Calls for national autonomy have grown.
Minorities are blamed but the real culprit is neoliberalism
In 2002 when Lula da Silva won his landslide
victory in Brazil's presidential elections, he warned supporters: "So far,
it has been easy. The hard part begins now." He wasn't wrong. He was
elected on a platform of fighting poverty and redistributing wealth. But on the way to Lula's inauguration the
invisible hand of the market tore up his electoral promises and boxed the
country around the ears for its reckless democratic choice. In the three months
between his winning and being sworn in, the currency plummeted by 30%, $6bn in
hot money left the country, and some agencies gave Brazil the highest debt-risk
ratings in the world.
The limited ability
of national governments to pursue any agenda that has not first been
endorsed by international capital and its proxies is no longer simply the cross
they have to bear; it is the cross to which we have all been nailed. The nation
state is the primary democratic entity that remains. But given the scale of
neoliberal globalisation it is clearly no longer up to that task. "By many measures, corporations are more
central players in global affairs than nations," writes Benjamin Barber in
Jihad vs McWorld.
"We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as
postnational, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very
idea of nations or any parochialism that limits them in time or space." This has continued, for more than a
generation.
The recent success of the far right in the
European parliamentary elections revealed just how morbid those symptoms have
become. Over the past 30 years, fascism – and its 57 varieties of fellow
travellers in denial – has shifted as a political current from marginal to
mainstream to central in Europe's political culture. The problem with describing these parties as
racist is not that the description is inaccurate but that, by itself, it is
inadequate. For their appeal lies in a far broader set of anxieties about the
degree to which our politics and economics are shaped by forces accountable to
none and controlled by a few: a drift towards cosmopolitanism in which
citizens, once relatively secure in their national identity and financial
wellbeing, are excluded from the polity.
The responses to these anxieties have been
racially problematic. But the anxieties themselves are well-founded. From the
Seattle protests over a decade ago, to
the Occupy movement more recently, the left has been grappling with
the same crisis. The recent elections produced less impressive but nonetheless
significant successes for the hard left. In six countries, socialist-oriented
groups critical of neoliberal globalisation got double figures, including
Syriza, which topped the poll in Greece. They are also Eurosceptic. However,
their base is driven not by a dislike of foreigners but by a desire for more
democracy in the EU and more national autonomy.
"It seems clear that … nationalism is not
only not a spent force," argued
the late Stuart Hall in an essay, Our Mongrel Selves. "It isn't
necessarily either a reactionary or a progressive force, politically." It
suits the far right to shroud its racial animus within these blurred
distinctions in order to appear more moderate. "Our people demand one type
of politics: they want politics by the French, for the French, with the
French," said Front National leader Marine
Le Pen in her victory speech. "They don't want to be led any
more from outside.”
Neither the right nor the left has a solution
for this crisis. But while the left holds out hope of building a more inclusive
society in the future, the right has built its populist credentials on
retreating to an exclusionary past.
In the absence of any serious strategy to
protect democracy the right resorts, instead, to a defence of
"culture" – reinvented as "tradition", elevated to
"heritage" and imagined as immutable. Having evoked the myth of
purity it then targets the human pollutants – low-skilled
immigrants, Gypsies,
Muslims,
take your pick.
"Minorities are the flashpoint for a series of
uncertainties that mediate between everyday life and its fast-shifting global
backdrop," writes Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. "This
uncertainty, exacerbated by an inability of states to secure economic
sovereignty in the era of globalisation, can translate into a lack of tolerance
of any sort of collective stranger." The targets of this intolerance shift
according to the context: Roma in Hungary, Romanians in Britain, Latinos in the
US and Muslims almost everywhere in the west. But the rhetoric and the true
nature of the crisis remain constant. Parochial identities describe the
protagonists, but it is global economics that shapes the narrative. [Abridged]
Twitter:@garyyounge
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/02/control-nation-states-corporations-autonomy-neoliberalism
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