The Failure of Liberal Democracy - The Greanville Post

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Montreal — 22 September 2011.

Gáspár Miklós Tamás interviewed by Matthew Brett

Freedom, equality and participation in the democratic process are cornerstones of liberal democracy. Yet these principles are unravelling across the world as states become increasingly authoritarian and unequal. On a speaking tour of North America, Hungarian dissident intellectual Gáspár Miklós Tamás speaks with political science graduate student Matthew Brett about the failure of liberal democracy. Tamás is a significant voice of the Hungarian democratic opposition. He co-founded in 1988 the Network of Free Initiatives, a dissident movement under the communist regime of Janos Kadar, and subsequently served as Member of Parliament between 1989 and 1994 under the banner of the Free Democratic Alliance.

He is currently Research Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and lectures regularly in political philosophy and social theory in universities around the world. Professor Tamás is the author of ten books in Hungarian and several of his essays have appeared in English translation in publications such as The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Boston Review, Public Affairs Quarterly and Socialist Register. Professor Tamás spoke with Matthew at Concordia University in Montreal on Sept. 22, 2011 following his lecture, “The Failure of Liberal Democracy in Eastern Europe…and Everywhere Else.”

How would you define yourself politically?

So nowadays you will say that people with some illnesses, people above a certain age, immigrants, racial groups, lifestyle groups designated as being of a criminal behaviour and the undeserving poor – to use the 19th century expression – those people are not only ill-served by their government, but also excluded from the core of society, and real active citizenship is re-becoming a privileged instead of a general condition of human beings. And that is something new. After all, liberal democracies aspired to universalize civic rights, to extend the privileges and securities and pride of citizenship to virtually all human beings. Well this trend has been reversed, and this is what I call the failure of liberal democracy.

But all this is based on a very intellectually interesting development in constitutional law that also has some symbolic changes – for example, Hungary is no longer designated a republic as of the January 1. It’s just Hungary. And where there are articles from the old constitution disappearing, such as equal pay for equal work – that’s not any longer in the constitution. Old welfare statist prescriptions are not there any longer. But what is most important is that rights are not defined as they are normally – like in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the beginning of your Constitution – but they are made dependent on the satisfactory delivery of duties – delivery of public functions and observance of duties. And there are other articles of the Constitution wherein its partially hidden, partially declared openly, that only citizens with a community spirit, and honest work, and appropriate makeup of a citizen can really count on the plenitude of all rights. The state is not obliging itself any longer to the performance of obligations on the side of the state toward citizens. So, for example, whenever the old constitution said that the government must guarantee housing or health or whatever, it said now that the government must do its best to insure fairness, health, housing, welfare, et cetera. So both the welfare state remnants in the old constitution are wiped out completely, and also the absoluteness of rights on which liberal democracies are based in most places have disappeared, which of course enables the authorities to deny various things to citizens in need.

That seems to be a trend that we’re witnessing, as you say, not only in Eastern Europe, but everywhere else – these increasing trends of authoritarianism, particularly on the legislative side, very particular invasive laws. It raises, to me, interesting questions about the role of the state. Particularly in Canada, there’s a strong base of anarchist organizing. That is a strong impulse here on the left. I was wondering if you could speak to your thoughts on anarchism, particularly as somebody who has often worked with political parties.

Well, I was myself an anarchist as a young man, and most of that I haven’t reneged on. I published in some illegal publication called the Eye and the Hand, and it actually has been translated into French, and appeared in a small anarchist publishing house in Switzerland in 1985. “Louis la main” it’s called. It’s a short tract of anarchist political libertarian philosophy. The problem of the state is very perverse nowadays, because the state is the only hope of many needy abandoned people – the same oppressive people that causes most of the problems. And people cling to the state, still hoping that the state, according to the old principles, is still representing fairness, and help, and redistribution, and a soothing hand. Well needless to say that this is a vain hope.

But we always have to take into account that we are speaking within the frameworks of the existing capitalist system, which I’ve done up until now in this interview, accepting experimentally that this is the framework in which we live. And of course I’m not at all opposed to reformistically trying to improve our lot if possible, although in the past time we haven’t witnessed the most progressive performance. And when I’m taking a step back to look more carefully at things, of course I know that there is no substantial hope of the state improving.

You can see that in such countries like Canada, which, compared to others, has been a pretty mild proposition. It’s becoming ever more brutal, although nothing on the scale of the French or the Italian state. Nevertheless, I can see, even though I have no large knowledge of Canada, that privacy, treatment of prison populations, police powers, there’s a progress backwards. It’s called regress.

So of course I don’t think that, if indeed the possibility of oppression is enshrined in the basic tenets of any given society, then you can expect the oppressors to convince them that in the goodness of their heart that they should dispense with all this. Of course they wouldn’t. What has been the only thing, and what will always be, is to mount pressure and to build up counter-powers.

And if you’re talking to anarchists, the question is how to build up counter-powers, when counter-powers by their very nature are also hierarchical? You use coercion, which may be much more dispersed and less toxic than other kinds of coercion. Nevertheless, if you have leadership, if you have organizational blueprints, then coercion of one kind or another will always materialize. These are almost eternal problems. Nevertheless, I think we should turn – as well as doing everything else – to considering again the old problem of how to pre-empt a future – peaceful, and equal, and non-oppressive and non-alienating society – within our own circles. How to live in exploitative, and oppressive, and repressive and in all senses fucked up society, sorry, in a way in which we can at least try to realize in our own lives the principles according to which we would like to live. This is extremely, extremely difficult, given that we have to earn our living, and fit in, and avoid jail, and all those kinds of things, while compromising, and ducking, and hiding ourselves, and lying about who we are. I know very well how tactical life rots your teeth. There’s no one solution to this. This means that you have to build up milieus in which there’s some kind of confidence in which you can get moral help on all these difficulties, and this has all the usual problems of sect building, and cult building. There are many pathologies that beset freedom loving people who want to get outside these really intolerable societies.

Because of course it could not, and did not, create a society in which the fundamental characteristics of exploitation and hierarchy disappeared. These were, even in the social democratic variant, pretty hierarchical and oppressive societies, in spite of the undeniable great merits of the 20th century – I mean real heroism, so this is a respectable thing that will be remembered as Ancient Greece is remembered. Nevertheless, it is the past, and in many ways a very unsavoury past. I have no illusions about its tragic greatness, if you wish. Now, the characteristics of socialism in this sense – I mean real socialism in a social democratic and Bolshevik way – of course these were productivists and tried to accumulate and produce a lot and construct newer enterprises and plants and factories based on a very limited and naive faith in technology and the natural sciences, and in growth, which of course they shared with capitalism.

The idea of a society in which the artificial separations between producers and the means of production, between classes, between races, between persons in authority and persons who obey et cetera, should be dispensed with, and in which indeed human activity based on personal aspirations and non-hierarchical relations should decide about directions to be taken, and which sacrifices in the favour of an imagined supreme common good are not any longer expected.

Matthew Brett is a political science graduate student at Concordia University and is on the organizing committee for the Montreal-based Forum to Resist the Conservatives. This interview was conducted for CKUT 90.3 FM, Montreal.

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