Farid Zakaria warned of the tension between the electoral legitimacy of some political regimes and the stifling of liberal constitutionalism. Illiberal democracy is authoritarianism legitimized by free elections.

The term “illiberal democracy” may seem, at first glance, a paradox. Modern democracy etymologically means power (kratos) people (demonstrations) through the mechanism of periodic election of governors through free elections. We call political regimes democratic where there is political pluralism and a peaceful change of power of the rulers.

After the Second World War, democracy meant not only a political order based on fair elections, but also democracy liberal, namely, one that is based on the principles of separation of powers in the state, protection of individual rights and guided by the values ​​of the rule of law. This set of values ​​in the history of political ideas is called liberal constitutionalism and evolved in the space of European modernity, starting from the 16th century.

Few people know that the phrase “illiberal democracy” first appeared in a famous essay by Farid Zakaria published in Foreign Policy in 1997. Farid Zakaria’s problem was that we are accustomed to associate the evolution of democracy with the values ​​of liberal constitutionalism, although the two phenomena can clearly coexist, historically and politically. In other words, just as there were relatively liberal autocracies in the 20th century, we may be seeing the other side of the coin.

The history of the 1990s has shown us political regimes in Eastern Europe, South America or Asia where, although fair elections are held, the values ​​of liberal constitutionalism are gradually and perhaps irrevocably suppressed. Thus, Farid Zakaria formulated the concept illiberal democracy to denote regimes such as Bosnia’s after the 1997 elections and, more broadly, regimes in which electoral legitimacy breeds arbitrary power that disregards individual rights, that undermines the separation and mutual control of power in a state in which the justice of independence is reduced to a rhetorical parenthesis.

Here it can be emphasized that in the 1997 article, Romania is already mentioned as illiberal democracyan Eastern European example of weak modernization.

The success and influence of the article with foreignaffairs forced the author to develop the initial hypotheses here into his own book, The future of freedom. Illiberal democracy in the USA and the world, with its first edition in 2003, it became a bestseller in America and has been translated into more than 20 languages.

The first part of Farid Zakaria’s book describes the history of freedom, followed by the socio-cultural factors that led to the establishment of liberal democracies in the 20th century. He shows how much the West owes to the classical Roman tradition, to the institutions that originated in Rome, and to Roman law. Latin term liberated is much closer to the modern meaning of freedom, and many political concepts have survived from Latin (constitution, senate, republic). Second, successive conflicts between church and state, then between different religious denominations and the emergence of capitalism prepared the ground for modern theories of the social contract, the assertion of individual rights and limited government, in other words, the values ​​of liberal constitutionalism.

The Industrial Revolution in Europe, through the economic growth it generated, had a huge impact on the definition of citizenship. One by one, oligarchies in the West turned into limited democracies, until the sanctification of universal suffrage and the emergence of modern institutions. Zakaria’s almost deterministic thesis is that economic growth in Europe, namely the level of GDP per capita, is causally related to the emergence of liberal democracy. Conversely, the less economically efficient a country is, the greater the risk of becoming a dysfunctional autocracy.

This success story, which includes waves of democratization in the Iberian Peninsula and the fall of the Iron Curtain, ends, according to Zakaria, in the 1990s, when many political regimes combine fair elections with authoritarianism. This increases the spectrum illiberal democrats. This is primarily about Russia, Venezuela, as well as a significant part of Africa and Central Asia and the former Soviet republics. Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro