The illiberal turn or swerve in Central Europe?

  • Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The corrosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by political proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the “illiberal turn” in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal “turns” and “swerves”, with the former representing more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive illiberal turn.

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Author:Lenka Bustikova, Petra Guasti
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-499565
DOI:https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v5i4.1156
ISSN:2183-2463
Parent Title (English):Politics and governance
Publisher:Lisbon
Place of publication:Cogitatio Press
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of Completion:2017
Date of first Publication:2017/12/29
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2019/04/10
Tag:Czech Republic; Eastern Europe; Hungary; Poland; Slovakia; democracy; democratic consolidation; illiberalism; nationalism; populism
Volume:5
Issue:4
Page Number:11
First Page:166
Last Page:176
Note:
© The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
HeBIS-PPN:450552497
Institutes:Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Gesellschaftswissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0