The mutating left of Western Europe and the illiberal states of Central and Eastern Europe

Last week, Brookings published a suite of 20+ “Democracy & Disorder” papers covering democracy issues around the globe and implications for geopolitics and international order. Given the troubled state of Europe and the West these days, a number of them focused on the Old Continent. I co-authored two of them.

Célia Belin and I have followed up our March 2018 American Interest piece on the “Macronification” of Europe with a paper on how "the challenges of globalization, identity, democracy, and the governance of the European Union have weakened social democratic political parties over the past 20 years.” In the second half of the paper, we categorize political parties on or stemming from the left in Western Europe into four categories “based on radical versus mainstream ideology and experimental versus traditional methods” - the Established Left of the classic center-left social democrats (but also including Germany’s rising Greens, on the more experimental side), the Radical Left which yielded Syriza’s revolt in Greece four years ago, the Experimental Left which includes Italy’s Five Star Movement, now governing in coalition with the far-right League, and the Extreme Center embodied in Emmanuel Macron. We recommend U.S. policymakers do more to engage to the European left on Russia and understand its approach to sovereignty and that the American left engage its transatlantic counterpart.

We published another long-in-the-works report the same day, on “The anatomy of illiberal states,” analyzing the tools that illiberal leaders of NATO and EU member states have used to erode checks and balances on their power, which I co-authored with Alina Polyakova and Torrey Taussig plus Kemal Kirişci, Amanda Sloat, James Kirchick, Melissa Hooper, Norman Eisen, and Andrew Kenealy, who wrote case studies on Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Our many recommendations boil down to a tougher but not carrot-free approach for the U.S. Congress and executive branch, key actors in the European Union, and NATO to member governments which have damaged their countries’ democracies.

I encourage you to check out the reports, hope you find them interesting/useful, and welcome your thoughts.