Quotation

Analysis

“The nationalist and populist movements themselves are building on each other. “We are just starting to learn to what degree are these developments coordinated… It is clear that people are learning from one another across countries. A political approach that worked in one place is tried somewhere else,” said Bonikowski.”

This diffusion of political approaches was also observed during the Occupy movement, or the ‘movement of the squares’ as it was known internationally in 2011. Masses of people learning from one another is a network effect — we can see how this happens online with the spread of memes and viral videos. People are able to coordinate with one another on increasingly larger scales. Does this also redefine the definition of politics? This reminds me of the sociologist’s Manuel Castells’ concept of ‘networks’, relations amongst people made possible by our information communications technology. It is clear that these technologies help facilitate this “learning from one another across countries” but it is not the cause of the cross-fertilization of nationalist and populist movements.

“...the fact remains that people are losing faith in their governments and are desperately seeking change. Many Europeans are disillusioned with the European Union and the conflict plays out between regions. As Bonikowski has found in his own research, the economic core is experiencing ethno-nationalist populism while in the southern countries, left-wing populism is on the rise. There are sentiments in both regions against each other, and “there is massive polarization among the political elites. That polarization is not going to decline in the coming years.””

Why have political representatives in the West been unable to respond to the needs of their base? Political scientist Peter Mair in Ruling the Void examines precisely this loss of faith in the electoral process in Western Europe since the 1990s. Mair attributes the disaffection by the masses not to individualistic notions such as "political apathy", but rather the increasing professionalization of political elites and their estrangement from their electoral constituencies. I can see how "establishment politicians" on both the moderate Left and Right in Western liberal democracies have been increasingly subservient to the needs and interests of various lobbyists, such as corporate interests, and other geopolitical concerns often far removed from the needs of regular people. So what we are seeing today is maybe not caused immediately by the financial crisis, or immigration, but is rather the product of a long-term development in social and political structures.