Democracy Against Liberalism

Central European Journal of International and Security Studies , 2019

The symposium on the book "Legacies of Totalitarianism" by Aviezer Tucker was part of the conference "Between Enslavement and Resistance: Attitudes toward Communism in East European Societies (1945-1989)" held in Poznań, Poland (June 15-16, 2018). The conference and the symposium was organized by the Institute of National Remembrance, Poznań Division, the Institute of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, The Centre for Culture and the Arts at Leeds Beckett University, and the Poznań Division of Polish Philosophical Society. The organizational and editorial work of the symposium was realized within the framework of the Branch Research Project of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poznań: "The Methodological and Theoretical Problems of Research on the Current History of Poland." Content: Krzysztof Brzechczyn, A Transformation of the Privileges of the Authorities into Property Rights or a Transformation of the Types of Class Rule?" Dragoş Petrescu, "Limits of democratic consolidation: Subversion of reason as a post-totalitarian syndrome" Michał Kwiecień, " The Hereditary Diseases of Post-Totalitarianism" Cristina Petrescu, "Simulated Change: Totalitarianism and what Comes Next" Grzegorz Greg Lewicki, Legacies, zombies and the need of long-term basis for short-term foresight" Rafał Paweł Wierzchosławski , "Dissidents and Nomads in [not only] Post-Totalitarian Countries – Why Are There so Many Problems If Things Are Going so Well?" Aviezer Tucker Harvard University)," Why 'Legacies' Matter: Reply to readings of 'Legacies;"

Aviezer Tucker's book, which masterfully chronicles the tenacity of totalitarian legacies across post-communist Europe, arrives at an opportune time. In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, many observers enthusiastically proclaimed the ideological victory of neoliberal economics and democratic governance over centralized planning and coercive political authority. This initial optimism, however, proved misplaced. Expectations that the whole of the post-communist space would eventually converge institutionally (and attitudinally) with Western Europe have been receding for well over a decade now, the teleological conceit embodied in viewing the events of 1989/1991 as a " catching-up revolution " (Habermas 1990) or a metaphorical " end of history " (Fukuyama 1992) withering away in the face of mounting evidence that the liberalizing reforms uniformly prescribed for the region were not as societally penetrative or durable as once anticipated. Noting that democratic practices and liberal norms did not take substantive hold in a number of these states is not a new observation, of course. Already in 2002 Thomas Carothers warned that the transition paradigm had exceeded its expiration date, post-communist polities by this time having sorted themselves into three distinct outcome categories: those possessed of relatively liberal regimes that appeared to be effectively integrating into the wider European community; those requiring adjectival modifiers to denote their persistent democratic deficits; and those, such as Belarus or Turkmenistan, that had rapidly lapsed into new flavors of dictatorial rule (the latter are not considered by Tucker). Moreover, in recent years even the liberal democratic credentials of countries like Poland—not long ago regarded as an undeniable success story of the post-Soviet transition— have been increasingly called into question. Consequently, both former communist states that never became full-fledged democracies, as well as those that did but that currently face growing populist and anti-liberal challenges, figure prominently in this volume. At its core, Tucker's argument is straightforward: instead of representing a radical break with the past, post-communist realities often bear a striking resemblance to what came before, totalitarian legacies revealing themselves in new guises but bringing about familiar results. This is a different tale than Westerners are used to hearing, but it rings depressingly true, implying that the real question in need of answering is not why some attempted transitions to liberal democracy failed, but why we believed they would succeed in the first place. A refreshingly original work of political theory that defies easy categorization, this ambitious book is a self-described foray into " middle-duration processes. " As such, Tucker states upfront that he is neither interested in analyzing deeper structural factors nor country-specific experiences with communism and its aftereffects. The same holds for exogenous influences, such as global economic trends and the eastward expansion of the European Union. Instead, he focuses his gaze on

Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2012

Italian Sociological Review, 2018

Although populism has many references and various definitions as an elusive and ambiguous concept, this article approaches it as a political strategy which has the potential to destabilize democracy in some ways. This approach enables a broader comprehension of populism rather than confining it to certain ideological tenets or a few undisputed populist movements. This study attempts to reveal the logic of this political strategy through a tripartite analysis which consists of the sense of democracy inherent in populism, its way of thinking and reasoning, and the political circumstances which enable and strengthen populism. It is argued that the analysis performed here can offer an outline of the ground on which the struggle against the features of populism, that threatens democracy, can be carried out. Finally, in the light of the aforementioned analysis and some ideas which are borrowed from the works of Habermas and Mouffe to a large extent, it is aimed to re-read democracy in order to deal with the populist challenge in liberal democracies.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019

This article examines a dominant vision in contemporary geopolitics, in which the world is imagined as divided between liberal and illiberal political systems, clustering around the two conceptual nodes of "democracy" and "authoritarianism". It considers how these conceptual nodes are imagined, mapped, and brought to life through writing, policies, and institutions related to democracy promotion. Instead of focusing on the definition of these concepts, this essay scrutinizes the ideological underpinnings of efforts to define "authoritarianism" and "democracy", and shows how these definitional debates themselves produce geopolitical imaginaries that facilitate certain kinds of intervention in an era of "post-triumphalist geopolitics".

Cold War History, 2012

Interstitio. East European Review of Historical Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 1(3), pp. 7-22, 2008

The aim of this paper is to consider the standard objections put against the construction of metanarratives in the philosophy of history. The author distinguishes following intellectual sources questioning the grasp of Entirety in the philosophy of history: anti-naturalistic German philosophy of science, dogmatic Marxism, liberalism and postmodernism. Analysis of the content of these stances allows for disclose of hidden methodological and theoretical premises which are responsible for misunderstanding and critique of the historiosophical discourse.

2018

Across the globe, democracy is under assault. For the twelfth year in a row, Freedom House has reported a general decline in global freedom. A rising portion of the world's population is in the midst of a global democratic recession. This paper explores causes of the global democratic crisis and the influence of the current world-wide populist movement. Populism ignores how responsible democratic citizenship is formed and sustained. It easily descends into autocracy. It threatens the conditions necessary for responsible citizenship, because it rejects elements of liberal democracy that citizens need to act responsibly, like the right to acquire and share information through speech and press, among others. In pursuing its goals, populism has exploited the power of social media, which also erodes responsible citizenship. A positive tool in the right hands, social media can also disrupt democratic processes and flood the public square with fake news. It can manipulate public opinion and suppress the voice of the people. Fortunately, educators have a formidable weapon to counteract both radical populism and destructive social media – a robust and comprehensive civic education program that fortifies young citizens against social media’s ill effects, and prepares them to participate responsibly in their democracy. (Paper basis for keynote address, first Annual Civic Education Conference, Bandung, Indonesia (April 2018).

This dissertation will tackle the topic of cognitive biases and their use as a political tool within the context of democratic theory. It takes cognitive biases, as they are defined and codified by cognitive psychology, to be an inevitable part of every human being's mind, and thus a factor be considered in the political sphere. These cognitive biases follow a tradition in political theory that has treated questions of rational defects before, but whose approach and solutions were quite different from contemporary understanding of cognitive biases (the dissertation will focus on the cognitive defects observed by empiricists and utilitarians in early modern philosophy as a point of comparison). These biases have come into the attention of a larger public in the late 2000s, accompanying a "behaviourist shift" in economics and public policy that deviated from classical theories. This change of models in economics and public policy brought the potential use of cognitive policies as political tools to the forefront, with the notable influence of Nudge Theory in the USA and the UK as chief examples. The inclusion of cognitive biases to the lexicon of liberal democracy poses a dilemma: on the one hand, the unfettered use of cognitive biases in a political context proves to be more problematic for liberal democracies than what libertarian paternalists propose On the other

Modern Intellectual History, 2015

The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. A new wave of scholarship seems, however, to be emerging, in which the paradigm of exceptionalism takes a back seat to considerations that, at first glance, would seem to be more conventional and less polemical in their approach to the history of French liberal thought.