Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop
rightwing populists
Europe and centre left everywhere need tougher approach to
phenomenon that fuelled Trump and Brexit, says Clinton
Clinton, Blair, Renzi: why we lost, and how to fight back
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
Thu 22 Nov 2018 14.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 23 Nov 2018
02.29 GMT
Europe must get a handle on immigration to combat a growing
threat from rightwing populists, Hillary Clinton has said, calling on the
continent’s leaders to send out a stronger signal showing they are “not going
to be able to continue to provide refuge and support”.
In an interview with the Guardian, the former Democratic
presidential candidate praised the generosity shown by the German chancellor,
Angela Merkel, but suggested immigration was inflaming voters and contributed
to the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU.
“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because
that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of
interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists,
particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches
that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is
fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we
are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if
we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body
politic.”
Clinton’s remarks are likely to prove controversial across
Europe, which has struggled to form a unified position ever since more than 1
million migrants and refugees arrived in the EU in 2015.
While some countries who have borne the brunt, such as
Germany, Italy and Greece, have argued for the burden to be shared more evenly,
some, particularly in central and eastern Europe, have rejected demands to take
in refugees.
Migration numbers have fallen sharply since 2015, while a
series of initiatives have been tabled, from a 10,000-member European border
and coastguard agency to an overhaul of EU asylum procedures.
Clinton was one of three heavyweights of the centre-left
interviewed by the Guardian to better understand why their brand of politics
appears to be failing. All three have seen their countries upended by political
events that to some degree can be explained by the success of rightwing
populism.
The other two interviewees, Tony Blair and Matteo Renzi,
agreed that the migration issue had posed significant problems for centrist
politics.
“You’ve got to deal with the legitimate grievances and
answer them, which is why today in Europe you cannot possibly stand for
election unless you’ve got a strong position on immigration because people are
worried about it,” Blair said. “You’ve got to answer those problems. If you
don’t answer them then … you leave a large space into which the populists can
march.”
Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe
and the US not to neglect the concerns about race and identity issues that she
says were behind her losing key votes in 2016. She accused Trump of exploiting
the issue in the election contest – and in office.
“The use of
immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of
attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity has been very
much exploited by the current administration here,” she said.
“There are solutions to migration that do not require
clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn
the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support
your political parties and movements.”
Brexit, described by Clinton as the biggest act of national
economic self-harm in modern history, “was largely about immigration”, she
said.
Clinton, Blair and Renzi all said rightwing populism had not
just fed off issues of identity but was also driven by a disruptive way of conducting
politics that dramatises divisions and uses a rhetoric of crisis. The centre
left struggles to get its voice heard over the simplistic, emotional language
used against it, they said.
Blair said populism would continue to rise until mainstream
parties found a way to cut through the reductive soundbites that populists
deploy so effectively.
“I don’t think it’s reached its peak,” he said, when asked
about the electoral success of populists globally. “I think it will peak, in my
view, when the centre ground recovers its mojo and has a strong forward
agenda.”
“A significant part
of the problem here is people’s desire for a leader that is going to just push
through change without regard to political pressures, you know, that ‘getting
things done’ mentality.”
Clinton said rightwing populists in the west met “a
psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and where to
go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one
version of reality.
“The whole American system was designed so that you would
eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and
maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and
freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and
only given one version of reality.
“I don’t know why at this moment that is so attractive to
people, but it’s a serious threat to our freedom and our democratic
institutions, and it goes very deep and very far and we’ve got to do a better
job of shining a light on it and trying to combat it.”
She also reveals her contempt for Steve Bannon, whose
attempt to bolster rightwing populist parties in Europe is stalling everywhere
outside of Italy. “Rome is the right place for him since it is bread and
circuses and it’s as old as recorded history. Keep people diverted, keep them
riled up appeal to their prejudices, give them a sense they are part of
something bigger than themselves – while elected leaders and business leaders
steal them blind. It’s a classic story and Bannon is the latest avatar of it.”
Renzi bemoaned a generational shift that he said had
elevated hate and confrontation over admiration and respect. “There is a
climate of hate that has come from the Five Star Movement and the League,” he
said of his political opponents in Italy. “This is the problem of the new
generation – they are educated to hate and to envy.”
How populism became the concept that defines our age
Cas Mudde
The spread of this idea reflects a deep and lasting change
in the way we view ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’
@casmudde
Thu 22 Nov 2018 06.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Nov 2018
16.11 GMT
Illustration by Eva Bee of two groups of people, one larger
and in the shape of a pointing hand.
Ilustration: Eva Bee
“Populism” as a term was rarely used in the 20th century; it
was limited to US historians describing, in highly specific terms, the original
agrarian populists of the mid-19th century. Latin American social scientists
(often Marxists) focused it primarily on the Peronists in Argentina. I only
started to really engage with the term in the mid-1990s, while researching my
dissertation on what was then still predominantly called “rightwing extremism”.
The German political scientist Hans-Georg Betz had just
published what is still the best book on the topic, Radical Right-Wing Populism
in Western Europe, and I dived into Leiden University’s library to find
anything I could find on this odd term. The great British political theorist
Margaret Canovan had written an excellent overview, simply titled Populism, in
1981, but argued that, while there were seven different subtypes, populism
itself could not be defined.
So I delved deeper, trying to engage with the work of the
late Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian post-Marxist theorist, undoubtedly the most
influential scholar of populism for academics and politicians alike. For
instance, at a workshop in Brussels this summer, Rafael Correa, the former
president of Ecuador, and broadly considered a populist himself, approvingly
cited Laclau. Unfortunately, I was not as smart as Correa, and never really
understood Laclau’s complex 1977 book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory,
so I decided to move on without the term.
I had noticed the growing use of Rechtspopulismus (rightwing
populism) among German scholars, however. They were using the term to
distinguish parties such as Austria’s Freedom party and the German Republicans
from “extreme right” or “radical right” parties such as the French Front
National or the Flemish Bloc in Belgium. This seemed to me to reflect a broader
acceptance of these parties in mainstream society, rather than a difference in
their ideologies.
In 2002 I moved to the University of Antwerp, where my
graduate student Jan Jagers wrote a dissertation on populism that renewed my
interest in the concept. In conversations with him, I developed my own
definition, which aimed to synthesise the consensus underlying most existing
definitions. In The Populist Zeitgeist, I defined populism as an ideology that
considers society to be separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups,
“the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics
should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.
The article didn’t exactly take off. It was cited just nine
times in 2005, 16 times in 2016, and 28 times in 2007. Most scholars, like me,
continued to see populism as part of a broader “radical right” agenda and
devoted little attention to its specific contribution. The rise of Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia created a new subcategory, “neoliberal populism”.
Incidentally, Betz had already distinguished between “national populism” and
“neoliberal populism” in his 1994 book.
The great recession that followed the 2008 financial crash
freed populism from the (radical) right. The rise of Syriza in Greece, and to a
lesser extent Podemos in Spain, showed clear similarities with, but also
fundamental differences from, the populist radical right. They shared a
pro-people and anti-elite politics, but Podemos and Syriza were clearly part of
the radical left, both in terms of ideology and subculture. As a consequence,
the term “populism”, without any qualifiers, became integrated into both the
academic and the popular debate.
But the use of the term truly exploded only in the wake of
the Brexit vote and, particularly, Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016.
Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 saw the biggest spike in Google searches
for “populism” to date. Academic research on populism surged too, as is
demonstrated in publications such as the 2018 Oxford Handbook of Populism.
While the term still lacks meaning in much of the public
debate, the academic community is closer to a consensus than it has ever been.
Most scholars use populism as a set of ideas focused on an opposition between
the people (good) and the elite (bad), although they still disagree on whether
it is a fully fledged ideology or more a political discourse or style.
Paradoxically, now that we finally agree on what we mean by
populism per se, the “populist phenomenon” in practice is almost exclusively
populist radical right. The much expected, and hoped-for, leftwing populist
wave has not happened. And while intellectuals and pundits of the left keep
assuring us that the only future is an inclusionary leftwing populism, existing
leftwing populism has turned nasty in Latin America and and become much less
leftwing (Syriza) or less populist (Podemos) in Europe.
Consequently, we increasingly talk about a general populism
when we’re actually referring primarily, and often exclusively, to a specific
populism. I have called this the populist radical right, rather than radical
right populism, because it is a populist form of the radical right rather than
a radical right form of populism. Ideologically, authoritarianism and nativism
determine the populism, rather than the other way around.
As decades of research have shown, the prime ideological
feature of this group of parties and their supporters is nativism, a xenophobic
form of nationalism. It is not surprising then that the main consequence of the
“rise of populism” is a battery of policies that restrict the rights of “alien
others” – most notably immigrants, Muslims and refugees – not of “native”
elites.
It is important that “populism,” or even “rightwing
populism”, does not (again) become a term that softens, and thereby normalises,
the ideology and impact of the radical right – let alone the extreme right,
such as Golden Dawn, which is not even populist. Some people have argued that
this is best done by abolishing the term altogether, which is the lazy
baby-bathwater solution. It assumes that populism is irrelevant, rather than
not dominant.
There is no doubt that populism explains part of the puzzle
of the simultaneous rise of parties as diverse as the Five Star Movement in
Italy, Podemos and Sweden Democrats. It is noteworthy that in the early 20th
century, nationalism and socialism mobilised mainly as anti-democratic
extremism, whereas at the beginning of the 21st century populists are mainly
democratic but anti-liberal. At the very least, this shows that democracy
(popular sovereignty and majority rule) is now hegemonic, whereas liberal democracy
– which adds key features such as minority rights, rule of law and separation
of powers – is not.
Whereas nativism is a revolt of the natives, against
“aliens”, populism is a revolt within the natives. This revolt is caused much
more by the emancipation of the citizenry, as a consequence of what the US
political sociologist Ronald Inglehart called “cognitive mobilisation”, than by
a particular change in the behaviour or demographics of the elites.
Sure, political parties have become almost completely
detached from society, and few workers still sit in parliament, but there are
fewer workers overall and few were truly influential within their parties in
the past. Similarly, while corruption scandals are bigger and more frequent,
this is largely because the media are no longer controlled by parties and there
is more state to exploit.
Given that the causes of all these processes are structural,
rather than incidental, they will stay with us for a long time. Even if
anti-austerity and anti-immigrant anxieties decline in both support and
intensity, politics and societies have come to terms with new expectations of,
and relations between, “the people” and “the elites”. This is what populism is
about – and it won’t be solved by further marginalising ethnic “others”.
• Cas Mudde is a Guardian columnist and the author of
Populism: A Very Short Introduction
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