The twenty-first century remains an era of continuous and bold transformation in constitutional regimes. The tides threatening constitutional democracy appear to fluctuate in recent years. In some states around the world, they appear to be weakening, while in others they seem reinforced. While the United States appears to be ion the democratic worry list, neither Italy nor Germany has gone the way of Poland, Hungary, Turkey. The constitutional democracy worry list remains extensive. Constitutional democracy collapsed in Hong Kong, is collapsing in Brazil, and has weakened considerably in Australia, a country that a few years ago was an example of a regime that had seemingly resisted the right-wing “populist” tide.
Contemporary constitutional systems are so diverse that they do not present a clear and predictable development direction. The comparative landscape of constitutional legal systems is rife with uncertainty and disorientation. Confident predictions about countries and global systems are often falsified in the (often considerable) time necessary to get those predictions published in scholarly articles and books. Who anticipated that Trump would revive his career after the January 6, 2021, insurrection or that PiS would lose substantial control over the Polish government? Works on democratic resilience now appear as frequently as works on democratic decline.
From one perspective, constitutional democracy, once thought to epitomize political stability, has been found to be vulnerable. Threats to contemporary constitutional democracies come at least as often from democratic processes as from anti-democratic events, such as a military coup. Too often, the institutions representative democracy are unable to mediate and find common ground between different social demands, leading to the emergence of a polarization that fosters the totalitarian potential inherent in democracy. Rival factions become the “enemy within” rather than fellow citizens with different conceptions of the public good.
From a different perspective, constitutional democracy now appears more resilient than suggested by much scholarship published during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Poland is the poster child for democratic resilience. That country in 2018 appeared a lost democracy. The European Union (EU) seemed incapable of reacting effectively to the continuous challenges Poland posed to the EU legal system and fundamental rights’ protection. Polish civil society and the Polish people, however, proved capable of reversing what appeared an inevitably slide toward authoritarianism. The opposition’s win in the November 2023 opened a new– yet difficult– path for Poland toward the restoration of the rule of law.
The main lesson the recent past teaches is that history governance throughout the globe is experiencing great transformations. Recent events in Israel, the United States, Austria, and other countries suggest constitutional democracy is unlikely to ever permanently triumph over authoritarianism. Recent events in Polish and elsewhere highlight the importance of studying the features and conditions of democratic resilience and reaction, exploring what mechanisms and factors contribute to halt (and reverse) processes of backsliding and autocratization. Constitutional democracies, the evidence from the twenty-first century indicates, experience different forms of stress in some places at all times and in all places at some times. At any time, particular constitutional democracies are likely to be in crisis, and particular aspects of these crises threaten to spread. The crucial question is when and whether those crises reflect an inevitable political cycle of democratic decline and renewal or whether the practice of constitutional democracy is under a set of global stresses from which that form of governance may not recover.
The Course will focus on the questions or resilience or vulnerability within several constitutional democracies from all over the world.