Writing about the rampantly nationalist illiberalism that has increasingly characterised the politics of central and eastern Europe since 1989, Michael Hauser (15 Nov. 2019) and Tom Junes (20 Nov 2019) make important points about how we might understand the causes of the rise of nationalism in eastern and central Europe. But both miss the central role in that rise of the neoliberal ‘settlement’ in Europe and further afield; and in so doing, both imply, however unintentionally, a sort of ‘European exceptionalism’ in terms of its old nationalisms. But the post-1989 history of Europe – whether eastern, central, western, southern or northern – is of a piece with that of the USA, Latin America, India and China. Getting clearer about this not only helps explain the “regressive populism” sweeping across Europe, but also allows us better to understand both neoliberalism and its causal relation to this nationalistic populism.
Let me start with what on the face of it might seem rather surprising: the genuine horror with which neoliberal thinktanks, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK, have greeted this development. After all, isn’t this “regressive populism” founded on a rejection of the soft liberalism of social democracy, precisely the same sort of liberalism that the neoliberals reject as statist? But there is in fact nothing at all inconsistent here: neoliberalism is not per se nationalistic, for all the arrant racism of some of its leading gurus, notably Hayek (see for example his interview with Earlene Graver et al in 1983). It prides itself, for instance, on selling to and buying from anyone, anywhere, recognising no national boundaries and insisting on the free movement of both capital and labour. In that respect neoliberalism really is committed to a political universalism; and this is precisely why many neoliberal cadres decry the anti-universalistic ‘cultural turn’ in politics, whereby political content is replaced by parochial cultural identities -- and the ‘free market’ takes second place to the protectionist nation-state.
Neoliberalism has… a blind spot about its own role in the rise of the very identity politics, or the non-political politics, as Hauser and Junes describe it, that it deplores.
But the trouble is that neoliberalism has – it has to have – a blind spot about its own role in the rise of the very identity politics, or the non-political politics, as Hauser and Junes describe it, that it deplores. The point is that the “regressive populism” of eastern and central Europe is of a piece with that of western Europe, the USA, Latin America, India and others. For in its insistence not only on the sovereignty of the so-called free market but also on its application across the whole of life (see eg Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, Verso 2013) neoliberal policies sentence millions of people to poverty – whether absolute or relative – and to the despair that such poverty brings, a despair that is at once material and existential.
