In the last decade since the financial crisis, there has been renewed interest in the phenomenon of authoritarian liberalism, when politically authoritarian forms of governing are used to defend and maintain the order and interests of economic liberalism (e.g. Menendez 2015). This conjunction of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism emerges in opposition to democracy and especially in opposition to any democratic constituent power which threatens to disrupt the material order. It reaches a crescendo through the recent Euro-crisis, with domestic and supranational authorities defending programs of economic liberalism in the face of national recalcitrance, most evidently within the Eurozone (Wilkinson 2013). Similar phenomena have been labelled “authoritarian neoliberalism,” grouping together critical episodes in Latin America and Southeast Asia, often under the auspices of the so-called Washington consensus in international affairs (Bruff 2014).
In each of these contexts, principles associated with democracy and social welfare are subsumed by a mode of governing in accordance with capital accumulation, marketization, and liberal economic rationality. The common denominator is the elision or repression of any democratic alternative to economic liberalism in general and austerity in particular. In the EU, this pressure is maintained in practice by a third factor: the material and ideological pressure to remain within the Euro-regime itself and the lack of any alternative political vision.
The confluence of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism in fact has a much longer historical pedigree (Cristi 1998). It was German constitutional theorist and social democrat, Hermann Heller, who coined the term “authoritarian liberalism” in the interwar period, applying it to the conservative and centrist cabinets who pushed programs of austerity through authoritarian politics in the early 1930s, bypassing parliament using various emergency measures (Heller 2015 [1932]).
Heller’s polemic against the authoritarian liberals took place in the crucible of late Weimar, as it was teetering on the brink of collapse. But as Karl Polanyi shows, the pattern of authoritarian liberal response and reaction to economic crisis was far from unique to Weimar—right across the globe, states tried to maintain the political-economic demands of the gold standard, fiercely resisting social democratic movements through exceptional measures, until, eventually but unevenly, they abandoned gold and market liberal ideology, leading, for example, to Welfarism in Britain and the New Deal in the USA (Polanyi 2001 [1944]).
According to Polanyi, the more fiercely countries resisted social democracy through authoritarian government in the name of economic liberalism and sound finances, the stronger and fiercer the eventual backlash (the “double movement”). Authoritarian government not only hollowed out democracy, eroding social protections, subjugating unions and subordinating all political organization to the service of deflationary policies; it also ultimately weakened the ability of political society to respond to the fascist threat when it arrived. It was, in other words, authoritarian liberalism that directly prepared the ground for fascism (Polanyi 2001, 205).1
If it is in the interwar period that the contradictions within the liberal democratic capitalist state are most openly exposed, and the state forced to reveal its hand, Polanyi’s account of the “great transformation” of the state and market over the long nineteenth century opens up a yet broader point about the backdrop to the interwar conjuncture. With a longer historical arc in view, the combination of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism comes to appear less exceptional than normal. The authoritarian state which defended the interests of capital and the ideas of economic liberalism made its mark not only in the crisis response of the 1920s and 1930s but in the initial forging of the market society across the nineteenth century. The idea of the liberal neutral state (the misnamed “nightwatchman state”) was always a myth; the market society was not spontaneous but planned and often coercively implemented, using a strong state apparatus. Heller’s polemic against authoritarian liberalism was likewise not only an assault on the regime managing the interregnum of late Weimar but on the broader trend of evolution from a national to a market liberalism.
With the label of authoritarianism, Heller was targeting not only the assorted cabinets of President Hindenberg, but the theorist who advised them, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt had recommended a strong state in order to defend the free market economy against the threat of democratic socialism and associated experiments of economic democracy, encapsulated in his address to German industrialists, the Langnamverein, in 1932, “strong state, free economy” (Cristi 1998). From Heller’s perspective, Schmitt represented less a critic of liberalism (as he is so often portrayed) than a vehement opponent of democracy, based on his fear that democracy would undermine the liberal neutral state and turn towards socialism.
This broader presentation of authoritarian liberalism in turn provides a background against which to make sense of the longer-term reconstitution of the post-World War II European state and regional order, on the basis of a fear of democracy, and especially of democratic constituent power. The fear is not only the one emphasised in standard political and constitutional theory, that democracy will commit suicide, and so needs to be “militant” to protect itself, but that democracy may undermine economic liberalism.2 Schmitt’s motto of “strong state, sound economy” would be taken up and reformulated by the German ordoliberals , who stressed the dangers of both unfettered democracy and of unfettered capitalism (with its own tendency to self-destruct by ending in monopolies and cartels). The state needed to be strong to secure the legal and institutional conditions (the ordo) of the free market and to disarm both democratic and capitalist threats to it (Bonefeld 2017).
This new brand of post-war authoritarianism reflects the reaction of political elites (as well as large sections of the people themselves) to the fear of a democratic- and class-consciousness that was unleashed in the interwar period and that remained a threat to the stability of a liberal order. “Militant democracy” is an inapposite label for this, concealing a de-democratization of society, with matters increasingly taken out of the hands of ordinary democratic politics in order to promote political and economic stability.
Indeed, the West German case represents a de-democratization not only of ordinary politics but also of constitutional politics, with its entrenched Basic Law and conservative constitutional culture, closely guarded by a Constitutional Court. This constitutional settlement is writ large through the project of European integration, elite-led and managed by experts and technocrats with the aim of constructing a single market with free movement of the factors of production. Although tempered in practice by corporatism, social democracy, and social Catholicism, it is from this perspective that we can see the neoliberal state of the 1970s, as well as the recent austerity state of the financial crisis, as representing a deepening of, rather than a departure from, the trajectory of postwar development.
Over the last decade, the postwar settlement has become increasingly unsettled. The pressure placed on elected governments to abandon it is coming to a head, and its most conspicuous symbols, the EU, Schengen, the single currency, and international human rights, are increasingly contested. This takes various forms depending on local context; in the debtor states of the Eurozone it may be to regain monetary authority and democratic control over the economy more generally; in other states, membership of the European Union or the European Convention on Human Rights may be called into question; elsewhere the appeal of liberal democracy itself has vanished. In one member state after another the center seems unable to hold, establishment parties have been demolished, especially the traditional center-left, with the occurrence of widespread “Pasokification,” named after the collapse of the Greek socialist party. The situation increasingly comes to resemble Gramsci’s “organic crisis”: the incapacity of the ruling bloc to maintain positional and ideological hegemony, reflecting a system that in its totality “is no longer able to generate societal consensus” (Fazi 2018).
As yet, however, there has been neither definitive rupture nor resolution, but rather a long interregnum; a series of crises as a combined and uneven process, where the rejection of established parties has been matched only by the relative impotence of potential alternatives. Only the nationalist Right has made any serious footholds, offering an inflection of the status quo, Hungary and Poland (and perhaps now Italy) developing an authoritarian populism from within the European Union, a variation of Polanyi’s double movement but without a clear break from neoliberalism.
Weimar: Back to the Future
The Weimar Constitution (booklet form)
Heller offered the term authoritarian liberalism to capture the two dominant features of this regime: an avowed antipathy towards representative democracy in favour of autocracy and dictatorship, reflected in practice in the move from a parliamentary to presidential government using emergency powers under Article 48 of the constitution, and an ideological defense of free market liberalism and the protection of the interests of capital and major industrialists (Heller 2015 [1932]).
Although an apparently contradictory formation, authoritarian liberalism expresses a standard classical liberal desire to avoid irrational interference in the economy, but with the authoritarian component indicating that such avoidance could best be achieved by a strong state apparatus. From this perspective, the perceived threat to economic liberalism comes not primarily from state intervention, or from monopolies and cartels, but from “bottom-up” social democratic pressures, which can best be resisted by an authoritarian state, a strong conservative state asserting itself to remedy the weakness and disorder of the parliamentary system. It represents the belief that market liberalism requires a strong state in order to maintain the separation of politics and economics, more precisely in order to depoliticize the economy.4 This is ideological because in reality, Heller notes, the authoritarian liberal state interferes ruthlessly in the economy in favor of certain class interests, in a manner that belies any claim to laissez-faire . Heller thus contributes to a broader line of argument developed by Franz Neumann, which aims to dispel the illusion of the liberal “night-watchman” state, a term used by Lassalle to dismiss classical liberalism in the nineteenth century (Neumann 1957).
The chief constitutional theorist in and of this interlude, which drew the curtain on the Weimar republic as a prelude to the fully fledged fascist dictatorship that would follow, was Carl Schmitt, who supported and advised the system of presidential cabinets before he became the “crown jurist” of the Nazis.5 Able to bypass parliamentary accountability and disruption, the system of presidential cabinets was “closer to Schmitt’s heart than any other” (Thornhill 2000, 237). In taking stock of the concrete reality of this period, Heller was not only targeting the regime but Schmitt himself.
Schmitt’s own defense of authoritarian liberalism was not merely conjunctural, restricted to the peculiar interregnum of late Weimar. On the contrary, it reflected his broader critique of the philosophy of legal positivism (especially its statutory version) combined with his fear of the danger posed to bourgeois society by mass democracy in a parliamentary system. Authoritarianism was presented as a necessary antidote to the relativism of legal positivism and the fragmentation caused by processes of democratization and pluralization, which were weakening the German state and endangering the liberal aspects of the Weimar Constitution.
The authoritarianism of Schmitt’s Weimar position was not designed to defend the set of positive constitutional laws but the constitution as a political and existential phenomenon, the soul of the political community, standing above the temporary politics of competing social forces. The actually existing pluralism and fragmentation of the time was one step away from a condition of civil war within which there would be no authoritative judge to determine “mine” and “thine” (Balakrishnan 2000, 124). Schmitt, sympathetic to Hobbes’s political theory, wanted to offer a Leviathan that was up to the task of setting itself over and above the various social movements, religious affiliations, and partisan political polemics that were threatening the stability of the constitutional order.
Distinguishing between the first—formal part of the Weimar constitution—its organizational elements—and the second, substantive part, which limited the political will of the community in the name of individual freedom, Schmitt would argue that the latter provided the Weimar Constitution with its ultimate principles (Schupmann 2017, 180). Once it became apparent that these could not be reconciled, protecting a bourgeois Rechtsstaat and contradictory socialist commitments (Soziale Rechtsstaat), guaranteeing private property as well as promising socialization of the means of production,6 Schmitt’s solution was to pare the substantive provisions down to the bare liberal essentials, a minimal set of private rights based on an individualistic social order.7 If and when decision was necessary, it would be made in favor of the liberal Rechtsstaat and against socialism, prioritizing negative liberties enforceable against the state above positive political rights over the state, with only the former properly considered basic rights protectable by judicial review (Schupmann 2017, 184–185). The institution of private property was important for Schmitt not only in ensuring the dominance of the prevailing concrete order but in precluding any instrumentalization of the constitution to achieve the aims of socialism or communism (Schupmann 2017, 187). Schmitt employed the term the Absolute Constitution to connote this substantive constitutional identity, which liberalism was incapable of properly defending due to its constitutional relativism and association with legal positivism.
Now the proletariat becomes the people, because it is the bearer of this negativity (that was Sieyes’ third estate: which was nothing and shall become everything). It is the part of the population which does not own, which does not have a share in the produced surplus value, and finds no place in the existing order… Democracy turns into proletarian democracy, and replaces the liberalism of the propertied and educated bourgeoisie. (Schmitt 2008, 271–272)
For Schmitt, the chief threat to the stability of the late Weimar state and its constitution was democracy, not liberalism.8 As Renato Cristi puts it: “if liberalism were to restrict its apoliticism to the sphere of civil society, and acknowledge the necessity of a sovereign state that retained the monopoly of the political, Schmitt would not object to conservative or authoritarian liberalism ” (Cristi 1998, 6). Schmitt was anti-liberal only in the sense that he found problematic its weakness in self-defense, philosophically and politically; its tolerance of a plurality of competing interests and groups pointed to its inability to secure its own principles, and especially those of a liberal market economy. His concern was that liberal philosophy and liberal constitutionalism might not be robust enough to protect and secure its own commitments in an era of mass democracy.
If Schmitt derided a liberalism too weak to defend itself, he feared a democracy, having integrating the working class into the franchise, that threatened to follow a path towards socialism. In other words, it was not only the threat of revolutionary socialism or Bolshevism (however much the presence of the Soviet menace added to his insecurity) but the democratic road to socialism that concerned him. Despite the failure of the German revolution, and the end of the “proletarian moment,” after 1918, the significance of the worker’s movements in Germany meant that “the middle classes were no longer able to ignore the existence of class conflicts as the earlier liberals had done” (Neumann 1957, 47).9
Unlike in England, where the bourgeoisie could assert their interests against the labor movement through parliamentary methods, in Germany the conflict centered on the Weimar constitution, which reflected a compromise between socialists and liberals. The German bourgeoisie, in alliance with capital, would thus mobilize legal form and constitutional principle in their struggle against labor, unable to rely on a legislative power that was unpredictable and unstable. The labor movement itself had also appealed to constitutional principle to justify its own radical program, in order, conversely, to democratize the economy, to elevate the worker from a subject of private law, a legal person, to a human being, able to exercise a power of control over his or her work (Dukes 2014, 15–17). The struggle between labor and capital, in other words, would take place over the meaning of the constitution itself.
It was labor lawyer Hugo Sinzheimer, an associate of Neumann, who had advocated the economic constitution as a supplement to the political constitution, to reject the “anarchy of so-called ‘economic freedom’” in bourgeois society and ensure the economy was run to achieve social ends. This required a degree of economic self-determination by council systems, even integrating revolutionary workers councils as its organs (Dukes 2014, 17–19).10 Labor law , in other words, was not only about changing the balance of working conditions in favor of the economic interests of labor, such as increasing minimum wages or decreasing the working day, but about democratic participation in the workplace as well as the whole economic order. The aim was not only to be free from exploitative practices but to be free collectively to participate in the exercise of political and economic power.
The difference on the conceptual plain is instructive. For Neumann, and those advancing democratic socialism, the economic and the political could not be separated. This was a bourgeois illusion. For Schmitt, however, this illusion was essential to maintain. He would do so through drawing a distinction between the qualitatively and quantitatively total state. The quantitatively total state (such as the welfare state advanced by the Social Democrats) was a weak state, threatened by economisation and colonised by interest groups and associations, deforming the “neutral state” of the nineteenth century (Tribe 1995, 179–180). The qualitatively total state by contrast was advocated to sever, rhetorically, the excessive connections that had been established between the state and the economy. A strong state was one which could distance itself from domestic economic interference and let the market run its course in an apparently autonomous manner.
Democracy, in other words, was a threat to the capitalist state if it threatened a de-differentiation of the political and the economic, transcending private property and market economics towards common ownership of the means of production, and economic democracy. Class struggle and democratic emancipation posed an obvious problem for Schmitt’s defense of bourgeois society. It was this threat that conditioned his authoritarianism.11
Postwar: A Misdiagnosis?
The message taken by mainstream constitutional theory in response to the extraordinary breakdown of liberal democracy would be quite different from the one Heller (and Neumann) had conveyed. It was not the potential for democracy to transcend liberalism, but the potential for it to threaten liberalism that resonated in the constitutional imagination. The predominant concern was the one expressed in Schmitt’s late Weimar writings: democracy in general and the democratic constituent power in particular might erode or even overturn liberal constitutionalism and the material order that undergirds it.
Schmitt’s concern came to prominence through the work of another constitutional theorist of the period, Karl Loewenstein, who had emigrated to the USA, but became closely involved in post-war German reconstruction. Loewenstein, writing in 1935, thought that liberal democracy needed to be more “militant” in the fight against fascism (and, if to a lesser extent, against communism) (Loewenstein 1935, 1937). The structures of the Weimar republic should have been more flexible in order for it to defend itself, by suspending constitutional rights, banning political parties, and preventing the rise of extremist groups and associations. Loewenstein, describing the opportunism of the fascist opponents of the constitution, urged liberal democracy to preempt them, to take the fight to its enemies, if necessary to “fight fire with fire” (Loewenstein 1937, 432).
Although Loewenstein’s appeal resonated in the post-war era, it was but an echo of Carl Schmitt’s own call for robust defense of the Weimar constitution by diktat and decree (Schupmann 2017). It was, in other words, a call for liberalism to be more authoritarian, if necessary to sacrifice political liberalism for the maintenance of economic liberalism.
In the aftermath of World War II, mainstream political and constitutional theory became preoccupied with bolstering this line of liberal constitutional defense. It neglected sociological examination of the material order, of the dynamic of capitalism and democracy, or of the way inequality undermined stability. The West German practice of entrenching strong constitutional guarantees to protect individual rights became increasingly influential and widespread, less as a dignified response to Nazism than as an exercise in liberal state-building. Constitutional lawyers, and those tasked with designing legal and political institutions, were dedicated to the justification of various institutional arrangements—whether domestic, international or supranational—that would constrain majoritarianism, with the rationale (or pretext) of preventing “democratic backsliding” or avoiding “democratic irrationality.” Independent technocratic institutions such as constitutional courts, expert commissions, and central banks, became the norm, and were gradually ingrained in the liberal constitutional imagination.
Jan-Werner Müller, with his label of “restrained democracy,” offers a more accurate assessment of this set of phenomena than suggested by the inappositely named “militant democracy” (Müller 2011). Müller in effect shows how it was liberalism and political moderation that was to be militantly advanced and protected. The Christian Democratic parties and a widespread ethos of social Catholicism played a strong role in this settlement, as did the project of European integration. But Müller underplays its material constitution and political economy; militancy was driven by concerns to keep the wheels of economic liberalism revolving as much as it was to defend political liberalism, still less to promote strong democracy. Democracy, rather than presented as an opportunity, an emancipatory material struggle for equal liberty in all domains, is disarmed as “liberal democracy,” or dismissed as likely to entail a “tyranny of the majority.”12 Popular sovereignty , as democratic constituent power , disappears, subsumed into written constitutional law, juristic institutions, and the protection of constitutional rights.
The post-war constitutional imagination in Europe is expressed in the story of West German constitutional development: “we are (afraid of) the people” (Möllers 2008). Reaction to this fear entailed a new vision not only of the governing function (in particular the technocratic functioning of government) but also of the governing relationship, the relation between state and society, and specifically of the restricted nature of the right to rule over the economy. In other words, this is a vision of de-democratization both of the constituent and of the constituted powers, of sovereignty and of government. It establishes a vision of political society prefigured in the authoritarian liberalism of the interwar years, of the individual as a market participant rather than a political actor, a consumer rather than a citizen. It is, properly understood, authoritarian in character; but it is an authoritarianism based on a fear of freedom that has not only a class character, but also a socio-psychological dimension: it is not only that elites fear and distrust the people, but also that the people fear and distrust themselves.13
As a constitutional vision, this new style of authoritarianism was presaged in the work of the ordoliberals, whose founding meeting in Freiberg coincided with Schmitt’s address to the Langnamsverein, “strong state, sound economy.”14 Sharing Schmitt’s vehement anticommunism, obsession with order, distrust of economic democracy , and belief in a strong state, they nevertheless presented unfettered capitalism (and not only democracy) as a challenge to the competition-based market society.15 Carl Joachim Friedrich identifies the ideological and constitutional significance of this “new liberalism” as early as 1955, noting how it signals a fundamental re-ordering of the basic ideas underpinning constitutional theory (Friedrich 1955, 509). As Friedrich understood, and as Foucault would later explore in his lectures on neoliberal governmentality in 1979, the decisive theoretical turn triggered by German ordoliberalism had been to replace constituent power (or popular sovereignty ) with individual economic freedom—a freedom to participate in the market rather than the polis—as the legitimating device for the whole constitutional order (Foucault 2008). This is not only a question of delegating power to technocratic agencies to avoid temporary democratic impulses; it is a basic elision or denial of political in favour of economic freedom.
The new liberalism reversed the original meaning of the economic constitution, which for Neumann and Sinzheimer had meant democratic control of the economy (Dukes 2014). Instead, the constitution itself becomes sovereign, protecting the economy from democracy, through technocratic and legal means. For the ordoliberals, the new economic constitutionalism would achieve the complete abolition of class as well as national conflicts from the political domain. It would be based on formal equality, individual economic rights, and a competitive market economy, protected by a strong state and its constitutional and legal apparatus which would disarm any democratic or capitalist threats to it. The class-conscious struggles of the interwar period would be repressed, and even abolished, in order to secure political and economic stability (Gerber 1994).
The interwar project of achieving economic democracy through workers councils—associated with Sinzheimer and Neumann’s earlier incarnation of the economic constitution—would be effectively abandoned (cf. Glasman 1996). By the time of the publication of the national federation of trade unions’ (DGB) Dusseldorf Programme in 1964, “the policy aims of the unions were no longer directed towards the institution of economic democracy. Demands were made instead for the extension of codetermination within a Keynesian capitalist economy” (Dukes 2014, 54). Trade unions and employers would increasingly negotiate wage-setting in cooperation with each other, securing the “social peace” in conjunction with a welfare state corporatism that could not be upscaled to the European level (Streeck and Schmitter 1991).
Although it was far from straightforwardly applied (in practice softened by the social market economy and aspects of corporatism), the ordoliberal reconfiguration of the constitutional imagination would become ideologically ascendant, first in Germany and then elsewhere, not least through its influence on the process of European constitutionalisation.16 The self-understanding of constitution-making in Europe would be increasingly conditioned by ideologies and interests that correspond to economic rationality and the logic of market competition, effecting a new geopolitical differentiation of the political and economic realms by taking matters out of domestic democratic deliberation. In conjunction with principles developed by the European Court of Justice, this geopolitical separation would import a strong economically liberal bias into the dynamic of European integration (Scharpf 2010).
The project of European integration is a key part of the postwar settlement, representing a soft form of authoritarian liberalism writ large (Wilkinson 2019). Democracy was simply not in the DNA of the original plans for European economic integration. Its energies were generated through administrative and bureaucratic processes rather than democratic movements. The European economic constitution emulated that of the ordoliberals, not the workers’ democracy extolled by Neumann and Sinnzheimer. Viewed through the lens of interwar labor lawyers, the formal mechanisms for the involvement of labor in the administration of the EEC and the nascent “European economy” were “markedly limited” from “the first decades of their existence” (Dukes 2014, 124), frustrating any goals for a transnational labor constitution. In practice, workers were “almost wholly reliant on the goodwill of the European Commission,” unable to influence policy in a social direction (Dukes 2014, 136).
The purpose of the new economic constitutionalism was to avoid a politicization of the economy which—in the ordoliberal imagination—would lead to the instability of the state. In other words, its purpose was to protect the economy from political-democratic pressures; “this could not be but authoritarian” (Jayasuriya 2001, 453). It is a trend that would become more acute in time and of course extend far beyond the EU, “Geneva school neoliberals” transposing the ordoliberal idea of the economic constitution… to the scale beyond the nation,” protecting an increasingly global marketplace from domestic democratic interference (Slobodian 2018, 8). Labor was thus hamstrung by international and supranational developments that weakened its domestic influence and which it had no possibility of influencing in turn.17
From this perspective, the dismantling of the social contract between labor and capital in the decades of neoliberalism and its ripping up since the financial crisis should be in no way surprising: this is not merely a result of the neoliberal turn encapsulated by the Maastricht Treaty and the financialisation of the economy. On the contrary, it deepens a trajectory that begins with post-war reconstruction. At least from the Treaty of Rome in 1958, the purpose and function of integration, and the post-war settlement more generally, has been to depoliticize the economy, foster market integration, and restrain democratic passions.
Conclusion
The EU in its constitutive moment (Maastricht) was endowed with a quasi-constitution… where, for the first time in this part of the world… a principle of political economy deriving from a specific ideological discourse (namely neo-liberal deregulation and unrestricted competition, believed to produce ‘optimal allocation of resources’ and spontaneously ‘just’ redistribution) was presented as the sovereign rule which all member states ought to implement in their national policies under close surveillance of the federal (or quasi-federal) organs of the Union… (Balibar 2014, 202)
If the argument here is accepted, however, this battle, or at least its preliminary stages, may already have been lost. The constitutional implications of ordo- and neo-liberal political economy are underscored by the reconstitution of Europe right from the start of the postwar period. Once politics is reduced to a single political-economic logic, and the possibility of genuine renewal comes down to the possibility of exercising a constituent power that is subsumed into constitutional rights, the autonomy of the political is reduced to either a bare formality or the prospect of a revolutionary rupture. This resettlement occurs at the beginning of the postwar reconstitution of the European state and in significant part through the project of European integration. The re-differentiation of the political and the economic is cemented at Maastricht, continued and taken to a further stage with the constitution of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).
The post-war constitutional imagination in Europe, though far from democratic, is more passively than actively authoritarian. It is technocratic, institutional, and juridical in terms of its constitutional form. In substance it is economically liberal, dedicated to expanding market integration, pursuing free trade, and intensifying economic rationality. Politically, it is moderate, extreme only in the centrism it espouses and the technocratic and managerial ethos it embodies. Democracy is restrained but not yet extinguished. But this hollowing out of democracy presages the more active authoritarianism to come. Although democracy had always been subdued in the postwar construct, since Maastricht, and especially since the Eurocrisis, parliaments and even popular referenda would be systematically subordinated in the process of integration.18 The “Oxi” referendum in Greece in 2015 was the most explosive, but far from the only, expression of popular discontent to be overridden in this way.
If the ultimate capitulation of Greece suggests authoritarian liberalism may continue, developments elsewhere, as right-wing Euroskeptic parties surge in popularity (in Hungary, Poland, as well as in the core of Europe, in France, Germany and Italy) suggests that the authoritarian liberal suppression of the democratic voice may, as in the interwar period, tend not only to the victory of capitalism, but also to the resurgence of reactionary forms of authoritarian populism.19 So although there has been no definitive rupture from the post-war order there is increasingly an inflection, where the protection of economic liberalism and the interests of capital is maintained not with restraint but with more active forms of political illiberalism , particularly with regard to issues of identity and immigration , as right-wing nationalism returns. This is occurring within the European Union, most evidently in Central and Eastern Europe but also in the core. Brexit may follow this inflection. But if it were to signify a rupture with the post-war order of authoritarian liberalism, it could also be through a reclaiming of democratic sovereignty over the economy.
The current conjuncture has thrown the post-war settlement into doubt, if not yet into oblivion. It has been strongly contested, but there has been no definitive rupture, with the possible exception of Brexit. Whether any reprisal of the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy will more closely resemble tragedy or farce remains to be seen. The UK is one of the few places in Europe to have avoided the “Pasokification” (virtual annihilation) of the traditional center left party, the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn performing extraordinarily well in comparison with its sister parties on the Continent, with roughly 40% of the electorate in the 2017 general election, and becoming the biggest political party in Europe. There are of course particular features of the UK’s constitutional landscape that explain this divergence other than Brexit alone. But is it a possibility that the UK’s departure from the status quo of EU membership, ironically given its advanced neoliberal trajectory, might lead not to a right-wing authoritarian illiberalism, as is occurring within the European Union, but towards a form of democratic socialism, as may only be feasible outside it (Lapavitas 2018)?
The underlying tensions contributing to the present long interregnum are not merely temporary, linked to a period of economic emergency; on the contrary, authoritarian liberalism is part of the DNA of the post-war constitutional settlement in Europe. The aim of the Euro-crisis measures has not been to enable a future return to normal democratic politics, but to restore the pressure of the financial markets and the constraints imposed by them, reinstating by different means the same constraints (conditionality) now imposed through political coercion and institutional devices such as the European Stability Mechanism and the Outright Monetary Transactions of the ECB (Wilkinson 2015). The last decade of crisis response can be viewed as having effected, in practice, a conservative revolution: bypassing and circumventing normal parliamentary, democratic, and legal accountability in order to conserve a liberal economic regime. If this is just as Schmitt had advised in late Weimar, the present bloc appears more robust than its predecessor and the alternatives less potent—so far at least.