The fact that these movements have emerged in so many different countries in one era effectively rules out some popular explanations.
The fact that these movements have emerged in so many different countries in one era effectively rules out some popular explanations.
I t seems as if it should be a simple question. Starting in Central Europe with the second rise of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law and Justice parties, a kind of national populism has spread across Western politics and beyond. By the middle of the last decade, it found outlets in Brexit and the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. It was asserting itself in France, then came to power in Austria and Italy. Now, arguably, Japan is led by a national populist; perhaps soon, Germany. Reform UK is capitalizing on this phenomenon as well.
Very often, these movements are made up of traditional culturally conservative voters combined with downwardly mobile or “left behind” voters from Labour and socialist parties. Another common feature is that they are often led or heavily influenced, at the intellectual level, by deeply religious people, whereas the bulk of their voting support is only culturally Christian or even secularized. Previously, conservative and right-wing parties tended to be led by skeptics and secularists while the bulk of voters were at least practicing some religion.
Nearly all of these movements have
- Opposed mass immigration.
- Questioned major features of the post–Cold War economic structure: free trade, the euro, etc.
- If European, opposed further political consolidation in Brussels.
The fact that these movements have emerged in so many different countries in one era and have had similarly disruptive effects effectively rules out some explanations. One such explanation is that they are entirely cults of personality. In Hungary, the U.K., and America in particular, critics have attributed the pull of national populism to the political talent and pedigree of Viktor Orbán, Boris Johnson, or Nigel Farage, or to the celebrity and personality of Donald Trump. The implication is that populist nationalism is something these politicians simply happened upon, absent any real interest in the associated political issues.
This cult explanation is plainly insufficient. While populist movements tend to feature an intense bond between leaders and followers, unusually charismatic or competent figures determine only when national populist movements come to power, not whether there is a persistent and widespread demand for their policies. Nor does the cult rationale explain the growth of populist parties that currently lack figures of extraordinary charisma or competence. Jarosław Kaczyński, the behind-the-scenes leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party, has never been seen as charismatic or personally popular, yet his party continues to win elections with candidates who are not exceptionally charismatic either.
In Europe, the key is often not a leader who is politically worshipped, but one who “de-diabolizes” — removes the devil’s stigma from the party. Leaders such as Sebastian Kurz in Austria, or National Rally’s Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, fit this pattern. The cult explanation also fails because some national populist parties merely inject their politics into the mainstream. When mainstream parties are willing to stop mass immigration and protect core national interests from global institutions, voters have proved willing to settle for this arrangement. That is arguably how it came to be in Austria and Denmark and, to a lesser degree, in Germany.
The answer to our question must therefore touch the nature of globalism itself. Dani Rodrik’s globalization trilemma offers the most obvious framework: economic integration (globalism), nation-states (sovereignty), and democracy (mass politics). You can choose only two. Rodrik’s claim is that global economic integration, national sovereignty, and democracy are mutually incompatible in full; any political order must sacrifice one of the three.
As the European Union has discovered, integrating markets requires regulatory harmonization, which in turn requires removing many questions from the direct influence of democratic publics whose voting behavior might introduce “border effects” on the flow of goods, capital, and people. Sino-American economic integration also meant tolerating radically different political economies and regulatory regimes. In this arrangement, financiers have a supreme advantage in exploiting regulatory differences. The money moves at the click of a mouse. Workers cannot — and for understandable reasons do not — move their families across the Pacific at similar speed.
The fairness of competing under broadly similar rules is how Adam Smith morally justified market economies, broadly guaranteeing that capital would flow to where it was most productive. But under this form of globalism, capital often sought easier advantage and profit in simple regulatory arbitrage.
The movement of peoples also helps explain — sometimes more than celebrity or charisma — the success and sequencing of national populist breakthroughs. If mass immigration drives populist backlash, it may seem counterintuitive that Hungary and Poland were first. But these Central European countries experienced significant out-migration upon EU membership, their youth going to Germany or the U.K. and Ireland for opportunity. The threat of mass immigration of foreigners on top of this was broadly intolerable.
Moreover, mass immigration initially slows the emergence of national populism because it creates, internally, a class of people who benefit from it economically or who regard it as a moral achievement for their nation. When employers rely on guest workers (immigrants in a new country living a lower quality of life, compared with natives’ quality of life), it makes restaurant dining, babysitting, and housekeeping cheaper for younger double-income families. The latter group becomes a politically influential, affluent high-proletariat that resists immigration restriction.
Rodrik’s trilemma also clarifies why national populism has been more likely to disrupt and half-conquer traditional conservative parties rather than Labour and socialist parties. In the Cold War context, national sovereignty and identity seemed to align with the capitalist world led by the United States. Globalization shifted the terrain, pushing established elites into the camp that prefers liberalism, free trade, and economic integration, and placing those who perceive themselves as losers of that arrangement on the side of the sovereign nation-state and democracy.
Each conservative likely feels instinctively pulled to one side or the other of this contest, and traditional conservative parties have found this bewildering because each side immediately perceives the dangers of the other’s principles being carried too far. Feelings of personal betrayal are evident in memoirs such as Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy, in which Cold War allies now appear to her as morons and potential oppressors. One sees a similar intensity of rhetoric at American outlets such as The Bulwark, composed of anti-populist ex-neoconservatives.
Instinctive liberals, even those from conservative parties, view populism through the lens of the 1930s, seeing in it the danger of demagogues and nationalist passions that sweep away rights and persecute minorities. Instinctive democrats look instead through something more like an 1840s lens, understanding democracy and sovereignty as allies against a transnational political class now dressed in the Patagonia vests of finance rather than imperial robes.