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HUMAN DIGNITY AND ‘ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY’ IN TIME OF CRISIS
political liberalism: human dignity and rights, justice, equality and the rule of
law, its commitment to multiculturalism and tolerance, ideas of Isaiah Berlin’s
‘negative liberty’, Karl Popper’s ‘open society’, John Rawls’ ‘overlapping consensus,
or Ronald Dworkin’s equality as the ‘sovereign virtue’.° From an institutional point
of view, and this was visible in the legal reactions both to the refugee crisis of
2015 and to COVID-19 in 2020 illiberalism challenges liberal democracy, which
isn’t merely a limit on the public power of the majority, but also presupposes
rule of law, checks and balances, and guaranteed fundamental rights. This means
that there is no democracy without liberalism advancing human dignity and
fundamental rights, and there also cannot be liberal rights without democracy’.
In this respect, there is no such a thing as an ‘illiberal or anti-liberal democracy,’
or ‘democratic illiberalism’ for that matter. Those who perceive democracy as
liberal by definition also claim that illiberalism is inherently hostile to values, such
as human dignity, or with constitutionalism, as an institutional aspect of liberal
democracy: separation of powers, constraints on the will of the majority, human
rights, and protections for minorities.
the human dignity of the unborn fetus. See Anna Rakowska-Trela, A Dubious Judgment
by a Dubious Court: The abortion judgment by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal,
Verfassungsblog (24 October 2020), https://verfassungsblog.de/a-dubious-judgment-by¬
a-dubious-court/.
These attacks against liberal values, such as human dignity occurring first and foremost
in the post-Communist countries, where the entrenchment of human dignity into the
newly enacted constitutions was an important element of the democratic transition in the
early 1990s. See Catherine Dupré, Importing the Law in Post-communist Transitions: The
Hungarian Constitutional Court and the Right to Human Dignity, Oxford, Hart Publishing,
2003.
Cf. Jiirgen Habermas, Uber den internen Zusammenhang von Rechtsstaat und Demokratie,
in Ulrich Preuss (hg.), Zum Begriff der Verfassung. Die Ordnung der Politischen, Frankfurt
am Main, Fischer, 1994. 83-94. The English version see Jürgen Habermas, Rule of Law and
Democracy, European Journal of Philosophy 3 (1995), 12-20. Also Juan Jose Linz and Alfred
Stepan assert that if governments, even being freely elected violate the right ofindividuals
and minorities, their regimes are not democracies. See Juan José Linz — Alfred Stepan,
Toward Consolidated Democracies, Journal of Democracy 7 (1996), 14-33, 15. Similarly,
Janos Kis claims that there is no such thing as nonliberal democracy, or non-democratic
liberalism. See Kis, Janos, Demokracidb6l autokracidba. A rendszertipoldgia és az ätmenet
dinamikaja [From Democracy to Autocracy. The System-typology and the Dinamics of the
Transition], Politikatudomdnyi Szemle 28 (2019), 45-74. Those critics, which argue that
liberalism as a three hundred years old concept predates liberal democracy forget that not
only democracy but also liberalism presupposes general and equal suffrage.
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