The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Dilemmas of Bulgarian Liberals
Abstract: For a long time, the project of liberal democracy had as its complement the institution of the welfare state as a source of social solidarity. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this institution was gradually abandoned in favor of a purely formal and rational framework, combining procedural legal rationality with instrumental economic rationality. Today’s “revenge of political passions” and the threatening rise of national populist and conservative xenophobic parties and movements is a challenge to which liberal democracy can hardly respond only by striving for more and more political and economic rationality, that is, to turn more and more of society against the regression towards the community considered retrograde. Calls for the rule of law, for the separation of powers, for human rights will not be able to guarantee the social stability of liberal democracies in the near future. The battle for their future will take place precisely on the terrain of the community. The question is: what type of community, if any, could liberal democracies offer in contrast to the return to tribal community desired by nationalists?
Boyan Znepolski is professor at the Department of Sociology, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. His research is in the fields of the sociology of culture and political sociology. Among his latest publications are: Boyan Znepolski (Introd. & Ed.), Assen Ignatov, L’impersonnel, trad. Stoyan Atanassov, Paris, Editions de la Sorbonne, 2023; Boyan Znepolski, Ruptures of the Era, Iztok/Zapad, Sofia, 2020.