Populism and Nationalism

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I happily confess to being an expert on nothing. I guess that gives me the right to speak today.

We live in an age of unanticipated shocks. No leading economist foresaw the coming of the world financial crisis; Alan Greenspan famously went from hero to zero overnight. Few commentators gave Donald Trump much chance of getting the Republican nomination, let alone becoming President of the United States. Everyone suddenly becomes wise after the event, and then there is a kind of media-driven rush to judgment. Thus the surge of populism has been widely explained in terms of a divide between the winners and losers of globalisation. However, things are much more complex than that. I shall argue that populism in our age, of both the left and the right, is as much a creature of globalisation as it is a reaction to it.

It is a great mistake to equate globalisation, as so many do, solely with economic ties and free trade. The Prime Minister, in a speech given moments ago, used “globalisation” in precisely that way, as indeed everyone seems to, but it is not correct. Globalisation is about accelerating interdependence in all its forms. The world today is massively more interconnected than in any other era, and in a host of different ways. This is new territory for us all. The opportunities are huge but so are the risks. Climate change and the ravaging of the world’s ecosystems, for example, are just as much features of globalisation as is the spread of free markets.

The origins of the “populist explosion”, as one book calls it, are several. I will be academic about it and mention four of them here. The first, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, mentioned, is the continuing dislocation produced by the financial crisis, a crisis that remains unresolved in the industrial countries. Ordinary citizens have had to pick up the costs of the miscreant behaviour of financial speculators who have largely escaped unscathed. The result has been cutbacks in health services, welfare and many other areas in virtually all the industrial countries.

The second is a revolt of the dispossessed, or those who feel themselves to be so. However, this is not only about a white working class left behind by deindustrialisation, and its roots are not only economic. It includes a disproportionately large number of older people, for example. Worries about immigration are to some extent a code for wider feelings of cultural alienation in a time of endless change. I recommend to all noble Lords a book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild called Strangers in Their Own Land, which applies to many people in this country who feel left behind, not economically but by the pace of change all around them, and who look for a national identity as a result. She also talks of “stay-at-home migrants”, people who are stuck but still feel outdistanced by change.

Thirdly, and crucial to it all, is the impact of the digital revolution. Its imprint is everywhere. Most populist parties are heavily organised online, yet the list goes on: “post-truth politics”, echo chambers, President Putin’s cyberwars, Mrs Clinton’s emails and Mr Trump’s tweets. The return to tradition that drives many forms of populism is certainly not tradition in its traditional form.

The fourth is sheer contingency—what you might call, “Events, dear boy, events”—which is so important both in everyday life and world history. Some 300,000 out of 139 million voters in a couple of key states settled the result of the presidential election in the US. However, once such an outcome is achieved, the world looks, and is, very different. President-elect Trump is, if I can put it this way, a complex personality whose political views have, one could say, evolved over the years. He used to be a Democrat, for example. His proposed rolling back of the US from the world stage would seem to be a lot more than purely economic. It looks like a wholesale retreat—this touches on what the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, said—from cosmopolitan values, rights of equality and protection for the poor. Not least important, Mr Trump will promote the fossil fuel companies and says that he will scupper the Paris accords. President Xi comes to Davos and gives a speech that Hillary Clinton might have given if she had won. Can one superpower replace another, so far as global government is concerned; or, as the new Administration seem to want, can they run the world in collusion with Russia? I doubt that very much. Global governance risks being undermined at the very time we need it most and in ways stretching far beyond free trade.