The Rise of Universal Liberal Values? Essays -- Essays Papers

The Rise of Universal Liberal Values? Democracy is one thing, and constitutional liberalism quite another. In the inexorable march of modernity, Fareed Zakaria argues in The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, the message of constitutional liberalism has gotten lost in the clamor for democracy. This is problematic because, without a strong foundation of pluralism and constitutional liberalism, the apparatus of democracy can easily be hijacked by forces that hardly espouse the liberal values that have, in the Western mind, become transparently conflated with democracy. The fact that liberal constitutional democracy has become the unmarked case for Western pundits serves and most likely will continue to serve, Zakaria points out, as a legitimizing shroud around illiberal democracies' practices. What is problematic is Zakaria's notion of legitimacy: who are we to say whether, to the extent that we find an illiberal democratic regime's actions questionable or worse, that regime is illegitimate? Such pronouncements not only fly in t he face of the democratic orthodoxy, but also dangerously destabilize the props of national sovereignty that comprise the underpinning of the current international system. Democracy, broadly defined, is a mechanism of governance, the participation of a people in the selection of its rulers. Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, as sketched by thinkers from the Enlightenment onward, is a philosophy of governance, granting the governed a set of inalienable personal freedoms, in addition to ensuring the rule of law and the separation of powers (132). These are quite clearly not the same thing, although they have been bedfellows for some time in the governments of western Europe and North America. Zakari... ...notions of basic liberal rights and freedoms upon other cultures that do not, by necessity, share them all. He takes the almost-insulting stance that people that choose an illiberal government do not know what is good for them, when they may in fact have quite tenable reasons to do so. To further suggest that America and company aim to spread these uniquely Western concepts is further problematic in that to do so could destabilize these countries, or even turn them against the West, surely not a desirable outcome. It is important to recognize that culture plays an important role in the choices people make, including their choice of government. And just as some cultures find nothing wrong with eating termites or belching in public, so too are they entitled to find no problem with illiberality to an extent. As long as they choose it voluntarily, it is their own choice.