Liberal Democratic Ideals Research Articles

Predictors of illiberalism in Romania: A case study during the Russian invasion in Ukraine

Illiberalism emphasizes traditional values and national sovereignty over liberal democratic ideals, which can lead to the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. Against this background, the paper investigates the relationship between illiberalism and various political and social factors in Romania, taking into account a particular context (the Russian invasion in Ukraine). Romania has experienced a rise in illiberal attitudes and the spread of populist and nationalist rhetoric, which is particularly concerning given its strategic location as a member of the European Union and NATO, and its proximity to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. This study aims to investigate the associations between various attitudes, news consumption habits, and perceived exposure to misinformation, and how these factors relate to levels of illiberalism in Romanian society. Given the increasing prominence of illiberal and populist ideologies globally, a nuanced understanding of these relationships is critical. The study employs a quantitative approach, leveraging an online survey to collect data from a sample of 1000 Romanian citizens. Soft quotas were used to ensure a diverse representation across age, gender, and education levels. Data collection was carried out by Dynata, a globally recognized market research firm, between March 1–9, 2022. Our analysis, informed by multiple regression models, uncovers complex relationships between trust in institutions, attitudes towards Russia and Ukraine, news consumption habits, perceived misinformation, and demographic factors in shaping illiberal perspectives. By providing a comprehensive understanding of the contributing factors, this study aims to inform public discourse and policy-making processes on how to address illiberal tendencies in society.

К вопросу об условиях формирования правовой культуры и правосознания современного молодого поколения в Российской Федерации

In the paper the analysis of the conditions for the formation of legal culture and legal awareness of the modern young generation is carried out. The features of the implementation of legal education programs in Russia are shown. The causes of nihilism in Russian society are revealed. The analysis of government programs is given. A variant of the development of national programs to improve the legal culture of the modern young generation is proposed. The relevance of the issue of national legal consciousness, the definition of socio-legal values in society is substantiated. The inextricable connection with the legal education of the individual and at the same time – the legal formation of the citizen, which is directly law enforcement activity, is shown. Legal education is understood as the joint activity of the state and society to transfer accumulated legal knowledge, liberal democratic ideals, and national legal culture from one generation to another. The process of education of national legal consciousness is shown as a multifaceted phenomenon that determines the peculiarities of the development of legal culture in society. Legal education is considered with such ethical standards of behavior as attention to people, willingness to cooperate and friendship, assistance to those in need, respect for others, the role of legal propaganda through advertising, social videos, and mass media is also given great importance. As the reasons preventing citizens from defending their rights and freedoms, both the low level of legal culture of society and distrust of power structures were singled out. At the same time, special emphasis was placed on the lack of knowledge among citizens about the existing human rights mechanisms, and as a result – the inability to defend their rights legally. The definition of the process of education of national legal consciousness is given – as a multifaceted phenomenon that determines the peculiarities of the development of legal culture in society. Special attention is paid to the process of globalization and digitalization, which have covered all aspects of society, and have a direct impact on the worldview of society.

The Colonial Roots of Midtwentieth Century U.S. Liberalism

Alexis de Tocqueville was to the nineteenth-century United States as Gunnar Myrdal was to the twentieth century. Both European intellectuals and left-of-center politicos who lived and wrote in the middle of their centuries, Tocqueville and Myrdal toured the United States and published lengthy volumes based on their observations and their discussions with high-level U.S. political leaders. Each argued that the United States was exceptional for its thorough embrace of liberal democratic ideals, but that its exceptionalism was precarious, persistently dogged by material and psychological forces that could undermine the grand experiment in individual equality. That both volumes were taken seriously and lauded by U.S. leaders at the time of their publication has long convinced historians that these two outsiders had a clear-eyed vision of the United States’ promise—what Myrdal called “the American creed.” Yet equipped now with Maribel Morey’s book, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order, we might connect the two men and two centuries on very different terms: the lessons they each provided in reconciling U.S. liberalism with a wholly unexceptional and illiberal colonial world order.

Para un esbozo de conceptualización teórica de la sociedad digital y su compatibilidad con la democracia liberal

Societies around the world are currently in a process of digitalization and technological advance at high rates. This has strong impacts in civil society to the extent that more aspects of everyday life begin to depend on digital and social media. This can present problems, so much that in some news or thought processes digitalization tends to appear as one of the main factors that cause the ills of 21 st century late capitalism society. In this work a conceptualization on how “digital society” must be understood and how it behaves against the ideals of liberal democracy will be considered. It will be argued that the search of a theoretical discussion that makes these practical and abstract pillars of the actual society dialogue is necessary in the endeavor to generate a bigger and better comprehension and response to the problems of our contemporary societies.

Psychoanalyzing democracies: Antagonisms, paranoia, and the productivity of depression

Psychoanalyzing democracies: Antagonisms, paranoia, and the productivity of depression

'Liberal crusader': Zach de Beer, apartheid and liberalism 1950-1990

Zach de Beer's political career began in 1950 when as a student leader and a member of the Civil Rights League he addressed a public meeting in the Cape Town City Hall to protest the banning of the Communist Party. Forty years later, in February 1990, he was in parliament when President F.W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the Communist Party, the African National Congress, and the Pan Africanist Congress. During the darkest years of the apartheid state he, along with others, kept liberal democratic ideals alive. In 1959 he helped to form the liberal Progressive Party, and in 1960 he opposed the banning of the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. This was a courageous action that would cost him his parliamentary seat in the 1961 general election and led to years in the political wilderness. Outside of parliament, as a prominent figure in the financial world, he continued to encourage constitutional and political reform. In 1988, he became leader of the Progressive Federal Party and played a leading role in the founding of the Democratic Party in 1989. This article shows that the party's good performance in the general election of that year was a crucial factor in pushing De Klerk to initiate the dismantling of the apartheid state in 1990. In recognition of his contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, President Nelson Mandela appointed him as South Africa's ambassador to the Netherlands in 1994.

What media coverage of the 1968 Olympic protests reveals about the deep structure of attitudes about athletic activism in the United States

ABSTRACT How do cultural norms, ideologies, and beliefs shape public opinion and media framing of race-based athletic activism? This paper uses media coverage of and commentary on the 1968 American ‘revolt of the Black athlete’ to explicate the deep cultural structures that help explain both support and opposition. The paper begins with a brief, schematic overview of the proposal for a Black Olympic boycott that was the centrepiece of 1968 organising and how it was reported by sports journalists and in the mainstream media. The second section identifies the reasons American reporters were, on the whole, so opposed to the proposed boycott: the inherent lack of support for the athletes’ racial change agenda and the far-more-familiar arguments that sports were not the proper venue for activism. The third section argues that a whole constellation of cultural norms and beliefs—about sport culture, colour-blind visions of racial justice, and liberal democratic ideals about politics and social change—coalesced to make race-based sport protest appear both unnecessary and inappropriate. The conclusion summarises the implications for understanding both public reception of and media responses to contemporary, race-based athletic activism as well as for tracking institutional changes and cultural shifts unfolding in the Black Lives Matter era.

‘Empty signifier’: The concept of ‘populism’ in the contemporary mainstream political science

The paper aims to clarify the origins of contemporary populism, as well as to outline the prospects for further research on this matter. The author examines this phenomenon within the framework of the dominant mainstream in political science. The latter imply the totality of approaches to conceptualization of the key modern social, economic, political and cultural issues. The author advances a hypothesis that both the extreme diversity of the views regarding the nature of populism and the impossibility to develop an all-encompassing defi nition of this paradoxical phenomenon directly stem from the characteristic features of this dominant discourse. The paper shows that this discourse emerged from the overlapping narratives of transition, modernization, free market, unlimited economic growth and ‘the end of history’ and establishes an hierarchy of global knowledge based on three principles: Western dominance, capitalism and liberalism. The author emphasizes that within this theoretical framework non-Western populism is portrayed as a relatively progressive phenomenon, as a means and an indicator of progress towards capitalism and democracy. In this case populism is interpreted as an element of transition to a ‘proper’ Modernity. However, identical political movements, practices and rhetoric of the Western populists are usually portrayed as a deviation from the norm, from Modernity in general and the ideals of liberal democracy in particular. Meanwhile, the paper argues that as Western liberal democracies transform into ‘conciliatory democracies’ (‘oligarchies’) and increasingly resemble ‘defective democracies’, they themselves start to deviate from the normative ideal, just as any regime they label ‘populist’. Therefore, the existing concepts of populism signify not only a certain deviation from the ideal but also the birth of a new reality which cannot be conceptualized within the framework of the contemporary mainstream political science. The concept of populism appears as an ‘empty signifier’ and as a collective term for all inconvenient and troubling social-political phenomena that mainstream political scientists are unable or unwilling to explain.

2020 UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL POLL AND CAPITOL HILL ASSAULT: TUMBLE FROM A DEMOCRATIC MORAL HIGH GROUND

Over 150 million Americans voted in their 3rd November 2020 presidential election. The poll recorded the highest number of voters since the creation of the United States of America (USA) over two centuries ago. The defeated GOP candidate and incumbent President Trump broke from the long-established tradition to concede. He instituted over sixty legal challenges of results of the poll without success. After multiple legal failures, he birthed conspiracy theories that end with a single message: ‘his mandate was stolen.’ This message instigated his supporters’ assault on Capitol Hill by insurrectionists on 6th January 2021. That singular decision liquidated cherished traditions of conceding to the will of the people, peaceful transfer of power, and faith in the American electoral system. A confluence of those events denied the Americans the moral strength to preach liberal democratic ideals at the global stage -- a mission they have been leading along with its allies since 1945, even long before then. This study was guided by the theory of American Exceptionalism that is traceable to the nation’s founding philosophy. The study relied on secondary sources of data from periodicals, journals, statements from political actors, and think tank reports. Conclusions and suggestions stemmed from facts encountered in various data consulted and analyzed.

Conspiracy Theories and the Crisis of the Public Sphere: COVID-19 in Slovenia

This paper examines the rise of conspiracy theories amidst the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic. Conspiracy theories have been a historic sojourner in Western modern societies, stretching from witch hunts in early modern Europe to the 1950s anti-communist witch hunt of the McCarthy era in the U.S. During the COVID-19 health crisis, however, the conspiracy theories have gained a fresh impetus, travelling globally and forming diverse communities of believers. Moreover, once a predominantly fringe phenomenon, at present, they have moved to the centre of the public debate, deliberating on the reliability of scientific evidence as well as the legitimacy of lockdowns and other public health measures. This makes the COVID-19 conspiracy believers an integral part of the public sphere where, in open conflict with expert knowledge and science, they act as a “pandemic counter-public.” I observe the rise of this pandemic counter-public in the context of the current political crisis in Slovenia, arguing that post-socialist legacies of democratic protest bear a vital role in contesting the conspiracy groups, as well as maintaining the resilience of the liberal democratic ideals of responsible citizenship and common good.

Transitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in the Post-Communist Space: A Comparative Review of the Czech Republic, Latvia and Slovakia

Abstract In this comparative review, I first evaluate scholarly findings attempting to dis/prove a relationship between transitional justice and the consolidation of democracy. Second, I outline several criteria for ‘democratic’ transitional justice in order to be able to judge transitional justice policies. Third, I examine and judge transitional justice policies of the Czech Republic, Latvia and Slovakia by these criteria. Last, I argue that transitional justice is neither a prerequisite for the successful consolidation of democracy nor inherently democratic unless it is carried out in coordination with the ideals of liberal democracy, which might support the achievement of peace and societal stability in a transition period.

Minimal Secularism: Lessons for, and from, India

Does liberal democracy require a strict separation between state and religion? In Anglophone liberal political theory, the separationist model of the First Amendment of the US Constitution has provided the basic template for the rightful relationship between state and religion. Yet this model is ill-suited to the evaluation of the secular achievements of most states, including India. This article sets out a new framework, minimal secularism, as a transnational framework of normative comparison. Minimal secularism does not single out religion as special, and it appeals to abstract liberal democratic ideals such as equal inclusion and personal liberty. Actual debates about secularism in India are shown to revolve around these ideals. The study of recent Indian controversies—about the Uniform Civil Code, the status of Muslims, and the rise of BJP nationalism—also sheds light on some blind spots of Western secularism and the conception of sovereignty and religion it relies on.

The Ethical Substance of Salvation

AbstractMateriality has been largely left out of the study of Muslim life in Europe, and limited to an etic rather than emic approach. In this paper, I analyse a conservative London mosque community (the East London Mosque) that depends on the material––what I term “ethical substance”––to reinforce its ascetic rejection of the world. Drawing from five months of ethnographic research in this mosque, I examine three aspects of materiality––clothing, the mosque building, and technology––in order to explore how the community negotiates its position in the city at hand, as well as more broadly vis-à-vis modernity. The mosque emerges as a site of discursive-material tension where ethics and locale intersect, and where intention (niyya) matters more than the constitution of objects. It elucidates European modernity as broader than liberal democratic ideals (i.e. in a community stressing a returns towards, rather than away from, tradition).

‘As It Was in the Beginning’: An Examination of the Convergence, Divergence and Dilemmas of Immigration Practices in Some Selected liberal Democratic States

This paper holds the view that the burgeoning phenomenon of immigration control sits uncomfortably on the fault line separating the prerogatives of State sovereignty from the rights of non-citizens regardless of the broad discretion of States to control immigration. Using liberal democratic ideologies, the paper expresses that, there is in existence, a tension between the right to liberty of migrants against the broadly unfettered rights of States to control the admission and expulsion of migrants conferred on States by national and international law. Drawing from law and policy, this paper considers in perspectives, immigration practices in selected liberal democratic states-the United States of America, Australia and France whose deportation reality offers significant similarities with the UK in immigration control and detention pending expulsion. Finding as it did, the paper illustrates that crimmigration in particular and immigration enforcement and control in general, serve as vehicles for enhancing and sustaining expulsion of migrants. This practice, it is argued, queries the liberal democratic ideals of fairness in particular and compliance to international human rights standards in general.

Towards a Right to Resist Gross Undemocratic Practices in Africa

AbstractThe adoption of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) has been a milestone for the transformation of Africa's political landscape. This instrument seeks to expand on the ideals of liberal democracy enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union and other African fundamental instruments. The ACDEG seems to pave the way for the right to democracy for Africans, which entails, inter alia, political sovereignty of African citizens. The latter have clearly and vigorously exercised their sovereignty through elections when given such an opportunity. However, in some instances, African citizens resorted to popular uprisings in cases of gross violations of their democracy-related rights. With reference to the recent popular uprisings and coups (or attempted coups) in Africa, this article enquires, from a human rights perspective, whether ACDEG or other instruments, enshrine a right to resist gross undemocratic practices underpinning the right to democracy.

Who should be granted electoral rights at the state level?

This paper has a twofold aim in determining who should be granted electoral rights at the state level, one negative and another positive. The negative part deconstructs the link between state-level political membership and citizenship and contests naturalization procedures. This approach argues that naturalization procedures, when coercively used as a necessary condition for accessing electoral rights at the state level, are both inconsistent with liberal democratic ideals and an inexcusable practice in liberal democratic states. The positive part of the paper seeks to establish what – if not the acquisition of citizenship –could determine state-level political membership for non-citizens. In other words, it attempts to explain how and in what conditions non-citizens may become political members of a state without naturalizing. This approach considers the most prominent arguments that base state-level political membership on residency, i.e. residency as a legal status granted by the previous members of the community and residency as physical presence within a defined jurisdiction. It argues that, in a world of increasing human mobility across borders, while the former way of understanding residency might be too restrictive, the latter might be too banal to forge membership ties that form a political community. Domicile is the proposed alternative, introduced as a type of residency that is self-given and remains stable despite numerous changes of residency. Domicile is a legal term that indicates where a person officially registers her permanent home even when residing abroad. In sum, this is an argument against naturalization as the access door for electoral rights at the state level and in favor of defining membership in the political community based on domicile.

Bringers of light: Performing resource revenue transparency in Liberia

Initiatives designed to increase transparency have become a tool for improving governance and fighting corruption in the natural resource sector. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is an international organisation that administers a voluntary standard for natural resource revenue transparency. In line with liberal democratic ideals, EITI aims to empower citizens through the dissemination of information supporting governance improvements, public scrutiny and accountability in the sharing of benefits from resource extraction. Adopting a critical lens to transparency, the article examines EITI's efforts to disseminate natural resource revenue data in rural Liberia. By focusing on how transparency is performed through dissemination workshops, the article creates a nuanced understanding of transparency by analysing how it is operationalised and practiced in encounters with people in areas where resource extraction takes place. The paper begins with an overview of relevant research and the conceptual framing of the study focusing on the performance in and of transparency and continues with a discussion of EITI internationally and in Liberia. Then follows a discussion of the ethnographic approach - travelling with the Liberian EITI-team on their dissemination trip. Through the analysis the article enables an understanding of the workings of transparency by examining how practitioners perform transparency through the performance in the workshops: the structure and orchestration of the workshops; and the performance of transparency by understanding the ways in which the workshops become spectacles that help to legitimise, rationalise and camouflage the fragmented and contradictory realities of extractive industries and their implications for people.

EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP: ERNEST SIMON’S IDEALS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN ENGLAND, 1934-1944

En 1934, con los crecientes desafíos a la democracia por parte de naciones totalitarias como Alemania e Italia, Sir Ernest Simon (1879-1960), un industrial británico y exdiputado liberal, fundó la Asociación para la Educación en Ciudadanía (AEC) para propugnar la reforma de la educación para la ciudadanía con el fin de cultivar la ciudadanía democrática. Los esfuerzos de Simon y su enfoque característico de la educación para la ciudadanía, que presentaba diferencias con respeto al de sus contemporáneos como Fred Clarke, R. H. Tawney y Richard Livingstone, ha sido tratada y reconocida por los historiadores. Aun así, pocos historiadores han intentado captar los ideales de democracia liberal de Simon y cómo se reflejaron en su visión de la educación para la ciudadanía. Debido a esta falta de vinculación entre los ideales democráticos de Simon y su visión de la educación para la ciudadanía, la bibliografía existente no sólo fracasa al explicar de qué manera el acercamiento de Simon a ciudadanía fue «liberal», sino que también interpreta erróneamente las ideas de Simon sobre la ciudadanía democrática y su campaña por una nueva educación para la ciudadanía. En vista de esto, el presente escrito explora la visión de Simon de la ciudadanía democrática y su campaña por una nueva educación para ciudadanía en relación a sus ideales de democracia liberal con el fin de ofrecer una mejor compresión del enfoque de Simon a la educación para la ciudadanía. El artículo, además, ayudará a arrojar luz sobre el desarrollo de la educación para la ciudadanía en la Inglaterra del siglo XX

Psychology and humanism in the democratic South African imagination

Attentive to a psychology underlying South Africa’s democratic imaginations, I describe how Nelson Mandela’s intervention at a critical moment of conflict management, along with mechanisms such as at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Moral Regeneration Movement, invoked and enacted a humanising ethos. Centred on the ideas of restraint, empathy, emotional proximity, witnessing, and fluid generative subjectivities, the humanising ethos was awakened to support the process of reconciliation, social justice, and the making of inclusive and socially just communities. Inspired by a decolonial attitude, and in part successfully enacted in support of the country’s liberal democratic ideals, the elaboration of this psychology has been limited by ongoing socio-economic disparities and a ruling psychology that naturalises extractive relations.

Moving beyond Comprehensive Immigration Reform and Trump: Principles, Interests, and Policies to Guide Long-Term Reform of the US Immigration System

This paper introduces a special collection of 15 papers that chart a course for long-term reform of the US immigration system. The papers look beyond recent legislative debates and the current era of rising nationalism and restrictionism to outline the elements of a forward-looking immigration policy that would serve the nation's interests, honor its liberal democratic ideals, promote the full participation of immigrants in the nation's life, and exploit the opportunities offered by the increasingly interdependent world. This paper highlights several overarching themes from the collection, as well as dozens of proposals for reform. Together, the papers in the collection make the case that: • Immigration policymaking should be embedded in a larger set of partnerships, processes, and commitments that respond to the conditions that force persons to migrate. • The US immigration system should reflect liberal democratic values and an inclusive vision of national identity. • It is incumbent on policy and opinion makers to publicize the broad national interests served by US immigration policies. • Policymakers should, in turn, evaluate and adjust US immigration policies based on their success in furthering the nation's interests. • The United States should prioritize the gathering and dissemination of the best available evidence on migration and on the nation's migration-related needs and programs, and should use this information to respond flexibly to changing migration patterns and new economic developments. • Immigrant integration strengthens communities and represents an important, overarching metric for US immigration policies. • The successful integration of the United States' 43 million foreign-born residents and their progeny should be a national priority. • An immigration federalism agenda should prioritize cooperation on shared federal, state, and local priorities. • An immigration federalism agenda should recognize the federal government's enforcement obligations; the interests of local communities in the safety, well-being and participation of their residents; the importance of federal leadership in resolving the challenges posed by the US undocumented population; and the need for civil society institutions to serve as mediators of immigrant integration. • Immigration reform should be coupled with strong, well-enforced labor standards in order to promote fair wages and safe and healthy working conditions for all US workers. • Fairness and due process should characterize US admission, custody, and removal decisions. • Family unity should remain a central goal of US immigration policy and a pillar of the US immigration system. • The United States should seek to craft “win-win” immigration policies that serve its own interests and that benefit migrant-sending states. • US immigration law and policy should be coherent and consistent, and the United States should create legal migration opportunities for persons uprooted by US foreign interventions, trade policies, and immigration laws. • The United States should reduce the size of its undocumented population through a substantial legalization program and seek to ensure that this population never again approximates its current size.