Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe

In recent years, the rise of authoritarian governments in East Central Europe and far right and populist movements across Europe has sparked concern that the liberal democratic order established after 1989 is falling apart. In Hungary and Poland, populist governments are employing the legal system to sustain illiberal forms of rule, cementing control through constitutional reforms.

The debate centering on Hungary and Poland, however, tends to be either highly normative or highly technical, and, too often, ahistorical. Politically the response on a European level to the illiberal turn in these EU member states was unconvincing and inconsequential. We agree with those commentators who argue that this is, indeed, an emerging challenge to Europe as a whole. Given the overall situation at the continent the nascent illiberal constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary might be rather permanent than temporary phenomenon and it might tend to spread beyond these two countries and thus endanger the constitutional and political landscape in EU and beyond. This situation creates an urgent need for interdisciplinary research and for building bridges between scholarly milieus, both geographical as well as disciplinary, which our project seeks to answer.

Thus, we aim to introduce much needed historical, interdisciplinary, practice-oriented and comparative perspectives to academic engagement with illiberal and authoritarian challenges to constitutional democracy. Many commentators have noticed that the illiberal constitutional architects of today were also in the front lines of the democratization movement in the 1980s and of the liberal transformation of the 1990s. This project intends to explain why it was so. We intend to situate present-day conflicts in the longer historical ebb and flow of ideas and practices of constitutionalism, democracy, legality and pluralism in East Central Europe. The project stretches from the post-war era with emphasis on the period since 1968, comprising the era of late state socialism, post-communist liberal transformation, into the present day. This will allow us to show how the rudiments of the rule of law and ‘liberal consensus’ of the 1990s evolved already in the late state socialist period and, similarly, how the rudiments of ‘illiberal challenge’ were born already within the liberal transition period.
This project will show why and how the East Central European experience is relevant to the current populist challenge to the constitutional foundations of liberal democracy in Europe and around the world. It supports junior researchers to focus on cutting-edge research on this urgent challenge, to form transnational network and thus to prepare the ground for their long-term academic engagement in the field.