Finally, illiberalism can also be used to talk about intellectuals or elitist movements that do not share the "us versus them" rhetoric so central to populism.
What are specific countries and examples we should be paying attention to?
There are several. Central Europe is probably the main playing field of illiberalism, but I would also add the US, because of its strong far-right and conservative constituencies, as well as its leading role in producing conspiracy theories. We also see several European countries, including the Nordic ones long considered immune to any type of illiberal sentiment, and Israel, which is often forgotten although Netanyahu shares similar traits with illiberal leaders (Orban, Duda, Putin, Erdogan, Trump…). A fascinating tension around liberalism that directly impacts our understanding of illiberalism is the discrepancy between philosophical ideals and realities. The core countries embodying liberal democracy - such as the US or, after the Second World War, the countries of Western Europe - have always engaged in practices which question the validity of an all-encompassing liberalism, whether by excluding women, engaging in segregation, or marginalizing minorities. It would be more accurate, therefore, to speak of liberal systems that contain pockets of non-liberal practices.
In the "Global South," there are various case studies to choose from: India, Brazil, the Philippines, or arguably, even South Africa. This allows the connection between scholarship on liberalism and its critics, and the huge postcolonial/decolonial literature that views liberalism as a European product, intimately articulated with non-liberal practices of domination, exclusion, and deculturation. The intuitive conflation of Western/European countries with liberal democracy and modernity/modernization does not leave room for the notion of "multiple modernities" - implying an access to modernity that does not follow one of the entanglement of liberalisms described above. As formulated by Jaeger et al. (quoted in Börzel and Zürn 2020, 13), liberalism has been an "external blueprint" of a political order claiming universal validity.
Copyright: ATTILA KISBENEDEK / AFP
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