Conservative Contenders: Can Liberal Democracy Prevail in the European Vicinity?

"True democracy is opposed to liberal democracy". These words open an essay in "The European Conservative", an online journal, that regularly celebrates Orban‘s "Christian democracy" as a role model of conservative democracy. Conservatism, centering around the idea of an "extra-human origin of the social order independent of human will" (Thomas Biebricher) and consequently essentially reactionary in its constant endeavour to (re-)establish that good order (Karl Mannheim), is a natural contender of liberalism, with its emphasis on liberty (guaranteed through the protection of individual right), constrained power and neutrality towards different concepts of the "good life" (thus building on equality, tolerance, and pluralism and rejecting any normative order of preferences). As conservatives’ "good order" always builds on hierarchy and authority, it can be characterised as what Kauth and King term "ideological illiberalism". While centrist, moderate conservatism aligns with many liberal demands, in particular concerning the rule of law, extremist conservatism opts for the destruction of the existing (liberal and Western) order. Varga and Buzogany thus characterize this as "revolutionary conservatism", others label it as "radicalised" or "new" conservatism. This new conservatism comes with a different understanding of democracy, a claim to rebuild real popular sovereignty by placing greater emphasis on the commons (the national interest and defence of majority populations; traditional values, religion and patriotism; common sense and attitudes to morality) and reject liberalism’s "radical" overemphasis of the individual. Conservative thinkers call for a "conservative replacement of liberal democracy" understood as the freeing of democracy from the constraints imposed on it by liberalism to make the "true will of the people" heard. While a plethora of literature exists on "illiberal democracy" (and whether it is democracy at all), this paper wants to step away from the classificatory debates and aims to provide a better understanding of how different self-proclaimed "conservatives" understand and frame what they regard as the pathological problems of liberal democracy, in particular in the format the EU propagates. In Russia (as shown by Katharina Blum) economic turmoil combined with the repeated experience of liberal democracy’s ineffectiveness in solving social conflicts prepared a fertile ground for conceptual ideologues to re-invent Russian conservatism as counter-Western and postliberal narrative and to rebuild Russia as a "sovereign democracy". But the focus here is on EU accession candidates and their "new conservatives", their design of "civilizational, true" democracy, and their resistance to and contestation of the EU’s liberal conditionality. This is relevant not only for critically addressing the transformative challenges of accession processes (and later potential for backsliding), but it also sheds light on conservative democracy promotion and consequently on conservative alliances in and outside the EU to create a "different" Europe rescued from the "moral, social and economic decay brought about by liberal democracy". The paper thus contributes to debates on contestations of the EU(ropean) model of liberal democracy, and the future of liberal democracy in a potentially larger EU, but also sheds light on how liberal democracy is framed by its contenders.