In 1944, as World War II neared its end, the exiled Hungarian economic sociologist Karl Polanyi published The great transformation a treatise that focused on the dangers of attempting to separate economic systems from the societies they inhabit. Eighty years later, Polanyi's warnings about a market economy detached from human needs may prove prescient. In fact, the future he predicted looks a lot like the one Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, in which the doctor's creature goes on a rampage and ends up turning against its creator.
In 2024, the largest electoral year in history, citizens of dozens of countries, representing half of the world's population, will go to the polls. The list includes the two largest democracies in the world (India and the United States) and three of its most populous countries (Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh). And the European Union, made up of almost 500 million people from 27 countries, will hold parliamentary elections.
Many commentators and experts consider this global synchronicity as a kind of plebiscite on the post-war world order. So far, popular reviews don't seem favorable. Some argue that the world is experiencing a “democratic recession,” citing evidence of declining levels of global freedom, authoritarian backsliding, and attacks on free and fair elections. Naturally, all of this raises the question of how we have moved from the hope that accompanied the end of the Cold War – what Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history” – to the profound disillusionment of today.
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While democracy has undoubtedly fallen prey to bad actors in countries ranging from Russia to Bangladesh to Pakistan, The current malaise is deeper and more fundamental than the alarming setbacks suffered by electoral integrity And the expression freedom. Leaders such as former US President Donald Trump, who is likely to secure the Republican nomination for another presidential run, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who informally launched his re-election campaign in January by inaugurating a controversial Hindu temple, appear to be genuinely popular. . His populism and polarizing agendas seem to express something real in the global psyche. But what?
The broken promise
After World War II, the world was promised perpetual peace and prosperity, the first thanks to political liberalism (particularly democracy and the rule of law) and the second thanks to neoclassical economics: a formula that any society could adopt. These models were marketed as systems plug and play that they needed neither community nor leadership.
The problem with this approach is that it ignored Polanyi's key idea: the economy cannot be “decoupled,” as he said, from society. After the Industrial Revolution, Polanyi arguedwe embark on a dangerous experiment, trying to elevate the economy above society and reduce people to commodities within it. And the result is a creature that poses an existential threat to its creators.
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Viewed from this perspective, the likely rejection of the postwar world order this year should not come as a surprise: the signs have become increasingly prominent in recent decades. The wave of discontent with globalization in the 1990s was interpreted as a geographically limited phenomenon: the growing pains of regions that had been left behind. But in the early 2000s, problems previously thought to be confined to the developing world – declining growth, rampant inequality, failed institutions, fractured political consensus, corruption, mass protests and poverty – began to emerge in developed countries. And many warnings were ignored: the global financial crisis of 2008, the sovereign debt crisis of the eurozone from 2009 and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016.
Scholars' efforts to understand populism have had only limited success because they attempt to apply a rational lens to what is essentially an emotional response: atavistic fears and instincts. Populist leaders around the world are gaining ground by abandoning economistic arguments and invoking nativist motives.: the mysticism and magic that, according to the German sociologist Max Weber, capitalism had decisively stifled.
The tragedy is that the dominant populist narrative about the architects of the postwar liberal order contains a kernel of truth. And this year should be a wake-up call for policymakers to heed the message Polanyi articulated 80 years ago: no economy exists outside the society that created and sustains it.
ANTARA HALDAR
© PROJECT SYNDICATE
CAMBRIDGE
#What39s #rampant #populism
