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HUMAN DIGNITY AND ‘ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY’ IN TIME OF CRISIS
Catherine Dupré is so close to the ECtHR idea of ‘democratic society’.**As Harvard
philosopher, Michael Sandel argues that the pandemic, and in particular the new
appreciation of the value of supposedly unskilled, low-paid work, offers a starting
point for new politics centered on the ‘dignity of work’. Geraldine Van Bueren
calls for a new social contract, which requires both justiciable socio-economic
rights and a prohibition of class discrimination, because the pandemic has brought
to the forefront the need to include class in this emerging social contract, in order
to provide everyone with a meaningful right to dignity.*° It remains to be seen,
whether this crisis can indeed serve as a catalyst for such change.* One reason for
cautious optimism is the recent ‘revolution of dignity“ in Belarus spearheaded by
women against the last traditional dictatorship in Europe.
CONCLUSION
As it has been shown, beyond the choice between economic and health
considerations also applied in liberal democratic countries, certain illiberal
regimes used the crisis situation as a pretext to strengthen the autocratic character
of their systems. Paraphrasing James Carville’s bonmot we should say: It’s the
authoritarianism, stupid, which is behind illiberal and populist reactions to
COVID-19. The ultimate question is, whether as after all other crisis so far, also
after this pandemic we can hope for the restoration of capitalism and democracy
with it, or we have to face “the crisis of the crisis of capitalism,” which will kill
democracy as well.
38 See Catherine Dupré, Dignity, Democracy, Civilisation, Liverpool Law Review 33 (2012),
263-280, as well as in the midst of the migration crisis (The Age of Dignity - Human Rights
and Constitutionalism in Europe, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2015.)
39 See Julian Coman, Interview with Michael Sandel, The Populist backlash has been a revolt
against the tyranny of merit, The Guardian (6 September 2020), https://www.theguardian.
com/books/2020/sep/06/michael-sandel-the-populist-backlash-has-been-a-revolt-against¬
the-tyranny-of-merit?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.
40 Geraldine Van Bueren, The New Social Contract — A Dignified Life for both the Poor and
the Wealthy, in Logi Gunnarson et al. (eds.), The Human Right to a Dignified Existence in
an International Contex, Baden-Baden, Oxford, Nomos, Hart, 2019.
“| For a more pessimistic view see Albena Azmanova’s new book, which claims in the current
phase of ’precarity capitalism’ we face not with a crisis of capitalism but a ‘crisis of the crisis
of capitalism.’ See Albena Azmanova, How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change
Without Crisis or Utopia, New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2020.
# See Slawomir Sierakowski interviews Adam Michnik, Belarus’s Revolution of Dignity,
Project Syndicate (21 August 2020), https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/belarus¬
revolution-of-dignity-by-adam-michnik-and-slawomir-sierakowski-2020-08.
+ 381 *