Kauth Illiberalism

jasper theodor kauth
and d e s m o n d k i n g
Illiberalism
Abstract
“Illiberalism” has assumed an invigorated if unanticipated significance in the 21st
century. Aspects of illiberalism populate not only states long known as indifferent to
such principles as personal liberty, human equality and the rule of law but have
expanded in “liberal” democracies as their rulers employ purportedly “illiberal” prac-
tices more frequently than in the recent past. Indeed, the term “illiberal” seems to have
lost its negative aura in the context of state action. We contend that illiberalism
represents either an opposition to procedural democratic norms—as disruptive illiber-
alism—or an ideological struggle—termed ideological illiberalism. We first discuss the
term as used in the vast literature on regime types in the debate on authoritarian/
democratic hybrid-regimes. We then turn to the key puzzle in what one may call
“illiberalism studies”: the rise of illiberal practices and policies in liberal democracies.
To inform our analysis empirically, we investigate the ways in which illiberal arguments
and institutions (notably camps) were deployed historically and in immigration policy.
We conclude with an example of illiberal policy from modern day Hungary.
Keywords: Illiberalism; Liberalism; Immigration; Camps; Democracy.
The Illiberal Horizon
“ I L L I B E R A L I S M ” has assumed an invigorated if unanticipated

significance in the 21st century. Aspects of illiberalism populate not only
states long known as indifferent to such principles as personal liberty and
equality but have also expanded in “liberal” democracies as their rulers
employ purportedly “illiberal” practices more frequently than in the
recent past. Whereas liberalism in the form of liberal democracy was
gushingly claimed to be unstoppable in the years following the fall of the
Iron Curtain, some governments of EU member states are openly
365
Jasper Theodor Kauth, Nuffield College, University of Oxford,
[jasper.kauth@nuffield.ox.ac.uk]
Desmond King, Nuffield College, University of Oxford,
[desmond.king@nuffield.ox.ac.uk]
European Journal of Sociology, 61, 3, (2021), pp. 365–405—0003-9756/21/0000-900$07.50per art + $0.10 per page
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jasper theodor kauth and desmond king
transforming their countries into what Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor

Orbán proudly terms “illiberal democracies”.1 In June 2019, Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin proclaimed that “the liberal idea is obsolete”.2
In the same month, the US Ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein,
suggested that US President Donald Trump “would love to have the
situation that Viktor Orbán has”.3 Just a month earlier, President Trump
himself had reportedly likened Orbán to a twin brother.4
The term “illiberal” has lost its negative aura in the context of state
action. Practices such as the casual abrogation of citizenship revealed in
the British Windrush immigration scandal and its associated “hostile
environment” policy against foreigners, Donald Trump’s “Muslim
ban” and Mexican border camps, and France’s actions against Roma
in 2014 all reek of illiberalism—the selective exemption of vulnerable
groups from standard human rights and the rights associated with
citizenship. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) has established itself among the top parties nationally by
pushing a party programme marked by staunch ethno-nationalist
anti-immigration policies, and by running upending campaigns that
included suggestions to shoot “illegal immigrants” at the border to
prevent them from applying for asylum.5 Concurrently, the charge of
illiberalism has become a common refrain in most debates dividing
Western democracies: activists and politicians on the left and right alike
have come to accuse their opponents of secretly (or sometimes explic-
itly) pushing “illiberal” agendas.6
The charge of “illiberalism” is employed loosely in political debates to
taint opposing political viewpoints. Especially in countries with long
traditions of self-characterised “liberalism” and “liberty”, for example
in the UK or the US, such a line of attack can swiftly turn into questions
about an individual’s patriotism or loyalty and, eventually, into accusa-
tions of undemocratic behaviour. It is not the aim of this article to make
broad judgements about the validity of such accusations or, in general,
about the use of “illiberalism” as a rhetorical device. Nor is it our goal to
1 6
KRASTEV and HOLMES 2019. Illiberalism is not necessarily a right-
2
BARBER, FOY and BARKER 2019. wing phenomenon. Some critics have voiced
3
FOER 2019. their concerns that efforts to address struc-
4
SIMON 2019. tural inequalities could lead to illiberal prac-
5
STEFFEN 2016. Other obvious past and tices such as censorship. See, for example, the
contemporary examples of illiberal practices widely shared, discussed, and contested Let-
include: gender inequality, workfare pro- ter on Justice and Open Debate signed by over
grammes, eugenics, rights of felons, censor- 150 public intellectuals: ACKERMAN et al.
ship, to name but a few. 2020.
366
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illiberalism
discuss the general phenomenon of political polarisation. Instead, we

consider instances of illiberal practices at the hands of official state
authorities and the wider use of the concept from an analytical point
of view.
The relationship between liberalism and democracy has enjoyed fre-

quent and detailed scholarly attention over the past decades, but their
conceptual opposites are still shrouded in obscurity. Recent develop-
ments have corrected this omission. In The Light That Failed, political
scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes [2019] observe that “the
future was better yesterday.”7 The shared optimism of Western liberal
commentators, so prevalent during the 1990s, has faded. In the face of an
“illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and
beyond”,8 complacent optimism gave way to a sense of urgency and
impending doom. In a 2020 editorial, theorist Michael Freeden focuses
on the current dis-integration of democracy and the issue of tying dem-
ocratic procedures with the varying interpretations of the “manifold
liberalisms on offer”. According to Freeden, liberal democracy is caught
up in “rhetorical and ethical grandeur, linguistic and conceptual vague-
ness, and institutional confusion and fragility”.9 In this paper, we seek to
clear up some of that conceptual opaqueness about liberal democracy’s
illiberal foe.
The two strands of illiberalism
We argue that what is commonly referred to as “illiberalism” can be

separated into two phenomena marked by distinct logics. We suggest that
illiberalism represents either an opposition to procedural democratic
norms—as disruptive illiberalism—or constitutes part of an ideological
struggle—termed ideological illiberalism. Disruptive illiberalism can be
found in the disguised anti-democratic attacks of autocrats in the making.
On the other hand, ideological illiberalism, in the form of unequal
allocation of rights and duties, is a part of ideological clashes within
outwardly “liberal” democracies.
The focus here is on the concept of “illiberalism” and its varied
scholarly interpretations rather than on the reasons for its recent
7 9
KRASTEV and HOLMES 2019: 1. FREEDEN 2020: 10.
8
Ibid.: 6.
367
re-emergence.10 To this end, we will first discuss the term as it is used in

the vast literature on regime types as part of the debate on authoritarian/
democratic hybrid-regimes. We will then turn to the rise of illiberal
practices and policies in liberal democracies as the key puzzle in what
one may call “illiberalism studies”. How have scholars accounted for the
recurrence of illiberal tendencies even in some of the most liberal of
countries?
Our discussions of these different variants of illiberalism are neces-
sarily preliminary. All approaches to the concept, be it the analysis of
regime types or illiberal traditions, have prompted copious debates. The
scale of this literature is not helped by the fact that the usage of the term
commonly remains ambiguous and vague in many scholarly accounts nor
by the frequent empirical overlaps between disruptive illiberalism and
ideological illiberalism. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to
provide a heuristic that will help lay bare the logics behind these illiber-
alisms and ideally assist in analytically dis-entangling contemporary and
historical phenomena. We aim to provide researchers with a framework
to categorise phenomena that can be used in comparative or single case
studies to isolate underlying causal mechanisms.
The recurrence of illiberal immigration policy
To further narrow the concept and its empirical implications, we turn to

recent debates on immigration policies in Western democracies as a
pertinent political issue in which illiberal practices have been pro-
nounced and enduring. The American public intellectual William
Galston goes so far as to identify immigration as the primary source for
illiberal (and populist) politics.11
Since the 1990s, immigration has taken centre stage in the politics of
most advanced democracies. After the “asylum crisis” of the 1990s and
early 2000s, immigration is again salient, powered by the current “ref-
ugee crisis”. Over the course of the past five years, Europe, the United
States and Australia have witnessed an increase in anti-immigration
rhetoric, violence against migrants, and punitive migration policies. In
addition to other measures to curb immigration and enforce migration
restrictions, many states have reverted to the use of camps to forcibly
10
We are of course fully aware of the inte- contractualist formulation: see MILLS 1997.
11
gral place of illiberal ideas in the formation GALSTON 2018.
of “liberalism” especially in its Lockean
368
illiberalism
detain asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. These camps, we

argue below, are powerful expressions of illiberalism.
A recurring theme in these cases of ideological illiberalism is an
underlying hierarchical concept of humanity that casts migrants, and
other minorities, as standing outside the boundaries of rights to liberty
and equal treatment. Such instances of illiberalism are often sustained
by a deficient legal system and the erosion of rule of law principles from
executive overreach and the creation of extra-legal or spaces of excep-
tion.12 In this way, disruptive illiberalism can propel ideological
illiberalism. The current clashes over migration politics as well as the
restrictive and often illiberal responses by Western governments are by
no means unprecedented. By providing a historical perspective, we
contend that, rather than being entangled in an eternal struggle of good
versus evil, “liberal” democracies have time and again consciously
employed “illiberal” practices on behalf of what psychologists call
the “in-groups” at the expense of individuals in the designated
“out-groups”. We will close with recent developments in Europe and
the United States to show how the two strands of illiberalism threaten
liberal democracies today.
Disruptive Illiberalism and Hybrid Regimes
One of the most prominent usages of “illiberalism” in public political

discourse, not least due to its popularity among political figures such as
Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, goes back to a 1997 Foreign Affairs
article by the political scientist Fareed Zakaria. In developing his concept
of “illiberal democracy”, Zakaria distinguishes analytically between con-
stitutional liberalism, that is the legal guarantee of civil liberties, and
democracy, that is the “procedure for electing government” by means of
open and fair competitive multiparty elections.13 Contrary to the hopes
of many Western analysts in the early 1990s, Zakaria posits that democ-
racy does not necessarily lead to constitutional liberalism and that liberal
democracy might thus just be one of several possible varieties of democ-
racy.14 In fact, Zakaria interprets the liberal and democratic understand-
ings of governmental power as being in fundamental conflict. While
classic liberalism seeks to limit the reach of government power into the
individual’s private sphere through the separation of powers and legal
12
For a historical perspective, see GERSTLE detailed account in ZAKARIA 2003.
14
and KING 2020. ZAKARIA 1997: 28.
13
ZAKARIA 1997 followed up by the more
369
guarantees of basic rights, democracy emphasises the sovereignty of the

people and thus the concentration and maximisation of power in the
hands of the majority.15
Illiberal states
Zakaria, of course, is not the first commentator to identify these theoret-

ical tensions. He himself points to James Madison and the Federalist
Papers.16 Other scholars cite Carl Schmitt’s perilous severance of democ-
racy from (political) liberalism, John Stuart Mill’s description of the
tyranny of the majority, the changing historic interpretations of Locke’s
separation of powers, or the anti-pluralist and totalitarian potentials in
Rousseau’s writings on democracy and the general will, intensely debated
from the interwar period until the 1990s.17
In Freedom House’s 2018 report on Confronting Illiberalism, Nate
Schenkkan picks up Zakaria’s concept of illiberalism as “an ideological
stance that rejects the necessity of independent institutions as checks on
the government and dismisses the idea of legitimate disagreement in the
public sphere.”18 Distinct from full authoritarian regimes, illiberal
democracies still hold elections and do not subject their citizens to direct
violent oppression; yet options for voicing discontent are already limited,
participation in the political process is made increasingly difficult, and
the rule of law is frequently undermined to serve the government’s
objectives. The Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of
Gothenburg takes a similar approach in their V-Dem Dataset. Their
most recent findings in autumn 2020 stipulate that “the median govern-
ing party in democracies has become more illiberal in recent decades.
This means that more parties show lower commitment to political plu-
ralism, demonization of political opponents, disrespect for fundamental
minority rights and encouragement of political violence.” Notably, their
data shows that the US Republican Party has undergone a strong shift
toward illiberalism under the leadership of Donald Trump.19
15
Ibid.: 30. to Talmon, attempts to make all aspects of life
16
Ibid.: 30. political. The ultimate goal is to reach, with all
17
MILL 1864; NISBET 1943; BELLAMY and means necessary and against all opposition, a
BAEHR 1993; Bell 2014; MÜLLER 2018. Jacob messianic ideal social order. Talmon traces
Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy back the idea of totalitarian democracy to the
proposes a similar dichotomy. However, he 18th century and to thinkers such as Rousseau.
emphasises the ambivalence of “democracy” See TALMON 1952.
18
rather than that of liberalism. Whereas liberal SCHENKKAN 2018: 1.
19
democracy wants to protect the freedom of the LÜHRMANN et al. 2020: 1.
individual, totalitarian democracy, according
370
illiberalism
Illiberal democracies are thus symptoms of democratic backsliding.

They are diminished democracies, closer to transitioning or democratic-
authoritarian hybrid regimes rather than complete authoritarian or dem-
ocratic ones. When considering recent developments in self-described
illiberal democracies such as Hungary or Poland, the assault on indepen-
dent institutions of checks and balances is visible in plain sight. In both
countries, the governing parties have openly attempted to erode or to
abolish outright liberal democratic institutions such as a free press and an
independent judiciary.20 These countries have been reproached by the
European Union for such legal transgressions. The EU has recently
responded by tying its coronavirus relief payments to meeting commit-
ments to liberal and legal criteria. This strategy may prove too late and
too infirm a response.21
Zakaria’s use of the concept to describe alternative types of democ-
racies has drawn critical fire from democracy scholars as well as from
those focusing on philosophical theories of liberalism. In their 2002
article and 2010 book on “competitive authoritarianism”, Steven
Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that concepts such as “illiberal democ-
racy” display an inherent “democratizing bias”.22 While Zakaria used
his concept in a sweeping fashion to include “modest offenders like
Argentina [and] near-tyrannies like Kazakstan and Belarus,”23
Levitsky and Way maintain that regimes which resemble authoritarian
regimes rather than diminished democracies should be categorised
accordingly. After all, grouping such diverse cases as 1990s Argentina,
Romania, and Belarus under the same label could “obscure crucial
differences […] that may have important causal implications.”24 On
this argument, their alternative concept of “competitive authoritarian-
ism” is not meant to be a complete substitute for “illiberal democracy”
and similar categories, but offers a more analytical account of hybrid
regimes.25
20
During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, rule. In a July 2020 tweet, Trump mused that
both countries were accused of trying to dis- the US presidential elections could also be
rupt democratic procedures. In the run-up to postponed. See CIENSKI 2020; NOVAK 2020;
Poland’s presidential election, the ruling coa- ZURCHER 2020.
21
lition attempted to postpone the vote or to KHAN 2020; IGNATIEFF 2020; HALL
change it to an exclusively postal process. 2020
22
These attempts were met with serious political LEVITSKY and WAY 2002: 51, 2010.
23
and legal opposition. In Hungary, Viktor ZAKARIA 1997: 23.
24
Orbán was temporarily endowed with unprec- LEVITSKY and WAY 2002: 52.
25
edented emergency powers in April 2020. A similar argument can be found in
Despite a removal of these powers two months SCHEDLER’s 2002 article on “electoral author-
later, critics fear that it only solidified Orbán’s itarianism”.
371
Liberal democratic procedures
Levitsky and Way present four minimum criteria that democracies need
to fulfil:26 open, free, and fair elections of legislatures and executives;
universal suffrage; meaningful authority invested in elected bodies; and
the protection of political rights and civil liberties that guarantee equal
chances for political candidates contesting elections, such as freedom of
the press and association and protection of those voicing their opposition
to the government. These criteria also imply the rule of law as another
“intrinsic” dimension of democratic governance, which is often directly
linked to liberal democracy.27 Indeed, the rule of law and especially the
legal mechanisms of appeal inherent to the concept function as crucial
safeguards against the purposeful erosion of democratic norms. Their
absence or subversion, as we will argue later, is a strong indicator of the
presence of illiberalism.28
Competitive authoritarian regimes maintain the appearance of hon-
ouring these democratic criteria by, for example, generally allowing
political opposition and by holding competitive elections. Yet, incum-
bents routinely undermine elections so thoroughly that they can no
longer be termed “fair”. Rather than reverting to voter fraud or stuffing
ballot boxes, governments in competitive authoritarian regimes protect
their power in more subtle and open ways while still creating “an uneven
playing field between government and opposition.”29 Such measures
could include legal harassment of opposition candidates, independent
journalists, or academics, government supported corruption and the
misappropriation of public funds into the hands of supporters. It is often
difficult to differentiate competitive authoritarian regimes from either
democratic regimes that occasionally violate one or several of the four
democratic criteria to a minor degree, or fully authoritarian ones in which
alleged democratic institutions are mere façades.
The key difference between Levitsky and Way’s concept of “compet-
itive authoritarianism” and Zakaria’s “illiberal democracy” is not the
widths of the spectrums covered by their respective labels, but lies in
the definitions of democracy that they employ. The comparativists’
26
Building on Scott MAINWARING, Daniel “rule of law” has a bad brother termed the
BRINKS, and Aníbal PÉREZ-LIÑÁN’s [2001] “rule by law”. Whereas the rule of law con-
definition of democracy. strains the actions of governments, the rule by
27
MAINWARING, SCULLY and VARGAS CUL- law is an illiberal way to exercise power, more
LELL, 2010: 14; see NEUMANN 1942 for an or less arbitrarily, through laws and courts. See
early formulation of this link. WALDRON 2019.
28 29
According to some legal theorists, the LEVITSKY and WAY 2002: 53.
372
illiberalism
democracy-defining criteria include civil liberties.30 Zakaria rejects these

criteria for a purely electoral definition. He concedes that “elections must
be open and fair, and this requires some protections of freedom of speech
and assembly”31 but discounts anything more comprehensive as a mere
“badge of honour” which has no place in a procedural definition of
democracy.
The term “illiberal democracy,” we argue, is a misnomer based on a
too narrow understanding of (liberal) democracy. It is true that democ-
racy and liberalism are both contested terms carrying centuries of con-
ceptual baggage. As Freeden reminds us, the comparative importance of
the different aspects of democracy is “invariably observed through dif-
ferent ideological lenses” with adherents to different ideologies “jettison-
ing what is perceived as immaterial.”32 Nonetheless, it is important not to
reduce democracy to a procedural shell, devoid of political meaning.
Democracies must protect minorities, represent their voices, and protect
their chances of (re-)gaining power in the future. Rights and equal
treatment are thus key characteristics of democratic polities. Freedom
of speech and assembly alone do not guarantee free, fair, and competitive
elections. If the separation of power loses its meaning and the judiciary
turns into the long arm of the government, opposition politicians would
have to fear legal prosecution for their political activities, thwarting them
from competing in elections. If a government advances corruption in
order to undermine its opponent’s chances, or if media outlets fear
persecution whenever they publish opposition commentary, elections
are not “fair.”33 If large ethnic or religious minorities within a country
are officially or virtually excluded from participating in the democratic
process, that country should not be called democratic. The basic protec-
tion of civil liberties is thus necessary to ensure even the most minimal
procedural democratic criteria. Without reining in the power of the
elected to protect the opposition, democracy cannot function in the long
run. Illiberal democracies in Zakaria’s sense of the concept are not only
anti-liberal. They are essentially anti-democratic. Their illiberal prac-
tices to erase opponents’ liberties fundamentally disrupt the democratic
process while keeping up the appearance of honouring electoral pro-
cedures. An exclusive focus on electoral procedure loses sight of such
disruptive practices that can erode democracy through the back door.
30 32
MAINWARING, BRINKS and PÉREZ- FREEDEN 2020: 8.
33
LIÑÁN, 2001: 39-45. MAINWARING, BRINKs and PÉREZ-LIÑÁN,
31
ZAKARIA 1997: 25. 2001: 42-43.
373
Illiberal Practices
Whereas the debate sketched out in the foregoing paragraphs has centred
on country-level variations in regime types, Edward Gibson, Robert
Mickey, and Jacqueline Behrend and Laurence Whitehead have focused
instead on subnational variations.34 In their exploratory collection Illib-
eral Practices, Behrend and Whitehead single out problems of uneven
democratisation in large, and, especially, federal polities. Even though
democratisation processes might lead to the adoption of democratic
institutions at the national level, the authoritarian structures of the old
regime survive locally, supported by, for example, entrenched personal
linkages between elites, cronyism, clientelism, biased media landscapes,
gerrymandering, discriminating judges or the violent oppression of
minorities by local police forces.35
The case studies collected in Illiberal Practices point to the two
overarching questions of “[w]hat drives these differential democratiza-
tion processes at the subnational level in large federal democracies and,
second, where illiberal and authoritarian systems persist, how might
fuller democratization eventually come about.”36 Conceptually, the
authors emphasise that the boundary between democracy and authori-
tarianism is not pristine but rather resembles a “slippery slope” with
localised illiberal practices and structures at one end of the spectrum and
overtly and widespread anti-democratic ones at the other.37 While they
“may add up to authoritarian structures in some subnational units,”38
illiberal practices and structures at the subnational vein do not only exist
in cases of Gibson’s “subnational authoritarianism”39 or Mickey’s
“authoritarian enclaves.”40 Such practices also comprise informal non-
procedural institutions that “exclude or distort democratic participation
to such an extent that they negate the principles of federal democracy
proclaimed at the national level.”41
At first glance, Behrend and Whitehead’s use of illiberalism resembles
Zakaria’s description of “illiberal democracies.”42 But, in contrast to
Zakaria, they contend that illiberal practices and structures not only
transgress a liberal understanding of political rights and freedoms but
34
GIBSON 2005, 2012; MICKEY 2015; BEH- Jasper Theodor Kauth).
38
REND and WHITEHEAD 2016a, 2016b, 2018; BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2016a: 1.
39
MICKEY 2018b, 2018a; WHITEHEAD and BEH- GIBSON 2005.
40
REND 2018. MICKEY 2015.
35 41
BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2016b, 2017. BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2016a: 5.
36 42
BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2016a: 301. Ibid.: 8.
37
BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2017 (transl.
374
illiberalism
are indeed of a “less than democratic”43 nature. Their concern is thus

with illiberalism in otherwise liberal democracies, conceived as territorial
variations in the levels of democracy proper.
Subnational illiberalism?
Despite the title of their book, Behrend and Whitehead’s discussion of

“illiberalism” itself is modest. They do spell out their departure from
some of the earlier conceptions of the term. According to them, political
illiberalism is incompatible with democracy as it “involves actively dis-
criminatory features of subnational politics that severely limit or render
ineffective formal citizenship claims.”44 Identifying these illiberal prac-
tices and structures is daunting since the distinction between undemo-
cratic political illiberalism and other variations of illiberalism is rarely
razor sharp.45 For example, cases of social exclusion on the basis of
religious affiliation in a given locality are uncomfortable situations for
those affected but they do not qualify as anti-democratic structures per
se.46 Once such practices of “mild” social exclusion embed and move
from not being invited to community events to efforts to undermine the
democratic rights of certain minorities, they start to disrupt democratic
processes. Furthermore, as the authors point out, “[political illiberalism]
involves not just the absence of democratic guarantees but also, more
important, the active presence of structures and practices that serve to
obstruct the emergence of challengers and of constitutions.”47 Locally
entrenched illiberal practices and structures often fall short of constitut-
ing full authoritarian regimes and do not always justify the label “author-
itarian enclave”. Undoubtedly, Behrend and Whitehead are correct in
arguing that there are myriad ways to “restrict choice, limit debate, and
exclude or distort democratic participation”48 without reverting to for-
mal legislation or written regulations. Especially within otherwise dem-
ocratic states, subnational units might refrain from open conflict with
federal authorities by hiding illiberal practices behind empty assurances
of norm-adherence on paper. However, precisely demarking the nature
and intensity of such illiberalisms is even more bracing when investigat-
ing such informal, or “unwritten,” local structures and practices which
undermine democratic norms. This fetter notwithstanding, the move
away from the discussion of national level regime types by Behrend and
43 46
Ibid.: 1. BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2016a: 5-6.
44 47
Ibid.: 6. Ibid.: 6.
45 48
BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2017. Ibid.: 5.
375
Whitehead is a potentially productive contribution to the study of

democracy, and, together with works by Gibson and Mickey, opens up
avenues with which to investigate the transition of states from authori-
tarian regimes to democracies.
This discussion confirms that illiberalism is a vague concept, often used
intuitively to describe phenomena lying on a continuum between “good”
and “evil”. This opaqueness is partly due to the messiness of political
phenomena. On the other hand, illiberalism is commonly employed to
describe the obverse of some form of liberalism; and often without much
consideration for the theoretical traditions and nuances.49 The use of the
concept of “illiberal practices and structures” enables scholars to group
together practices as diverse as the violent repression of opposition protest
and systematically biased media coverage in local party elections.50 Both
undermine democratic norms in an illiberal fashion, yet they also exist on a
continuum ranging from occasional mild illiberalism in the latter case to
overt authoritarian practices in the former.
This proposition, in turn, points to a second observation regarding the
use of “illiberalism” in the loquacious literature on regime types. Moving
from an exclusively procedural definition of democracy towards one that
includes the protection of some liberal values has caused scholars to
equate the definitions of “illiberal” and “anti-democratic”. Rather than
being contrasted with “liberal” values, “illiberal” is often employed as a
qualifier of “undemocratic”: if a practice undermines the overall quality
of democracy in a polity without amounting to an outright undemocratic
regime, one might call it “illiberal”. While this usage does speak to the
intuition of a continuum of anti-democratic tendencies—ranging from
informal and diffuse illiberal practices to formal and rigid undemocratic
structures—in practice, referring to illiberalism alone risks obscuring the
relentlessly anti-democratic nature of these structures and practices.51
We thus propose the term disruptive illiberalism to describe anti-
democratic illiberal practices. As can be observed in cases such as Poland
and Hungary (but also in long established liberal democracies), the pri-
mary targets of such anti-democratic practices are what one might call
liberal institutions, as well as electoral norms and procedures: the
49
BELL 2014. anti-neoliberal, political agendas. The usage
50
BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2017. of the term “illiberal” by critics of the current
51
Political theorist Jan-Werner Müller Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Turkish gov-
emphasises a similar point in regard to politi- ernments has not led to any change of belief or
cians in Poland and Hungary who use the term behaviour by these actors—indeed, as indi-
“illiberal” to stylise their anti-democratic cated earlier, they have come to wear “illiber-
politics as merely conservative, that is alism” as a badge of honour. See MÜLLER
anti-progressive, anti-globalisationist, or 2016.
376
illiberalism
judiciary, the press, academia, and international NGOs. The aim of

disruptive illiberalism is to undermine democracy.
For accounts of “illiberalism”, observing subnational variations of
democracy leads to the second, more vexatious, dimension of the con-
cept: how do we account for illiberal exclusionary practices within liberal
democracies? Exclusionary practices try to determine who is deemed
worthy of being bestowed with liberal rights—they essentially determine
who is considered a full member of society. Based on ideological argu-
ments, such practices defy basic liberal criteria, such as equal treatment,
vis-à-vis outsiders without necessarily attempting to undermine the
quality of democracy for insiders. We call this second aspect of illiberal
politics ideological illiberalism.
Ideological Illiberalism and Liberal Democracies
The “liberal” pillar of “liberal democracies” is often understood to

comprise a much broader conception of liberalism than the narrow protec-
tion of a level electoral playing field and democratic procedures. “Illiberal”
is then often used to describe a range of political activities that allegedly
deviate from standard notions of civil, economic, or political liberalism. It is
invoked when one of these principles—such as an independent judiciary,
freedom of the press, the equal application of social policies, or the rights to
private property—is violated but not abolished outright.52
The quality of democracy in countries like the United States or the
United Kingdom should not be equated with the state of democracy in
Hungary, Poland, or even Russia. And yet both of those venerable liberal
democracies, as well as many others, display insouciant and long tradi-
tions of illiberal practices and policies that exclude certain sections of
society from the political process and subject others to differential treat-
ment on the grounds of their countries of origin, the colour of their skin,
their gender or sexual orientation, or other selective criteria.53 Illiberal
policies assume multiple shapes and encroach on the personal liberties of
select groups in all aspects of political and private life. They can include
exclusive tax benefits for heterosexual marriages,54 the criminalisation of
52
LEVITSKY and ZIBLATT 2018. ruling by Germany’s Constitutional Court in
53
The US in particular was enamoured by 2013, civil partnerships for same sex couples
the attractions of eugenic policies until the late were excluded from most tax credits granted to
1930s: HANSEN and KING 2013. heterosexual marriages. BUNDESVERFASSUNGS-
54
From their introduction in 2001 until a GERICHT 2013.
377
Sinti and Roma,55 or forced sterilisations.56 The political theorist Marc

Stears daubs this propensity the “politics of exclusion”.57
Ideological illiberalism
We propose the term ideological illiberalism to describe the practices that

emerge from the politics of exclusion. Despite frequent attempts by
supporters to justify exclusionary policies “in the name of liberalism”
or to defend them as necessary “illiberal means to liberal ends,”58 they
break with basic liberal criteria. Rather than being designed to under-
mine democratic institutions outright, ideological illiberalism is aimed at
demarking who is and who is not a full member of society based on
ideological constructions of the societal in- and out-groups.59 The
boundaries between these two variations of illiberalism are unambigu-
ous. While the disenfranchisement of felons in some US states may
rightly be called exclusionary and illiberal based on the disproportion-
ately racial dimension of the practice,60 it is not primarily aimed at
eroding democratic procedures overall but at creating unequal citizen-
ship. On the other hand, as Mickey describes, disenfranchising poll taxes
and literacy tests, targeting primarily African American but also some
poor white voters, were key techniques in erecting undemocratic subna-
tional authoritarian regimes in the American South during the late 19th
century.61
It is possible to find instances of ideological illiberalism and disruptive
illiberalism sutured. Yet disruptive illiberalism does not need to rest on
an ideational foundation beyond its anti-democratic nature. The practice
of gerrymandering in the US is evidently anti-democratic and creates
geographically unequal “voting power”. Gerrymandering, employed
predominantly by Republicans as they presently control most state
legislatures, mainly disadvantages minority-majority districts and
advantages pockets of rural voters. However, the primary feature of
gerrymandering as a technique is the preservation of power and the
creation of an un-level playing field. Krastev and Holmes, in discussing
the differences between Cold War East-West antagonism and the
55
For a historical discussion, see LUCASSEN arguing that exclusion and disruption are
1996; for a contemporary opinion, see MON- instances of the same political illiberalism at
BIOT 2020. different intensities, we suggest that ideologi-
56
HANSEN and KING 2013. cal illiberalism and disruptive illiberalism fol-
57
STEARS 2007. low distinct logics and aims.
58 60
KING 1999; TRIADAFILOPOULOS 2011. KATZENSTEIN, IBRAHIM and RUBIN,
59
This constitutes a key difference with 2010.
61
BEHREND and WHITEHEAD 2016a. Instead of MICKEY 2015: 38-40.
378
illiberalism
contemporary opposition of democracy and authoritarianism, argue that

“the proliferation of authoritarian regimes is real. But authoritarianism,
unlike communism, is not an ideology transferable across borders. It is an
oppressive, non-consultative and arbitrary style of rule.” They add: “the
concentration of all power in the hands of a single lifetime president is
profoundly illiberal, but it does not constitute an anti-liberal ideology
confronting Western liberalism on the plane of ideas.”62
Against liberalism
Ideological illiberalism is “illiberal” because it does exactly that. It is, of

course, not a straightforward task to identify the core ideas of liberalism.
Albeit, we posit that political liberalism, at its core and as it is commonly
ascribed to liberal democracies today, guarantees rights to personal
liberty as well as to equal treatment vis-à-vis an individual’s essential
characteristics.63 Political liberalism’s key concern is the individual and
their protection from government overreach. Yet these principles are not
without limits (as Mill fully recognized, and as do many subsequent
theorists adding footnotes to his essential analysis). Liberal societies
can legitimately coerce against those breaking the law in order to uphold
a maximum of overall liberty if the laws themselves rest on liberal and
democratic principles and as long as everybody has access to legal
recourse and due process. This, in turn, implies the rule of law: state
coercion is only legitimate on the basis and to the extent of legal statutes
and derivative secondary legislation. At least in theory, liberal democra-
cies have put in place high legal thresholds to prevent arbitrary and
excessive arrests, detention, or prison sentences. In the imaginary world
conjured by Rawlsianism, liberalism entails a redistributive element if
social and economic inequalities are to benefit the least advantaged within
a given society. Furthermore, every member of a society must have equal
access to public offices under conditions of equal opportunity.64
While liberal democracies are thus allowed, for example, to tax people
unevenly in order to level the societal playing field through redistribu-
tion, they are not allowed to restrict access to public services based on the
colour of one’s skin or one’s sexual orientation. Liberalism allows for a
limited intrusion into people’s lives on the basis of “what they do”, not
however, on the basis of “who they are”.65 To be sure, this is not a finite
62 64
KRASTEV and HOLMES 2019: 196. RAWLS 1999, 2005.
63 65
BARRY 1996; KING 1999; HANSEN and See also HANSEN and KING 2000.
KING 2000.
379
definition. The literature on political liberalism is vast and includes

discussions of many varieties of these core principles as well as debates
on many additional criteria.66 The scope of legitimate state interference is
especially contested as is the question of how far liberal guarantees and
freedoms can go before they limit democratic participation too greatly.
Further, it is important not only to analyse policies in theory but to
examine their application and consequences. The American criminal
justice system can serve as an example: investigation practices, criminal
prosecution, and prison sentences might be justifiable purely on liberal
grounds. When scratching beneath the surface, however, some of these
policies reveal non-random exclusionary and ideological forms. In the
US, African Americans, Latinos, and other minority groups are dispro-
portionally targeted by policies such as stop-and-frisk or the war on
drugs. Systemic racisms exist at all stages of the wider criminal justice
system, entangled with economic and spatial inequalities.67 And while
most of these policies are colour-blind on paper, they perpetuate an
illiberal system—and are often consciously designed to do so.68 An
apparently innocuous policy can thus become vividly illiberal through
its systematic unequal application in practice.
Ideological illiberalism is “ideological” not because it is in itself a “set
of political ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that involve the adoption of
practices which explain, support, justify or contest socio-political
arrangements, and which provide plans of action for public political
institutions.”69 Rather, ideological illiberalism emerges from ideological
constructions of inclusionary and exclusionary criteria. The unequal
treatment of homosexual and heterosexual partnerships in Western
democracies, for example, is often defended by pointing to Christian
values and their role in constituting marriage between men and women as
an institution more worthy of state protection and promotion. Other
exclusionary policies rest on ethno-national identities, on beliefs about
differential humanity and the West’s “civilizing” supremacy over the rest
of the world,70 or on long-standing racial hierarchies that still underpin
systemic racisms even if the associated legal language has been divested of
overt racisms.71 In addition to drawing exclusionary boundaries, ideo-
logical illiberalism can expand the limits of state interference to the
disadvantage of select groups.
66 69
MULHALL and SWIFT 1996. FREEDEN 1998: 749.
67 70
E.g. GOTTSCHALK 2015. MAYBLIN 2017.
68 71
KING and SMITH 2011; Miller 2014. RANA 2010, 2015.
380
illiberalism
Not all illiberal policies can be traced to a distinct and coherent set of
political beliefs, but they do rest on particular ideas about society. Notably,
they often rest on exclusionary aspects of liberalism itself. As one scholar
writes, ideological illiberalism arises from ideological negotiations over
two fundamental questions of liberal democracy: “[f]irst, who should be a
[full] member of the polity? And, second, once accorded citizenship what
obligations are incurred […]? The latter is an issue which results in two
sorts of public policy: first, social engineering schemes to alter the eco-
nomic and social circumstances facing citizens […], and, second, attempts
directly to modify the behaviour of individuals by altering the balance of
rights and obligations defining their relationship to the state”.72
The genesis of ideological illiberalism
Scholarly accounts of ideological illiberalism not only examine the par-

ticular answers given to these questions in different polities, but notably
also focus on the origins of illiberalism in liberal democracies. Two
general theoretical approaches can be identified: first, illiberalism could
emerge from conflicting ideologies. Rogers Smith’s “multiple traditions”
thesis posits that US politics is characterised by conflicting political
traditions with illiberalism strongly anchored in what he terms the
ascriptive tradition.73 In his influential article and book on US civic
ideals and visions of American citizenship, Smith argues that American
political culture has been shaped by the three conflicting traditions of
liberalism, republicanism, and, crucially, ascriptive Americanism.74
Before Smith, the stories that were told of US political development
almost exclusively resembled a whiggish teleological account of over-
coming exclusion and discrimination through the ever more generous
expansion of “the nation’s inclusive ‘core’ principles”.75 Yet this tradi-
tional view of prevailing liberal values, initially conceived by Tocqueville
and later fleshed out by Louis Hartz,76 fails to account for the recurrence
and resilience of “illiberal ideas and practices” based on “ascriptive
inequalities”—namely the unequal treatment of women as well as African
Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, immigrants,
and other ethnic and non-ethnic minorities.77 Against the flawed inter-
pretation of the United States as the global benchmark for the rise of
liberal democracy over feudalism, religious intolerance, British
72 75
KING 1999: 291. SMITH 1993: 557.
73 76
SMITH 1993, 1997. HARTZ 1955.
74 77
Ibid. SMITH 1993: 558.
381
imperialism, Soviet communism, and, eventually, racism, Smith

unravels a more complex analysis of American political development.
Americans “share a common culture” which is made up of three political
traditions interacting in “inconsistent combinations” and “accompanied
by recurring conflicts”.78
In The Two Faces of American Freedom and a follow-up article, Aziz
Rana goes one step further to conclude that American liberalism, from
the beginning, was built on the exploitation of outsiders, predominantly
Native Americans and enslaved Africans and their descendants.79 This
white settler empire was first transformed at the turn of the 20th century,
when American expansionism looked outside the American continent.
Stylised as an anti-imperial tutelage of native populations, the US sought
to increase its grip over countries like the Philippines. At home, after the
Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s through to the 1970s, American
political development was further re-interpreted as having always strived
for being an inclusionary civic nation. This popular misreading of Amer-
ican history, Rana persuasively contends, has protected the routinely
brutal illiberal institutions built on the premise of white settler suprem-
acy from the fundamental reform they would have needed: the electoral
college, life tenure for Supreme Court justices and equal Senate repre-
sentation for each state regardless of population size, aided first enslave-
ment, then Jim Crow and now systemic racism.80 On a more abstract
level, Rana suggests that, rather than conflicting with each other, Amer-
ica’s liberal tradition was consciously built upon the illiberal exclusion of
outsiders.
Other authors suggest an even stronger entanglement of illiberalism
with liberalism itself, building the discomforting claim that liberalism is
marked by a hybrid character allowing for ideological illiberalism to arise
from, seemingly, liberal arguments.81
Liberalism’s inherent tensions
In his book In the Name of Liberalism, King argues that unresolved

tensions within liberal democracy itself provide the foundations for
illiberal policies. Crucially, illiberal policies are often linked to liberal
values via the assumptions liberal theories make about individuals
78
Ibid. 2010. A third, separate approach is what Marc
79
RANA 2010, 2015. Stears terms the “liberal multiplicity” thesis
80
TAYLOR 2020. [STEARS 2007]. It holds that liberalism has
81
See for example KING 1999; KATZNEL- always been contested which means that the
SON 2005; KATZENSTEIN, IBRAHIM and RUBIN, boundaries of inclusion are in constant flux.
382
illiberalism
capable of fully participating in liberal societies and the obligations they

bear as members of those societies: “since liberal principles accord such
importance to rationality, individual autonomy and choice, and to
knowledge, these constitute the ground for illiberal policies […] in ways
which can be justified with liberal principles.”82 Liberal demands, redis-
tribution, and the emphasis of rights dependent on certain responsibil-
ities of an imagined social contract can open the floodgates to
illiberalism.83 Historically, the tension between individual liberty and
equal treatment and the sort of demands described here has led to
numerous attempts to manipulate individual behaviour and to alter the
relationship between the state and the individual whose freedom liberal
democracies purportedly protect.
Examples of such liberal-illiberal transgressions include widespread
coerced sterilisation based on eugenic pseudo-science as well as workfare
and welfare programmes that impose unduly harsh conditions on par-
ticipants. In 19th century Britain, welfare recipients would lose their
right to vote and in 1990s New Jersey, single mothers would lose benefits
if they had another child while receiving state assistance.84 In Germany,
debates surrounding the Hartz unemployment programmes display sim-
ilar tensions: sanctions on welfare recipients that do not fulfil obligations
such as regularly meeting advisors or accepting job offers were recently
struck down by the Federal Constitutional Court in a divisive ruling.85
The exclusion of people with disabilities from many aspects of public life
or the abrogation of full citizenship rights would be examples of pater-
nalistic illiberalism at the hands of liberal democracies.
Partially revoking rights on the grounds of an individual’s incompat-
ibility with a social contract—or due to failures to fulfil civic obligations—
is an illiberal practice with a long tradition in liberal democracies. From
today’s perspective, some of these policies seem more justified, more
“common sense”, and less “illiberal” than others. However, all these
examples use the same distinct liberal justifications: they are based on
liberal demands placed on the individual and aimed at engineering a
society more in line with varying aspects, and varying interpretations,86
of liberalism. Albeit, they still break with the basic and defining liberal
commitments to equal treatment and liberty and are thus “genuinely
illiberal”.87 Debates over the extent of legitimate state action and the
practical answers to the tensions described here give meaning to liberal
82 85
KING 1999: 26. DPA 2019.
83
See also the review by STEARS 2001: 86
See the “liberal multiplicity” thesis by
223-224. STEARS 2007.
84 87
KING 1999: 302. STEARS 2001: 223.
383
democracy. According to King, they resemble “tests” which “should

warn us that liberal democracy is a dynamic not a static set of institutions
and values, the content of which should never be assumed but instead
periodically scrutinized”.88
Historically, advocates of illiberal policies had no need to veil them in
a liberal guise. In liberal democracies today, however, the focus often falls
on excising these obvious illiberal legacies; and, as structural racism in the
US and colonial heritage in many European countries show, this agenda
faces robust oppositions.
Illiberalism rooted in liberalism itself is more evasive and hidden,
whether accidentally or by design, beneath language abounding with
references to liberal ideals. These thicker notions of how liberalism itself
bears the potential of exclusionary practices not only add a second
analytical layer to the study of ideological illiberalism. They also alert
us to masked illiberal practices. Nowhere are these conflicts stronger than
in the realm of immigration policy and in the related decisions about
access to membership in liberal democracies.
Illiberal Policies Against Outsiders
All states take decisions about whom to admit to their territory and,
subsequently, to societal membership. These decisions are necessarily
decisions about inclusion and exclusion and thus especially pertinent in
the discussion of ideological illiberalism.
We examine immigration for two reasons. First, practices against
foreigners seeking admission to a country’s territory are, in the first
instance, not aimed at democratic procedures and are less likely to overlap
with disruptive illiberalism. Mirroring Rana’s model of America’s
two-faced freedom, we observe that proponents might even justify the
exclusion of outsiders by pointing to the protection of democratic pro-
cedures.89 This, of course, is not to say that exclusionary practices against
other marginalised groups are not significant or not as widespread.
Secondly, their very status as “outsiders”—geographically, culturally,
financially, legally, etc.—makes asylum seekers and prospective
immigrants vulnerable to illiberal practices. Their right to liberty and
equal treatment does not rest on their status as citizens but on their
humanity, a seemingly obvious characteristic which, nevertheless, many
88 89
KING 1999: 308. RANA 2015: 266.
384
illiberalism
states, including liberal democracies, frequently disregard. Migrants’

lack of political representation makes it impossible for them to exert
direct political pressure. Even though liberal democracies usually sub-
scribe to the protection of a wide notion of human rights, their standard
of treatment of foreigners—and especially the most vulnerable ones—
often displays an astounding disregard for those principles. Rather than
defending their status as full citizens against illiberal onslaughts, the
rights of immigrants and refugees vis-à-vis the states they aspire to enter
are often few and fragile to begin with.
While some overtly illiberal practices, such as selecting migrants
according to eugenicist pseudo-science or racial hierarchies,90 have
become less pervasive due to internal civil rights struggles and the
diffusion of liberal international norms, others, less obvious ones, have
become more widespread. The current use of migrant detention camps,
we argue, is such an illiberal practice: camps constitute spaces in which
asylum seekers are deprived of their liberty through administrative rather
than legal procedures. In this section, we will first briefly consider the
normative debate on immigrant selection before turning to a discussion
of migrant detention camps.
Illiberal immigrant selection
Even proponents of open borders like the political philosopher Joseph

Carens grant states the right to limited border controls.91 As Stephanie
Silverman shows in her doctoral thesis, The Normative Ethics of Immi-
gration Detention in Liberal States, Carens implicitly agrees with advo-
cates of a nationalist exclusive liberalism such as the theorists David
Miller or Michael Walzer.92 The key differences between these theorists
centre on the frequency and scope to which liberal democracies may
legitimately employ immigration restrictions under liberal principles.93
Whereas Carens would only permit temporary limitations on free move-
ment in exceptional cases of overpopulation or in circumspections of
acute danger to the “public order,” for Miller partial immigration poli-
cies based on national self-determination and national culture are com-
patible with liberal nationalism.94 Walzer and Miller want all those
90 94
See e.g. KING 1999; JOPPKE 2005; FITZ- Since Miller believes a sense of national
GERALD and COOK-MARTÍN 2014; FITZGER- solidarity warrants exclusion criteria (though
ALD et al. 2018. not the use of discriminatory rules) this in
91
CARENS 1987. practice may result in supporting the white
92
SILVERMAN 2013; WALZER 1983; majority ethos and population size in most
MILLER 2007, 2008, 2016. Global North societies [2016].
93
SILVERMAN 2013: 172-174.
385
admitted to a country for longer periods to be able to assume full

membership eventually if they wish to do so. This criterion implies a
direct link between immigrant selection and the interest of the present
community to regulate national-cultural evolution. Whereas Walzer puts
the right to communal self-determination above liberal claims to equal
treatment and thus defends the selection of immigrants according to
ethnic “desirability,” a contention the sociologist Christian Joppke calls
“stunningly illiberal,”95 Miller is more nuanced and warns against the
use of prejudiced selection criteria. In order to avoid establishing illiberal
ethno-cultural hierarchies, Miller argues, states must refrain from select-
ing immigrants on the grounds of ethnicity or initial political attitudes
(if they are not immediately threatening to the community). Instead,
“although national values and national priorities can reasonably be
invoked when deciding how many immigrants to take in over any given
period of time, when it comes to selecting among the applicants, only
‘neutral’ criteria such as the particular skills a person has can legitimately
be used.”96
In the introduction to his book Selecting by Origin, Joppke contrasts
Walzer’s and other arguments in defence of ethnic selection with the
realities of political communities. Liberal democracies are distinguished
by a multitude of dynamic communities: “The notion of a master ‘com-
munity’ united by a ‘way of life,’ which stands to be defended at the
immigration front, does not adequately describe the fragmented, chaotic,
and multiple worlds we live in.” Joppke rightly dismisses this view as
“sociologically naïve”, since a defining feature of liberal democracies
must include neutrality about the “right” way of life.97
These theoretical concerns have not prevented liberal democracies from
engaging in illiberal immigration policies, almost entirely disadvantaging
prospective immigrants of colour based on ideas of racial hierarchies. The
discrediting of eugenics and biological racisms as bases for official state
policy permit other forms of illiberal liberal-ascription to fill the void.
Whereas most states now refrain from openly discriminating against
certain ethnic groups in their selection procedures, Western democracies
today claim to be defending themselves against ascriptively incompatible
cultures. As described by political scientist Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos,
aggressive civic integrationist policies through which non-Western
immigrants are to be “compelled” to accept liberal “Judeo-Christian”
95
JOPPKE 2005: 9-10. abused as proxies to select migrants according
96
MILLER 2008: 389. In reality, of course, to socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
such seemingly “neutral” criteria could also be 97
JOPPKE 2005: 11.
386
illiberalism
values, might be warranted to defend liberal values against imminent and

well-defined individual threats.98 Once adopted more widely, as some
proponents demand, aggressive integration courses quickly conflict with
those liberal values: by employing force and sanctions instead of softer
forms of persuasion and neutrality to integrate immigrants into Western
liberal democracies, “civic integrationists risk alienating the very groups
they seek to integrate”.99 Illiberal integration policies demanding full
assimilation under threat of sanctions reflect the same tensions inherent
to liberalism that we describe above. This is true for demands to restrict
(temporary and indefinite) immigration to persons from cultures judged
compatible with Western liberal democracies. Basing immigration and
integration policies on “defending” liberal values against groups of “illib-
eral” outsiders risks falling into an illiberal trap, that is “conflating the
pursuit of security with the objectives of immigrant integration policy,
reducing a complex and dynamic process into an uncomplicated two-sided
relationship pitting a civilised and superior ‘us’ against a caricatured
‘them’”.100
While there may be a valid normative debate about immigrant selec-
tion, authors writing on the ethics of asylum mostly agree that states must
not select among refugees and (legitimate) asylum seekers in principle, as
their individual need would supersede national claims to admission.101
In practice, liberal democracies have created an “organized hypocrisy”
around their obligations to assist refugees:102 even though most accept
the obligation to help those in need on paper, they try to deter those that
seek help in practice.
Sociologist David FitzGerald documents how the states of the Global
North have created almost insurmountable barriers shielding them from
those obligations. Mechanisms of remote control, such as visas, airline
passenger regulations, buffer zones, refugee camps, maritime cordons and
so forth, have created a global “architecture of repulsion” against asylum
seekers.103 As theorist Matthew Gibney argues, the fact that only “some
lucky individuals manage to slip through the net of restrictions” is not seen
as evidence for the need for reform but rather as an indicator that “the
institution of asylum is alive and well”.104 Even those refugees that reach
the Global North despite the adversities of life-threatening treks and boat
journeys and against all the odds created by the “architecture of repulsion”
face further fetters. Following a century-long tradition of “foreigner
98 102
TRIADAFILOPOULOS 2011. Ibid.: 229.
99 103
Ibid.: 874. FITZGERALD 2019.
100 104
Ibid.: 875. GIBNEY 2004: 229.
101
See e.g. GIBNEY 2004.
387
camps”, Western democracies have created illiberal detention centres

within their borders to detain asylum seekers while processing their appli-
cations.
The historical evolution of immigration and camps
The mechanisms employed by liberal democracies to repel asylum

seekers as well as other “undesirable” migrants have created a restrictive
“non-entrée regime” directed against persons from the Global South.105
Their institutional development started over a century ago and, despite
the proliferation of human rights norms and the successive opening up of
internal EU borders after World War II, such confinement systems
expanded and endured.
Historians debate when and why exactly the liberal, open-border
regime of the 19th century, characterised by scant controls and general
free movement for all who could afford it, transformed into the restricted
regime of general suspicion migrants face today.106 Towards the end of
the 19th century, the US started expanding local policies against Asian
immigrants into restrictive national immigration policy. Driven by xeno-
phobic agitation, the illiberal 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act excluding
Chinese workers was a major step towards the racialisation and politici-
sation of national immigration policy.107
Over the next decades, all immigrant-receiving countries across the
Western world followed the American example. Motivated by a damning
mix of labour-market protectionism, welfare state policies, and racist and
often antisemitic tropes, more or less disguised beneath alleged “security
concerns,” they enacted increasingly restrictive migration regulations.
Many of these countries were of course simultaneously exporting mil-
lions of their own citizens as colonisers to imperially controlled colo-
nies.108 In the UK, the 1905 Aliens Act, which mainly limited Jewish
immigration from Eastern Europe, broke with a tradition of liberalism
towards migrants, especially regarding those claiming political asylum
(a concept not fully enshrined in international law at the time).109 The
interwar period constitutes the decisive moment in this development.
Under the shadow of the Great War and in the face of large-scale
migrations from Eastern Europe, the countries of Europe as well as the
United States decisively ended the “liberal moment in the history of
105
CHIMNI 1998. questions about how migration is conceptual-
106
ZOLBERG 1997; KAUTH 2018. ized, see ACHIUME 2017.
107 109
LEE 2002, 2019; KING 2000. HANSEN and KING 2000.
108
This colonial legacy raises crucial
388
illiberalism
international migration.”110 In the absence of any legal protection or

political support groups, migrants, including Jewish refugees fleeing
from pogroms and civil war in former Czarist Russia, were at the mercy
of national governments who decided, often arbitrarily, who was allowed
to stay and who was sent back.111
Among the policies put in place by Western states to thwart migration,
such as mass group deportations of undocumented refugees, border
closures and abrogation of visa programmes, aggressive border controls,
ethnic-based quotas, the exclusion from legal recourse, and others, one
practice stands out as crushingly illiberal: camps. Camps built to detain
foreigners and national minorities signalled the exclusionary policies of
states against targeted groups of immigrants and asylum seekers. From
the beginning at Ellis and Angel Island, these camps were not only used
to process immigration and asylum applications but also to discourage
migration altogether;112 to coerce migrants into returning to their coun-
tries of origins, regardless of their individual circumstances; and, more-
over, to openly display a heavy-handed approach against outsiders in
times of public anti-migration sentiments.
The use of camps in migration politics has not changed much since the
interwar period. Indeed, as several researchers have noted, the practices
of detaining foreigners during admission or before deportation has
spread dramatically in liberal democracies in recent years.113 What are
the distinctive features of detention camps, and what makes these camps
illiberal? To find answers to these questions, we first need to understand
the varied usage of camps in 20th century politics.
Illiberal camps and camps for illiberalism
Historically, the systematic use of camps originated during World War

I. A key factor in the spread of the camp phenomenon around the globe
was the aggressive hyper-nationalisation of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries which led to the omnipresent categorisations of peoples into
familiar and alien, friend and foe, civilised and barbarian. Turning the
combatants in the opposite trenches into enemies personifying absolute
evil did not only set the scene for the unprecedented use of weaponry but
also created a need for the more public display of prisoners in camps.
110 113
ZOLBERG 1992: 322; LUCASSEN 1998; WELCH and SCHUSTER 2005a, 2005b;
MOYA 1998; KAUTH 2018. BERNARDOT 2008; SILVERMAN and MASSA
111
KAUTH 2017. 2012; LEERKES and BROEDER 2013; NETHERY
112
LEE 2019. and SILVERMAN 2015.
389
Rather than being limited to war, camps quickly became part of the
peacetime toolset deployed to police and control perceived enemies of
the nation, whether internal or external.114 Their widespread use led the
late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to hyperbolically crown the 20th
century as the “Century of Camps”, and thus a wicked perversion of
modernity.115 Camps have become a shorthand characterization for
states’ mistreatment of the vulnerable. This interpretive, linguistic link
recurred recently when US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
sparked controversy with her description of detention camps for “illegal
immigrants” at the US-Mexican border.116 In their 2000 book, Joël
Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot pick up Bauman’s proposition and describe a
global history of “Le Siècle des Camps” in an encyclopaedic handbook
form. They distinguish three types of camps: internment camps,117
concentration camps, and extermination camps. Each of these types are
shown to follow distinct functions ranging from the isolation of a group
of “suspects” to the modification of society by eliminating “undesired
elements”.118 Historians view the relationship between different camp
systems as best described by models of loose transnational institutional
learning and dynamics of internal radicalisation.119
The American deportation camps of today cannot be equated with and
do not follow the same goals as the industrialised extermination camps
used by Nazi Germany in the mid-20th century.120 But the use of
camps––involuntary confinement––is now widespread in state responses
to migrant and refugee claims and in repressing national minorities, and
is in need of more scholarly attention from historians, sociologists, and
political scientists alike. To date, only a few studies have examined camps
114
KRAMER 2013. under the Special Powers Act 1922, and
115
BAUMAN 1995. excluded from review under the European
116
MCWHORTER 2019. Christian Goeschel Convention on Human Rights by an exemp-
and Nikolaus Wachsmann point out: tion the UK lodged in 1957 with the Council
“[N]owhere was the horror of the camps more of Europe. The legacy and political damage of
evident than in Auschwitz, which has become internment has been widely documented
shorthand for concentration camps (and Nazi [PATTERSON 2002, ch. 8].
118
terror more generally)” [GOESCHEL and KOTEK and RIGOULOT 2000; also avail-
WACHSMANN 2010: 518] . able in German: KOTEK and RIGOULOT 2001.
117 119
The British government introduced Rather than falling back simply on
internment without charges or trial against direct lines of heritage evoked by the close
the Nationalist community in Northern association of camps with the name
Ireland in 1971 when 342 Nationalists were Auschwitz: GREINER and KRAMER 2013, see
arrested overnight on 9-10 August. The policy the introduction by Kramer.
120
continued until December 1975 by which The Nazi death camps marked the
time close to 2,000 people had been interned, height of inhumanity in the “global history
including 100 who were Unionists rather than of concentration camps” [PITZER 2017].
Nationalists. The policy was legally justified
390
illiberalism
as a historical and global phenomenon, with even fewer studies available

in English.121
In Camps d’Étrangers, Marc Bernardot studies French camps since
World War I and provides readers with a detailed discussion of existing
approaches to the phenomenon of camps as a policy instrument to detain
foreigners.122 Bernardot posits that camps have been intertwined with
the development of modern states and the increasing control and sur-
veillance of their territories. By means of the concept of “foreigner
camps”, as opposed to the more commonly used term “internment
camp”, Bernardot formulates a new analytical category that points
directly to the use of camps as part of restrictive migration policies and
the exclusion of those states deemed to be alien and deviant:
The camp has also been trivialised and spread throughout the countries of the
South as the regular space for refugees. It has even become the humanitarian space
par excellence. However, the concept of the camp has developed differently in the
countries of the West. It has once again become usable as a repressive space due to
the framing of migration as a menace linked to terrorism.123
Greiner and Kramer’s Die Welt der Lager offers a robust analytical
approach by focusing explicitly on the institutional dynamics of
camps.124 Their general definition of concentration camps as places
“for the mass housing of individuals or groups that are being separated
from society as security threats” is narrowed down by their focus on
camps with a repressive function.125 The authors of the case studies
collected in their volume do not discuss foreigner camps specifically
but their general findings also apply in our case.
From a more contemporary perspective, the work by political scientist
Stephanie Silverman and her collaborators on the normative ethics of
detention facilities, as well as their empirical discussions of camps, is
compelling.126 In their introduction to Immigration Detention, Amy
Nethery and Silverman delineate defining practices of illiberal camps:
immigration detention is an administrative rather than a legal-punitive
measure, yet in more and more countries, detention facilities resemble
prisons (and, in some countries, they are one and the same). Perversely,
121 123
Andrea Pitzer’s journalistic account of Ibid.: 214 (transl. Jasper Theodor
“a global history of concentration camps” and Kauth).
Dan Stone’s recent “short” and “very short” 124
GREINER and KRAMER 2013.
introductions to concentration camps remain 125
Of which Guantanamo would be a fit-
the only English language publications that ting modern day example. See KRAMER 2013:
situate individual camp systems within a wider 8 (transl. Jasper Theodor Kauth).
126
historical phenomenon [PITZER 2017; STONE SILVERMAN and MASSA 2012; SILVER-
2017, 2019]. MAN 2013; NETHERY and SILVERMAN 2015.
122
BERNARDOT 2008.
391
migrants in detention camps in countries like the UK or the US, despite

explicitly not being detained for a crime, often have far fewer rights and
their treatment is far less regulated than that of prisoners. Many of the
legal procedures that would otherwise ensure liberal standards of equal
treatment, protection of personal liberty, and the rule of law are
absent.127 Migrants are either practically unable to seek legal recourse
due to administrative barriers or their access to legal recourse is
barred.128
States justify migrant detention predominantly by pointing to the
administrative challenges of assessing the legitimacy of the application
made by asylum seekers. During the periods between arrival and admis-
sion of potential asylum seekers—as well as between refusal and depor-
tation—governments claim to have a superseding interest in preventing
absconding that allows them administratively to curtail the individual
liberty of migrants. This claim is empirically spurious. Silverman shows
convincingly that alternatives to camps exist and that community super-
vision programmes have proven to be more effective in preventing flight
from administrative decisions while also infringing less on the individual
liberty of asylum seekers.129 However, even if, in some cases, the risk of
absconding was so high as to justify detention over alternative pro-
grammes, this would still not save the current system of migrant deten-
tion from the charge of illiberalism. In reality, the reason for setting up
camps and centres is not only to facilitate and expedite administrative
procedures but also to achieve wider immigration goals.
These insights correspond closely to the underlying logic of ideolog-
ical illiberalism. Tightly connected to racial hierarchies, migrants, today,
are still being categorised and selected according to systems of “differ-
ential humanity”.130 Not dissimilar to the construction of mortal polit-
ical enemies during World War I, as described by Greiner and Kramer,
pundits and politicians routinely evoke images of the “uncivilized” to
conjure a lethal security threat to their nations. Ever since the beginning
of the 20th century, immigration has been linked to such security con-
cerns.131 Despite their vulnerability and involuntary flight from dire
situations, asylum seekers have often been met with suspicion and hos-
tility. In the countries of the Global North, immigration has come to be
associated with “alien invasions”.132 In addition to the administrative
127 129
SILVERMAN 2013; NETHERY and SILVERMAN 2013.
130
SILVERMAN 2015. MAYBLIN 2017.
128 131
See e.g. KING and VALDEZ 2011 or the See, for example, BOSWELL 2007: 89.
concept of “spaces of exception,” in GERSTLE 132
ZOLBERG 1997; POLAKOW-SURANSKY
and KING 2020. 2017.
392
illiberalism
functions, foreigner camps thus take up a symbolic repressive function in

the system of migration control. Crucially, they signal symbolic restric-
tionism133 to their own population and symbolic deterrence to potential
future immigrants and asylum seekers.134
Both of these secondary justifications are fundamentally illiberal.
They revoke the liberty of entire groups of people and turn them into
political symbols of a threat that needs to be contained. Especially in
situations of high political saliency—be it 2020 or 1920—governments
react to anti-immigration pressure from the electorate with symbolic
actions against migrant groups.135 Creating prison-like structures to
detain migrants of unknown status is an effective way of showing action
and displaying a heavy-handed approach, regardless of how effective the
policy is. Once political language and rhetoric establish a link between
migration and crime, justifying these group-based infringements on
personal liberty against non-criminals as temporary emergency measures
becomes acceptable but sparks a dangerous downward spiral of ever more
illiberal detention programmes: “immigration detention communicates
just as clearly to domestic audiences as it does to asylum seekers on their
journeys. For this reason, we can observe a ‘race to the bottom’ […],
whereby political parties joust for the most restrictive asylum policies to
demonstrate their commitment to maintaining the ‘integrity’ of state
boundaries.”136 Crucially, symbolic restrictionism and symbolic deter-
rence both encourage states to treat immigrants badly and consciously to
create and tolerate conditions that are beneath minimum standards of
living, as the situation at the US-Mexican border clearly shows.137
Configured illiberalism
Detention camps for migrants are strong manifestations of ideological

illiberalism. Even though liberal democracies argue that they are neces-
sary features of a rational administrative system for the scrutinizing of
immigration claims, they violate core liberal values and undermine the
rule of law. Oftentimes, the only escape from detention of an indefinite
133 137
We borrow this term from James F. SERWER 2019. In 2019, the US revised
Hollifield et al. who refer to frequent ineffec- its policy on the detention of undocumented
tive symbolic anti-immigration policies by migrants: they are now immediately returned
governments in reaction to their citizens’ to the other side of the Mexican border after
anti-immigration sentiments; see HOLLIFIELD, capture. This has led to large, unorganised,
MARTIN and ORRENIUS 2014. and highly dangerous camps on the Mexican
134
SILVERMAN and MASSA 2012. side of the border. See O’TOOLE 2019 in col-
135
LEERKES and BROEDER 2013; HOLLI- laboration with Glass, O’TOOLE and GREEN
FIELD, MARTIN and ORRENIUS 2014. 2019.
136
NETHERY and SILVERMAN 2015: 6.
393
and unknown length is for asylum seekers to return to their home—a

place many left due to unbearable circumstances.
For Bernardot, detention camps are part of three wider developments
which we suggest are part of ideological illiberalism in liberal democra-
cies. First, they are evidence of the willingness of states to circumvent
protective legal institutions by creating extra-legal spaces and by
strengthening administrative and executive action to display symbolic
actions. Secondly, they show how the process of institutionalisation of
administrative practices has led to the formalization of arbitrary practices
and not to their eradication. And thirdly, they show how the interplay of
different policy areas, in this case security and migration, can lead to
the illiberal conflation of policy objectives: the war on terror is used to
justify detention and surveillance—in other words administrative crim-
inalisation—of those that the right to asylum is supposed to protect from
persecution and criminalisation in their countries of origin.138
Configured as spaces of exception in which the politics of exclusion are
plainly visible renders detention camps as examples of ideological illib-
eralism.139 From their origin, camps have displayed exclusion in action.
Interwar Germany is a pertinent example for these early post-World War
I developments. As xenophobic resentments against Eastern European
Jews rose in the early 1920s, the democratic state and federal govern-
ments of the Weimar Republic decided to create “concentration camps”
(sic!) to detain refugees. Both practical and humanitarian considerations
and Germany’s fraught international position after World War I, made
the forced deportation of Jewish refugees impossible. The idea of using
camps became more and more popular as a tool that promised to prevent
international criticism of state-led antisemitism while also fulfilling pro-
tectionist policy objectives and calming a public agitated and hostile
towards Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. The first such camps
opened in Prussia and Bavaria in the winter of 1920/1921. These camps
were explicitly installed to eliminate alleged threats emanating from
refugees, to ease the pressure on the German housing market, to prepare
mass group deportations, and to deter future migrants. The German
government hoped simultaneously to present them as “welfare institu-
tions” internationally to avoid the charge of antisemitism. The reality of
the camps, of course, was starkly different. Rather than welfare, they
resembled punitive and repressive institutions. In the summer of 1921, a
Prussian parliamentary delegation under the left-wing representative
Mathilde Wurm protested against the inhumane living conditions and
138 139
BERNARDOT 2008: 72-74. GERSTLE and KING 2020.
394
illiberalism
clear antisemitic coercions by camp guards (including the lack of sanitary

facilities, meagre food provisions, frequent physical abuse, and inten-
tionally locked doors during a fire) calling the camps a “disgrace for
German culture.”140 The political protest fell on deaf ears at first. Only
once the camps became too expensive for the strained inter-war state
budget in 1923 were they closed by the centre-left Prussian govern-
ment.141
Such detention camps are powerful instances of ideological illiberal-
ism not only because they “accidentally” violate liberal principles. They
are not simply “illiberal means to liberal ends.” Instead, both historically
and as they currently function, camps are designed to display illiberalism
as exclusion. They are de facto means of administrative coercion with
grave psychological and physical consequences for the affected individ-
uals and with scant or no legal recourse for those confined in them.142
The German interwar jurist Ernst Isay criticised Weimar Germany’s
practice of mass deportations and arbitrary administrative decisions on
migration applications as “the remains of a police state” which went
against the ideals of the rule of law.143 Today, many liberal democracies
have included rights to asylum and legal recourse over migration deci-
sions in their legal frameworks. An international human rights regime
curtailed arbitrary illiberal decisions against individuals. But the archi-
tecture of repulsion, and above all, modern day detention camps are
evidence that the illiberal “remains of a police state” are still alive and
well in liberal democracies around the world.144
Illiberalism in Plain View
The fate of the Central European University (CEU) powerfully

illustrates disruptive and ideological illiberalism combined in action,
140
WURM 1921. allowed to leave the centres and move freely
141
For excerpts from primary sources and in neighbouring cities (trips further afield are
analytical overviews, see HEIZMANN 2011: only possible upon application). However,
110-117; PROMUTICO 2017. For a journalistic asylum seekers in such centres still face many
historical overview of early German detention of the difficulties described here (such as
camps, see WIPPERMANN 2015. administrative barriers to legal recourse and
142
NETHERY and SILVERMAN 2015. strained living conditions). The facilities are
143
ISAY 1923; KAUTH 2017. controversial, not least because of uncomfort-
144
German detention facilities, called able memories of Germany’s Nazi past. See
“Ankerzentrum” or anchor centres, were e.g. KRAUß 2019. The present is brilliantly
introduced in response to public anti-immi- realized in Jenny ERPENBECK’s novel Go, Went,
gration sentiments. They are more open than Gone [2017].
those of the US or the UK. Internees are
395
and how illiberalism can be fostered in a putatively liberal democracy

whose autocratic leaders are steadfastly pushing it towards one-party
state authoritarianism of the sort we described above.
Opening its doors on 1 January1991 in Budapest, the CEU was
founded by the billionaire financier, George Soros, as a part of his
philanthropic effort to fan democracy in the former communist Eastern
European states including Hungary (where he was born). For the last five
years, the CEU has been targeted by the Viktor Orbán Fidesz political
movement hostile to the values of liberalism and internationalism which
the University conveys. This campaign has forced the CEU physically to
move from Budapest to Vienna because of the state’s determination to
deny a free centre of academic learning protected by the rule of law.145
In elections in April 2018 the Prime Minister Viktor Orbán unasham-
edly promoted the notion of “illiberal democracy” as the most attractive
means of organizing the state and led his Fidesz Party to a huge electoral
victory (taking two-thirds of the parliamentary seats). His platform
included not just extensive anti-migrant promises and rhetoric but an
explicit anti-Soros plank, accusing the financier and his university of
bringing foreign influences into the state including through the Soros
Foundation-supported CEU. The CEU is accredited as an American
graduate programme offering advanced master’s and doctoral pro-
grammes in English for students, many of whom come from Western,
Central and Eastern European countries. Once in office, the party enacted
its so-called “lex CEU” law forcing the CEU to move its base from
Budapest to Vienna.146 The pressure was part of a general legislative
attack on NGOs as voices of civil society in a liberal democracy (especially
those working with migrants), and an intention to erode any account-
ability of the executive, the exercise of which is a distinguishing feature of
liberal democracy. Orbán’s personal animosity to Soros allegedly laced
the anti-CEU drive.
The degradation of the CEU’s rights and status was methodical. The
ease with which the Fidesz party government could enact and pass the
restrictive laws reveals how the apparent institutions of liberal demo-
cratic government may exist in name only. Hungary has the trappings of a
free country (a judicial system, no secret police) but is in practice a
145
For the background, see: RANKIN 2017; accredited in the US; second, it required the
WALKER 2018; NOVAK 2019. institution to be linked to a bilateral treaty
146
The law affecting the CEU included between the US and Hungary. The final leg-
two unachievable elements: first, it required islation affected other NGOs located in Hun-
the CEU to open a branch in the US, specif- gary.
ically in the state of New York, since it is
396
illiberalism
democracy at risk of being set firmly on a trajectory towards becoming a

one-party system intent on hollowing out democratic norms and insti-
tutions for its exclusive purposes.147 Furthermore, in the classic inter-
war authoritarian strategy the dominant ruling party in Hungary has
made ample use of the law to proscribe activities and institutions it
dislikes. This arbitrary use of executive power can be declared lawful
but, in the absence of genuine constitutional and appeals courts, it is in
fact despotic.148 Despite a recent move in favour of the CEU at the Court
of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the university’s status in
Budapest is fragile and its return from Vienna uncertain.149
The undermining and displacement of the CEU also exposes the
weakness of external agents committed to liberalism and opposed to
illiberalism. The European Union is a defender of such basic liberal
values as academic freedom and the rule of law, but has been ineffectual
in this role.150 As a US accredited graduate programme CEU might have
expected support from the US—which could well have been decisive
given America’s power—but the juxtaposition of the US’s own norm and
rule breaking executive, President Trump, ensured that there was no
American response to challenge the rise of illiberalism.151 Orbán seized
his moment, recognizing the weakness or indifference of domestic and
external impediments to pursuing his implacable hatred of liberalism, the
doctrine which implies checking executives and avoiding despotism by
setting up accountability mechanisms.
In the absence of international assistance, all hope rests on new
oppositional coalitions from within. In December 2019, “[echoing] the
green push at city and state level in the US aimed at countering Donald
Trump’s decision to leave the Paris accord,” the mayors of the capitals of
the so-called Visegrad Four, the countries standing at the forefront of
disruptive illiberalism in the EU––Poland, Hungary, the Czech Repub-
lic, and Slovakia––announced a new “Pact of Free Cities” to jointly
counteract illiberalism in their countries.152 Hungary’s government
swiftly responded to the mayoral pact by issuing new legislation curtail-
ing opposition and municipal influence.153 The historical parallels to
inter-war Europe are too obvious to spell out.154
147
The election victory of opposition justices. See SHOTTER AND PEEL 2020. And see
parties in Budapest’s October 2019 mayoral HALL 2020.
151
elections is a positive sign against this trend. SKOWRONEK, DEARBORN and KING
See WALKER 2019. 2021.
148 152
See also WALDRON 2019. HOPKINS AND SHOTTER 2019.
149 153
KIRST 2020. Ibid.
150 154
See IGNATIEFF 2020. The EU is trying See CAPOCCIA 2007; BERMEO 2016 and
harder to respond to the Polish weakening of NEUMANN 1942: 360-375.
397
This example of the CEU’s displacement points to some of the

elements that can help withstand illiberal practices and ideas in a liberal
democracy. Without the rule of law, independent judiciaries and robust
appeals processes, the foundations upon which a liberal democracy rest
can collapse speedily. Liberal democracy needs appeals processes to
compel executive authority and executive abuses of power to face
accountability tests and reviews. At the micro-level institutions such as
camps, in which rule of law mechanisms are suspended or at least likely to
seem distant to internees, maintaining legal processes with external
members is crucial. Such spaces of exception, “[zones] in a liberal
democracy that the sovereign controls but where liberal-constitutional
principles do not govern or govern only partially,”155 can be found in
many liberal democracies and while it might seem impossible to abolish
them completely, it is imperative to monitor and limit this use of illib-
eralism. An atmosphere in which whistle-blowers face recrimination and
abuse—as was the case for the civil servants called to testify in Congress
during the impeachment hearings concerning President Trump’s
exchange of aid to Ukraine for political assistance in investigating his
opponent Joe Biden—constitutes disruptive illiberalism, as do efforts to
compel the independent US Department of Justice to behave par-
tially.156 These actions deliberately weaken the mechanisms of executive
accountability and the rule of law intrinsic to liberal democracy.
The regulation of media and defence of free journalism is equally vital
to monitoring illiberal procedures. The rise of social media and massive
tech companies such as Facebook and Google, which are driven by profit-
based algorithms to maximise “user engagement” (that some allege
includes a willingness to accept uploads of fake or hate based news stories)
fundamentally conflicts with liberal procedures.157 Online media report-
age did not create illiberal ideology or anti-democratic ambitions.158 But
it has enabled like-minded purveyors of these beliefs and values to meet
and reinforce each other, diffuse their arguments more widely than ever
before, and to do so liberated from opposing views. Fuelling the rise of
online anti-democratic and illiberal extremists is a determination to
revert to a world in which in-groups, organized around racial and
ethno-national categories (considered defunct until the 2010s), dominate
155
GERSTLE and KING 2020: 257. however. This is especially true in the context
156
APPLEBAUM 2018; FOER 2020. of foreign interference in elections, often pro-
157
We note pressure to change, and some moting illiberal campaigns that are running on
of the tech platforms have committed to mon- a platform of “fake news”.
158
itoring and removing hate speech and racist SETTLE 2018; EBNER 2020; MARANTZ
bile. There is a formidable challenge ahead, 2020.
398
illiberalism
over “out-groups.” The core element of this tendency is racism, specif-

ically versions of white supremacy expressed in central Europe in anti-
Muslim policies, in Germany in the rise of neo-Aryan concepts such as
“Bio-Germans”, in France by Renaud Camus’s “great replacement”
conspiracy theory, and in the US’s emboldened white identity poli-
tics.159
Illiberalism can follow two distinct logics: a logic of anti-democratic
disruption and a logic of exclusion. Both variants signal a return to issues
unresolved at liberalism’s emergence and commonly institutionalized in
liberal democratic procedures: the failure to reconcile the nation with a
pluralist and inclusive conception of belonging, instead of building
hierarchies and exclusions which have endured.160 This movement
against democracy and equality can arise, the historian Anne Applebaum
remarks, in “any society” and she thinks that “if history is anything to go
by”, all societies will eventually face its challenges.161
That pessimism may be due to the fact that, in our modern world, the
claims of imagined national homogeneity (and associated rights of
citizenship) have trumped other sources of membership and, crucially,
the right to membership. From Trump to Orbán, illiberalism falls
harshly on those still defined as beyond membership. Judging by current
trends and exacerbated by turns to protectionism and anti-pandemic
border closures, both disruptive illiberalism and ideological illiberalism
are, once again, on upward curves in our democratic societies.
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Kauth Illiberalism

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jasper theodor kauth

Keywords: Illiberalism; Liberalism; Immigration; Camps; Democracy.

The Illiberal Horizon

“ I L L I B E R A L I S M ” has assumed an invigorated if unanticipated

transforming their countries into what Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor

discuss the general phenomenon of political polarisation. Instead, we

The relationship between liberalism and democracy has enjoyed fre-

The two strands of illiberalism

We argue that what is commonly referred to as “illiberalism” can be

re-emergence.10 To this end, we will ﬁrst discuss the term as it is used in

The recurrence of illiberal immigration policy

To further narrow the concept and its empirical implications, we turn to

detain asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. These camps, we

Disruptive Illiberalism and Hybrid Regimes

One of the most prominent usages of “illiberalism” in public political

guarantees of basic rights, democracy emphasises the sovereignty of the

Zakaria, of course, is not the ﬁrst commentator to identify these theoret-

Illiberal democracies are thus symptoms of democratic backsliding.

Liberal democratic procedures

democracy-deﬁning criteria include civil liberties.30 Zakaria rejects these

are indeed of a “less than democratic”43 nature. Their concern is thus

Despite the title of their book, Behrend and Whitehead’s discussion of

Whitehead is a potentially productive contribution to the study of

judiciary, the press, academia, and international NGOs. The aim of

Ideological Illiberalism and Liberal Democracies

The “liberal” pillar of “liberal democracies” is often understood to

Sinti and Roma,55 or forced sterilisations.56 The political theorist Marc

We propose the term ideological illiberalism to describe the practices that

contemporary opposition of democracy and authoritarianism, argue that

Ideological illiberalism is “illiberal” because it does exactly that. It is, of

deﬁnition. The literature on political liberalism is vast and includes

The genesis of ideological illiberalism

Scholarly accounts of ideological illiberalism not only examine the par-

imperialism, Soviet communism, and, eventually, racism, Smith

Liberalism’s inherent tensions

In his book In the Name of Liberalism, King argues that unresolved

capable of fully participating in liberal societies and the obligations they

democracy. According to King, they resemble “tests” which “should

Illiberal Policies Against Outsiders

states, including liberal democracies, frequently disregard. Migrants’

Illiberal immigrant selection

Even proponents of open borders like the political philosopher Joseph

admitted to a country for longer periods to be able to assume full

values, might be warranted to defend liberal values against imminent and

camps”, Western democracies have created illiberal detention centres

The historical evolution of immigration and camps

The mechanisms employed by liberal democracies to repel asylum

international migration.”110 In the absence of any legal protection or

Illiberal camps and camps for illiberalism

Historically, the systematic use of camps originated during World War

as a historical and global phenomenon, with even fewer studies available

migrants in detention camps in countries like the UK or the US, despite

functions, foreigner camps thus take up a symbolic repressive function in

Detention camps for migrants are strong manifestations of ideological

and unknown length is for asylum seekers to return to their home—a

clear antisemitic coercions by camp guards (including the lack of sanitary

Illiberalism in Plain View

The fate of the Central European University (CEU) powerfully