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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-bya-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. * 373 ¢
