Cultures, Nationalism and Populism

New Challenges to Multilateralism

José Luís de Sales Marques, Thomas Meyer, Mario Telò

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367202460
• eBook ISBN: 9780429536038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the role of the cultural factor, and patterns of its interaction with social, economic and political developments, in fostering identity-based new populisms and various forms of political authoritarianism across the globe.

Comparing authoritarianism in the Asian and Western context, this book attempts to shed light on the different ways in which new political actors make use of cultural traditions or constructs in order to justify their claims to power and challenge the culture of modernity as understood in the Western world. Lastly, the book focuses on the consequence of these new challenges for multilateral cooperation at regional and global levels, asking the question: is the world going towards fragmentation and anarchy or a pluralist and innovative form of multilateral cooperation?

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of populism and authoritarianism studies, democracy, global governance and more broadly to international relations.

PART I

Competing modernities and models of modernization

1

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES AND ANTI-MODERNISM TODAY

Thomas Meyer

Introduction

Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Victor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi—to drop just the most familiar names from different spots on the globe. This list suggests that we are living in a time characterized by tremendous and permanent changes, shifting backdrops, and disruptions, some of which are driven by the growing power of populist movements and authoritarian leaders. They threaten not only democracy and the rule of law but the very foundation of modern political culture. Some of them undermine the foundations of peaceful regional cooperation (such as the United Kingdom, Poland, and Hungary) or global governance (the US). Consequently, when the late Tony Judt a few years ago called the present age an “epoch of insecurity” (Judt 2011: 11), he was referring to both the domestic situation in Western-style democracies and the international order.

The unprecedented Trump phenomenon in the US, both a result and a catalyst of the decay of civic culture, the soft power of reason, and democratic rule of law—and all this in a country that used to be a global beacon of freedom and a guarantor of a liberal world order—has become an unpredictable factor sowing confusion, destabilization, and increased insecurity.

The European Union, aiming to become a peaceful world power and a haven against the onslaught of “negative globalization,” is caught in a multi-dimensional crisis. It is beset by the populism-driven Brexit decision of the UK as well as by ascendant right-wing populism in all member states and especially in parts of Eastern Europe. All too many of the citizens of Europe seem to have fallen in love with ethnic identity politics and a new kind of authoritarianism.

India, the world’s largest democracy for over seven decades now, seems caught in the grip of a populist movement/party that exhibits features of both cultural fundamentalism and intolerant nationalism.

China is reversing the direction of its reform agenda in almost every sphere of society, but only in its domestic politics; it is maintaining course in international relations. Increasingly, it seems determined to establish the legitimacy of its social order and governmental power by harking back to pre-modern traditions.

Turkey, once the pioneer of secular and democratic modernization in a Muslim society, now finds itself regressing toward re-Islamization and increasingly authoritarian rule.

And these are just a few of the flash points. What is happening in today’s world? We see two things going on. First, there are more countries in which the elites claim the right to choose a non-Western, alternative path to modernization. Multiple modernities seem to proliferate (Russia, Turkey, China, Iran). Second, we are witnessing a spectacular process of rebalancing the relative cultural and political weight of modern vs. anti-modern socio-political orders in most Western democratic countries (the US, Europe).

People from countries all over the globe once greeted modernity—together with the culture of cosmopolitanism with which it is associated—as a great hope for permanent progress and peace. But now prospects have grown less sanguine due to a series of severe economic and cultural crises that have arisen in the arch-modernizing West. The list is long and includes the over-exploitation of nature (with its well-known attendant risks); the destructiveness of an untamed market economy, which threatens social cohesion and security; increasing socio-economic inequality and alienation; and the rise of a new wave of often racist identity politics. It frequently appears as though big corporations dominate politics and social life at the price of social disintegration. The global credibility of the West is at stake, along with the moral universalism with which it is often associated.

Around the world, various actors and cultural-political tendencies have been more and more successful in challenging the Western model of modernization and its cultural underpinnings from both within and without. They maintain that the present crisis is the final proof of the inherent contradictions or even the bankruptcy of the Western way of life in all its dimensions, particularly in regard to the establishment of just and inclusive government. They claim, further, that the shortcomings and crises of Western modernity show that the world needs fundamentally different models of development, culture, and government.

In particular, during the present phase of global reorientation cultural factors play a highly ambivalent, even contradictory role in politics, ideological debates, and intellectual discourse. By “cultural factors” we mean the growing impact that distinct world-views and identities are having, as well as the uses political actors make of them. Both the trend to defy universalistic norms and values in the name of cultural regionalism or particularism and the trend towards aggressive political-religious fundamentalism in the form of an identity politics that attacks the very foundations of human civilization have become more conspicuous and forceful. In their wake, a new wave of authoritarian neo-populism is sweeping across many parts of the world.

We need new, clearer concepts to help us analyze and understand these unprecedented developments and their role in the contemporary world. In debates about globalization, modernization, and multiple modernities, too little attention is usually paid to some basic facts that can make the complex situation more comprehensible. What is modernization? What is the common core of multiple modernities, if any? What is anti-modernism? What is the role of cultural and political agency here? What basic socio-cultural units play the key role in the political arenas, both domestically and globally? And what are the root causes, forms, and consequences of the authoritarian neo-populism that has infected liberal democracies?

Modernity, culture, and styles of civilization

The discussion surrounding multiple modernities suffers from a lack of clarity concerning the basic cultural units of reference. The questions are: whose modernity and whose anti-modernity? When we talk about multiple modernities, are we referring to entire cultures, to sub-cultural or regional units, to societies, to nations, or to something else? In order to find an appropriate answer to these questions, it would seem helpful to start with the observation that two distinct ideas—modernization and civilization—have much in common. Civilization as an historical process has been understood as nearly equivalent to modernization ever since the path-breaking work of Norbert Elias (1979) on the topic. I suggest that we should adopt Elias’s definition, since it combines two related dimensions: the process and consequences of the internalization of cultural norms and precepts into the individuals’ motivational structure and the rapid differentiation of societal and political institutions within societies (division of labor). In every culture, processes of civilization as understood here are evolving. They are not isolated elements; instead, they continually interact, particularly in the modern age of intensified globalization. Cultures—the specific pattern of narratives, of meaning, values, myths, general explanations, and rituals that help us make sense out of life—are the original content or context in which these processes of internalization and differentiation take place.

Understood in this way, culture and its norms embed all other social structures (politics, economy, group solidarity) while remaining in permanent flux and interaction with them (Parsons 1951). More specifically, modernization can be understood as the process in which tradition is transformed according to the logic of subjectivity, secularization, rationality, and universalism with degrees of rapidity, comprehensiveness, and depth that vary from one society to another. Or, as Richard Münch describes this process, the ongoing logic of modernization in diverse contexts of cultural tradition creates the dynamics of modernization, i.e., different cultural constellations that preserve to varying degrees the specific character of each culture even under conditions of modernization (Münch 2001). To this extent, at least, modernity is necessarily multiple.

Cultures have proved to be fluid social discourse-formations or dynamic and contradictory discursive spaces. They are reproduced in daily life under the impact of social and political power structures, occurring in a social space with conflicting collective actors (Bourdieu 1987). Hence, a shared cultural tradition will have a variety of meanings in everyday life for the diverse socio-cultural milieus in which these collective actors are embedded. All these meanings are influenced by current experiences and competing interpretations, by social positions in society and related habits, by power structures and their dynamics, and via interactions with the outside world. In this sense modernization can be seen as a global system. Inevitably, cultures are constantly interpreted and re-interpreted. Therefore, internal differentiation and arguments about what traditions mean is an ineluctable feature of cultures. The belief that there are still homogenous cultures in a globalized world is a fiction. Thus, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, the “West,” and Judaism, for instance, all are internally highly differentiated and dynamic “cultures” that display different faces from one place or milieu to another.

Today the most basic alternative ways of understanding and practicing a given cultural heritage within the broad frame of each given culture are traditionalism, modernism, and fundamentalism (Meyer 2001; Marty & Appleby 1995). They epitomize conflicting ways of understanding the content of a given culture and putting the relevant tradition into contemporary practice. Therefore, they may be termed “styles of civilization” in much the same sense as the economic styles identified by Werner Sombart (2001). They differ in dealing with a cultural heritage by highlighting certain aspects of it, forgetting others, stressing differences, and reinterpreting traditions in the light of new experiences and particular milieu interests. Styles of civilization belong to the most crucial factors that create varying social-cultural milieus in each society. Similar milieus in different cultures may have more in common than different milieus in the same culture (like fundamentalist or modern milieus across cultures against each of them toward other milieus in their own culture). In this sense modernity/modernization is understood as one of the three principal styles of civilization that are active in all cultural contexts. It is a way of re-interpreting a cultural tradition through the lens of reflexivity: a principle that has been identified by paradigm-building authors, notably Max Weber and Shmuel Eisenstadt, as the essence of modernization. Traditionalism as a style of civilization is selectively reflexive, in that it defends as much of a tradition as it can without resisting modernization across the board. By contrast, fundamentalism pretends to retrieve the original essence of a given culture/religion in its totality without any re-interpretation or hermeneutics—i.e., without reflexivity.

As extended research on religious/political fundamentalism in all cultures of the world has demonstrated, modernization everywhere takes place as project that is always contested among differing socio-cultural milieus (cf. Marty & Appleby 1995; Kepel 1991; Meyer 2001).

The basic dimensions in which modernization takes place include the following:

• Discursive spaces are marked by differences and contradictions.
• Rival actors (or milieus) and coalitions of actors, drawing on their cognitive, social, and political resources, attempt to “capture” whichever interpretation of tradition is the dominant one at any given place or time.
• The continuing dominance of certain interpretations, as well as political stability, requires a sufficient degree of correspondence or connectivity between popular cultural traditions and elite culture.

Similarly, the process of modernization reshapes cultural identity-formation at the following five levels.

• Belief culture: metaphysical world views.
• Everyday life and work culture: ways of life.
• Social culture: national solidarity.
• Civic culture: behavior in the life-world and civil society (e.g., human respect and equality; “feminism” vs. “machismo”).
• Political culture: ways of living together as citizens.

In modern milieus, the levels of cultural identity become relatively independent of one another. For example, one might share a certain religious belief with other persons, but not their lifestyle or political culture. Alternatively, one might share the political culture without holding the same belief or way of life. Contrary to modernity, anti-modern milieus (fundamentalism, intégrisme) claim the invariant holistic unity of all identity levels. We cannot share a political culture with people with whom they do not share what I have termed belief and everyday life cultures. Thus, liberal democracy and the rule of law require a sufficient level of cultural modernization. They are built on an idea of citizenship that involves common norms of political behavior while allowing for the free individual choice of belief and lifestyles. This fact helps explain why fundamentalism transcends the character of a religion to function as a political ideology in which the representatives of certain confessional or ethnic groups claim the right to define the content of all the different levels of cultural identity and to exercise total cultural hegemony and power.

Socio-cultural milieus: The basic units of culture

The confluence of competing styles of civilization, the logic of cultural modernization, and the diverse interests of differing social groupings gives rise to a wide array of internal differences in value orientations within contemporary societies. Pierre Bourdieu (1987) has shown that the basic units of social structure and socio-cultural belonging (identity) in all contemporary societies cannot be cultures, religions, or nations as a whole, but instead the smaller units of socio-cultural milieus. More specifically, the rise of anti-modern milieus in the midst of modernization in the West has proven to be an inseparable part of this process. As we observe today in so many parts of the world, these milieus react to the often painful, disorienting, and threatening contradictions of modernization—including social deprivation, the devaluation of socio-cultural self-esteem, and general insecurity in their life-worlds and workplaces—by rejecting the entire project of modernization, both its norms and most of its means. These milieus, known in the West today respectively as radical nationalist authoritarian populism, right-wing extremism, and religious/political fundamentalism, actually extend well into the socio-cultural upper middle strata of their societies and embrace a broad palette of attitudes either skeptical about or downright hostile to modernity and its proxy, globalization. Usually they take refuge in ethnic or religious identity politics in tandem with aggressive scapegoating. They dismiss democratic pluralism and embrace political authoritarianism, nationalism, and xenophobia. In general, they hope to overcome the problems of an open society and cosmopolitan openness for which modernization stands by closing their identity groups and their countries against the onslaught of (under-regulated) globalization.

The anti-modern milieus that have arisen both in the global South and in the West are always hybrids combining modernity and anti-modernity in varying ways. They are modern in the formal sense that they have issued from the contradictions and fractures of modernization itself and make use of modern forms of organization, communication, recruitment, and weapons technology. Yet the content and strategic approaches of their activities are anti-modern; at bottom, they seek to replace the principle of autonomous subjectivity and its social-political implications by the principle of a homogeneous collective (Marty & Appleby 1995). As the Indian historian Pankaj Mishra most recently documented, from the very outset, even in the heartlands of Western modernization, an intrinsic process of counter-modernization has been at work (Mishra 2017). It found expression on both the cultural-ideological and the political planes as a persistent undercurrent. That undercurrent varies in intensity as a function of existing circumstances, sometimes showing up as a cultural-ideological force and at other times as a claimant (occasionally successful) for political power in the state.

The milder cultural-ideological variant of anti-modernism began relatively gently in the early 19th century in the form of European romanticism in art, philosophy, and politics, in various shapes and forms of staunch con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I: Competing modernities and models of modernization
• PART II: The EU and China: Diverse identities and political prospects
• PART III. Challenges for a common agenda of a new multilateral convergence
• Conclusion
• Index