manipulative misdiagnosis of discontent seems to work so effectively, partly because the abstract ideals and normative institutional prerequisites of democracy do not have a broad constituency. Hence, the dilemma of how to respond to the rise of illiberal political forces that are eroding democracy from within. Michael has adopted a consistently principled liberal position that rejects any attempts to use the law to ban preemptively the participation of extreme right parties in the electoral process.
He argued today that such attempts may backfire, damaging the reputation of the judiciary and undermining faith in the impartiality of the law. It remains to be seen how the current reactionary assault against so-called progressive judicial activism by many soft authoritarian leaders will ultimately play out the politics of the street, which would be one way to overcome such crises, also carries however, a risk of violent escalation when populists denounce elites.
They blurred the distinctions between a numerically small group of governing elites who have indeed become increasingly isolated from ordinary citizens and a much larger group of professional middle class people with university education, many of whom are anything but disconnected from the everyday concerns of their fellow citizens as Michael argued. Thus, the populous attack on elites, paradoxically targets the very institution: universities that have paved the way for an unprecedented degree of upward mobility since the 1960s in most Western democracies.
The sheer scale and force of this backlash against higher education has its roots in the emergence of a new divide between credentialized elites seem to be enjoying relative privileges and those without academic credentials. This is a disconcerting paradox since the mass expansion of access to higher education was meant to increase equality of opportunities for all. To stem the tide of populist onslaught, universities must search for a new common language, one that transcends the boundaries of class and privilege, allowing them to reconnect credibly to the diverse publics that constitute the body politic in our societies today. Universities are deeply embedded and invested in liberal democracy, which in turn depends on liberal institutions of higher education to train informed and concerned citizens. As the fate of our university, the Central European University shows, which both Michael and I have had the privilege to lead, there cannot be a free society without free universities, but universities as autonomous institutions cannot thrive under authoritarian rule.
This was the final episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in September for the start of a new season after a well-deserved break in what will likely be a far from peaceful summer.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast, if you're enjoying it, you can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] Ignatieff, M. (1998). Isaiah Berlin: A life. Metropolitan Books.
[ii] Ignatieff, M. (2000). The rights revolution. House of Anansi.
[iii] Ignatieff, M. (2001). Human rights as politics and idolatry (A. Gutmann, Ed.). Princeton University Press.
[iv] Ignatieff, M. (2013). Fire and ashes: Success and failure in politics. Harvard University Press.
[v] Ignatieff, M. (2017). The ordinary virtues: Moral order in a divided world. Harvard University Press.
[vi] Ignatieff, M. (2021). On consolation: Finding solace in dark times. Metropolitan Books.
[vii] Ignatieff, M. (2025, March 9). The cost of betrayal: The price to pay in politics when trust is destroyed. Substack.