Idea Transcript
EVENT REPORT
Policy Research in Times of Populism and Austerity: How Can Think Tanks Help Europe through Its Troubles? Gavan Titley
Think Tank Fund Does “populism” propose the wrong answers to the right questions? The answer, at a seminar held in Budapest on February 18-‐19, 2013, was a resounding “it depends.” For some audiences, this sounds like the standard product of research events. At this gathering of policy-‐ researchers, activists, journalists, academics, and politicians, however, it was more a consequence of a commitment to analyzing not just current affairs, but what was termed the “deeper tectonics” of socio-‐political change. What is populism, and does it involve, or require, populists? Is populism a threat to, or an immanent dimension of, representative democracy? Does “populism” signify a desire or demand for ideological horizons of meaning in political life? Is resurgent right-‐wing populism a warning sign, or a symptom of transition, and if so, towards what state? The notion of “populism”’—which cannot appear in a report such as this unaccessorized by inverted commas—is a conflicted and contested one. For some, it is profoundly incompatible with representative democracy. For others, its invocation signifies the anti-‐democratic fear of “the mob.” Its polarizing accents are not helped by its eclectic and often motivated usage. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that it was frequently used as a synonym for “exotic” in 1 international coverage of the death of Hugo Chávez. In a time of crisis within the European Union, as Cas Mudde recently argued, the blanket detection by EU elites of “anti-‐European populists” lumps together and flattens out very different forms of political criticism and
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For commentary, see Greg Grandin, “On the legacy of Hugo Chávez,”, The Nation, March 5, 2013: http://www.thenation.com/article/173212/legacy-hugo-chavez#
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opposition. This seminar exhibited little patience for such reductions. Discussants started from the premise that “populism” cannot be determined out of context, that it is inherent to democracy—what Margaret Canovan describes as a “mobilization that follows democracy like 3 a shadow,” or what Benjamin Arditi terms an “internal periphery of democratic politics” —and that it provides a focus for thinking through antagonisms, desires and demands in the current conjuncture, as well as for analyzing the characteristics and implications of particular parties and movements. The urgency that underpins the question of ““populism”” is enflamed by the politics of “austerity”—the second, and equally conflicted, keyword of the seminar topic. In its English usage, “austerity” can never fully enter the contemporary technocratic vocabulary; it harbors, as Steven Poole notes, “connotations of admirably severe virtue,” and is thus irreducibly 4 euphemistic. Debating this euphemistic character is no language game, as it cuts to the heart of an ideological conflict that endures regardless of the preponderance of economic data and 5 evidence. In a recent study, Mark Blyth describes austerity’s faith in cutting a return path to growth as the “zombie economics” that disguises what is a “banking crisis first and a sovereign debt crisis second.” He moves beyond the data to spell out the political consequences: Austerity, then, is a dangerous idea because it ignores the externalities it generates, the impact of one person’s choices on another person’s choices, especially for societies with highly skewed income distributions. The decisions of those at the top on taxes, spending, and investment prior to 2008 created a giant liability in the form of a financial crisis and too big to fail and bail financial institutions that they expect everyone further down the income distribution to pay for…in sum, when those at the bottom are expected to pay disproportionately for a problem created by those at the top, and when those at the top actively eschew any responsibility for that problem by blaming the state for their mistakes, not only will squeezing the bottom not produce enough revenue to fix things, it will produce an even more polarized and politicized society in which the conditions for a sustainable politics of dealing with more debt and less growth are undermined. Populism, nationalism and calls for the return of “God and gold” in equal doses are what unequal austerity generates,
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As Mudde concludes: “In short, there is not much evidence that European democracy, at the national or EU level, is being threatened by either the national elites or the masses. While protest parties are registering record scores in several national elections, many of these parties, even the so-‐called populist ones, are reformist rather than revolutionary, with regard to both national democracy and European integration. In fact, the real threat for the EU fearmongers does not come from true anti-‐democrats or anti-‐Europeans (in the restricted sense of anti-‐EU), but from democratic Eurosceptics, who want to fundamentally transform, rather than abolish, the European Union. Juncker admitted as much when he said: ‘Of course politicians should respect the will of the people as much as possible, provided they adhere to the European treaties.’ Asked whether this also applies to policies opposed by a majority of the people, he clarified: ‘This means, if need be, that they have to pursue the right policies, even if many voters think they are the wrong ones.”’
“The European Elites’ Politics of Fear,” Open Democracy, March 18, 2013: http://www.opendemocracy.net/cas-‐ mudde/european-‐elites-‐politics-‐of-‐fear 3
See Canovan, Margaret (1999), “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies, 47(1) 2-‐16; and Arditi, Benjamin (2007), Politics on the Edges of Liberalism.
Poole, Stephen (2011), “Austerity Measures: Enhancing the Credibility Deficit,” Unspeak: http://unspeak.net/austerity-‐ measures/
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For the most recent survey, see Blyth, Mark (2013), Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press.
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and no one, not even those at the top, benefits. It is in this context that long-‐established debates about the weaknesses of centrist, highly-‐ mediated representative democracies have become acute (though participants emphasized that their durability should be borne in mind in discussions of crisis). The social impact of mass unemployment, catastrophic youth unemployment, emigration, cuts in public resources and social services, reduction of wages relative to the cost of living; the political impact of electoral instability, rising support for and tolerance of right-‐wing actors that are increasingly confident in appealing to registers of racism previously marked as taboo, and a sense that representative democratic structures have no agency in a transnational crisis; the political-‐ economic crisis in the Eurozone and wider Europe provides a petri-‐dish in which emergent forms of political action are developing. This seminar peered into the dish from a variety of perspectives, based on an invitation by the Open Society Think Tank Fund and the Open Society European Policy Institute for participants to “investigate how cutting-‐edge policy research can slice through the know of huge policy challenges and voter disenchantment with politics.” Specifically, the question posed for this seminar was how does policy research identify the “major questions about the future of politics on our continent,” and how can “think tanks play a constructive role in policy and wider public debates?” The seminar was organized around three points of focus: (i) the supply side of politics and the future of political parties, (ii) the demand for radical policy alternatives, (iii) new policy thinking: where can new ideas come from and go to? This report provides a summary, an overview, and in part, a reflection on the discussion that occurred over three working sessions. For the sake of accuracy, the report proceeds according to the progress of the sessions. For the sake of cogency, it cross-‐references between the sessions, and uses endnotes to link to relevant resources and perspectives.
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Blyth, ibid, pp.17-‐8. The notion of “zombie economics” is quoted by Blyth from John Quiggan’s Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (2010), which in turn has echoes of Ulrich Beck’s broader critique of “zombie categories” in social science and public discourse, i.e., concepts that endure despite their lack of analytical purchase. See Beck and Elizabeth Beck-‐Gernsheim (2002), Individualization: Institutional Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage. The notion of “zombie economics” recalls a comparable recent study by Jamie Peck, who presents the gap between the “pristine clarity of the ideological apparition (of) the free market’ and repeated empirical failure as a dialectic that informs a tendency to ‘...fail forward,’, in that their manifest inadequacies have—so far anyway—repeatedly animated further rounds of neoliberal animation.” See Constructions of Neoliberal Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011, p.6, emphasis in original).
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1. The Demand Side of Politics Are voters unrealistic in their demands for alternatives to austerity policies? What lies behind widespread disenchantment with traditional parties? Do voters feel represented by mainstream political parties? How do they want to engage in politics through party membership, online debates or street movements? Can mainstream parties address the legitimate grievances that lie behind the illegitimate expression of xenophobia? What motivates protest votes? The introduction provided by the seminar organizers augmented these orienting questions above with some further dimensions. As Heather Grabbe noted, “Europe is in crisis mode,” but crisis provides its own equilibrium; it has become the new normal for policy-‐makers, where this normal involves a restricted number of people focusing on a restrictive number of issues. Focusing on “populism,” according to Jordi Vaquer, and on populism beyond austerity, can counter this restrictive focus because it draws attention to the inability of governments to offer sustainable answers to key fundamental questions in social and political life. It also proposes an inversion that offers a challenge to thinktanks: if studies of populism often focus on its anti-‐elitist stance, isn’t this also an invitation to question the role of elites, and the status of elitism, in the first instance? Nevertheless, the introductory comments all echoed something noted by the third speaker, Goran Buldioski, that not only is Budapest currently a fitting site for considering these questions, but that it is something of a shock for the Open Society Foundations to find that it has programs that are actively concerned about basic open society values in the European political space. This invitation to make strange the coordinates of crisis, and to invert political common sense, was taken up by the first of three speakers, Paul Taggart, Professor of Politics at Sussex University Institute. Taggart initiated an exploration of the coordinates, rationales, and demand for “populism” that continued throughout the seminar as a whole. The exacerbation of a long-‐term decline in trust in politicians and political process within a severe economic crisis has certainly fuelled a “populist moment,” though this can be over-‐stated through too much attention being paid to small movements, and by restricted understandings of 7 “populism” as a consequence of political-‐economic crisis. As Taggart has argued elsewhere, discussions of populism require clarity concerning defining features, as Looking around, there are plenty of examples of populist movements, parties and politicians making hay at Europe’s expense. From Wilders in the Netherlands with his anti-‐Islamic stance, to the Euroscepticism of UKIP in Britain, via Jobbik’s anti-‐Semitic radical Hungarian nationalism, the anti-‐elitism of Die Linke in Germany, and the anti-‐politics of Beppe Grillo in Italy, Europe appears awash with populism. But in reality populism is a limited force and what is remarkable about the current state of European politics is how little populism there is.
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And, there have been other “populist moments”: the political scientist Cas Mudde used the idea of the “populist zeitgeist” to examine not only the electoral successes of populist right-‐wing parties in northern and Alpine Europe in the late 1990s, but also to capture the “mainstreaming” of populist logic and appeals in political discourse. See “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government & Opposition: An International Journal of Comparative Politics, Vol. 39 (4) 542-‐563
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These different examples don’t aggregate into a wider populism and it is surprising how little 8 mass populism there is in reaction to the economic crisis. Populism, in this analysis, involves an antagonism to the forms and practices of representative politics that is not revolutionary, but claims the status of the “reluctantly political,” and marks its putative difference from the elite, professional, technocratic, and corrupt character of “business as usual.” The “reluctantly political” is activated because politics as usual demeans 9 “the heartland,” an affective, rhetorical and imagined constituency inhabited by “ordinary people.” In turn, it is this division that supports a division of the world in irreconcilable opposites, “us and them,” “good and evil.” As Taggart wrote in his earlier book, Populism, the populist idealization of the people invariably situates them in an idealized landscape, but one under threat, and in so doing “populism excludes elements it sees as alien, corrupt or debased, 10 and works on a distinction between the things that are wholesome and those which are not.” In a 2012 article, Catherine Fieschi offered a comparable definition: If we draw up an etch-‐a-‐sketch version of populism, its constitutive parts can be summed up as: a) the perception of a fundamental, unbridgeable fracture between the real people and the elite; in other words a militant anti-‐elitism, since elites are fundamentally perceived as the root of all national problems; b) a conviction that ordinary people in their common sense and emotionally direct relationship to politics have all the answers; they are therefore the one true, reliable political compass; c) as a result, the populist discourse of “democracy” is one which will privilege, as a matter of principle, an unreflective diagnosis of problems and quick-‐fix solutions. This is crucial because contrary to the principles of deliberation and debate intrinsic to—at least our model of—the democratic process, the populist process will purposefully avoid sustained inquiry or debate 11 because the latter is seen as anathema to common sense. Based on these key dimensions, the empty heart of populist movements in Europe pumps xenophobia through the body politic, but not only. There was a curious reluctance in the discussions to explore this not only as xenophobia, but as racism. A signature of the current moment is not only the extensive licence provided for the coded culturalism of the so-‐called “new racism” that has been, for decades, a feature of the European political landscape (and one easily adapted to the overwhelming, racializing focus on Muslims in the post 9/11 12 period). It is also the recuperation of signs, symbols, tropes, and allusions that flirt with 8
See Paul Taggart, “Populism Has the Potential to Damage European Democracy, but Demonizing Populist Parties Is Self-‐ defeating,” London School of Economics and Politics South East Europe blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2012/12/13/populism-‐has-‐the-‐potential-‐to-‐damage-‐european-‐democracy-‐paul-‐ taggart/ In an earlier book, Populism (2000, Open University Press), Taggart draws attention, in a useful metaphor, to the “empty heart” of populism, as an ideology without commitment to key values.
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In the accepted sense of constructed and shaped within a structure of feeling, as opposed to “conjured up” or “fictitious.”
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Taggart op.cit. p.3.
See “A Plague on Both Your Populisms,” Open Democracy, April 19, 2012: http://www.opendemocracy.net/catherine-‐ fieschi/plague-‐on-‐both-‐your-‐populisms
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It is important that policy research does not accept the comforting assumption that racist and xenophobic ideas are a property of the far-‐right and populist right that travel or are strategically adopted by the center. The post 9/11 period in particular, across European sites, does not support this assumption. For extensive discussions of these ideological formations see Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (2009); Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance (2007), and Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (2011).
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“biological” racism and overt ideologies of hierarchy and supremacy. It is these lines of division that—for all the acceptance of populism as involving political 13 form and modes of appeal, over and above ideological content and substance—tend to profoundly associate the charge of populism with the radical right. And while most discussants accepted the idea that such parties propose a “rule change” rather than a “game change,” the degree to which certain parties and movements exhibit fascist potential 14 remained a contentious, if under-‐developed, point of debate. Arguably, contemporary racisms are not best understood by restricting analysis to overtly populist formations. Xenophobic division, as Arjun Apparudai argues in his essay Fear of 15 Small Numbers is a standing reserve of the form of the nation-‐state, for, “No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius (p.3). What he terms the “inherent ethnicist tendency in all ideologies of nationalism” is exacerbated by the increased scale and intensity of “uncertainty in social life”: …the certainty that distinctive and singular peoples grow out of and control well-‐defined national territories has been decisively unsettled by the global fluidity of wealth, arms, peoples and images…globalization exacerbates these uncertainties and produces new incentives for cultural purification as more nations lose the illusion of national economic sovereignty or well-‐being (p.6-‐7). This line of thinking is important, as it draws attention to the expansive repertoire through which lines can be drawn and purification delineated, and not all of this ideological work is conducted on the conventional far-‐right. Phil Triadafilopoulos, for example, has recently 16 examined what he terms “Schmittian liberalism” that advocates a “sharply antagonistic discourse designating putatively clear and inviolable boundaries of liberal-‐democratic conduct.” It justifies a sharp designation between friends and enemies, and while differentiation proceeds through the universalized values of the open society rather than ethnic genius or homeland imaginaries, it locates these values as the characteristic of Europeans that must be defended against threatening, illiberal—non-‐European—others. Nevertheless, a range of political dynamics and trends has created increased space for right-‐ wing populism to inhabit. A Manichean mode, as Paul Taggart noted, frequently structures national media and parliamentary representations of relations with the European Union— “Are you for or against Europe?” The “plebiscitary urge” also parks complexity in exchange for spectacular insistences on for/against, and can in turn be seen as symptoms of both the oversimplification of politics—no longer a field of competing interests and constant 13
See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 2007.
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For a very useful overview, see Pedlars of Hate: The Violent Impact of the European Far-‐Right, a report by the Institute for Race Relations: http://www.irr.org.uk/publications/issues/pedlars-‐of-‐hate-‐the-‐violent-‐impact-‐of-‐the-‐european-‐far-‐ right/
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Arjun Apparudai, Fear of Small Numbers (2006, Duke University Press).
(See “Illiberal Means to Liberal Ends? Understanding Recent Immigrant Integration Policies in Europe, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2011).
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negotiation—and simplistic media portrayals of political processes as character-‐driven contests and morality plays. Further, political education is limited and inadequate in many contexts. The solutions, Taggart concluded, involve insisting on pluralism as the opposite of populism, and laying out what is required to oppose populism, and what, in turn, is required to reinvigorate democracy, without collapsing the latter fully to the former. There is also the thorny challenge of addressing, fully and clearly, those issues that right populists foreground 17 as evidence of elite slipperiness and obfuscation, such as “migration.” In discussion, several participants expanded on dimensions of this picture. As Jordi Vaquer pointed out, while it is true that politics is often over-‐simplified—in, say, the dramatic arc of political reporting—nevertheless certain contexts present choices that are so stark as to be, on one level simple, if not simplistic (the example being that the choice between the two main parties in Spain over the last two decades has not been interchangeable). Vaquer added a further dimension, addressed more fully in the next section, that the rise of “populism” relates to the drastic narrowing down of what is possible, and deemed to be possible, by government; in other words, it provides a nexus of political meaning and mission where many significant dimensions of socio-‐political life are predominantly “left off the table.” Catherine Fieschi provided a complementary viewpoint, arguing that what the current crisis has laid bare is not just a relative lack of faith in governing, but that “voters have cottoned on to the fact that nobody really knows what it means to govern,” a problem exacerbated by national scale and relative power in a globally mediated crisis. If there is a growing disbelief in technocratic expertise, then what would be a new basis for governing, and on what kinds of claims can legitimate governing be based? Philippe Schmitter developed the idea of “populism” representing the failure of established parties by asking whether this required an emphasis on making parties more credible agents of representation, through new mechanisms of candidate selection and participation, or whether thinking needed to look beyond political parties per se? As he pointed out, the permanent bureaucracies of political parties are historically relatively new developments, thus, under conditions of digital networking, what might new, viable systems for organizing political representation, and government, look like?
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Two points could be further debated here, when it comes to policy formation around the need to openly address issues appropriated by populist right formations, and presented as putative evidence of the closed or dishonest behavior of elites. When we call for a debate on X, a “migration debate,” for example, what form does this debate take? As I have detailed here (“Exclusion through Openness? A Tentative Anatomy of Migration Debates,” Journal of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Vol. 11: http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/journal/volumes/volume_11/index.htm), each and every migration debate is called on the basis that what has preceded is never “‘open and honest” enough. In other words, there is also the question of political ritual, and how certain kinds of public debate are structured as public relations exercises, particularly where blaming migration becomes an acute temptation during periods not only of economic recession, but of relative political paralysis. The anthropologist Ghassan Hage has argued that “migration debates” function as rituals of belonging and “fantasies of national management” under conditions of neoliberal dislocation, and I would submit that these perspectives on ritual process and political strategy must be included in discussions of the normative need to openly address contentious issues. See White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press 1998. The second point is that it is historically untenable to maintain that the vocabularies, issues, and strategies used to target migrants, ethnic minorities, and racialized subjects are discretely or predominantly generated under right-‐wing populism, and seep into, or provide irresistible temptation for, the political center. See the references under footnote 12 for relevant historicization.
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Better ideas, of course, have also to be communicated in a material world, and the session’s second presentation, by Joy Warmington, the CEO of brap, a Birmingham-‐based think tank, focused attention on the cumulative social and political effects of “austerity.” Giving a depth of testimony to Mark Blyth’s anatomizing of austerity’s dangers, Warmington noted that the simple fact that the measures implemented under the sign of austerity impacted on the poor and socially excluded—while having no impact on the class from which decision-‐makers are overwhelmingly drawn—ensured that they were perceived as politically motivated. In one of the most unequal cities in Europe, she noted, the communities she works with witnessed inadequate services falling further behind and being targeted for “reform.”These communities were also marked by the increasingly widespread belief that whom you vote for is irrelevant. Further, the political justification of austerity requires a moralizing and individualizing governmental discourse that targets the “scroungers” who are “welfare-‐dependent,” a strategy of concerted alienation that is not lost on the constituency targeted, and that presents knock-‐ on political problems for left-‐of-‐center parties disconcerted by the purchase of this 18 predictable form of scapegoating. Warmington’s focused analysis was amplified by Thomas Klau, who argued that one of the toxic consequences of “austerity” is that people and citizens clearly perceive that highly significant decisions are being imposed in ways that are not open to contest through established democratic avenues, but that, at the same time, they are invited to pretend that thisis democracy in action. As Ferruccio Pastore noted, it is this growing disbelief that gives credence to populist attention to how inequality functions in society. Further, in a context where debt foreshadows future policy decisions, how will inequality be tackled? The third presentation of the session was delivered by Lamprini Rori, a researcher at the University of Paris I, who gave a detailed treatment of the rise of the neo-‐fascist Golden Dawn in Greece. Rori emphasized that the spectacular gains of a party that, in rhetorical, tactical, th and iconographic terms, recalls the terror of early 20 century fascism, cannot be adequately understood solely in relation to the current crisis and the spectacular electoral losses for the center-‐right and center-‐left in the June 2012 elections. Golden Dawn capitalized on the feelings of national persecution engendered by economic collapse and the Troika intervention, but it also built on anti-‐immigrant sentiment stoked by successive 19 governments, and what Rori described as a cumulative feeling of political pessimism and paralysis over the last decade or so. In a stark description of the systemic generation of “populism,” the Greek political philosopher Panagiotis Sotiris puts Golden Dawn in further context: In order to understand the rise of Golden Dawn we must also take into consideration …the fact that the political system has more or less endorsed the transition towards an authoritarian “state of emergency” as a result of the economic crisis. The practice of passing laws through parliament in special fast sessions, without any special discussion, even if we are 18
Joy Warmington’s point was intensified during March 2013 in the run-‐up to far-‐reaching changes in welfare provision in the UK. For a discussion of the political problem posed by welfare scapegoating for, among others, the British Labour party, see John Harris, “We Have to Talk about Why Some People Agree with Benefit Cuts,” Guardian, March 31, 2013: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/31/we-have-to-talk-why-some-want-benefit-cuts
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See Spyros Marchetos, “Golden Dawn and the Rise of Fascism,” Guardian, June 19, 2012: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/19/golden-dawn-fascism-greece
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talking about the complete overhaul of labour law, the dismantling of social rights through simple acts of cabinet, the extreme political violence against protesters and the intensified effort towards penalization of collective forms of protest, leads to the legitimization of a “strong State” that will “deal with anomie.” This, in turn, only gives extra legitimacy to the Golden Dawn’s openly authoritarian, ultra-‐conservative and—despite the populist references to Greek workers—openly pro-‐business discourse. In a way we are dealing with complementary processes: on the one hand we have the authoritarian turn of government and state practices, in a combination of neoliberalism and authoritarian statism, in a situation marked by open political crisis, an erosion of popular sovereignty and a complete disregard for democratic procedure. On the other hand, we have a shift of the discourse of mainstream parties to the right, both as an expression of the changes in policies and strategies, but also as 20 a result of the rise of Golden Dawn, which also acts as a catalyst for this right-‐wing turn. Rori illustrated how Golden Dawn had built upon such movements as the “Outraged Residents of Athens,” providing goods and services to residents, infiltrating “resident committees,” providing “protection” against immigrants, and, in classic fascist mode, seeking to replace the function and role of the state. In discussion, Jacek Kucharczyk underlined the need to challenge the tendency not only of “populists” to speak for the “the people,” but also of many of their opponents to accept the idea that they do. Building on the forms of ethnic and racial exclusion implicit in this invocation of the “people,” Marwan Muhammad argued that far more research must be dedicated to quantifying and analyzing the penetration of populist racism into “mainstream” discourse, particularly where the instantaneous circuitries of social media networks facilitates the flow of these ideas, images, and arguments. Running against the grain of the shared assumption that populism proposes some form of answer to a frustrated desire and demand, Ivan Krastev invited people to reflect on whether there is, in fact, a huge demand for participation in politics in societies, a demand that is currently being alienated. This question provides a useful gateway to the second session. 2. The Supply Side of Politics Is the upsurge in populism just because of austerity, or is it part of a wider crisis of representative democracy? Do the mainstream parties of left and right represent major interests in European society anymore? Are they in long-‐term decline? Is the era of mass membership of political parties over? What new mechanisms of representation would satisfy st 21 century voters? Do European and regional parliaments give people more representation or just more jobs for the elites? Who can offer real policy alternatives? How can voters be more directly engaged in policy-‐making beyond elections? Can deliberative mechanisms be used across Europe or in local contexts? It is not to underplay right populism, or to relegate it to the expression of false consciousness, to ask what resurgent populism signifies, and how it relates to the failures of historically dominant centrist parties, or even to the failures of representative democracy. Ondřej Liška,
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“Some Notes on the Greek Left and the Rise of the neo-‐fascist Golden Dawn”: http://lastingfuture.blogspot.fi/2012/11/somenotes-on-greek-left-and-rise-of.html
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former Czech Minister for Education and current chair of the country’s Green Party, argued with admirable bluntness that in times of crisis, the outputs of think tanks are irrelevant to politicians, for this is when they are engaged with populist actors not on the finer points of “evidence-‐based” policy making, but for niche supremacy on “wedge” issues. This in turn, Liška argued, should be seen as symptomatic of a wider failure—that of representative politics itself. To move beyond the particular coordinates of this crisis is to allow a more fundamental set of “tectonics” to come into relief; that of a crisis of meaning and the need for political renewal. Liška’s critique proceeded at two levels. Political parties are dead as historical actors, as they cannot represent, adequately never mind substantially, the social formations they inhabit, and the needs for human flourishing they may rhetorically recognize but cannot meaningfully pursue. Here his analysis coincides with one of the most interesting books to emerge from the revolutionary and democratizing movements of 2011, Paul Mason’s Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere (2013), that examines the anti-‐ideological, horizontalist organization of movements emerging from what he terms a “new sociological type—the graduate with no future,” and a nascent sense that: There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible; that a great change in the world’s priorities is within people’s grasp. The essence of it is, as Manuel Castells has written, the collapse of trust in the old regime, combined with the inability to go on living the pre-‐crisis lifestyle: “the perceived incapacity of the political elite to solve the problems destroyed trust in the institutions in charge of managing the crisis.” If anything, the impervious nature of official politics—its inability to swerve even slightly towards the critique of finance capitalism intuitively felt by millions of people—has deepened the sense of alienation and mistrust. But the changes in ideas, behavior and expectations are running far 21 ahead of changes in the physical world. Evidently, the extent of this collapse in trust depends not only on the acuity of the current crisis, but also historically established relationships to the state and state institutions, and is thus very different across European contexts (that said, it is likely that European institutions are experiencing a more distributed and equally acute crisis of trust and legitimacy, an issue that did not receive substantial treatment at the seminar, despite its increased centrality to discussions of the Eurozone crisis and the possible fracturing or tiering of the European 22 Union ). For Liška, politics must be seen as a form of enchantment, it is a politics of being, a locus of faith in an unevenly (and problematically) secularized age. Here his argument very clearly maps onto influential critiques of politics and the “end of ideology” that pre-‐date the current crisis, such as Zaki Laïdi’s (1998) argument that the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the end of future-‐oriented collective projects. The putative victory of the West and of market capitalism, in this argument, is no such triumph, as it also deprives Western political elites of coherent and cohering projects, as market democracy “aspires neither to reach a new objective nor to construct a new horizon of meaning. It seeks simply to 21
p261-‐262, Castells quote is from Manuel Castells et al., Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, Oxford 2012, p.211.
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For an extended discussion of this crisis of legitimacy, see Stefan Auer, “The End of the European Dream: What Future for Europe’s Constrained Democracy?” Eurozine, February 22, 2013, part of a series The EU: Broken or Just Broke?: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-02-22-auer-en.html
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confirm the viability of the existing reality.” Thus, “political actions no longer find their legitimacy in a vision of the future, but have been reduced to managing the ordinary 23 present.” The current crisis, and the populist resurgence, in this reading, unsettles an always fragile technocratic consensus that does not, as yet, show signs of realizing that its “impervious nature” communicates flat-‐lining rather than leadership. What happens, Liška asked, when there are no apparent policy alternatives on offer, no matter how people mobilize? Does this not also represent the failure of liberalism, a crisis of faith in the stabilizing properties of bureaucratizing politics? What then of a European project, envisaged as a remedy to the dark potentials of the nation-‐state, but that, at the moment, is actively implicated in amplifying these energies? In a way, Liška and Taggart’s interventions represent different evaluations of and reactions to what Margaret Canovan has described as the “revivalist flavor” of populist movements that promise some form of redemption, “the promise of a better world through action by the sovereign people,” a promise girded when “too great a gap opens up between haloed democracy and the grubby business of politics…(then) populists tend to move on to the vacant territory, promising in place of the dirty world of party maneuvering the shining ideal 24 of democracy renewed.” Is the response to this revivalism the promise of a better, transformative horizon of meaning, based, as Liška contends, on a commitment to human dignity, and emerging from popular movements, or a better explanation and practice of the patient art of politics, making pluralism meaningful and making evident the negotiations and compromises that parliamentary democracy depends on? The session’s second speaker, René Cuperus, director for International Relations at the think tank of the Dutch Labour Party, offered a similarly direct critique of the space afforded to xenophobic populism by defining it as fundamentally a reaction to elites. Populism can be understood as a counter-‐revolt to what Christopher Lasch (1995) diagnosed as the “revolt of the elites,” the professional “cognitive elite” – among whom think tanks stand as a particularly suggestive cipher—that have “in effect removed themselves from the common life,” in Lasch’s analysis, through an abstract commitment to meritocracy and social mobility rarely borne out beyond their habitus; to a reduction of democracy to “the reign of specialized expertise”’ and technocratic “competence”; and the denigration of democratic discourse, which must hold out the hope of common political dialogue, to the insular concerns of the “talking classes.” What Lasch describes as a removal from the common life Cuperus presents as a form of estrangement that now has serious political consequences. This estrangement involves not only technocratic policy-‐making removed from material, social realities, but the seeming inability or unwillingness of European elites to understand the extraordinary demands that a globalized, competitive economy makes on social subjects, and most recently, that the austerity mandated by the idea that “there is no alternative” imposes on people, localities, communities, and societies. 23
Zaki Laïdi, (1998) A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics. London: Routledge.
24
Canovan op. cit. p.12.
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Thus populism emerges from the erosion of a meaningful left/right divide as it allows for the shaping of narratives of revolt that are not only plausible but also affective. Populism, Cuperus argued, channels a variety of overlapping negations: a revolt against the positive narrative of globalization; against expert-‐driven and seemingly unaccountable decision-‐making; against the “neoliberal betrayal” of socialist and social democratic parties; against the powerlessness and/or complicity of a political class that display neither the capacity nor desire to restore or even negotiate democratic control over financial capitalism; and more inchoately, a rejection of what Zygmunt Bauman terms “liquid life,” worlds of work and social interaction that appear to be marked by rapid change and precariousness, and devoid of the “moral and 25 cultural constraints” provided by the grand narratives of Christianity and socialism. From the horizon of politics to the blindness of elites, to a crisis of liberalism? Peter Učeň, a researcher at the Europe Programme of the International Republican Institute, echoed Cuperus’s concerns that the designation, and subsequent demonization, of populism is too easy, and constitutes an elite mode of political correctness. Instead, he argued, populism provides an umbrella term for different political trajectories united in their criticism of liberalism, as an economic hegemony but also as a constitutional settlement. Our inability to accept that the canonical era of representative democracy is over stunts an attempt to think through what “differently democratic democracies” might look like, and how they many be organized. In common with the other panelists in this session, Učeň framed populism as a field of responses intensified and exacerbated, but not caused by, the current political-‐ economic crisis. The field of politics, he argued, has been artificially cleansed of ideology, antagonism, and differentiated interests by a veneer of “evidence-‐based” policy making, itself based on the “third way” conviction that decision-‐making can be artificially extracted from the field of political antagonism, and that questions of redistribution can be dodged by a fatal attraction to the fictitious growth promises of financial capitalism and the thin fiction of GDP growth. Where Učeň perhaps differed from the previous contributors was in his focus on the locus of repoliticization and political renewal; we cannot avoid, he argues, the difficult debates presented by the relationship of nations to Europe, of identities in the context of the nation, and so forth. A very useful overview of such debates, and how left and liberal actors need to recognize why their criticisms map onto right-‐populists but also crucially diverge from them, can be found in Jordi Vaquer’s article “Reclaiming Democratic Demands from the Populists,” where he argues that: To a considerable extent, denunciation of the capture of democratic structures and policies by private and corporate interests, and of the impotence of the state in front of large-‐scale international capitalism—both fundamental arguments of the Left and of democratic activists—has become a central part of the discourse of successful European populist
25
For a fuller exploration of these points, see for example Réne Cuperus, ”Tough on Populism and the Causes of Populism,” Social Europe Journal, April 29, 2011: http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/04/tough-on-populism-and-the-causes-of-populism/
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movements. Structural criticism of the system accompanies xenophobic and Eurosceptic arguments in their shared repertoire. This, added to their rejection of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, challenges the accuracy of “extreme right” as a label for these groups. There are striking examples: Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, styled herself in the last presidential election in France as “the anti-‐system” candidate, using a term which had been 26 claimed heretofore by extreme left and anarchist movements. Faced with this diagnosis of profound fracture, how, asked the journalist and president of YouGov Peter Kellner, does representative democracy survive? Kellner’s input captured and represented a countervailing tendency at the seminar, which, without diminishing the importance of the stresses and tensions under discussion, preferred to proceed from recognition of historical resilience, and historically relative stability. Greek democratic institutions, for example, which were previously captured through military coup from 1967-‐74, have formally survived the current crisis. A question worth considering, Kellner noted, is whether historians in 50 years time will be writing predominantly of the resilience of 27 institutions, or of a crisis of representation? While we therefore risk losing a sense of historical proportion, and Kellner emphasized, there is optimism to be found in this resilience, what is of significant consequence in the current context is the increased inability of public authorities and democratic power to regulate private power at any level. Here again, populism can be assigned a symptomatic status, as what is promises, often vaguely, is some form of public control over private power (though in a national-‐capitalist, rather than anti-‐capitalist, framework). Yet, as Wolfgang Streeck has argued in his influential essay “Markets and Peoples,” the current crisis may represent a thicket of final contradictions for post-‐war “democratic capitalism,” that is, the series of compromises and “borrowing from the future” strategies that have ameliorated and disguised the fundamental contradiction between the “interests of capital markets and those of voters”: It is now quite clear that the democratic states of the capitalist world have not one sovereign, but two: their people, below, and the international “markets” above. Globalization, financialization and European integration have weakened the former and strengthened the latter. The balance of power is now rapidly shifting towards the top. Formerly, leaders were required who understood and spoke the language of the people; today it is the language of money that they have to master. “People whisperers” are succeeded by “capital whisperers” who, it is hoped, know the secret tricks needed to ensure that investors receive their money back with compound interest. Since investor confidence is more important now than voter confidence, the ongoing takeover of power by the confidants of capital is seen by centre left 28 and right alike not as a problem, but as the solution. 26
http://www.opendemocracy.net/jordi-vaquer/reclaiming-democratic-demands-from-populists
27
Of course, as the slew of constitutional reforms in 2012-‐2013 in Hungary demonstrate, populist political gains can also be institutionalized, and by constitutional means. For the most recent discussion at the time of writing, see Benjamin Abtan, “Hungary Is No Longer a Democracy,” New Statesman, April 2, 2013:
http://www.newstatesman.com/austerity-and-its-discontents/2013/04/hungary-no-longer-democracy 28
New Left Review 73, January-‐February 2013. http://newleftreview.org/II/73/wolfgang-streeck-markets-and-peoples
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As Kellner concluded, one question that requires attention in any discussion of democratic renewal is the extent and nature of the barrier to entry for new political parties. High barriers prefer stability, yet exacerbate the problem of lack of differentiation, whereas low barriers make for governmental instability when parties wax and wane, and large coalitions need to be formed from unwieldy and sometimes incompatible alliances. The discussion brought in a further dimension of this accounting of democratic deficits, which was the perceived gap between the mobilizing power of some populist parties, in contrast to their established rivals. Guillaume Liegey, whose campaign work is discussed in the next section, noted that, very often, banal explanations are important. The work of volunteering for political parties can be boring, demanding, and exhausting. As against this, as Andrea Pirro of the University of Siena pointed out, populist parties score relative successes when it comes to grassroots mobilization, and central to regaining the initiative must also be a commitment to renewed popular engagement.
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3. New Policy Thinking: Where Can New Ideas Come from and Go To? Picking up on the question of the public role of think tanks, the leader of the third session, Ivan Krastev, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, noted that think tanks aim not only to advise on what can be done, but also on how; by communicating it to decision-‐ makers, and thinking about their modes and strategies of communication, in turn. The final session was therefore dedicated to showcasing and analyzing political communications, mobilization strategies, and the contribution of think tanks to these questions. Zephyr Teachout, associate professor of law at Fordham University, described the importance of real-‐ time engagement in network-‐based movements that coalesce around a clear common goal. One such example is Occupy the SEC, a grassroots movement formed in 2011 by a non-‐expert group of “concerned citizens” to work for the implementation of the Volcker rule, a piece of federal legislation that would support the separation of investment banks from commercial 29 banks and thus also support the re-‐regulation of the financial sector more broadly. Network-‐based movements reflect in interesting ways on the discussion of a surfeit of expert knowledge, and knowledge-‐brokers, as it involved a voluntary group committing themselves to regular meetings where they would read, parse, and analyze the legal documents, and identify those who may be able to work with them on highly technical dimensions of the legal argumentation. Teachout also brought the Progressive Change Campaign Committee into the discussion, a campaign that works to support the election of progressive Democrat candidates to the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. In both instances, these campaigns represent rapid responses where activists can intervene on specific policy questions by mobilizing public campaigns on specific issues, lobbying specific politicians, and working from the assumption that any member of the public can, and should, learn about issues, no matter how complicated, and that as a consequence, all members should be respected as potential thinkers as well as activists. Yet, a lesson of these mobilizations, and one that runs contrary to the current focus on horizontalism, is that “consensus” processes are “action killers on the left,” as they retard the nimbleness required in developing real-‐time interventions when taking on financial power, and can, paradoxically, diminish trust in a common mission. Guillaume Liegey, who managed François Hollande’s voter mobilization campaign during the 2012 French presidential election, focused on a different experience of compressed mobilization. During their campaign, five million doors were knocked on by 80,000 volunteers, three quarters of whom were members of the Parti socialiste. In an era where mobilization strategy discussions are dominated by the potentialities of new media networks, this emphasis of knocking on doors may easily be regarded as antiquated, but in Liegey’s analysis, this tactic was a practical answer to the forms of alienation and disconnect that permeated the discussions. The historical decline in voter turnout, he argued, had a disproportionate effect on the already disenfranchised and marginalized banlieusards. The emphasis of the campaign, as a consequence, was on mobilization over conversion, as not only is it hard to identify the “undecided” voters, and to calibrate the messages to “convert” them, the demands of large-‐scale mobilization are off-‐set by a surer knowledge of political 29
For more information on the campaign website, go to: http://www.occupythesec.org/projects/
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inclinations and sympathies. The door-‐knocking campaign, he argued, was also important in shaking the stereotypical notion that the French value “privacy” over and above the invitation to engage politically. Peter Kellner noted that political parties, like brands, gain and retain credibility over time through track records of achievement. Mobilizing voters, he argued, is not about sloganeering, but about confirming substantive reasons as to why one should be trusted, and providing evidence that the key issues have been thought through. The engagement of think tanks with parties tends towards this development phase, and recedes into the background during electoral campaigns, however the increasing importance of valence techniques suggests that the sustained development of coherent positions and ephemeral electoral strategy need to be regarded as a continuum. The idea of valence politics proposes an individualist, rational actor model whereby citizens vote and make choices based on party political attachment (if not set partisanship), leadership image, and assessment of the options in relation to economic performance. As Clarke and Saunders argue, “in the realm of valence 30 politics, it is not ‘what,’ but rather ‘who’ or ‘how’ that matters.” Ivan Krastev proposed a variation on the valence model by arguing that the problem of austerity politics, for governments, is that they resort to the justification of “there is no alternative (TINA).” The modern day TINA, he argued, is very different from the TINA associated with the ideological projects of Thatcherism and Reaganism, which amounted to a motivated dismantling and dismissal of alternatives. The contemporary iteration, he argued, presents politicians with the requirement to compete on grounds of impotence and weakness, a perverse form of valence. Under austerity imperatives, “government can be reduced to exhausting the protest energies of the other side.” Concomitantly, popular mobilization is frequently organized around opposing and preventing things from happening, but far less about the slow, collective development of positive goals and processes. As a coda, rather than rebuttal of this point, Jordi Vaquer criticized the prevalent stereotype of popular mobilization as trapped in a negational politics, of “being against something,” or as having failed if certain outcomes are not prevented. The big collective actions of each generation are enabling because the belief and feeling of collective action must be relearnt, or newly experienced. Further, the protests, occupations, and gatherings of the last two years unsettled the idea of a set division between negational and productive politics by using the flat rejection of the current, imposed settlement as the basis for political exploration, experimentation, and hopefully, gestation.
30
Harold D Clarke and David Sanders, “Valence Politics and Electoral Choice in Britain, 2010”: http://bes.utdallas.edu/2009/papers/electoralchoice2010.pdf
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Concluding Remarks And what of the role of think tanks in policy and wider public debates in the contemporary political terrain? The role of think tanks in political processes has, of course, been a subject of controversy for some time. In a generally positive account, Ben Rodgers argued that the production of ideas in an “increasingly centerless, networked society” required think tanks 31 that provided a “space between government, universities, the third sector, and journalism.” Yet what Rodgers sees as a less tribal politics can be equally critiqued as a post-‐democratic settlement—in a review of what he terms the “think tank revolution,” Gerry Hassan evaluated the rise of think tanks in British politics as follows: After the Thatcher revolution, the think tank industry became a means by which the political class outsourced policy and built a new anti-‐democratic way of consolidating the new consensus which emerged. The think tank industry is part of the new establishment which has arisen in the post-‐democratic order and it is even more self-‐interested and self-‐serving than the previous one, which while it had faults, was also influenced by “duty” and “public 32 service.” Ironically, what may serve to reconcile these opposing evaluations is the serious reflection prompted by the deepening and overspill of the political economic crisis. The close popular association with “technocratic” knowledge, “unaccountable” elites, “expert-‐driven” alienation and the absence of value-‐driven political projects led several participants to admit that think tanks are seen as “part of the problem.” For René Cuperus, the crisis of the Eurozone is an invitation to modesty for think-‐tanks, who are not only positioned amongst the elite targeted for rejection, but are implicated in the failing architecture of the Eurozone, and the political project that presented it as central to the inexorable enlightenment of the European project. Further, those systems of funding and patronage that structurally delimit independent thinking amongst the “thinking classes” need to be recognized and discussed. As Ivan Krastev noted, politicians frequently want think tanks to justify what they are already doing or intend to do, not to advise them on what they should do. Neither does evidence-‐based policy necessarily inform evidence-‐led politics. In this context, how much independent thought really occurs, and is it even necessary that ideas be perceived as “independent”? Thus one clear strand of reflection suggested that if studies of populism emphasize its anti-‐ elitist stance, and think tanks stand as a suggestive symbol of the “cognitive elite” subject to revolt, then think tanks need to do more than attend to their image in this context, and instead apply themselves to the hard slog of transformative projects (raising the question as to how transformative a project that depends on elite-‐led labor can ever actually be). However, a second, contrasting strand of thought rejects this “revivalist” character in favor of acting as pragmatic ballast. For Peter Učeň, the question is how can governments be kept accountable when they don’t decide on really crucial issues? Think tanks have a role to play in educating people about the scope of political work in constrained democracies, and in providing realistic information that 31
“Rethinking the Role of Think Tanks,” The Guardian, “Comment is Free,” July 5, 2010:http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jul/05/role-‐thinktanks-‐political-‐theory-‐left
32
“The Limits of the Think Tank Revolution,” Open Democracy, September 8, 2008: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/yes/the-‐limits-‐of-‐the-‐think-‐tank-‐revolution
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will, at least, prevent people from being “continually disappointed.” This idea was echoed in discussion, where several participants argued that think tanks can only remain relevant through the quality of their ideas and research, and that this can be furthered by offering implacable and rational rebuttals of the “false solutions” of populism. Lamprini Rori provided a concrete example of this purposive countering by arguing that think tanks can play a role in providing clear information that can inject rational substance to inflamed public debate and sentiment on immigration. Think tanks, then, can play a role in adjudicating solutions that work, as against the false promises of populism. Faith in the rational mission of think tanks was accompanied by an acknowledgment that think tanks need to “communicate better ideas better.” While this is a catchy notion, those who have both faith in rational persuasion and in the power of better communication would do well to consider what this means in an informational environment characterized by abundance and the competition for attention.