The underlying mistake here is to believe that the EU is everything that is good – sugar and spice – therefore the correct response to anything puppy dog tales like populism must be more EU. The concept that perhaps there’s actually something wrong with the EU is BadThink and therefore cannot even be thought. The idea that greater decarbonisation will see off the National Front is particularly cute.
Populism: Roots, consequences, and counter strategy
Karl Aiginger 20 April 2019
Populism represents a challenge to liberal democracy, pluralism, human rights, and the exchange of ideas. This column examines the features and drivers of populism, as well as the potential strategic response by the EU and its member states. This includes a vision for Europe to become the role model for high-income societies providing well-being, lower unemployment, and less inequality, and a leader in decarbonisation and public sector management.
Populism is not easy to define, but its effects are visible when it challenges liberal democracy, pluralism, human rights, and the exchange of ideas. In the upcoming European elections, populist parties may acquire influence in shaping Europe. They call for a halt to enlargement to prevent migration, the end of the euro, and the exit from international humanitarian or climate compacts.
The first feature of populism is the oversimplified and pessimistic interpretation of the problems of a society, used as an instrument for gaining political influence. The second is the polarisation between the large group of ordinary, virtuous citizens and the corrupt, self-serving economic or cultural minority dominating the society. The third is to declare pluralism, globalisation, and multilateralism to be negative, since these endanger the homogeneity of people and nations are deprived of their right to solve their problems as their own people see fit. The fear of migration of unqualified people from distant countries importing non-Christian religions is a turbo for today’s populism, while the emancipative feature of former left-wing populists is absent.
Populism is found empirically to have four interrelated root causes (Fukuyama 2018, Guriev 2018, Mudde and Kaltwasser 2018). Its economic roots are stagnating incomes, unemployment and – personal as well as regional – inequalities. Its cultural root is the increasing dominance of liberal values (such as gender equality and new lifestyles); populists make conservative values acceptable again. The third cause is fear and uncertainty. These are a consequence of any quick change, whether it be economic, cultural, or technological. Policy failures are a fourth cause; if the losers of structural and technological changes or globalisation are neither compensated nor assisted, they lose faith in institutions.
Populist parties are attractive for two groups: low-income segments (but not necessarily those with the lowest incomes) and the middle class (typically with apprenticeship training). Populist voting decreases with rising income and higher education. As partial collateral of this, the voting share for populist candidates is high among blue-collar and low-skilled workers in manufacturing, as well as among older people and men and in rural areas. Interestingly, regional voting shares decrease with a higher share of migrants and when people have personal experience with migrants.
Populist parties first enter coalitions, usually with a conservative mainstream party. In government, these coalitions shift the agenda. If, finally, the chosen policy instruments aggravate economic problems, external enemies are invented that supposedly prevent expected success (from George Soros to immigrants and centralists in Brussels). Voting procedures are changed, ‘strongmen’ eliminate constitutional checks and balances and increase their influence on the judiciary system and media, and European rules are neglected. Since an exit from the EU does not get a majority, radical and unrealistic reforms of the EU are demanded, with a threat to exit if the EU does not change its governance accordingly. Renationalisation of policy is demanded, even for issues that evidently cannot be solved by individual countries – such as crime, speculation, tax fraud, or climate change.
A stronger role for populist parties in government weakens the role of Europe in shaping trade and investment compacts, as well as globalisation (Rodrik 2017). China uses this weakness to expand the Silk Road and to buy infrastructure in Africa as well as in Southern Europe. In Europe, the split between the East and the West widens. Right and left populists are keen to cooperate with Russia, endangering peace efforts in the Western Balkans.
Mainstream parties often go for ‘populism light’ – a populist agenda that is only a little less radical and xenophobic. But then economic problems worsen due trade restrictions, and uncertainty and pessimism rise.
The alternative starts with correcting the wrong framing (Aiginger 2019). Economic problems in the EU exist, but in general well-being is higher and poverty lower than 30 years ago. Life expectancy is increasing, in contrast to the US. The EU has brought peace to a conflict-ridden continent.
Second, the EU and its member countries need a new strategy for governance, migration, and ageing. The members should agree what can be done better in a joint effort. Special emphasis has to be given to the problems of ageing. The population in Africa will quadruple in this century, while the share of people aged between 20 and 30 will decrease by a third or will even halve in Southern and Eastern Europe (Rodriguez-Pose 2018). Migration needs a policy mix – on the one hand, attracting qualified migrants plus training and integrating humanitarian refugees; on the other, devising a strategy for investment, education, and governance in Africa. This is very different to the instruments proposed by populists.
The third step is a vision for 2050. Europe should become the role model for a high-income society providing well-being, lower unemployment, and less inequality, leading in decarbonisation and public sector management. Innovations have to be driven by societal goals and not focus merely on labour productivity. This implies shifting taxes from labour to energy. Unemployment cannot be financed by lifelong social payments but has to be prevented ex ante by empowering young people to take on change in technologies.
Last but not least, the EU has to reconnect with citizens, who should support the European project not only intellectually, but with empathy. This requires a narrative of why European integration is welfare-enhancing: “A Europe that empowers and increases life choices“.
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Economic problems in the EU exist, but in general well-being is lower and poverty higher than 30 years ago, compared to a counterfactual of 10 European territories that avoided both post-War communism and EU membership
Fixed it.
Interesting article. What I would say is that populism is not a particular brand of politics but a way of presenting a particular brand of politics and occurs when the mainstream parties or political leadership becomes too far out of line with the majority's way of thinking. It generally will cease when this ceases to be so. For example, it could be argued that Lenin (at least initially) was a populist.
Populism, even with its roughest of edges, is the only antidote to the EU's Enlightened Despotism. Populism must be welcomed, bearing in mind that enlightenment is a delicate flower which withers quickly whereas despotism is a virulent and hardy weed. If populism is seen as pestilential it remains the only pesticide capable of challenging the egomaniacal plague of totalitarianism that infects the EU, both in terms of its structure as well as its staff, adherents and supporters.
The aspiration to create a high-income pan European society emitting low levels of carbon with reduced inequality may seem laudable and is certainly on the surface seductive. However, the EU can never be the driving force behind this process, simply because it neither has the capacity nor in reality the will to deliver, for the mechanisms of the Union require crisis or at least the threat of crisis to thrive.
The efforts of the people, in commerce, science and industry are the drivers of the wealth that is needed to raise incomes. They emerge not through central planning but by the efforts of individuals collaborating in a free market of ideas and opportunities under a protective umbrella of just and justly applied law. The EU's predilection for the creation of legislative acts offers not protection, but a crushingly heavy burden that stifles innovation and restricts development. The extraordinary low levels of growth in the Eurozone as compared to both non-Eurozone member states and the wider world should be a warning that none should ignore, but the ideological attachment, amongst the ideological EU federalist, verges on the suicidal. No change, "ever closer union" must proceed however nihilistically.
The EU's interest in carbon is not as benign or even as important as they argue. The idea that carbon emissions need to be reduced plays well in the halls of bureaucracy for it gives both raison d'etre for the wielding of enormous power and the justification to raise ever higher taxes. However, the narrative that CO2 is somehow threatening our existence is looking weaker by the day, as evidenced by the litany of failed predictions, the fact that the world is not warming and the increasing number of scientists at odds with IPCC orthodoxy. For the unelected wielder of power inculcating fear of catastrophe is so seductive that it matters little whether the fear is a phantom or a tangible actuality. The frightened are more easily herded so the herd must be frightened.
Just as a life giving trace gas is demonised by those who would subsume ever greater control of our lives, so too is inequality. Yet it is equality that has no inherent value. In all areas of life equality supresses improvement. For the waiter to have a job the diner must have an unequal surplus, the pop singer's income must be greater than the listener. The brain surgeon's remuneration must exceed the supermarket cashier. No legal supplicant wants to be treated equally if the court is known to rule harshly and without justice, no patient seeks poor treatment however ubiquitous, no one wishes themselves to struggle on the global average wage. No EU Commissioner would enjoy remuneration at a national average. No one really would prefer limited but equal opportunity over a variety of opportunity, even if not enjoyed by all. None genuinely believe that the conscientious and honest deserve an outcome equal to the criminally fraudulent.
Equality is undesirable, those who clamour for it stir up bitterness, it is the siren call of tyrants and the enemy of improvement, the most equal societies in history have also been those with the highest levels of human suffering, for "the envy of the devil brought death to the world".
Today's populists are in all their crude variety the campaigners against totalitarianism and despotism, they are the supporters of real human rights. Critics of today's populists are those who disdain democracy, who wish to subsume power, who willing use fear to manipulate, they are the reactionaries of our time, they would crush individual rights, they are the EU.
It's one of those irregular nouns:
I have a democratic mandate.
You are a populist.
He is a rabble rouser.