The Neoliberal Project and the Rise of Populist Nationalism: Ideology and Development since 1991

A special issue of Societies (ISSN 2075-4698).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2023) | Viewed by 4533

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, University of Waikato, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand
Interests: sociology; political sociology; social exclusion; political economy

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

All probably agree that the core telos of the neoliberal imaginary contrasts with the practical emergence of regressive and authoritarian populist nationalism. The neoliberals themselves portray nationalism as a backwardly dangerous and authoritarian anti-neoliberal force, diametrically alien to what they see as their project: to make a cosmopolitan global market civilization. Some neoliberalism scholars accept that nationalism and neoliberalism are generically unrelated, but they observe how the cosmopolitan neoliberal project is nonetheless mutating towards movements that are incorporating state, capital and popular movements in nationalist coalitions.

In another view, even though in contradiction with its core mission, competitive national rivalries are seen to be inscribed in the neoliberal model of development’s core trajectory. Its wrap-over veil of cosmopolitan ideology hiding its regressive nationalist tendency are actually the contradictory expressions of the neoliberal model of development’s national-trans-national dynamic that turns countries into ‘competition states’. For a progressive form of nationalism to emerge would require a different model of world development that could turn countries into ‘cooperation states’.

This special edition of Societies seeks contributions that investigate aspects of this complex and contested relationship between nationalism, populism and neoliberalism. It also invites contributors to consider alternatives. Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papersarticle, conceptual paper or reviewof the journal.

Dr. David Neilson
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • neoliberalism
  • nationalism
  • populism

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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20 pages, 357 KiB  
Concept Paper
Explaining the Populist Right in the Neoliberal West
by Christian Joppke
Societies 2023, 13(5), 110; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13050110 - 25 Apr 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4062
Abstract
With the 2016 double shock of Brexit and Trump, the populist right has become a game-changing force on both sides of the North Atlantic. A proper explanation needs to combine political, economic, and cultural elements. Qua populism, the populist right addresses a political [...] Read more.
With the 2016 double shock of Brexit and Trump, the populist right has become a game-changing force on both sides of the North Atlantic. A proper explanation needs to combine political, economic, and cultural elements. Qua populism, the populist right addresses a political condition, which is neoliberalism’s endemic democracy deficit. However, the illiberal democracy that populists advocate is not a cure for it. Cleavage theory in the Lipset–Rokkan tradition sheds light on the rightist orientation and the nationalist content of this populism. The main explanatory challenge remains the combination of economic and cultural factors in the rise of populism. In economic respect, middle-class decline under a neoliberal order seems to be the root cause of populism. However, its agenda is culture-focused, amounting to a nationalist opposition to immigration and cosmopolitanism. This “cultural deflection” is a persistent puzzle. The minimum to conclude is that one-sided accounts of populism in exclusively economic or cultural terms are unconvincing. Full article
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