DISENTANGLING AUTHORITARIANISM AND ILLIBERALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GLOBAL STATES SYSTEM.

• Author: Waller, Julian G.

INTRODUCTION

The global states system is in crisis, a function of the decline of the system-level ordering derived from the post-Cold War moment and the ideological victor that emerged from it--global liberalism made in the American mold. (1) Indeed, the fragmentation of the international order, once under-girded by "unipolar," American-backed international hegemony, has become clearer in the accounting of both academics and policymakers. (2) As this has taken place, so too has there been an increased recourse to conceptual tools from the comparative politics subfield which provide ideational descriptions that may better describe the shape and substance of this partial dissolution of the system. In an era typified by a revitalized realism and heightened interstate competition for many policymakers, observers nevertheless continue engaging with the constructivist emphases on ideas and ideologies to explain the international system's more jarring tendencies. (3)

Chief among conceptual constructs in vogue today are analytical terms such as "illiberalism," "nationalism," "populism," and "authoritarianism" (among others), used to describe, categorize, and assess outcomes relevant to interested observers. (4) Why is democracy in decline? In what ways do "black knight" international actors engage with the system? (5) Where are the weak-points in longstanding alliances, and why? Why do we speak without confidence about the "global liberal order" (or the more rather congratulatory "rules-based order") and other such terms for hegemonic authority? (6) Such concepts entice scholars by seeming to provide answers in this vein.

This reliance on a small range of expansive, conceptual toolkits is certainly a necessary one, yet is also subject to considerable analytic slippage, given the often-pejorative nature of these concepts' common terminological deployment. (7) To put it mildly, when many political scientists or international relations experts write about non-liberal or non-democratic challenges to the global order, they often do so in a normative register that assumes a specific ideological position about the value of the old order and the threat of a new alternative. (8) This is perfectly acceptable, but it raises the challenge of ensuring that we know precisely what we are talking about when we use such terms.

This article reviews the conceptual contours of just two of these terms--"authoritarianism" and "illiberalism"--and situates them in a broad context at the level of the international states system and their feedback loops from relevant domestic-level political systems. (9) I argue that given the domestic bounds of these particular concepts, and the fact that they operate at different (and in the case of illiberalism, multiple) levels of analysis, these concepts must be integrated into the theoretical assumptions of a state-oriented approach to international politics with care.

Specifically, I argue that we must be particularly cautious of assuming the existence of "authoritarian internationals" or "illiberal waves" as anything more than useful heuristic, descriptive accounts, rather than evocations of genuine, coherent groupings besetting an abstracted liberal international order. (10) There are certainly authoritarian regimes or illiberal ideological pressures that act on the world system, sometimes in patterned ways. But whether they do so with intentional-agential purpose, in concert, or in tandem is not always clear. At the very least, it is better for these assertions to be interrogated rather than assumed. Furthermore, we must be wary of connecting these two concepts without clear theoretical frameworks and nuanced comparative empirical research. Domestic-level concepts of political order (authoritarianism) and ideational/ideological motivations or orientations (illiberalism) should not be taken to act as ontological units at the state-level without considerable caveats and reasoned consideration--and should certainly not be conflated. (11)

The point is relevant for both scholars and policymakers alike, although it may seem somewhat abstruse at first glance. For academics, correctly identifying and using concepts of relevance is a basic task in the social sciences--failure to do so can lead to miscoding quantitative data-sets, suggest misleading country-case comparisons, and produce faulty assumptions from which theoretical frameworks will find ill-fit. (12) Concepts that are asserted to be readily identified as ontological phenomena are even more important to get right, if only to ensure that the knowledge-building project that is iterative academic research ensures it is not talking past itself, but is engaging on fundamental questions in shared, paradigmatic ways. The messy conflation of concepts or their haphazard deployment means that scholarship may simply speak about the empirical world in a manner divorced from reality--and in doing so lead to inferences that may only be corrected much later. (13)

For policymakers, the stakes are sometimes even higher, as inclusion in one or another category can have legal and foreign policy ramifications, especially for highly-bureaucratized legal processes that can bind the international policies of Western states. Although the policy field sometimes seems unrelated to academic theory, the translation of concepts from academe to Western intergovernmental organizations and national states is increasingly regularized. (14) For example, the European Union's (EU) parliament recently labeled Hungary an "electoral autocracy." (15) Yet the EU's own treaties define the supranational organization as a club of democracies--does this imply Hungary might be kicked out of the union with the justification being a labeling process? Or does this mean the EU will be pressured to conduct regime-change operations or otherwise coerce its own membership, as some scholars argue? (16) That the abstraction of regime-type is now debated in the halls of a supranational organization suggests that it is not meaningless to ensure we deploy such concepts rigorously.

This is not only a European issue, nor one dealing with internal matters alone. Similar problems matter with other designations, such as whether countries experience "coups"--foreign aid legislation in the US is shut down should the State Department label a regime change to be as such. (17) And, of course, conceptual labels matter to policymakers as heuristic components in debates over justifying decision-making within government. The Biden Administration's focus on "democracy vs. autocracy" framings in its foreign policy priorities have been expressed in the 2022 National Security Strategy, as well as in other regulatory and orienting directives for both diplomatic and military bureaucracies. (18) The gap between theory and policy is not as small as sometimes assumed--thus it is wise to check and revise our assumptions when needed and engage with high-level concepts with care. (19)

To that end, this article provides an analytical check against conceptual stretching and assumptive theorizing, while sketching out relevant interactions between domestic-level dynamism and system-level approaches for the concepts of "authoritarianism" and "illiberalism," respectively. (20) In doing so, it will take a hard look at how we use these concepts to build out descriptions of interstate patterns, such as "internationals" and "waves." As with all attempts to maintain conceptual rigor while embarking on a broad sweep of the international system, the result is more questions than answers. Yet this is merely the inevitable cost of such scholarship and will ultimately better prepare future research with greater understanding and more refined deployment of the conceptual toolkits that we have available.

AUTHORITARIANISM AND ILLIBERALISM AS COMPLICATED CONCEPTUAL TOOLS

Concepts such as authoritarianism and illiberalism are at their core scholarly constructs, designed to combine a set of observed political sub-elements which are asserted to hold together as an ontological (i.e., that which really exists or is) reality that can be useful to undergird a given theoretical approach. (21) That is, in the way that theoretical models--statistical or otherwise--are in some ways best viewed as analogues to maps or schema, such concepts should be understood as objects that should be judged and crafted based both on their usefulness and their relation to actually-existing social phenomena. (22) Given this, a demand for parsimony as well as clear delineation of conceptual boundaries is always at a premium. (23)

It is beyond the scope of this article to deeply dive into the disparate strands of literature that dispute definitions and conceptualizations of these scholarly terms of art. (24) Yet a recapitulation is in order, most vitally to make relevant conceptual distinctions that will aid an empirical sweep of the global state system and how rising ideational, organizational, and political challenges to the status quo hegemonic order can be distinguished within and across cases. (25)

Actually-Existing Authoritarianism

We first turn to authoritarianism, which is a conceptualization of political regime. (26) Although the term has been applied in a variety of ways in social science and humanities disciplines--from individual-level behavior, attitude, and even psychological makeup to policy categorization to a broad synonym for state coercion--we restrict the term intentionally to political order at the polity-level. Political authoritarianism denotes a political regime that is not an electoral democracy. (27) Insofar as the term is used not at the polity-level, but in reference to political actors, it refers to the desire by said actors for the establishment of an authoritarian regime. (28) This residual definition is longstanding in the political science literature, given as an antipode vis-a-vis the dominant understanding of the concept of...