Abstract
The article addresses the following question: if an extensive period of globalization and also democratization after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been followed by populism (protectionist nationalism in the West and authoritarian nationalism in the Global South), does this mean that there is something wrong with liberalism itself? Must liberalism be substituted by alternative economic and political concepts? The article presents three alternatives to liberalism that are supposed to counter populism: a new communitarianism, a renewal of the democratic project as much as novel conceptions of social justice. However, it takes also into account positions that address the current crisis from within the liberal framework itself.
Last year, Reset DOC Seminars took place for the first time in Venice, Italy. After nine years during which İstanbul Seminars were hosted at İstanbul Bilgi University, Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations found itself constrained to move the seminars away from Turkey. The very reason for such a decision has of course been, after the failed coup in July 2016, the rise of an authoritarian and repressive form of populism in Turkey that no longer guarantees the freedom of speech.
But Turkey is certainly not an isolated, though more extreme, case in what concerns the upsurge of populism. The year 2016 was also the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election as US president. Two years before, Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India and General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi president of Egypt. For almost a decade, Freedom House’s annual survey has highlighted a decline in democracy in most regions of the globe, which indicates, according to many observers, that Authoritarianism Goes Global. 1
And yet, since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of today’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first gained a majority in the Turkish parliament in 2002 breaking with Kemalism, it was for almost ten years supported by the various liberal and progressive forces in the country. Similarly in Egypt, before the military came back to power, the Arab Spring had brought about important democratization processes. On the whole and, most significantly, the world experienced in the three decades from 1980–2010 a perhaps unprecedented wave of globalization that came along with the establishment of a liberal international order.
Could it be that the move of Reset DOC Seminars from İstanbul to Venice coincides also with the end of liberalism as we know it? The issue we have seen ourselves to be confronted with is that in this last decade not only Erdoğan and the AK Party, but world politics as such, has increasingly turned against liberalism. There is a dispute about what exactly populism is and how to define it. 2 Yet, a general rejection of liberalism is what characterizes all forms of populism, both right-wing as much as left-wing populism, 3 populism in the West as well as in the Global South. Whereas populism in the West goes above all against economic liberalism, populism in the Global South is mainly directed against political liberalism. 4 In Turkey, Russia, Egypt, India and China, populist governments are increasingly curtailing political and civic rights (Boyraz, Bilgrami and Hamzawy, in this issue).
Accordingly, the topic of Reset DOC Seminars ‘17 was “The Populist Upsurge and the Decline of Diversity Capital.” The question at the center of the seminars was the following: if an extensive period of globalization and also democratization after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been followed by populism (protectionist nationalism in the West and authoritarian nationalism in the Global South), does this mean that there is something wrong with liberalism itself? Must liberalism be substituted by alternative economic and political concepts?
It is clear, according to all contributions in this volume, that the upsurge of populism is deeply problematic, last but not least because it contributes to the decline of pluralism (diversity capital) in a society and gives rise to intolerance with respect to differences. But at the same time it could be argued that populists have come up only with the wrong remedy, while they identify quite rightly the underlying problems and malaise of liberalism. While there is a tendency in politics to engage and criticize morally the populist project (Ferrara, in this issue), it could be claimed that people cannot help but vote for populist parties given the deep pathologies of liberalism. As Michael Sandel writes in this issue, “the hard reality is that Donald Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations, and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties have no compelling answer” [emphasis added]. In this perspective, if we want to overcome populism, we first have to come to terms with liberalism (Azmanova, Bilgrami, M. Sandel, in this issue).
We can identify three possible positions on the crisis of liberalism and the rise of populism: (1) whatever the problems of liberalism should be, populism has no moral justification; (2) liberalism is flawed and the cause of populism, and therefore needs to be replaced by an alternative political project; And (3) if liberal politics have indeed given rise to serious problems and real grievances, liberalism has the conceptual resources to address these effectively.
Contributions in this volume endorse in particular the second position and propose three alternatives to liberalism: a new communitarianism, a renewal of the democratic project as much as novel conceptions of social justice. While these proposals are all critical of liberalism, they disagree about what exactly is wrong with the liberal project and recommend competing political projects. Some authors, however, try to suggest ways how the current crisis can be solved from within the liberal framework.
The first part introduces the new communitarianism. The second section presents the new democratic project, and the third part raises questions concerning social justice and the future of liberalism.
Populism and the search for a new communitarianism
Michael Sandel is most outspoken about the relationship between the rise of populism and the failure of technocratic liberalism. Growing deregulation, financialization, and globalization of the economy, initiated in the Reagan–Thatcher era and consolidated by the Clinton and Obama administrations, have given rise to growing income inequalities, meritocratic hubris, the erosion of the dignity of work as much as of patriotism and the national community. The problem is that the liberal insistence on open markets, equal opportunity, procedural justice, and public reason is anything but morally neutral. It promotes particular conceptions of the good that favor the college-educated upper class and leaves the working class and parts of the middle class frustrated and humiliated. Sandel proposes therefore to open up the public sphere to the deep moral disagreement characterizing contemporary societies, admitting into the public discourse questions concerning borders, national identity, solidarity, and the dignity of work. This helps to cultivate a new sense of belonging cutting the roots of populism.
Adam Adatto Sandel backs the communitarian criticism of liberalism. Asking what an open mind is, Adatto Sandel rejects the Enlightenment point of view that conceives it as independent from the specific identities of the persons. Drawing in particular on Heidegger, Adatto Sandel argues that “there is no such thing as value-free, disengaged, objective knowledge” that is not “committed to some understanding of how to live,” to some notion of the good. Yet, traditions, commitments, and social roles do not condemn societies to blind habit and custom, since they do not preclude interpretation and critical evaluation.
Tiziana Lippiello argues that President and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping, launching a campaign “to revive Chinese culture” is trying to avoid the pitfalls of Western-style liberalism. Lippiello, following Michael Sandel, writes that “Chinese thinkers, and in particular Confucian thinkers, have foreseen the limits of an abstract notion of universal justice and have otherwise affirmed the importance of a proper behavior, righteousness and a moral disposition to do good, together with cardinal moral values such as humaneness, social rites and wisdom.” She claims that among Chinese scholars and philosophers “there is a general consensus on the adoption of traditional values and their positive psychological and social impact.” Yet, Lippiello also acknowledges that the Communist Party’s insistence on the “unity of thought” can assume totalitarian forms.
Tuğçe Erçetin and Emre Erdoğan do not defend directly a new communitarianism. Yet, their qualitative analysis of the change in the speeches and discourses of the leaders of the AK Party between the elections in June and November 2015 demonstrate to what extent democracies in times of internal and external crises are vulnerable to populism. The 2015 elections in Turkey took place amidst repeated terrorist attacks, the beginning of Turkey’s military operations in Syria, and the end of the Kurdish–Turkish peace process. Not winning a sufficient majority in the June elections, Erçetin and Erdoğan observe how the AK Party leaders increasingly recurred to populist topics such “us-them distinction,” “in-group superiority,” “scapegoating,” and the “people” in the November elections reflecting the “threat, anger and uncertainties.”
Populism, neoliberalism and democracy deficit
Albena Azmanova shares much of Michael Sandel’s criticism of liberalism. She also believes that populism is the result of legitimate claims resulting from technocratic rule and neoliberal global economic competition that disregards social consequences. She equally contests the liberal pretension of neutrality and sees the democratic re-politicization of policy choices as the only possible solution to the crisis of liberalism. Yet, Azmanova has, as she calls it, a more “radical view” of the political than Michael Sandel. Whereas Sandel’s proposal aims to reproduce the social roles within the national community that liberal policies have tended to put into question, Azmanova conceives deliberative democracy as a contestatory process that has at its center a “critique and criticism of the operational dynamics of capitalism,” a contestation of the very social roles capitalism has engendered. She poignantly states that “the Left struggled for equality and inclusion within the system of social relations, but failed to question and challenge the system into which entry was requested and within which equality was sought.”
According to Luigi Vero Tarca, populism reveals the limits of democracy or the “democratic superstition,” as he calls it. Tarca states that “when we say that ‘populists’ are substantially antidemocratic, we have to be aware that democracy itself is really a problem.” Although democracy is based upon the sovereignty of the people, democratic procedures and, above all, the majority principle are problematic insofar as they do not solve the “real power/conflict/violence problems.” Hence, Tarca believes that simply criticizing populists on moral grounds is actually going to be counterproductive. What we instead need to do is “understanding their [the populists’] reasons” and recognize their “right to be right.” Tarca sustains an epistemological position according to which “all propositions are in some sense true, and hence even those who are wrong are, from a particular point of view, right.” The solution to the problem of the “democratic superstition” and populism “is the ability to interpret difference as harmony rather than as negation”—in short, the recovery of the lost diversity capital.
Murat Borovali is a firm believer in the strength of liberal democracy. Unlike Azmanova and Tarca, Borovali holds that liberal democracy is the right framework even for a country as Turkey that “is facing significant challenges and is in the process of devising and implementing radical reforms.” Borovali’s argument is rather that populism is undermining liberal democracy, not vice versa. He analyzes a specific form of argumentation in politics, the so-called ad hominem argumentation, which tackles and “aims to discredit the critic rather than address the criticism” and that has come to characterize the populist political culture in Turkey. Distinguishing four possible types of ad hominem argumentation (tu quoque, “whataboutery,” bias, and direct ad hominem) and proving their fallacy, Borovali concludes that ad hominem argumentation hinders collective deliberation and puts at risk the democratic system in the long run. The consequence of ad hominem argumentation is that the democratic polity stops to be divided along individual lines and competing comprehensive doctrines. It gives rise to groupthink and political groups engaged in an existential struggle with a tribalist and zero-sum understanding of politics.
Cemil Boyraz analyzes another form of governmentality—the communication centers of the AK Party, prime minister and president in Turkey—that risks to harm the democratic system and to impede deliberation in the public sphere. Boyraz is more skeptical than Borovali about the promises of liberalism. As much as Michael Sandel and Azmanova, he believes the rise of authoritarian populism in Turkey to be strictly related to neoliberalism and the political legitimacy crisis that it has brought about. Over the last two decades, the AK Party has privatized all state-owned enterprises and cut down public administration to some rudimental form of minimal state. In order to counter the arising societal tensions in the form of unemployment, inequalities, and low wages, the government and AK Party created communication centers that can be directly addressed by the citizens. According to Boyraz, despite the semblance of democratic engagement, the goal of the communication centers is, on the contrary, to avoid that certain political and economic issues enter the public sphere and become discussed publicly. They contribute to the “individualization and atomization of the social demands” introducing forms of party patronage and clientalistic networks rather than “to create platforms where different interests, identities and lifeworlds are coordinated in a pluralist logic.”
Populism, the quest for social justice and the future of liberalism
Akeel Bilgrami presents populism as a radical quest for social justice in a globalizing world. While as most precedent authors he relates populism back to the neoliberal globalization of trade and finance, he is the first to ask if some form of global governance together with a global labor movement could come to substitute the national welfare state. Discussing the legitimacy of Brexit, he puts himself in the shoes of a working person and asks: What was the site where these safety nets were administered and implemented? And he would answer: well, the site of the nation. He might scratch his head and wonder: Has there ever been a supra-national site at which welfare was ever administered? What would a mechanism that dispensed it at a supra-national site even so much as look like?
Alessandro Ferrara is much more positive about the possibility of liberal democracy to offer an alternative response over and above protectionism to “rampant inequality and the absolute power of disembedded financial markets.” After rejecting populism as “indigenous unreasonability,” he in fact criticizes radical-democratic critical theorists for putting a stigma on consumption and mistrusting the law. He writes: “Nothing prevents liberal-democrats from injecting a strong normative content into consumer-protection through class-action. Nothing prevents liberal-democratic theorists from giving class-action and punitive damages a new twist capable of representing a third course between populist neonationalist closure and neoliberal globalism.” He continues that one could dismiss these law-suits as internal to the logic of an instrumental use of the law, subservient to the neoliberal hegemonic credo, but the burden of proof is on radical neo-marxist critics to show that under the present conditions of hyperpluralism, flexibilization of work [and] fragmentation of social classes it is possible to oppose financialized capitalism more effectively through traditional street-demonstrations, petitions, strikes, press-campaigns.
Lisa Anderson is cautiously optimistic that liberal forces can overcome current forms of populism in the Arab world. She wholeheartedly shares the analysis that the Arab uprisings and the current turmoil in the Middle East have their origin in an irresponsible libertarian, minimalist law and order conception of the state that deprived Arab states of their political legitimacy. She states that “improvements in macroeconomic indicators obscured the increasing unemployment, poverty and income inequality, particularly in the IMF’s ‘good pupils,’ such as Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and Egypt.” As a result, people in Arab countries started to turn for help to religious and ethnic communities that “were usually proudly illiberal and exclusionary.” If “the social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, in which political acquiescence was bought with state employment, access to public healthcare and education and low taxation” is largely impossible today, Anderson argues that the new media “created what might be called the first global community of grievance” where “collective memory now truly extends to virtually everyone on earth.” Could the emergence of more global identities give rise to more extended forms of global governance able to tackle today’s stall in the region?
Amr Hamzawy doesn’t think that there are any sorts of justifications for populism. He writes a politically very engaged attack against the human rights abuses committed by the Egyptian rulers and generals. He strongly contests the myth “that the new authoritarianism would save the most populous Middle Eastern country from a civil outbreak, terrorism, and economic decay,” showing that today Egypt actually fares worse than ever on all accounts. Therefore Egypt’s generals have to rely on alternative narratives to justify the use of heavy-handed ruling techniques. They engage through a religious and nationalist breed of populism in what Borovali calls ad hominem argumentation: conspiracy theories, defamation campaigns, negative collective labeling, and hate speech against voices of dissent and pro-democracy groups. Hamzawy protests that “nationalistic populism often allows regimes to dismiss universal standards of democracy and the rule of law as Western practices pushed by ‘enemies of the nation’ that do not apply to Egypt and are not binding to the regime.”
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, it seems, at least if we follow the contributions in this volume, that there is a causal relationship between liberalism and the rise of populism. In the richer West, neoliberal globalization has contributed to the relative impoverishment of the lower classes. In the global South, the opening of markets and the expansion of democratic ideas have menaced age-old value systems and privileges. In both cases populism promises to keep intact a world that is about to disappear. Liberalism is undeniably about what Joseph Schumpeter calls “creative destruction,” but at the same time there has been marked progress on reducing poverty over the past decades. As the World Bank states, “the world attained the first Millennium Development Goal target—to cut the 1990 poverty rate in half by 2015—five years ahead of schedule, in 2010.” 5 In this period, the poverty rate was reduced by more than one-third.
The true problem is that unfettered global markets go also along with increasing inequalities, human rights abuses, and exploitation, as well as environmental pollution. Although Bilgrami is certainly right when he writes that “the mind boggles at the idea of a serious possibility of global labor movements to oppose global finance capital,” some form of political and not only economic global governance seems to be the only possibility of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 6 From this perspective, the fatal error of the Left has been not so much to endorse globalization, but to believe that it can be governed from within the logic of the nation-state. The disastrous electoral results of social democratic parties in the West and the marginalization of Left thought in the Global South show to what extent in particular the Left is hit by the crisis of liberalism. The current state of the European Union indeed demonstrates all too well the very legitimate concerns Bilgrami has with regard to global government, but perhaps we philosophers should be the last to give up “the principle of hope” so courageously upheld by Ernst Bloch.