Introduction

Philosophy and Social Criticism

2018, Vol. 44(4) 346–352
Populism and the crisis ª The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permission:

of liberalism sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0191453718774951
journals.sagepub.com/home/psc

Volker Kaul
LUISS ‘Guido Carli’ University, Rome, Italy

Abstract
The article addresses the following question: if an extensive period of globalization and also
democratization after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been followed by populism (protectionist
nationalism in the West and authoritarian nationalism in the Global South), does this mean that
there is something wrong with liberalism itself? Must liberalism be substituted by alternative
economic and political concepts? The article presents three alternatives to liberalism that are
supposed to counter populism: a new communitarianism, a renewal of the democratic project as
much as novel conceptions of social justice. However, it takes also into account positions that
address the current crisis from within the liberal framework itself.

Keywords
globalization, populism, liberalism, communitarianism, social justice, global governance

Last year, Reset DOC Seminars took place for the first time in Venice, Italy. After nine
_
years during which Istanbul _
Seminars were hosted at Istanbul Bilgi University,
Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations found itself constrained to move the seminars away
from Turkey. The very reason for such a decision has of course been, after the failed
coup in July 2016, the rise of an authoritarian and repressive form of populism in Turkey
that no longer guarantees the freedom of speech.
But Turkey is certainly not an isolated, though more extreme, case in what concerns the
upsurge of populism. The year 2016 was also the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s
election as US president. Two years before, Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of
India and General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi president of Egypt. For almost a decade, Freedom
House’s annual survey has highlighted a decline in democracy in most regions of the
globe, which indicates, according to many observers, that Authoritarianism Goes Global.1

Corresponding author:
Volker Kaul, LUISS ‘Guido Carli’ University, Center for Ethics and Global Politics, Viale Romania 32, 00197
Rome, Italy.
Email: volker.kaul@gmail.com
Kaul 347

And yet, since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of today’s President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan first gained a majority in the Turkish parliament in 2002 breaking with
Kemalism, it was for almost ten years supported by the various liberal and progressive
forces in the country. Similarly in Egypt, before the military came back to power, the
Arab Spring had brought about important democratization processes. On the whole and,
most significantly, the world experienced in the three decades from 1980–2010 a perhaps
unprecedented wave of globalization that came along with the establishment of a liberal
international order.
_
Could it be that the move of Reset DOC Seminars from Istanbul to Venice coincides
also with the end of liberalism as we know it? The issue we have seen ourselves to be
confronted with is that in this last decade not only Erdoğan and the AK Party, but world
politics as such, has increasingly turned against liberalism. There is a dispute about what
exactly populism is and how to define it.2 Yet, a general rejection of liberalism is what
characterizes all forms of populism, both right-wing as much as left-wing populism,3
populism in the West as well as in the Global South. Whereas populism in the West goes
above all against economic liberalism, populism in the Global South is mainly directed
against political liberalism.4 In Turkey, Russia, Egypt, India and China, populist gov-
ernments are increasingly curtailing political and civic rights (Boyraz, Bilgrami and
Hamzawy, in this issue).
Accordingly, the topic of Reset DOC Seminars ‘17 was “The Populist Upsurge and
the Decline of Diversity Capital.” The question at the center of the seminars was the
following: if an extensive period of globalization and also democratization after the fall
of the Berlin Wall has been followed by populism (protectionist nationalism in the West
and authoritarian nationalism in the Global South), does this mean that there is some-
thing wrong with liberalism itself? Must liberalism be substituted by alternative eco-
nomic and political concepts?
It is clear, according to all contributions in this volume, that the upsurge of populism
is deeply problematic, last but not least because it contributes to the decline of pluralism
(diversity capital) in a society and gives rise to intolerance with respect to differences.
But at the same time it could be argued that populists have come up only with the wrong
remedy, while they identify quite rightly the underlying problems and malaise of liberal-
ism. While there is a tendency in politics to engage and criticize morally the populist
project (Ferrara, in this issue), it could be claimed that people cannot help but vote for
populist parties given the deep pathologies of liberalism. As Michael Sandel writes in
this issue, “the hard reality is that Donald Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of
anxieties, frustrations, and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties have
no compelling answer” [emphasis added]. In this perspective, if we want to overcome
populism, we first have to come to terms with liberalism (Azmanova, Bilgrami,
M. Sandel, in this issue).
We can identify three possible positions on the crisis of liberalism and the rise of
populism: (1) whatever the problems of liberalism should be, populism has no moral
justification; (2) liberalism is flawed and the cause of populism, and therefore needs to be
replaced by an alternative political project; And (3) if liberal politics have indeed given
rise to serious problems and real grievances, liberalism has the conceptual resources to
address these effectively.
348 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(4)

Contributions in this volume endorse in particular the second position and propose
three alternatives to liberalism: a new communitarianism, a renewal of the democratic
project as much as novel conceptions of social justice. While these proposals are all
critical of liberalism, they disagree about what exactly is wrong with the liberal project
and recommend competing political projects. Some authors, however, try to suggest
ways how the current crisis can be solved from within the liberal framework.
The first part introduces the new communitarianism. The second section presents the
new democratic project, and the third part raises questions concerning social justice and
the future of liberalism.

Populism and the search for a new communitarianism

Michael Sandel is most outspoken about the relationship between the rise of populism
and the failure of technocratic liberalism. Growing deregulation, financialization, and
globalization of the economy, initiated in the Reagan–Thatcher era and consolidated by
the Clinton and Obama administrations, have given rise to growing income inequalities,
meritocratic hubris, the erosion of the dignity of work as much as of patriotism and the
national community. The problem is that the liberal insistence on open markets, equal
opportunity, procedural justice, and public reason is anything but morally neutral. It
promotes particular conceptions of the good that favor the college-educated upper class
and leaves the working class and parts of the middle class frustrated and humiliated.
Sandel proposes therefore to open up the public sphere to the deep moral disagreement
characterizing contemporary societies, admitting into the public discourse questions
concerning borders, national identity, solidarity, and the dignity of work. This helps to
cultivate a new sense of belonging cutting the roots of populism.
Adam Adatto Sandel backs the communitarian criticism of liberalism. Asking what
an open mind is, Adatto Sandel rejects the Enlightenment point of view that conceives it
as independent from the specific identities of the persons. Drawing in particular on
Heidegger, Adatto Sandel argues that “there is no such thing as value-free, disengaged,
objective knowledge” that is not “committed to some understanding of how to live,” to
some notion of the good. Yet, traditions, commitments, and social roles do not condemn
societies to blind habit and custom, since they do not preclude interpretation and critical
evaluation.
Tiziana Lippiello argues that President and General Secretary of the Chinese Com-
munist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping, launching a campaign “to revive Chinese culture” is
trying to avoid the pitfalls of Western-style liberalism. Lippiello, following Michael
Sandel, writes that “Chinese thinkers, and in particular Confucian thinkers, have fore-
seen the limits of an abstract notion of universal justice and have otherwise affirmed the
importance of a proper behavior, righteousness and a moral disposition to do good,
together with cardinal moral values such as humaneness, social rites and wisdom.” She
claims that among Chinese scholars and philosophers “there is a general consensus on
the adoption of traditional values and their positive psychological and social impact.”
Yet, Lippiello also acknowledges that the Communist Party’s insistence on the “unity of
thought” can assume totalitarian forms.
Kaul 349

Tuğçe Erçetin and Emre Erdoğan do not defend directly a new communitarianism.
Yet, their qualitative analysis of the change in the speeches and discourses of the leaders
of the AK Party between the elections in June and November 2015 demonstrate to what
extent democracies in times of internal and external crises are vulnerable to populism.
The 2015 elections in Turkey took place amidst repeated terrorist attacks, the beginning
of Turkey’s military operations in Syria, and the end of the Kurdish–Turkish peace
process. Not winning a sufficient majority in the June elections, Erçetin and Erdoğan
observe how the AK Party leaders increasingly recurred to populist topics such “us-them
distinction,” “in-group superiority,” “scapegoating,” and the “people” in the November
elections reflecting the “threat, anger and uncertainties.”

Populism, neoliberalism and democracy deficit

Albena Azmanova shares much of Michael Sandel’s criticism of liberalism. She also
believes that populism is the result of legitimate claims resulting from technocratic rule
and neoliberal global economic competition that disregards social consequences. She
equally contests the liberal pretension of neutrality and sees the democratic re-
politicization of policy choices as the only possible solution to the crisis of liberalism.
Yet, Azmanova has, as she calls it, a more “radical view” of the political than Michael
Sandel. Whereas Sandel’s proposal aims to reproduce the social roles within the national
community that liberal policies have tended to put into question, Azmanova conceives
deliberative democracy as a contestatory process that has at its center a “critique and
criticism of the operational dynamics of capitalism,” a contestation of the very social
roles capitalism has engendered. She poignantly states that “the Left struggled for
equality and inclusion within the system of social relations, but failed to question and
challenge the system into which entry was requested and within which equality was
sought.”
According to Luigi Vero Tarca, populism reveals the limits of democracy or the
“democratic superstition,” as he calls it. Tarca states that “when we say that ‘populists’
are substantially antidemocratic, we have to be aware that democracy itself is really a
problem.” Although democracy is based upon the sovereignty of the people, democratic
procedures and, above all, the majority principle are problematic insofar as they do not
solve the “real power/conflict/violence problems.” Hence, Tarca believes that simply
criticizing populists on moral grounds is actually going to be counterproductive. What
we instead need to do is “understanding their [the populists’] reasons” and recognize
their “right to be right.” Tarca sustains an epistemological position according to which
“all propositions are in some sense true, and hence even those who are wrong are, from a
particular point of view, right.” The solution to the problem of the “democratic super-
stition” and populism “is the ability to interpret difference as harmony rather than as
negation”—in short, the recovery of the lost diversity capital.
Murat Borovali is a firm believer in the strength of liberal democracy. Unlike Azma-
nova and Tarca, Borovali holds that liberal democracy is the right framework even for a
country as Turkey that “is facing significant challenges and is in the process of devising
and implementing radical reforms.” Borovali’s argument is rather that populism is
undermining liberal democracy, not vice versa. He analyzes a specific form of
350 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(4)

argumentation in politics, the so-called ad hominem argumentation, which tackles and

“aims to discredit the critic rather than address the criticism” and that has come to
characterize the populist political culture in Turkey. Distinguishing four possible types
of ad hominem argumentation (tu quoque, “whataboutery,” bias, and direct ad hominem)
and proving their fallacy, Borovali concludes that ad hominem argumentation hinders
collective deliberation and puts at risk the democratic system in the long run. The
consequence of ad hominem argumentation is that the democratic polity stops to be
divided along individual lines and competing comprehensive doctrines. It gives rise to
groupthink and political groups engaged in an existential struggle with a tribalist and
zero-sum understanding of politics.
Cemil Boyraz analyzes another form of governmentality—the communication cen-
ters of the AK Party, prime minister and president in Turkey—that risks to harm the
democratic system and to impede deliberation in the public sphere. Boyraz is more
skeptical than Borovali about the promises of liberalism. As much as Michael Sandel
and Azmanova, he believes the rise of authoritarian populism in Turkey to be strictly
related to neoliberalism and the political legitimacy crisis that it has brought about. Over
the last two decades, the AK Party has privatized all state-owned enterprises and cut
down public administration to some rudimental form of minimal state. In order to
counter the arising societal tensions in the form of unemployment, inequalities, and low
wages, the government and AK Party created communication centers that can be directly
addressed by the citizens. According to Boyraz, despite the semblance of democratic
engagement, the goal of the communication centers is, on the contrary, to avoid that
certain political and economic issues enter the public sphere and become discussed
publicly. They contribute to the “individualization and atomization of the social
demands” introducing forms of party patronage and clientalistic networks rather than
“to create platforms where different interests, identities and lifeworlds are coordinated in
a pluralist logic.”

Populism, the quest for social justice and the future of liberalism
Akeel Bilgrami presents populism as a radical quest for social justice in a globalizing
world. While as most precedent authors he relates populism back to the neoliberal
globalization of trade and finance, he is the first to ask if some form of global governance
together with a global labor movement could come to substitute the national welfare
state. Discussing the legitimacy of Brexit, he puts himself in the shoes of a working
person and asks:

What was the site where these safety nets were administered and implemented? And he
would answer: well, the site of the nation. He might scratch his head and wonder: Has there
ever been a supra-national site at which welfare was ever administered? What would a
mechanism that dispensed it at a supra-national site even so much as look like?

Bilgrami fervently rejects any idea of global government as “just fantasy” and thinks that
at least countries of the South “would be better off de-linking (at least partially) from the
global economy and getting sovereignty over their own nations’ political economies.”
Kaul 351

More than a simple return to social democracy, Bilgrami proposes to make “the ideal of
an unalienated life more central even than liberty and equality.”
Alessandro Ferrara is much more positive about the possibility of liberal democracy
to offer an alternative response over and above protectionism to “rampant inequality and
the absolute power of disembedded financial markets.” After rejecting populism as
“indigenous unreasonability,” he in fact criticizes radical-democratic critical theorists
for putting a stigma on consumption and mistrusting the law. He writes: “Nothing
prevents liberal-democrats from injecting a strong normative content into consumer-
protection through class-action. Nothing prevents liberal-democratic theorists from giv-
ing class-action and punitive damages a new twist capable of representing a third course
between populist neonationalist closure and neoliberal globalism.” He continues that

one could dismiss these law-suits as internal to the logic of an instrumental use of the law,
subservient to the neoliberal hegemonic credo, but the burden of proof is on radical neo-
marxist critics to show that under the present conditions of hyperpluralism, flexibilization of
work [and] fragmentation of social classes it is possible to oppose financialized capitalism
more effectively through traditional street-demonstrations, petitions, strikes, press-
campaigns.

He concludes that “‘equal protection of the laws’ needs to acquire a new meaning
connected with equality of opportunity in the market.”
Lisa Anderson is cautiously optimistic that liberal forces can overcome current forms
of populism in the Arab world. She wholeheartedly shares the analysis that the Arab
uprisings and the current turmoil in the Middle East have their origin in an irresponsible
libertarian, minimalist law and order conception of the state that deprived Arab states of
their political legitimacy. She states that “improvements in macroeconomic indicators
obscured the increasing unemployment, poverty and income inequality, particularly in
the IMF’s ‘good pupils,’ such as Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and Egypt.” As a result,
people in Arab countries started to turn for help to religious and ethnic communities that
“were usually proudly illiberal and exclusionary.” If “the social contract of the 1950s and
1960s, in which political acquiescence was bought with state employment, access to
public healthcare and education and low taxation” is largely impossible today, Anderson
argues that the new media “created what might be called the first global community of
grievance” where “collective memory now truly extends to virtually everyone on earth.”
Could the emergence of more global identities give rise to more extended forms of global
governance able to tackle today’s stall in the region?
Amr Hamzawy doesn’t think that there are any sorts of justifications for populism. He
writes a politically very engaged attack against the human rights abuses committed by
the Egyptian rulers and generals. He strongly contests the myth “that the new author-
itarianism would save the most populous Middle Eastern country from a civil outbreak,
terrorism, and economic decay,” showing that today Egypt actually fares worse than ever
on all accounts. Therefore Egypt’s generals have to rely on alternative narratives to
justify the use of heavy-handed ruling techniques. They engage through a religious and
nationalist breed of populism in what Borovali calls ad hominem argumentation: con-
spiracy theories, defamation campaigns, negative collective labeling, and hate speech
352 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(4)

against voices of dissent and pro-democracy groups. Hamzawy protests that

“nationalistic populism often allows regimes to dismiss universal standards of democ-
racy and the rule of law as Western practices pushed by ‘enemies of the nation’ that do
not apply to Egypt and are not binding to the regime.”

Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, it seems, at least if we follow the contributions in this volume, that there is
a causal relationship between liberalism and the rise of populism. In the richer West,
neoliberal globalization has contributed to the relative impoverishment of the lower
classes. In the global South, the opening of markets and the expansion of democratic
ideas have menaced age-old value systems and privileges. In both cases populism pro-
mises to keep intact a world that is about to disappear. Liberalism is undeniably about
what Joseph Schumpeter calls “creative destruction,” but at the same time there has been
marked progress on reducing poverty over the past decades. As the World Bank states,
“the world attained the first Millennium Development Goal target—to cut the 1990
poverty rate in half by 2015—five years ahead of schedule, in 2010.”5 In this period,
the poverty rate was reduced by more than one-third.
The true problem is that unfettered global markets go also along with increasing
inequalities, human rights abuses, and exploitation, as well as environmental pollution.
Although Bilgrami is certainly right when he writes that “the mind boggles at the idea of
a serious possibility of global labor movements to oppose global finance capital,” some
form of political and not only economic global governance seems to be the only possi-
bility of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.6 From this perspective, the fatal
error of the Left has been not so much to endorse globalization, but to believe that it can
be governed from within the logic of the nation-state. The disastrous electoral results of
social democratic parties in the West and the marginalization of Left thought in the
Global South show to what extent in particular the Left is hit by the crisis of liberalism.
The current state of the European Union indeed demonstrates all too well the very
legitimate concerns Bilgrami has with regard to global government, but perhaps we
philosophers should be the last to give up “the principle of hope” so courageously upheld
by Ernst Bloch.

Notes
1. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner and Chrisopher Walker (eds.) (2016), Authoritarianism Goes
Global: The Challenge to Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. For a very good literature review on populism see Erçetin & Erdoğan, in this issue.
3. For the commonalities between right-wing and left-wing populism see Volker Kaul, “Über den
Umgang mit Populismus”, in Zeitschrift für praktische Philosophie (forthcoming).
4. Volker Kaul and Ananya Vajpeyi (eds.), Minorities and Populism – Comparative Perspectives
from South Asia and Europe, Cham: Springer (forthcoming).
5. See http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty (retrieved 14 April 2018).
6. Joseph Stiglitz (2007), Making Globalization Work, New York: W. W. Norton & Company;
Antonio Badini (2016), The Changing Process of Globalization, Rome: LUISS University
Press.