Chapter 2 in this book considered the histories of populism, pointing to its reappearance in Europe of today, generating a new series of challenges about how to conceptualise the political landscape. In this chapter, this investigation is continued, placing populism in its relationship with the democratic system(s). The rise of political parties labelled as ‘populist’ in various European countries – testified by their spectacular scores in national and European elections – is often presented by mainstream media (i.e. magazines and daily newspapers, such as The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, La Repubblica), mainstream politicians1 and a significant number of scholars (Held 1996: 63–64; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008: 22) as ‘a threat’ to democracy or ‘the democratic system’ of the EU and Europe – the two entities, one political and one geographical, frequently overlapping.
As a matter of fact, parties or forces labelled as ‘populist’ accept representative democracy and its tools (elections, voting) and conduct electoral battles using strong verbal violence, but rejecting physical violence. Their position towards ‘the political system’ is different from that of the neo-fascists and neo-Nazi parties and movements whose open or hidden aim is the ‘regime change’. As demonstrated in Chapter 3 of this book, neither neo-fascists nor neo-Nazis can be defined as populists.
While they are considered a ‘threat to democracy’, the so-called ‘populist’ forces and parties present themselves as democrats – in fact, as the only ‘true democrats’ that are able to give voice to the real needs of the people. They consider the ruling political class as betrayers of the people, having placed their private interests to the forefront. If this can appear as a ‘populist argument’, it is a matter of fact that, in most European countries, the divide between voters and their representatives is constantly growing. The declining voters’ participation in elections – even if not alarming – is a sign of the malfunctioning of democracy in today’s Europe (Delwit 2013). The erosion is especially remarkable in the European elections: in 2014, the percentage of Europeans that voted has only reached the majority in five member states (plus Luxemburg and Belgium, where voting is compulsory). In the other twenty-one member states, voters have been a minority: the lowest scores were in Slovenia, with 21 per cent, Czech Republic, with 19.5 per cent, and Slovakia, with 13 per cent. In big countries such as France and United Kingdom, voters were a minority: 43 per cent and 36 per cent respectively.2
Another indicator of the European democratic malfunctioning is testified by the presence of consociation governments where parties of the right and the left govern together, as was the case in Greece both before and after the electoral victory of Syriza; in Italy during the period of Mario Monti’s government between 2011 and 2013; and now (2015) in Germany. These coalitions, by their nature, invalidate the normal democratic dialectic between political alternatives, but even when there is an alternating of power between mainstream right and social democratic parties, the present dynamics – namely, the limited sovereignty in terms of national budgets, because of the rules imposed by the European Union, especially in the Eurozone – bring to an alternating in power without a real alternative.
The so-called ‘populists’ have different responses to the malfunctioning of democracy in Europe, according to the variety of ideologies and political cultures the various ‘populist’ groups represent. The responses are, in fact, an important element of distinction between the ‘national populists’ and other forms, such as the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo. ‘National populists’ are, as Taguieff (1990) defined them, right-wing, neo-fascist and rural–populist parties that have gone through a process of ‘modernisation’, abandoning extremism and violence; they focus on identity issues.
‘National populists’ are in favour of a return to the nation states, recovering sovereignty before supranational institutions, such as the European Union. Their idea of sovereignty is linked to the reconstruction of a ‘homogenous nation’, de facto based on ethnicity; consequently, they want to give priority to the ‘nationals’ against migrants. Other forces that are labelled as ‘populist’, such as the Italian Five Star Movement, are in favour of recovering the sovereignty of the people through a different form of democracy, the ‘participatory democracy’ – the people who wish to become citizens, instead of a passive entity (Spinelli 2014).
This complex scenario cannot be reduced to a dichotomist approach opposing populism versus democracy. The question posed by various scholars – if populism is a threat or a challenge/corrective for the democratic system (Bryder 2009; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013) – is a pertinent one when taking into consideration the dysfunction of democracy in Europe. Do ‘populists’ represent a threat to democracy or are they, on the contrary, a challenge that ‘repoliticizes and brings revival to dull and stagnant discourse of the mainstream parties’ (Bryder 2009)? As a matter of fact, many Italian scholars (Biorcio and Natale 2013; Orazi and Socci 2014; Spinelli 2014) suggest that the good electoral scores of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement have been functional for a healthier democracy, forcing elites to open up party competition and to broaden their political agenda. A few French scholars – for example, Jacques Sapir3 and Michel Onfray4 – have (finally) reached the opinion that some national populist parties – such as the National Front – despite the worrying risks represented by their xenophobic (and even racist) discourses, have raised a major issue: the nature of ‘sovereignty’ in Europe as regards the global economy and the powers of a supranational institution such as the European Union.
In fact, the idea that populism is a challenge to democracy that may have positive effects is not new. For Canovan (1999), populism’s function is to redeem representative democracy. As discussed in the second chapter of this book, Ernesto Laclau considers populism in light of the concept of hegemony, which is the essence of political competition: populism can be the right or the left, presenting different constructions of the people competing in the aim of gaining hegemony. When there is a threat or challenge to democracy, populist forces raise major issues around the notion of democracy and, eventually, its metamorphoses or ‘anamorphosis’5 (deformed democracy) in the neo-liberal era, under the pressure of the neo-liberal economic global system and the European Union.
This chapter analyses, first, the possible ‘threats’ that various forms of populism represent for democracy, introducing the issue of ‘extreme’ nationalism or ethno-nationalism, which characterises the national populists. Second, we address the concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ developed by Fareed Zakaria. After exploring the differences between liberal democracy and illiberal democracy, the chapter considers the relationship between democracy and national sovereignty in respect to the triumph of the neo-liberal economic dogmas and the supra-national construction of the EU. Finally, we look at the structural economic, social and political changes that are at the core of the competing mainstream and populist discourses, introducing the concept of post-democracy, as it has been developed by various scholars, focusing especially on the work of two sociologists, Colin Crouch and Luciano Gallino, whose analyses converge in several points.
Why would ‘populists’ threaten the European democratic system? In order to answer this question, we should make a clear distinction between the accusations that are launched by mainstream politicians and the media against ‘the populists’ and the scientific arguments developed by academic research. The first are often generic and are not based on in-depth analysis; that is not the case of the academic studies that raise a series of issues that place populism at the core of the present political dynamics and induce a clear distinction between right-wing national populists and other forces labelled as populists – namely, the Italian Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo or the Spanish Podemos.
In the case of right-wing national populists, scholars (including the authors of the different chapters in this book) evoke the exclusionary construction of the people as a threat to democracy, legitimising the division between ‘us’ and the ‘others’ (that do not belong to the ‘people’), producing xenophobic discourses and splitting society. We speak here of the rise of a type of ethno-nationalism that is not oriented to safeguard the state, but ‘the people’ against the constructed ‘other’. Some authors (Wodak et al. 2014) relate right-wing populist parties to ‘Haiderisation’, which stands for a ‘firm’ populism that is built on strong ethno-nationalist sentiment, is grounded in nativist ideology and may eventually lead to a politics of fear. Ethno-nationalism that is often legitimised by national populists as ‘good nationalism’ or patriotism utilising claims such as ‘we are only defending our nation, culture and values’ excludes ethnic, religious and sexual minorities that allegedly do not conform to the majoritarian ethno-national scapes.
‘Firm’ populism that functions along the exclusionary lines of ethnonationalism favouring the allegedly homogeneous ethnicity of the ‘natives’ should also be related to contemporary manifestations of racism (Pajnik and Valenčič 2015). Contemporary processes of ‘neo-racialisation’ and the ‘culturalisation of racism’ (Balibar 1970, 1991) certainly insist on priority of the ‘natives’ (‘the people’), but also point to the incompatibility of cultures, which is a strategy of ‘differentialist racism’, according to Taguieff (1990) or of ‘racism without races’ (Balibar 1970, 1991). Differential racism has, to a large extent, replaced race with ethnicity, culture, gender, religion, lifestyle and so on to construct a myriad of reasons to legitimise exclusion, often justified by the need to protect the majoritarian morality, nation and culture. Racial hierarchisation and segregation implemented by national populists does not necessarily imply direct superiority. They point to differences and reaffirm difference between the ‘in’ and the ‘out’ groups, where they interpret life with ‘fixed cultures’ that should be differentiated for ‘the people’ (the natives) to be able to survive. Cultural racism practices implemented by national populists essentialise differences and, by so doing in the name of ‘respect for difference’, actually reproduce hierarchy between cultures.
If the virulence of the anti-immigrant (or anti-Muslim) discourses differentiates populists from mainstream political forces – see Chapter 4 – similar positions are now spreading in mainstream parties all over Europe. It is a fact that the rise of national populists may contribute to this trend, as the French case would illustrate: the electoral scores of Marine Le Pen push right-wing parties to readapt their discourses on immigration towards the National Front voters’ sensibilities. Still, deeper reasons are behind these similarities, making it difficult to draw a clear line between national populists and traditional right-wing parties, competing in anti-immigration discourses. We will try to indicate at least some of the reasons why ‘populist’ and mainstream parties find themselves in a continuum in respect to immigration and racism.
Ethno-nationalism can be considered a main characteristic of national populists, but it is difficult to ignore the complex links between populist ethnonationalism and the ‘Herderian’ idea of the people (see Chapter 2) that is at the core of the foundation of many European nation states. The Herderian idea of the people is, of course, pregnant in the construction of the German nation, but it also strongly influenced a part of the Italian Risorgimento (process of construction of the Italian nation state) and coexisted in France with the Republican idea of the nation composed by active citizens. Even if after World War II, ethnic nationalism was rejected and civic nationalism became predominant, it remained as a hidden ideology and it re-emerges in critical occasions. Nowadays, the ethnic idea of the people is not absent from mainstream parties’ discourses (mainly right-wing, but also socialist and social-democrats).
As for differential racism, strict migration regimes that reconfirm the ‘fortress Europe’ by dividing ‘us’ from ‘migrants’ are examples of a contemporary processes of racialisation implemented by the mainstream political actors. Scholars speak of institutional racism, when national populists, but also mainstream political parties, united in the extreme centre, as Tariq Ali (2015) would say, plea for management of migration that invests in stricter border control, tightening of citizenship policies, reinforcement of deportation and direct discrimination of Muslim migrants, emphasised even more after the Paris attacks in November 2015.
National populists clearly oppose ideas of multicultural society6 – that is, of course, a target against which to fight. But multiculturalism – especially as a convivial idea of intercultural exchanges – is far from being a shared model in today’s Europe. On the contrary, it is rejected by most conservative mainstream parties and survives, at the most, as a sort of identity policy based mainly on religion.
We should also be reminded that nationalist or even ethno-nationalist arguments are not limited to migration issues. During the Eurozone debt crisis, much of the arguments that have been developed by mainstream parties in Northern Europe – namely, in Germany or Finland – in order to impose austerity policies on the Southern European countries, have used the worst possible nationalist stereotypes against the Mediterranean populations, praising the ‘national interest’ of the virtuous Germans or Finns against the incompatible South. The verbal war between the Germans and the Greeks has characterised five years of European politics. To conclude on this point, in today’s Europe, not only nationalism but also ethno-nationalism is embedded both in the mainstream and in the right-wing populist parties.
An argument that seems promising in defining the threats that populists (especially national populists, but eventually other forces that cannot be included among the national populists) can represent for democracy concerns the shift from a liberal democracy to an ‘illiberal democracy’ – a concept that has been developed, among others, by Fareed Zakaria (1997).
Over the last decade, elected governments claiming to represent the people have steadily encroached on the powers and rights of other elements in society, an usurpation that is both horizontal (from other branches of the national government) and vertical (from regional and local authorities, as well as private businesses and non-governmental groups). These types of governments are mainly outside of Europe (Fujmori in Peru, Menem in Argentina, Yeltsin in Russia), but they are also developing in Europe – especially in the Eastern part of the continent (Zakaria mentions Slovakia and Hungary), but also in the ‘core’ of Europe, in Italy, as the case of Silvio Berlusconi demonstrates. Once in power, these ‘illiberal democracies’ would be a sort of tyranny of the majority. This accusation was addressed to the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi when he ruled Italy. Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia – then, Popolo delle Libertà – is a mainstream party, which is a member of the European Popular Party. If it presents a few ‘populist’ characteristics, it remains difficult to include it in the ‘national populists’ family. However, the way Berlusconi’s government ruled presents elements of ‘illiberal democracy’.
The concept of illiberal democracy developed by Fareed Zakaria (1997) is a theoretical tool that can help us in understanding how ‘populists’, once elected in free elections, as was the case in Slovakia, Hungary and Italy, affect democracy. After explaining that for almost a century in the West, democracy has meant ‘liberal democracy – a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property’, Zakaria (1997) points out how the ‘latter bundle of freedoms – what might be termed constitutional liberalism – is theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy’. Constitutional liberalism was not, in nineteenth-century Europe, a democracy, but a liberal autocracy, where only a minority of the population had the right to vote. It was the rule of the ‘elites’. It was only after World War II that Western countries became full democracies, but as Zakaria (1997) points out: ‘The “Western” model is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge.’ This is an extremely important point: looking at the historical precedent helps us explain the present ‘populist’ critiques to the current state of the European Union, accused of as an oligarchical government of technocrats by the ‘populists’. The return of a rule of the ‘elites’ (such as, for example, the technocratic power in Brussels) may represent a threat to the democratic system that was introduced after World War II.
Zakaria points out how the tension between constitutional liberalism and democracy centres on the scope of governmental authority. Constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power; democracy is about its accumulation and use. For this reason, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals saw a force in democracy that could undermine liberty. The most well-known example is Alexis de Tocqueville, who warned of the ‘tyranny of the majority’. He wrote: ‘The very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority.’ It is not by chance that the first protests against Silvio Berlusconi’s government, organised by the ‘professors of Florence’ in October 2001, had the words of Alexis de Tocqueville as slogans. At the same time, it is precisely this type of popular sovereignty that the illiberal democracies represent – rejoining the political aims of the ‘populist’ forces.
Illiberal democracy is close to the populist idea of democracy, where the people represent the absolute sovereignty. When in place, illiberal democracies are: ‘Democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been re-elected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms.’ The shift from liberal to illiberal democracy can be an outcome of some ‘populist’ governments, as is demonstrated by the twenty years’ battle between Silvio Berlusconi and the Italian justice system (with several attempts by Berlusconi to reform the system in order to submit it to the executive power). Nowadays, a clear example of ‘illiberal democracy’ would be the Orbán government in Hungary, which ignores the balance of powers, attacks the independence of the institutions (such as, for example, the independence of the national bank) and denies the rights of minorities (Mudde 2004). A similar trend towards ‘illiberal democracy’ is seen as a possible outcome of the victory of the right-wing party founded by the Kazinsky brothers in Poland and the arrival into power of Marine Le Pen in France. Holders of such ‘democracies’, in recent years, claim to speak for a democratic perspective in the name of liberal values, but they actually speak against democracy and its values. In this context – and Hungary is a good example – we might speak of ‘captive democracies’: when exclusivist ethno-nationalist and anti-democratic sentiment triumphs in the name of ‘the people’.
A valuable reflection on populism and liberalism is provided by Ignazi, who stresses that populism is not a ‘mentality’: there are very clear borders between populism and liberal democracy, as between the forces that can be labelled as populist and the ones that are not, even if they both act in a democracy, as the Italian Republic. For Ignazi, liberal democracy is based on the division, respect and reciprocal control among the powers; the pluralism of interests and opinions is secured by the separation of competencies and fields. On the contrary, the ‘populist’ democracy (as, for example, the one that Berlusconi has tried to create in Italy) is an insidious strain of liberal democracy. In populist democracy the leader ‘interprets’ the will of the masses. His legitimacy is not the outcome of the election, but his exclusive relationship and direct contact with the deep feelings of the people, which only the leader interprets and meets. So, those who oppose him or her become objectively an enemy of the people. In fact, the ‘populist’ democracy ‘needs’ an enemy, either indefinite and hidden or overt and identifiable, to whom ‘populists’ attribute the difficulties they may find in the path of the government.
The notion of ‘illiberal democracy’ has revealed a conflict between democracy and sovereignty. Where does sovereignty lie? In the rule of law (the Constitution) or in the ‘people’ (and its elected/chosen representatives)? This conflict has not been really resolved over the years, not even in Europe, where it has been complicated by the introduction of a supra-national institution, the European Union. Liberal democracy (or liberal constitutionalism) and ‘illiberal’ democracy converge, in fact, on one point: the definition of the space where the democratic process takes place. This is not a universal space, but a bordered space – symbolic but also physical – the space of the nation/country that is at the same time a political and geographical entity.
The modern nation state appears as a ‘territorial state’ because it is based on the defence of its borders. This territorial ideology serves to unify the inside and outside divide, the countrymen/foreigners/enemies (Anderson 1996: 116).7 The persistence of the territoriality of the state is best shown in the example of citizenship regimes where citizenship as ‘passport citizenship’, as a status, is prioritised on the ius soli or the ius sanguini principles, connoting those that belong to ‘the soil and the blood of the nation’. The space of the citizenship may coincide with the space of the ethnicity and of the ‘people’ constructed as homogenous. As Étienne Balibar (2004) reminds us, Europe as a ‘borderland’, with both permeability and flexibility of physical and virtual borders, constitutes minorities as outsiders. Border regime reproduces what Balibar calls ‘the recolonisation of migration’ (2004: 38), with migrants being constantly placed and replaced at the outskirts of the borders.
In a recent debate with the former European Parliament member Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut reminded him of the following: ‘The nation is the space where what happens to the others happens to you. Despite the “telepresence” in the world, no one can overthrow the power of the boundaries. In this bordered space, democracy makes sense’ (Le Monde 2014).
It is in the space of the nation that, in Europe, the political citizenship – the possibility to elect their representatives, to be elected and the right to association – has been implemented. The same goes for civil rights comprising equality before the law, freedom of speech and religion. And it is also in the space of the nation that social citizenship, with the introduction of the welfare system, has been imagined (Marshall 1950). The nation state has been, historically, the producer of the exclusion of non-citizens (as foreigners and immigrants), but it was also – especially after World War II – the guarantor of democracy and welfare for citizens.
The implementation of welfare signified the abandonment of the myth of laissez-faire policies for central governments’ programmes. Keynesianism gave the ideological foundations: the politicians who chose another path won the war against economic liberalism on the barricades of the 1929 crisis, which left tremendous unemployment, rampant nationalism and the rise of totalitarian regimes. Unemployment/authoritarian reaction and employment/democracy: these two simple pairs have marked the pace of European political history of the twentieth century and, apparently, are marking the twenty-first century as well. Globalism and neo-liberalism embedded in the programmes of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1970s have unmasked the paradox of social rights, which manifests itself in the conflict between the ostensible (distributive) justice (they should ensure a just distribution of social protection) of rights and the assumption about their peaceful coexistence with the existing economic and political system. It seems that the opportunism of the social citizenship concept lies in the fact that social rights could be exercised in practically any socio-economic system, be it reformist, liberal, but also authoritarian, and so on, since they arbitrarily adapt to various governing strategies. If political and civil rights are, at least professedly, ensured once and for all and believed to be above national interests, social rights are heavily dependent on national and international economic ideologies.
For years, the post-war model of democracy, combining constitutional liberalism with social citizenship and the welfare state, has been dismantled and is in a deep crisis: today, the deregulation of the economy according to the dictates of neo-liberalism prevents the state from making its own economic choices to a plan articulated around a balanced relation between the market economy and guaranteed welfare.
We are hereby touching on one of the central issues of the democratic challenge today: the majority of citizens do not see democracy as an end in itself, they want freedom, but they also want social justice, and they consider that only the space of the nation can guarantee this. They connect the rights not to an abstract universalism, but to the concrete membership of a nation state, a national citizenship. The issue of the sovereignty that is about a pact between the government of a country and the people is crucial for understanding the processes of nationalising citizenship. Historically, the idea of liberal democracy was based on what is called constitutional liberalism, which was embedded in constitutions in a national space. In the time of neo-liberalism, however, the role of supra-national organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is rising and dictates the economic policies in countries suffering under the debt’s burden and, in the European context, under the technocracy of the European Union and its institutions. This is not to say that the post-Westphalian concept of sovereignty is without problems. Migration has shaken the national protectionism of sovereignty and pointed to the need to rethink the states in their worldly context, along the lines of world citizenship, transnational citizenship (Soysal 1994) or multi-layered citizenship (Yuval-Davis 1999), which would prioritise citizens’ protection (human rights) and the public good over ethnonationalist interests in the context of sovereign national states. In Kantian terms, this would require the restoration of the idea of ‘joint possession of the world’ by the citizens (and not by alienated political and economic forces), which is manifested in his idea of cosmopolitan rights (Weltbürgerecht).
In neo-liberalism, the defence of sovereignty – at least for what concerns the economic choices (as Orbán does) – is considered ‘populist’. Nouriel Roubini in a recent article, referring to the elections in Poland, stated:
But now the backlash against globalization – and the freer movement of goods, services, capital, labor, and technology that came with it – has arrived. This new nationalism takes different economic forms: trade barriers, asset protection, reaction against foreign direct investment, policies favoring domestic workers and firms, anti-immigration measures, state capitalism, and resource nationalism. In the political realm, populist, anti-globalization, anti-immigration, and in some cases outright racist and anti-Semitic parties are on the rise.8
A liberal free-market economy can be a viable economic system, but there are various ways of implementing it: neo-liberalism is not, at the moment, providing assurance of either prosperity or employment. Here, we face the issue of the economic choices governments make and their benefits for the different categories of the population. It is not by chance that working classes and lower-middle classes are now voting for the Front National in France or the Northern League in Lombardy or Fidesz in Hungary. They have lost confidence in mainstream parties that all accept neo-liberal dogmas. They vote in hope for some restoration of social rights, but are faced instead with the rising exclusionary and even racist sentiments. It must also be stressed that the ‘populist’ parties have different approaches to the economic model they propose – their positions shift as well between protectionism and neo-liberalism – and this should be analysed on a case by case basis.
Why would the critics of the present economic neo-liberal dogmas in the management of the economy and of the state represent a threat to democracy, instead of a healthy debate for democracy? Is it not a real problem for democracy that the mainstream media support the ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) neo-liberal dogmas in the management of the economy and the state and accuse every politician that criticises these same dogmas of being a ‘populist’?
The market, and the good functioning of the market, according to the neo-liberal dogma, having become the only accepted model for policy, all the experiences that do not follow are considered ‘populist’, independent from their eventual success in respect to the well-being of the population. This is how Syriza became a ‘populist’ party, even if it has nothing to do with the characters of populism described in the previous chapters – critics of the political elites, charismatic leaders and so on.
The critiques of the neo-liberal model and the management of the crisis in Europe are shared by very different political forces that have nothing in common, neither in the construction of the people, nor in the political proposals and model of society that they aim to build. We have mentioned Syriza and the traditional post-Marxist or post-socialist left – such as SEL in Italy, Front de la gauche in France, The Left in Germany or The United Left in Slovenia. In contrast to some (Wodak et al. 2014) who speak of ‘left-wing populism’, we claim that these forces do not present any populist character. The critiques are also directed against new forces, such as the Five Star Movement in Italy or Podemos in Spain, which cannot be easily classified. The mainstream media tend to classify them as ‘populists’, even if they construct ‘the people’ in a very different way from the national populists.
The rejection of the neo-liberal dogmas is linked, by the so-called ‘populists’, to the issue of national sovereignty, defined not in exclusivist territorial terms, but as the possibility of choosing its own policy. It is precisely the idea of sovereignty that is presently at the core of much debate inside these movements.
The emerging issue of sovereignty is linked to two main issues: the construction of the European Union and especially of the Eurozone; and the shift towards post-democracy, as a consequence of the neo-liberal dogmas and the loss of control over the state of the economy. The current Euroscepticism among the so-called ‘populist’ parties is linked to the loss of sovereignty, in the sense of the triumph of the weak state’ or the ‘state in crisis’ (Bauman and Bordoni 2014) that is giving way to strong international bodies and their economic hegemony, producing the subordination of the citizen to the consumer. The construction of the Eurozone signifies the loss of monetary sovereignty, which means that the government is unable to make decisions about their economic choices that affect the entire democratic system.
In the past decades European elites have engaged in one of the most amazing transfers of power from the national to the supranational. Rarely have politicians so happily marginalized themselves. Of particular importance was the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which has taken many important issues out of the national democratic realm and transferred them to the much less democratic EU sphere. This was, of course, most notably the case for the countries that joined the Eurozone, which no longer control their own currency or monetary policy.
(Mudde 2015: 72–73)
This choice has not been a democratic one. Referendums to approve this loss of sovereignty have been organised only in a minority of the European countries. In addition, the weakened position of the role of the state in general also contributes to the hegemony and unilateralism of some of the existing ‘strong’ states – analysing the debt crises as a crisis of democracy, Ulrich Beck (2013) speaks of German Europe, i.e. the stronger states of the European centre colonising the states on the periphery. The interference of the European Union with the democratic choices of different countries – from Italy at the time of Berlusconi through to Greece and Portugal with austerity measures – are numerous and, in spite of popular protests and poor economic results, are criticised by the majority of economists; despite this, austerity policies continue to be imposed on European citizens. The outcome is a growing Euroscepticism that is now broadly shared by the populations of the EU member states. One of the last surveys conducted by Ipsos European Pulse has shown that around two-thirds (68 per cent) of the interviewed think that Europe is going in the wrong direction – 77 per cent of Italians, 77 per cent of French, 76 per cent of Spanish and 61 per cent of Germans. The interviewed consider that the weight of the EU is important in the economy (as in agriculture, law, state budget, immigration), but they consider this role as negative. A total of 65 per cent of citizens consider that their country has been damaged by the policies of budget control and expenses imposed by the Union. Austerity policies are strongly criticised in Holland (77 per cent), France (75 per cent), Spain (75 per cent) and Italy (70 per cent). They are less criticised in Germany (50 per cent) and Sweden (51 per cent in favour). Citizens also think that the EU increases inequality and that it brings advantages to the richest countries at the expense of the poorest: this sentiment is shared by 73 per cent of Spanish, 71 per cent of Italians, 64 per cent of Poles and 58 per cent of French. In Germany (39 per cent), Holland (43 per cent) and Sweden (45 per cent), this position represents a minority. In the long-term, only 11 per cent declare that things should go on like this in Europe: nine out of ten want a change; 19 per cent think that their country should leave the EU; 34 per cent think that they should stay, but reduce its power; 19 per cent think that a closer integration among EU member states would be a better choice; and 18 per cent suggest that the United States of Europe would be the solution (37 per cent against 53 per cent, as regards preference to get out or to reduce the power). The strongest Eurosceptics are in the UK (68 per cent) and Holland (68 per cent), but they are also found in France (55 per cent); in Italy, it is about fifty–fifty (Pagnoncelli 2014).
What is happening in Europe – the submission of the choices of the economy to economic dogmas – is, however, part of a more general trend worldwide. Has democracy been a victim of the neo-liberal globalisation? This question has been raised by the alter-global movements since the end of the 1990s – i.e. the example of the Battle of Seattle protests against World Trade Organization (WTO) trade policies. Are we entering into a new phase that can be defined as post-democracy?
The concept of post-democracy was first defined in the United States by Gore Vidal, in order to indicate the growing divide between voters and their representatives. Low participation to vote is a long-term reality in the USA. In Europe, the term ‘post-democracy’ has been theorised by several authors (Stavrakakis and Lazaridis 2013), among whom the most pronounced is Colin Crouch, who first published an article in 2000 in Fabian Ideas (publication of the Fabian Society), then a book whose first edition was in Italian (Crouch 2003).
In a recent interview9 Colin Crouch explained the features of a post-democratic society, establishing an analogy with the concept of post-industrial society:
The term actually established a direct analogy with the ‘post-industrial’. A post-industrial society is not a society without industry. It continues to produce and to use the products of the industry, but the energy and innovative drive of the system have gone elsewhere. The same principle applies in a more complex way to the post-modern, which is not the same as antimodern or, of course, pre-modern. It implies a culture using the same achievements of modernism but moving away from looking for new possibilities. A post-democratic society therefore continues to have and use all the institutions of democracy, but it closes them more and more in a formal shell.
(Crouch 2013)
In post-democracy, politics and governments gradually give ground, falling into the hands of privileged elites, as was the case before the advent of the democratic phase – for example, during the Ancien Régime or in the early stages of representative systems, which excluded much of the population from political representation. The parable of democracy arrived at its highest point during the second half of the twentieth century, with the greatest affirmation of egalitarian policies and the adoption of welfare. Then it started declining. How did the transition to post-democracy happen? Post-democracy has not been formed through an anti-democratic turn, but, progressively, the democratic structures were emptied through the hegemonic ideology of the neo-liberal and, through globalisation and globalism, the triumph of the managerial economy, the structures of a neo-liberal world were implanted.
A new ruling class of executives of multinational corporations, big businessmen and bankers, whose members have power and wealth, both political and economic, were able to influence the parties and the governments ended up triumphing – with scarce opposition – given the loss of attractiveness of any topic in favour of egalitarianism. In the meanwhile, societies have become more and more unequal, given the contrast – well identified by Colin Crouch – between the tendency to equality (typical of democracy) and the free opportunities of liberalism: two models that tend to conflict, often to the advantage of the second on the first. Consequently, the energy and innovative drive have gone from the democratic area and moved toward small political–economic elite circles, while external powers and lobbies tend more and more to determine the choices of nations:
[…] even if elections continue to unfold and influence governments, the electoral debates are a show firmly controlled by rival groups of experienced professionals in the techniques of persuasion and it covers a limited number of topics and issues, selected by these same groups. The mass of citizens plays a passive, acquiescent, even apathetic role, merely reacting to signals it receives. Apart from the performance of the electoral struggle, policy is decided in private by the ‘integration’ (collaboration?) between the elected governments and the elites that represent almost exclusively economic interests.
(Crouch 2003: 6)
Crouch insists on the loss of centrality of welfare – the guarantor of citizenship, according to Marshall (1950) – and the introduction of a marketing citizenship model. The process of commodification brought social activities into the sphere of the market through the continuous process of privatisation and state deregulation. The marketisation of citizenship created a situation in which the presence of migrants in Western economies is desirable, but under fundamentally unequal conditions, while equality between citizens is also deteriorating; migrants, as well as citizens, are becoming contractual servants, who are exploited and exposed to the logic of market fundamentalism (Somers 2008) and are eventually left without ‘the right to have rights’ (Arendt 1951).
Ideology of the market is at the core of post-democracy, and its corollary – the ‘global company’ or corporation – is a ‘key institution in the post-democratic world’ that has gained supremacy over governments, parties and politics. The company has also become the institutional model for the public sector (Crouch 2003: 49): public bodies are restructured to be more attractive to private investors, while privatisation processes tend to transform the activities of the administrations, according to the logic ‘buyer–supplier’. Outsourcing from governments to businesses of a large field of activities results in a stronger boundary between economic power and public bodies and in increasing the political power of the lobbies. The border between government – which should take care of the common public good – and private interests become more and more blurred. The state of the privatisations represented by a small group of the government that interacts with the private business sector elites is, in fact, the ‘return of the corporate political privileges covered by the slogan of the market and free competition’ (Crouch 2003: 59).
The global company enjoys the tax exemption, much as the nobility and the clergy during the Ancien Régime:
Today, due to the increasing dependence of governments on the skills and opinions of executives of multinational corporations and large businesses and the dependence of parties from their funding, we go towards the formation of a new ruling class, political and economic, whose members have not only growing power and wealth, while societies become increasingly unequal, but they also acquired the privileged political role that has always distinguished the true ruling class. These are the central factors of the crisis of democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
(Crouch 2003: 60)
The parties that have lost their traditional base seek to build a model of a ‘party for all’, based on the professionalisation of politics and its detachment from citizenry. Money today can only be assured by the use of private capital and by the relationship with the economic and financial elite (Crouch 2003: 73). This means a transition from the leadership of militants and sympathisers to the centrality of the opinion polls and mediatically effective leaders. The after-party democratic will is thus formed by an internal elite that reproduces itself, far from its base in the mass movement, but well-connected with a number of large companies, which, in turn, will finance opinion polls, external consultants and collection of votes, provided that the party, when in government, accepts their requests. And while citizens lose power, the democratic election looks more and more like ‘a marketing campaign based quite openly on the techniques of manipulation used to sell products’ (Crouch 2003: 116). Meanwhile, the displacement of the overall action of government to that of ‘governance’, with an increased focus on efficiency, tends to render the role of parliaments meaningless.
All this has important implications, concerning the loss of credibility of politicians and the trust in government. Therefore, it is not surprising if in the framework of post-democracy, as described by Colin Crouch, there is the growth of so-called ‘populist’ parties who attack the elites. With their criticism, they express the consciousness or at least the perception that we are facing a profound questioning of the principles of democracy. Therefore, Crouch links growing populisation with that of the depletion or the emptying of democracy caused by a ‘strong imbalance developing between the role of the interests of large companies and those of all the other groups’ (Crouch 2003: 116), to which the mainstream parties do not seem to bring remedy. For Crouch, the rise of populists can even have positive aspects, because they, representing a ‘new disruptive creativity within the demos’ (Crouch 2003: 130), are an antidote to post-democracy. He refers, of course, to new movements that rise on the left of the political landscape – the national populist movements trying to reconstruct an ideal relationship between the citizenry and the government. Among the new ‘populist’ movements, such as the Five Star Movement in Italy or Podemos in Spain, one can find chaotic forces that have the potential to revitalise democracy.
As the journalist from El Pais Miguel Mora has written:
The Italian political laboratory gave birth to an absolute novelty. Absolute in the crisis of European democracies: the angry, young but not only, have taken Parliament through the ballot box. At the head of this vote, Beppe Grillo. Stigmatizing his movement as populist is a useless simplification. Party politics is dying along with the ultra-liberal diktat that it supports, and Italy, the cradle of the law, the good life and art, understood it before others.
(Mora 2013)
While the problem of post-democracy is general, in the case of the EU, there is another dimension, a ‘coercion of the Merkiavelli’, as Ulrich Beck would say (2013) or what Miguel Mora (2013) points out: the problem of the legitimacy of Berlin and Brussels.
Angela Merkel imposed in Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish unbearable austerity that made the citizens slaves with no future. The cry that comes from Italy is a symptom of mass dissent against governing by decree in favor of banks, companies (as the government of Mario Monti did in 2011–2012) and depriving young people of their present.
(Mora 2013)
On this same topic, the Italian sociologist Luciano Gallino (2013) has masterfully described the rise of a post-democratic Europe in his book The Golpe (colpo di stato) of Banks and Governments. The Attack on Democracy in Europe. Gallino describes what he calls the ‘Party of Davos’, consisting of about 3,000 people who are, incredibly, a homogeneous class, as regards education, language, career paths, and which meets in Davos to support just a few large global investors with subsequent actions of the deregulation of the economy and society. In the global world, the economy has killed policy, becoming a kind of automatic pilot (auto-pilot), leading the world towards catastrophe.
It is troublesome to assist, inside the European Union, to the electoral success of political forces that encourage xenophobia through exclusion of migrants or question the constitutional liberalism. Using a dichotomic approach between democratic mainstream parties and populists’ threat to democracy is of no help: the political, economic and social dynamics that are behind the success of the so-called populists are complex and embedded in the structures represented by the economic neo-liberalism and the institutional construction of the European Union.
Globalisation, neo-liberalism and the formation of the European Union as the union of nation states have questioned the role of the nation state in respect to the economy and the welfare, breaking the pact between nation state and citizens. This has weakened the idea of democracy that developed after World War II, where political participation was combined with social rights. Deprived of its competency, the nation state has become an empty signifier that is filled with identity discourses, of which national populists are the masters. The loss of social rights is combined with the loss of sovereignty – a loss that has been caused by the construction of the European Union, a dream that has become a nightmare over the years of the crisis since 2007. The fight against the European Union to recover sovereignty has become a priority for the populist parties, combined with the fight against immigration.
To conclude, national populism is a product of the weakening of the nation state and the shift towards post-democracy. A liberal democracy can not last ong in the presence of constant social tensions that generate endemic waves of fear and panic in the midst of social suffering. Furthermore, democracy that imposes austerity policies and attacks human rights is not worthy of its name and its achievements related to the protection of citizenry and of public good.
1 In 2010, then-EU President Herman van Rompuy called populism ‘the greatest danger for Europe’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 April 2010). Since then, many establishment voices have done the same, from the German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the editors of the New York Times. What all warnings have in common is that they: (1) come from people in power; (2) are vague on the exact meaning of populism; and (3) claim that populism is (omni)present in European politics (Mudde 2015).
2 See: http://blog.openpolis.it/2014/05/26/affluenza-europee-in-europa-vince-si-vota-sempre-meno. By minority, we mean below 50 per cent of the electorate.
3 See: www.liberation.fr/france/2015/08/24/jacques-sapir-on-ne-peut-plus-nier-que-le-fn-ait-change_1368833.
4 See: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20150930.OBS6822/onfray-mon-probleme-c-est-ceux-qui-rendent-marine-le-pen-possible.htm.
5 Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point (or both) to reconstitute the image.
6 Among the various political scientists that theorised the multicultural society, we are reminded of Canadians Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka.
7 Nationalism
defines the people mainly with respect to their membership – or not belonging – to a particular country or culture that calls ‘nation’ rather than in terms of ‘status’ or class; and ignores or conceals the divisions and internal conflicts, partly by outsourcing its problems.
(Anderson 1986: 116)
8 Read more at: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nouriel-roubini-likens-the-rise-of-nationalism-today-to-that-of-authoritarian-regimes-during-the-great-depression#urfuWrkQBOdfuIjx.99.
9 London School of Economics (9 February 2013). See: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/policsandpolicy/archives/30297.
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