Lessons from Interwar Crisis of Democracy and ‘the End of Ideology’: A Defence of Liberal Democracy

While democracy is commonly recognized as ‘an essentially contested concept,’ it is still almost always taken as something positive. The same cannot be said about ‘liberal democracy.’ It seems that democracy is either not liberal enough or it is too liberal. The latter view has been gaining ground in recent years. One can find this attitude, for instance, in the US republican party, within the political leadership in Budapest or Moscow, as well as among academic notables in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Political leaders such as Putin, Orban and Trump claim that democracy is weak and degenerated because it is liberal and thus calls for different cultural, religious, racial or sexual identifications instead of a unitary people. In the political and academic left, the argument is that liberal democracy is the root cause of inequalities, injustices, and the hollowing out of democracy, which leads to populism and neoliberalism. Given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the political and geopolitical repercussions of it and given the rise of anti-liberal and populist politics in Europe and in the US, this paper claims that we need to defend liberal, representative democracy against different brands of extremism rather than abandon it as an ideal. Drawing on Judith Shklar’s famous notion of the ‘liberalism of fear,’ I try to provide a historically grounded argument in defence of liberal democracy in the age of fear. To do so, I first discuss interwar arguments in defence of representative and ‘liberal’ democracy, including Swedish, Finnish, and British political rhetoric in favour of representative democracy, as well as some prominent scholarly accounts against totalitarian ideologies, such as Ernest Barker’s defence of liberal democracy and Karl Loewenstein’s argument on ‘militant democracy.’ In the second part of the paper, I will revisit the famous cold-war argument on the end of ideology. As I will argue, the postwar notion of the end of ideology was launched as an ideological and defensive attempt to demarcate the influence of the Soviet Union and Marxist politics in western Europe, rather than just a sign of an innocent belief in a non-ideological politics. Its political content dealt more with democratic procedures and welfare policies than about conservative or laissez-faire liberal attitudes. In the next part of the paper, I will reassess Francis Fukuyama’s thesis on ‘the end of history,’ claiming again that its rhetorical aspect has been ignored, as most commentators have focused on the impossibility-cum-naivety of any possibility of the end of history. What unites the historical cases discussed in the paper is an explicit critique of totalitarian or extremist ideologies, as well as their argument for a procedural conception of representative democracy in a free society, based on the rule of law and welfare policies. Unfortunately, this is what is at stake in the western democracies today.