2023-08-19 14:28:01
The only alternative to globalization is the nation,” asserts Marine Le Pen. “We have rejected globalism and embraced patriotism,” Donald Trump declaimed during his presidency. “The era of liberal democracy is over,” Viktor Orbán knew years ago. “Globalization and the neoliberal economic model have been rejected in Latin America. They just weren’t a solution for our people,” said Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia.
Measured in terms of economic figures, globalization is stagnating at a historically high level, but its reputation has suffered badly in many places. Violent criticism of globalization and the liberalism that ideally supports it is being voiced above all by tendencies labeled as populist. Disparate forces are gathering under the expanding umbrella of populism, but they are united by an “us versus them” stance.
Populists claim to represent a majority of the people (“we”) and thus to stay in the political center. In contrast, the formerly dominant oligopoly of the traditional parties of the left and right center now only represents the interests of an elite that is at least distant from the people, maybe even corrupt (“they”), behind which interests of other countries are often hidden – be they global elites who United States in general, Wall Street in particular, or the European Union including the European Central Bank.
Latin America and France
Occasionally, populists conjure up a (supposedly) glorious past for their own nation. As in the case of Trump, this is linked to the claim that the people must regain control of their own country together with the populists. For many supporters, it is not least about a question of their own identity.
Populism is by no means a new phenomenon. And it does not only have economic causes, among which globalization is by no means alone. Economic change as a result of technological revolutions can also promote populism. In order to consider the interactions between globalization and populism, it seems useful to look at two cases from different parts of the world: Latin America as an example of populism in emerging countries and France as an example of populism in a rich industrial nation.
The idea formulated by the British economist David Ricardo that all countries would benefit from free trade was contradicted by important voices in Latin America soon after the Second World War. The ideological foundation in Latin America was the “dependency theory”. She posited that poor countries were politically dependent on rich countries and opposed the “modernization theory”, according to which wealth and democracy would spread everywhere in the course of global liberalization.
The economic-theoretical basis was created by the “Prebisch-Singer thesis”, named after two economists, according to which the fruits of international economic activity accrue through favorable trading conditions in the rich industrialized nations – at the expense of the poor countries, which primarily supply cheap raw materials. The “Prebisch-Singer thesis” rejected Ricardo’s free trade theorem. The economic-political answer consisted of the “structuralist economic policy”, which wanted to build up national industries through tariffs, nationalization and the substitution of imports with the help of the state.
#Populism #declared #war #globalization