Abstract
The past three decades have not been kind to liberal democracy. In the aftermath of the Cold War, a considerable body of opinion held that the West’s victory marked the final triumph of liberal universalism over its enemies. Exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s famous invocation of the “end of history,” this optimistic assessment fed expectations of a new international order built on free markets, democracy, and individual rights.
Today, however, such triumphalism seems hopelessly naïve. Across the globe, the liberal order has come under increasing strain in recent years. In the West, democratic politics has become increasingly polarized since the 2008 financial crisis, feeding the rise of a growing collection of populist parties and movements, from Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos on the left, to the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. In 2016, fears of an authoritarian backlash against globalization seemed to be confirmed with the passage of the U.K.’s Brexit referendum and the shock victory of Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election.
This is the backdrop for Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert’s book, Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest. First published in German in 2017, and now translated into English, the book situates these developments in what it describes as a long-term crisis of “depoliticization.” Over the past five decades, Vormann and Lammert argue, democracy has gradually been hollowed out by neoliberal globalization. This process has given rise to a “politics of no alternatives,” in which the imperatives of democratic government are increasingly subordinated to the economic logic of the market.
For the authors, the emergence of this “politics of no alternatives” reflects a political and ideological crisis of liberalism, which they define as “a worldview that . . . accords high priority to the market mechanism as a means of preventing the centralization of state power and protecting the rights of individuals” (p. 11). Gradually, however, “the economic philosophy of markets” has displaced the original aims of political liberalism.
The roots of this shift lie in the collapse of the postwar “Fordist compromise” during the 1970s. Resting on an agreement between the state, capital, and labor, that compromise facilitated three decades of economic growth and rising social mobility. Vormann and Lammert only briefly touch on the reasons for its collapse (such as technological change, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods global monetary system, and the emergence of “stagflation”). But they see this as the context for an attack on the redistributive policies of postwar governments by free-market ideologues and political leaders.
The result has been a long-term shift in the balance between market and society, manifested in rising inequality, declining social mobility, and falling public trust in government. For the authors, these developments lie at the heart of democracy’s present crisis. Rejecting the notion that this was an inevitable consequence of globalization, they argue that globalization was itself part of a broader political project carried out by national governments. That project reflected an emerging political consensus, which held that the economic priorities of the market should take precedence over the needs of citizens. Embodied in the slogan “there is no alternative,” this consensus drove a “depoliticized” approach to democratic government, exemplified by the technocratic centrism of the “Third Way.”
This account of the crisis is indicative of the influence of Karl Polanyi on the authors’ thinking. Like Polanyi, they view markets as politically constituted and socially embedded. Their neo-Polanyian framework is central to their understanding of contemporary populism. For Vormann and Lammert, today’s populists represent a kind of “countermovement” against economic liberalism. Downplaying the role of other factors—like xenophobia, the War on Terror, or the rise of ethno-cultural nationalism—they argue that growing support for figures like Trump or Marine Le Pen are an expression of a larger political backlash, driven by voters’ frustrations over the lack of social mobility and the unresponsiveness of established parties and leaders.
Much of Democracy in Crisis is devoted to exploring the different forms this populist “countermovement” takes. The authors write that while the crisis is global in scope, its impact is mediated by national political traditions and institutions. In the United States, where an ideology of individualism and free-market economics has long fueled distrust of government, political polarization has fed support for a radicalized version of the Republican right’s traditional anti-statist agenda, represented by Trump. In Europe, by contrast, where social solidarity was strongly rooted in the institutions of the welfare state, populism is largely a reaction to the corrosive effects of globalization and European integration. In these circumstances, voters have increasingly opted for populists of the nationalist right (in Northern Europe) or anti-austerity left (in the South).
This account of contemporary populism is insightful and impressively wide-ranging (although likely to raise objections among scholars specializing both in American politics and the European far right). The authors conclude with a call for radical action to revive democracy, including the reconstruction of national welfare states, and reform of the EU to facilitate economic redistribution from wealthier to poorer countries. Even more ambitiously, Vormann and Lammert propose measures to establish transnational social rights, through the introduction of residential citizenship—no longer tied to nationality—and the creation of a new system of “global federalism.”
These proposals are worth considering. But the authors’ optimistic assessment of the prospects for achieving them is also indicative of larger weaknesses in their neo-Polanyian framework. Vormann and Lammert view the double-movement between market and society primarily through the lens of political and ideological competition. Yet, this understanding is far too narrow to explain the changes that lie at the heart of their analysis. Thus the book’s account of the neoliberal turn describes this as a shift in “political practice,” rather than institutional transformation. However, the postwar “Fordist compromise” depended on the highly favorable conditions created by the global economic boom and the pressure exerted by strong, well-organized labor movements. In the 1970s, the material foundations of this compromise were destroyed by the confluence of rising social conflicts and a global crisis of capital accumulation. As Wolfgang Streeck (2014) has argued, the decades since have been marked by a series of dilemmas for democratic governments, reflecting the constraints created by “slow growth.”
Today, any movement seeking to construct new mechanisms of democratic control over the market must confront these constraints. Democracy in Crisis sidesteps these difficulties, suggesting that what is needed, above all, is the “political will” to make radical change. Yet, given the decline of organized labor and the fall in class voting associated with political “dealignment,” it is unclear what social force has the capacity to spearhead such an effort. Nor is it evident that governments will be able to access the resources necessary to enact a robust program of redistributive reforms (for which the authors’ suggestions of a global financial and carbon tax seems entirely inadequate). These flaws mar an otherwise useful work and limit the book’s value as a roadmap for contemporary politics.