Tag Archives: open society

The open society and our internationalist story

By John Hills | Sun 20th July 2025 - 10:28 am

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society.

So states the preamble to our Federal Constitution.

In a political climate increasingly defined by identity, insecurity, and polarisation, I think it would be helpful for us to explicitly consider what we mean when we talk about an Open Society. Here I want to make the case that the open society can be viewed through the prism of another of the Liberal Democrats’ core commitments – our internationalism.

Karl Popper first coined the term Open Society to describe a system that resists authoritarianism and defends individual liberty through rational, democratic means. It was a product of the mid-20th century, born from the trauma of fascism and the hope of post-war reconstruction. But the phrase has since drifted into the background of our politics—understood intuitively, but rarely claimed explicitly.

I think we should be making the position a lot more explicit than we do. Not just as a vague liberal instinct, but as a clear ideological banner—one that differentiates us from Labour’s managed decline, the Conservatives’ nationalist retrenchment, and Reform’s anti-globalist populism. If we articulate it well, the Open Society can be the hook around we offer a forward-facing vision of Britain’s role in the world and its commitment to fairness at home.

Beyond fortress or fog

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged inclusion and political narrative | 15 Comments

The Liberal Democrats must remain the party of the Open Society

By Samuel Skubala | Mon 8th May 2017 - 9:27 am

Throughout the world, the defining cleavage in elections has largely become that between those advocating the Open Society, against a new wave of parties and movements strongly propagating the Closed Society. In the UK, this is at the forefront of the current election, embodied in the debate around Brexit.

Here we see many of the standard clashes in the Open-Closed debate, including on the virtues of globalisation and of international institutions, strong disagreements on immigration, and a debate on whether to take society back to the communities of the past, or forward to the future.

In addition, with the rise of those advocates of the Closed society – Marine Le Pen in France, and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines among them in what appears to be a global phenomenon – there has been a return of authoritarianism, and strong law-and-order values where freedom and liberty have been seconded in importance to the mercurial concept of “collective security”. Carrying this message are the aforementioned populist figure, with the most notable figure within the UK having previously been Nigel Farage, although the Prime Minister has done well politically in co-opting much of this rhetoric.