Lunch seminar with Esra Demir-Gürsel

The Council of Europe’s Oppositional Framings of Europe and Its Others: From Totalitarianism to Authoritarianism, From Populism to Backsliding

In the past decade, there has been a marked shift away from the human rights associated with liberal democracy. Several European states have been at the forefront of this development since the 2008 global financial crisis, which was followed by other events triggering anxieties around migration, security, and stability. These trends against liberal democracy among its members have severely disrupted the foundational discourses of the Council of Europe (CoE), which has played a crucial role in framing Europe’s history and present in human rights and democracy.

Various concepts have been mobilized to capture this drift away from liberal democracy, including illiberalism, populism, authoritarianism, authoritarian populism, and democratic/rule of law backsliding. In the CoE context, these developments have not only recalled the discourses surrounding the establishment of the CoE and the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights to prevent a drift towards “totalitarianism” and “authoritarianism,” but they have also introduced new terms to the CoE’s vocabulary, such as “populism” and “democratic backsliding.”

This paper investigates how these concepts are used by CoE organs and its member states to analyze their discursive functions across different phases of the CoE’s history. It argues that within the CoE context, these concepts are employed less to denote clearly differentiated political forms or categories with distinct political and legal implications. Instead, they are used more as discursive tools to frame Europe in human rights and democracy in opposition to its “others.”

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