Abusive Constitutional Borrowing as a ‘Dark Side’ of Liberal Democracy (A Review)

In the book Abusive Constitutional Borrowing. Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy its authors Rosalind Dixon and David Landau emphasize that legal globalization has its ‘dark side’ since the norms of liberal and democratic constitutionalism can easily be used for anti-democratic purposes. There appears disorientation in both the national and international political arena through the application of norms, which are peculiar to democracies, albeit they constitute potent tools for consolidating power and suppressing opposition. The present era is the time where democratic backsliding and covert autocratization have become the prevalent issues. Some regimes dress their activities under the guise of a liberal and democratic discourse. In lieu of committing military coups, modern policymakers tend to implement more legal forms of anti-democratic change to undermine democracy by using constitutional rights or the courts (judicial review). The characteristic feature of abusive constitutional borrowing is to maximize the achievement of antidemocratic goal. It is a deliberate attack on the democratic minimum core, which consequently leads to a gradual erosion of democracy. Modern democracies have a tendency to move back to autocratization by combining different forms of constitutional abuses, which can be classified as constitutional changes and sub-constitutional ones with a formal or informal character. Moreover, one can also discern various forms of borrowings i.e., superficial, selective, acontextual, and anti-purposive.

In the book Abusive Constitutional Borrowing. Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy its authors Rosalind Dixon and David Landau emphasize that legal globalization has its ‘dark side’ since the norms of liberal and democratic constitutionalism can easily be used for anti-democratic purposes. There appears disorientation in both the national and international political arena through the application of norms, which are peculiar to democracies, albeit they constitute potent tools for consolidating power and suppressing opposition. The present era is the time where democratic backsliding and covert autocratization have become the prevalent issues. Some regimes dress their activities under the guise of a liberal and democratic discourse. In lieu of committing military coups, modern policymakers tend to implement more legal forms of anti-democratic change to undermine democracy by using constitutional rights or the courts (judicial review). The characteristic feature of abusive constitutional borrowing is to maximize the achievement of antidemocratic goal. It is a deliberate attack on the democratic minimum core, which consequently leads to a gradual erosion of democracy. Modern democracies have a tendency to move back to autocratization by combining different forms of constitutional abuses, which can be classified as constitutional changes and sub-constitutional ones with a formal or informal character. Moreover, one can also discern various forms of borrowings i.e., superficial, selective, acontextual, and anti-purposive.