Anti‐liberalism Pushes Back
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | John M. Owen |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12435 |
Anti-liberalism Pushes Back
John M. Owen
University of Virginia
Abstract
Europe is besieged from within and without by anti-liberal threats. The rise within Europe of populist-nationalist parties and
renewed jihadist attacks interact with pressure from Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, and actual and aspiring despotisms in
Muslim-majority countries. To varying degrees these threats are reactions to the effects of 21st-century liberalism on societies.
Liberalism always has been chiefly concerned to safeguard individual autonomy or self-legislation, but the content of auton-
omy has shifted over two centuries. First-stage liberalism saw the chief threat to autonomy as the state; second-stage, as capi-
tal; the third-stage version now ascendant sees traditional norms and institutions as the main menace. Third-stage liberalism
in Europe (and elsewhere) distributes power towards ‘symbolic analysts’and away from those adept at services or manual
labour. Thus the anti-liberal backlash: within Europe large numbers of people find themselves less autonomous, in the older
senses of the word, and ambivalent about the newer notion of autonomy; while on Europe’s periphery many find certain fea-
tures of liberal societies unappealing and threatening. Defending liberalism will require not only devoting more resources to
national security and mitigating the disruptions of economic openness, but revisiting what individual autonomy ought to
mean in the 21st-century world.
Policy Implications
•Immigration into and within the EU has alienated many middle and working-class Europeans, and so current policies
should either be better defended or reformed.
•The EU should increase the EU Globalisation Adjustment Fund for retraining of displaced workers.
•Member states can enhance the EU’s legitimacy and health by increasing the transparency and democratic accountability
of the EU’s governing institutions.
•The increasing emphasis in EU law and policy on third-stage liberalism, which sees traditional institutions and practices as
the chief threats to individual autonomy, should be rethought in light of first and second-stage liberalism, which see the
state and capital as the main threats to individual autonomy.
When it comes to the European Union, Europeans are far
too ready to inflate ordinary problems into crises. Or so it
can seem to the North American observer. The rejection of
an EU Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2004 set
off warnings of European disintegration. The Greek financial
crisis that began in 2011 was met with predictions of Grexit
or else a moral hazard-induced spiral of profligacy and
defaults all over Southern Europe. The EU weathered these
storms, although not without cost.
At the time of this writing, however, the European project
does appear to be in deep trouble. The crises are real, the
causes many and complex. In this article I focus on anti-
liberal threats, that is, ideational threats from sources inside
and outside of Europe that reject at least some of the EU’s
liberal institutions and values and that carry the possibility
of weakening liberalism within Europe itself. Liberalism is
notoriously difficult to define; it has to do with, among
other things, openness to new ideas, personal liberty, and
constitutional democracy. Here I adopt the Kantian argu-
ment that at its core liberalism is a strong commitment to
individual autonomy, or each person’s right to self-legisla-
tion; any legislation by others must have been freely dele-
gated by the individual through due process. As I elaborate
below, ‘autonomy’is a formal concept. Its contents, and the
threats thereto, have shifted over time, so that we can speak
of three historic stages of liberalism: a first stage, in which
the threat came from the state; a second, in which markets
or capital were the largest menace to autonomy; and a
third, in which the chief threat to autonomy emanates from
traditional norms and institutions.
To Europe’s East, Southeast, and South, actors and move-
ments are challenging the European project by assaulting in
particular this third-stage liberalism, its notion of the good
life (and of less worthy lives), and the way it redistributes
power in society. Within Europe, as well, anti-liberal actors
and movements have gained strength lately. External and
internal anti-liberalisms interact in some ways to make the
problems worse. Russian anti-liberalism provides an exem-
plar for its European counterparts and even offers them vari-
ous kinds of aid. The failure of liberalism in the Arab
Uprising of 2011–12 is part of what has generated the mas-
sive outflowing of refugees into Europe, which in turn feeds
anti-liberal movements on the Continent.
I call these actors and movements anti-liberal rather than
simply illiberal because they are deliberate negations of at
least some aspects of liberalism in its third-stage, early
Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12435 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 4 . June 2017 73
Research Article
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