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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-againstthe-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/belarusrevolution-of-dignity-by-adam-michnik-and-slawomir-sierakowski-2020-08. + 381 *
