*** GORAN ADAMSON: Populist Parties and the Failure of the Political Elites. The Rise of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). Peter Lang (42-50 Eschborner Landstraße, D-60489 Frankfurt. Tel: (49-69) 780700 – Fax: 78070550 – Email: frankfurt@peterlang.com – Internet : http://www.peterlang.com ). ‘Demokrit – Studien zur parteienkritik und parteienhistorie’ series, No. 6. 2016, 263 pp, €48. £60.39, $63.95. ISBN 978-3-631-66158-1.
This book is urgent reading for anyone trying to understand what led to the election of Donald Trump, why the majority of people in the United Kingdom opted for Brexit and why extremist, nationalist and/or populist parties have the wind in their sails just about everywhere in Europe. In his thesis in 2010 on the rise of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) of Jorg Haider from 1986 to 2000, sociologist Göran Adamson reveals in a particularly convincing way the real, profound reasons that have led increasing numbers of Austrian citizens to make this questionable democratic gesture. The precious lessons he draws do not apply to Austria alone!
Throughout the ten chapters of this thesis, designed so as to be within the reach of the largest number of readers, it very quickly appears that analysts and commentators made the mistake of attributing the success of the FPÖ and its charismatic leader to their far-right tendencies. These tendencies were clearly patent, but far less seductive for the majority of Austrian voters than ‘Haider's anti-elitist rhetoric and populist appeal.’ Clearly, the book says, the Haider phenomenon was ‘a conservative and/or right-wing populist response to modern social phenomena such as globalisation, immigration and (later on) Austria's EU-membership,’ and proof of the late politician’s ability to obtain ‘the support of voters alienated by the dual elite’ of traditional parties that had been sharing power for decades. The author also explains how populism proves itself to be a ‘very loose concept’ that focuses on an idealised ‘people’ who are symmetrically contrasted with the ‘elite,’ a concept that can be associated with nationalism, exclusion, xenophobia and racism if it gets together with right-wing extremism and also, if more moderate, it can look like a power preoccupied with the fate of the nation state or working conditions. In the end, writes Göran Anderson at the conclusion of his thesis, the FPÖ has always been ‘a safe haven for racists, fascists, ultra-nationalists and National Socialists’ although its ‘voters are only marginally more susceptible to right-wing extremist rhetoric and anti-semitic views,’ their motivation being the search for responses to ‘typically anti-elitist themes’ such as the fight against corruption and the unveiling of scandals.
Since that time, plenty an ill wind has continued to sweep across Europe, making parties like the Slovak National Party prosper, or the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, and plenty of others, ‘often much more racist, anti-establishment, anti-Brussels, anti IMF, etc., than the FPÖ ever was.’ The author therefore decided to assess these statements in the light of new developments by answering two questions: firstly, ‘Why do right-wing populist parties prosper?’ and secondly: ‘What is wrong with people in Europe?’ In answer to the first question, he says that their political opponents, along with observers and journalists, all moulded by anti-racism, are mistaken about how to fight populists who say ‘things in order to incite rebellion among the common electorate in the face of the elite's outcry.’ On the other hand, the author says anti-racists commit the error of underestimating the depth of the political convictions of people who vote for populists, since ‘voters deemed right-wing populists are dismissed as if they had chosen to vote against their own interests, and no one is happier (about this) than the populist leaders.’
Göran Adamson then hands the microphone to other scientists who, in the same spirit as himself, discern in a less comfortable manner the causes of populist successes, for example by pointing out the temptation of the political classes to often wash their hands of any responsibility because ‘recent social changes are all due to 'the EU and globalization,’ forces that escape from their control. The author finds other allies too, who consider that jobs are a key motivation for the people who let themselves vote for extremists, neo-liberalisation clearly being an essential factor in this drift by citizens, to which only ‘the resurrection of the welfare state’ can put an end. Failing which, he adds, right-wing populist parties will continue to grow ‘because neo-liberalism creates division and animosity among marinalized groups of workers and immigrants.’ All these elements put a different light on the election results won by some, such as a certain Donald Trump who also, in his way, built his victory on the rejection of an elite who forgot those excluded from the benefits of globalisation. The final idea put forward by Göran Adamson is that populist parties are not cut out for power and when they achieve it, what was magical about them disappears very rapidly, so much so as to speedily throw them out of power. All the same, the election of Trump and the victory of Brexit supporters are warning signs for political leaders inclined to behave in the light of this citizen divorce as if nothing was happening. Michel Theys
*** IOANNIS VARTZOPOULOS, THANOS VEREMIS (Eds.): La tentation du populisme. Les aventures de la parole. Editions Armos (11 rue Mavrokordatou, GR-10678 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3304196 – Fax: 3819439 – Email: info@armosbooks.gr – Internet: http://www.armosbooks.gr ). 2016, 224 pp, €14. ISBN 978-960-527-982-0.
The phenomenon endemic in social life and politics that is populism is always exacerbated in periods of crisis, when it particularly affects how things develop. It affects individuals, society and their relationship in a way that highlights the nature and content of individual connections with collective expressions. Ways of overcoming the corrosive effects of populism and the problems of achieving this are addressed in this book edited by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ioannis Vartzopoulos, director of the Greek Psychoanalytic Association, and Prof. Thanos Veremis, who lectures in political history at the universities of Athens, Harvard, Princeton and St Antony’s College in Oxford, and is an active researcher at the International Strategic Studies Institute in London. The other ten or so authors are all researchers, writers and lecturers who are well-known in Greece. In their writings,, they note that psychoanalysis, an eminently humanist discipline, goes to meet representatives of social science, populism, philosophy, art and the Church. Running through this book is the notion of seduction, which the authors use to gain a better understanding of populism. (AKa)
*** Futuribles. L’anticipation au service de l’action. Futuribles Sarl (47 rue de Babylone, F-75007 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 53633770 – Fax: 42226554 – Email: revue@futuribles.com – Internet: http://www.futuribles.com ). November-December 2016, No. 415, 192 pp, €22. Annual subscription: €115. ISBN 978-2-84387-428-4.
This issue of this authoritative French review of future prospects takes a look far into the future because it opens with some key elements of possible futures for 2030 to 2050 selected from the Vigie report drawn up in 2016 by members of the Futuribles International association headed by François de Jouvenel and the association’s experts. Thus heavy and emerging trends are detected and analysed – facts that are ‘emerging’ or that ‘carry the future,’ explains Hugues de Jouvenel in the editorial – that are taking shape in various domains, along with the uncertainties and risks of major breakdowns that can be observed among them. For example, the slowing down of economic growth could well turn out to be a long-term phenomenon, explains economist Charles du Granrut, not hesitating to consider even the possibility of growth disappearing in the long-term. He says this means that structural policies need to be carried out in connection with environmental constraints and taking account of changes to the labour market, along with a review of economic cooperation models at global level. While André-Yves Portnoff discerns seven challenges to be taken up by companies and the labour market in the economy affected by digitalisation, Prof. Julien Damon (Sciences Po Paris) discerns four broad trends that will characterise society and lifestyles in the world over the next thirty years. The first two may a priori seem a little paradoxical in Europe because they are ‘disimpoverishment of the world’ and ‘the global affirmation of the middle classes,’ which can clearly only be explained by trends observable in Asia and Africa. The other views of long-term prospects look at demographics (which, given what it is now and how it will remain in Africa, will continue to fuel the migration question for a long time to come), the issue of resources (which has to be addressed also in the light of their impact on the environment), education, health (with the threat of the re-emergence of infectious diseases and the risk of pandemics) and science, which is moving ‘towards new frontiers.’ Also to be noted, on the fringes of this dossier, is the usual ‘Tribune Européenne’ column by Jean-François Drevet who, this time, invites readers to consider that Turkey itself has closed the doors of the European Union through the behaviour of President Erdogan. ‘We now have answers to the question of the limits of Europe,’ says the former European official, inviting leaders to cast more of a prospective eye in the direction of the idea of the continental partnership mooted by the Breugel institute in the wake of Brexit. (MT)
*** LORD LOTHIAN: Le pacifisme ne suffit pas, le patriotisme non plus (et autres textes). Presse fédéraliste (c/o Maison de l’Europe et des Européens, 242 rue Duguesclin, F-69003 Lyon. Internet: http://www.pressedefederaliste.be ). ‘Textes fédéralistes’ series, No. 13. 2016, 280 pp, €22. ISBN 978-2-9558710-0-3.
This thirteenth book in the Textes fédéralistes series is devoted to one of the outstanding personalities of the British federalist school who, in the 1930s of the last century, made a large contribution to the diffusion of federalist ideas in the whole of Europe, going as far as influencing Altiero Spinelli when he was relegated to Ventotene by the fascist authorities. Dying in 1940 in the United States where he was the United Kingdom’s ambassador, Philip Henry Kerr, better known as Lord Lothian, held the view that in order to achieve definitive peace in the world, a ‘global federal state’ needed to be set up. Why? French federalists Jean-Francis Billion and Jean-Luc Prevel, compilers of the texts brought together in these pages, sum it up by saying that above all, in their view, it was necessary to remove States from the ‘blind balance of power game without removing their individualities.’ For the British thinker, it was above all question of filing down nation states’ canines and incisors which, buttressed by defence and absolute sovereignty, seemed to him the ‘leading cause of international anarchy and war.’ There is no doubt at all that he would hold the same view today. This major work, a fundamental contribution to the theory of federalism, preceded by a long introduction by John Pinder and Andrea Bosco who, supplementing the preface by Luigi Majocchi, place the marquis of Lothian in the context of his time within the British Federal Union, the birth of which is presented by Charles Kimber at the end of the book. John Parry looks at the British proposal of June 1940 for an irrevocable Union with France, an offer largely inspired by the British federalists and a certain … Jean Monnet. (MT)
*** IRNERIO SEMINATORE: Waterloo 2015. Vie et mort de l’Union européenne – Fiction sur un coup d’Etat post-moderne. Editions Godefroy de Bouillon (119 rue Lecourbe, F-75015 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 45821661 – Email: editions@godefroiydebouillon.fr – Internet: http://www.godefroydebouillon.fr ). 2016, 382 pp, €33. ISBN 978-2-841-91229-2.
Founder of the European International Relations Institute, Prof. Seminatore is out of place in the European quarter in Brussels, where he doesn’t only have friends and adulators, His latest book is unlikely to arrange matters because it is historical fiction that announces no less than the death of the European Union. In an allegorical and analogous form, the author describes the ‘failure of a system of thought and a political class’ that made the mistake, in the view of this political analyst, of proudly displaying their radical membership of the school of realism and of over-upsetting the mental categories inherited from the past. In these pages, the author denounces a capital of ‘Good’ that strangely resembles Byzantium for its interminable discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while it’s being besieged by the forces of radical Islam, the damage wreaked by a ‘bureaucratic integrationism’ that is said to have paved the way for Brexit ahead of Grexit, an Angela Merkel who is described as no less than a gravedigger of European civilisation for having slyly opened all of Europe’s doors to refugees, for which she was even taken to the International Criminal Court, where she would be found guilty of crimes against humanity... The ideas are very crude and served up with an unusual flamboyance, but the intellectual posturing at the antipodes of Houellebecq’s ‘submission’ that the author takes on board intellectually while floating in the same waters will certainly lead to him irritating many of his book’s readers, (MT)