America’s Disengagement and Its Consequences

Demographic policies became one of the most defining political battlegrounds of our time. Within this debate, pronatalism is usually discussed within the framework of traditional values and nationalist agendas. This approach, as our podcast guest Kristijan Fidanovski emphasized, might obscure posing other questions. What prevents millions of people from having the families they want? How could social democratic policies reclaim the debate on social reproduction?These questions were at the core of Kristijan Fidanovski’s presentation at the Democracy Institute’s Annual Conference, held in Budapest on June 26. With the title, Imaginary Exhaustion?, this event explored to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion and how we might rebuild a more democratic future. Fidanovski spoke in the panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety.In our conversation following his panel, we explore the implications of the low fertility rate. This demographic reality often morphs into an anxiety, which in turn politicians instrumentalize it. In this framework, he proposes the concept of “progressive pronatalism”. As Fidanovski stated for Review of Democracy, "we have a below replacement fertility rate, which means less than two point one children per woman (…). It is in essence an observable and measurable demographic trend, which has led to certain policy responses (…).The concept of progressive pronatalism seeks to capture some of these policy trends, but it also seeks to critique them in some important ways. Many policy responses have tended to be quite ideological in a similar manner, as all of them have been introduced by self-declared conservative governments."The discussion next tackles common misconceptions about the term, addressing critics who view the concept progressive pronatalism with skepticism. Afterwards, we focus on the political implications:"just because national conservative actors today as well, not just historically, are very alarmist about demography and sometimes exaggerate the objective, the otherwise objective socioeconomic challenges associated with demography, that does not mean that these are not realities. (…) If populations in developed countries continue to have below replacement fertility rates (which will happen), I think it is very unlikely that we will ever go back to above replacement fertility levels."Fidanovski argues that progressives make a strategic error by abandoning the demographical question explicitly. To counter this, Fidanovski advocates transforming demography from an instrument of population management into an ideologically neutral policy space.Kristijan Fidanovski is an economist at Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies focusing on tobacco taxation in Eastern Europe and the political economies of the Western Balkan countries. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford’s Department of Social Policy, where he examined pronatalist policies and politics in (Eastern) Europe. His other research interests include population aging, EU integration, and electoral systems.The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file. Photo: Daniel Vegel / CEU Democracy Institute

In our new podcast, Brigitte Le Normand describes and interprets the main phases of migration in Europe since 1945; discusses what gendered and intersectional perspectives can reveal about labor migration; explains why a combined focus on “destination countries” and “countries of origin” is needed to understand labor migrants; and draws a preliminary balance sheet of the discriminatory,the exploitative and the more emancipatory aspects of female labor migration.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, our lives are increasingly influenced by decisions made outside our national constituencies. Today, government actionsare likely to affect many people who never participated in elections in which the government in question ran for office. This applies to various policy areas but seems especially true in the financial sphere. As the financial crisis in the late 2000’s has shown, the absence of governmental oversight regardingfinancial activities in a country can have consequences far beyond its borders.One mechanism to address this is transnational peer review of financial regulators. Such peer review aims to enable supervisory convergence and dissemination of best practices. Yet, mechanisms of transnational governance themselves are often claimed to undermine democracy by giving decision-making power to experts and thereby taking it out of the hands of publicly elected officials. In this conversation, Yane Svetiev analyzes processes of peer review of financial regulators – both their peril and their promise.

Between 1914 and 1941, Bucharest’s population tripled,approaching one million inhabitants. This rapid growth created new neighborhoods and new opportunities but also brought new forms of poverty. While some historians portrayed the interwar Bucharest as ” the little Paris”, Alexandra Ghiţ’s book Welfare Work without Welfare: Womenand Austerity in interwar Bucharest provides a much more nuanced perspective about this city by focusing on the women’s role in welfare work.As she states in our podcast: ”the city had a larger modern area with beautiful governmental buildings and bloc houses (...) . Beyond the city center, there were large popular neighborhoods made up of small houses, many ofthem with a small yard (..). Increasingly, there were very precarious improvised neighborhoods. Such small housing might coexist with very clumsy barrack-like organized dwellings, which were covered with corrugated cardboard, without running water, where the tram and public transform does not really reach well, extremely dusty in the summer and very muddy in the autumn and winter”.While some celebrated the quick modernization, thelabor market was fragile and the welfare system struggled to respond. Bucharest was” a city without welfare but with plenty of welfare work”. In this context, the real engine of welfare was not the state at all. As the book argues, women created and sustained a welfare system through volunteer work, political advocacy, and sheer endurance. To explain this situation, Alexandra Ghiţ advances the concept of ”austerity welfare work”, which means” intensified labor for thewell-being of others under circumstances of great economic instability”. In our podcast, she introduces the internationalactors, religious groups and foundations that brought their contribution. Among them, we discuss the case of Veturia Manuilă, who is extremely illustrative about the ideological and social nuances of interwar Romania. Alexandra Ghiț’s book challenges the familiar image of Bucharest as simply a modernizing “little Paris”. Behind the city’s new architecture stood a much less glamorous reality, which included precarious work, but also a welfaresystem sustained to a remarkable extent by women’s largely invisible labor.

The Arctic is undergoing a profound transformation. As the region literally unfreezes under the pressures of climate change, established political relationships, imaginaries and assumptions about its future are also being unsettled. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Anna Niia Varfolomeeva speaks with Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds about their book Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic . Together, they explore who gets to shape the region at this critical moment: as governments and globalpowers increasingly look northwards, whose interests guide its transformation?And how can northern and Indigenous communities retain meaningful agency over the places they call home?  Movingbetween geopolitics and everyday realities, Bennett and Dodds challenge portrayals of the Arctic as an empty wilderness or simply a new arena of great-power competition. Instead, they invite us to see it as a complex and lived space whose future is being negotiated at multiple levels, and to pay closer attention to whose voices and visions are heard as that future takes shape.

In the new episode of our series produced in collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Christina Cottiero, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, and Christina J. Schneider about their article, “Can the Liberal Order Survive America's Retreat?”They discuss the United States’ disengagement from institutions of global governance and what that has meant for multilateral support for human rights and democracy;what main forms the strengthening of authoritarian forms of multilateralism has taken in the meantime; whether a new liberal coalition could emerge in the aftermath of the US’ disengagement; and what key threats a more fragmentedworlds are likely to bring.

In this special-series podcast with SaeidGolkar, we discuss his latest essay “Why IRGC is the war’s Biggest Winner” published in the July issue of the Journalof Democracy.  Professor Golkar argues that Iran’s wars, security crises, and political upheavals have gradually transformed the IRGC from a revolutionary militia into a powerful institution that increasingly functions as a “state within the state.” Rather thanweakening authoritarian rule, external threats have expanded the Guards’ political, economic, intelligence, and security roles, steadily reducing meaningful civilian control and shifting the balance away from elected and clerical institutions. This has contributed to Iran’s evolution from an ideologically driven theocracy toward a more security-centered authoritarian system, particularly as leadership succession approaches. While a cohesive IRGC may make the regime more resilient in the short term, its growing dominance canalso create elite rivalries, public alienation, and new internal vulnerabilities.The broader lesson is that militarization does not always occur through coups, as the Iranian case shows. The military can gradually absorb state functions while preserving the formal appearance of civilian and constitutional institutions.

Can a law be unjust and still be legitimate? And if we believe a law is unjust, does that mean the state has no right to enforce it? In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Jonathan Quong discusses his new book PoliticalPhilosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice which examinesthe uneasy relationship between two central concepts of political philosophy: justice and legitimacy. He explains why disagreement about justice is an unavoidable part of living together in free and pluralistic societies, and why even well-functioning democracies will inevitably produce laws and policies that some of us have good reason to regard as unjust. How, then, should societies deal with these unavoidable political mistakes?Quong argues that rather than seeing justice and legitimacy as competing values, we should think about how theburdens created by our collective disagreements can be shared fairly. The conversation explores why some unjust laws may nevertheless remain legitimate, when injustice crosses the line into illegitimacy, and how we might distinguishreasonable political disagreement from laws rooted in prejudice, corruption, or self-interest. Finally, we discuss what this perspective can tell us about contemporary debates ranging from immigration and racial injustice to thegrowing role of artificial intelligence in government.

In our new podcast, Aline Sierp discusses central questions in contemporary European memory and surveys how EU institutions have attempted to deal with Europe’s past over the decades. She also considers why the remembrance of European colonialism and imperialism remained marginal for so long – and what might be changing these days. The conversationalso focuses on how studying the politics of memory can contribute to our understanding of contemporary conflicts. Last but not least, she reflects on the rise of memory studies, whether it has become a discipline, and where it might be heading next.

Across the world, political actors are challenging rights in increasingly sophisticated ways. But are we looking in the right places? In this episode of Review of Democracy,Gabriel Pereira speaks with María Paula Saffon about how we should understand backlash against rights today. They discuss why familiar accounts of backlash may overlook some of its most consequential forms, explore the distinctionbetween backlash and pushback, and unpack the idea of veiled backlash—a concept that sheds light on how rights can be weakened through seemingly ordinary legal and institutional practices. The conversation draws on examplesfrom Latin America while reflecting on broader implications for democracy, the rule of law, and the future of rights.