In 1992 US American political theorist Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history”. The fall of the Soviet Union, he argued, heralded “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
By Western liberal democracy, he meant formal multiparty electoral systems, with established liberal institutional norms and the removal of many economic questions from the realm of politics full stop. For a while, he was right. The 1990s saw a wave of multiparty elections across the African continent. The former Soviet and Eastern Bloc states experienced the same, accompanied by shock therapy liberalisation of their economies and tremendous looting of public assets. Neoliberalism was strengthened at the national, transnational and international levels.
30 year on, ours is another planet. Neoliberal dogmas were shattered in 2008 and since then many countries have closed the space of liberal governance. In the United Kingdom, protest can be banned for being “annoying”. In Israel, the government seeks to overturn the independence of the judiciary. In India, minority rights and bodies are attacked. In Russia, the executive claims full power and shuts down alternative media. In Turkey, journalists and opposition politicians are harassed and arrested. The list goes on.
Each of these developments has its own particular dynamics but they are also part of a shared story. History is back. But where is it leading us?……………..
Erdoğan helps tell the story of our age, an age of spreading Erdoğanisation. Coming to power in 2003, he fitted into the dominant Western framework for what a leader should be: modernising, free market, pro-European. 20 years on he is a nationalist autocrat whose mishandling of the economy hurts the pockets of ordinary people in Turkey. And yet his grip of power remains. How?
As Yanis Varoufakis wrote this week that by deploying a clever “combination of ultra-nationalism, social conservatism, a pro-Big Business agenda, a network of patronage, and huge doses of authoritarianism, Erdoğan managed to reproduce his electoral and discursive hegemony.” Varoufakis sees a “cunning resemblance” across the Aegean in Greece, where last week right-wing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis won re-election and now looks set to secure a super majority in the Hellenic Parliament under new electoral rules he himself introduced. On Mitsotakis, Varoufakis writes, “he presided over a steady diminution of median real incomes, had a terrible pandemic, many of our forests burned down on his watch, was caught red-handed eavesdropping on his political opponents and even his own ministers, behaved outrageously when 57 young people were killed in an avoidable railway accident etc. And yet, like Erdogan, deploying cleverly a combination of ultra-nationalism, social conservatism, a pro-Big Business agenda, a network of patronage and huge doses of authoritarianism, Mitsotakis managed to reproduce his electoral and discursive hegemony.”
This is not an Aegean ailment. Nor one confined to the eastern Mediterranean, although Egypt and Israel, with Sissi and Netanyahu suffer a similar affliction.
The world system is struggling to reproduce itself. As the global order breaks down, it generates insecurity and confusion, as well as hunger and deprivation. Into this gap steps the symbolic security offered by the hard right. Across the globe we are witnessing the hard right overtake the traditional right and swell its electoral appeal.
In some countries it is winning — Philippines, India, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Egypt — and in others it not in power but growing — France, Sweden, the US, Chile, Colombia, Brazil.
We can’t defeat this reactionary international by returning to the end of history. The cracks in the global system are too deep to paper over for long. Pretending that plaster can fix ruined foundations only strengthens the popular appeal of the new right.
We can share across borders the tactics and strategies deployed to stop the hard right in its tracks, such as in Brazil, Chile and Colombia, to name a few. But we need a real alternative to and a different plan. That’s where you and the Progressive International come in.
This world is dying so we have to build a new one. While every struggle can sow the seeds of a new world, to have the power to win it, we must “join forces across borders in a common defence of people and planet”, as our political declaration states. That way, we can build a hopeful counterpoint to the crumbling rule of neoliberalism and the alarming rise of the reactionary international’s hard men.
If your organisation isn’t already part of the Progressive International, now is the time to join. Find out more about how to get involved here and if you can afford to fund our work as the global social crisis spreads, please do so here.
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
