Andrei Dirlau, Liberal Democracy and National State, Economic Forum, Karpacz, Poland, Sept 8th, 2021

Values like patriotism, nation, identity, Christianity were abandoned by liberal democracy which, like a genetically modified organism, has suffered mutations, ceasing to be what it originally was. In its triumphant march after the fall of communism, liberalism was globalized, and in the process it turned into something else: a mutant. Globalization of liberalism meant an erosion of the sovereignty of national states by integration in international organizations and loss of self-determination.
Culturally, liberal democracies adopted the biased assumptions of the radical leftist ideology called political correctness. Patriotism and Christian identity were systematically deconstructed on ideological criteria and eliminated from Western liberal democracies, depriving them of their foundational elements. Transcendence has been forbidden in the public space. Based on false assumptions, they tried to forge an identity centered on human rights and secular values, but they obtained a simulacrum expressing no-one, a fake in which citizens cannot recognize themselves.
In a world with no anchor in the transcendent, God is replaced by the state, and morality is replaced by politics. That is what happened in liberal democracies: the hegemony of secularism, a teophobic culture, intolerant to Christians. The state became a secular fundamentalist state.
Religion is reduced to a moral euristic (Habermas) in an entropic, absurd, disenchanted world. God “died” (Hegel 1802), or is in eclipse (Martin Buber), being evacuated from society. The battle for sovereignty also has a spiritual side: the battle for God.
The state is losing its legitimacy, becoming a mere choice of a political life-style, having no moral authority but the authority of brute power, exercising coercion with no moral ground.
Liberal democracies are torn by cultural wars and bioethical battles. Medical ethics and bioethics grounded in traditional Christian morality are a cultural rift along which cultural tectonic plates are colliding, being perceived by the secularist establishment as fundamentalist threats to the dominant ethos. The rights of sexual minorities have become a battlefield between the two visions.
The Covid pandemic is a new battlefield between traditionalists and globalist medical “ethics” used with totalitarian methods and purposes.
Economically, liberal democracies turned to market fundamentalist neoliberalism, adopting the “neoliberal manifesto” called Washington Consensus with its dogmas: opening developing and transition economies to global markets, liberalizing imports, eliminating quotas and tariffs, deregulation, privatizing utilities, energy and transport state companies.
But these policies are often not in the interest of developing nations. In Eastern and Central European emerging and transition nations, some strategic or insufficiently developed industries, unable to face global competition, needed protectionism, subsidies and import tariffs. Liberalization benefitted the developed, not the developing economies. Privatizing public services (education, health) is not beneficial for the population. The free market is unstable, deregulation leads to financial instability. After the Great Depression of 2008 confidence in laissez-faire policies collapsed. Paradoxically, neoliberalism survived after that financial meltdown and its dogmas are still applied - says Colin Crouch in The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a “corporate takeover of the market”. Neoliberal hegemony resulted in a corporatization of the planet. Liberal democratic ideals have been “hollowed out” and “colonized” by neoliberal market rationality. Corporate rationality has been internalized by public policies and state institutions. The neoliberal discourse legitimates the market and delegitimizes the social, increasing social inequities. Public institutions become subordinate to undemocratically elected private interests, motivated by profit.
Today’s world order, resulting from the neoliberal globalization formula, is dysfunctional. The new economic polarization is between masses with no chance and transnationalized elites, integrated into global economic and informational flows.
The EU, as emblematic organism of liberal democracy, is eroded by chronical, structural democratic deficit, inherent to its institutions, perpetuated by the bureaucrats who manage them. Excluding citizens from decision-making, the technocratic elite in Bruxelles sets up a neoliberal, politically correct ideological monopoly. It deprives nations of their right to exercise their legitimate sovereign prerogatives, and turns the EU, from a community of nations, into an oligarchy imposing social engineering and civilizational transformations against their own traditions and national will.
Instead of a cure for all ills, politically correct neoliberalism has become a source of ills. We should preserve its best democratic traditions, but oppose its current pathologies.