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Author: Interview led by Daniel Erlacher, including an introduction text by Tamara Ehs
Photo credit: Valérie Maltseva
Tamara Ehs in April 2021: When I drew attention to the danger for democracy posed by state of emergency legislation in the wake of an inadequate response to the climate crisis at the 2020 Elevate Festival, I would not have thought it possible that just a few days later democracies around the world are being subjected to the stress test of such an emergency. Not only have long known authoritarian regimes used the crisis as cover to rule by decree, arrest critics and heighten censorship, even “non-authoritarians won praise for limiting democratic freedoms in ways that would have drawn condemnation in ordinary times”, as the Journal of Democracy correctly observed.
When I was still wondering what is suddenly possible, I had to think of Walter Benjamin who in his thesis On the Concept of History (1940) radically broke with progress optimism, for it “only wants the progress of the mastery of nature to be true, not the regress of society” and therefore creates blind spots. In fact, the belief in progress only allows us...
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