Barrie Axford - Populism Versus the New Globalization

Barrie Axford, 2021

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947607

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ISBN 978-1-5264-8720-9

eISBN 978-1-5297-3741-7

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Populism and globalization share a baleful reputation; though to be fair, not universally, and not for the same reasons. Intellectually too they have had chequered careers. In the academy they are often pilloried for being imprecise concepts; no more than convenient, and sometimes misleading, shorthand for more complex, or quite other, phenomena (Freeden, 2017; Steger and James, 2019). Outside the academy the ascription populist has been applied with something like abandon to a host of political incursions that share few characteristics beyond outrage at the way things are, and this may be an important datum. Populists rarely self-identify, and their coyness in this regard is also intriguing.

The concept of globalization, sometimes used to signify a game change in the social-scientific prospectus, suffers from the tendency to conflate empirical-analytical and normative positions. There is also evidence of conceptual slovenliness, as practitioners and scholars slip too easily between the notions of globalization as process, globalism as ideology and globality as systemic. As we shall see in , while the brunt of commentary tends to see globalization as systematic interconnectivity, it is the more fey concepts of globality and global consciousness that offer purchase on the imbrication of situated lives with institutional structures and rules that transcend the local. Of course, in popular discourses and in the imagination of activists, where little of this academic drollery has purchase, globalization remains a vibrant source of dismay or ambition. Populism postmodern populism is an expression of these sentiments.

When applied to real-world agonisms, opinions are rarely ambivalent and work with a rough-and-ready calculation wherein populism is the antithesis of globalization. This is as much a normative stance as a datum, and the normative charge is always palpable, not least in the much-repeated aphorism that populism is a backlash against globalization. Much in line with George Orwells coining in Animal Farm (1945), each term is deemed good or bad by definition, with praise or blame attributed on the basis of their allegedly regressive or progressive features strained through competing world-views and pressing contingencies. At such a pass, and in the real world, the normative calculation might dictate either plumping for the lesser of two evils, or crying a plague on both houses. Bearing in mind that some observers believe that obsessing with populism is a distraction for scholars and activists alike, and that globalization is over, there is still no escaping the fact that these concepts are code for the temper of our times, and thus too important, and certainly too newsworthy to ignore. Their articulation, and what that tells us about the cast of the world today, is the focus of this short book.

All this sounds portentous but rather abstract. In fact, we are talking about narratives that have considerable analytical, normative, ideological and empirical heft, as well as significant real-life consequences. Populism is cast variously as globalizations reflex political discontent today, and possibly its nemesis, or as a backlash against the silent revolution in values that characterized the closing decades of the twentieth century (Inglehart, 1977). Sometimes it is painted as liberal democracys Mr Jekyll, a mostly hidden, but immanent, schizoid tendency. In less picaresque accounts, it is a frisson on the journey from neoliberal hegemony to the more eclectic and plural forms of a new globalization that, in part, has re-valorized the national and all forms of local and, in a forlorn politics, chosen parochialism as a defence against the world, or a new gateway to it (Canovan, 1982, 1999; Inglehart, 2019). For all the attention populism has reaped in the academy and beyond, at this point it is as well to be cautious about its status as a destroyer or maker of worlds.