Populism and Nationalism as Global Trends

A host of new populist nationalist leaders claiming democratic legitimacy via elections have emphasised national sovereignty and national traditions in the interest of ‘the people’. These leaders include Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Hungary’s Orbán, Poland’s Kaczynski, and finally Donald J. Trump in the United States.

The Brexit movement in the United Kingdom has not had a clear leader, yet here too the basic impulse was a reassertion of national sovereignty.

Populist parties are waiting in the wings in France, the Netherlands, and all over Scandinavia. Nationalist rhetoric has not been limited to these leaders, however; Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan have both been identified with nationalist causes, as has Xi Jinping of China, who has emphasised a socialism with distinctively Chinese characteristics.

Islamist movements continue to spread in countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Philippines. In Indonesia, the popular Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok), was attacked for alleged blasphemy by increasingly self-confident Islamist groups and eventually jailed after narrowly losing his re-election bid.

Manifestations of Politicized Religion

Freilich ist der Islam nicht die einzige Erscheinungsform der politisierten Religion. Ministerpräsident Modis Partei BJP basiert ausdrücklich auf einem hinduistischen Verständnis der indischen nationalen Identität. Eine militante Version des politischen Buddhismus hat in süd- und südostasiatischen Ländern wie Sri Lanka und Myanmar Fuß gefasst, wo es zu Zusammenstößen mit muslimischen und hinduistischen Gruppen kam. Religiöse Vereinigungen gehören zudem konservativen Koalitionen in Demokratien wie Japan, Polen und den USA an.

In Israel, dessen politische Ordnung nach der Unabhängigkeit mehr als eine Generation lang von zwei Parteien mit Ideologien europäischen Stils, der Arbeiterpartei Awoda und dem konservativem Likudblock, dominiert wurde, fällt ein immer größerer Stimmenanteil religiösen Parteien wie Schas und Agudat Jisra’el zu.

Decay of the Class-oriented Left

The decline has happened more slowly in other parts of the world: left-wing populism made a strong showing primarily in parts of Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and the Kirchners in Argentina. But this wave has already retreated, with the self-immolation of Venezuela under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

The temporarily strong showings of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States a few years ago may be harbingers of a recovery, but parties of the left are nowhere the dominant forces they were through the late twentieth century. The global weakness of the left is in many ways a surprising outcome, given the rise of global inequality over the past three decades. By global inequality, I am referring to the rise of inequality within individual countries, rather than between countries.

The gap between rich and poor countries has closed as high levels of growth have occurred not just in East Asia but in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. But as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, within-country inequality around the world has seen a large increase since 1980; contrary to the long-accepted theory of the economist Simon Kuznets, rich-country incomes have been diverging rather than converging. Hardly a single region of the world has not seen the rise of a new class of oligarchs—billionaires who use their wealth politically to protect their family interests.

The economist Branko Milanovic has devised a widely cited ‘elephant graph’, which shows the relative gains in per capita income for different segments of the global income distribution. Real income grew worldwide in all income brackets from 1988 to 2008, mainly through productivity gains and globalisation.

European Coal and Steel Community as an Antidote to National Identity

The future of liberal democracy is at stake. The contemporary European struggle over national identity begins with the founders of the European Union, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, who understood that exclusive ethnic definitions of national identity had been at the root of the two world wars that Europe experienced.

As an antidote, they created the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, composed of France, Belgium, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, which was designed to prevent German rearmament while facilitating trade and economic cooperation in a formerly integrated region that had been ripped apart by war.

The idea that Germany and France, the two main antagonists of the world wars, would ever go to war with each other is vanishingly remote today. A stratum of young, usually well educated Europeans are now born in one member state, get their education in another, marry someone from yet another country, and work in multiple locations within the EU and farther afield. They retain an awareness of their birth nationality, but their lives are tied to the EU as a whole.

The symbols of nationhood such as a flag and an anthem came late, and the EU’s diverse membership had no common civic education.

But whether ‘Europe’ has an identity stronger than the old national identities it was supposed to supersede is not clear. In the EU’s early decades, it was not politically acceptable to celebrate national identity too loudly at a member-state level. This was particularly true for countries such as Germany and Spain that had fascist pasts: citizens did not wave national flags, sing national anthems, or cheer too loudly for their country’s sports teams.

For them Europe was a refuge, but not necessarily a preferred destination. But the leaders of the EU were not in a position to invest much effort in building an alternative new identity. They did not create a single European citizenship; rules for citizenship remained the province of individual member states. The symbols of nationhood such as a flag and an anthem came late, and the EU’s diverse membership had no common civic education.

But the most important failure was in the democratic accountability of the EU itself. The most powerful institution within the EU was the Europe an Commission, an unelected technocratic body whose main purpose was to promote a single market within Europe. It was answerable to the people only indirectly, via the Council of Ministers, which represented the individual member states. A directly elected European parliament had rather limited powers, which has consequently failed to generate significant voter turnout or enthusiasm.

Citizens of Europe knew that the important votes they cast were still those at the member-state level, and their chief energies and emotional attachments were directed there. As a result, they felt little sense of ownership or control over the institutions governing Europe as a whole. So while the elites talked of ‘ever-closer union’ within the EU, the reality was that the ghosts of the older national identities hung around like unwanted guests at a dinner party. This was particularly true among older, less educated voters who could not or would not take advantage of the mobility offered by the new Europe. These ghosts started to emerge at critical junctures, where they have created an existential threat to the EU as a whole.

This was vividly illustrated by the crisis over the euro, in which the common currency allowed Greece to borrow profligately during the boom years of the 2000s. The Germans, who were perfectly willing to support their less well-off fellow citizens with an expansive welfare state, were not inclined to be so generous with the Greeks when the latter threatened to default.

Citizens of Europe knew that the important votes they cast were still those at the member-state level, and their chief energies and emotional attachments were directed there.

Greece indeed had very different approaches to savings, debt and practices such as public sector patronage than did Germany. Berlin, as Greece’s chief creditor, was able to impose crushing austerity on Athens with help from international institutions such as the European Central Bank and the IMF, a situation that persists to the present.

The euro crisis exposed a deep rift within the eurozone’s northern and southern members, who today are far more aware of their national differences than they were prior to the outbreak of the crisis.

Any action that takes place will therefore have to happen, for better or worse, on a member state level. Those laws of EU member states still based on jus sanguinis need to be changed to jus soli so as not to privilege one ethnic group over another.