Michael Meyer-Resende is writing a book about where the line is between democracy and authoritarian rule. He argues that there is no deep consensus among pro-democracy forces. The dominant terms of public debate and scholarly research (such as populism or illiberalism) do not mark the boundary, they obscure it.
The terms used often express ideological orientations that are negotiable in democracy. By dramatizing negotiable issues, they also trivialize real transgressions. This plays into the hands of extremist forces. They claim that accusations of extremism are always about party politics. They cleverly use the confusion of terms to divert the debate away from the question of democracy.
The Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu wrote: ‘If you know yourself and the enemy, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.’ The democratic majority is weak when it fails to recognize what constitutes an authoritarian opponent. It is weak when it draws the boundaries of democracy too narrowly, thereby excluding democratic voices. It is also weak if it does not take the limits seriously and trivializes authoritarian positions.
The democratic majority is strong when it has a clear idea of the limits of democracy. Democratic society is mature when it argues robustly within these limits and accepts that sometimes one political direction wins and sometimes the other, without destroying the system.
Michael Meyer-Resende will propose a demarcation that is – pragmatically – based on international law and thus offers a basis beyond national particularities. He wants to strengthen the ability of the democratic majority to recognize and weaken its opponents.
The fellowship gives Michael Meyer-Resende the opportunity to take a productive break from his work with the NGO Democracy Reporting International. His concrete experiences in more than 50 countries in which he has worked over the past 25 years, as well as his numerous publications, have informed the book.
Michael Meyer-Resende is a fully qualified lawyer. After completing his legal traineeship, he worked for four years at the Human Rights Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Warsaw. He travelled to many countries of the former Soviet Union and the Western Balkans to support the rule of law and democratic elections. He then worked for the European Commission for three years, negotiating the deployment of EU Election Observation Missions with governments in Asia and Africa.
Following this experience, he turned to social entrepreneurship and co-founded the NGO Democracy Reporting International (DRI). It supports democratic transitions and institutions in a flexible, pragmatic and transparent way. DRI also works in the EU to promote the rule of law and to regulate and monitor political discourse on social media. DRI has a staff of 80. It is headquartered in Berlin and has offices in Ukraine, Lebanon, Tunisia, DR Congo and Sri Lanka.
Meyer-Resende is a regular contributor to newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Politico. He worked for the BBC and is a columnist for the EUobserver.
