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Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 11 November 1947. 1 No. Illiberalism has not yet brought the West to the brink of collapse. But the populist radical right surge that has hit both sides of the Atlantic in recent years has revealed failures of and weaknesses in
The West of which we speak is defined by the values of liberal democracy, individual freedom, human rights, tolerance and equality under the rule of law. This book explores how Islamist terror and Russian aggression as companion threats to the West when terrorists target Russia as well as the United States and its allies. The threats posed by Islamist terror and Russian aggression present themselves in very different ways. In the time of transatlantic traumas, the Islamist terrorist threat and the Russian threat have worked diligently and with some success. The book examines the hatred of Islamists towards Western democracies, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union for their involvement in the Middle East politics for several decades. There is no single explanation for the rising popularity of illiberalism in the Western democracies; a combination of factors has produced a general sense of malaise. The book discusses the sources of discontent prevailing in the Western countries, and looks at the rise of Trumpism, Turkey and its Western values as well as the domestic tensions between Turkey's political parties. It suggests a radical centrist populist Western strategy could be applied to deal with the threats and challenges, reinvigorating the Western system. The book also touches upon suggestions relating to illiberalism in Europe, Turkey's drift away from the West, and the Brexit referendum.
liberal democracy. Such politicians and parties have thrown around their political weight in several countries, exercising power in some, including the United States, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland and Turkey. Sources of discontent There is no single explanation for the rising popularity of illiberalism, but a combination of factors has produced a general sense of malaise. The Great Recession, starting in 2008, left millions of Americans and Europeans without jobs and in debt. While the job market has recovered, real wages have not, and a significant portion of
This chapter examines the wide range of gendered identities within the British extreme right, past and present. It comments on the appeal of women to interwar fascist groups as an important corrective to those who see this movement as one only appealing to men. Women’s roles were important in the National Front, British National Party and English Defence League as well. Masculinities are also important to consider, and the chapter examines how men can often feel a sense of frustration, while the extreme right space reflects these concerns and offers alternate male ideals to gravitate around, sometimes set in hypermasculine terms. Finally, it explores how gendered politics can be developed to express prejudices, such as the homonationalism that celebrates LGBTQ identities to frame Muslim communities as stereotypically illiberal.
authoritarian, illiberal government structure with power transferred to the executive is incompatible with Western ideals of democracy and the rule of law. Erdoğan’s post-coup purges also threaten to weaken Turkey’s military and thus the security of NATO. Many officers assigned to NATO were recalled and presumably many who returned to Turkey have ended up in jail, including as much as a third of Turkey’s officer corps. Some officers on NATO duty sought asylum in NATO countries to escape that fate. In the foreseeable future, it would be nearly impossible to resume EU
not an unalloyed good: it is part of Irish women's illiberal legal inheritance’. The fear around the female body, its legislation and regulation by patriarchal moral codes, are not easily consigned to the past. As Eilís Ward demonstrates in ‘Who is protecting whom and what? The Irish state and the death of women who sell sex: a historical and contemporary analysis’, the Irish state's passing of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act (2017) attempts to ‘disappear’ the embodied prostitute (without stopping the act of prostitution), thus ‘removing
In 1960–62, a large number of white autochthonous parents in Southall became very concerned that the sudden influx of largely non-Anglophone Indian immigrant children in local schools would hold back their children’s education. It was primarily to placate such fears that ‘dispersal’ (or ‘bussing’) was introduced in areas such as Southall and Bradford, as well as to promote the integration of mostly Asian children. It consisted in sending busloads of immigrant children to predominantly white suburban schools, in an effort to ‘spread the burden’. This form of social engineering went on until the early 1980s. This book, by mobilising local and national archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals the extent to which dispersal was a flawed policy, mostly because thousands of Asian pupils were faced with racist bullying on the playgrounds of Ealing, Bradford, etc. It also investigates the debate around dispersal and the integration of immigrant children, e.g. by analysing the way some Local Education Authorities (Birmingham, London) refused to introduce bussing. It studies the various forms that dispersal took in the dozen or so LEAs where it operated. Finally, it studies local mobilisations against dispersal by ethnic associations and individuals. It provides an analysis of debates around ‘ghetto schools’, ‘integration’, ‘separation’, ‘segregation’ where quite often the US serves as a cognitive map to make sense of the English situation.
Defenderism, and religious antagonisms were permitted to grow apace.1 Similarly, Curtin asserts: The inclusive, secular, national consciousness forged by Tone, Drennan, Neilson and their colleagues in Dublin and Belfast in the early 1790s collapsed before it had ever neared its goal…Irish Protestants, particularly those radical Dissenters in Ulster who felt threatened by what they saw as an illiberal, intolerant, popish menace, retreated from the principals of 1791 into a closer identification with Great Britain. Moreover in Curtin’s eyes, the United Irishmen inadvertently
– individual liberty, human rights, and so on – and that the West can be defined as synonymous with these values. However, the struggle against ideas that run counter to these Western values continues, as demonstrated by recent political developments on both sides of the Atlantic. As one observer has noted, “The source of the West’s evolutionary power has been its openness, its equality of rights, and its social trust.” 2 All of those attributes have been called into question by the recent resurgence of illiberalism. This, of course, is not the first time that such a
pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron soundly defeated the extreme-right populist and EU-sceptic Marine le Pen for the French presidency. Consequences The Brexit vote to leave the EU is one of the most important victories yet for illiberal political movements in Europe – if one accepts that the UK is part of Europe, despite the beliefs of some Brits to the contrary. While the UK’s leading populist radical right party – UKIP – did not win control or even direct participation in government, it nonetheless scared the hell out of the Conservatives and led them down the