Etienne Balibar: Populism in the American Mirror
As I was teaching in
the US this autumn term both during and after the presidential elections, all
my friends, students and colleagues would sooner or later ask me the same
question: who is next? Do you think that Le Pen will win the French election in
May?
Deploying various
scenarios stretching from a kind of domino theory whereby each “liberal
government” that crashes destabilizes the next one, to a contagion spread by
the ruin of the distributive social policies that are universally targeted by
neoliberalism, they tended to view Brexit as a prefiguration of the new
“surprise” result. Clinton’s defeat together with Renzi’s fall and Hollande’s
defection became aspects of the same disaggregation of the “center left”.
The defeat of the
neo-fascist right in the Austrian presidential election appeared as a brief
respite, and Poland’s civic demonstrations against the Kaczynski regime, a
fragile element of resistance. The strategic question (this was before the
recent murder rampage in Berlin) would be: will Merkel “stand her ground”
before the offensive of the xenophobic alliance attacking her opening of the
borders for the Syrian refugees last year (“Wir schaffen das”)?
Returning to Europe, I
can see that the same questions are in dispute on this side of the Atlantic as
well. And the category around which analyses or speculations revolve is always
“populism”, with its deep ambivalence and its range of antithetic applications.
Revelatory Atlantic
mirror: I agree that Europe
(meaning in practice the European Union, of which, note well, the UK is still a
member, albeit with diminished prerogatives in anticipation of Brexit, should
it ever take place) and the United States are holding up a revelatory mirror to
each other. The differences are obvious, and they are well-known.
But, yes, the two
situations interact, and they shed light on one another, which may help us
grasp the deep crisis of the political institution now running
on both sides of the Atlantic, to identify its key points of contact, avoiding
empty generalities as well as myopic localism. This makes sense, in particular,
because on the European side the strategic level is decidedly a continental
one: the increasing paralysis of parliamentary systems, the ungovernability
affecting one nation after the other (Britain, Spain, Italy, France…), which
makes them easy prey for demagogic nationalistic discourse, must be seen in
good part as a direct consequence or collateral damage of the collapse of the
European project as a credible political and cultural trajectory.
On the American side,
the declining power of the “empire” is now shaking not only the “social
compact” to which it once gave an economic and patriotic basis, but also its
constitutional edifice, despite its forming one of the oldest republican
regimes in the world, with a remarkable system of “checks and balances”
allowing for its stabilization in times of internal tension. For us Europeans, I
submit that the American election bears lessons that we need to adapt,
“translating” them into the language of our own history and current
vicissitudes.
Let me suggest three such lessons:
1) The lesson of
Clinton’s defeat (which was essentially her incapacity to overcome the rhetoric
and the tricks of her opponent which gave him the lead in crucial “popular”
swing states, since, as we know, she won the national vote by a considerable
margin) is the following:
it is both absurd and a sure recipe for disaster to try
and neutralize the political, in the line of post-democratic governance now
hegemonic in our bi-partisan parliamentary systems, through a camouflage of the
deep divisions within our societies that neoliberalism has either intensified
or generated: class divisions (including increasing economic
and educational inequalities), ethnic and racial divisions (frequently
combined with religious discriminations), moral divisions (particularly
in the realm of family values and sexual norms). Add to this a high level of
structural violence: economic, judiciary, domestic, urban, that Clinton never
mentioned (except, to some extent, in the form of sexism), and that Trump
managed to appropriate under the terminology of “anger”.
2) The lesson arising
from the comparison of the two campaigns led by Trump and Bernie Sanders
respectively, often presented by liberal analysts (e.g. in the New York
Times) as “symmetric” movements of rejection of the elite, is the
following: henceforth and forever we must stop using the category “populism” in
a manner that bridges the chasm between left and right. This is especially
important from a European point of view, since the word “populism” has a
distinct history and a partially different semantic distribution in the US
(where a typical “populist” at this moment in time would be Elizabeth
Warren, a very rational and well-established senator…).
That there exists a crisis
of the “system”, both in terms of its legitimacy and in terms
of its representative capacity, is no longer just an opinion or a
political doctrine, but an objective fact. However, the conclusions that are
deduced from this pull in radically opposing directions: either a xenophobic
nationalism (which tends to be combined with protectionism, through
the lens of migratory politics and the “closing” of borders), or a quest for the
“missing people” (Deleuze’s expression), a new synthesis of
resistances and democratic hopes involving a plurality of
cultures and social forces. But, despite certain
possibilities for amalgamation in the political game (sometimes referred to in
Europe as a “red-brown” alliance, of the kind that there seems to be an attempt
to construct in certain regions of Austria today, with similar temptations
arising in Germany and in France), there is in fact no middle ground.
3) The third lesson,
it seems to me, is the following: undoubtedly institutional models rooted in
different histories determine different conditions for political action, both
parliamentary and extra-parliamentary. This is true when comparing the US to
its European counterpart, and it is true within European
“pseudo-federalism”, among the historic nations themselves. This difference,
however, should not obfuscate the fact that in both regions of the world (the
two regions where the “bourgeois” democratic model was invented in the
nineteenth century, later having to become adapted to the rise of emancipatory
movements and the counter-effect of social struggles), the same constitutional
problem is now emerging.
This is a general problem of
our time (which does also exist, of course, in other parts of the world: Latin
America, India, South Africa immediately come to mind as meaningful points of
comparison, whereas the case of post-communist regimes in China or Russia seems
to obey a different logic), whose content is a brutal oscillation between the
seemingly irreversible process of “de-democratization”, and the possibility of
a “democratization of democracy” itself.
We begin to see what
mixture of depoliticization (with its institutionalized corporate lobbying and
subjection of “representative government” to technocratic instances) and
permanent “state of emergency” or the security-state is involved in the process
of de-democratization. We understand conversely that the idea of “democratizing
democracy” should begin by curbing the power of money in politics, reversing
the technocratic monopoly over public judgment, and limiting the privileges of
cultural or material heritage. This is a genuine regime change that seeks to
make room for a direct participation of citizens in public
affairs: an exigency now widely perceptible in all our constituencies. It is,
put simply, synonymous with active citizenship, but at
the risk (which must be consciously run and controlled) of bringing back “civil
conflict” between parties or antagonistic world-views, thus subverting ossified
political systems which appear obsessed with “normality” and “consensus”, while
in fact targeting their dissidents with extreme intolerance.
Perilous choices: At a more general
level, while comparisons with the world-crisis of the 1930’s are at the same
time useful and partially inadequate, we understand that radical choices
between social models and values are now (again) becoming hazardous, because
the “global” stakes that are reflected locally contaminate each other in a
negative manner: as it were they produce conditions of impossibility for
any rational examination of their causes and effects. This is true of the way
in which global warming has now passed the threshold of irreversibility in
changing the environment, threatening whole groups of the human population
(among other species) with a destruction of their lifeworld, potentially
forcing them to flee or perish in a predictable future. It is true for the
deregulation of financial capitalism, now dominated by the new gold rush, the
rush for liquid assets – whose reverse side, however, is an exponential
development of human precariousness, whether nomadic or sedentary, that Saskia
Sassen has adequately called generalised "expulsion". And it is true
for the “clash of civilizations”, a murderous self-fulfilling fantasy with a
real basis nonetheless, which is the new regime of international migrations and
the concomitant hybridization of traditional cultures.
Where these phenomena
intersect and over-determine each other, extreme violence is looming. And it
rages actually wherever the flames are fanned by dreams of lost empire,
conflicts of secular and religious “monotheisms”, the massive trade of arms and
the thirst for oil (or, in the French case, uranium), the combination of real
and imaginary security threats under the name of “terror”.
With respect to such
global challenges, more or less perceived by the masses, what we can observe
daily is the fact that so-called “sovereign” entities (nation-states, however
big, supranational federations and alliances, international organizations) are
largely ineffective if not detrimental. It is this “powerlessness of the
omnipotent” (an expression I used in the past to explain the roots of
neofascist xenophobia among “petty-white” citizens who try to forget their own
social downgrading in calling for the visible discrimination of the Other by
“their” States) that generates collective resentments and panics, on which
“populists” are riding, but which can also escape their control or push them
towards some sort of dictatorship.
On the other hand, we
discover with hope and admiration the energy for a renovation of democracy in
“assembly” movements like Indignados, the Arab Springs (which
also had other dimensions), Occupy Wall Street, Syntagma Square, Gezi Park,
Nuit Debout… which in the recent period have truly resurrected the idea of a
people both deliberative and active. But we are desperate to see how disarmed
they remain before the accumulated and concentrated power of the oligarchy,
when it comes to bringing about institutional and policy change. Something more is
clearly needed.
Otherwise, the
pendulum will shift in the opposite direction in the most brutal manner.
Already Trump (who was elected on a “populist” agenda) is orchestrating the
clamorous revenge of Wall Street over the “occupy” movement that, obviously,
keeps haunting its CEOs. In Erdogan’s Turkey (not to mention the broader Middle
East) a “counter-coup” brutally crushes democracy and individual liberties. And
everywhere in Europe politicians from left to right compete for the trophy of
intolerance. Are we then entering the long night of subjection and
anti-politics?
Transnational
counter-populism: There is no way
however that national-populism can offer solutions to the radical challenges of
the day or satisfy the basic demands of the popular majority (made of multiple
“minorities”), whether this concerns the protection of
populations and their ways of life; or the necessity of regulating the
global movements of capitals, goods, and persons; or the articulation of participation with representation within
a new form of citizenship that is adapted to the age of multiculturalism and
internet communications. Instead, the fundamental question of the place (and
the “places”, or “squares”) for living, working, learning, meeting, thinking,
struggling in common, that must be created for all citizens, becomes reduced to
imaginary and discriminatory scenarios.
Inexorably, under the
Trump presidency or any of his potential European imitators, this will produce
more resentment and feelings of insecurity, thus an increased tendency to divert
them aggressively towards scapegoats and “internal enemies”. For this reason,
but first to counteract as much as we can the devastating effects of
national-populisms which are on the rise in one country after another, we must
imagine a transnational counter-populism, ceaselessly
working to invent its political language and promote its ideals.
Tentatively, speaking
in Athens in 2010, I had given this oxymoronic name to the diverse resistances
against austerity policies in Europe, in full awareness that it offered neither
a program nor a solution to the institutional and social crisis opening up
before us at the hands of the EU itself, when it decided to destroy one of its
own member states in the name of financial rules devised by the banks and for
the banks, and inscribed in the treatises that function as substitutes for a
European constitution.
It was (and remains)
just a name to indicate that we need a concentration of forces
and an assemblage of ideas to recreate a politics made by the people
and for the people. With populism, “counter-populism” shares a formal
characteristic: criticizing the dispossession or disempowerment of the masses
in the oligarchic regime. Against populism, it doesn’t confer the task of
ending dispossession to the dispossessors themselves, but seeks and requires
the empowerment of the citizenry, therefore pushing its capacity beyond the
limits and across the borders that in the past defined the political.
