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Post-Democracy Finds a Fan
Niall Ferguson is a brilliant historian with plenty of brilliant things to say, something that makes his recent article in the Financial Times all the more startling. He’s concerned by the rise of populist parties across the EU. That’s not a problem. But his solution is to have the parties of Europe’s establishment unite against the upstarts (in fact they long have done so, but let that pass):
Populism is back; it is not about to go away. The wrong response is for mainstream parties to pander to the populists. The right response is for the centrists to join forces, hard though it is to bury their ancestral rivalries. I have long been identified with conservatism, though on many issues I am in fact a liberal. The advent of a new era of grand coalitions is good news for me. From now on, I no longer need to deny my allegiance to the extreme centre.
Approvingly, he notes this:
Bi-partisanship is something Americans believe in but do not practise. In Europe the opposite applies: coalitions across the left-right divide are unloved but increasingly ubiquitous. No fewer than 25 of the EU’s 28 member states are ruled by coalition governments .
The trend is even more evident in Brussels. Witness the recent distribution of the EU’s top jobs: the president-elect of the European Commission hails from the conservative EPP, while the president of the European Parliament is from the socialist PES. The proposed new commission includes representatives from all four of the mainstream European parties. The populists are out.
Another way to describe this is that the establishment politicians of left and right have witnessed the rising popular discontent over the mess that they have made of Europe and decided to ignore it. Better, they think, to stick with the policies that have already brought such misery and ruin to those they preside over. The few that did bother to mount an intellectual defense of what they were doing did so in terms — e.g., “This time we’ll do it right” — all too reminiscent of the one used by old leftists during the decades of Soviet economic failure: the only problem with communism was that it had never really been tried.
And quite where Ferguson gets the idea that grand coalitions are something new escapes me. Formally, yes, they have been relatively rare, but the underlying reality of much of European politics for years now has been the predominance of an ideological grand coalition—sometimes tilted towards the social market, sometimes towards social democracy— united in its enthusiasm for an ‘ever closer’ EU.
But back to Ferguson:
Grand coalitions used to be viewed as temporary expedients. When Germany’s Christian Democrats and Social Democrats joined forces for the first time in 1966, commentators feared it would lead to political instability. In fact, grand coalitions have turned out to bring stability. Would Germany, for instance, be better off with the alternative coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and the ex-communist Linke – which last year proposed to raise the top income tax bracket to 100 per cent?
No, but Germany might be better off with a coalition of CDU, CSU, and the new ‘populist’ anti-euro (but not euroskeptic) AfD.
Ferguson again:
In 2012, in the depths of the eurozone crisis, Greek voters were twice called to the ballot to decide between two mainstream parties and a multitude of populists ranging from neo-Nazis to Communists. When no party emerged with an outright majority, the two mainstream parties put aside four decades of animosity and formed a coalition under Antonis Samaras. This decision surely averted what would have been a disastrous exit from Europe’s monetary union.
“Disastrous”? Actually, no: the coalition itself was a good thing, and an exit from the euro would not have been easy (to put it mildly), but it might have been preferable to the slow death that now seems to be Greece’s destiny, a destiny that has been good only for the neo-Nazi goons of Golden Dawn and the Chavez Lites of SYRIZA (currently topping the polls, incidentally, and likely to dominate the next government). Wrecking a nation will do that.
The current populist wave is the product of the very ‘extreme center’ that Ferguson so admires, that same extreme center that pushed European integration much farther than the peoples of Europe wanted it to go; that same extreme center that subjected a large swathe of the continent to a dangerous, irresponsible, and hugely destructive monetary experiment; that same extreme center that welcomed mass immigration, fostered multiculturalism, and made questioning either a taboo.
Voters who wanted alternative policies were treated with disdain. The lazy and arrogant assumption was made that they had nowhere else to go, an assumption shattered by the troubles that the bone-headed and delusional policies of the extreme center have brought in their wake. Desperate voters will consider alternatives unthinkable in calmer times, and if populist parties are the only ones seeming to address their far-from-unreasonable concerns, who can be altogether surprised that votes start going their way?
I don’t pretend to have an easy answer to the question of how Europe should best deal with this populist wave. The answer is complicated and would vary from country to country. But there is one thing that it would not involve: more of the failed, miserable, post-democratic same that the “extreme center” has made its own.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user koya979.
Published in General
Yes, the governing elite had better come up with something that solves problems for actual people in the real world.
The gentry had better sort something out before the entire west goes all french revolution-y on them. It doesn’t work out for anybody, but peasant revolts are typically pretty nasty.
The republicans had better come to populist jesus before they get thrown out with the bathwater too.
Better solution: European nations could embrace rugged, robust federalism, with health/welfare/education devolved to the state/provincial level, giving populist parties the ability to shape policy at the local level and keeping them away from national government where they might cause harm to the nation’s foreign policy.
Never gonna happen, especially in the EU paradigm where those policies are dominated by the super-national government in Brussels, but it’s fun to dream.
Just like the U.S. design. Oh wait; never mind.
The US design doesn’t devolve health/welfare/education to the state level. It devolves the “residual powers” to the state level, which means that something is only a state responsibility up until the moment that the federal government can come up with some way of reinterpreting the constitution in order to make it a federal responsibility, which it almost always can (via the taxing power, for example).
My suggestion for European nations (which are much smaller than the USA) is to explicitly devolve health/welfare/education to their state/provincial levels, but to keep residual powers at the national level. That way, the national government (theoretically) cannot infringe on state/provincial jurisdiction.
In a way, they already do – if you consider each country to be a local “state” and the EU to be the federal government.
In some ways, the EU as currently structured resembles the founder’s dream for the US better than the US itself.
I absolutely disagree, as the EU is able to impose regulations on its member states in ways that would disgust the founding fathers.
I do not believe that the founding fathers would have ever dreamed of standardizing the AmeriSausage, for example:
(Yes, I know this clip is a work of fiction. Don’t care, still counts.)
I am a huge admirer of Prof. Ferguson. I have all of his lectures as are available on my iPod and am currently reading one of his books Empire. So I find it strange that he would be fretting about the rise of “Euroskeptics” in Europe, the so-called populist movements. I assume he is talking about Geert Wilders’ group in Holland or UKIP? If he isn’t talking about them, then I must assume that many of those who read his piece ARE thinking about them. The point is that Prof. Ferguson has sung the praises of the Tea Party here in the US which is an American version of UKIP, at least in the sense that they believe political solutions to problems ought to be handled on the local level. It’s quite disheartening to hear that he seems to be equating these parties to the complete wacko, fringe parties in Greece. It must be stated that there is no shame in standing up for Western Civilization. Parties like UKIP or Party of Freedom are examples of this and they do it through standing up for their particular culture.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a fair assumption. He may simply be referring to those parties on the continent which are genuinely fascist/communist/neo-nazi flavoured.
Hmmmm. Can’t “devolve” something you don’t have. Unless of course you first usurp it. Oh wait; never mind.
It seems to me that the “centrism” of the European grand coalition is illusory. There is a coalition, indeed, but the compromises over more mundane things like tax rates or welfare levels are peripheral to what the coalition is “centered” on, which is the profoundly leftist idea that it is possible to invent and plan a new world, better than the old one in every way, by overthrowing the organic cultures of the masses of people, and replacing them with the ideology of the elites. There are analogous divisions among the populists as well, but they too take a back seat to what appears to be motivating all of them: the desire to preserve something of their culture, and not be reshaped or diluted into something unrecognizable, by elites who hold them in self-evident contempt.
This is really the central story of Western Civilization at this point: the antagonism between the cultural masses and the ideological elites. Rather than the oppressed masses rising up and overthrowing the elites and their status quo, the elites are revolting against the masses and their status quo. Has that ever happened anywhere before, on such a vast scale? I’m not aware of any example from history, but if it has happened, I doubt it turned out well.
Paul DeRocco, I believe something similar led to the French Revolution. After a failed attempt to overthrow the young Louis XIV, Louis forced or lured the nobles to reside at Versailles. That ended the feudal system where local nobles lived among the local peasants. A couple of generations, where the nobles’ fate did not rely on the success of their peasants, but on gifts from the centralized monarchy, created a great distance between the groups. Thus, when provoked by the radical lawyers, the peasants did indeed support brutality to eliminate the nobles. The nobles only took from the peasants, and did not protect or help them. You might say it was a destruction of dispersed power, similar to federalism.
It seems to me that that was a more conventional revolution of the masses against an entrenched elite. It wasn’t the aristocracy that was trying to impose a New World on the masses, it was the other way around. Now it’s the elites that are filled with revolutionary zeal.
Paul DeRocco, I meant that the actions of Louis XIV and the nobles were the actions of the elite. The destruction of the relationships of nobles and peasants was due to the centralizing “revolution” that destroyed the remnants of the feudal system. So under this theory the peasants would be reacting to that revolution with, I suppose, a counter-revolution hoping to recover some influence over the nobles.
“Bi-partisanship is something Americans believe in but do not practise. In Europe the opposite applies: coalitions across the left-right divide are unloved but increasingly ubiquitous. No fewer than 25 of the EU’s 28 member states are ruled by coalition governments .”
I am a longstanding admirer of Mr. Ferguson’s scholarship and writing abilities. That being said, the above statement is true but misleading in that the governing coalitions have replaced congressional/parliamentary gridlock with cabinet-level gridlock. Consider, as examples, their inability to deal with the Eurozone crisis, ISIS, Ukraine, immigration. There isn’t a one that can act decisively or speak coherently to the major issues of the day.