Illiberal biopolitics: Fighting demographic decline and "population replacement"

The concept of illiberal democracy gained widespread attention after the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, declared in a 2014 speech that Hungary would become "an illiberal state, a non-liberal state" (Orbán 2014). What had initially been a critical concept developed in academic and policy-oriented discussions (c.f., Jones 1995; Zakaria 1997, 2003) thus became a directly political and positive label that would soon gain broad influence in Europe and beyond (c.f., Lendvai 2017; Mudde 2017; Mayer 2018; Laruelle 2022; Kallius 2022). Today, two member states of the European Union, Hungary and Poland, are widely characterized as an "illiberal democracies," in which the division of powers, the independence of the judiciary and the media, and the rights of individuals more generally – especially those of minorities and immigrants – have been gravely jeopardized. In the state-of-the-art literature, illiberal democracies and their concrete policies have most often been conceptualized as exemplifying authoritarian populism (Brubaker 2017; Palonen 2018; Moffit 2020; Glied 2020; Mudde 2021; Lamour 2021), democratic backsliding (Sedelmeier 2017; Pech and Scheppele 2017; Vachudoca 2020; Bellamy and Kröger 2021), authoritarianism (Nyyssönen and Metsälä 2021; Katsambekis 2023) or fascism (Stanley 2018). Recently, some studies have also begun to see illiberalism itself as novel and distinct political phenomenon (Rupnik 2016; Kahn 2017; Plattner 2019; Benoist 2019; Laruelle 2022; Sajó et. al 2022). This presentation moves the discussion away from the debate on how to describe illiberal democracies as forms of government and aims to tackle a thus-far understudied aspect of illiberalism: The politics, policies, and ideological aspects involved in the fight against the threatening demographic decline, which has posed a grave issue in Eastern Europe after the Cold War (e.g., Krastev and Holmes 2020). It is suggested that illiberal states employ a distinct version of biopolitics aimed to fight this demographic decline. The paper explores how this biopolitical fight against demographic decline is legitimized as a battle against perceived threats to the health of the nation. It is shown that illiberal states and political movements legitimize policies of demographic growth against such perceived threats as "population replacement" and "Islamization" of Europe (e.g., Raspail 2011) as well as neo-liberal policies of privatization that threaten to atomize the population (c.f., Slobodian 2018). By exploring how illiberal democracies use these far-right ideas and conspiracy theories to legitimize demographic, economic as well as nationalistic cultural policies, the paper argues that the research framework of biopolitics can help to illustrate contemporary illiberalism from a novel perspective.