I am participating at 80th Annual Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference April 13-16, 2023 in Chicago. I am chairing the panel "At the Boundaries of Liberal Democracy". I present a sub-topic of my postdoctoral research on "The State of Emergency in the Era of Global Ecological and Pandemic Crisis". I speak about Democratic Threats and Opportunities of the Exceptional Governance.
The
authoritarian populist right-wing has rapidly reborn in the field of
authoritarian state and emergency governance, moreover the COVID-19 crisis gave
a new rise this phenomenon mainly at the expense of civil society. The failures
of liberal democracy opened the way of authoritarian populist right-wing
populism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which on the one hand remained
integrated into the neoliberal capitalism and on the other hand dismantled the
legal basis of liberal constitutionalism. Investigating the CEE authoritarian
populist regimes (especially Hungary), it has been argued that Hungarian
authoritarian populism and its regional followers established this politics
from the migration crisis of 2015 on the permanent state of exception. The
COVID-19 crisis offered a new opportunity to maintain and extend the emergency
measures. Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister found the way to capitalize the pandemic
crisis and introduced the overlapping exceptional measures. Relying on the
political theoretical concept of exceptional governance, it has been argued and
analysed in this paper that the new forms of authoritarianism in CEE are based
on the extraordinary measures. Civil society is basically the victim of
exceptional governance and has no control over it. At the same time, the
European Union (EU) has not been able to counteract the authoritarian
instruments of exceptional governance in the various waves of the pandemic.
This highlights the fact that the EU has almost no control over the exceptional
legal regimes of the Member States. The crises of recent years have shown that
the EU finds it difficult to enforce the rule of law even in the normal legal
order, and that there are no European standards for state of exception and
other forms of extraordinary governance measures. Yet it was the COVID-19 that
showed how important it would be, both regionally and at EU level, if Member
States could harmonise their different types of exceptional legal order.
According to Carl Schmitt, it is the sovereign who rules over the exceptional
legal order. Based on an examination of the extraordinary measures of
governance introduced by authoritarian populists during the pandemic, it has
been argued in this paper that the EU could address many sovereignty problems
much better if it took steps towards developing a framework of “European
state of exception”. The various forms of global ecological and climate
crisis we are facing make this all the more urgent. This study explores the
ways in which civil society can control and constrain exceptional situations at
national and EU level.
