Speech given at the occasion of his visit at the Europa Institut at the University of Zurich on 4 October 2021
I. Speech by Prof. Michael Ignatieff
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I. Speech by Prof. Michael Ignatieff
You have asked me to speak about populism and the future of democracy in Europe. Populism is one of those words that is dying from promiscuous over-use. I have heard Mr. Trump described as a billionaire populist. That is plausible and less of a contradiction than it may seem, but Joe Biden’s recent decision to ignore his generals and exit Afghanistan has also been described as populist foreign policy. So I am not quite sure what populism means, if it could apply both to Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. I think what it means it is a general descriptor of any course of political action that does not command assent from a centrist elite of experts. Which means that it is not necessarily a bad thing at all. So we must not use it as a swearword, it may be a wakeup call. I am going to use populism to describe anti-elite, anti-institutional challenges, in the name of the people, to center right and center left political dominance of European politics. These challenges critically include rhetorical attacks on elites, experts and foreigners in the name of political solutions that are usually not solutions at all, but instead efforts to pander to the fears and hopes of an electorate. Typical forms of populist politics would be AfD in Germany or Cinque Stelle in Italy and there are some others we will talk about as we go along.
Even though populists often fail to propose real solutions to real problems, it is a question whether these movements do harm democracy. Populists, after all, are hardly the only people in politics peddling false solutions to real problems. I have been in politics and there is a lot of snake-oil being peddled by a lot of people. So, the fact that populists are not particularly plausible in their solutions does not necessarily mean that they are doing democracy much harm. Moreover, and we have seen recent evidence of this, the German and Italian political systems have proven resilient in absorbing the challenge of populist politics. So far, populists of the right and left remain safely on the margins. While both Cinque Stelle and AfD continue to challenge elite governance, the electorates in both Italy and Germany have voted for men like Mario Draghi and Olaf Scholz who incarnate elite competence, and this has sidelined challengers from the right. The real question, I think, about right wing populism, and to a lesser extent, left-wing populism, is whether they are constitutional, whether they are committed to peaceful politics, representation of the people inside the institutions of a parliamentary system. Most populist parties in Europe, including some very right-wing ones, do claim that they are constitutional. The question is whether we should believe them. Do you believe Marine Le Pen when she tells you that she respects the institutions of the Fifth Republic? Do you believe that Geert Wilders will respect the constitutional order of the Netherlands if he got power? If they remain constitutional, populist parties may renew democracy by articulating the resentment, anger and disillusion towards mainstream parties. This in turn, forces mainstream parties and governments to reach out and accommodate this discontent.
For example, we may not like the Prime Minister of Denmark’s policy towards refugees in her country, but there is no doubt that it is an example of a mainstream party seeing off a threat from the far-right. If so, whether you like it or not, the democratic system is working as it should in Denmark. Populism becomes a challenge only if populist parties resort to violence – this happens rarely – or more commonly – if they start to excuse the violence of others. I want to put violence at the center of this discussion because we do not usually talk about it and I think it is important. Any populist political rhetoric that acts to legitimate attacks on migrants, refugees and other minorities does not just endanger them. It also threatens democracy since it weakens the civic norms on which democracy depends. And where these norms are broken, populist parties can become complicit in the intimidation of citizens, migrants and refugees. One example of that is in eastern Germany, where AfD chapters colluded with violent anti-migrant demonstrations by an extremist group, Pegida, and this violated clear constitutional norms. That is where AfD gets dangerous. As a result, they have been properly excluded from coalition formation by the other German political parties. Centrist political parties can use the coalition formation to defend the constitutional norms of democratic politics. So far so good, this is working.
Democracy depends, to a degree that we often forget, on political actors retaining sufficient respect for constitutional norms to occasionally put those ahead of party political advantage. Crucially, this means maintaining the basic norm of non-violence in politics. Coalition formation in Western Europe is functioning in that way. But the case of the United States is much more troubling. Here the function of mainstream parties in reinforcing constitutional norms has broken down. Recently, we have seen what happens when this occurs when moderate Republicans in the Republican Party lost control to populist insurgents inside the party. The storming of the US capitol on January 6th, 2021 was the most serious breach of constitutional norms that I have seen in my lifetime. The most serious aspect of it was the failure of Republicans to condemn it utterly. Instead, they continue to circulate falsehoods about stolen elections and are actively seeking to incorporate the populist extremists. American populism of the right—and the example that it offers to right wing parties around the world—is now the most serious threat to democratic government in the world. This change in the climate ought to concern every European. For your citizens watch what the Republicans are doing and this may become a source of active destabilization in European politics.
So the problem with populism is not its attack on elites, scientists, liberals and so on; to the degree that the privileges of science, expertise and elites are challenged, it can strengthen democracy rather than damage it. Every form of authority—including the expertise of professors like me, including the expertise of scientists—should be subjected to scrutiny and challenge in a vital democracy, especially when expertise and science have the huge public impacts that they do.What we have seen through the Covid crisis, was science establishing its legitimacy in democratic debate through performative results. Not simply by assertion and rhetoric but by saving lives. In this way, science has seen off the populist challenge. The claim that Covid restrictions are thefirst step towards tyranny, have been widely circulated by populist rhetoric, but the claim has failed to win elections in Canada or in Italy. Populist parties foolish enough to misuse the language of liberty in this fashion and to attack science in this fashion, have had their comeuppance. That is good news for democracy.
So, in other words, despite Covid, lockdowns, populist challenges, substantial economic dislocation after 2008, democracy in Europe is holding together. The centrist political parties, the center left and centre right, continues to hold.
But, at this point I want to criticize what I have just said. This relatively sanguine view of the state of European democracy may be false consolation. It may be a way of cheering ourselves up, in the face of a gathering crescendo of warning signs that our luck may be about to run out.
One reason that we perhaps should not be as confident about the future of European democracy is simply that political violence in Europe has a very long history. That is why I keep focusing on violence. Violence is the moment when a political system goes into crisis. It is true that the continent has managed to avoid a return to the 1930s, but fascism does remain in the political bloodstream of Europe, like a malignant viral strain in remission. This is the specter that could come back again, if climate change were to become unmanageable, a pandemic were to get out of control, economic growth would suddenly collapse, food and other shortages became a constant fact of life… This is the possibility that begins to worry me: a gradual convergence of crises that, taken separately, a democracy can handle, but if they all begin to impact simultaneously, might suddenly overwhelm governments and the democratic system itself.
We are not there yet. We are not possibly even near that. The pandemic, for example, is a mixed bag for democracy. The death toll is much higher than it should have been. It is shocking to me that at least a million people have died in the United States. Electorates are bruised and battered by the pandemic, but there is a kind of grudging forgivingness for political leaders who are prepared to admit mistakes and learn from them and move on. So, I do not see Covid alone as a signal of democratic crisis. But what I worry about is a scenario in which we begin to get a convergence of environmental pressure, pandemic, economic crisis and migration. Put those together and you begin to see a very different scenario which I think should concern us.
If new variants of the infection return and our existing arsenal of vaccines proves unable to adapt quickly enough; if environmental harms begin to escalate into crises that prove unstoppable: fires raging out of control, floods sweeping away towns, farmlands alternatively suffering from drought or flood, our food supply suddenly running short; a conversion from fossil fuels to sustainable energy that stalls or fails to achieve its targets, leaving us with suddenly rocketing energy prices that then crash into the economic situation, producing dislocation; followed by uncontrolled migration surges from Afghanistan, Haiti, or North Africa. You can begin to see a convergence of crises which separately can be managed but together might simply break the capacity of our democratic system and expose democracy’s besetting weaknesses—the party bickering, the inability to make decisions, the penchant to hope for the best rather than plan for the worst. These failures, if they begin to accumulate, might convince a lot of citizens that ‘strong measures’, curtailing democracy itself, are needed. We need to remember that disaster is always an opportunity for the ruthless, and leaders may emerge who throw off the carefully managed display of constitutional propriety and begin to sound the drum of authoritarian power.
We need to talk more about climate change as a threat to democracy. We need to talk about the energy conversion failing as a potential threat to our democracy. It is not that we are not doing anything about climate change. Greta Thunberg, excuse me, is wrong. The recent COPP 26 climate gathering in Glasgow was not all ‘blah blah blah’ as she said. The problem is that the things we are doing—the energy transition, the recycling, even research into hydrogen fuels, just to choose three examples at random—are not happening fast enough. If our political responses to climate change continue to lag, democracy itself may run out of time. In such a scenario, disillusionment would grow, the call for radical action and for civil disobedience would grow and authoritarian populism might surge into power, as it did in the 1930s, telling us that the problems—epidemics, climate disaster and economic disruption—are all caused by the same thing: too much democracy. We democrats need to show in our human rights work and in our work as citizens, that it is democracy, and more of it, that is the right response to these challenges. We need political systems and parties that are more, not less responsive to public concern on the environment, governments that are more and not less energetic in cushioning the vulnerable from the environmental and economic impacts. If our governments and governing parties continue to drift and let these problems accumulate, the ultimate casualty might be the democratic system itself.
I have done some democratic politics and love democracy with a kind of in-the- guts passion. For the first time in my life I am worried about the future. It is this convergence thesis that is causing me to be concerned. But that is only one problem.
An apocalyptic end of this type is not the only way democracy could end in Europe. Another end is if it is destroyed from within. Let me spend a little moment on one particular example of that, Victor Orbán’s Hungary. Orbán is important because he tells you what populist movements could do if they get power. Most populist movements in Europe are on the fringe, they are kept at the margins, they are in opposition. Ask yourself what they would do if they got power. Orbán is one answer to that question.
Orbán is the leading example of an authoritarian populist in power—and conservative politicians at the edge of the constitutional order, including American Republicans, are making the pilgrimage to Budapest to learn from the master. He has been in power for more than a decade, he looks well placed to carry his particular brand of single party authoritarianism into power for another decade. The point is that he uses democracy to destroy democracy. He has four electoral mandates under his belt, and so every anti-democratic action he has taken since 2010 is undertaken “in the name of the people”: he re-writes Hungary’s constitution, he muzzles the supreme court, he introduces new media laws which nearly eliminate the opposition press; he evicts a free university like CEU and invites in a university that pledges its ultimate loyalty to the Communist Party of China; he refuses to honor any international obligation to refugees and illegally engages in refoulement of migrants at the border; he passes legislation banning the so called promotion of gay lifestyles in public schools and makes an explicit public equation between homosexuality and pedophilia, which is an incitement to violence against our fellow citizens; the list goes on and includes the gerrymandering of an electoral system, so in the next election in 2022, the opposition, if it hopes to defeat Orbán, cannot win with a plurality, it must win with a plurality plus at least 5%. Finally, most serious of all, the transfer of assets in public hands – beach front on Lake Balaton, agricultural and forest lands, state owned companies, publicly owned housing – from public to private hands. So a single party and its cronies are fast approaching a point where they own the whole country.
This situation is an irony unprecedented in European politics. After ending eight decades of single party rule, Fidesz in power has recreated every feature of Communist party rule – phony elections, single party clientelism, corruption, media control – that they founded their movement to free their country from.
Orbán sees himself as the leader of “Christian conservatism” not only at home, not only in Europe, but world-wide. His speeches make grand civilizational claims – about the decadence of liberal secularism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism – and the need to defend a conservative Christian national identity, based on a new kind of regime – namely illiberal democracy. Just to give you a flavor of this ideological claim, I quote from a speech in September 2020:
“The rebellion against liberal intellectual oppression is not only widening, but also deepening. … We can already see that the Emperor has no clothes – despite the refusal to admit this in the Brussels bubble. The doctrine that “democracy can only be liberal” – that golden calf, that monumental fetish – has been toppled. Now we only need to wait for the dust to settle and we will not only know it, but also see it. It seems that conservative and Christian democratic parties and political movements can finally escape from the deadly embrace of the liberals.”
It may seem hard to take Orbán seriously— he is the leader of a small country with an inveterate tendency to dramatize its own self-pity, but this ideological attack needs to be taken seriously because it gives a leader in a small country a power leverage that on his own he would not have. He also illustrates the complete failure of the European integration and accession process. The accession process, as you will recall, was meant to discipline the domestic political systems of the accession countries and lock democracy in place forever in Central and Eastern Europe. So far, European institutions have done little or nothing to stop Orbán. He campaigns against Europe Monday to Friday and cashes the European structural funds on Saturdays and Sundays. When the European Court of Justice rules against him, as it did in our CEU case, he basically ignores the law and continues on his authoritarian path. I do not want to feed Euroscepticism, but Europe is both ineffectual and complicit. The structural subsidies are essential to maintaining Orbán in power and paying off his clients and dependents. This is the dirty secret. Europe is actively enabling this regime to stay in power.
Nothing is eternal. There is a chance that Hungarians will tire of the lying, hectoring and bullying tone of the government and the opposition may unite around a single leader who will have to say something like: Let us return Hungary to European norms of democratic politics and let us clean the stables.” This should be their mantra.
If he does win in the spring elections in 2022 and succeeds in consolidating a single party state this will have widespread repercussions. He will have the support of Russia and China as he anchors a new civilizational alternative to European democracy in the heart of Europe. This new model is not a return to the past. This is 21st century authoritarianism, it uses Facebook, 24/7 media management, constant attack politics borrowed from the United States, recurrent mobilization of his base by inventing enemies: one day it is George Soros, occasionally it is me, then it is Brussels, now it is homosexuals, the list of enemies never stops. It is a politics of diabolization which has an immensely destructive impact. He is recreating the single party rule of the Communist era but without the secret police, without the informers, and torture and the closed borders. This is what makes it a 21st century phenomenon. If you do not like Hungary you can leave , if you are critical you can go. This whole project is sustained by the funding of the European Union and also by German multinationals who love Hungary as a low-wage platform for car manufacture.
Is this what Ken Roth calls a ‘zombie democracy’? I do not think it is quite zombie, that is “the living-dead”. Where I have some hope here is that there will be an election next year – whether he abides by the verdict is another issue – but as long as there is an election there is hope that democracy will do what democracy eventually does, which is throw the rascals out. It will not be free, it will not be fair, but it will take place. There is opposition to Orbán, a loathing for what he has done to the country. These people know what it means to fight for freedom. They have gone into the streets. They have fought the tanks. So do not write them off. The future of democracy in Hungary, and by extension any country whose politics has been influenced by the Orbán example, will depend, as democracy always does, on whether ordinary people decide enough is enough. Enough stealing, enough contempt, enough enemies – and get out to vote for something better. Being a democrat is not a matter of opinion, it is a performative act. You either do it or you do not. Democracy dies if you do not do it. We should hope that people in Budapest will come out. And we hope that there will be enough democrats in Europe, not only in Hungary but also here and elsewhere.
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II. Panel discussion / Q & A
Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals (Director, Europa Institut at the University of Zurich): Thank you so much, Michael Ignatieff, for this excellent presentation. You raised a couple of issues on which you might now have the opportunity to go a bit more into depth and afterwards we will have a question and answer session. I already now want to ask everybody to prepare some questions to ask afterwards. Thank you very much, also to Ken Roth, for sharing your thoughts with us here on this platform, I will now leave the panel to the two of you. If I may, I might start with a question to Ken Roth: Can you share your thoughts about why populism is an issue of human rights?
Ken Roth (Executive Director of Human Rights Watch): First, let me start with a personal anecdote because Michael and I have actually known each other for a year or two. Almost two decades ago, we were debating each other in a room very much like this at Harvard, the Kennedy School. The room was filled, it was just after George Bush had invaded Iraq, and the topic was on whether this was a humanitarian intervention or not? Michael said it was and I said it was not, so we talked it through.
Michael Ignatieff: Guess who was right.
Ken Roth: Anyway, sitting in the back of the room someplace, was this woman I had never met before, who ended up being my wife. She did not bother introducing herself, but she decided by the end of the talk that she was going to marry me and she just told me that later. So, Michael played a very important role in my life.
Michael Ignatieff: I am happy to help out.
Ken Roth: Is populism a human rights issue? I think Michael is correct in saying that the impetus for populists is, in some ways, the failure of traditional elite politicians. That we have to recognize that there is a significant segment of democratic societies who feel left behind. They feel that their wages are stagnating. Their careers are stymied. They are maybe not happy with some of the sociological changes taking place within our society. But most importantly, I think they feel disrespected by the elite. They feel condescended to. Looked down upon. The brilliance of somebody like Trump was that he spoke their language. He was a multi-millionaire who was clearly not of their world, but who was able to show that he respected them, he was not one of the elite, he dumped on the elite. So, that is not in and of itself a human rights issue, but it does speak, I think, to a challenge of today’s democracy, which we have to pay attention to. Because, I think, in order for democracy to survive, it has to begin to answer more broadly to these people who feel that the traditional politics are not answering their needs, not simply material needs, but really their psychic needs, their needs for respect.
Maybe I can just say a few words about your very interesting presentation, thank you for that, Michael. I agree with you that the populists obviously represent a challenge to democracy. You talked in terms of it being a challenge to constitutionalism. I would use a slightly different term because the element of constitutionalism that for me is most essential, is the rights component. In other words, if you think about what a democratic constitution is. Obviously, it is one where there are periodic elections. But it also requires a free media, a free civil society, to be able to criticize government and it requires the rule of law. It requires that the government abide by the same rules as everybody else. Among those rules are ones that define basic rights: not to be discriminated against, the right to be able to seek asylum, the rights to be able to be an LGBT person or for women to have equal rights. These are the things that are attacked.
For me, the danger of the populists is not simply that they are appealing to a majority, but they tend to appeal by demonization, as Michael said. By promoting hatred towards some disfavored minority. This is where Orbán comes up with attacking the asylum seekers or attacking the gays. You see something very similar in Poland, where they are creating LGBT-free zones, where women’s rights to reproductive freedom are very much under attack. Trump attacked blacks as well as migrants and sort of the whole multiculturalism of US society. These are appeals designed to resonate with the majority culture at the expense of the minority. In that sense, in the way populism tends to play out, it is anti-rights. That is why it is a profound concern.
Orbán epitomizes this in that he is running within a democratic system, but he has so manipulated the democratic system – as you describe – that it is a parody. I mean, when I use the term zombie democracy, it is the walking dead of democracy in that the essence is gone. You have the formal structures that are still there. But the opposition media has been silenced. Liberal universities like CEU are gone. The civic activists are being hounded and even the basic duty of governments to respect rights is discarded. Orbán has taken this odd twist to it, which Michael referred to. He is privatizing government so that even if the opposition is able to overcome its divides and put together the kind of united challenge to Orbán that happened during the last mayoral elections, the local elections, where Orbán lost all of the major cities in Hungary. Now, the question with next year’s parliamentary elections is: Could the same thing happen again? If the opposition succeeds they are going to find that they control the government but the government does not control the traditional assets of the state because they have all been privatized to foundations that Orbán’s cronies now control. In that sense, Orbán is his own particular brilliant variation of a zombie democracy.
Where I do agree with the sort of warning sign that you pointed to Michael. I think that it is easy to point out that autocratic populists almost invariably serve themselves in their perpetuation in power, rather than the people. That is their Achilles heel. When push comes to shove, they are always going to make a decision that benefits themselves and the population be damned. What is making it easier for them to say: “We deliver better than those messy democracies”, is because the democracies have not done a great job addressing today’s biggest challenges.
On the pandemic, yes, vaccines were developed relatively quickly. In many parts of the world the pandemic is more and more under control. But then it is not. Then you have all these anti-vaxxers and it is not really going away. If you look at the other big issues, whether it is climate change or poverty and inequality or the question of migration or the challenges posed by technology, democracies are sort of fumbling around. They really are not doing a great job at figuring out what the answers are. This enables Xi Jinping. I realize we are supposed to speak about Europe, but you know he is the big challenge, because he is the one who more than anyone else is trumpeting the supposed advantages of autocratic rule. He can say: “You need a dictatorship. You need a strongman like me to address these big problems, because democracies are too divisive and too slow and too disunified to address the big challenges of our time. So that is the difficulty before us.
Where I do feel that we have the capacity to fight back, is, first of all, to look a bit more parochially, as Michael pointed out, the European Union is funding Orbán. Orbán could not exist without these major EU subsidies. While I know this is the time to lionize Angela Merkel, because she is stepping down, but Angela Merkel blew it. She had the opportunity to firmly condition this next tranche of European Union aid for the next seven years on Orbán’s respect for the rule of law and basic rights. She punted, to use an American term. She just could not lay it down and say this is the conditionality, because she was so determined to have a deal during her European Union presidency, which ended last December. So we now have this kind of odd mush, where the European Council kind of representing the leaders of European governments, have accepted a sort of wishy washy conditionality and the European Parliament is trying to be tougher and it is just not clear where it all stands. The European Court of Justice is trying to step in, but is Orbán or anybody else going to listen to them? It is much messier than it should have been had Merkel really insisted that: “If you want to have our money, you live by our values.” She did not say it that clearly.
The other thing that I think we have going for us and this is really in many ways the most powerful tool we have, is the ability to show that autocrats do serve themselves. They do not deliver to the people. While it is important to outline their censorship, their stifling of civil society and their various ways in which they are undermining rights and playing with the rules, ultimately our best ability to fight back is to show that they are not doing what they pretend to be doing. And the best example is Viktor Orbán himself.
One of my favorite Human Rights Watch reports was the simple little report that my colleague Lydia Gall did. She is our researcher based in Budapest. She said: “Well, let us see what is happening with all this money coming from the European Union. It is literally going to build football stadiums, so Orbán can pay off his cronies. If you go to a hospital in Budapest, it is decrepit. You have to bring in your own toilet paper. There is nothing there. Because he is not interested in serving the people. He is just trying to pay off his cronies and stay in power. And you can say the same thing over and over when you look at the Egyptian government, the Turkish government, the Polish government or the Chinese government. These governments are portraying themselves as a superior form of government because they do not have the messiness of democracy. That they will serve the people. When you scratch the surface, they are serving themselves. That is their weakness. Our ability to highlight that is our most powerful tool in what really is a global battle – at this point – between two alternative methods of governance. So I will stop there with my brief comments.
Michael Ignatieff: I want to get to questions quickly, but let me abuse my position here to ask you one, which is: Human rights advocacy depends on a moral premise about universalism. We are all brothers and sisters under the skin and what happens in Budapest should concern you in Zurich, because we are a) Europeans, b) human beings, et cetera. But universalism is in a lot of trouble and I am just wondering whether you can speak to that. Because if that premise is questioned, if people start to think: “Well, actually. Universalism is pretty weak. Why should I care about Orbán’s Hungary? It is an hour and a half away by plane, but it is actually in another universe as far as I am concerned. And do not talk to me about Turkey, do not talk to me about Egypt. Myanmar? Forget about it.” A lot of your advocacy depends on a premise of universalism, which for a lot of people is increasingly embattled, difficult to defend, et cetera. I just wonder whether you could talk about that.
Ken Roth: That is a good question. I think Orbán is the easier case. Orbán’s response to the pandemic initially was – he already had two thirds of the parliament, he already could change the constitution at will – to decide to nonetheless rule by decree. To say that parliamentary laws are unnecessary because Hungary is facing this pandemic and so therefore he is going to make all the decisions. What that meant was that Orbán suddenly was the European Union’s first blatant overt dictatorship. All of you should care about that. You are not in the European Union, technically, but European Union values matter. The structure of governance matters. If a full-fledged member of the European Union can get away with calling themselves a member and still being a dictatorship, that completely undermines the European Union project, that is of profound concern.
Now, if you ask more broadly: Why should I care about Myanmar or the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or what have you? The fact of the matter is that enough people do. That governments will not overtly be complicit in that. They may not really care, they may just wish it would go away. But today, if your company is shown to be importing goods made from forced labor out of Xinjiang, you are in trouble. If your government is seen as providing arms to the Saudi crown prince while he bombs Yemen or to support Egyptian President Sisi while he summarily executes people in the Sinai, this does not resonate well with most democratic polities. I think that we cannot just assume this universal sense of camaraderie. But our job is to first of all personify the victims so that it is not just an abstraction but these are genuine people there, which makes it easier to identify. But then second, to draw those lines. To show that your government could be making a difference here, but it is actually making it worse. No politician wants to be in that position. Fortunately, we have built enough of the human rights consciousness among the major democracies and indeed among much, much of the world that this kind of complicity is still studiously avoided.
Michael Ignatieff: I think you and I could talk all night. That would be fun for us and not so much fun for you. So maybe we could get some questions from the audience.
Question from the audience: Good evening and thank you for your really excellent presentation, which is, of course, not very promising. I agree with you with regard to the failure of the European Union. But now my question to you and I think both of you are Americans: Is what will…
Ken Roth: Oh no, you just insulted him. He is Canadian. That is a different country.
Audience: Forgive me.
Michael Ignatieff: I am happy to be taken as an American, but I am actually Canadian.
Question from the audience: Sorry. Now, since the European Union is not really doing its job and we now have a Democratic president in the United States and the United States is sort of what we would call “eine Ordnungsmacht” [regulatory power/global power]. What do you expect the United States should do to handle such cases like Hungary?
Ken Roth: Look, with respect to Hungary you do not wait for the United States. The answer to Hungary is here in Europe. Under Trump the United States stopped being a human rights defender. It is now slowly coming back. Biden has said the right things about human rights being a guiding principle for his foreign policy. He is not acting that dramatically differently. He is joining the multilateral institutions, but if you look at what he is doing bilaterally, he has largely been a disappointment. But the answer to Hungary does not lie in Washington. The answer to Hungary lies here in Europe.
Michael Ignatieff: Let me let me add a little Swiss addition to this story. One of the most revealing things that was ever said to me when I was in Hungary was said by the Swiss ambassador to Hungary. We were talking about the rule of law. He looked at me with a very interesting smile on his face and he said: “The rule of law is very important for small and medium enterprise.” He just let that drop. Meaning that the big multinationals in Germany do not care about the rule of law. It is all done politically. This is an important fact. The rules that shape contract law and property matter to small and medium enterprises, but large ones solve their problems politically. Large corporations are doing major business in Hungary and they are not essentially bothered by the subversion of the rule of law because they solve the problem at a political level. If they want to build a factory in Debrecen, they build a factory in Debrecen and Orbán is only too happy to help and God knows what cash changes hands. This is an issue that just has to be understood here.
Ken Roth: I could extend this metaphor. The United States is like a large multinational corporation. It does not want the rule of law applied to itself. It would rather work things out through power politics, which is why the US is so adamantly opposed to the International Criminal Court ever pursuing in America. When the last prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, was even considering investigating US torture in Afghanistan – Afghanistan being a state that had ratified the International Criminal Court, therefore the crime of torture on its soil was perfectly appropriate for the court to examine – Trump went so far as to impose sanctions on the prosecutor so she could not even use her bank account. It was that serious. Biden took the sanctions back, but still takes the view that if an American commits a crime, even in a country that has ratified the International Criminal Court’s Treaty, the American cannot be prosecuted. The US is the only country in the world that adopts that position. Do not look to the big guy to enforce the rule of law. In fact, they refer to the rule of law as what the Lilliputians do to Gulliver. They tie him down with all these little rules, rather than let Gulliver do what he wants.
Question from the audience: Thank you very much and excuse my bad English, but I have a question: For a strong democracy, you also need also a strong civil society. Now we can observe that societies are getting more and more multicultural on the one hand and on the other hand, they are more and more divided because the differences are more and more pointed out. Also in the media for example. So the feelings about the “other group” is getting stronger, sometimes maybe violent, especially if you feel frustrated because of your personal life or of a failure. Is this not a threat from within for democracy in these states?
Michael Ignatieff: There were moments in Canadian politics, when I just did ask, how does this center hold together at all? We are divided by regions; we are divided by language; we are divided by race; we are divided by religion. At the moment, our societies are very polarized. It is very difficult to talk across class, racial, gender lines and it does make civil society mobilization more difficult.
But it is still going on. And extraordinary mobilizations are happening very, very quickly. When a black man is killed by an American policeman, the people who come out in the streets are not just black people. Every religion, every race, everybody came out and said: “This has to stop. And it has to stop, not because it is hurting black people, because it is destroying the republic. Police violence will destroy us. It is a threat to all of us.” So I do think there are still rallying causes like this that pull people together.
Ken Roth: I think the difficulty is, the US is moving toward being what is called a majority-minority nation, where ethnic and racial minorities will constitute the majority. You have a segment of what used to be the white majority, which is now soon becoming a white minority, that does not accept that and therefore does not accept the legitimacy of an electoral loss. Because they feel that the electoral loss was a product of people that they do not view as 100% Americans. That is how you get a party, the Republican Party, they used to be conservative – retain the status quo – that is becoming increasingly radical because they want to preserve minority rule. They are willing to overthrow a democratic system in order to do that. Because they no longer accept the system. If you accept the system, you lose, you are fine, you fight the next election. But if you feel that only your kind counts and your kind is just a minority – so of course you are going to lose the election – you do not accept the election as legitimate. That is the real threat, because the Republican Party leadership is now fueling that sentiment. It started with Trump but now they have all been preempted and this is the common refrain in the Republican Party, which is an enormous problem.
Question from the audience: Thank you very much. My question would be about the other side of the coin. Scholars like Daniel Roderick or Pippa Norris from Harvard have pointed out that when we are speaking about the challenges of Western democracy, on the one side, we have, democratic illiberalism, as you have spoken about, but on the other side is undemocratic liberalism, which is not just about the economic and social discontent of many but also about what the priorities are in terms of values and the disconnect between many in the population and the so-called elites. My question would be how do you think Western centrist European parties are doing in addressing these root causes these days? Especially the values issue?
Michael Ignatieff: There is no doubt that liberal democrats like myself have been very slow to confront something that Daniel Rodrik, for example, has raised: the contradiction between globalization and democracy. Switzerland has done a fantastic job of making globalization work for you most of the time. But there are just country after country, which are sovereign in name, but not sovereign in reality because their entire output is controlled by international markets or by single companies. Closer to home, is the immense power of the big five digital companies. It is unprecedented to have the global public sphere essentially owned by a tiny group of media companies. Facebook decides whether to platform or de-platform the president of the United States. Nobody who is a constitutional democrat is easy about that decision. The European Union is doing something to regulate big Tech and Biden is doing something, to get some taxation order here, so that you do not have this constant arbitraging of tax risk, which means that these companies are operating in lots of countries and paying no tax at all.
Some of the toxic effects of that have been very damaging to democracy itself. How do we create democratic spaces in which we can all contribute? The problem with breaking up the democratic spaces is that what you risk doing is creating a whole series of bubble worlds in which you are in a bubble world and you are in a bubble world and you never actually interact at all..
Question from the audience: So my question relates to advocacy. You said that you are focusing on revealing how leaders, such as Orbán for example, are not serving the people but themselves. I was wondering how you bring these kind of reports to the people that should know about these things? Like Hungarians living in villages who only have access to government radio and media. So how do you bring these reports to the people?
Ken Roth: That is a good question and it is a tough problem. Because the first thing these autocrats do is they control the traditional media. So that route is foreclosed. Hungary is actually an easy case compared to China, where they also control the internet. We actually have an entire person on our staff whose job it is to take the Mandarin translations of key reports and disseminate them through social media, basically via the Diaspora, where they cannot censor them, figuring that then the Diaspora will find its own way through WeChat to get it back in. But it is a very indirect and a very long term strategy. Hungary is easier because there still is internet access. There are still a handful of minority media outlets that are not controlled by Orbán. But you are right, because the most important audience is the domestic audience. And ultimately, you need to discredit an autocratic leader before that home team.
Sometimes you have to settle for a surrogate. In the case of Hungary, we do have the surrogate of Brussels and we can reach Brussels. But when you have something like China, nobody can cut off subsidies to China, that is not the issue. We have to be a little bit more creative. There what we have done is, China, despite presenting itself as impervious to pressure, actually cares desperately about global opinion. Because here is a government that does not hold its own elections, so it does not have traditional forms of legitimacy to bolster itself. It cares deeply how it is treated by the rest of the world. That is why Xi Jinping spends one trillion dollars on the Belt and Road Initiative. It is not a development program, it is a buying-friends-program and he uses this to ensure positive votes at the UN and fend off condemnation.
We have been spending a lot of our time building coalitions of governments willing to condemn Xi Jinping, particularly for Xinjiang, for their treatment of the Uyghurs. Now we are at 45 governments. We are about to do this again this month and hope to increase that further. He hates that. So even though we cannot directly reach the Chinese people with the efficiency that we would want, we still can figure out an audience that he cares about and try to use that to then curb some of the atrocities that we are seeing in China.
Question from the audience: Thank you so much for your interesting talk and contributions. In your talk, it seemed like democracy and human rights sort of go hand in hand. But you have also mentioned that some of the attacks that we have seen in Europe, also on human rights protection, especially on the international level, have been the result of democratic processes. I mean, I am Swiss. In Switzerland, a couple of years back, we had a vote. We thankfully voted against the Swiss Federal Constitution taking precedence over the European Convention of Human Rights. In light of this, I was just wondering if human rights and democracy really do go hand in hand, as you said. They are both in the constitution, yes, but in your opinion, should there maybe also be limitations on democracy in light of these developments? So that especially the rights of minorities can be safeguarded under these conditions. Thank you.
Michael Ignatieff: Great question. It is actually an uncomfortable issue. In my talk, I use the example of Denmark. She is sending back planeloads of people who have been settled in Denmark for a while. I think there may be straight violations of human rights there. But she would claim: “This is a democracy deciding what it wants to do.” There is, I think, a much stronger conflict between democratic sovereignty and human rights than we are comfortable talking about. And it may be the biggest conflict of them all. What is it to be a liberal democrat? A liberal democrat believes that majority rule must be tempered by absolute constitutional guarantees of individual rights. But part of the populist challenge we have been talking about tonight explicitly contests that. When Orbán says I wanted an illiberal democracy, that is what he means. A democracy without rights. And there are a lot of people who think that is a pretty good idea for democratic reasons. That is one of the challenges we need to face. Why should we have a democracy with its hands tied behind its back? Right? That is what people say. Because rights do constrain governments. That is what they are there for.
Ken Roth: Yes, I completely agree with that and I say without any discomfort: If you have democracy unconstrained by human rights, that is not democracy, that is majoritarianism. Democracy is periodic elections, with the powers of government then constrained by human rights and the rule of law. The rule of law meaning they have to abide by those rights. So I think one of the threats that we have seen in Europe and Denmark illustrates this. You see mainstream parties responding to far-right challenges by adopting their program. That is what happened in Denmark. They are threatening to send people back to Syria pretending that it is safe to do that when it is completely not safe, they end up in prison, tortured and executed. Macron is doing this. His response to Marine Le Pen is to basically adopt very similar anti-Muslim rhetoric. I have sat down with him and actually challenged him on this, he backs off a little bit. But particularly when you listen to his interior minister, he views political Islam as inherently bad. Political Christianity, the Christian Democrats, that is okay, but political Islam, that is anathema. This is a problem where you can win the battle but lose the war. I think we have to be very careful in looking at the mainstream centrist European parties, that they do not move so far to the right in this preemptive move, that they become the right.
Question from the audience: Thank you very much for the very interesting discussion. I just have a question on Hungary. You mentioned the EU, you mentioned Miss Merkel had the chance to stop Hungary by cutting back the subsidies. Are there any other means than money in order for a democratic society to make one of the members compliant? Other than money?
Michael Ignatieff: I always like to imagine a Friday afternoon with Angela Merkel making the call to Victor and she would say: “Victor, I am working on the budget with Emmanuel here and we have come to the structural subsidy, Victor, and we got a problem here. Just politician to politician. I cannot sell this to my people because they are wondering why their tax dollars are going to support your crooks. So, Victor, I need a little help from you by Monday morning. Otherwise, this number, which is four five, is going to be zero. Have a nice weekend.” Right? I dream that European politics could be like that. But here is the point. I learned this in Copenhagen. No European state wants to authorize that call to another member state lest they get the call. This is a club of European member states. Sovereignty is the default setting here. Orbán has a lot of friends around the council table in the Council of Ministers, who all understand that if Berlin calls Budapest, Berlin can also call Copenhagen. Berlin can also call Paris, for heaven’s sake. Nobody wants that. So this is why it is very difficult.
The other thing you could do that does not involve money is just to suspend their voting rights. Say: “Listen, this is not a commercial treaty. This is a union of values You have shredded every single thing this organization stands for. So until you fix something, Viktor, you can stand in the corridor when we vote.” There are lots of things you could do. But there is not a member state prepared to support that. That is what has to be understood. This is reason d’état playing in and it is structural to the European Union. There is no point lamenting it or complaining. I think the European unity has been a great achievement since the Second World War, but it is built on the sovereignty of states. Switzerland stood outside it, fearing that they would lose the sovereignty that you take pride in. So you understand it as well as anybody in Europe. I do not think there is a way beyond this. That is why Orbán will get away with it. That is why the only solution to the Orbán problem are Hungarians getting up and saying: “Enough.” It will not be Europe that fixes this. It will be Hungarians that fix it.
Ken Roth: This was a problem in the original formulation of the European Union. As Michael mentioned in his speech, the European Union has very tough accession criteria, the so-called Copenhagen criteria. It has nothing about what you do with existing members. There are these theoretical possibilities, to suspend voting and those kinds of sanctions. But the will has not been there to exercise those. There was always this assumption that it is a one way trend. That once you rise to the level of the Copenhagen criteria, then you are a democracy. There is no going back. We have learned that that is not the case. But we do not now have, at least the will, to use even these intermediate mechanisms, not necessarily kicking somebody out of the European Union but suspending Orbán’s party Fidesz from the European People’s Party, the EPP, which took an enormous effort to get done. They never expelled them, they just suspended them. The idea of suspending voting rights, we are not there yet. The option of actually kicking somebody out of the EU is not even on the table.
Question from the audience: Thank you so much. You hinted at it in the answer to the question just before. I am just asking myself. We are talking about populists who come to us with a fascist rhetoric. What are we doing about the people this fascist rhetoric resonates with? Who really think it is a good idea to speak like this, to act like this, to not adhere to facts, to science? What are we doing about them?
Michael Ignatieff: Well, I am a teacher and so my answer to those questions is always the same Just education. Education. I just do not know what else you can do. My job as a university teacher is not to teach people what to think, but to teach how to think and try to understand and teach the kids who come across my path just to reflect, to be prudent, to take their helmets off and put another helmet on and see what the world looks like when you see it through another set of eyes.
I think the single most depressing phenomenon of my adult life has been the ways in which our new social media technologies have weaponized and accelerated hatred, ignorance and contempt for people. That is why I feel the education answer is now so insufficient. Because we are in this kind of vortex, this churning vortex of hatred in which a young girl comes home from high school and gets tweeted against for her appearance by the girls in her classroom and suddenly feels her life is worthless.
There was always teasing. There was always malice. There was always unkindness in classrooms. But the ways in which it has been weaponized by the technologies is frightening to me. Just as some of the hatred towards migrants and refugees is frightening to me. And it is not enough to stand up against it. You just feel this stuff got such power in the media now that it is very difficult to deal with. But there is lots of fightback. I cited the example a while ago. When a black man gets choked to death by the police, millions of people hit the street. Because they feel this threatens me. It is love and brotherhood and all kinds of human rights things, but it is also: “This frightens me. This must stop.” I am not pessimistic because the social media at the same time is also a tremendous mobiliser. Millions of people come out because they all start tweeting. Everybody says this, but it feels true. It feels like 1520 to me. It feels like Gutenberg has just invented the printing press and the Catholic Church has just been blown apart. We are living through the same kind of convulsive, revolutionary change in how we speak and communicate. Just as in the 1520s, it released a torrent of anti-Semitic, horrifying prejudice and hatred, religious war, all that kind of stuff. It then took 120 years to the Peace of Westphalia, to get order in Europe again. I do not mean to be pessimistic, but if that is the analogy, we should be very frightened about what looks like purely private hatred on the media. This thing could tear us all apart.
Ken Roth: The only thing I would add to that is that I would not treat public sentiment as a given. Public sentiment evolves depending on the environment. Part of what affects it is obviously social media. I would also highlight the role of political leadership. I think one of the awful things that Trump did and you can find parallels in Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders or the AfD, is that they broke certain taboos. People may have felt certain sentiments of hatred, but they did not express them because this just was not done. Then a figure like Trump comes along and says it out loud. That gave the signal that it is okay to feel this way. That broadens the number of people who have these illiberal sentiments. The people we have as leaders matter a whole lot.
Prof. Dr. Andreas Kellerhals: Usually, it is not a good idea to have two panelists who share the same values and the same views, it gets boring. But it was not boring tonight. It was a wonderful evening. I would like to thank you, both of you. Come back. It was wonderful. Thank you very much.