Evidence of meeting #138 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was democratic.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
Ms. Applebaum, Mr. Pankowski, thank you for your excellent presentations. It was very interesting.
We will now suspend the meeting for two minutes to prepare for the second panel.
Thank you very much.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
We'll now move to the second panel. We have two guests again. The first is Professor Daniel Ziblatt, who holds the Eaton Chair of the Science of Government. He is also acting director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on democratization, democratic collapse, political parties, state-building and historical political economy, with an emphasis on Europe from the 19th century to the present. He is the co-author of the book How Democracies Die, to which a number of people referred during this study. Mr. Ziblatt appears by videoconference from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Welcome to the committee, Mr. Ziblatt. I hope I'm saying your name correctly.
Our second guest, who is here with us, is Michael Williams, Professor of International Politics at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Mr. Williams is also a senior researcher with the Global Right project, seeking to better understand the international foreign policy agenda of radical conservatism and its potential impact on the world order. In 2011, Mr. Williams co-authored the book Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics.
We'll start with Mr. Ziblatt from Cambridge, for ten minutes.
Daniel Ziblatt Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, As an Individual
Thank you for allowing me to have the chance to speak to you today. I'm sorry I can't be there in person.
Is liberal democracy in crisis in Europe? I want to begin today with two facts. As we all know, social scientists tend to disagree on a lot of things, but there are two pretty solid pieces of evidence they do agree on. First is that old democracies don't die; that is, the longer a democracy has been around, the probability that a democracy will break down decreases. The second fact is that rich democracies don't die. No democracy with $22,000 U.S. per capita income or more has ever broken down. So rich, old democracies don't die. This means Europe, especially the core of western Europe, should be safe. But something significant has changed in our lifetime. The way that democracies die has changed.
During the 20th century, democracies used to die at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, three out of every four democratic breakdowns took the form of a military coup. Today, most democracies die in much more subtle ways. They die not at the hands of generals, but at the hands of elected leaders. Presidents and prime ministers use the very institutions of democracy to subvert it: elections, plebiscites, acts of parliament, supreme court rulings. This is Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary, in the heart of Europe.
What's so dangerously insidious about this electoral road to autocracy is that it happens behind a facade of democracy. There are no tanks in the streets. The constitution remains intact. There are elections. Parliaments continue to function. As a result, many citizens often aren't fully aware of what's happening until it's too late. In 2011, which was 12 years into Hugo Chavez' presidency, a survey showed that a majority of Venezuelans still believed they were living under a democracy.
Could this really happen in Europe? As I have said, this has already happened on the eastern edges of the European Union, in Hungary, under Viktor Orban. In 2010, Orban's party came to power legally, constitutionally and democratically, but armed with a constitutional supermajority over the past nine years, it has followed a pattern that my co-author, Steve Levitsky, and I identify in our book How Democracies Die. Once in power, it captured the referees of the political game: the courts. It sidelined rivals and critics: the media and universities. It tilted the playing field to make it harder and harder for an incumbent to lose by altering electoral rules. This is a playbook that has also been repeated in Poland, with only a little less success.
What about the core of western Europe? Even though these democracies are richer and older, the fact that democracies now die at the ballot box means that perhaps we are in a new world and a new set of rules may apply. Indeed, in western Europe, in many countries for the first time since the end of World War II, illiberal anti-system radical right political parties are either in power, on the threshold of power or being elected to parliament for the first time. Most recently, just this week, Spain's Vox party made it into Spain's parliament, the first time a far-right party has made it into parliament since Franco. This is the Alternative for Germany, Sweden Democrats and Italy's Lega Nord, just to name a few.
If these parties single-handedly gain power without coalition partners, as they have in Poland and Hungary, would they inflict such serious damage on democracy as they have in Poland and Hungary? I believe the answer is yes. A core and underappreciated precondition of Europe's post-World War II order, and democratic order and democratic stabilization from post-Nazi Germany to post-Franco Spain has been not only a social democratic party of the left, but a robust and democratic centre right. As Franz-Josef Strauss, the Bavarian conservative, put it in the 1980s, for democracy to survive in Germany, there cannot be a party to the right of Germany's Christian Democrats. This condition held through the entire postwar period until 2017. It is no longer true. The biggest opposition party in the German parliament today is a radical right party to the right of the Christian Democratic Party and this has upended Germany's political equilibrium.
Given all of this, there are two important questions to consider.
First, how do we know these parties truly are a threat to democracy and not just expressing the disaffection of marginalized voices that can be integrated into stable, democratic political systems? To answer this question, we have to have a set of criteria to assess whether parties and politicians are genuine threats to democracy or not.
With this sort of question in mind, in my book with Steve Levitsky, we devised a kind of early warning system, what we call litmus tests, to identify politicians and parties before they get into office who might pose a threat to democracy once they are in office. This is critical, because if democracies die at the ballot box, it's important to be able to identify politicians ahead of time who might be threats to democracy once they are in office.
We propose four criteria. First, does a politician reject the rules of the game? For example, do they challenge the legitimacy of elections? Do they reject the legitimacy of the constitution? Do they endorse or support extra-constitutional means of changing government? Second, does a politician or party publicly deny the legitimacy of their opposition? For example, do they describe their rivals as subversives, traitors or criminals? Third, does a politician or party tolerate or encourage violence, or do they align with or fail to condemn supporters who use violence? Fourth, does a politician or party express a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media?
If a politician or political party tests positive on a single one of those criteria before getting into office, we should be worried. In Europe, we have seen radical right parties at times passing some of these tests. When they do, and if they do, they are a threat to democracy.
The second question is: What has caused this rising tide of Europe's new illiberal radical parties? Analysts usually refer to two kinds of factors to explain the rise of Europe's illiberal radical right: first, economic factors, and second, cultural factors connected to immigration. For example, analysts often argue that slowing wage growth, increasing economic inequality and unemployment have all generated voter disaffection with democracy in Europe.
There's a lot to this, but it's not the whole story. It's striking that a country such as Poland, that has had uninterrupted economic growth since the early 2000s, and escaped the 2008 financial crisis essentially unscathed, not only has a strong and illiberal political party, but one that is currently in power. A country like Spain, which suffered some of the worst fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, with unemployment rates reaching over 26% at the high point, has until this year not had a populist radical right party in parliament. Economics matters, but it's not the whole story.
Others argue that the causes are cultural. The rise of the radical right has come as the percentage of national populations of immigrants in Europe has increased. The radical right has thrived in response to the refugee crisis, it is often thought, but there are puzzles here too. Cross-nationally, the places where the radical right has done best—Poland and Hungary—are precisely where there are the fewest foreign-born residents—less than 5%. Countries like Spain and Germany, where foreign-born residents reach over 10%—double—have experienced much more sporadic radical right movements.
Likewise, as in the United States, inside countries in Europe, it's precisely in those regions and provinces in a country like Germany, with not many foreign-born residents—eastern Germany—where radical right sentiment is highest. In urban areas where there are many immigrants, radical right sentiment is almost non-existent.
Again, it's not that immigration doesn't matter, but all of this suggests what I think of as a third factor that actually matters more than these other two. The success of Europe's radical right is rooted in failures of Europe's mainstream political parties.
Two failures are worth mentioning. First, there was the move to the ideological centre by social democratic parties and labour parties in Europe in the 1990s. Tony Blair's new labour and Gerhard Schroeder's neue mitte may have been smart and actually necessary electorally, but it came with a cost. It left many working-class voters with the view that they no longer had a choice. The centre-right and the centre-left were now virtually indistinguishable. The first failure on the part of the centre-left was a failure to offer something clearly different, leaving a potential pool of voters feeling abandoned, and available for the populist radical right.
There was also a second failure. Because the centre-left moved to the centre on economic questions, many parties and politicians on the centre-right—Christian Democrats and Conservatives—began to search for new cultural issues to run on, including by drawing a hard line on immigration. It was in the 1990s that many centre-right politicians in Germany, for example, began to talk about threats of immigration, adopting nativist and nationalist slogans that were even picked up in some instances by the small radical right.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
I apologize. I will ask you to wrap up your presentation in about 30 to 45 seconds.
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, As an Individual
Yes.
This move left these issues salient in voters' minds, and when the centre-right failed to deliver, the appeals of the populist right only grew.
To conclude, on the eastern edges of post-communist Europe, democracy is vulnerable. In the core of western Europe, the sky might not be falling, but it's clearly darkening.
The good news—and this is my final word—is that the process of democratic rights idea is not due to economic unstoppable forces. Mainstream politicians, if creative and responsible, can offer politics that address the concerns of voters, but does so in a way that keeps the most dangerous threats of democracy out of parliament and office.
Thank you.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
Thank you very much, Mr. Ziblatt.
I am very sorry that the time for presentations is so limited. It is even more so for the questions and answers that follow.
I will now give the floor to Michael Williams for about 10 minutes.
Michael Williams Professor, International Politics, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, everyone, for the invitation to speak to you today on what I think is a remarkably important issue. It's very heartening to see you taking it with such seriousness.
I'm not going to go over some of the empirics, which many of you know inside out. I want to pick up on Professor Ziblatt's last point, because I want to suggest to you that to understand what is going on in Europe and in fact more broadly in the word, we have to understand that there is a new ideological struggle taking place. In other words, what is taking place right now is not simply a question of an ill-defined populism. It's not simply a question of economic dislocation. It is certainly not the re-rise of fascism.
What's taking place is much more complicated than that. In fact, it arises out of a series of intellectual, political and cultural strategies, which have been developing for more than two decades. It's the level of ideas, the level of ideologies, that we have to take more seriously if we're going to understand the way in which all of these things fit together.
It seems to me that one of the biggest problems we have in understanding the rise of what I call the radical right or radical conservatism is that we fall back on clichés, and our two favourite ones are populism and fascism. Populism is great, because it seems to identify something we just don't like. It's happening, and it's kind of the rise of the great unwashed. We're really not sure what's happening, but it's bad. The problem with it is precisely its ill-defined nature. Fascism really does not get at what is happening in contemporary Europe, or in fact more broadly, in the United States on the radical right.
What I want to suggest is that we can understand populism in a much more systematic way, which is in fact the way that ideologues of modern populist movements have understood it. We can understand it on a basis of two axes. The first is what we might call a vertical axis, which is the divide between the people and the elite. Almost all populist movements will make this divide. The people are defined in some way, and the elite are defined as their opponents—those who undermine or oppose the people. The second is what we might call a horizontal axis, that is, a divide between the people and those who are outside the people. What makes a populist movement really powerful is the way in which it is able to combine these two axes—the way in which the elite and the outside are fused in a very specific political rhetoric.
If we look at the contemporary far right in Europe, one of the most interesting things is the way that it's been able to do this with the primary adversary being defined as liberal globalization; that is, internally, these liberal elites who attack the interests of the people. Those liberal elites are explicitly globalist, globalized. They are the representatives of global capital. They are the representatives of international human rights. They reside in international NGOs. They come from abroad. They make linkages.
The ideology of contemporary radical right populism, then, revolves around this fusion of a vertical and a horizontal axis in opposition to liberal globalization. This is a strategy that one can trace back. It emerged—for those of you who are interested in these kinds of things—in France, in roughly 1968. It's been around for almost half a century. It has only really picked up power in the last 10 years.
This is not, therefore, simply an inchoate political spasm. It has to be understood as part of a political, ideological struggle. It's also an ideological struggle that these people understand as specifically cultural; that is, the attack on global liberal culture is an explicit part of its political orientation. National culture—local culture—is seen as that which is threatened, precisely by universal global values attached to liberalism.
In this way then, what the contemporary radical right seeks to do is to create an ideological movement within states but also across states. One of the most fascinating things about contemporary radical nationalism is that it is explicitly internationalist. It sees itself as forming a series of movements of movements, and it sees itself as doing so in a pan-European way and also, potentially, in a pan-western way.
This is, to some degree, a civilizational ideology. The best illustrations of this come from three people. One person you already mentioned, Matteo Salvini, makes this argument explicitly. He also makes it in alliance with Aleksandr Dugin, out of Russia. They both make it in alliance with somebody with whom I'm sure you're all very familiar, a rather dishevelled man by the name of Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon just founded something called the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West. This is designed to be an intellectual and cultural training school for a cadre of radical conservative academics, policy-makers and bureaucrats. It is mirrored by the school that has been started in Lyon by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. It has exactly the same agenda.
In other words, what we're seeing here is not simply chaos. What we're seeing is something that can be understood as an ideological and strategic political struggle.
It's a struggle that is also not simply explicitly illiberal. This is one of the biggest problems in countering it. It often manifests what we might paradoxically call “illiberal illiberalism”. If you look at the far right in northern Europe, for instance, one of its major political points is what it sees as a defence of liberal values—free speech, secularism—and the argument that the defence of these values requires illiberal measures, specifically against those civilizations they present as threatening to them. Islam is the one that usually comes to mind when we talk about the north European far right.
Within this coalition and these movements, there are massive tensions. There is no doubt about that. What we are seeing here is not a systematic bloc. What we are seeing is an attempt to build a cultural, political and ideological movement that understands what it is doing, that has a systematic and structured political rhetoric and that seeks systematically to attack liberal values and global values, doing so in ways that link up to local conditions. If one is thinking about how to confront it, the only way to do so is to take it seriously as an ideology as well as a set of social upheavals.
That's all I will say for now.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
Thank you very much.
First, I want to clarify something. We have been informed that a vote will likely be held at 10:35 a.m. I would like us to continue the meeting until about 10:20 a.m. Each speaker will therefore have three minutes, for a total of about 10 minutes.
Do we have unanimous consent to proceed in this way?
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
We have unanimous consent. Thank you very much.
Each party will therefore have three minutes.
I'm going to give the floor to Mrs. Kusie.
Conservative
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Ziblatt, it's so special to have you here today. I'm a huge fan of yours. I've read your book. I'm going to say something really selfish here. It's my birthday. I kind of feel like I'm talking to the Brad Pitt of democracy on my birthday. Thank you so much. It's truly a thrill.
Conservative
Leona Alleslev Conservative Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON
Ask him for a signed copy of the book.
Conservative
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
Well, I thought you were going to be here, so I brought it for you to sign. You can see that I've made notes and everything. Truly, this is a thrill.
Thank you to the clerk and staff for having Mr. Ziblatt here today.
Since I only have three minutes, I'm going to move into a concept.... I am a big fan of your evaluation of the four key indicators of authoritarian behaviour. Since I will not have enough time with three minutes, if given permission by the clerk, I will submit, in writing, a request for you to do an evaluation of the Canadian government. Recently, we have certainly seen a rejection and weakness of democratic rules of the game, a denial of legitimacy of political opponents, for sure—although more internally—and a readiness to curtail civil liberties. I will be asking, in writing, for you to do an evaluation on Canada.
I want to talk briefly about another concept, which you didn't really touch on in your opening remarks, but which I really appreciated seeing in your book. It is called “forbearance”, which is something else I am seeing significantly here in our Canadian system and our Canadian processes.
For example, we are seeing a significant use of time allocation by the present government to cut down debate. It is using the rules to do this. I'm not sure it would be fair to say that they have been historically abided by in this case.
There is something more disturbing to me. I am the vice-chair of the House procedure committee, and a case came before it that was clearly one of contempt of Parliament. However, the current government did not want to wear that it was contempt of Parliament, and therefore, the final report's wording was softened.
How do we eliminate forbearance?
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, As an Individual
Well, I don't think you're interested in eliminating forbearance. You want to support forbearance.
Conservative
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, As an Individual
Forbearance is an unwritten rule. It's about showing self-restraint. All political entities require unwritten rules. Parliaments, countries as a whole, any organization require self-limits on power. One of the things that drives the elimination of forbearance in our mind is polarization. When each side views the other side as deeply threatening, then of course you'll use extreme measures to block the other side. The driver of the erosion of forbearance is polarization.
In the United States, a context that I know better than the Canadian context as the political parties regard each other as existential enemies, they begin to use any means necessary to stop the other side. One sees this in parliaments.
One also sees this in the German parliament. In the face of the radical right in Germany, parliamentary procedures are being used to exclude the radical right from debate. We're in this kind of funny dilemma where the radical right can now point to the mainstream parties and say, “We're not the ones breaking the rules; you are.”
The point I would make is to just highlight the importance of forbearance. In order for our institutions to work, people need to use self-restraint with them, and there's a cost to our institutions of behaving without self-restraint. Alerting people to that cost is not just about winning and losing elections; it's about the viability and the future of sustaining a set of institutions. This requires forbearance. Bringing this up is really a critical point.
Conservative
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
Thank you, Professor Ziblatt.
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, you have the floor for three minutes.
Liberal
Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Professor Ziblatt and Professor Williams, we saw how democracy died in Germany in the 1930s and its tragic consequences. Many would argue that democracy has died in Hungary and is being subverted in countries such as Poland. However, we're also seeing a new act for which there isn't a historical precedent. It is what the previous panellist, Professor Anne Applebaum, called the “populist international”. Professor Williams referenced in his introductory remarks their attempts to gain leverage control of the European Parliament.
Professor Ziblatt, you said that democratic states can die at the ballot box. Do you foresee the possibility, a danger, of the death of the EU at the hands of a united populist international?
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, As an Individual
The May elections are absolutely critical, and I think people are downplaying the potential threat. The estimates are that they'll gain 170 or so seats of a parliament that has over 500 members. Some say that's not a big deal, but I think it is a big deal. The parliament as it has existed to date in the European Union is dominated by the EPP, the centre-right group, and there's a very real possibility that as these groups get organized in the ways that Professor Williams described, the EU could become dysfunctional.
I think the European Union is not a democracy; its member states are, but the fear that I would have about these parties is that they dismantle the European Union. If they do that, it does undermine democracy within nation-states. The thing to focus on is the degree of Euroscepticism that these parties often offer.
Professor, International Politics, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
This is where the pre-war analogy becomes difficult because contemporary populists don't present themselves as anti-democratic. Their argument against the EU—I completely agree with Professor Ziblatt—is that it is an anti-democratic institution. Their representation of the EU is as a liberal hegemonic project that wants to foist on them radical free markets and elite-defined human rights, and which therefore needs to be opposed precisely in the name of democracy.
When one is assaulting them at this level or trying to take them on at this level—and this has been a consistent problem for the defenders of the EU—the EU's democratic status becomes a real problem if you define democracy back as a national public, which is precisely what the radical right has done. To take them on effectively, we cannot simply look at them as anti-democratic, because that is a label that both they and their supporters will absolutely reject. They will say, “What we are trying to do is actually rescue democracy from these undemocratic, elitist institutions that have no connection to us.” Therefore, the EU's dilemma is to try find a response that is effective. It's difficult.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Guy Caron
Thank you, Professor Williams.
I'm going to ask questions for three minutes.
I'd like to have an answer from both of you. I'll start with you, Professor Ziblatt.
We're talking about the tool of delegitimizing openness used by authoritarian parties. The thing is, if we want to protect and strengthen Liberal democracy, we need to strengthen the structure in the institutions themselves. If we strengthen freedom of the press, if we strengthen the validity of the evidence-based decisions that have to be made, then it might be seen and used by those parties to actually promote and let us view that they are fighting.
How do we fight this effectively? How do we fight those arguments that are being used to delegitimize the process and delegitimize the attempt to strengthen the democratic process itself?
Hopefully we will have time to hear from Professor Williams.
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, As an Individual
I'll try to be quick.
When you have political parties that are not committed to democratic rules and to truth, and so on, in a political system there are no easy answers. They pose a series of dilemmas. Do you crack down on them? Do you treat them as illegitimate, but then run the risk of reinforcing their appeal? Or do you ignore them and run the risk that they gain in popularity? There are really no good answers. I think there's a series of bad options and worse options.
One of the critical points that, I think, merge out of historical records is that one does need to act with forbearance. In other words, one does need to act with self-restraint. One does need to try to treat these other parties as legitimate representatives of the people who have voted for them.
On the other hand, one has to beat them electorally. I think that at the end of the day, the point of a democracy is that you can win in elections, and this sends a message to parties that what they're offering doesn't work.
It's critical to not limit their access to institutions, on the one hand, but on the other hand, one has to draw a hard line and not form coalitions, for instance, with them.