Description

In a democracy numbers matter. Demography may not be destiny but it shapes political power in the way that water shapes rock. Put simply, when populations change, power changes hands. This lecture is about how shrinking ethnic and racial majorities in Western democracies are trying to adjust to a future in which their declining numbers threaten their majority status. It’s not about how people elect their governments, but rather how different governments select their people. This occurs by re-designing citizenship criteria and electoral law, by crafting new immigration regimes, by employing practices like gerrymandering and voter suppression, and by changing national narratives. The central argument is that today’s clash between liberalism and illiberalism is at root a contest between two contrasting ideals of the “people”. Liberalism is a vote for an inclusive body politic, representing the diversity of modern society, in which the only majority that matters is the one born on election day. Illiberalism, by contrast, is a belief that the political and national community should be aligned. It’s an effort to try and preserve the indigenous character of national democracies at a time of dramatic change in ethnic, racial or generational composition.

Short bio: Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is the author of “Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe” ( Penguin, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes – won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize; “After Europe” (UPenn Press, 2017); “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest” (UPenn Press, 2014) and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?” (TED Books, 2013). Ivan Krastev is the winner of the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing 2020.