Globalization and the New Populism
Andrew Gamble
In the last ten years there has been a marked rise in various forms of populism in Western democracies. The question is, why? One explanation is that it is the result of globalization, which has benefited some but not others, causing a backlash among the losers, who now seek to turn back globalization or obstruct its progress. The rise of the new populism is seen to be drawing its strength from those left behind by globalization, particularly the white working class in former heavy manufacturing districts. In this chapter I will examine this argument and its plausibility. One of the difficulties in pinpointing the argument is the vagueness of terms like ‘populism’ and ‘globalization’, and the loose way they are used in political discourse. We will address our understanding of these terms before going on to explore the links between them, in particular the theory of the globalization paradox put forward by Dani Rodrik (Rodrik 2011). Attention will be paid throughout to political context: Globalization means different things in different periods and so does populism. They are not single uniform phenomena, rather there are many ‘globalizations’ and many ‘populisms’ (Berger and Huntington 2002; Canovan 1981; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Muller 2016).
A crucial context for understanding the contemporary interrelationship between these terms is the financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath of relative economic failure. We are still in a period defined by the 2008 financial crash. At the end of 2017, it was already nine years since the financial crash itself, and more than ten years since the start of the 2007 credit crunch. Swift and decisive action by governments on both sides of the Atlantic in 2008 prevented a financial meltdown, but it came at a heavy cost. There was a sharp recession and a very slow recovery, characterized by sluggish growth, stagnant or depressed living standards, and low productivity (Gamble 2016). The failure of Western economies to rebound from the 2009 recession as they had from every previous recession since 1945 perplexed policy-makers, especially since interest rates remained close to zero, the central banks supported banks liquidity with quantitative easing, and private companies had mountains of cash available for investment.
In the second half of 2017 and the start of 2018 the growth prospects of the international economy began to improve. The IMF expected all leading economies, with the exception of the UK, to expand faster in 2018. Stock markets responded by reaching all time highs in the hope that the generalized recovery the world had been waiting for since 2009 was, at last, materialising. The tax cuts announced by the Trump administration were predicted to add a further stimulus to the world economy, even as they pushed the US deficit towards £1 trillion, and the overall debt to $20 trillion, 104 per cent of GDP. Many observers were still cautious about whether a corner had finally been turned. Anxieties about the future of the international economy continued to be voiced. The Bank of International Settlements, and some of its former officials, have drawn attention to the huge debts which still exist in the system and which threaten to explode should the authorities start to raise interest rates to the kind of levels needed for financial health. The flood of money which had been injected into the international economy since 2008 meant that many new forms of shadow banking had emerged, posing grave financial risks if interest rates started rising sharply. Yet interest rates needed to rise sharply to give the financial authorities sufficient room to lower rates again in order to deal with the next downturn. If there is another financial crash and associated economic recession while interest rates are still very low, and QE has not been unwound, then the international economy risks widespread debt defaults and a plunge into a far more serious recession than that of 2008. Central banks have run out of tools to avoid such an outcome (Evans-Pritchard 2018).
There are more optimistic views about the immediate prospects for the international economy, but there is general agreement that the structural problems highlighted in 2008 and the period which followed have not yet been solved. The issues of new governance arrangements for the international economy to reflect the shifting balance of power, the obstacles to raising growth rates and productivity and to finding profitable investment outlets, the mountain of debt – public and private – which still hang over the international economy, and the erosion of legitimacy and trust in those governing it, were all mostly unresolved in 2018. There was still a political impasse, and it was unclear what political forces could break the logjam. The ability of government to just about manage meant that although incumbents were frequently ousted, they were replaced by other incumbents, sometimes centre-left but mostly centre-right, who continued the broad international consensus on appropriate policy priorities and policy instruments. Many governments adopted austerity programmes in the expectation that shifting the burden of adjustment on to public services and private households would facilitate a strong recovery. But the austerity programmes dragged on endlessly without stimulating recovery or eliminating the deficit or the accumulated public debt which, in many countries including the United States and the UK, continued to rise. Some of the deepest austerity was experienced in the eurozone, because of its sovereign debt crisis in 2010–12. It was temporarily solved by the European Central Bank finding its way to act as other Central Banks and beginning its own programme of quantitative easing (QE). It is against this background of national economies, still functioning but failing to bounce back, that the rise of populism needs to be understood.
Populism
Populism is not a very precise term, at least in the way it is often used in media and political discourse. It has been ascribed to parties of both the right and the left, as well as to individual politicians. The term is vague because there is an inherently ‘populist’ element to modern democracies. Politicians gain power by making pitches to the people for their support. The legitimacy of modern democracy depends on their ability to appeal to voters’ values, their identities or their material interests, and often all three. All democratic politics is ‘populist’ in this sense, but to be characterized as a populist party or politician requires additional criteria to be met. Populists are distinct from other politicians because they are anti-system and anti-establishment. They typically counterpose ‘the people’ to ‘the elite’, and blame the elite for all the problems, suffering and oppression of the people. Elites are corrupt, they do not listen, they are insulated from the people, and no longer represent their concerns or their interests. Such populist discourses flourish in authoritarian regimes, often covertly. But they are also an inherent feature of democracies. Populist parties in democracies are natural parties of opposition, sometimes permanent opposition. Problems arise if they win office. As anti-system parties they are dedicated to overthrowing or at least radically overhauling the system, displacing the existing elites and remaking the state and its relationship to the people. They are not expected by their followers to become part of the elite itself as soon as they win power. If they are not absorbed by the existing elite and the ‘deep state’ they must become the new establishment, which generally means moving in an authoritarian direction, restricting democracy, as in Turkey, Poland and Hungary.
Many of the populisms which have attracted attention in the last decade, such as the Front National in France, are not newcomers. They are long-established anti-system parties which have benefited from the political conditions since the financial crash and increased their support, although so far without managing a breakthrough. Other parties, such as the AfD in Germany or the Five Star movement in Italy are new parties which have grown very rapidly. Other parties will not work with them, which means they will find it hard to enter government unless they can win a majority on their own, but in the case of Italy, at least, it is no longer unthinkable that this could happen. In some of Europe’s new democracies, such as Poland and Hungary, national populist parties have won power and are threatening the fragile institutions of liberal democracy, particularly the rule of law and human rights, which were established after the collapse of communist rule. In other democracies, such as Austria, national populist parties have entered government as a coalition partner. There is now a national populist presence in the politics of almost every Western democracy, including Sweden and the Netherlands. Almost all these parties are on the right. There are very few left populist parties, apart from Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. What unites the national populist parties is their opposition to the EU and to globalization. Many advocate referendums to pull their countries out of the euro and out of the EU altogether. Brexit has many admirers on the national populist right in Europe, none on the centre right. The European elite is seen as a unified bloc which has taken away national sovereignty and undermined national identity. The peoples of Europe have to escape its yoke.
The politics of many European democracies are being remade by the advance of national populism, but its most dramatic recent manifestations have come in two of the oldest and traditionally most secure Western democracies – Britain and the United States. In Britain, the populist UK Independence Party campaigned successfully for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, and then was part of the Leave Coalition that delivered a narrow vote for Brexit in the referendum on 23 June 2016. UKIP managed to do so without ever having more than two MPs in the Westminster Parliament (both of them defections from the Conservatives), even though it won four million votes in 2015 and had achieved significant representation in the European Parliament. Being on the winning side of the Brexit vote did not benefit UKIP: The party has been consumed by in-fighting, losing most of its votes and its Westminster representation in the general election in 2017. But despite this, the result of the referendum was a signal victory for the populist anti-system politics which was at the core of UKIP’s appeal. It was predictable that no sooner had the vote been won than the party quickly turned to warning that the vote would be betrayed. The elites would cheat the people of what they had voted for. The populists had won the vote but it was still Establishment Conservatives, most of whom had voted Remain, who dominated the government and parliament. More than two thirds of MPs had voted for Remain. It was an even higher percentage for members of the House of Lords.
There was a different situation in the United States, where an outsider, Donald Trump, first won the Republican nomination (although he was doubtfully a Republican and in the past had funded the Democrats) and then went on to defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college in the presidential campaign of 2016. Trump was not a professional politician. He was a property developer and a TV reality show host. He drew support from populist groups like the Tea Party and the far right fringe of US politics, and built a campaign around outlandish populist claims (about his opponents) and populist commitments (such as building a wall on the southern border to keep out Mexican immigrants). His tactic was always to pitch himself and the people against Washington and the elites. Washington was the swamp which had to be drained. In many ways this was an old trope in US politics; the importance of state politics in the United States meant that generations of politicians had run against Washington, but Trump took it to a new level.
Having won power on an economic nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization platform, the question became how far he would seek to deliver it. Would he really attempt to drain the swamp, and change the principles, the procedures and the personnel of US Government? At the beginning he had radicals on his staff like Steve Bannon, who wanted to do exactly that. But Trump also surrounded himself with representatives of the US military and the US financial and business elites, as well as by the Republican party political elite. The policies he enacted in his first year were mostly through administrative orders, aimed in particular at scrapping government regulation of business. His one big legislative achievement was his tax package, crafted by Republicans and passed at the end of 2017, and which disproportionately favoured the wealthy elite, including Trump himself, but which was sold as benefiting the American middle class. Trump disengaged the United States from the rest of the world as much as he could, cancelling US involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Paris agreement on climate change, but he was more cautious in delivering on his promises to fight a trade war with China or to pull out of the WTO or NATO.
The victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was the most important breakthrough made by national populists in the ten years following the financial crash. To win the presidency in the most powerful state in the international order, by threatening to overturn many of the institutions and principles which had built and sustained this order since 1945, was a shock. If it could happen in the United States it could happen anywhere, and even if it was not repeated elsewhere, the victory of populists in the United States could start to unravel the networks, alliances and institutions which had maintained and deepened international cooperation. Trump’s long-standing economic nationalism (Laderman and Simms 2017) and his crude America First slogan, an echo of the America First movement of the 1930s which sympathized with Hitler and opposed entering the war on the side of the democracies, alarmed many of its allies, who had been used to the United States pursuing its own interests, but not at the same time disengaging from active leadership of the international order.
It is unclear at the moment whether the Trump phenomenon is a passing spasm which will soon be forgotten under a more traditional president, or whether it betokens a lasting shift in international politics. If the United States continues to be openly contemptuous of many of the institutions which it worked so hard to establish to project US power and influence, and actively disengages from them, the international order might rather quickly unravel as other nations take the opportunity to carve out their own spheres of interest. A return to a world of trade wars, currency wars, and stronger borders to deter immigration would be the likely consequence. Such an outcome is not inevitable but it has become a possibility, especially since the financial crash and the increasing strength of national populism in so many countries. Steve Bannon has referred to national populism as the ‘global tea party’ (Bannon 2014, as cited by Feder 2016), Its leaders in the United States and Europe have established strong networks to share ideas, drawing inspiration and comfort from each other’s successes. Anti-globalization, anti-European integration, and anti-immigration were common themes which drew them together.
Globalization
Much of the populism that has been so evident in the last nine years, and in particular the political earthquakes of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are strongly associated with the hard economic times of the period since the financial crash. But if this populism is only the product of austerity, it might then be expected to decline sharply if and when the international economy finally recovers. Many observers, however, doubt this. As already indicated, some of the populist movements are new, but others are of long standing. Just as the causes of the financial crisis have been traced to much deeper structural problems in the Western political economy, so the populist eruptions have also come to be seen in a much longer perspective. Their causes are sought not just in the years since the financial crash but in the two decades preceding the crash, which saw huge changes in the way both the international market order and national economies were structured. These changes are ascribed to processes of globalization and to the adoption of neo-liberal doctrines as the ruling common sense.
How far is globalization itself responsible for the rise of national populism and increasing political polarization that has taken place in so many Western democracies in the last ten years? The meaning of ‘globalization’ has been sharply contested since the term came into general use in the 1990s. Globalization was not an event but a process, and it is a process which is hardly new. Capitalist globalization has lasted at least as long as the international capitalist economy itself. This modern world system, as Wallerstein termed it, began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. In these five centuries the strength of globalising forces has waxed and waned. At times it has been very intense as in the second half of the nineteenth century, at other times, as in the middle decades of the twentieth century, much less so. The revival in the strength of globalising forces in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s was extremely marked, but some of its proponents got carried away and began to speak of the creation of a borderless world, or the end of the nation-state (Ohmae 1995, 1999). This hyper globalization was always a fantasy and rightly criticized (Held et al. 1999; Hirst and Thompson 1996). There is not one but many globalizations. Globalization needs to be broken down into the diverse set of processes which increase the flow of goods, people, and capital, making the international economy ever more interconnected. As in previous periods of globalization there was a deployment of new technologies, this time associated above all with the IT revolution, which permitted a further shrinking of distance in the international economy and a further increase in mobility. In rapid periods of globalization everything speeds up.
The big shifts which drove globalization in the 1990s were firstly the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet bloc, but secondly, and of much greater significance, the entry of China, India and other rising powers into full participation in international trade. The tantalising prospect of the international economy becoming One World again hovered through the 1990s, the first time since the nineteenth century that it had seemed realistic, and in that earlier period it was severely restricted by the existence of the European colonial empires. The phenomenal growth of the Asian economies caused a great shift in the way production was organized, with Western multinationals taking advance of the efficiency and low costs of Chinese factories to outsource much of their manufacturing to China and other Asian economies, building extremely complex and elaborate production chains in the process. This new division of labour in the international economy gave a huge boost to world output and to world trade, as well as removing inflationary pressure from the Western economies. It was the major factor in the upswing in the 1990s and early 2000s, which brought prosperity and steady growth to the Western economies, and dramatic transformations in some of the poorest and most highly populated states. A measure of the transformation that was under way is the UN estimate in 2001 that for the first time the world now had more of its population living in cities than on the land. It also indicated how much further there was to go before every part of the world economy was developed and integrated.
The other side of this globalization was that though it brought great wealth to the financial and industrial elites in the Western economies, it also meant further de-industrialization for them, the loss of domestic manufacturing capacity and jobs. Many of those displaced found new jobs but often more precarious, with lower pay and lower status. This pattern was repeated in many countries; only a few escaped it. It created a mass of discontented and alienated citizens, a new ‘precariat’, those unable or unwilling to adapt to the new economy, which increasingly demanded adaptability, reskilling, flexibility, mobility. The new economy created a widespread resentment among those left behind, which was easily directed at the cosmopolitan global elites who were so much at ease with globalization and were so obviously the beneficiaries of it. Globalization created great benefits, but they were very unevenly distributed. There were clear winners and losers, and new dividing lines in politics as a result. In the Anglo-Saxon countries the particular form which globalization took led to a dramatic increase in inequality, with huge gains going to the richest 1 per cent. Inequality had not been so marked in Europe and the United States since before World War I (Piketty 2014). The contrast between the spoils of globalization’s winners and the losses of the losers was stark, and fuelled further resentment. The hugely inflated bonuses which bankers pocketed, and the extravagant lifestyles they funded, became symbols of the era, and more targets for populist rage.
This is the argument as to how globalization fed populism. The political elites became detached from large numbers of their citizens, and no longer represented or understood them. Instead their primary loyalties came to be to the international networks of the proliferating international organizations and institutions which provided global governance for an increasingly complex world. These developments have led to the globalization paradox analysed by Dani Rodrik. The world system as Immanuel Wallerstein conceived it always contained a tension between the drive for ever greater economic integration of markets and production, and the fragmentation of political authority among a number of competing states. This is the tension Rodrik explores in relation to the latest phase of globalization. The increasing interdependence of the international economy exists alongside the desire of individual countries to retain and exercise their own sovereignty, and also the need for them, as democracies, to retain the support of their citizens. Rodrik suggested this creates a trilemma. It is possible to achieve any two of the three – increasing economic interdependence, national sovereignty and democratic legitimacy, but not all three at once. In the first combination – economic interdependence and national sovereignty – authoritarian governments use their power to pursue economic interdependence and sacrifice democracy. In the second combination – economic interdependence and democratic legitimacy – national sovereignty and nation-states wither away to be replaced by a cosmopolitan government. In the third combination – national sovereignty and democratic legitimacy – governments stay close to the wishes and interests of their citizens, and take steps to limit or even reverse economic interdependence.
Of these three alternatives there are examples of the first and the third, much less of the second. The EU was originally conceived by some of its architects as a regional prototype for the third, but in practice although it has developed some supranational elements, it remains very much an association of nation-states, and much discussion, particularly of the handling of the eurozone crisis has focused on whether the EU has become an example of the first type, creating a form of government supported by the national governments which insulates policy-making from democratic control, and which promotes greater interdependence and the giving up of sovereignty. The dilemma for global elites is that they are committed to the twin principles of a liberal international order and democratic national government. These were founding principles for the international order after 1945. But the question has always been, if there is a clash between these two principles which takes precedence? In the first three decades of the liberal international order, great attention was paid to what was acceptable to democratic electorates in each nation, and as a result national governments were accorded a great deal of autonomy and often the United States made concessions in order to make it easier for states to stay within the Western alliance and be fully contributing members of the international order. The United States was so much the dominant power that it could afford to do this, and although this never stopped the United States from pursuing its own interests, or from overthrowing governments it perceived were a threat to them, it was often prepared to make concessions to its democratic allies because of the overriding need to maintain the cohesion of the ‘West’ against the Soviet bloc. Cold war security considerations meant that its core allies (which came to include Germany and Japan) were generally treated sympathetically.
This began to change in the 1970s because the United States could no longer afford to bear the costs of the fixed exchange rate system that had been agreed at Bretton Woods. In cutting loose and floating the dollar, it both removed one of the main barriers to inflation, which was gathering pace, and signalled the determination of the United States to give greater priority to its own needs and interests. The international system was gradually reshaped to fit these changed priorities, and it led to a new set of policies and instruments for managing the international economy which became the framework within which all Western states had to work, some more eagerly than others. The doctrines of neo-liberalism were important in shaping the new regime which emerged. They included the monetarism of Milton Friedman and the supply-side economics of Arthur Laffer. Many of the new ideas became policy orthodoxy by the end of the 1980s for the leading international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, and were dubbed the Washington consensus. This was a package of policies including privatization, deregulation, low taxes, flexible labour markets, weak trade unions and low public spending which was imposed on countries which got into economic difficulties and required loans to bail them out, and also on developing countries, as a condition for aid and restructuring of their debt.
This was also the policy package which became associated with globalization. The promotion of free markets around the world, and therefore the acceleration of flows of capital, goods, services and money became the hallmarks of this phase of the development of a new liberal international order, which after the collapse of communism in Europe now extended into all corners of the world, with very few countries remaining outside. The governance of this new international order was much more complex than in the past because of the degree of cooperation, the number of players, and the scale of the challenges, many of which such as mass immigration, terrorism, climate change and nuclear proliferation were recognized as inherently transnational. One response was the proliferation of international organizations and NGOs to facilitate the management of these problems and secure greater cooperation between states (Slaughter 2009). To some it seemed that a global polity and a global civil society were in the making to go alongside the global economy.
What was sometimes overlooked was the need to embed the new transnational institutions in the national democracies. This was often not done because it was difficult to do. Some of the new members of the international order were not democracies and did not accept liberal principles. In the democracies it was often hard to engage citizens with the complexities of international rule-making. It was easier to focus on the international networks rather than the national ones. In these ways the various global elites gradually became more similar to one another and more detached from the citizens from whom ultimately they derived their legitimacy and their authority.
Rodrik believes there is no easy solution to his trilemma. He regards cosmopolitan government rooted in a global demos as unattainable. He is opposed to economic interdependence being sustained by authoritarian politics. His preference is therefore for national sovereignty which is legitimated through democracy. This is also the demand of most of the new national populists. They are opposed to globalization and the global elites it has spawned, and they want to take back control of borders, money and laws. They want to bring back production which has been outsourced and give priority to the national economy and the communities which depend upon it. If this means becoming much more closed to the outside world and retreating from existing levels of economic and political interdependence and cooperation, and accepting a lower standard of living, that is a choice many of them are prepared to make. The vitality of the democracy and the ability of the majority opinion to be reflected in the policy of a sovereign government is what counts. This is heard particularly on the right but also on the left of politics. It was, for example, the basis of Tony Benn’s argument in the 1980s in the British Labour party against Britain remaining a member of the European Community, and against NATO. Benn still considered himself a committed internationalist, but it was an internationalism based on cooperation between independent sovereign socialist nations, not an internationalism based on trade and security.
Most of the global elite do not want to see the liberal international order undermined, believing that although it is highly imperfect, it is the best available solution to maintaining openness, cooperation and peace. But the more thoughtful members of the elite agree with Rodrik that globalization and neo-liberalism have gone too far. The existing model no longer works, and there needs to be substantial change if the liberal international order is not gradually to unravel. The hyper globalization which led to the financial crash, Rodrik argues, needs to be replaced by a smart globalization, which recognizes the important role played by governments in regulating markets, compensating losers and curbing excesses. This means a politics which starts to recognize that many citizens do not benefit from greater openness and are hostile to many of the changes it forces upon them. Martin Wolf has argued that an open liberal international order is still the ideal, the current difficulties of the international economy and the backlash against globalization mean that it needs to be given a lower priority than looking after citizens and ensuring that they do not become so disaffected that they start supporting much more radical parties and movements which want, like Steve Bannon, to tear down the whole edifice of the liberal international order (Wolf 2018a, 2018b).
This would imply trying to resurrect the earlier compact which underpinned post-war reconstruction and the creation of the liberal international order under US leadership. This compact was founded on governments delivering employment, social security, health care, and education for all their citizens. These became defined as the entitlements of democratic citizenship, the addition of social rights to civil and political rights. Such states earned their legitimacy by being responsive to what their citizens wanted and delivering it. When they failed to deliver what voters wanted, they could lose office. The model is a beguiling one. It worked imperfectly, but it did capture something that helps account for the stability of many of the Western democracies, some of them quite new or reborn after the defeat of fascism. Western democracies, by a number of indicators, worked better for their citizens and were closer to them in the immediate post-war decades than more recently. Part of the explanation comes down to the impact of globalization and the gradual transfer of more and more decision-making and authority to bodies over which citizens had no direct control. If political elites had remained trusted, this might not have mattered. But every Western democracy has seen a decline of trust in both the competence and the integrity of elected representatives. In these conditions, populism thrives.
Conclusion: Embedded Populism?
If the new populism has risen during the recession, will it therefore fade away once the recession ends and growth resumes? This is a comforting thought, but may be too optimistic, both because the prospects of a sustained recovery are still very uncertain, and also because the causes of the new populism are much more deep-rooted than just a reaction to austerity after the financial crash. Thirty years of globalization and widening inequality have led to resentment against the rich, but also a deep alienation from society and the way it has become organized. The erosion of traditional class identities tied to heavy industry and working class communities has weakened the base of traditional centre-left parties, and this has been exploited by the new populist parties. The centre-left parties cannot regain these voters simply by promising a return of prosperity, since they have become so closely identified with younger professional cosmopolitan voters who are at home in the global economy and the opportunities and autonomy it brings.
The key issue which has focused resentment against globalization and the EU has been immigration. Free movement of goods, services, capital and persons were the foundations of the EU single market, and they were also the implicit basis of the global markets which boomed in the 1990s. The UK was a strong supporter both of the European single market and also of the opening of world markets associated with globalization. The successful UK growth model of the 1990s was built on the export of services, particularly financial services, and flexible labour markets which encouraged the development of a low wage economy and the recruitment of large numbers of migrant workers. This reached its peak in the early 2000s, when the UK chose not to impose restrictions on the ability of new EU member states to seek work in Britain. At the same time, immigration from non-EU countries was also rising, so that by the time of the financial crash, immigration was running at over 300,000 a year. Despite the promise of the Conservatives to reduce this figure to the tens of thousands, they signally failed to do so. Many Conservatives blamed the EU for this failure, but that was only part of the story, since EU migrants only made up half of the total. The other half came from outside the EU.
Hostility to the scale and pace of immigration was one of the major factors leading to support for Brexit. The failure of national governments to control immigration was seen by many citizens as symptomatic of the politics of globalization. It benefited those in the networks of globalization and penalized those who had to compete with immigrants for jobs, housing and access to public services. There was some overt racism as well, but the main factor was the widespread feeling that communities and neighbourhoods were being changed in ways which a majority of their inhabitants did not understand and did not want. Centre-left parties in the UK and in many other European countries found themselves on the wrong side of this argument as far as many of their traditional supporters were concerned. The levels of immigration into the EU also became high during the recession years: what might have been easy to manage while economies were still growing became difficult when unemployment was high and living standards stagnant. Yet one of the consequences of globalization has been to make the riches of the West ever more visible and desirable to citizens of poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Most of the rich countries have seen their birth rates decline to the point where some of them are facing actual population decline. Encouraging immigration of young, healthy, energetic and resourceful people is one solution, but nothing has done more to fuel the growth of the populist parties, who are able to blame immigration on the liberal global cosmopolitan elites with their selfish concern for their own privileges, insulated from the rest of the society in which they live. Trump and many other populist leaders seized on that issue, and Trump crystallized all the frustration of his base in calling for a wall on the Mexican border. Support for the wall was highest in those states furthest removed from it, and the value of a wall in actually stopping illegal immigration was doubtful, but that did not matter. What mattered was the symbolism of closing a border and making people feel more secure, and no longer overrun. The wall affirmed the identity of US citizens, and remains a powerful rallying call for Trump’s base.
National populism should not, therefore, be seen as an aberration or some kind of malign affliction. It has a deep connection to the way in which the international political economy has been organized over the last three decades, which have transformed the prospects for so many citizens and communities, and not always positively. For a long time this revolt looked to be containable, but the political and economic impasse since the financial crash has provided fertile ground for populism to thrive, drawing on a range of cultural as well as economic grievances. It may not achieve its goals. Its successes breed a counter-response, but it has already reshaped politics and put a question mark over how durable a liberal, open international order will prove to be (Zielonka 2018).
References
Berger, Peter and Huntington, Samuel. Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Modern World (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2002).
Canovan, Margaret. Populism (New York, Harcourt Brace 1981).
Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose. ‘World finance now more dangerous than in 2008, warns central bank guru’, The Telegraph (22 January 2018). Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/22/world-finance-now-dangerous-2008-warns-central-bank-guru/ (Accessed 16 July 2018).
Feder, J. Lester. ‘This is how Steve Bannon sees the entire world’, Buzzfeed (16 November 2016). Available at https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world (Accessed 16 July 2018).
Gamble, Andrew. Crisis Without End? The Unravelling of Western Prosperity (London, Palgrave-Macmillan 2016).
Held, David; McGrew, Anthony; Goldblatt, David and Perraton, Jonathan. Global Transformations (Cambridge, Polity 1999).
Hirst, Paul and Thompson, Grahame. Globalization in Question (Cambridge, Polity 1996).
Laderman, Charlie and Simms, Brendan. Donald Trump: The Making of a World View (London, I.B.Tauris 2017).
Mudde, Cas and Kaltwasser, Cristobal. Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford University Press 2017).
Muller, Jan-Werner. What is Populism? (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2016).
Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York, Harper Business 1999).
Ohmae, Kenichi. The End of the Nation-state (London, Harper Collins 1995).
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press 2014).
Rodrik, Dani. The Globalization Paradox (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2011).
Slaughter, Anne-Marie. A New World Order (Princeton, Princeton University Press 2009).
Wolf, Martin ‘Davos 2018: the liberal international order is sick’ The Financial Times (2018). Available at https://www.ft.com/content/c45acec8-fd35-11e7-9b32-d7d59aace167 (Accessed 27 June 2018).
Wolf, Martin. ‘Counter-Revolution by Jan Zielonka – project backlash’, The Financial Times (2018). Available at https://www.ft.com/content/e4290c10-069f-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5 (Accessed 27 June 2018).
Zielonka, Jan. Counter Revolution: Liberal Europe in Retreat (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2018).