The Liberal Project and the Transformation of Democracy: The Case of East Central Europe

1. INTRODUCTION

1 INTRODUCTION T his book figures as a defense of liberalism, but not in the sense in which it is commonly understood. What has come to be understood and championed under the rubric of liberalism is often very different from what it was at the time it was developed. In defending liberalism , then, I am returning to the classics, in order to provide a basis for analyzing what has been happening in Eastern Europe (and, by extension, in the world more broadly) and to chart an alternative future for liberalism.1 In this spirit, I have undertaken to extend the argument first broached in my 1997 publication Whose Democracy? to the effect that moral relativism, nationalism (in the sense in which I define it), and capitalism all present challenges to the project of establishing, consolidating, and maintaining legitimate (and hence, stable) political systems, and to the effect that the standard for system legitimacy is Natural Law or, as I called it in my earlier work, Universal Reason.2 Recently, there have been claims registered on behalf of certain notions about cultural diversity to the effect that there are no universal standards , no universal rights, and, above all, no such thing as Universal Reason, which is to say, no universally valid mores of human behavior. Moral relativists choosing to take up this particular banner may be overstating their case. “After all,” Shashi Tharoor reminds us, “concepts of justice and law, the legitimacy of government, the dignity of the individual, protection from oppressive or arbitrary rule, and participation in the affairs of the community are found in every society on the face of the earth. Far from being difficult to identify, the number of philosophical common denominators between different cultures and political traditions makes universalism anything but a distortion of reality.”3 The words “found in every society” establish the universalism of certain minimal truths; there is no need to insist on universal assent in order to establish the universality of a minimal moral law, any more than one would need to insist on universal assent to the laws of mathematics in order to establish that the laws of physics have a legitimate claim to universal and transcultural validity. In order to insist on the nullibicity of universal standards of behavior, a would-be consistent relativist would have to maintain that murder, torture, the killing of infants, mass rape, pickpocketing, lying, slavery , cruelty, insulting one’s hosts, and other forms of hurtful behavior are not necessarily wrong or even morally problematic. In order to connect this with misconceived notions of cultural diversity, he or she would have to claim further that at least one of these behaviors is or could be considered a local tradition in some country or other. That said, it should be clear enough why I consider such relativists to be either unconscious of the import of their own words or, alternatively, driven by contempt for non-Europeans; the typical charge against classical liberal notions of universal rights and mores that they are Eurocentric is, in practice, not so much a charge as a claim. Yet, far from being mere Eurocentric conceits, as the cultural relativists suppose, honesty, generosity, hospitality, kindness, loyalty, and mutual aid have been found by anthropologists to be universally held to be important virtues in societies at all levels of development, on all continents.4 No one (as far as I am aware) denies that there are variations in customs, traditions , and even mores from one society to another, from one group (however defined) to another. What Natural Law theorists insist, however, is that not everything is arbitrary or relative or merely a feature of one or another religion or culture. Natural Law has also encountered resistance among authoritarians of various stripes, because they are aware that it establishes the concept of an external standard by which the conduct of state authorities may be judged. As Heinrich Rommen put it in a 1945 publication, “There must be a law from which all human laws derive their validity and moral obligation. There must be a right which is paramount to all rights of the state.”5 The Natural Law tradition constitutes the single most important area of overlap between Catholic social teachings and the classical liberal tra2 CHAPTER ONE dition of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Immanuel Kant.6 And, in spite of recurrent announcements from time to time...