AUTHORITARIANISM
AT THE GATES Professor Roman Kuźniar, a political scientist from the University of Warsaw and a former longtime diplomat, talks to Witold Żygulski.
M
ore than 30 years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay “The End of History,” in which he posited that humanity has reached an optimal political form, i.e. liberal democracy with a free market economy. However, the following decades have shown that tendencies toward authoritarianism are even appearing in the developed countries of Europe. Why is this happening? Fukuyama did not claim that everything would only go in the right direction. On the contrary, he warned of the inevitable emergence of vital and comprehensive atavistic tendencies, including the temptation of authoritarianism precisely, even on the part of great powers. He believed that because the synthesis of liberal democracy and the free market had succeeded in defeating the two greatest threats of the 20th century, fascism and communism, no new dangerous alternative would emerge in the world. And such an alternative has not appeared; what has appeared is an attempt to return to the past. This is nothing new; we have already had to deal with this in history, only in different decorations. However, there also appeared conditions thanks to which the present right-wing-nationalist wave could start moving and find fer-
DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SYSTEM IMMUNIZED AGAINST THREATS COMING FROM WITHIN. THIS IS DUE TO ITS ESSENCE, ITS SUSCEPTIBILITY TO CERTAIN DEGENERATIONS AND EXTREMES 8
Winter 2021
tile ground. Democracy is not a system immunized against threats coming from within. This is due to its essence, its susceptibility to certain degenerations and extremes. Through the process of globalization generated by the United States and Western Europe, the free world has been creating a new liberal order in the last 30 years. Poland has been a great beneficiary of this process. In many regions of the world, countries have been given a new chance to develop, but they have begun to grow not necessarily according to the Western pattern. China, for example, has benefited enormously from globalization, but liberal democracy is out of the question there. The same can be said of Russia. Both of these powers have turned globalization against its creators and have decided to attack democracy, a clear example of which was Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election and the election of someone more to their liking: Donald Trump. Democracy is therefore in a difficult situation in the world; it is extremely fragile today. What are the reasons for the rising popularity of authoritarianism in countries that seemed to be places of fully established democracy, like Western European countries or the United States? This was very well described by Samuel Huntington in his book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, published in 1991. In our good faith and a certain naivety, we believed democracy to be a system that would take hold and develop on different soils, on different cultural, civilizational or religious foundations. Meanwhile, Russia, for example, is less democratic today than it was before World War I. Lenin was able to prepare his Revolution precisely because Russia was relatively democratic in 1917. Today, Putin would nip the revolution in the bud. Countries with a developed democracy have difficulties with it today, but they are coping well with them. In Western Europe, right-wing nationalist parties exist, but they are far from dominant and, above all, they do not question democracy, nor are they openly opposed to the idea of the European Union. Take, for example, the history of Jorg The Warsaw Voice
