What is Global Illiberalism?

 Marlène Laruelle (ML) and Christophe Jaffrelot (CJ): The Illiberalism Studies Program was created in 2020 at George Washington University. It has now opened a hub in Paris and one in Rome. It studies the different faces of liberal and illiberal politics and thought in today’s world, accounting for the diversity of their cultural contexts, their intellectual genealogy, the sociology of their popular support, and their implications for the global order. It treats illiberalism as a global, context-dependent ideological universe shaped by political, economic, and cultural contestations, and therefore as a flexible framework that adapts to local contexts while participating in a shared global conversation.

ML & CJ: No, illiberalism is not a finished or stable object of study, for three reasons. First, there is no consensual definition of the concept, since across the field's major framings illiberalism is treated variously as a discrete ideological family with its own positive content (Laruelle, Waller), an umbrella term covering distinct ideological sub-types (Enyedi), two unrelated logics sharing one label (disruptive versus ideological illiberalism for Kauth and King), or a diffuse social condition that is "not an ideology or a regime type" at all (Sajó, Uitz, and Holmes). Second, there is no agreement on the concept's relevance, since some scholars contest its analytical validity outright, for instance by noting that illiberal practices historically predate liberalism, which raises the question of whether the term names anything genuinely new. Third, even where the concept is defined and accepted, it works best not as a fixed label but as a heuristic lens meant to generate new questions rather than a stabilised category for sorting cases.

ML & CJ: You may consider that some turn has been achieved in international politics when a majority of countries apply a similar type of governance. In the 1990s-2000s, we saw a majority of countries becoming democratic. The illiberal turn started soon after this and has become somewhat dominant in the course of the present decade. But we do not mean that the point of no return has been reached and that it is an all-pervasive model. This is why we do not use the metaphor of the “wave” that Huntington has popularised about the democratisation process at the end of the twentieth century. A wave would submerge everything—and then withdraw. But many countries remain democratic and some of them return to democracy (Brazil, Hungary) after illiberal episodes. A turn is not a wave.

Yet it is an important phenomenon anyway and we have tried to explain it by combining domestic variables and international forces. The latter are the most interesting ones: how do ideas travel, how does a Zeitgeist crystallise, what is the role of spin doctors and technologies of communication in these movements? Hopefully the reader will learn from reading our analysis.

ML & CJ: This special issue emerged from the third workshop we organised in the context of the Sciences Po Transatlantic Fund. The two first ones had prepared the ground through presentations juxtaposing national trajectories. This time we wanted to combine these trajectories and the impact of transnational trends. And comparisons between societies help us here to understand the complexity of the global phenomenon that is illiberalism. On one hand, we find common features everywhere, including in terms of authoritarianism (repression of civil society, control of the media, attacks on the judiciary) and ideas which are traveling across the globe, like the “great replacement” syndrome resulting in anti-migrant attitudes. On the other hand, the illiberal repertoire will find different expressions according to the societal context: in X country, racism will prevail, in Y country, caste will prevail, in Z country, religion will prevail, still elsewhere it will be gender. Different variables often play a cumulative role, but with nuances. The work of comparative politics consists precisely in making sense of the interaction of transnational trends and their national (or even local) adaptations. This is not new: to decipher the specificity of brands of nineteenth-century nationalism is equally challenging. Students of identity politics in particular have always to factor in culture without being culturalist.