Populism Versus the New Globalization

Barrie Axford, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526487209
• eBook ISBN: 9781529737417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Populism and globalization are shorthand for the temper of our times. Populism is usually cast as globalization's nemesis, a backlash against worldwide connectivity, while globalization is often said to be in retreat or even demise. 

This book takes issue with both interpretations, claiming instead that while populism of all shades tends to be anti-globalist, the globalism it is pitted against has changed dramatically in recent years and is increasingly decentred, destabilized, contingent, multipolar, and multidirectional. Axford paints a picture of this new globalization and dissects the strains of postmodern populism that both contest it and are its expression. Attention to the current surge of populism also affords purchase on an axial feature of our turbulent and globalized world—the imbrication or antithesis of local and global, of difference and sameness. This is an interdisciplinary examination of populism as a factor in global change, drawing on international politics, sociology, and global studies.

1 Populism and Globalization: Uneasy Bedfellows

Introduction

Populism and globalization share a baleful reputation; though to be fair, not universally, and not for the same reasons. Intellectually too they have had chequered careers. In the academy they are often pilloried for being imprecise concepts; no more than convenient, and sometimes misleading, shorthand for more complex, or quite other, phenomena (Freeden, 2017; Steger and James, 2019). Outside the academy the ascription ‘populist’ has been applied with something like abandon to a host of political incursions that share few characteristics beyond outrage at the way things are, and this may be an important datum. Populists rarely self-identify, and their coyness in this regard is also intriguing.

The concept of globalization, sometimes used to signify a game change in the social-scientific prospectus, suffers from the tendency to conflate empirical-analytical and normative positions. There is also evidence of conceptual slovenliness, as practitioners and scholars slip too easily between the notions of globalization as process, globalism as ideology and globality as systemic. As we shall see in Chapter 4, while the brunt of commentary tends to see globalization as systematic interconnectivity, it is the more fey concepts of globality and global consciousness that offer purchase on the imbrication of situated lives with institutional structures and rules that transcend the local. Of course, in popular discourses and in the imagination of activists, where little of this academic drollery has purchase, globalization remains a vibrant source of dismay or ambition. Populism – postmodern populism – is an expression of these sentiments.

When applied to real-world agonisms, opinions are rarely ambivalent and work with a rough-and-ready calculation wherein populism is the antithesis of globalization. This is as much a normative stance as a datum, and the normative charge is always palpable, not least in the much-repeated aphorism that populism is a ‘backlash’ against globalization. Much in line with George Orwell’s coining in Animal Farm (1945), each term is deemed good or bad by definition, with praise or blame attributed on the basis of their allegedly regressive or progressive features strained through competing world-views and pressing contingencies. At such a pass, and in the real world, the normative calculation might dictate either plumping for the lesser of two evils, or crying a plague on both houses. Bearing in mind that some observers believe that obsessing with populism is a distraction for scholars and activists alike, and that globalization is over, there is still no escaping the fact that these concepts are code for the temper of our times, and thus too important, and certainly too newsworthy to ignore. Their articulation, and what that tells us about the cast of the world today, is the focus of this short book.

All this sounds portentous but rather abstract. In fact, we are talking about narratives that have considerable analytical, normative, ideological and empirical heft, as well as significant ‘real-life’ consequences. Populism is cast variously as globalization’s reflex political discontent today, and possibly its nemesis, or as a backlash against the ‘silent revolution’ in values that characterized the closing decades of the twentieth century (Inglehart, 1977). Sometimes it is painted as liberal democracy’s Mr Jekyll, a mostly hidden, but immanent, schizoid tendency. In less picaresque accounts, it is a frisson on the journey from neoliberal hegemony to the more eclectic and plural forms of a ‘new’ globalization that, in part, has re-valorized the national and all forms of local and, in a forlorn politics, chosen parochialism as a defence against the world, or a new gateway to it (Canovan, 1982, 1999; Inglehart, 2019). For all the attention populism has reaped in the academy and beyond, at this point it is as well to be cautious about its status as a destroyer or maker of worlds.

In the following pages and with due care over conceptual nuance, I explore what I will later expound as postmodern populism as a significant feature of the current phase of global constitution, which some observers argue is a new phase. And at this point it is also worth remembering that postmodern too is a term that, in the vernacular, ‘has form’. I highlight the tensions between a process of allegedly secular, if variable, convergence across, sometimes heedless of, borders, and the potential for disruption, perhaps for transformation, that resides in populism’s brand(s) of contentious local politics, its robust take on the sanctity of some collective identities, and in its mediatized persona. These prospects too are often glossed as good or bad by definition. Specifically, the book is framed by the ways in which assumptions about globalization – especially, but not exclusively, ‘market globalism’ (Steger, 2015) – and knowledge about the global are being reworked under what are frequently taken as crisis conditions.

For the burden of much reflection is that contemporary populism is, to use a weasel word, ‘implicated’ in one or more related crises or transformative moments – of modernity, of capitalism, of liberal democracy and of globalization. To that we can now add the ecological crisis and, of course, the current global pandemic of Covid-19. Rarely is there precision as to cause and effect (Diamond, 2018; Economist Intelligence Unit, 2020). In these reflections, the recent global financial crisis, along with enforced and voluntary migrations are frequently bruited as contexts for and/or causes of recent outbreaks of ‘left-’ and ‘right’-wing populism, with the latter sometimes styled ‘national populism’, of which more later (Taguieff, 1996, 2016). Current manifestations of identity politics too are often linked to the appearance, or revitalization, of populist rhetoric, leaders, parties and movements.

So to reiterate, populism is slated as a quickener in the playing out of globalization’s current travails. In this role it musters as an expression of immanent tensions in the fabric of politics and societies, as an instrument of catharsis, as a possible denouement, or – perhaps counter-intuitively – as no more than a periodic, if uncomfortable, variant of politics as usual (Blühdorn and Butzlaff, 2019). And there is a further aspect worth noting at this stage, one sensitive to the vicissitudes of global capitalism and the calculus of global change in the still new millennium, but agnostic (at least) on where populism fits in that narrative. This sees a focus on populism as a side-show to the real business in hand for critical global science, which ought to be taken up with what Simon Tormey characterizes as ‘the critique of elite governance in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and austerity’ (2018). In other words, a science dedicated to unmasking hegemonic orders. Scholarly obsession with, and mostly revulsion towards, populism and its ‘various extremisms’ can blind observer and activist to the ‘misbehavior of elites in a world in which eight billionaires own as much as half the world’s population’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2018). In this scenario, even the disreputable qualities of mainstream politics are worth approbation simply on the grounds that they are not populist; a view pretty much endorsed by Francis Fukuyama when he consigned populism as another elite discourse, one that works ideologically to bolster an elite gestalt and elite interests (Fukuyama, 2017; Nederveen Pieterse, 2018).

More on all this as we proceed. For the moment, let me repeat that for many commentators and for good or ill, globalization implies secular integration across many areas of life, along with the growth of a modal consciousness of global constraints and opportunities. But in fact, globalization is a multidimensional process moving to different impulses that inflect economic life, culture and, of course, politics. It is performed by a diversity of actors through their engagement with more encompassing economic, cultural and political scripts. More often than not the complexity of what I have called world-making practices (Axford, 2018) translates into emergent, rather than embedded, globalities, for there is no certainty that processes of globalization will yield fully institutionalized outcomes, let alone determinate ones. Indeed, its recent career easily lends itself to claims that it is either rampant or in demise. Both scenarios owe something to the recent successes or failures of neoliberalism as a globalizing script. Hyperbole was once the stock-in-trade of many commentaries. The upshot was that early theories of globalization were sold on all-or-nothing visions of the process, leaving them inadequate as descriptive or explanatory devices, and just wrong-headed.

Globalization and Populism: Some Preliminary Remarks

The relationship between globalization and populism is itself an echo of a trope familiar to students of globalization; the antinomy of sameness and difference played out as an elemental dialectic of global and local. This dialectic is apparent in both routine and non-threatening ways – in the day-to-day engagements between local and situated subjects and global networks and flows – and in more visceral encounters seen, for example, in Arjun Appadurai’s ‘geographies of anger’ (2006). In the latter, strangers are treated with suspicion, disdain and even violence when they alight in the guise of terrorists, or would-be terrorists, some forms of migrant labour and refugees. Difference is often justification enough for suspicion, not embrace. Some observers, including Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, claim that today we are more illiberal than of yore, and the better for it. In truth, the evidence is mixed and the direction of travel still unclear. For while there is much here that describes proliferating, and occasionally despicable, features of contemporary politics around the world, that is just part of the story.

On the face of it, populism – and certainly national populism – is the antithesis of globalization. It is a sanguineous, but essentially moral, appeal to and evocation of militant and pristine difference couched as resistance by ‘the people’ – always virtuous or pure, and certainly ill-done by – to the wilful and wanton destruction of the particular, the local and the idiosyncratic by remote and uncaring (sometimes global) elites, indifferent economic forces and a host of malign, or opportunistic, others (Zaslove, 2008). In different populist discourses, the strategic location and peculiar qualities of the elites in question will vary. And as we shall see, the rhetoric of ‘the people’, employed as a stick with which to beat opponents, is also highly charged when used in populist rhetoric, not least because it too is conceptually imprecise and normatively laden when used in different political idioms. In one of the many paradoxes of the populist credo – if such exists – its advocates appeal to the inclusive, even universal, subject of ‘the people’, but are selective about conferring membership, or cavalier about actual numbers, favouring those with notionally ‘authentic’ claims to a particular birthright and the heirs to bespoke, albeit imagined, histories. Sometimes, ‘the people’ is conjured as a rhetorical device to justify actions and to demean opposing views. Just how the concept is used, and with what consequences for quality of life and the temper of politics in different countries, will become clearer as the argument unfolds.

Local-global accommodation is often considered the default outcome of a modal ‘glocalizing’ dynamic, one that tends to produce hybrid identities and syncretic forms. In one sense, this is hardly surprising. The existence of local difference – especially cultural difference – paints what for many scholars is a benign picture of global constitution. Here, diversity morphs with little difficulty into the image of an even more impure, connected and still largely pacific, world, which is hybridized or creolized; diversity is its stock-in-trade. Set against predictions of a global future moving to more-or-less pathological forms of identity politics, local cultures feeling swamped by a tide of cultural and economic relativism or fractured postmodernity, we are offered a seemingly more wholesome brew.

But there are also more abrasive and polarized accounts of and prescriptions for the temper of an ideal world. Slogans such as ‘left behind by globalization’, ‘taking back control’, even ‘America first’, while inchoate, may speak to another dynamic entirely – or else distill particular alarms over economic austerity and the destitution that results, inequality, multiculturalism and political correctness. All have been successfully amplified or, to use current phraseology, ‘weaponized’ in various political agendas; not all of them populist. In this lexicon, independence, (in)security, a sense of place and, abstract though it may seem, sovereignty, also have emotional purchase and electoral leverage, with advocates promising new kinds of unsullied or redemptive politics and a return to a more benign past.

In such narratives, and on the part of those feeling distraught and unheard, the defence of cultural and other enclaves does not appear as the last refuge of scoundrels and fools, or of the terminally gullible, but is embraced as a return to first principles and laudable essentials, not the least of which is patriotism. Populism as localism then takes on a heroic, rather than a toxic, cast, at least in the eyes of its proponents. Although there is a parallel – and possibly counter, narrative – it is not rooted in common feeling and habits of the heart, but in contempt and cynicism for things as they are. This narrative is found in the conceit that populism’s appeal is always negative; rooted in a lack of trust in elites, economic alienation, political marginalization, dying communities, the fissiparous nature of identity politics and in the despair thus engendered. Sometimes the two strains are conjoined, and I will return to this matter in Chapter 3.

Populism and the Politics of Discontent

So we must tread carefully here, if only to avoid the Orwellian trap found in his mantra of ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, of things being taken for granted, and of claims that are true by definition – except when it is decided that they are not (Orwell, 1945). Not all those who support populist ideas and parties cleave to a politics that is discriminatory, exclusionary and brutal. The electoral platforms of left-populist parties, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, are largely devoid of racist and xenophobic content. In 2016 and, for a short while, in the 2020 US presidential campaigns, Democrat hopeful Bernie Sanders touted a rhetorically spare brand of populism in the guise of a revamped ‘New-Dealism’. His solutions to austerity and widening precarity were essentially collectivist and, whisper it, social-democratic. Then there is the matter of what might be seen as policy, or ideological, inconsistency within populist parties and groups. In Italy of late, the balance of politics has shifted to a more right-wing, Eurosceptic and anti-globalist demeanour. The Five Star Movement, which made a short-lived alliance with the more obviously right-wing, nationalistic Lega, has a leftist and green pedigree on environmental policy, but endorses policies of immigration control with the same vigour as parties and movements of the right.

As Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have shown (2018), it is easy, but mistaken, to caricature support for populist parties and leaders; to depict the ‘populist revolt’ as a clear instance of Morlocks rising from their dark caverns to devour the Eloi. That interpretation is all too apparent in some commentary on the election of Donald Trump, about the leave majority in the UK Brexit referendum of 2016, and with regard to the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ (yellow vests) in France and across Europe (Goodhart, 2017). In such accounts, the best that is said of and for populism is that it parades as a form of anti-politics; the worst, that it is a carrier of what Georges Balandier called ‘democratic sickness’ (1992: 43).

Whether populism musters as a viable – or any – alternative to the ills now generally held to beset mass representative democracy, runs like a thread through both balanced and committed treatments of the phenomenon. The questions asked are standard: is populism immanently democratic or necessarily anti-democratic? Can it ever be pluralist or is it an implacable enemy of diversity? These stark dichotomies also inform much commentary on the trajectories and temper of populist incursions into contemporary politics. So, among a host of queries, it is appropriate to ask whether curating the ‘will of the people’ always pushes populist regimes and movements in an authoritarian direction? And in terms of impact, are we talking about a strain of political contagion that is no more than a zeitgeist, its progress and demeanour always contingent and probably time-limited?

What can be said is that few places are now immune to a politics that both invests regimes where pluralist democracy has shallow roots, and those where events and trends in the global politics and economics have weakened the legitimacy of previously sound or largely unchallenged institutions. This will be a recurring theme. As a case in point, the previously remarked, and always precarious, coalition between Italy’s free-wheeling populist movement, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement) and the more traditionally conservative and authoritarian Lega in the spring of 2018, provides fascinating insights into the ways in which conventional political parties and mainstream print and broadcast media are losing their grip on electoral politics, and where the routine brokerage and aggregative functions associated with mass political parties in representative democracies attract increasing calumny.

Nothwithstanding the short period of grace afforded to beleaguered political elites by the ravages of Covid-19, the parlous esteem in which the two-party dominant system in the UK is held following the Brexit referendum, is also a datum in any such judgement. Elections to the EU Parliament in May 2019, in Italy and elsewhere, would seem to confirm this trend, although by no means entirely, with the latter an important qualification. How then to consign the Italian and EU experience in terms of what it means for the shape and temper of politics in quite mature, democratic systems? What have been and what will be the consequences for democratic theory and practice? In weighing such questions, there is also the necessary caution not to over-read the scale and impact of populist incursions into usual politics.

These are not imponderable matters, but they are complex. We must be wary of off-the-shelf answers. An appropriate caution is to take due care over how we judge populism as a strain of politics likely to yield glocal and accommodative outcomes as opposed to pathological forms of localism and authoritarian rule. National populism speaks to and claims to be the expression of particularistic identities and world-views. There is rarely a universal populism, or a claim to it, even though, as Niall Ferguson notes (2016: 42), ‘populists are nearly always part of a global phenomenon’, and the idea of populism across borders, or a global populism subsists in various prescriptions and ambitions (Attila, 2019; Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2019). President Trump’s one-time adviser Steve Bannon referred to national populism as the ‘global Tea Party’ (in a speech at the Vatican on 8 May 2014), implying a global network or coalition of the newly precarious, whose raison d’être is the protection of difference in the guise of nations and their threatened cultures, or imputed civilizations. More prosaically, Matteo Salvini, leader of the Italian Lega, sought to build a coalition of populist right parties in the European Parliament (EP) following the EP elections in May 2019. As I note in Chapter 2, apparent, or sought for, convergence may hide, but not negate, marked differences between populists.

These are vignettes from what many would still dismiss as populism’s darker side, but is populism amenable to a much wider and more inclusive audience or constituency than the authoritarian nationalism of the liberal nightmare allows?

Populism looks to co-opt the voice of the forgotten ‘ordinary’ citizen and disports as the only begetter of genuine patriotism (Zakaria, 2016). It traffics a unifying meta-language in times of uncertainty and ‘will of the people’ is its most potent meme (Hauser, 2018). Under the mantle of national populism, it disparages adversaries as enemies of the people and unworthy of their trust. A campaigning Donald Trump wrote in the Wall Street Journal (14 April 2016) ‘(t)he only antidote to decades of ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will. On every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong.’ Norbert Hofer, who mounted an ‘Austria first’ presidential campaign in 2016, berated his opponent ‘(y)ou have the haute volée [high society] behind you; I have the people with me’. Of course, there is an element of playing to the gallery in this kind of rhetoric, and it is certainly opportunistic, but there is no denying its resonance with portions of otherwise diverse national electorates willing to be swayed, or who feel unrequited. And there is no gainsaying it’s campaign savvy.

The people set against all manner of subversions and incursions is a constant theme, sometimes replete – Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the USA come to mind – with mysogynistic and racist clamour and often couched in the rhetoric of victimhood and the imagery of beleaguered national identity (Muller, 2017). Even Theresa May, erstwhile prime minister of the UK, and hardly the epitome of a charismatic populist leader, felt emboldened or besieged enough to inveigh against what she saw as the democratically elected parliament’s attempts to usurp the will of the British people to leave the EU in March 2019. Some contenders for the leadership of the UK’s Conservative and Unionist Party in the spring and summer of the same year were not shy in employing similar rhetoric.

But not all sentiments jealous of the nation and the national interest are plucked from the authoritarian-populist playbook, or rehearse deviant political theory as an invitation to come over to the dark side. In some theoretical accounts, the global narrative of the nation-state is not mustered as a realist call to arms in a war of all against all. The emotional need for people to cleave to and refurbish a national story does not have to be a stalking-horse for illiberal and authoritarian nationalism, blatant xenophobia or lumpen populism (Degler, 1959). In other words, populism is not, or need not be, the same thing as nativism, although the two are sometimes conjoined....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Populism and Globalization: Uneasy Bedfellows
• 2 What’s in a Name? Populism in Thought (and Some Deeds)
• 3 Populism in Practice: Causes, Correlates and Crises
• 4 Populism and the New Globalization
• 5 Populism: Pathological Localism or Vernacular Glocalization?
• 6 Postmodern Populism, Globalization and the Crisis of Modernity
• Epilogue: Postmodern Populism and the New Globalization – Reasons to be Cheerful?
• References
• Index