« Populism » and « Counter-populism » in the Atlantic Mirror

Etienne Balibar

« Populism » and « Counter-populism » in the Atlantic Mirror[1]

As I was teaching in the U.S. this fall semester, during and after the Presidential Election, all my friends, students and colleagues would ask me the same question: who comes next? Do you think that Le Pen will win the French election in May? Using various scenarios between a kind of domino theory, whereby each “liberal government” that crashes destabilizes the next one, or a principle of contagion, spread by the ruin of distributive social policies that are universally targeted by neoliberalism, they would see Brexit as a prefiguration of the new “surprise” result, and Clinton’s defeat together with Renzi’s fall and Hollande’s defection as aspects of the same disaggregation of the “center left”. The final defeat of the neo-fascist right in the Austrian presidential would appear as a simple respite, Poland’s civic demonstrations against the Kaczynski regime a fragile element of resistance. The strategic question (this was before the recent massacre in Berlin) would be: will Merkel “stand her ground” before the offensive of the xenophobic alliance denouncing her opening of the borders for the Syrian refugees from last year (“Wir schaffen das”)?

Returning to Europe, I can see that the same questions are disputed 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.

I agree that Europe (meaning in practice the European Union, of which, don’t forget this, the U.K. is still a member, albeit with diminished prerogatives, as an anticipation of Brexit, if it is to finally arrive) and the United States are offering each other a revelatory mirror. The differences are obvious, and they are well-known. But, yes, the two situations interact, and they shed light onto one another, which may help us grasp the deep crisis of the political institutionnow running on both sides of the Atlantic, to identify its sensible points, avoiding empty generalities as well as myopic localism. This makes sense, in particular, because on the European side the strategic level is decidedly the continental one: the increasing paralysis of parliamentary systems, the ungovernability affecting one nation after the other (Britain, Spain, Italy, France…), which make them easy prey for demagogic nationalistic discourses, must be seen in good part a direct consequence or a collateral damage of the collapse of the European project as a credible political and cultural perspective. 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 the 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 tensions.

I submit that, for us Europeans, the American election bears lessons that we need to adapt, “translating” them in the language of our own history and current vicissitudes. Let me suggest three of them:

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 that neoliberalism has either intensified or generated within our societies: class divisions (which include sharp economic and educational inequalities), ethnic and racial divisions (which are also, increasingly, combined with religious discriminations), moral divisions (particularly in the realm of family values and sexual norms). Add to this the high level of structural violence: economic, legal, domestic, territorial, that Clinton never mentioned (except, to some extent, in the form of sexism), and Trump managed to appropriate under the terminology of “anger”.

2) The lesson of a comparison between 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: we must stop forever to use the category “populism” in a manner that bridges the gap 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 U.S. (where a typical “populist” in this moment would be Elizabeth Warren, a very rational and established senator…). That there exists a crisis of the “system”, both in terms of its legitimacy and in terms of its representative capacity, this is no longer just an opinion or a political doctrine, but an objective fact. However, the conclusions that are deduced from this factpull in radically opposite directions: either a xenophobic nationalism (more or less organically 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 of amalgamation in the political game (what in Europe is sometimes called a “red-brown” alliance: there seems to be an attempt at building one in certain regions of Austria today, and there are temptations in this sense in Germany or in France), there is in fact no middle.

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 U.S. to its European counterpart, and it is true within European “pseudo-federalism”, among the historic nations themselves. This difference, however, should not obfuscate that in both regions of the world (the two regions where the “bourgeois” democratic model was invented in the 19^th century, and later had 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 offer 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 (therefore corruption and subjection of “representative government” to technocratic instances) and permanent “state of emergency” or security-state is involved in the process of de-democratization. We understand conversely that the idea of “democratizing democracy” should involve a limitation or curbing of the power of money, the technocratic monopoly of judgment, the privileges of cultural or material heritage. This is a genuine regime change that seeks to make room within the political institutions for a direct participationof the citizens in public affairs: an exigency now widely perceptible in all our constituencies. It is simply synonymous with active citizenship,butat the risk (which must be consciously run and controlled) of bringing back the “civil conflict” between parties or antagonistic world-views, thus subverting ossified political systems which are obsessed with “normality” and “consensus”, while in fact targeting their dissidents with extreme intolerance.

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 perilous, because the “global” stakes reflected locally contaminate each other in a negative manner: as it were they produce conditions of impossibility for a rational examination of their causes and effects. This is true for the way in which global warming has now passed the threshold of irreversibility in changing the environment, threatening much of the human population (among other species) with a destruction of their lifeworld, potentially forcing them to leave 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”. 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. Everywhere these phenomena intersect and overdetermine each other, extreme violence is looming. And it rages actually wherever the flames are fanned by dreams of lost empires, 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 threats under the name “terror”.

With respect of such global challenges, more or less completely perceived by the mass, and their local expressions, what we can observe dailyis the fact that so-called “sovereign” entities (nation-states, however big, supranational federations and alliances, international organizations) are by themselves largely ineffective. It is this “powerlessness of the omnipotent” (an expression I used in the past to explain the roots of neofascistic 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) which 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 demanded for a renovation of democracy in the “assembly” movements like Indignados, the Arab Springs (which also had other dimensions), Occupy Wall Street, Syntagma Square, Gezi Park, Nuit Debout…, which 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 changes. Something more is clearly needed. Otherwise, the pendulum will shift in the other direction in the heaviest possible 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 Turkey (not even mentioning the broad 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 entering the long night of subjection and anti-politics?

There is no way however thatnational-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 it regards the protection of populations and their ways of life, or in terms of regulating the global movements of capitals, goods, and persons, or in matter of articulating participation with representationwithin a new form of citizenship adapted to the age of multiculturalism and the wide web. The fundamental question which is the question of the place (and the “places”, or “squares”) for living, working, learning, meeting, thinking, struggling in common, a place that must be created within a globalized world for all citizens, becomes reduced to imaginary and discriminatory scenarios. Inexorably, this will produce more resentment and insecurity feelings, and an increased tendency to divert them towards scapegoats and “internal enemies”, under the Trump presidency, or any of his potential European imitators. 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 transnationalcounter-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 European resistances against austerity policies, in full awareness that it offered neither a program nor a solution to the institutional and social crisis that was opened by the E.U. itself, when it decided to destroy one of its own member States in the name of the financial rules devised by the banks and for the banks, but 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 mass 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 had defined the political in the past.

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[1] A reduced version of this paper is published by Il Manifesto, Rome (30 December 2016) and Libération, Paris (2 January 2017).