Liberal Democracy Critiqued and Affirmed Bertolini, Joseph C.
The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms,
05/19/2023, Volume:
28, Issue:
3-4
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
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Même en démocratie libérale les ministères des Affaires étrangères peuvent être des freins pour l'exécutif. Par leur organisation et leurs agents, ces administrations, censées servir et faciliter la ...politique étrangère de l'exécutif dont l'autorité émane du peuple, peuvent en réalité la brider. Cet article illustre ce phénomène à travers deux exemples. Dans le premier, des fonctionnaires du Quai d'Orsay cherchent, dans les années 1920, à limiter la stratégie du ministre Aristide Briand pour bâtir une Europe unie. Dans le second, l'exécutif britannique assure l'exécution de sa politique étrangère contre les obstacles potentiellement dressés par le Foreign Office en créant, à partir de 2016, un ministère parallèle chargé de faire sortir le Royaume-Uni de l'Union européenne.
While the European Union (EU) professes a commitment to liberal democracy, in recent years it has allowed some member governments to backslide toward competitive authoritarianism. The EU has become ...trapped in an 'authoritarian equilibrium' underpinned by three factors. First, the EU's half-baked system of party politics and its ingrained reluctance to interfere in the domestic politics of its member states help shield national autocrats from EU intervention. Second, funding and investment from the EU helps sustain these regimes. Third, the free movement of persons in the EU facilitates the exit of dissatisfied citizens, which depletes the opposition and generates remittances, thereby helping these regimes endure. While more fully developed democratic federations have the capacity to eventually steer autocratic member states back toward democracy, the EU appears to be stuck in an autocracy trap.
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Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy's eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize ...contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this article provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this article shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the "end of history" in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the "end of democracy" now.
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These are not happy times for liberal internationalists. No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal internationalism runs. However, in what follows, I argue that despite its troubles, liberal ...internationalism still has a future. The nature of the crisis is surprising. The threats to liberal internationalism were expected to come from rising non-western states seeking to undermine or overturn the postwar order. In the face of hostile, revisionist states, the United States and Europe were expected to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect the gains from 70 years of cooperation. But, in fact, liberal internationalism is more deeply threatened by developments within the West itself. The centrist and progressive coalitions that lay behind the postwar liberal order have weakened. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile and polarized, vulnerable to far right populism and backlash politics. In recent decades, the working and middle classes in advanced industrial democracies—the original constituencies and beneficiaries of an open and cooperative international order—have faced rising economic inequality and stagnation. Within the West, liberal internationalism is increasingly seen, not as a source of stability and solidarity among like-minded states, but as a global playing field for the wealthy and influential. Liberal internationalism has lost its connection to the pursuit of social and economic advancement within western countries.
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Across the West, economic dislocation and demographic change have triggered a demand for strong leaders. This surge of populism is more than an emotional backlash; it encourages a political structure ...that threatens liberal democracy. While populism accepts principles of popular sovereignty and majoritarianism, it is skeptical about constitutionalism and liberal protections for individuals. Moreover, populists’ definition of “the people” as homogeneous cannot serve as the basis for a modern democracy, which stands or falls with the protection of pluralism. Although this resurgent tribalism may draw strength from the incompleteness of life in liberal society, the liberal-democratic system uniquely harbors the power of self-correction, the essential basis for needed reforms.
The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe—essential ...for building that order—faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China's rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders—one dominated by China, the other by the United States—poised for waging security competition between them.
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The Russian war against Ukraine is an attack on liberal values. This essay bases itself on the critical analysis of few selected exponents and defenders of modern liberalism in International ...Relations, which recently appeared in some media outlets and academic reviews. It critically engages with this International Relations’ theory and offers the advantages and limitations, interpretations, and outlook on it considering the aggression in Ukraine. Most of all, it discusses the advantages – security concerns, principles of ethics, defence of national independence, spread of democracy – and the disadvantages – security threats, fallacy of trade, geopolitical return of Russia, lack of State-level analysis – liberalism’s spectacles entails. Liberalism is convincing in analyzing the facts and has a good theoretical frame for exploring historical and geopolitical events. However, it risks being too naïve and incomplete in its diagnosis.
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