Towards a transnational and social history of anti-liberalism. Insights from the trajectory of Ryszard Legutko

Anti-colonial neo-traditionalism in Central-Eastern Europe: A theoretical examination

“…In this sense, rather than identifying specific ‘neo-traditionalist actors’ (that would entail an essentialist core of political agents), we can observe how neo-traditionalist narratives have been expressed by a great variety of ‘intellectuals’ who refuse the key tenets of liberal democracy: from political leaders (for example, the former Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša) to grassroots movements (e.g., Pegida in East Germany); from publicists (e.g., the Polish journalist Paweł Lisicki) to philosophers and academics (e.g., the Hungarian András Lánczi or the Polish Ryszard Legutko). These few examples account for what has been described as an illiberal Internationale (Behr, 2021; Bluhm, 2019; Korolczuk and Graff, 2018) that promotes illiberal and traditionalist values. Certainly, this informal alliance cannot be confined to Central-Eastern Europe; in fact, the same ideological content is expressed in Western Europe, as illustrated by conservative international conferences with the participation of several intellectuals from different countries.…”

Antagonistic understandings of sovereignty in the 2015 Polish constitutional crisis

“…PiS sought to 'correct the unjust consequences' of the post-1989 transformations, as declared by most of its representatives (Morawiecki, 20/02/2018). Before the parliamentary elections of 2015, the party looked to gain support by unifying conservative circles and denouncing the 'betrayal of the liberal elites' who transformed the country into a 'Western colony' (Behr 2021). Although the Kaczynski brothers participated in the roundtable talks that negotiated the transition to democracy in the 1980s, the outcome represented for them 'a rotten compromise' (Koncewicz 2016(Koncewicz , 2018, which allowed former communists to stay in power.…”

“…Drawing on 20 Polish parliamentary debates, 2 the article shows that the Law and Justice party's understanding of State sovereignty is rooted in the past, echoes a state-centred conception reminiscent of Carl Schmitt's notion of the political and of democracy (Bunikowski 2018), and was pitted in 2015 against the supremacy of the Constitution (legal sovereignty) and the idea that sovereignty can be shared. PiS' understanding of sovereignty is anchored in an anti-liberal vision of democracy and the rule of law fostered by the reinvention of political/intellectual conservatism in Poland (Bunikowski 2018;Bluhm and Varga 2019;Behr 2021;Buzogány and Varga 2021). In contrast, the opposition Civic Platform party, whose claims about sovereignty are expressed only in reaction to the ruling party's conception, seems to appeal tacitly to key features of liberal democracy, which 'in this part of the world became an obligatory syntax of political thought' (as pointed out by Craiutiu, quoted by Bluhm and Varga 2019: 3).…”