NATIONAL-POPULIST DEMOCRACY AND ITS IMPACT ON STRATEGY

The current wave of right-wing populism in the West is a far cry from historical and progressive populisms in the developing world.  It is narrow minded, reactionary, persecutory, and oblivious to consequences.  This essay explores the geopolitical consequences of the trend.

 

In a celebrated lecture on politics as a vocation, Max Weber referred to an emerging possibility in modern politics, which he called Plebiscitary Leader Democracy (plebiszitären Führerdemokratie). As a German nationalist but an objective and a lucid analyst as well, Weber did not dismiss that formula because he thought that charismatic leadership might provide a balance to the soulless and impersonal machinery of modern government, and thus bridge the distance between the public and state institutions.

Political judgment in the complex modern world is a challenge even to the most skillful statesman or stateswoman.  Political judgment, Weber contended, is learned through the actual exercise of political power. It has to be honed by practical political education, that is, through long experience of formulating intentions and assessing their possible outcomes. Adherence to a coherent and stable set of ends and instrumental reasoning towards these ends requires a form of objectivity, a coolness that has to be learned. This is genuine strategic vision. Weber called it “the politics of responsibility.”

Weber insisted that in the absence of such a political education, if ordinary people are entrusted to make political decisions, or to judge political outcomes, they are liable to respond emotionally. For Weber the aggregation of their fitful whims and desires can be a dangerously destabilizing political force. A responsible leader aided by a dose of charisma knows how to steer these emotions while keeping a cool head on decisions and know their likely consequences.

I would add to these Weberian strictures that even calculated positions on an issue deemed urgent or important by the populace, when isolated from other issues, produce poor governance. For instance, a referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to vote on a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new law, but it is seldom part of a comprehensive strategic vision.

But what happens when the leaders themselves are charismatic but ignorant, irrational and unprepared, when in leading they follow simplistic and stubborn beliefs, regardless of consequences?  In this case, the destabilization is compounded.

As the world careens towards reactionary populism, and voters sometimes succeed in electing authoritarian demagogues to the highest offices in their lands, it behooves us to assess the impact of these new regimes on geopolitics.

On the paths through which populists accede to power it is worth noticing that instead of forming new parties populists have succeeded in either infiltrating or taking over traditional conservative parties (in the UK and the US) as argued by Jan Werner Mueller.  This raises an important question. What induces groups to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender?  In his book Ruling Oneself Out, Ivan Ermakoff focuses on two paradigmatic cases of such surrender –the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (1933) and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Petain in Vichy France (1940).  Ermakoff recasts abdications as the outcome of a process of collective alignment that in my estimate has been happening in the US and the UK for quite some time, and in several other important countries as well. Here I shall consider only the geopolitical consequences after the abdication happens.

After pondering the various policies that often result from the new national populist dispensation, it is hard to discern a coherent strategy. At best such policies lead to a new volatile order. Foreign policy “old hands” like Zbigniew Brzezinski foretold it.  Why such a sobering conclusion?

With all its pros and cons, globalization has made the world more interdependent than it ever was. The unprecedented compression of space and time, in markets, interpersonal communications, technological development and diffusion, and mass migrations, and the rapid impact of all these on climate and the environment, today form a true multidimensional “world-wide web,” and much more than the Internet.  As a consequence, a true strategic vision requires knowing and connecting these dimensions, and proposes a path that favors the best advantages globalization affords humanity and mitigates its various dysfunctions.

But populism and its twin, nationalism, do not connect the dots.  Through their leaders they are prone instead to exploit a series of disjointed single issues.  A single-issue focus distracts the public with multiple discrete solicitations and prevents the individual from developing an ecological view that deals with complexity.  Unconnected initiatives –often no more specific than slogans and impulsive proclamations—are checked off either serially or simultaneously, without formulating the linkages among them or anticipating second-order effects, and (to use the old language of sociology) their likely latent functions (Merton).

In the international arena, national populism is a way to make nations individually stronger but in appearance only, with pageantry and bombast rather than substance, and in the case of superpowers, also over-stretched.  As a result, the risks of war increase, or more precisely, multiply. Here are a few examples.

As nations wish to guard their interests in trade and security, they can either pursue the path of organizing alliances and trade pacts (most likely regional than global today).  Conversely, they may chose to “get tough”, that is, turn their backs on each other.  The latter is a lose-lose situation.  In Pareto’s terminology, the geopolitical situation calls for the cunning of foxes, not the roaring of lions.  Under national-populism nations will get the exact opposite –the wrong posture at the wrong time.

Closing borders in thoughtless ways may be popular as a reassertion of “sovereignty” but the likely consequences of such an action are the disruption of supply chains, higher prices for national consumers, and higher labor costs, which given the dynamics of capitalism, will lead to the faster replacement of workers by robots. To cite renowned investor Seth Klarman “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”

Although China is still much less powerful than the United States, its economic size and ambition, combined with population size, make it the only potential other superpower.  Its further rise is inevitable (barring total war).  Until now many people in the West were concerned that in its rise China would retain an authoritarian and illiberal political system, instead of following the example of the West.  But as the West moves in a pronounced authoritarian direction itself, and its much heralded “soft power” dissipates, China’s counterbalancing prestige as a pragmatic top-down “can-do” power will increase.

In the Pacific, China’s regional heft will increase as a result of the precipitous American withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017. Republican Senator John McCain described the president’s decision as a “serious mistake that will have lasting consequences for America’s economy and our strategic position in the Asia-Pacific region. It will create an opening for China to rewrite the economic rules of the road at the expense of American workers. And it will send a troubling signal of American disengagement in the Asia-Pacific region at a time we can least afford it.”  China-led institutions have proved appealing to a growing number of countries. Most US allies have joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite American opposition.

Strategically, China’s relaxed attitude to Trumpian bombast follows an old geopolitical rule from General Sun Tzu to the present, and best expressed by Napoleon Bonaparte: Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

In the Western Hemisphere, the proposed repeal of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) between Mexico, the US, and Canada is a perfect illustration of unintended consequences of unilateral, ill-conceived “national” policies.

If we take just the agricultural sector, the new closed-borders policy of the United States will hit back at the American heartland, ironically one of the popular bastions of Trump’s support. As US and Mexican food supplies are enmeshed, punitive tariffs will play havoc with supply chains.  In the beef market, a subject I once studied for my analysis of Argentine development[1], calves raised on pastures in Mexican states are sent across the border when they turn one year old. Texas feedlots fatten them, and then US packing plants slaughter them.  Cuts of beef are then shipped back to Mexican cities.  These chains and many other chains would be disrupted by protectionist policies.

If these protectionist policies come to pass, Mexicans will first suffer and then adapt.  The American policies will force them to work on diversifying markets once and for all.  American farmers will have even more trouble adapting to a situation that would hurt them too.  An old Mexican proverb states “Pobre Mexico; tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos (“Poor Mexico: so far from God and so close to the United States”).  American nationalism will make Mexico less close to the US.  As a result, it may come if not closer to God, certainly closer to new markets in the European Union, Asia, and Russia.

One of the more lamentable dysfunctions of the new American protectionism is the damage it does to hitherto well-organized and high-performance small economies. As Mohamed A. El-Erian has written “Membership in effective international institutions brought these countries into consequential global policy discussions, while their own capabilities allowed them to exploit opportunities in cross-border production and consumption chains. But, at a time of surging nationalism, these small and open economies, however well managed, are likely to suffer”.

The closing of borders will also lead to degrading the collaboration on cross-border information and intelligence, and the inevitable increase in “dark networks” of organized crime and terrorism.

Refusing to act on climate mitigation and in some cases an ideological denial of climate change can only exacerbate the stress on the planet leading to mass human migrations. On the demographic trends and the problem of carbon emissions no exposition is clearer than that of the late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling[2].

A similar latent dysfunction will result from religious zealotry and refusal to promote birth control in developing countries, which is where the explosion of populations produces migrations and violent discontent.

Another extreme example –but in the current political climate not farfetched– is the religious, moralistic, or outright paranoid refusal of vaccination, which will lead to plagues and pestilence. In short, the road to hell is paved with the politics of ultimate ends, which are the most “popular” politics in our unfortunate world.

Even more troubling than the examples listed above is the “hardening” of an ill-conceived Realpolitik among national-populist leaders, which is a barely disguised cult of force and messianic zeal.  A convergence in style and ideas between newly elected populists and long-established dictators does not augur well for the rule of law, for effective diplomacy, and for human rights.  Alliances between dictators do not last long and sooner or later succumb to the resort of force against each other.  The relationship between Hitler and Stalin –arguably the two worst scoundrels of modern history– is an eloquent case in point.  There are good and bad alliances.  National populism tends to select the bad ones, precisely because it is beholden to absolutist ends.

On the other hand, a potentially positive unintended consequence of an “entente cordiale” between Presidents Putin and Trump could very well be the reintegration—by ricochet– of a hitherto tottering European Union, provided both Germany and France survive the onslaught of national populism in their respective 2017 political cycles.  If they do, Eurozone leaders may very well rethink their strategy.  One option would be to build a more flexible union with a “variable geometry”, favored by some in the current German establishment.  The alternative would be a closer Europe, favored by some politicians in France, Italy, and Germany. Whichever path is chosen, European institutions still have the power to make it happen, especially the economic resources on which investors are betting again.  The new development strategy would favor greater equality, more inclusion, the repair of safety nets, and the correlative abandonment of the failed model of growth based on credit, rising asset prices and stagnant productivity.  That model has reached its limits.  All is left of it is widespread inequality, high unemployment, a disenfranchised young population without either jobs or assets, and rising populism.

As the triumph of national populism in England and the US make these two nations the site of even further inequality due to restrictive trade and migration policies, the revival of a reformed Europe making use of its still robust social safety net may well change the geopolitical balance in its favor.  If it comes to pass, it would be the most felicitous unintended consequence of the triumph of the extreme right in the Anglo-Saxon world.  If on the contrary, Europe follows the nationalist trend, with anti-euro candidates gaining power in France and the Netherlands, then the entire West will be fragmented, weaker, and on a path to serial, overlapping, and possibly violent conflicts.

 

[1] Juan Corradi, The Fitful Republic, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment/video/2013/may/17/population-climate-change-hans-rosling-video?CMP=share_btn_link

 

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