“shock therapy.” Unlike in populist democratic Southern Europe, post-Communist governments did not need to borrow to keep their atomized and passive civil society from unseating them. At the same time and for the same reasons, the post-Communist technocratic elite was able to enjoy high levels of personal corruption. In the post-Communist countries, democracy took root immediately, while liberal institutions and traditions evolved gradually for twenty years, after transplantation in a rough soil. Then, following the recession and the perception of corrupt and self-serving elites, technocratic democracy turned populist. This technocracy had already stronger liberal institutions than in 1989, but they were still weaker than in older liberal democracies. Progress toward liberalism was then halted, its growth stunted and, finally, in Hungary it was drawn and quartered in the prime of life.
India is another case of democratic transition to populist neo-illiberalism from a technocracy. India inherited at its founding technocratic liberal democratic institutions and bureaucracies that gained popularity as alternatives to populist decision making. Like the United States, India imported traditional liberal institutions that originated in Britain. But growing populism led to authoritarianism during Indira Gandhi’s “National Emergency” rule (1975–1977). The liberal democratic restoration in the late 1970s strengthened some liberal institutions like the Supreme Court, but political populism persisted on the national level and managed to win elections on the local level. Indian technocracy gave way to populism, and populism pushed politics in a neo-illiberal direction to attack and overwhelm the liberal institutions, using some of the legal means that had been established during the authoritarian phase. India has retained its democracy along with some liberal aspects, like a vibrant civil society and legal profession. But the victories of the ruling BJP and prime minister Modi in elections in 2014 and 2019 led to a struggle between an increasingly neo-illiberal state and its liberal institutions, as the state expanded to take over educational and legal institutions, and replace technocrats with populists (Chatterji et al. 2019). The source of India’s questionable policies is not democracy as Zakaria (2003) implied, but neo-illiberal populism. As in other neo-illiberal democracies, the process of transition from technocratic liberal democracy via populism to illiberalism in India has been gradual. The geographical size and demographic diversity and size of India, like that of the United States, are natural barriers to strong central governments, including neo-illiberal ones.
The Scope of Neo-Illiberal Democracy
This book is a political theory of contemporary, modern, and therefore neo-illiberal democracy. The scope is wide, including post-Communist countries in Central Europe, political movements and members of coalition governments in Western Europe, the Republican Party in the United States, Israel’s Likud government, India’s BJP government, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro. The neo-illiberal focus excludes from the scope of the book illiberal or authoritarian states that have never been liberal such as Russia, the Philippines, and Turkey. Authoritarian regimes that attempted to use some veneers of liberal legality and democracy, but have never been liberal and were only selectively democratic when it suited their interests and the results could be guaranteed, like Russia, Turkey, the post-reconstruction confederate states, and so on, are beyond the scope of the book.
Russia was an imperialist late-totalitarian dictatorship that imploded. In the 1990s, the state became very weak and, consequently, an unregulated and unprotected space for freedom emerged spontaneously, for civil society such as it was, as well as for crime and corruption. But Russia has never had liberal institutions, not even state independent religion and property rights. Following Putin’s restoration, the old secret police elite reasserted its control over a stronger though still quite weak state. Russian liberal-democracy did not die; it was stillborn.
In Turkey, a decades-long power struggle between a secular, modernizing, and authoritarian military and Islamist populists ended with the dramatic suppression of a military coup and the establishment of a hybrid authoritarian populist regime. During this struggle, the Islamists used democratic legitimacy against the military. But they never constructed liberal institutions, nor has there been much of a constituency for liberalism in Turkey outside the big cities of Istanbul and Ankara. The Turkish judiciary and press, though less weak than they are today, have never wielded the independent power they possess in liberal democracies. Erdogan’s post-coup consolidation of power and suppression of political opponents mark the end of the institutional independence of the military, and its submission to the state. The military is not a liberal institution.
After the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, the occupying Unionists forced abolition and democracy until they stopped enforcing the second, which led to undemocratic (Democratic Party) single-party rule. Democracy was foreign to the South and so it did not die there, but ceased to be enforced from without.
The liberal institutions of illiberal states in Latin America, like Venezuela and Ecuador, have been too weak for those states to be considered neo-illiberal rather than absolutist-illiberal or authoritarian. Their political permutations took place within broader cycles of populist democracy and authoritarianism, neither of which has been liberal. The Latin American transitions from democracy to authoritarianism were too quick to have encountered resistance from viable liberal institutions; they displayed none of the back and forth pushing and shoving between the executive and liberal institutions that is so typical of neo-illiberal democracy, and creates much of the sound and fury that surrounds it. Authoritarian regimes ebb and flow for internal and external reasons. Without pre-existing liberal institutions, there can be no neo-illiberal democracy.
There are obvious similarities in the “tool kit of dirty tricks” that authoritarian and illiberal regimes, including neo-illiberal ones, use to muzzle the press, centralize control of the branches of government, and persecute their opponents. They have obviously imitated and learned from each other. However, conceptually neo-illiberal democracy must be a liberal democracy to some noticeable degree first. Only then can democratically elected governments seek to “de-liberalize” the state, by inventing, borrowing, or imitating, by design or coincidence, the methods of authoritarians who meet weaker or no resistance when they consolidate authoritarianism, transfer power from one authoritarian elite to another, or expand an already illiberal state to destroy resistance in institutions or civil society. The similarities between Turkey and Poland, the United States and Russia, are only in some “symptoms” but not in the underlying etiology.
The British Brexit political crisis was initiated by the top-down introduction of an illiberal democratic instrument, the plebiscite, which had never been part of the British liberal unwritten constitution, though it was used before a few times in a consultative form and once (over changing the electoral system in 2011) in a binding form. This illiberal populist measure led predictably if unintendedly to a populist result. Other populist themes like xenophobia emerged subsequently in British politics. However, none of this amounts to neo-illiberalism or even to an attempt at neo-illiberalism. Britain is not and is not likely to become a neo-illiberal democracy, though it is likely to experiment with populist politics. British neo-illiberalism would have had to involve the British prime minister sacking the director of MI5 or the Special Branch before attacking the Lord Chief Justice over corruption investigations, while violating the independence of the BBC and transforming it into a propaganda arm of the ruling party, either by appointing party hacks to direct it, or by selling it to a friendly oligarch. An illiberal British PM would further appoint politically loyal judges, who would allow the imposition of a new written constitution and electoral rules to guarantee permanent gerrymandered majorities for the ruling party. The ruling party would also replace apolitical civil servants with party operatives and exercise direct control over the Bank of England. In England, last but not least, the government could instruct the Queen to dismiss the Archbishop of Canterbury and replace him with a politically loyal cleric, should he refuse to grant divine sanction to government policies. Sounds like an idea for a TV mini-series entitled “A Very Un-British Coup,” or a movie plot for Rowan Atkinson? England then is not about to transmute into a neo-illiberal democracy, even if it may have populist democratic governments at least in ideology if not in practice.
This book does not analyze “left-wing populism” because it is not illiberal, and it is unclear whether it is even properly