Around the world, political candidates are endorsing policy options previously thought to belong to mutually exclusive camps. Writing in London’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf notes that “Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France or Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party” are “politicians who combine the nativism of the hard right, the statism of the hard left and the authoritarianism of both.”
Wolf argues that national political processes have abandoned their responsibilities to the citizens of their respective nations, and have instead become part of a global constellation of political views:
The projects of the rightwing elite have long been low marginal tax rates, liberal immigration, globalisation, curbs on costly “entitlement programmes”, deregulated labour markets and maximisation of shareholder value. The projects of the leftwing elite have been liberal immigration (again), multiculturalism, secularism, diversity, choice on abortion, and racial and gender equality. Libertarians embrace the causes of the elites of both sides; that is why they are a tiny minority.In the process, elites have become detached from domestic loyalties and concerns, forming instead a global super-elite
One of the foundational principles of the modern nation-state is that civil rights are for citizens. When non-citizens begin to consume a growing part of the nation’s material and political resources, voting citizens
are alienated. They are losers, at least relatively; they do not share equally in the gains. They feel used and abused. After the financial crisis and slow recovery in standards of living, they see elites as incompetent and predatory. The surprise is not that many are angry but that so many are not.
The argument can be made, and Martin Wolf cites lots of statistics in making it, that working-class wages have been stagnant for several decades across the industrialized world. If incomes in the upper lower class and the lower middle class lag behind the productivity of the total economy, and non-citizens are consuming a growing share of a nation’s wealth in the forms of social benefit programs from the government, the result is the rise of “populist” candidates, like “Ms. le Pen or Mr. Farage.”
The net effect of this shift is to draw attention to the concept of citizenship, a concept which has been neglected in recent decades. There is a difference between a citizen and someone who merely happens to live in a particular country.
Elections across Europe manifest the growing attractiveness of political parties who emphasize the rights of citizens. Wolf writes that:
Western countries are democracies. These states still provide the legal and institutional underpinnings of the global economic order. If western elites despise the concerns of the many, the latter will withdraw their consent for the elite’s projects.
Democracy takes various forms. In modern nation-states, its form is a republic with freely elected representatives.
Direct democracies, as schoolchildren know, work, at most, only in small villages. The structure of a republic not only deals better with larger populations spread over larger territories, but it also prevents a majority from abusing a minority.
But in any form of democracy, the foundational concept is that of citizenship. Without a clear understanding of citizenship, democracy is impossible.
Wolf argues that the growing resentment among citizen voters against the global elite is the result of emerging evidence that this elite has lost the vision that the purpose of a government is to protect the lives, freedoms, and properties of its citizens.
Feeling abandoned, feeling that the traditional political elites no longer seek to protect civil rights, voters look elsewhere. Populists are gaining followers, while the
Elites of the left have lost the allegiance of swaths of the native middle classes. Not least, democracy means government by all citizens. If rights of abode, still more of citizenship, are not protected, this dangerous resentment will grow. Indeed, it already has in too many places.
In Germany, chancellor Angela Merkel squandered her popularity by admitting into the country an immense flood of “Syrian refugees” - many of whom turned out to be neither Syrians nor refugees. When groups of Muslim men orchestrated gangrapes of German women in different cities at the same time, much of Merkel’s political capital evaporated.
Those political parties which are viewed as a part of the new populist wave, and not part of the old elite establishment, gained against Merkel’s party, the CDU/CSU, in subsequent elections. The party known as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is one such party.
From Britain to France to Germany, populist parties emerge in response to the perception that citizenship has been devalued. This is happening in other nations as well. Voters are posing a question: what is the meaning of national citizenship in the twenty-first century?
