This episode explores the crises of liberalism. How do recent conditions of uncertainty and multiple crises play a role in amplifying the appeal of illiberal ideologies? And how does illiberalism differ from authoritarianism and populism? Tune in to hear how the defense of liberalism requires a connection to the everyday concerns and grievances of citizens.
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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. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
This is the eighth episode of Season 8 of "Democracy in Question." I'm very pleased to welcome today my colleague, Zsolt Enyedi. He's Professor of Political Science at the Central European University here in Vienna and is also Senior Researcher at our university's Democracy Institute in Budapest. He has worked on party politics, on comparative government, church and state relations, political psychology, with a particular focus on political tolerance, prejudices, and authoritarianism, the questions which will interest us today.
He was awarded the Rudolf Wildenmann Prize in 2003, and the Bibó Award in 2004. He's published articles in several important academic journals, and his recent book titled "Party System Closure"[i] was co-authored with Fernando Casal Bértoa. It was published by the Oxford University Press in 2021.
Our conversation today will focus on the very large international research project he's currently engaged in[ii]. It's on neo-authoritarianism in Europe and a possible liberal democratic response to this backsliding of democracy. We'll address ideological aspects of illiberalism on which Zsolt has recently published a fascinating article in the journal "Contemporary Politics"[iii]. His research here focuses on authoritarian and autocratizing challenges to liberal democracies across both Eastern and Western Europe, including the United Kingdom.
The idea of Europe as the cradle of democracy has shaped dominant geopolitical imaginaries in the European Union and beyond. These go hand in hand with the philosophy of history underpinned by ideas of exceptionalism, triumphalism, and a naive faith in irreversible linear progress towards democracy. Not only was liberal democracy presumed to have been invented in Europe, however fuzzy the geographical idea might be on closer scrutiny, but it was supposed to spread from here to the rest of the globe, serving as a model to be imitated by non-Western societies all over the world.
Zsolt and his collaborators join a growing group of scholars who are sounding the alarm bell. They're arguing that liberal democracy, and I quote him here, "is no longer the only game in town, even in the European Union." So I'll ask Zsolt to first explain the term illiberalism, which is central to his project, and its varied manifestations, and explain why we need to keep illiberalism as a term or phenomena relatively distinct from concepts such as populism or autocratization, with which they are empirically enmeshed. We'll then discuss some theoretical challenges and also some methodological questions which are being pursued in the project, where there is a measurement but also a comparison of varieties of illiberalism.
This is a very timely topic, because we are on not only the eve of the elections to the European Parliament, but also the U.S. presidential elections are looming large later this year, where all of the questions we discuss today will play a large role as well. I'll ask him about the crises of liberalism and the broader popular appeal of illiberal ideologies because of that crisis. Does the generalized uncertainty of our age marked by multiple crises amplify the appeal of illiberal ideologies? What are the main ideas? What are the cultural and civilizational tropes that constitute the shared repertoire of illiberal ideologies?
And we'll speak about what he has recently described as the three ideological pillars of the Orban regime in Hungary, but which characterize illiberal regimes in many other parts of the world, namely illiberal conservatism, a civilizationist ethnocentrism and paternalist populism. This threefold conceptual matrix illuminates the channels of cooperation, imitation, and also diffusion that these soft authoritarian regimes and rulers, as I call them, have built up over the years.
Zsolt, welcome to the podcast. And thank you very much for joining me today to talk about your fascinating ongoing research project. So let me begin with the Horizon project, which I've described a little bit. It's a European Union-funded project. It's based on the historical epistemological, but also the political premise that the future of liberal democracy in Europe can only be safeguarded if we understand adequately its opponents today.
The challenges to liberal democracy are manifold, they are diverse, and they range from the institutional to the ideological. Your project aims at a systematic exploration of what you call the varieties of illiberalism across Europe. And I would like to talk to you also about the family resemblances among these. Regular listeners to my podcast, which has featured our CEU colleagues, Andras Sajo[iv] as also Renáta Uitz[v], but also scholars like Martin Krieger[vi], Kim Scheppele[vii], Nadia Urbinati[viii], are familiar with the concept of illiberalism in their work and the related phenomena in the contemporary political landscape, such as populism, anti-constitutionalism, what I have called soft authoritarianism. So could you begin, Zsolt, by elaborating on the meaning of illiberalism in your own analytic and theoretical framework and explaining how it differs from, say, populism and authoritarianism?
Zsolt Enyedi (ZE): In our understanding, illiberalism is a set of ideas and practices that question such core principles of liberal democracy as freedom of speech, state neutrality, rule of law, checks and balances, pluralism, non-discrimination. These diverse ideas, policies, and attitudes can be structured around three major blocks, in my opinion. The first is the promotion of power concentration. That can happen in two ways. On the one hand, it can happen as removal of limits of executive power, and on the other hand, as the curtailment of individual rights.
The second block concerns state neutrality. So here, again, we can see attacks on state neutrality manifesting themselves in two different fashions. First, as imposition of the majority cultural standards on the members of the minority and the mobilization of state power in favor of particularistic cultural goal. On the other hand, as the prioritization of the dominant group in distributive conflicts.
The third block is connected to the concept of open society. Basically, what I'm arguing for is that illiberal preference implies support for the idea of closed society. Well, I mean two things, basically. One is opposition against rules that transcend society, such as universal human rights or international governance, and also, again, social change that is seen as non-organic, for example, externally driven. On the other hand, also preference for, I would say, non-rational type of decision-making, where I would include restriction on skeptical scrutiny, restrictions on individual autonomy, and the demonization of the opponent.
So in this understanding, illiberalism is not simply a criticism of liberal ideology. In our vocabulary, socialists and conservatives are, or at least can be, liberal democrats. And illiberalism is not simply an attack on checks and balances either, but rather an attack on those principles of human contact without which liberal democracy cannot function. This is a kind of wide approach to illiberalism that is, nevertheless, quite different from authoritarianism or populism. I understand that some people use these terms as synonyms, but I think there is quite a lot of leverage to be gained from differentiating them from each other.
By populism, I mean belief in the corrupt nature of the elite, also belief in the limitless supremacy of the general will, the will of the common people. This is, of course, not a very original take, but I consider particularly important the demand for bottom-up decision-making and the rejection of elite-led political structures in favor of majoritarian modes of governance. Of course, you could argue that many populist politicians, once they reach power, forget about these principles.
When you look at illiberalism, then you don't see, necessarily, this anti-elitist or anti-establishment streak. They don't need to venerate the people. I agree, for example that Vladimir Putinis an illiberal politician, but he is not a populist politician. Illiberalism doesn't have a problem with intermediary institutions, populism does. Populism politicizes things. Illiberalism doesn't. So there are major differences that I consider to be essential for populism.
When you move to authoritarianism, you can apply a similar logic, pointing out that not all illiberals are authoritarian. These concepts overlap, but they are not identical. To me, authoritarianism is primarily about respect for hierarchy, longing for uniformity, a kind of righteous punitiveness towards those who break the rules, and also, to some extent, it implies an opposition against bottom-up democratic mechanisms. So in a way, it's almost the opposite of populism. Unlike illiberalism, authoritarianism is not a reactive concept. It is not built on rejecting liberal democracy. Actually, you can be an authoritarian without even being aware of liberal democracy.
So while authoritarianism is primarily, for me, about hierarchical relations, and populism is primarily about a kind of boundarian decision-making, illiberalism is more a kind of umbrella concept that denotes all those forces that question individual autonomy, universalism, and divided power.
SR: So this is where the project's conceptual apparatus began with two years ago in 2022. Has it developed in any new direction since you launched it because empirical reality forced you to think about new questions or bring in other considerations?
ZE: Well, we are obviously stuck with countries we have picked originally. So even though Poland doesn't look as illiberal today as it looked when we have done our case selection, and there are other cases like Slovakia that would be more relevant today. We can still study the problem through the lens of these countries very well. This is partly so because we picked our countries using a kind of historical approach.
There are different varieties of illiberalism present for a longer time. So if you look at Hungary, even in terms of parties, you see Jobbik and Fidesz. If you look at Italy, you see Brothers of Italy and the League, and to some extent, Forza Italia as well. Then if you look at France, and actually France was our initial model country, at the projects of Marine Le Pen, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, these are all different varieties of illiberalism. And the same you find in Poland, the same you find in Austria.
To some extent, U.K. and Czechia are different from the others, but we needed one country in Eastern Europe and one in Western Europe, where the fundamental culture is liberal but the leaders experiment with illiberal tools from time to time. And also you find vestiges of left-wing illiberalism, something that our conceptual framework allows for.
While we are investigating these historical and present-day differences, we always adjust our tools to what we can actually measure. So our project is largely empirical. We try to fine-tune our instruments so that we can detect the changes of illiberalism across time and between the countries.
SR: So how exactly do you go about measuring and comparing these seven cases which you have?
ZE: So until now, we have primarily focused on policies and text. In the next wave we will use survey framework to do experiments in laboratory settings. We will conduct usual kind of surveys, and they will rely on deliberative polling. We will bring together groups representing different versions of illiberalism and let people interact, and partly manipulate these interactions, partly observe these interactions.
So far, we have concentrated on existing policies. We checked what kind of political initiatives were introduced by governments and opposition actors in these countries. And we also collected a large amount of political texts, which means party programs, speeches of politicians, but also Twitter conversations, Facebook conversations, other facets of social media.
SR: So, Zsolt, could you just give maybe a couple of examples of the kinds of illiberal laws or trendencies you observe in, say, France or the United Kingdom? Because that may come as a surprise to some of our listeners.
ZE: Well, when it comes to these countries, we, as I mentioned, also focused on initiatives that did not become laws, so looking at what parties from the opposition propose. But we also left open the question that maybe some of the policies that have a liberal democratic understanding can have also an illiberal implication. Here, the most sensitive area is immigration. How immigrants are treated. And in this regard, you can see both in UK and in France a shift by the political mainstream that is normally not regarded as being illiberal towards taking on board some of the ideas coming from radical parties. In the UK, of course, much of this discussion is focused on the Rwanda question, but in general, there are issues raised here that go beyond the immediate question of immigration, and this is how the judiciary can have a say in these matters.
And this is, of course, related also to Brexit, to some extent, onto the question whether it should remain part of the European Court of Human Rights, but it's also related to the question of whether the courts in the U.K. are allowed to interpret the law as they wish, or the parliamentary majority basically enforces its own interpretation on the courts, which would be an issue of lack of separation of powers.
SR: If we now look at France and the United Kingdom as well here, not just Poland, where there's been a reversal in the recent election, but still a long way ahead to return to liberal democracy, even in Poland, Europe seems to be a far cry from being the exception to a disconcerting global trend, which is the backlash against liberal democracy we are seeing in so many places.
One of my previous guests on the podcast, Thomas Carothers[ix], warned against a blanket generalization, contrasting, for example, the continued relative stability of liberal democracy in Western Europe with its emergent crises in Eastern and Central Europe, or the United States. It seems to me that what makes illiberalism as an ideology so effective today is that it can coexist so well with formal democratic structures, even as it erodes substantially the civic culture which sustains and is the bedrock of liberal democratic processes and institutions.
So if we take the Hungarian example, Viktor Orbán would claim that he would invoke plebiscitarian legitimacy for himself and say that his ideological project is actually more radically democratic than the ossified institutional structures of liberal politics. Is that what makes these illiberal narratives so seductive and popular? Can you say something about how these illiberal ideologies are able to coexist so well with formal democratic structures without sometimes inevitably sliding into autocratization sooner or later?
ZE: So as far as the question of what is the appeal of these actors, part of the answer comes from our research on policies where we see that often they are so popular because they have very generous social policies. Sometimes they are competent, so basically these are just usual standards. We also see that in family policies, sometimes they have initiatives that converge with feminism, at least some kinds of feminism, like when they provide financial remuneration for mothers and so on.
So their legitimacy and popularity comes from various sources. They don't have a kind of united economic policy. They don't have a united institutional reform. But what they do is they all converge on promising security, strong leadership, national pride, and they also converge in expressing some fundamental negative sentiments, such as fear of social disintegration, this lack of globalized elites, and, of course, fear of immigration.
As you very well pointed out, these things are compatible with aspects of democracy. And actually, once you add up those who have never internalized liberal democratic norms, those who became disenchanted because of the various social developments of the last decades, and those who simply have different priorities, then you can easily have plurality or majority in virtually any society.
Now, why exactly these actors are so effective now? I think for that, you really have to go into the developments of the last decades and to consider the lackluster economic growth, the financial crisis, the lack of mobility that we see now in many societies. But what I would rather emphasize is the polarization around educational lines and to some extent also settlement, so urbanization. This development is extremely important because if you consider those who have higher education as becoming increasingly inward-looking and inbreeding, having their own specific norms that are different from the rest of the society, then you can understand that the disproportionate impact of this group on rules and norms leads to some sort of a backlash in the society, especially in a democratic setting.
And this is important because, in the last decades, two things coincided. On the one hand, these economic and social defeats, particularly for Europeans and Americans who also lost on the world stage against rising powers, and at the same time, huge victories for the progressive side. So same-sex marriage, more progressive education, diversity in media, and so on. And because these things coincided, the losers combine the two and they kind of attribute their misery to the advances of economic and cultural liberalism.
You mentioned the concept of coexistence. Yes, we have to coexist with these diverse approaches simply because this is what is the hallmark of liberal democracy. We have to tolerate autonomous institutions even if they promote very different norms.
SR: If I look now at the commonalities or shared repertoires which you've alluded to, we can see that the critics of liberalism tend to share a conservative ethos, but it's heavily informed in most cases by religious elements. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about the whole narrative that we are hearing of the defense of Christian values and indeed, in many cases, like in Hungary and Russia, the defense of Christian civilization, which is being pitted against universalist, cosmopolitan, secular liberalism that is advocated by this small, educated urban elite, as you pointed out.
So the idea of Europe or even Eurasia imbued with the spirit of this so-called Christian tradition is, for example, central to anti-liberal thinkers in France as much as in Russia. I'm thinking here of Dugin, for example, who is one of the major ideologues for Putin. But liberalism has also come under fire in many contemporary cultural wars with which we as academics are all too familiar. And it's the scholarly critique of liberalism which has been instrumentalized by politicians like DeSantis in the U.S. or Viktor Orbán.
So could you say something about this civilizational religious dimension to illiberalism that is part of the current cultural war, reversing what we thought was another inevitable progressive trend towards greater secularism?
ZE: Yes, this is extremely spectacular nowadays if you look at American politics, but to some extent in many other countries as well. So the previously mentioned polarization along education provided politics with a new framework. Culture wars are now the key to understand politics. And this was not the case 30 or 40 years ago. It's amazing how powerful this factor is engulfing even Russia and other countries that are not really affected by the progressive reforms.
So it seems that partly because the legal elite and the political went ahead faster than the median citizen and partly because of these economic difficulties, especially connected to neoliberalism I mentioned earlier, there is a profound backlash that has civilizationist content in the sense that people long for bygone era where identities and values were fixed, where you could rely on the cultural templates you inherited from previous generations.
The cultural war framework had a particularly interesting trajectory. So originally, the term was coined in the 1980s in the United States where it referred to the fact that individuals who belonged to particular religious traditions started to behave not according to this religious template, but according to whether they represented the conservative or the liberal end of that tradition. So what you see that conservative Catholics started to ally with conservative Protestants, and liberal Catholics with liberal Protestants, and so on.
But then afterwards, you had a series of conflicts, especially in elite universities, so things like conflicts around critical race theory, intersectionalism, de-platforming, and so on. And these conflicts have been amplified by the right-wing media to the extent that there is a fear on the conservative side that the entire civilization is about to die. And, of course, this happened in the midst of some real conflicts like terrorist attacks, both by Islamists and by right-wing supremacists that kind of added to the dramatic nature of this cultural conflict.
And in Europe, it was, again, very much seen from the perspective of immigration and grand replacement type of conspiracy theories, resulting in a kind of mobilization of those who think that this is the last moment when you can resist the changes. Our identity, our nations, our values, our religion, defined our way of life so far. These are all attacked consciously. And if you don't resist now, even by overreaching, even by violating some of the liberal democratic rules, we lose ourselves. So this is an existential threat, and therefore, you see even citizens and politicians who until now were loyal to liberal democratic norms saying that, well, it is time to depart from them because the stakes are too high.
SR: Let me turn to Hungary as a very particular case because you've described it as the laboratory of illiberalism since 2010. And what you've said in a recent article is a really compelling case for putting ideology center stage, right? You make the argument that it's a mistake to see Orbán's regime only in terms of political opportunism or to see the ideology which they are putting forward as only a fig leaf or a smoke screen meant to conceal the ruthlessly pragmatic quest for power, as some of my other interlocutors on the podcast, I think, I'm thinking of Kim Scheppele or Jan-Werner Müller[x], have argued.
So you are saying let's take Orbán's ideology seriously because it's not only part of the popularity of the regime, but it's part of the cultivation and dissemination of what he's striving for, which is cultural and intellectual hegemony. And this is a key element of the war of position that he's waging against both internal and external critics.
Now, as a sociologist and an anthropologist, of course, I would agree with you wholeheartedly that ideas and cultural narratives have a central role to play, and we should not reduce them to just being instrumental. However, I'm also wary of culturalist reduction, as you can imagine. That is the unmoving of these ideas from the larger political-economic context. So if you're thinking of the Hungarian case, in particular, how would you relate Orbán's ideology, which has been enormously successful, with the material realities in Hungary and the kinds of social divisions, not only the ones that they can ride on successfully, but the ones which they create, which lend themselves so well to this kind of ideological capture?
ZE: Before moving to Hungary, maybe I could say a few words about why my approach differs from some of our colleagues to this issue. So in general, I think that there's too much aversion among observers against taking ideology seriously because we are in a way too cynical as observers, partly because we see how spin doctors manipulate things, how business and political elites cooperate behind the scenes, and also because we think that ideology must mean something monolithic like communism used to be.
But I think you cannot have politics without ideology. Simply political entrepreneurs, they justify their actions, embedding them into values. And once these justifications are public, then they become social facts because they start to constrain these actors and also they change the way of thinking of citizens. And by the way, there are many intellectuals involved in these enterprises. So if you look at the European scene, you see people like, Thierry Baudet, who is a radical right leader in the Netherlands, Ryszard Legutko, who is a Polish MEP.
Now, when it comes to relationship between social reality and ideology, obviously politicians use social reality as a kind of raw material that they can work with. In case of Orbán, the post-communist transition was the social reality he had to work with. He had to face the fact, back in the early 1990s, that what he offered to the electorate that is a kind of technocratic liberalism, has no audience. There is no social group that would enthusiastically support this kind of narrative.
So instead of that, he was looking for something that has roots in the Hungarian society. And he found this partly in the emotional opposition to foreigners and Western powers that deprived Hungary of its territories. Hungary lost two-thirds of its territories at the end of the First World War, so in this type of victimhood nationalism. And he also identified the religious groups that are in minority numerically but have considerable degree of organization as pillars he can build on.
And then, indeed, as you said, he did not only serve the existing cleavages in the society but tried to create new ones. He managed to change the way how young people identify already back in the 1990s. He created a narrative where post-communist forces are equated with liberalism. And together they are considered to be kind of ruthless elite that has no loyalty to the Hungarian nation and depicted the majority population as being opposed to this elite group, which sounds very much like how Jews have been described between the two world wars. So opposing the majority of the Hungarian nation to this group, identifying the cleavage between the two as being the number one topic on which electoral campaigns need to focus on.
SR: So let me follow up immediately from that and ask you to elaborate on what I alluded to in the introduction of this fascinating critical anatomy, which you presented in this recent article of yours on the hegemonic ideology of the Orbán regime. And you identified three constitutive pillars, illiberal conservatism, civilizationist ethnocentrism, and paternalist population. Could you say something about these ideas and how they are related to one another, which gives them this very, very strong appeal?
ZE: So I think political actors in general need to answer three main questions if they have ideological ambitions. First, what is a virtuous life? Second, what is the nature of the represented community? And third, what is the relationship between citizens and the state? And illiberal conservatism is supposed to answer the first question, civilizationist ethnocentrism, the second, and paternalist populism, the third.
Now, I tried to underline in my article that all three concepts are doxical. They have internal tensions. But in spite of that, or exactly because of that, they are effective because they serve different audiences. So let me start with the question of what should be the represented community, which is answered by ethnocentrism. So this ideological template divides the world into relatively homogeneous, culturally homogeneous ethnocultural units whose boundaries are defined by lineage and loyalty, not so much by citizenship. But then these units are expected to unite in confronting the ages of other civilizations.
So this concept combines anti-globalism, national sovereignty, civilizationist identification, and opposition against migration and cosmopolitanism. The civilizationist bit, also to Rogers Brubaker, who suggested that the contemporary Nordic radical right-wing parties promote white Christian civilization. That particular concept included not only some degree of identification with Christianity but also identification with elements of enlightenment, the tradition of enlightenment. These parties endorse gender equality. They have pro-Israel policies. This is a huge change compared to the previous anti-Semitic and very patriarchal ideas.
Now, of course, some people argue that this is not to be taken seriously as superficial, instrumental, designed to facilitate the fight against immigration and Islam. But I think, as I said earlier, that if you keep saying something for a long time, it becomes a social fact. So I see how civilization ethnocentrism is replacing old-fashioned nationalism, for example, in Central Europe. In this part of the world, old-fashioned nationalism was omnipresent but now it's not that visible anymore.
The second concept is illiberal conservatism that defines what is a virtuous life. Now, here the internal tension comes from the fact that the ideal typical conservatism promotes local and corporate autonomies. By the way, also university autonomy. Illiberal conservatism doesn't, as CEU knows from practice. Contrary to many other versions of conservatism, the illiberal variety is not satisfied with simply protecting religious legacies or traditional families. It is explicitly hostile to checks and balances, rule of law, and influential civil society, and it demands compliance with official cultural norms in return of public support. It expects educational institutions to defend state-sanctioned traditionalists values.
I also notice that illiberal conservatives, even if they come from different cultural backgrounds, tend to divide society into hardworking, deserving, morally exemplary groups versus undeserving and unproductive groups. But what is new here is that they also advocate the re-channeling of resources from the latter to the former, which is already related and is supporting the third concept that is paternalist populism.
So earlier, we already alluded to the fact that populism is a kind of rejection of elite-led political structures in favor of majoritarian modes of governance and also the glorification of the will of the people. In contrast to that, paternalism regards the state as the guardian and also the educator of the citizens, and it sees the various national authorities and spiritual leaders that are linked to the state as a legitimate elite. So they actually are elitists in some sense. Paternalism is also in favor of redistributive government that is engaged in social transformation programs that have a long-time horizon. Populism is not. It emphasizes the duties of the citizen and not their rights.
So if you put together populism and paternalism, you get an interesting new enemy. This type of thinking has a kind of qualified people-centrism and a qualified anti-elitism, that is not all elites are bad and the people are not necessarily perfect. This construct is populist in the sense that its representatives speak on behalf of the people against corrupt international elites, but they reject the bottom-up project that's associated with populism. And in this regard, they follow a very different, I would say even opposite logic to populism.
It's also interesting that elections are regarded as extremely important channel of preference formation in such regimes. Next to elections, there are other channels which are much more elite-dominated, and direct democracy is very rarely used. Populism has an affinity with direct democracy, but paternalist populism either doesn't use direct democracy at all or only in very specific circumstances where the outcome is guaranteed.
SR: We've seen some of the referenda by Viktor Orbán with leading questions using this kind of a tool.
ZE: At the same time, he doesn't allow for anybody else to initiate a referendum, although in the Hungarian constitutional system, you can, even as a citizen, initiate referenda, but this is not possible in Hungary. And in general, all other forms of direct democracy like local assemblies are made impossible in today's Hungary.
SR: So let me turn at the end of our conversation, Zsolt, where you've given a really extremely clear and, in my view, astute analysis of the phenomena that we are facing, illiberalism with ideology as a key point of mobilization of support. Let me turn to a prescriptive question, which I'm not sure you're going to like, but your project doesn't limit itself to just describing the problem and charting, mapping the varieties of illiberalism in Europe. But you've also set yourself the task of providing, of course, at the end of the project, a toolkit, as you say, for policymakers to defend and enhance liberal democracy because you aim to design and test interventions to counter the spread of authoritarianism.
And I presume when you were talking about the methodological tools, you were alluding to the fact that you will not just carry out surveys, but also do experiments. And I think those are the kinds of experiments that you would like to see. So I know they've not been carried out yet, but I would still like to hear from you what you think could be viable antidotes to both the kind of illiberal ideology that we are seeing that you described so well, and which is also fostering such large transnational and strong transnational alliances across Europe, but also between Orbán and Trump and Erdoğan. Could a project of counterhegemonic ideology, which would be capable of undermining these tricky pillars that you've described to us, what could such a project look like?
ZE: Well, I think fundamentally we should treat these illiberal initiatives with respect in the sense that we have to identify what we can learn from them. And I think there is a lot to learn from these initiatives. Now that I'm researching this field, I'm listening day and night to talk radios, podcasts, reading blogs produced by actors whom I consider illiberal. And frankly, I'm amazed how good they are at this. So they seem to be able to bridge the layer of abstract concepts and the everyday concern of the citizens better than the liberal democrats. Even though I think that the concepts that liberal democrats cherish, so pluralism, open society, state neutrality, and so on, can be made relevant for citizens, this is not happening. And it's not happening partly because of the intellectuals, and I very much think of myself in this regard, who work on these issues, prefer to talk to a select audience and not to the citizenry at large. That is a major lesson that I drew just by watching and listening to these cultural products.
The other thing concerns cooperation. There are many fora today where illiberals come together and exchange ideas, so the World Congress of Families, CPAC, National Conservative Conferences, and so on. There is an incredible readiness to collaborate and to tolerate each other. Varieties of illiberalism, for me, is an interesting concept because it reminds us of how different these groups that question or undermine liberal democracy are. And yet they come together, cooperate, tolerate each other, and they are united for achieving a common goal, and somehow, on the other side, it doesn't seem to work, at least not as effectively. So both at the elite level cooperation and at the level of dissemination and civic education, there is a lot to learn from them.
SR: So thank you very, very much, Zsolt, for this very insightful and fascinating analysis of the opponents of liberal democracies today, but also for reminding us that there is something to be learned from their successes nationally and also the way in which they are transnationally networked at the moment. So thanks very much, again, for joining me today.
ZE: Thank you very much for having me.
SR: Zsolt stressed the need to analytically distinguish the concepts of illiberalism and authoritarianism, which are often used interchangeably and they may also overlap empirically. While populism mobilizes against elites, authoritarianism remains a top-down project of imposing hierarchy and uniformity. Illiberalism can be conceived of as a set of ideas and practices that questions the core principles of liberal democracy, such as the division of powers, individual autonomy and universal rights, state neutrality, or minority rights. Illiberalism does not necessarily rely on either populism or authoritarianism. Unlike populism, illiberalism does not reject intermediary institutions with an anti-elitist rhetoric. Or, as Zsolt argues, in the case of Hungary, populism has been successfully combined with governmental paternalism. There are different varieties of illiberalism, and not all are authoritarian even in countries where the political culture has long been dominated by liberal principles, one can still find tendencies to use illiberal tools, for example, France or United Kingdom, usually considered to be bastions of liberal democracy, both countries have recently adopted some far-right ideas regarding for example immigration and migrant communities.
Zsolt has also pointed out that illiberal actors do not always need to deploy autocratic means because they enjoy electoral legitimacy. They do that thanks to generous social policies, the promise of security and national pride, all of which have popular appeal and are compatible with democracy. However, authoritarian leaders also play on fears of social disintegration or immigrants, and anxiety of loss of national identity by often capitalizing on the frustrations of of those left behind by neoliberal capitalism. As we often discussed on this podcast, when people associate their loss of income or their reduced mobility with advances of cultural and economic liberalism, discontent with liberalism as such gains momentum.
The backlash against growing inequality is thus partly fueled by nostalgia for an idealized earlier era of stable values and identities. Hence, it also tends to manifest itself as a proverbial clash of cultures, clash of civilizations, as culture wars, which have become the main framework expressing political polarization in so many societies all over the world today. This is the reason why Zsolt insists on paying greater attention to ideologies and ideologues, instead of simply viewing illiberal rule through the lens of instrumentalism, or as expressions of pure cynicism. Using the example of the Hungarian regime’s three ideological pillars, namely, illiberal conservatism, civilizationist ethnocentrism and paternalist populism, he has compellingly shown that the constitutive role of ideology in the relative success of illiberalim cannot, and also should definitely not, be underestimated. We have indeed much to learn from the strategies successfully employed by the illiberal regimes. To mount an effective defense of liberalism we must understand how illiberalism connects abstract ideas to the everyday concerns and grievances of ordinary citizens. We must also of course reflect a bit more on the relative failings and shortcomings of our own work as progressive intellectuals, who may be insufficiently engaged, both with each other transnationally and with the people locally.
This was the eighth episode of Season 8 of "Democracy in Question". Thank you very much for listening to us. Join us again for the next episode in a fortnight when my guest will be Seema Syeda, a London-based activist who will talk about her current research on the rise of Islamophobia in Europe today.
Please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed, including the previous two which have also focused on the relationship between democracy and the historical dynamics and logics of capitalism. And, of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Bértoa, F. C., & Enyedi, Z. (2021). Party system closure: Party alliances, Government Alternatives, and democracy in Europe. Oxford University Press.
[iii]Enyedi, Z. (2024). Illiberal conservatism, civilisationalist ethnocentrism, and paternalist populism in Orbán’s Hungary. Contemporary Politics, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2023.2296742
[iv]https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/governance-in-illiberal-democracies-Z2AFJepD
[v]https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/the-genealogy-of-illiberalism-xyRuiesy
[vi]https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/martin-krygier-on-anti-constitutional-populism-4sPxtrGy
[vii]https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/kim-lane-scheppele-on-destroying-democracy-by-law-ggFnrfMm
[viii] https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/nadia-urbinati-on-the-resurgence-of-populism-its-history-and-its-various-forms-92TcpHw0
[ix] https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/thomas-carothers-on-democratic-backsliding-in-a-comparative-perspective-PjkHacQb
[x] https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/populism-and-democracys-critical-infrastructure-DQ2krC_h