Crisis of liberal democracies: a future without rights? Elements for an international perspective on the far right project

Abstract

This article aims to point out elements for the understanding of the present crisis of liberal democracies, especially of rights as its fundamental component. It seeks to recover history in its political sense of building the predominant model in the West and to highlight some explanations of the crisis as being the crisis of the “liberal” component, that is, the guarantee of rights. This “model” was never presented as complete materiality for vast portions of the world population and even of the central states. The violation of rights by the States has always been a permanence in capitalist modernity. Several states in the "center" and "periphery" have gone through periods in which such violations are specifically recognized, such as European fascisms and Latin American dictatorships. At the moment when anti-liberal political forces ascend, uncommitted to the rights formally guaranteed in state and international orders, it is worth reflecting on the relationship they establish with this past of massive rights violations, pointing out that the fragility of the promises embodied in rights, including due to the incompleteness of the processes of overcoming the serious violations of the past, it is at the basis of the crisis of contemporary liberal democracy.