The radical degree and rapid pace of institutional changes initiated by Donald Trump’s second administration has taken many observers by surprise. In Europe, by contrast, the rise to prominence of illiberal figures has been as gradual as their proposed transformations. In countries with an established illiberal regime, such as Putin’s Russia, Vučić’s Serbia, or Orbán’s Hungary, it took years for these leaders and their supporters to build cultural hegemony and secure institutional de-democratization.
The fact that the most radical version of illiberalism is coming from the United States, the heart and quintessential source of Western liberalism, needs to be reflected on. One can, of course, stop at simplistic and shortsighted answers: the resounding defeat of the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections, the revenge mindset of Trump himself, the ingrained racism of the MAGA world, etc. But these explanations fall short of providing us with the keys to comprehending the transformations that are taking place. Far-right electoral gains are not accidents of history. Illiberal leaders and parties have gained electorally worldwide and in diverse cultural contexts that differ markedly from the United States and Europe, such as in Turkey, India, the Philippines, or El Salvador. This suggests that the answer must be found in structural transformations of our socioeconomic and political landscape, not in one-off sets of issues or grievances.
For anyone working on or knowledgeable about the post-socialist world, the parallels are striking.
The concept and its value
Is the concept of illiberalism coming up with new ways of disentangling this knot? The concept has a double birthplace: one in the field of the “transitology” studies, which observed a backlash against liberal democratic values and institutions in countries that had been part of the “third wave of democratization” (Latin America and the former socialist world): this is the origin of Fareed Zakaria’s concept of “illiberal democracy” (1997). The term then traveled to Central Europe to become a major feature of describing Orbán’s Hungary (2010–present), as well as Poland under the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s government (2015–2023). The concept’s second birthplace can be found in the field of Asian Studies (in particular with the 1995 book, Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia), where it was employed in analyzing the narrative of Asian values, the resurgence of Confucianism, and examples like Singapore as an early precursor of a type of illiberal technocratic paternalism.
In the late 2010s, the adjective illiberal, used to qualify democracies that seem to be “hybrid,” “in decay,” “eroding,” or “autocratizing,” transformed into the noun, illiberalism. The addition of the -ism suffix presupposes a thicker ideological content, as well as a shift away from discussing regime type toward exploring ideological construction. While political science was initially dominant in the field of illiberal democracy, it is now political philosophy that seems to be the master of illiberalism. This disciplinary shift is accompanied with an enrichment of the concept by a large array of disciplines, ranging from legal and constitutional studies to sociology, history, and cultural studies and critical geopolitics.
The shift to the noun form happened in parallel with the growing presence of illiberal forces—also often presented as “national-populist,” “conservative,” or “far-right”—in almost every European country and in the United States (with Trump’s first term upending old taboos), and throughout the Global South (Bolsonaro’s term in Brazil, Bukele in El Salvador, Modi’s India, Duterte’s Philippines, etc.).
Scholarship on illiberalism, as represented by the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, the Routledge Handbook of illiberalism, and a series of standalone peer-reviewed articles and monographs, has confirmed the heuristic value the concept brings to the ongoing discussion of these political and cultural transformations.
Here I define illiberalism as an ideological universe that posits that: (1) liberalism has failed (either as a political philosophy or as “liberalism in practice”), and (2) an alternative political and societal order should emerge to take its place, based on:
- an expansion of executive power and majoritarianism (against liberal checks and balances and minority rights),
- the supremacy of nation-state sovereignty (against supranational institutions),
- a push for a multipolar world shaped by a belief in civilizations (against abstract universalism and unipolar domination),
- the need for some forms of cultural homogeneity of the nation (against multiculturalism),
- respect for traditional values and hierarchies (against progressive values).
Beyond this core set of values, the illiberal ideological family remains heavily context-dependent, adapted to national political cultures and historical moments, and can be expressed in moderate or radical versions. It can also be agnostic on some issues: the economic policies of illiberal regimes are particularly varied, ranging from extreme libertarianism (Milei in Argentina), state capture by corporate firms close to political power centers (Trump’s second administration), classic neoliberal policies (the AfD in Germany or the FPÖ in Austria), redistribution of public services toward key constituencies (Poland under PiS or Orbán’s Hungary), or even a defense of the welfare state accompanied by a working-class narrative (Le Pen in France).
Last but not least, illiberalism should not be thought of in terms of a binary, black-and-white relationship with liberalism. On the contrary, it is on a continuum with it—marked by a gradation of shifts away from liberalism. As liberalism itself is an ideological universe of more than one unique set of principles, which have been expressed in many diverse ways both in space and time, liberalism and illiberalism find themselves intimately entangled.
Getting the comparison right: Similar challenges, similar backlashes
For anyone working on or knowledgeable about the post-socialist world, the parallels between the rise of illiberalism in Western Europe and the United States and the experiences of the last couple decades in Central and Eastern Europe are striking. This mimesis appears all the more obvious in that many (though not all) Western far-right parties have shown an admiration for Russia, considering it an illiberal progenitor and leader, and have replicated some Russian narratives in their own political fights. More recently, the rapid re-engagement of the second Trump administration with Moscow in search of a ceasefire or peace deal in Ukraine has accentuated the impression of an easy dialog between the United States and Russia because of their presidents’ shared illiberal worldviews.
But as the old French saying goes, “comparison is not reason,” and such comparisons may cloud rather than clarify our analytical perspective. They also show strong normative/prescriptive interpretations. As Nathalie Koch explained, there are “moral geographies of the liberal and illiberal, the democratic and autocratic, the good and bad, which are inextricable from the actual conduct of geopolitics … [By presenting the West] as inherently morally superior, these narratives advance an Orientalist worldview, whereby authoritarian political configurations are portrayed as essentially foreign and ‘backward.’” Those days are gone.
Illiberalism rises from homegrown, local dissatisfactions stemming from what citizens have experienced in the past three decades and what they identify—rightly or wrongly—as the liberal status quo, led by elites who are considered globalized, technocratic, and divorced from everyday realities. Many sociological studies confirm the feeling of insecurity, pessimism toward the future and, more globally, dispossession of a large part of our citizenry—what the Italian historian Giovanni Orsina coined as the “feeling of having lost control over one’s own existential environment.”
Illiberalism rises from homegrown, local dissatisfactions.
These dissatisfactions rely on a systemic set of very deep transformations: democracy no longer appears to deliver prosperity (given the rise of socioeconomic inequality, job insecurity, cultural marginalization of the non-college-educated part of the population, etc.); it has stalled in terms of meritocracy and institutional representativeness; the cultural gap between the metropolises and the rural towns and small cities has widened (and with it, that between “laptop cadres” and “essential workers”); and media ecosystems rely on algorithms that generate revenue by dividing the polity, not by uniting it. And finally, the current era of postmodernity implies an extreme individualism defined by its consumerist patterns and its atomized identity, making the self the center of our worldview. This is what Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called liquid modernity: the boundaries of once-stable structures have dissolved, leaving a world wherein all values, norms, and identities are fluid.
These structural transformations explain why illiberal forces are gaining popular support and influence almost everywhere: there is no mimesis, but similar systemic change; no hidden hand of Russia solely responsible for every illiberal success, but parallel societal evolutions and similar political backlashes; no influence from the Kremlin tearing down otherwise healthy domestic societies and institutions, but a confluence of reactions in facing the end of the societal order that has prevailed in the West since the end of the Second World War.
The media and think tank obsession with “disinformation from abroad” bears a heavy responsibility in having jeopardized our ability to catch what seems obvious: most of the social media platforms that we use are a creation of Silicon Valley (the only exception being the Chinese TikTok), and therefore a pure product of American technological advance and digital capitalism. The role of external actors such as Russia or China constitutes only the very small tip of a huge iceberg: Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll factory was mere sea foam compared to Elon Musk’s Twitter/X tsunami.
This is why projecting “Trumpism” as a copy-paste of “Putinism” does not make sense if we do not first look at the long history of Illiberal America—the title of Steven Hahn’s new book, showing the deep-seated illiberal traditions nested in the heart of the country embodying liberalism. Capturing these systemic transformations helps us understand that illiberalism emerges as a product of liberalism—in a dialectical way, for those who want to use Marxist language. It is a language of crisis, telling us that we have reached the end of liberalism’s cultural hegemony.
In this interregnum period, ideological boundaries are fluid and new political landscapes open up. The right and the left may intersect on some issues (think Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, with a leftist agenda but an anti-immigration stance), liberal democracies may develop illiberal public policies (think immigration and counterterrorism policy), and language fluctuates (think defense of freedom of speech now being a flagship of the far right).
New venues for comparative studies
In these unchartered territories, one does find mutual inspiration and borrowing between the “West” and the “East.” Russia’s ideological language around traditional values, conservatism, realism and sovereignty speaks indeed to many illiberal audiences around the world and in the West. In the United States, part of the MAGA world dreams of a mythicized Russia as a brand synonymous with rebellion against the liberal, progressivist status quo. Orbán’s experiment in Hungary, both in terms of narratives and public policies, is celebrated by American post-liberal intellectual circles and creates emulation among Trumpist policy circles. China’s social credit system and heavy use of AI for political purposes inspires the right-wing Silicon Valley tycoons. The foreign policy toolkit of the Kremlin, unafraid of breaking international rules and taboos, has opened up new strategic frontiers—something Trump’s second administration is pushing further with the renewal of pan-American imperial aspirations.
In the illiberal imagination, for once the former socialist world finds itself not the epigone of the West, the rule-taker, the student having to learn, but the precursor, the one showing the way, the professor from whom one can learn. It embodies a revenge of the periphery against the center, of the second world against the first, which confirms—for those who still need to be convinced—that there is no “end of history.” The liberal-democratic models as we have experienced them are no longer the obvious normative models of our societies and of the world. On that front, the formerly socialist world had been one step ahead of the former capitalist West: both the social order built by Communism and the experience of its rapid replacement by liberalism (in all its scripts: political, economic, cultural, and geopolitical) made former socialist societies acutely attuned earlier to an illiberal or post-liberal order.
In the illiberal imagination, for once the former socialist world finds itself the one showing the way.
Moreover, the current ideological fluidity that makes the former East a source of inspiration for Western illiberal figures should be replaced in a broader context where the general equilibrium between what is seen as the Global North and the Global South is shaking. The majority of countries from the South have clearly stated that while they denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and violation of internationally recognized sovereignty, the historical dominance of the West in and over international institutions and the US unipolar moment should come to its end, hence their refusal to support the West in its sanctions against Russia.
Moscow’s ability to speak to the Global South using decolonial language, shaped by the Soviet legacy, the cult of sovereignty, and a conservative values agenda, has accelerated the ideological reinvention of today’s world, mixing right-wing and left-wing repertoires. But this comes with a cost: transactional politics, with its realist understanding of international relations and push for strategic hedging, serves autocratic regimes across the globe.
The astonishing lack of comparative studies between Russia and the United States—in their messianic, interventionist, imperial foreign policies, for instance—as well as a still very limited body of research based on comparative fieldwork from different area studies—confirms that for a long time the realm of the former socialist world was in a kind of epistemological ghetto. This time is over. With the concept of illiberalism, new venues for research have opened that can contribute to better integrate our region of study into genuinely global trends. Here too, the horizon has reopened, and comparing Russia with the United States—or Ukraine with Canada, for instance—no longer sounds exotic, but right to the point.
Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at The Elliott School of International Affairs, at The George Washington University. She is also Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program. She has recently published Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime (2025) and edited the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (2024).
First published by ASEEES Newsnet. Read the original here.
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