IR TALKS 6: Rule of Law and Democracy under Siege
The May 5 session of IR TALKS focused on the questions of the politics of anti-corruption and the state of the rule of law and democracy in Europe and the United States of America. According to scholars of democratic backsliding like Kim Lane Scheppele, the recent siege of the rule of law in the United States mimics authoritarian tendencies experienced in Hungary since the previous decade. Therefore, we found it relevant to compare European and US challenges posed to the rule of law and democracy, and we discussed how applied political theory can face these challenges in the fields of anti-corruption, judicial institutions, and the separation of powers as we exchanged American and European best practices. After attempts at defining the rule of law and corruption we observed how systemic corruption and state capture took shape in Hungary during the previous 15 years and compared that to the aspirations of the current US administration. It was agreed that it was too early to tell whether the changes in the United States would lead to comparable outcomes to the ones we see in Hungary. The discussion ended on a positive note as our panellists argued that some societies being more prone to corruption and disinterested in upholding the rule of law than others was not an intrinsic, unchangeable quality. Political apathy and shying away from criticising corruption can end as the past year of Hungarian domestic politics demonstrated.
Our panellists were:
Matthew Stephenson (Professor of Law at Harvard Law School)
József Péter Martin (Executive Director of Transparency International Hungary, and Senior Lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest)
The talk was moderated by Zoltán Kelemen (Assistant Professor of International Relations and instructor of the course Rule of Law and Democracy in Europe at Corvinus University of Budapest)
IR TALKS is a series of guest and roundtable talks organised by the Department of International Relations at Corvinus University to make sense of the world we live in at a time of turbulent international politics.
