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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81872816113?pwd=cis3MUJJOXZPK0VGRTNjVkJ2b0ZZQT09

Meeting ID: 818 7281 6113
Passcode: 629025

PROGRAM

11:00 – 11:20 Opening address

Valentina Sandu-Dediu, New Europe College
Andreas Zivy, AMEROPA Foundation
Alexandru Volacu, New Europe College
Andrei Poama, Leiden University

11:20 – 13:00 Panel 1

Arina Cocoru, New York University at Abu Dhabi
Democratic Resilience or Democratic Robustness?

Fabio Wolkenstein, University of Vienna
Ethics and Affect in Resistance to Democratic Regressions

Camil Pârvu, University of Bucharest
Representation, Deliberation and Democratic Resilience

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 15:40 Panel 2

Cristina Chiva, University of Salford
Gender and Democratic Resilience Against Autocratisation: The case of Romania’s ‘Gender Identity’ Bill

Alina Dragolea & Vlad Terteleac, SNSPA
Democratic Erosion, Illiberalism and Universities: An Argument for Academic Refugees

Tom Theuns, Leiden University
Correcting EU Complicity with Democratic Backsliding

15:40 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:40 Panel 3

Carlo Burelli, University of Chicago
Democratic Resilience vs. Authoritarian Efficiency – A Necessary Functional Trade-off

Alexandru Volacu, New Europe College & University of Bucharest
The Epistemic Challenge to Democratic Resilience

Joanna Rak, Adam Mickiewicz University
Civil Disorder-Driven Neo-Militant Democracies in Post-Communist Europe

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

PANEL 1

Democratic Resilience or Democratic Robustness?
Arina Cocoru, New York University at Abu Dhabi

The recent interest in the resilience of democratic systems has undoubtedly been generated, at least in part, by concerns linked to evidence of democratic backsliding in multiple parts of the world. The underlying thought appears to be that, if democratic regimes are vulnerable to erosion, then a natural response would be to bolster their resilience. But what does this actually mean? Contributions to the literature on democratic resilience appear to use the term with at least two different connotations – (1) the ability to withstand pressures and threats; and (2) the ability to bounce back after pressures and threats have created some negative impact. As an answer to the immediate concerns of democratic backsliding, connotation (2) has an intuitive appeal as a line of research. I want to argue that this second connotation is the one that should be properly referred to as ‘resilience’, and that the first is more appropriately deemed ‘robustness’. The justification for this distinction is two-fold: firstly, the debate would be streamlined with more conceptual clarity. Secondly, and more importantly, the two connotations can be in tension – a concern with making a system robust may appeal to different institutional design principles than one concerned with resilience (in the sense of ‘bouncing back’). The rest of the paper aims to exemplify some of these tensions and the trade-offs involved in prioritizing one of these two goals over the other.

Ethics and Affect in Resistance to Democratic Regressions
Fabio Wolkenstein, University of Vienna

In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or regression. This paper deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in their attempts to prevent a further erosion of democracy, transgress democratic norms. But the argument advanced in the paper is not merely about the ethics of resistance. It begins, perhaps unconventionally, by addressing the affective dimension of resistance to democratic regressions, looking in particular at the powerful feelings of anger and despair that pro-democratic citizens living under a regressive government are likely to experience. As the paper argues, these feelings have not only motivational but also epistemic potential that must be adequately conceptualized in order to understand how resisters can respond to the ethical challenges facing them.

Representation, Deliberation and Democratic Resilience
Camil Pârvu, University of Bucharest

This paper evaluates the importance of shared notions of political representation for democratic resilience and explores the deliberative conditions for rethinking representation within increasingly polarised environments. The literature on democratic resilience decries the advance of populist, techno-populist or autocratic movements that propose monistic, anti-pluralistic understandings of political representation. Such movements deny the legitimacy of other political parties, of independent agencies and other mediating institutions, and claim to be the unique purveyors of univocal expressions of people’s will. Yet these are also times of renewed interest in revisiting the concepts and institutions of political representation, in testing their limits and probing new emancipatory ideas aiming to include previously excluded or ignored constituencies. Moreover, absent ‘others’ are increasingly taken into consideration within theories that aim to represent future generations, non-human animals, nature itself, etc.  Concepts and practices of democratic representation are, therefore, both sites of conceptual and normative innovation and renewal, and sources of stress and crispation when facing of populist challenges. The paper examines some of the recent public deliberation theories and experiments aiming to rescue democratic innovation in political representation amidst threats of democratic erosion.

PANEL 2

Gender and Democratic Resilience Against Autocratisation: The case of Romania’s ‘Gender Identity’ Bill
Cristina Chiva, University of Salford

In this presentation I argue that, given the centrality of gender for recent processes of autocratisation, it has become imperative to understand and theorise the conditions underpinning democratic resilience against opposition to gender equality. I conceptualise democratic resilience as the outcome of critical actors’ efforts to represent marginalised groups in the face of threats to existing gender equality rights. The case study is Romania’s 2020 ‘gender identity’ bill, which would have prohibited discussion of ‘gender’ within the educational system but was eventually ruled unconstitutional. I identify two key causal mechanisms through which civil society organisations were able to shape this outcome: framing, which emphasised the bill’s non-compliance with democratic norms and constitutional principles; and learning, which prompted a reflection by the two key institutional actors, that is, the president and the Constitutional Court, as to the importance of core democratic principles for politics and society in post-communist Romania.

Democratic Erosion, Illiberalism and Universities: An Argument for Academic Refugees
Alina Dragolea & Vlad Terteleac, SNSPA

Normative scholarship on the topic of refugeehood and asylum is enjoying a fertile period, mostly motivated by the numerous refugee crises of recent years and the saliency of immigration in the public debate of contemporary democracies. While the questions of who is a refugee and what moral duties exists regarding refugees take centre stage in much of the theorizing on this topic, there is a stark lack of theorizing of academics at risk as refugees. One way of conceptualizing academic refugees is to say that they are asylum-seekers who happen to be academics. On this understanding, the reasons for their persecution and not tied to them being academics, but to one of the reasons for persecution of the 1951 Refugee Convention. This is the standard approach in international refugee law, as there is no recognition of academics as a particular group of refugees. Another way of conceptualizing academic refugees is to understand persecution as directly linked with their status as academics. In this paper, we argue that the two conceptualizations are not mutually exclusive, but that they raise distinct moral concerns. We distinguish between academics who need protection because of general persecution and insecurity and academics who need protection because they are persecuted qua academics. This conceptualization of academic refugees raises the issue of academics’ experiences in countries that are experiencing democratic erosion and illiberalism. Given that democratic backsliding in contemporary democracies often comes hand in hand with attacks on academic freedom and political pressure on universities, we ask if interferences of this sort are sufficient for establishing a claim for protection from academics. In the last part of the article, we argue that while under present EU and national legislation the legal duty to protect academics at-risk falls on state institutions insofar as they are recognized and treated as general refugees, Higher Education institutions have a supplementary (moral) obligation to integrate academics seeking refuge.

Correcting EU Complicity with Democratic Backsliding
Tom Theuns, Leiden University

In this paper, I seek to clarify the notion of ‘complicity in democratic backsliding’, and to argue why priority must be given to correcting such complicity. By complicity I mean that normative wrong whereby an agent variously enables, induces, encourages, permits or fails to prevent another wrong, where that failure is blameworthy. Importantly, complicity in this sense is distinct from (collective or shared) responsibility for wrongdoing and from co-authorship. Collective or shared responsibility and co-authorship rest on collective agency. In contrast, to be complicit in a wrongful act one need not be an agent of that action (Lepora and Goodin, 2013), one need merely to make a potentially crucial contribution to it by one’s action or blameworthy omission. So, for example, European Parliament groups that have condoned backsliding by partners, focusing on those outside their group, are complicit by omission. Similarly, EU executives turning a blind eye to backsliding when economic or strategic interests are at stake are complicit for failing to act. However, there are also important examples of EU complicity which turn not on blameworthy omission but on a material contribution to democratic backsliding. This is the case for instance when EU funds are corruptly funnelled by autocratic actors to their allies, directly financing state capture (see e.g.: Monitor and Transparency International Hungary 2021 pp. 20-33). This chapter argues that the first normative urgency in EU responses to democratic backsliding in member states is to correct EU complicity (‘first, do no harm’).

PANEL 3

Democratic Resilience vs. Authoritarian Efficiency – A Necessary Functional Trade-off
Carlo Burelli, University of Chicago

There are many virtues functional institutions should exhibit. Two key ones are efficiency and resilience. While both are functional in the precise sense that they are necessary to survive competition, they pull institutions in opposite directions. Efficiency can be defined as the ability to achieve an end goal minimizing waste, effort, or energy. Resilience on the other hand is the ability to adapt oneself to survive recurrent unpredictable shocks, while retaining the ability to reach an end goal. Success in any competitive environment requires both virtues, and yet these pull in different directions. Efficiency requires centralization, scaling up, and streamlining. Resilience instead demands modularity, subsidiarity and redundancy. This creates a cyclical dynamic: while normal times select for efficiency, exceptional crises filter out systems that are not resilient. The article argues that the recent fascination among some scholars and citizens with the seeming functional success of highly efficient authoritarianisms loses sight of the importance of resilience in the survival of political institutions. Democracies are possibly less efficient and yet more resilient -hence more capable to withstand exceptional crises.

The Epistemic Challenge to Democratic Resilience
Alexandru Volacu, New Europe College & University of Bucharest

In this paper I aim to outline and subsequently explore ways of mitigating what I will call the epistemic challenge to democratic resilience. I first argue, drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, that the collective reaction of democratically attached citizens in the face of attempts to subvert democracy is one of the primary mechanisms through which democratic resilience can be achieved. I then maintain that such a reaction does not only rely on widespread positive attitudes towards democracy, but also on epistemic features such as perceiving that democracy has been – or is in the process of being – undermined. The incrementalist nature of democratic erosion, however, poses a challenge in this respect since there is no singular moment in which it is clear that democracy has been subverted and the need for a collective response by the citizen body is triggered. I subsequently draw on a historical case study, namely that of Late Classical Athens and, in particular, on the Law of Eukrates which has convincingly been interpreted by David Teegarden (2013) to establish a signalling mechanism for democratic erosion. I unpack the various features of the Areopagus which made it a suitable signalling institution in the late classical period, and I show how we can build counterpart principles suitable for contemporary times building on this historical case.

Civil Disorder-Driven Neo-Militant Democracies in Post-Communist Europe
Joanna Rak, Adam Mickiewicz University

Three recent crises inspired great waves of civil disorder in post-communist Europe. In the aftermath, neo-militant democracies became vulnerable to anti-democratic threats resulting from inefficient dissent. Embedded in the original theoretical framework of neo- and quasi-militant democracies, the lecture explains why anti-democratic measures have proved ineffective in protecting democracy. It offers two theory-grounded explanations. While the former assumes that neo-militant democracies have become vulnerable as the traditional tools of militant democracy have become obsolete, the latter assumes that the misuse or abandonment of these measures with public consent is at the root of this ineptitude. The main argument is that socioeconomic inequalities and uncertainty have weakened European civil societies. As a result, they backed the populists in exchange for a promise of political change. The way and costs of the expected political change were the anti-democratic measures used to expand the authorities’ powers and prevent the replacement of the ruling parties. At the same time, civil society could not self-organize to participate in politics. It co-created a quasi-militant democracy, which became defenseless because the neo-militant democracy means were abused or not used with the consent of civil society, which relinquished its political subjectivity to populist parties.

This workshop is organized within the Ameropa Fellowship program at NEC, supported by Ameropa.