Alfons López Tena: Globalization and Authoritarian Populism

The self-perceived decline of countries that regard themselves as once having been mighty offers a fascinating deep insight into the darkest corners of the pshyche of ebbing nations, as the people who consider themselves a country’s core and bulk, its rightful owners, are overwhelmed by the fear of falling under Nirad Chaudhuri’s spell — Lack of power tends to corrupt and absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely, which fuels a sour nostalgia for the largely imagined good old days in which they alone ruled the world, the waves, at the bare minimum their neighbors, or at the very least themselves, a resentful sentiment revealed by the 53% of the English who voted to leave the European Union. 

England is one among many such nations whose self-proclaimed rightful bulk imagine as wobbling, from an intense longing for national pride. It is a global drift, but extreme cases such as Catalonia’s are often the best to analyze a general trend, because the underlying forces that empower a surging wave come to the surface sooner in the peripheral countries, unimpeded by the stronger institutions and traditions of liberty and sanity that delay their full destructive wrath as they become an engulfing tsunami sweeping the central countries as well, as soon as the bulk of both the ruling and the lower middle classes are haunted at the heart by “a terrible sense of disappointment. The pride of [the] modern [country] has been far greater than its accomplishments,” as Fouad Ajami wrote about Egypt. No matter the nation, there is always a strain of resentment at having lost a sometimes real but largely imagined mightier past, and a peevish nostalgia for a future which never came: Kojève’s “history of desired desires” in a game where there are winners and losers, either masters or slaves. 

One of the steepest European cases of downfall in power is Catalonia. A once mighty nation ruling a Mediterranean Empire that lost independence five centuries ago, it was incorporated into Spain three times and into France twice, lost its independence war in the 17th century, was partitioned by Spain and France, became a dependency of those more powerful neighbors, and since has striven simply to avoid assimilation and disappearance.

It is also a country which is afflicted by the burdens that Vesna Pešić points out on Serbia: “In underdeveloped countries such as ours, things are much worse, because here one can lie to infinity with impunity. This is because citizens are poorer, less educated, more prone to authoritarianism, more powerless, and more suspicious of democracy; while our institutions are battered and fragile, the media weak, and the economy frail.” Catalonia is also my nation, and I have been witness to its aspirations and excesses, to its politics and machinations, to its charms and delusions. As a high official, activist, politician, and writer, I have fought its drift toward authoritarian populism, now all-pervading, since its early appearances, to no avail. 

In England, Catalonia, Serbia, Hungary, Pakistan, the United States, Thailand, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Israel, Brazil, India, to name a few, globalization has disrupted the time-honored way of managing things which ensured that the right people — the “good people,” themselves — would always rule by relying on patronage games and an extended network of clients fed on public money and resources. International competition, based on values of meritocracy, steadily and relentlessly erodes the very fundamental assumption that only the right people may thrive because they are protected by their caring right rulers. Meritocracy emboldens all people to fend and thrive on their own, therefore more and more non-right people prevail over the right people, who become globalization’s leftovers.

The latter, traditionally in power, come to realize both their fading significance and the gradual disappearance of all that they hold dear, and fight back to restore their dominance, whatever it takes — even by crushing the rights and liberties of those “people of anywhere” whose wholesale destruction is needed for the rooted “people of somewhere” to think they are not being persecuted: Plato’s thymos gone berserk. 

That is all just a little bit of history repeating endlessly, more than an eerie echo from the millennia-old hatred of country-side folks against the corrupted, god-less city; of deeply-rooted peasants and herders against fleeting merchants. A demonization of cities, whence both moral diseases and physical illnesses sprout to hover over the pure, unsullied heartland, which must revolt to obliterate those broods of rot, from Babylon to Sarajevo. 

A backlash ensues and the majoritarian nationalism strikes back, as Mukul Kesavan defines it: “the claim that a nation’s political destiny should be determined by its religious or ethnic majority… Members of the majority faith and culture are viewed as the nation’s true citizens. The rest are courtesy citizens, guests of the majority, expected to behave well and deferentially. To be tolerated at the majority’s discretion is no substitute for full citizenship in modern democracies. It is a state of limbo, a chronically unstable condition. A polity that denies full citizenship to its minorities will, sooner or later, politically disenfranchise them or expel them on the grounds that, despite being residents, they aren’t citizens at all and actually belong elsewhere.” Those non-right citizens, who have been emboldened by global meritocracy, cease to behave well and deferentially just because they thrive by themselves unaided by the time-honored patronage networks; they cease to submit and need to be reminded of their place. “Majoritarian politics results from the patiently constructed self-image of an aggrieved, besieged majority that believes itself to be long-suffering and refuses to suffer in silence anymore … the nation was being subverted by predatory minorities,” whose threat to the status quo is regarded by the pampered majority as a threat to themselves, who enjoy a higher trophic level in the human food chain.