Political ethics in illiberal regimes: A realist interpretation

By Zoltán Gábor Szucs

What is it like to live in an illiberal regime? Ethical life in totalitarian regimes is easy to critique because it deviates from everything we think morally acceptable. But illiberal regimes are similar enough to liberal democracies to make addressing the experience of living there strikingly difficult.

Political ethics in illiberal regimes argues that the common language of normative political theory is simply not up to the task of capturing this experience. On the one hand, we do not really need political theory to know why illiberal regimes are dangerous and undesirable. On the other, we do need political theory – at least of a certain realist kind – to understand why millions of reasonable people come to terms with living in such regimes.

The book presents a novel theoretical language – Williamsian, liberal and realist – to articulate this experience. Part I lays out the theoretical framework, while Part II examines how politicians, experts and citizens in illiberal regimes are confronted with role-specific, political-ethical challenges and how the various normative contexts of their roles shape their agency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526142368

Book preview

Political ethics in illiberal regimes

Political ethics in illiberal regimes

A realist interpretation

Zoltán Gábor Szűcs

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Zoltán Gábor Szűcs 2023

The book was written as part of a project funded by NRDI (FK_21 138367 Political normativity).

The right of Zoltán Gábor Szűcs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 5261 4234 4 hardback

First published 2023

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: In theory

1 The case for a liberal political realism

2 A neo-Aristotelian regime theory to the rescue

3 The political-ethical experience of living in illiberal regimes

Part II: In practice

4 The politics of illiberal ambition

5 Independence in an illiberal regime

6 Illiberal citizenship

Conclusion

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Every book has a story. For instance, Edward Gibbon accounts for the pivotal moment of conceiving his world-famous Decline and fall as follows: ‘It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind’ (Gibbon 1869, p. 79). The idea of writing this book has developed slowly and silently over a decade as its author sat musing amidst the ruins of what had been once called the Third Hungarian Republic, while the supporters of the regime were singing the praise of their populist authoritarian leader, his ‘revolution in the ballot-boxes’, his newly established ‘system of national cooperation’, and the construction of an ‘illiberal state’, or, in a lower key, a ‘Christian Democratic state’. They were singing his praise in front of the majestic nineteenth-century neo-Renaissance building of the Parliament, in the public media outlets controlled by political appointees, in the countless newspapers owned by the allies of the regime, on vast billboards along the highways, on websites, in the Facebook groups of the fans of the prime minister, and many other venues on many other occasions. In the meantime, the regime’s puzzled opposition heatedly, ineffectively, and largely self-destructively debated what went wrong, whom to blame, and how to move forward.

At the beginning of this long decade, I considered myself something of a historian of political thought, interested chiefly in how to do things with words, and had a twofold research focus on eighteenth-century political thought and the period of the post-communist transition. It would have been an obvious choice for me to try to write the decline and fall of the Third Republic as a historian of political thought. But I did not feel the buzz for it. Living in and studying a post-truth world made me realize that it is much less intellectually fruitful to ask how to do things with words than to ask how to do things with things. Thereby the motivation for merely understanding democratic decline ceded its place to a desire to judge it and react to it. So far, so good, but I still did not know how to proceed and in which direction.

The decisive impetus to turn to normative political theory came from multiple sources. In the middle of the 2010s, I had the opportunity to hold a series of university courses at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, about classics from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Tacitus to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, and Weber (not entirely new terrain for a historian of political thought). I also held a course about political realism in literature and popular culture from Antigone to Game of Thrones. I owe a great deal of gratitude to the participants of these courses at Eötvös Loránd University for the stimulating conversations and their enthusiasm for these topics. Meanwhile, I began to study political theory systematically, and I soon realized that it is realist political theory that I find most relevant to the issues I am most passionately interested in. Through the works of Bernard Williams, Raymond Geuss, Mark Philp, Andrew Sabl, Matt Sleat, Enzo Rossi, and Alison McQueen – to mention just the most important inspirations for my academic transformation – I learned a new language and a new perceptivity for the complicated relationship between ethical and political problems. Gradually, I started to have an understanding of the stakes of contemporary debates about realism. I also learned to appreciate the critics of political realism and found my place on the liberal side of the realist current. I consider it my exceptional fortune that during the last few years, I got acquainted with many other political theorists like Allyn Fives, Edward Hall, Gulsen Seven, Janosch Prinz, Paul Raekstad, Uğur Aytaç, Ben Cross, Carlo Burelli, Ilaria Cozzaglio, and Thomas Fossen.

For me, the next huge step forward was the establishment of a realist research group at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest. I owe special gratitude to the members of this group: Attila Gyulai, Zoltán Balázs, Tibor Mándi, Gábor Illés, Milán Pap, Anna Ujlaki, Annamária Csornay, Dávid Csepregi, Marcell Sasvári, Ádám Darabos, and Szilárd Tóth. Our weekly reading seminars opened a fast lane for us to become familiar with the state of the art of political theory, and our intensive collaboration inspired writing articles and more than one doctoral dissertation in the last few years. However, we soon realized that reading recently published papers is not enough to get in sync with what was going on in realism because what was published freshly was the state of the art of the workshops held two or three years before. To make up for this shortcoming, we started to organize conferences and seminars, edited books, and tried to put Budapest onto the map of realist political theory. Among the friends and colleagues participating in this group, three people stand out: Attila, Gábor, and Anna, with whom I had the most inspiring conversations about realism.

My first attempt to present my ideas about realism in front of an international audience took place at a multidisciplinary workshop on utopias at the Central European University in Budapest (alas, CEU was ousted from the country by the illiberal government of Hungary some years later). My original paper was overcrowded with ideas and messed up a little by my earlier interest in how things can be done with words. It was about the epistemology of political realism and made a baffling analogy between fiction and political realism. It is no surprise after all that a much more polished version eventually got published in the collection of essays based on the Budapest workshop. I am especially grateful to the main organizer of the event and the editor of the book, Zsolt Czigányik, for his great help in making my ideas more transparent even to myself. Other parts of my argument later found their way into publication through long and winding roads. A paper about the ‘a-theoretical core of political realism’, a distant descendant of this early paper, was later published in Studies in Social and Political Thought.

Quickly, it became evident to me that this was not exactly what I really want to do, and therefore I started to work on the project that eventually resulted in this book. Over the years, I gave multiple talks and presentations about the core idea of the project (at a seminar at the incredible Political Science Department of Central European University, a workshop at Princeton University, another seminar at Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, a Mancept workshop, a seminar at Aarhus University, and an APSA Annual Meeting). During this time, while keeping one eye constantly on the book project, I wrote multiple essays that sought to explore largely uncharted territories for political realism and seemed especially relevant to the book’s main theoretical concerns. One paper, published in the European Journal of Political Theory, argued, for example, that realism could profit from a neo-Aristotelian regime theory that dispenses with what I then described as a ‘moralistic bias’. Another paper, published in Res Publica, laid the groundwork for a realist theory of political obligations and examined its implications for non-democratic contexts. Yet another paper in Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy defended a realist understanding of political obligation against philosophical anarchism. (Since then, the theory of political obligations became a kind of obsession for me. There is more than one manuscript of mine about political obligations under review in various journals.) The fourth paper about Tacitus and his realist understanding of the problem of political failure (a late fruit of my courses held at Eötvös Loránd University) came out in The European Legacy. Not all of what I said in these papers found its way into this book, but this is not astonishing, after all. These papers were essential milestones along the path toward this book, but it is the fate of milestones – even the important ones – to stay where they have stood while the travelers pass them and move forward toward their proper destinations.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude for the patience, open-mindedness, and cheerfulness to all those people at Manchester University Press whom I had the honor to collaborate with during the last some years. It was a long journey – longer than any of us had expected. But now, here we are.

Introduction

Illiberal regimes meet political realism

This book has grown out of an encounter with two different needs that, I think, I might have shared with many other people who are interested in political theory and are observing with a keen eye what is currently going on around us in the political world. One was both a politically and ethically motivated intellectual desire to make sense of one of the most disturbing phenomena of our contemporary world: namely, the obstinate survival of authoritarian regimes since the beginning of the third wave of democratization – successfully mimicking but never fully subscribing to the institutions and principles of modern liberal democracies – that has continued into a new era of the recent emergence of another generation of authoritarian regimes, mostly through a process of democratic decline (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). Democracy has never been the only game in town (Linz and Stepan 1996; Levitsky and Way 2015, p. 49). Even at the peak of the third wave of democratization, hundreds of millions of people remained under the yoke of autocratic regimes (Brownlee 2007; Levitsky and Way 2010, p. 3). However, what we are witnessing now is a wholly new chapter in the history of the coexistence of various political regimes. The regimes I am talking about seemed to be halfway toward becoming fully democratic states or were consolidated democracies, and now they have unexpectedly begun to slide away from what appeared to be a liberal democratic consensus before. How could this happen to millions of people worldwide, and why might these people acquiesce to or even proudly identify with these authoritarian regimes (Alizada et al. 2021)?

Importantly, this anti-democratic turn, resulting in the emergence of a new species of political regimes that will be called, for the sake of simplicity, illiberal regimes throughout this book (a detailed explication of the term can be found in Chapter 2), took place amid a whirl of converging trends, all threatening the very foundations of liberal democracies. These ranged from the appearance of charismatic leaders (Pakulski and Körösényi, 2012) to the rise of populist movements (Müller 2016), the blossoming of internet-based conspiracy theories and post-truth (Block 2019; Hristov 2019), new forms of massive political manipulation and widespread misinformation (Guisti and Piras 2021), digital authoritarianism (Wright 2018), and disconnectedness between liberal and democratic elements of liberal democracy (Zakaria 1997; Mounk 2018). The main lesson of these recent developments may not be so much that liberal democracy is in danger as that the political struggle for souls is not over yet – and may not ever be.

The other need was a no less urgent intellectual desire, with significant ethical and political implications, to find a theoretical framework that could do justice to what has seemed the proper ‘circumstances of politics’ for me (Waldron 1999; Sleat 2013) and what I have thought was mostly missing from contemporary normative political theory. I say ‘mostly’ because the recent revival of realist political theory (Sleat 2018) seeks to fill this normative political theoretical gap. Instead of looking for theoretically sophisticated moral justifications of various proposals under presupposed ideal or non-ideal circumstances, which I will call the ‘justificatory model’, realism undertakes a sustained effort to understand the varieties of political-ethical challenges we face every day and the difficulties of adequately addressing these challenges. It is especially true to the Williamsian liberal strand of realism (as opposed to the justificatory model and to other, Geussian, radical strands of realism) whose prominent contemporary champions are John Horton, Mark Philp, Andrew Sabl, Matt Sleat, and Edward Hall (among others).

What are the circumstances of politics, and why do I feel that normative political theory – except for realism – systematically fails to address it? I see the circumstances of politics as a condition in which deep disagreements exist among people about largely incompatible values, norms, and interests. In this condition, no theoretically coherent solution to these disagreements is available, nor does it seem worthwhile to be sought after. The circumstances of politics are a condition in which our most cherished commitments – ethical and other – are constitutive of, products of, filtered through, and dependent on never-ending political contestation. The circumstances of politics make any theoretical effort to ‘settle’ a political debate (in the sense of offering a theoretically compelling solution to it) futile and misconceived. The circumstances of politics call the authority of the justificatory model over the realm of politics into question.

The circumstances of politics do not necessarily mean that we should take the realms of ethics and politics as entirely different spheres of human activity, raising entirely independent questions about and offering sometimes incompatible answers to the questions of human coexistence. Nevertheless, they do mean that we cannot say with Nozick (1974, p. 6) that ‘Moral philosophy sets the background for, and the boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.’

To do justice to the circumstances of politics, we need to pay more attention to the particularities of the political realm and bother less with the general moral principles; this is both a methodological and a substantive challenge that contemporary realist political theory seems to understand rather well (e.g. Sleat 2016). Doing justice to the circumstances of politics does not demand that the mere fact of successful acquisition of power should be seen as satisfactorily justifying every instance of domination, possession, and maintenance of political power (i.e., might is not right). However, it implies the acknowledgment of the ethical seriousness of meeting the challenges that arise from the circumstances of politics and the moral weight gained by any more or less successful response to these challenges, even if many of these responses might be found quite undesirable on the grounds of our most cherished moral and political convictions. Instead of merely conceding the often not-so-ideal conditions in which real-life politics occurs, this recognition reveals some theoretical room populated by a wide variety of political-ethical phenomena primarily overlooked by other approaches. Importantly, these political-ethical phenomena cannot be derived from any theoretically coherent view of how politics should look but still exist due to their success at responding to the circumstances of politics. Recognition of the existence of this class of political-ethical phenomena does not necessarily make one biased toward the status quo (a common charge against the Williamsian, liberal strand of political realism – e.g. Finlayson 2017; Cross 2020) because our all-things-considered response to the status quo must not be determined by our recognition of the ethical seriousness of having any particular status quo at all. Nevertheless, its recognition can help us better grasp what is going on around us in the world and appreciate more the actual political-ethical stakes of political contestations of which we are the observers and in which we might be stakeholders and actors.

In this respect, Andrew Sabl’s seminal work on the democratic ethics of politics office (2002) offers a particularly illuminating case study of how democracy as a specific political regime sets the background conditions for a wide variety of ethically serious and largely incompatible political endeavors within a framework that is both considerably stable over time and ready for gradual adaptation to the changing political circumstances. Sabl depicts his subject, democracy, as a particular and historically contingent set of institutions, values, norms, and different political roles and offers a normative political theory based on the assumption that democracy offers a stable solution to the circumstances of politics. Nevertheless, this does not mean that his depiction suffers from a status quo bias: his commitment to the stability of democracy comes not so much from a metatheoretical bias toward political order as from a sincere and deep commitment to democracy. If he were explicitly critical of democracy, he still could appreciate the ethical seriousness of democracy as a stable form of political order.

So, what is the connection between illiberal regimes and the circumstances of politics? For me, the most disturbing feature of these regimes is that they offer astonishingly successful and stable responses to the circumstances of politics and do so in a way that makes them both alarmingly and deceptively similar to liberal democracies. There are several various labels for these kinds of regimes that I call illiberal, from ‘competitive authoritarian’ to ‘electoral authoritarian regimes’ (Levitsky and Way 2010, Schedler 2013; for the terminological and measurement problems, see Bogaards 2010; Collier and Levitsky 1997; Armony and Schamis 2005). Researchers all highlight two seemingly incompatible features of these illiberal regimes. On the one hand, they are obviously not democracies – not only are they not consolidated democracies, but they fail to meet the minimal criteria of democracy even though illiberal regimes have all the major democratic political institutions. Later in the book, I will also refer to the Regimes of the world database based on Lührmann et al.’s (2019) regime typology in which there is a large room for measurement uncertainties, and therefore I will delimit the group of polities that I prefer to call illiberal regimes as comprising the lower tiers of electoral democracies (that may not be democracies after all) and the upper tiers of electoral autocracies. These polities have regularly held multiparty elections that are often free (but never fair), there is some level of media pluralism, and sometimes political incumbents can even lose the elections and do transfer their power to their challengers.

On the other hand, illiberal regimes are not classical, closed autocracies either. The supreme power is not concentrated in the hands of a military junta, a theocratic leadership, a charismatic leader, a monarch, an oligarchic or hereditary elite, or a bureaucratic state party. Political life is not highly ritualized; political dissent is not violently oppressed; the possession of power is not secured through formal constraints. Instead, there is an open-ended, multiparty competition for power that takes place on a systematically – although for the most part informally – distorted, uneven political playing field. This distortion should not be underestimated because it shows that elections in illiberal regimes have a special stake that in liberal democracies they are not expected to have: in illiberal regimes every election seems to be a referendum on the survival of the regime itself. Since liberal democracies themselves allow some inequality in the distribution of political resources (one example is tellingly called the incumbent advantage: it is the advantage in access to resources of those who are already holding public office), the success of illiberal regimes mimicking liberal democracies is all the more obvious when compared to the realities and not the abstract ideals of democracy. One can even say that there is an alarming continuity between the values, norms, and institutions of liberal democracies and the values, norms, and institutions of illiberal regimes. Given that dozens of illiberal regimes have emerged during the last three decades in more than one wave and many of them have proven surprisingly resilient against internal and external challenges, there might be little reason to doubt that these regimes can provide stably successful answers to the circumstances of politics. The question is how to deal with this fact in normative political theoretical terms.

One thing is for sure: nothing I will say in this book will be an attempt to justify illiberal regimes either directly or indirectly. I would gladly live in a liberal democracy (even though most researchers – including myself – seem to agree that I do not at the moment of writing this Introduction). If I imagined a desirable alternative to liberal democracy, my utopian fantasy or political-philosophical blueprint for a better polity would be more different from an illiberal regime than from liberal democracy. Recognizing the ethical seriousness of the circumstances of politics and the moral weight of any largely stable response to the challenges raised by these circumstances by no means implies that illiberal regimes, all things considered, should not be resisted or sought to be transformed into a liberal democracy. Nevertheless, I think it is important to distinguish my position from two seemingly similar, widespread, and equally problematic approaches to why people might be content with living in illiberal regimes.

One problematic approach would suggest that people can have important, but merely prudential reasons not to massively resist illiberal regimes: in this view, most probably people are partly misled, partly coerced, and, in some cases, there may not be available for them any viable political alternative to the ruling illiberal elite of the regime. Another problematic approach would suggest that people can have morally significant reasons to maintain their allegiances toward an illiberal regime even though the regime as a whole cannot be morally justified if these moral reasons are linked to other, morally significant parts of human life: we can have morally significant interests in the well-being of ourselves, our family, friends, neighbors, or other groups of our compatriots, and these interests can justify our acquiescence in the survival of an illiberal regime, or, in other words, they can override our moral reasons to resist the regime. In the former case, acquiescence can result from a calculus in which prudential reasons might outweigh something that is a morally bad thing, while in the latter case, it might be the result of a calculus in which other moral reasons can outweigh something that is a morally bad thing.

Despite their apparent latitudinarianism, these approaches, in fact, take a very restrictive understanding of what matters to the political-ethical assessment of a political regime that can easily distort the true nature of the political-ethical challenges of living in illiberal regimes and might result in the misappreciation of the responses of people to these challenges. They start with the assumption that illiberal regimes are morally unjustifiable, which might well be true, but definitely misses the point. We should realize that every political regime successfully provides its subjects with a wide variety of political-ethical reasons for accepting its terms in particular situations. Importantly, every regime does so in a structured form (that is why we can identify them as particular regime types and not as a succession of random efforts to deal with the circumstances of politics) when they put people recurrently into similar situations, confront them with very similar challenges, and offer them similar sets of choices while systematically reducing the probability of getting into radically different situations with radically different challenges or possible responses. For instance, a regularly held multiparty election is a common situation in an illiberal regime, while ritual participation in single-party, merely formal elections is not. How to react to massive political violence is not a common political-ethical challenge in an illiberal regime, while enduring sporadic and targeted political violence might well be one. The claim that politics is hardball might often be heard in illiberal regimes while the claim that every form of political dissent is illegal is probably not.

Illiberal regimes may not be morally justifiable, but like every other stable political regime, they have three important qualities that can lend moral weight to any political regime in the considerations of their subjects because these qualities help the regimes to offer more or less stable responses to the circumstances of politics:

Illiberal regimes (like every other regime) create a ‘division of political-ethical responsibilities’ by offering a set of regime-specific political roles, making it possible for people to focus on a specific set of political-ethical challenges instead of the entirety of the regime (for role ethics see Sabl 2002; Hardimon 1994). Consider the role of the soldiers: soldiers are supposed to defend