Globalisation and
politics
Drawbridges
up
The new divide in
rich countries is not between left and right but between open and
closed
Jul 30th 2016 |
CLEVELAND, LINZ, PARIS, ROME, TOKYO AND WARSAW | From the print
edition
IS POLAND’S
government right-wing or left-wing? Its leaders revere the Catholic
church, vow to protect Poles from terrorism by not accepting any
Muslim refugees and fulminate against “gender ideology” (by which
they mean the notion that men can become women or marry other men).
Yet the ruling Law
and Justice party also rails against banks and foreign-owned
businesses, and wants to cut the retirement age despite a rapidly
ageing population. It offers budget-busting handouts to parents who
have more than one child. These will partly be paid for with a tax on
big supermarkets, which it insists will somehow not raise the price
of groceries.
“The old
left-right divide in this country has gone,” laments Rafal
Trzaskowski, a liberal politician. Law and Justice plucks popular
policies from all over the political spectrum and stirs them into a
nationalist stew. Unlike any previous post-communist regime, it eyes
most outsiders with suspicion (though it enthusiastically supports
the right of Poles to work in Britain).
From Warsaw to
Washington, the political divide that matters is less and less
between left and right, and more and more between open and closed.
Debates between tax-cutting conservatives and free-spending social
democrats have not gone away. But issues that cross traditional party
lines have grown more potent. Welcome immigrants or keep them out?
Open up to foreign trade or protect domestic industries? Embrace
cultural change, or resist it?
In 2005 Stephan
Shakespeare, the British head of YouGov, a pollster, observed:
We are either
“drawbridge up” or “drawbridge down”. Are you someone who
feels your life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies,
spongers, asylum-seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad
things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s
a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we
could all open our arms and embrace each other?
He was proven
spectacularly right in June, when Britain held a referendum on
whether to leave the European Union. The leaders of the main
political parties wanted to stay in, as did the elite of banking,
business and academia. Yet the Brexiteers won, revealing just how
many voters were drawbridge-uppers. They wanted to “take back
control” of borders and institutions from Brussels, and to stem the
flow of immigrants and refugees. Right-wing Brexiteers who saw the EU
as a socialist superstate joined forces with left-wingers who saw it
as a tool of global capitalism.
A similar fault line
has opened elsewhere. In Poland and Hungary the drawbridge-uppers are
firmly in charge; in France Marine Le Pen, who thinks that the
opposite of “globalist” is “patriot”, will probably make it
to the run-off in next year’s presidential election. In cuddly,
caring Sweden the nationalist Sweden Democrats topped polls earlier
this year, spurring mainstream parties to get tougher on
asylum-seekers. Even in Germany some fear immigration may break the
generous safety net. “You can only build a welfare state in your
own country,” says Sahra Wagenknecht, a leader of the Left, a
left-wing party.
In Italy, after the
Brexit vote, the leader of the populist Northern League party
tweeted: “Now it’s our turn.” Japan has no big anti-immigrant
party, perhaps because there are so few immigrants. But recent years
have seen the rise of a nationalist lobby called Nippon Kaigi, which
seeks to rewrite Japan’s pacifist constitution and make education
more patriotic. Half the Japanese cabinet are members.
There’s no we in
US
In America the
traditional party of free trade and a strong global role for the
armed forces has just nominated as its standard-bearer a man who
talks of scrapping trade deals and dishonouring alliances.
“Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” says Donald
Trump. On trade, he is close to his supposed polar opposite, Bernie
Sanders, the cranky leftist who narrowly lost the Democratic
nomination to Hillary Clinton. And Mrs Clinton, though the most
drawbridge-down major-party candidate left standing, has moved
towards the Trump/Sanders position on trade by disavowing deals she
once supported.
Timbro, a Swedish
free-market think-tank, has compiled an index of what it calls
“authoritarian populism”, which tracks the strength of
drawbridge-up parties in Europe. On average a fifth of voters in
European countries back a populist party of the right or left, it
finds. Such parties are represented in the governments of nine
countries. The populist vote has nearly doubled since 2000 (see chart
1). In southern Europe austerity and the euro crisis have revived
left-wing populism, exemplified by Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain. In Northern Europe the refugee crisis of 2015 has boosted the
populists of the right.
Drawbridge-up
populists vary from place to place, but most share a few key traits.
Besides their suspicion of trade and immigration, nearly all rail
against their country’s elite, whom they invariably describe as
self-serving. British people “have had enough of experts”, said
Michael Gove, a leader of the Brexit campaign. Mr Trump last week
said that the elite back Mrs Clinton because “they know she will
keep our rigged system in place….She is their puppet, and they pull
the strings.”
Distrust of elites
sometimes veers into conspiracy theory. Poland’s defence minister
suggests that Lech Kaczynski, a Polish president who died in a plane
crash in 2010, was assassinated. Mr Trump talks of “the plain facts
that have been edited out of your nightly news and morning
newspaper”. Panos Kammenos, a member of Greece’s ruling
coalition, wonders if Greeks are being sprayed with mind-altering
chemicals from aeroplanes.
Nearly all
drawbridge-up parties argue that their country is in crisis, and
explain it with a simple, frightening story involving outsiders. In
Poland, for example, Law and Justice accuses decadent Western
liberals of seeking to undermine traditional Polish values. (A recent
magazine cover spoke of “Poland against the Gay Empire”.) It also
plays up the threat of Islamist terrorists, who have killed no one in
Poland since the days of the Ottoman Empire—but will start again,
unless the government is vigilant.
Poland’s previous
government, led by a party called Civic Platform, agreed last year to
take a few Middle Eastern refugees—7,000 in total—to show
solidarity with fellow members of the EU. Law and Justice accused
them of recklessly endangering the lives of Poles. Voters kicked them
out of office.
The recent string of
terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany has boosted support
for drawbridge-raising throughout Europe. On Bastille Day a jihadist
in a truck killed 84 people in Nice; on July 26th two men linked to
Islamic State slit the throat of an 85-year-old Catholic priest
celebrating mass near Rouen. These assaults on symbols of French
culture—the anniversary of the revolution and the dominant, if
declining, religion—prompted President François Hollande to
declare war on Islamic State. He vowed that: “No one can divide
us.” Ms Le Pen retorted on Twitter: “Alas, @fhollande is wrong.
Islamic fundamentalists don’t want to ‘divide’ us, they want to
kill us.”
Europe’s
drawbridge-uppers would have enjoyed the Republican convention in
Cleveland last week, where team Trump wrote a new script for the
party of Lincoln. Speaking by video link, Kent Terry and Kelly
Terry-Willis described the murder of their brother Brian, a
border-patrol agent, in a shootout in Arizona. Later, three parents
told the audience how their children had been murdered by illegal
immigrants. There is no evidence that illegal immigrants commit more
crimes than other people. But Mr Trump said that to Barack Obama,
each victim was “one more child to sacrifice on the altar of open
borders”.
The great disruption
Mr Trump’s
charisma aside, the success of drawbridge-up parties in so many
countries is driven by several underlying forces. The two main ones
are economic dislocation and demographic change.
Economics first.
Some 65-70% of households in rich countries saw their real incomes
from wages and capital decline or stagnate between 2005 and 2014,
compared with less than 2% in 1993-2005, says the McKinsey Global
Institute, a think-tank. If the effects of lower taxes and government
transfers are included, the picture is less grim: only 20-25% of
households saw their disposable income fall or stay flat. In America
nearly all households saw their disposable income rise, even if their
headline wages stagnated. Such figures also fail to take full account
of improvements in technology that make life easier and more
entertaining.
Nonetheless, it is
clear that many mid- and less-skilled workers in rich countries feel
hard-pressed. Among voters who backed Brexit, the share who think
life is worse now than 30 years ago was 16 percentage points greater
that the share who think it is better; Remainers disagreed by a
margin of 46 points. A whopping 69% of Americans think their country
is on the wrong track, according to RealClearPolitics; only 23% think
it is on the right one.
Many blame
globalisation for their economic plight. Some are right. Although
trade has made most countries and people better off, its rewards have
been unevenly spread. For many blue-collar workers in rich countries,
the benefits of cheaper, better goods have been outweighed by job
losses in uncompetitive industries. For some formerly thriving
industrial towns, the impact has been devastating (see page article).
Economic insecurity
makes other fears loom larger. Where good jobs are plentiful, few
people blame immigrants or trade for their absence. Hence the divide
between college-educated folk, who feel confident about their ability
to cope with change, and the less-schooled, who do not.
Consider Austria,
where a presidential election on October 2nd will pit Norbert Hofer
of the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic and protectionist Freedom Party
against a global-minded Green candidate, Alexander van der Bellen. In
Linz, an industrial city on the Danube, the central Kaplanhof
district is full of startups and technology firms that have moved
into former factories and warehouses. Here, globalisation means
customers and opportunities; pro-openness messages go down a treat.
In a nearby café, Mr van der Bellen told cheering regulars: “Don’t
forget that in Austria, every second job is directly or indirectly
linked to trade with the rest of the world.”
A couple of miles
south is a different Linz: the Franckviertel. Vast chimneys from
chemical plants loom over rusting railway sidings. Streets are lined
with cheap clothes shops and empty video-rental outlets. Here,
globalisation has meant decline. Like Kaplanhof, it has an
above-average proportion of foreigners (32% of the population), but
these tend to be the poorer, less well qualified sort: Afghans and
north Africans attracted by low rents. This has bred resentment:
“It’s the Moroccans. They rape, they sell drugs. Have you seen
the train station?” complains Peter, a “Linzer born-and-bred”
waiting for the trolley bus into town. In these parts Mr Hofer is
likely to win.
This divide is new
in Austria. For decades it was dominated by a centre-left and a
centre-right party. But both have struggled to reconcile the
cosmopolitan and nativist parts of their electoral coalitions. In the
first round of this year’s presidential election, they won just
22.4% of the vote between them and had to drop out.
The second force
pulling drawbridges up is demographic change. Rich countries today
are the least fertile societies ever to have existed. In 33 of the 35
OECD nations, too few babies are born to maintain a stable
population. As the native-born age, and their numbers shrink,
immigrants from poorer places move in to pick strawberries, write
software and empty bedpans. Large-scale immigration has brought
cultural change that some natives welcome—ethnic food, vibrant city
centres—but which others find unsettling. They are especially
likely to object if the character of their community changes very
rapidly.
This does not make
them racist. As Jonathan Haidt points out in the American Interest, a
quarterly review, patriots “think their country and its culture are
unique and worth preserving”. Some think their country is superior
to all others, but most love it for the same reason that people love
their spouse: “because she or he is yours”. He argues that
immigration tends not to provoke social discord if it is modest in
scale, or if immigrants assimilate quickly.
When immigrants
seem eager to embrace the language, values and customs of their new
land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is
good, valuable and attractive to foreigners. But whenever a country
has historically high levels of immigration from countries with very
different moralities, and without a strong and successful
assimilationist programme, it is virtually certain that there will be
an authoritarian counter-reaction.
Several European
countries have struggled to assimilate newcomers, and this is
reflected in popular attitudes. Asked whether having an increasing
number of people of different races in their country made it a better
place to live, only 10% of Greeks and 18% of Italians agreed (see
chart 2). Even in the most cosmopolitan European countries, Sweden
and Britain, only 36% and 33% agreed. In America, by contrast, a
hefty 58% thought diversity improved their country. Only 7% thought
it made it worse.
Most immigrants to
America find jobs, and nearly all speak English by the second
generation. For all Mr Trump’s doomsaying, the recent history of
race relations is one of success. But that cannot be taken for
granted. In one respect, America is entering uncharted waters. Last
year white Christians became a minority for the first time in three
centuries. By 2050 whites will no longer be a majority. The group
that has found these changes hardest—whites without a college
education—forms the core of Mr Trump’s support.
White Americans,
like dominant groups everywhere, dislike constantly being told that
they are privileged. For laid-off steelworkers, it doesn’t feel
that way. They do not like being accused of racism if they object to
affirmative action or of “microaggressions” if they say “America
is a land of opportunity”. Another Pew poll found that 67% of
American whites agreed that “too many people are easily offended
these days over language”. Among Trump supporters it was 83%.
How to fight back
What can
drawbridge-downers do? The most important thing is to devise policies
that spread the benefits of globalisation more widely. In the
meantime, and depending on how their national political system works,
they are trying various tactics. In Sweden, France and the
Netherlands, the mainstream parties have formed tactical alliances to
keep the nationalists out of power. So far, they have succeeded, but
at the cost of enraging nationalists, who see the establishment as a
conspiracy to keep the little guy down.
Instead of, or in
addition to this, mainstream politicians sometimes borrow the
nationalists’ clothes. In Britain the Conservatives have taken a
far tougher line on immigration than many of their cosmopolitan
leaders would have preferred. Theresa May, the new prime minister,
was the architect of this policy. In America Mrs Clinton’s
flip-flop on free trade is a tactical concession to her party’s
protectionist wing: among the free-trade deals she now decries is one
that she helped negotiate.
Virtually no
politicians have forthrightly argued that free trade and
well-regulated immigration make most people better off. Emmanuel
Macron, France’s economy minister, says it is time to try.
Drawbridge-downers in France’s main parties have more in common
with each other than with the National Front, he says, so he has
launched a new movement.
An obvious objection
is that if parties align themselves into explicitly globalist and
nationalist camps, this might lend the nationalists legitimacy and
accelerate their ascent. Piffle, says Mr Macron. “Look at the
reality,” he says: in France the National Front was already the top
party in voting at the most recent (regional) elections. It’s not a
risk; it has already happened.
Although the
drawbridge-uppers have all the momentum, time is not on their side.
Young voters, who tend to be better educated than their elders, have
more open attitudes. A poll in Britain found that 73% of voters aged
18-24 wanted to remain in the EU; only 40% of those over 65 did.
Millennials nearly everywhere are more open than their parents on
everything from trade and immigration to personal and moral
behaviour. Bobby Duffy of Ipsos MORI, a pollster, predicts that their
attitudes will live on as they grow older.
As young people
flock to cities to find jobs, they are growing up used to
heterogeneity. If the Brexit vote were held in ten years’ time the
Remainers would easily win. And a candidate like Mr Trump would
struggle in, say, 2024.
But in the meantime,
the drawbridge-raisers can do great harm. The consensus that trade
makes the world richer; the tolerance that lets millions move in
search of opportunities; the ideal that people of different hues and
faiths can get along—all are under threat. A world of national
fortresses will be poorer and gloomier.
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