The pendulum swings back: New authoritarian threats to liberal democratic constitutionalism

Abstract

Introduction At the close of the twentieth century, for political elites it was reasonable to believe that liberal democratic constitutionalism (LDC) was the ascendant political arrangement in states of the ‘Global North’ and, through colonialism, relatedly for states of the ‘Global South’. LDC was presented as not only asserting a claim to superior normative validity – undergirded by human rights, democracy and the rule of law – but also a claim to inevitability as a mode of governance. In the words of perhaps the most (in)famous articulation of this hopeful claim from its heady heyday, ‘there is now no ideology with pretentions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy’, which stands as ‘the single universal standard’.1 While this sense of inevitably had its sceptics even at LDC’s zenith,2 for a time its continued spread and ultimate triumph were not only a defensible prediction of the future, but plausibly the most convincing one. Twenty-odd years later, LDC has not only failed to become a universal mode of political organization, but its traditional bastions have themselves suffered democratic backsliding. For the past decade, the most salient form of this has been internal crisis.3 As we observed following Trump, Brexit, and a general resurgence of far-right parties across the diverse polities, ‘far right populist authoritarianism’ poses an immediate threat to LDC.4 Yet, a year after Trump’s defeat andwith the EUhaving survived Brexit in part because states central to its integrity, such as France, have – so far – resisted far right populist leadership, the norms of constitutionalism have shown a measure of robustness.5 The possibility that LDCmight