Contributors

Arjun Appadurai, born 1949 in Mumbai, is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Visiting Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2016/17).

Zygmunt Bauman, born 1925 in Posen, died 2017 in Leeds, taught latterly at the University of Leeds. He received many accolades for his work, including the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1998) and the Prince of Asturias Award (2013).

Donatella della Porta, born 1956 in Catania, is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre of Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence.

Nancy Fraser, born 1947 in Baltimore, is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York.

Heinrich Geiselberger, born 1977 in Waiblingen, has been an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag since 2006.

Eva Illouz, born 1961 in Fès, is Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the EHESS in Paris. She writes regularly for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz.

Ivan Krastev, born 1965 in Lukovit, is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. Since 2015, he has been a regular contributor to the New York Times International Edition.

Bruno Latour, born 1947 in Beaune, is Professor at Sciences Po Paris and at the Centre de sociologie des organisations. He has received multiple awards, including the 2013 Holberg Prize.

Paul Mason, born 1960 in Leigh, is an English author and award-winning television journalist. He worked for many years for the BBC and Channel 4 News and now writes regularly for the Guardian.

Pankaj Mishra, born 1969 in Jhansi, is an Indian essayist, literary critic and author. Amongst other publications, he writes for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the Guardian. In 2014 he received the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding.

Robert Misik, born 1966 in Vienna, is a journalist and political writer. He writes for the daily newspaper die tageszeitung as well as the magazines Falter and Profil and manages the video blog ‘FS Misik’ on the website of the daily newspaper Der Standard. In 2009 he received the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Communication.

Oliver Nachtwey, born 1975 in Unna, is a sociologist at the Technische Universität Darmstadt whose research focuses on labour, inequality, protest and democracy. He writes regularly for daily and weekly newspapers and web portals.

César Rendueles, born 1975 in Girona, teaches sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Wolfgang Streeck, born 1946 in Lengerich, is a sociologist. From 1995 to 2014 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His research centres on comparative political economy and theories of institutional change. He is a regular contributor to the New Left Review.

David Van Reybrouck, born 1971 in Bruges, is a writer, dramatist, journalist, archaeologist and historian. In 2011 he founded G1000, an initiative that campaigns for democratic innovations in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. His book Congo: The Epic History of a People received several awards, including the ECI Literature Prize, the NDR Kultur Non-fiction Prize and the Prix Médicis essai (all 2012). His articles appear in newspapers internationally, such as Le Monde, La Repubblica and De Standaard.

Slavoj Žižek, born 1949 in Ljubljana, teaches at the European Graduate School, Birkbeck, University of London, and at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Ljubljana.

Preface

Heinrich Geiselberger

When a world order breaks down,

that is when people begin to think about it.

Ulrich Beck 2011¹

The idea for this book arose in late autumn 2015, after a series of terrorist attacks had shaken Paris and as the debate in Germany about the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees became increasingly fraught. The reaction to these events in politics, the media and general discourse gave the impression that the world was suddenly falling below the standards it had fought hard to achieve and had thought of as secure.

Directly associated with terrorism and migration is the fact that all around the globe the number of territories in which a state as such no longer exists is growing. Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, the three countries from which most people seeking asylum in Germany came in 2016, ranked near the top of the ‘Fragile State Index’ compiled by the NGO Fund for Peace in the same year.² While the blank spaces on the maps had grown smaller and smaller over the centuries, things now appear to be going in the opposite direction. In the age of Google Maps there are a growing number of territories of which one knows very little and which ancient cartographers would have marked with the phrase hic sunt leones. Furthermore, many of the political reactions to the terrorist attacks and the migrant wave fit the pattern of post-democratic gesture politics and what sociologists call ‘securitization’. There are the calls for walls, and there has even been talk of orders to shoot at refugees trying to cross frontiers. The president of France has declared a state of emergency, saying that the country is at war. Unable to tackle the global causes of such challenges as immigration and terrorism or growing inequality at the national level, or to combat them with long-term strategies, more and more politicians rely on law and order at home, together with the promise to make their respective countries ‘great again’.³ In the Age of Austerity, it is evidently no longer possible to offer citizens much in their roles as workers, fellow sovereign citizens, school children or users of public infrastructure. In consequence, the political emphasis has shifted to the dimension of nationality, the promise of safety, and the restoration of the glory of a bygone age.

The list of the symptoms of decline could be extended almost indefinitely. We could highlight the yearning for an anarchic, unilateral de-globalization or the emergence of the Identitarian movement, as for example in France, Italy and Austria; or the growing xenophobia and Islamophobia, the wave of so-called hate crimes, and of course the rise of authoritarian demagogues such as Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Narendra Modi.

By the late autumn of 2015 all this was accompanied by an increased hysteria and a coarsening of public discourse, together with a certain herd mentality on the part of the established media. Evidently, people could no longer talk about flight and migration without invoking the semantic fields of ‘natural catastrophes’ and ‘epidemics’. Instead of issuing calls for calm and pragmatism or contextualizing events historically and thus helping to see them in perspective, the risks of terrorism and immigration in Germany were turned into the greatest challenge not just since Reunification but even since the Second World War. At demonstrations as well as on the internet, terms such as ‘lying press’, ‘dictatorship of the chancellor’ and ‘traitors to the people’ (Volksverräter) instead of ‘representatives of the people’ (Volksvertreter) became common currency.

Symptoms such as these are discussed in the present book under the heading of ‘the great regression’. Beyond the naive belief in progress that might be implicit in that term, it is intended to make clear that the ratchet effects of modernization appear to have lost their force in the most diverse spheres of activity and that we are witnessing a reversion to an earlier stage of ‘civilized conduct’.⁴ However, the term is intended also to point to a further puzzling phenomenon, namely that in the debates about the impact of globalization we have in some respects fallen back beneath the level that had already been reached almost twenty years ago. Two warnings that seem prophetic today were repeatedly recalled in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's victory. One was Ralf Dahrendorf's statement that the twenty-first century might well become the ‘century of authoritarianism’.⁵ The other was Richard Rorty's book Achieving our Country, in which the author analyses the effects of globalization (and the role of the ‘cultural left’) and lists a whole series of possible retrograde steps. He refers in particular to the rise of ‘scurrilous demagogues’, the growth of social and economic inequality, the onset of ‘an Orwellian world’, a rebellion of the people who have been left behind, and a return of ‘sadism’, resentment and disparaging remarks about women and ethnic minorities.⁶

The collection containing Dahrendorf's essay appeared in 1998, thus at the high point of the first wave of reflection about globalization. If we glance at the books of those years, we come across further statements that can be read as commentaries on the events of 2016. The German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer warned against an ‘authoritarian capitalism’, ‘repressive state politics’ and ‘rabid right-wing populism’.⁷ Dani Rodrik prophesied that globalization would lead to ‘social disintegration’ and cautioned that a ‘protectionist backlash’ was not an unrealistic scenario.⁸

Many of the relevant assessments are based on something like a Polanyian mechanism of a Second Great Transformation. The Austro-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi showed in his classic work The Great Transformation, which appeared in 1944, how the capitalist industrial society of the nineteenth century emerged out of smaller, feudal, agrarian conditions – politically, culturally and institutionally integrated – into something that led to a series of side effects and counter-movements until the economy was embedded once again at the level of national welfare states.⁹ This phenomenon of both geographical and social expansion is repeating itself today at a moment when capitalism is leaving the boundaries of the nation-state behind it, and when, once again, it is accompanied by all sorts of side effects and counter-movements.¹⁰ We need think only of the founding of Attac in 1998, the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, and the first meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001 on the political left;¹¹ alternatively, of the first successes of anti-globalization populists on the political right: Pat Buchanan's surprisingly strong showing in the Republican primaries in 1996 (to which Rorty and Rodrik allude), or the success of Jörg Haider's FPÖ, which became the second-largest parliamentary party in Austria in the 1998 elections.

If we summarize the solutions put forward at the time, what was called for – echoing the movement described by Polanyi – was the re-embedding at the global level of an economy that had been let off the leash: by building transnational institutions, politics must be enabled to seek global solutions to global problems. Parallel to that, a corresponding mental attitude should emerge, a feeling of a cosmopolitan collective identity or ‘we-feeling’.¹²

The bitter irony of this is that in the following years all the risks of globalization that were discerned at the time actually became reality – international terrorism, climate change, financial and currency crises, and lastly, great movements of migrants – while politically no one was prepared for them. Subjectively, there is evidently an utter failure to establish a robust sense of a cosmopolitan collective identity. On the contrary, we are at present witnessing a resurgence of ethnic, national and religious us/them distinctions. The logic of a ‘clash of civilizations’ has replaced the friend/foe pattern of the Cold War with astonishing speed, despite the supposed ‘end of history’.

Against this background, after the expanding regression in late autumn 2015, the events that followed gradually combined to form a bleak panorama. These events included the conflict in Syria, the result of the Brexit referendum, the terrorist attack in Nice, the successes of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the attempted coup in Turkey and the political reactions to it, and, finally, Trump's victory.

Whereas others had previously spoken of the risks of globalization in general, many of the writers in this volume stress that we are faced with a neoliberal version of globalization, so that we might with equal justice speak of the risks of neoliberalism. In this sense, the contributions collected here can be read as attempts to explore the question of the many different ways in which neoliberal democracies live on the basis of preconditions that they cannot themselves guarantee – to vary a phrase of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde's.¹³ These preconditions include media that provide a certain plurality of opinions; intermediate bodies such as trade unions, parties or associations in which people can achieve something like agency; genuine left-wing parties that succeed in articulating the interests of different milieus; and an education system that is not reduced to the production of ‘human capital’ and learning PISA tasks by heart.

The Great Regression that we are witnessing currently may be the product of a collaboration between the risks of globalization and neoliberalism. The problems that have arisen from the failure of politicians to exercise some control over global interdependence are impinging on societies that are institutionally and culturally unprepared for them.

This book sets out to pick up the threads of the globalization debate of the 1990s and to take it forward. In it, scholars and public intellectuals respond to urgent questions: How have we ended up in this situation? Where will we be in five, ten or twenty years’ time? How can we stop the global regression and achieve a turnaround? In the face of an international league of nationalists the book attempts to create something like a transnational public sphere. The term ‘transnational’ here operates at three levels: first, that of the contributors; second, that of the phenomena under discussion; and third, that of distribution – the volume will appear simultaneously in several countries.

My thanks go first to the contributors for their willingness to take part in this venture and to produce substantial texts in a relatively short space of time. Thanks also to our international partner publishing houses for their belief in the project, and in particular to Mark Greif and John Thompson for their advice. This volume is also a project that would not have been possible without the assistance of my colleagues at Suhrkamp. A special word of thanks is due therefore to Edith Baller, Felix Dahm, Andrea Engel, Eva Gilmer, Petra Hardt, Christoph Hassenzahl, Christian Heilbronn, Nora Mercurio and Janika Rüter.

Berlin, December 2016

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Notes

1
Democracy fatigue

Arjun Appadurai

The central question of our times is whether we are witnessing the worldwide rejection of liberal democracy and its replacement by some sort of populist authoritarianism. Strong signs of this trend are to be found in Trump's America, Putin's Russia, Modi's India and Erdoğan's Turkey. In addition, we have numerous examples of already existing authoritarian governments (Orbán in Hungary, Duda in Poland) and major aspirants to authoritarian right-wing rule in France, Austria and other European Union countries. The total population of these countries is almost a third of the total population of the world. There has been growing alarm about this global shift to the right but we have relatively few good explanations for it. In this essay, I offer an explanation and a European approach to building an alternative.

Leaders and followers

We need to rethink the relationship between leaders and followers in the new populisms that surround us. Our traditional habits of analysis lead us to imagine that major social trends in the political sphere have to do with such things as charisma, propaganda, ideology and other factors, all of which presume a strong connection between leaders and followers. Today, leaders and followers do of course connect but this connection is based on an accidental and partial overlap between the ambitions, visions and strategies of leaders and the fears, wounds and angers of their followers. The leaders who have risen in the new populist movements are typically xenophobic, patriarchal and authoritarian in their styles. Their followers may share some of these tendencies but they are also fearful, angry, and resentful of what their societies have done for and to them. These profiles do of course meet, especially in elections (however rigged or managed they may be). But this meeting place is not easy to understand. Why did some Muslims in India and the United States vote for Modi and Trump? Why do some women in the United States adore Trump? Why do groups from the former German Democratic Republic now vote for right-wing politicians? Addressing these puzzles requires us to think about leaders and followers in the new populisms somewhat independently of one another.

The message from above

The new populist leaders recognize that they aspire to national leadership in an era in which national sovereignty is in crisis. The most striking symptom of this crisis of sovereignty is that no modern nation-state controls what could be called its national economy. This is equally a problem for the richest and poorest of nations. The US economy is substantially in Chinese hands, the Chinese depend crucially on raw materials from Africa and Latin America as well as other parts of Asia, everyone depends to some extent on Middle Eastern oil, and virtually all modern nation-states depend on sophisticated armaments from a small number of wealthy countries. Economic sovereignty, as a basis for national sovereignty, was always a dubious principle. Today, it is increasingly irrelevant.

In the absence of any national economy that modern states can claim to protect and develop, it is no surprise that there has been a worldwide tendency in effective states and in many aspiring populist movements to perform national sovereignty by turning towards cultural majoritarianism, ethno-nationalism and the stifling of internal intellectual and cultural dissent. In other words, the loss of economic sovereignty everywhere produces a shift towards emphasizing cultural sovereignty. This turn towards culture as the site of national sovereignty appears in many forms.

Take Russia in the hands of Vladimir Putin. In December 2014, Putin signed a decree setting up a state cultural policy for Russia centred on the maxim ‘Russia is not Europe’. Reflecting an explicit hostility to the cultural West and to European multiculturalism, which Putin has characterized as ‘neutered and barren’¹ – both loaded sexual expressions – it enlists Russian masculinity as a political force. This rhetoric is an explicit call to return to traditional Russian values and is anchored on a deep history of Slavophile sentiment and Russophile cultural politics. The immediate context for this document was the battle over the future of Ukraine, and it underlay the cancellation of concerts by Russian anti-Kremlin rock musician Andrey Makarevich, while reflecting the longer-term harassment of the musical group Pussy Riot. The policy calls for a ‘unified cultural space’ throughout Russia and makes it clear that Russian cultural uniqueness and uniformity are crucial tools to be used against cultural minorities at home and political enemies abroad.

Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also turned culture into a theatre of sovereignty. The main vehicle of his strategy is to advocate a return to Ottoman traditions, language forms and imperial grandeur (an ideology that his critics have dubbed ‘neo-Ottomanism’). This vision of Turkey also encodes its global ambitions, its resistance to Russian interventions in the Middle East, and acts as a counterweight to the country's aspiration to join the European Union. This neo-Ottoman posture is a key part of Erdoğan's endeavour to marginalize and replace the secular nationalism of Kemal Atatürk, the icon of modern Turkey, with a more religious and imperial style of rule. The country has also witnessed considerable censorship of art and cultural institutions alongside direct repression of popular political dissent, as in Gezi Park in 2013.

In many ways, Narendra Modi, the right-wing ideologue who now enjoys the prime ministership of India, offers the best example of how the new authoritarian leaders produce and maintain a populist strategy. Modi has a long career as a party worker and activist for the Hindu Right in India. He served as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, and was implicated in the state-wide genocide of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, after some Muslims attacked a train carrying Hindu pilgrims through the state. Many progressive Indians still believe that Modi actively orchestrated this genocide, but he has managed to overcome many judicial and civil condemnations and won the campaign to become prime minister of India in 2014. He is an open advocate of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) as the governing ideology of India and, like many of the current crop of authoritarian populists across the world, combines extreme cultural nationalism with markedly neoliberal policies and projects. Under his now almost three-year-old leadership, there has been an unprecedented number of assaults on sexual, religious, cultural and artistic freedoms in India, anchored in a systematic dismantling of the secular and socialist heritage of Jawaharlal Nehru and the non-violent vision of Mahatma Gandhi. Under Modi, war with Pakistan is always a heartbeat away, India's Muslims are living in growing fear, and Dalits (the lowest castes, previously ‘Untouchable’) are brazenly attacked and humiliated every day. Modi has brought together the lexicon of ethnic purity with the discourse of cleanliness and sanitation. Indian cultural images abroad, highlighting its combination of digital modernity and Hindu authenticity, and Hindu domination at home are the cornerstones of Indian sovereignty.

And so it is with our latest nightmare, the victory of Donald Trump in the US elections of 8 November 2016. This event is still very recent, so even hindsight is in poor supply. But Trump has already begun to act on his election plans with his cabinet appointments and policy utterances since his election. We cannot expect his victory to moderate his style. Trump's message, which combines misogyny, racism, xenophobia and megalomania on a scale unprecedented in recent history, is centred on two extreme messages, one implicit and one explicit. The explicit message is his aim to ‘Make America Great Again’, by beefing up foreign military options for the United States, renegotiating various trade deals that he believes have diminished American wealth and prestige, unshackling US businesses from various tax and environmental constraints, and, above all, by making good on his promises to ‘register’ all Muslims in the US, deport all illegals, tighten up American borders and massively increase immigration controls. The implicit message is racist and racial, and speaks to those white Americans who feel they have lost their imagined dominance in American politics and economy to blacks, Latinos and migrants of every type. Trump's biggest rhetorical success is to put the Greeks of ‘whiteness’ into the Trojan horse of every one of his messages about ‘American’ greatness, so that ‘making America great again’ becomes the public way of promising that whites in America will be great again. For the first time, a message about America's power in the world has become a dog-whistle for making whites the ruling class of and in the US again. The message about the salvation of the American economy has been transformed into a message about saving the white race.

This, then, is what the leaders of the new authoritarian populisms have in common: the recognition that none of them can truly control their national economies, which are hostages to foreign investors, global agreements, transnational finance, mobile labour and capital in general. All of them promise national cultural purification as a route to global political power. All of them are friendly to neoliberal capitalism, with their own versions of how to make it work for India, Turkey, the United States or Russia. All of them seek to translate soft power into hard power. And none of them has any reservations about repressing minorities and dissidents, stifling free speech or using the law to throttle their opponents.

This worldwide package is also visible in Europe, in Theresa May's UK, Victor Orbán's Hungary, Andrzej Duda's Poland, and in a host of increasingly vocal and ‘mainstream’ right-wing parties in virtually every other country. In Europe, the flashpoints for this trend are the fear of the latest wave of migrants, the anger about the various terrorist attacks in some of its major cities, and, of course, the shock of the Brexit vote. Thus populist authoritarian leaders and demagogues are to be found everywhere across the old continent, and they too operate with the same mix of neoliberalism, cultural chauvinism, anti-immigrant anger and majoritarian rage as the major models discussed in this essay.

This is one way to look at the leaders of the new authoritarian populisms and their appeals. What about the followers?

Vox populi

I suggested earlier that an explanation of the worldwide success of populist authoritarians should not assume that the followers simply endorse or replicate the beliefs of the leaders they seem to adore. There is, of course, a degree of overlap or compatibility between what these leaders decry or promise and what their followers believe or fear. But the overlap is partial, and the popular followings that have allowed Modi, Putin, Erdoğan and Trump, as well as May, Orbán and Duda in Europe, to achieve and retain power have their own worlds of belief, affect and motivation. To grasp something of what these worlds are like, I return to the famous ideas put forward by the political economist and philosopher Albert O. Hirschman in his brilliant book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.² Hirschman provides a powerful understanding of how human beings respond to a decline in products, organizations and states by either remaining loyal to them, leaving them or staying with them to protest the decline by ‘voicing’ opposition, resistance or complaints in the hope of repair or reform. The great originality of Hirschman's analysis was its linking of consumer behaviour to organizational and political behaviour, and his approach was a vital move in comprehending how long and in what circumstances ordinary people could tolerate disappointment with goods and services before they switched brands, membership of organizations, or countries. Published in 1970, Hirschman's book offered a deep insight into modern capitalist democracies before globalization began to undo the logic of national economies, local communities and place-based identities. It was also written before the rise of the internet and social media and thus could not have anticipated the nature of disappointment and protest in the world of the twenty-first century.

Still, Hirschman's ideas remind us that Brexit is above all about exit and that exit is always in some kind of relationship to loyalty and to voice. How can Hirschman's use of these terms help us today? I suggest that from the perspective of those mass followings that support Trump, Modi, Erdoğan and the other established or rising figures of authoritarian populism, the exit that far too many of them are today supporting is a form of voice, not an alternative to it. More concretely, Hirschman was right that elections were the major way in which citizens enacted voice and showed how disappointed or happy they were with their leaders. But elections today – and the recent US elections are an excellent example – have become a way to ‘exit’ from democracy itself, rather than a means to repair and debate politics democratically. The approximately sixty-two million Americans who voted for Trump voted for him and against democracy. In this sense their vote was a vote for ‘exit’. And so it was with the election of Modi, the election of Erdoğan and the pseudo-elections in favour of Putin.

In each of these cases, and in many of the populist pockets of Europe, there is a fatigue with democracy itself, a fatigue which forms the basis for the electoral success of leaders who promise to abrogate all the liberal, deliberative and inclusive components of their national versions of democracy. It might be objected that all populist leaders have thrived on this sort of frustration with democracy and have built their careers on it, going back to Stalin, Hitler, Peron and the many other leaders from the first half of the twentieth century who exploited the failures of the democracies of their times and places. So what is new about today's democracy fatigue?

There are three ways in which today's widespread feeling of being fed up with democracy itself has a distinctive logic and context. The first is that the extension of the internet and social media to growing sectors of the population and the availability of web-based mobilization, propaganda, identity-building and peer-seeking have created the dangerous illusion that we can all find peers, allies, friends, collaborators, converts and colleagues, whoever we are and whatever we want. The second is the fact that every single nation-state has lost ground in its efforts to maintain any semblance of economic sovereignty. The third factor is that the worldwide spread of the ideology of human rights has given some minimal purchase to strangers, foreigners and migrants in virtually every country in the world, even if they face a harsh welcome and severe conditions wherever they go. Together, these three factors have deepened the global intolerance for due process, deliberative rationality and political patience that democratic systems always require. When we add to these factors the worldwide deepening of economic inequality, the global erosion of social welfare, and the planetary penetration of financial industries that thrive on circulating the idea that we are all at risk of financial disaster, impatience with the slow temporalities of democracy is compounded by a constant climate of economic panic. The same populist leaders who promise prosperity for all often deliberately create this sort of panic. Narendra Modi's recent decision to root out ‘black money’ (untaxed cash wealth) from the Indian economy by taking 500 and 1,000 rupee currency notes out of circulation is an exemplary case of induced economic distress and financial panic. In today's India these currency notes are a vital part of everyday life for poor and middle-class workers, consumers and petty commercial operators, since they are worth about 7 and 14 euros respectively.

The new chapter being written in the worldwide story of authoritarian populism is thus founded on a partial overlap between the ambitions and promises of its leaders and the mentality of its followers. The leaders hate democracy because it is an obstacle to their monomaniacal pursuit of power. The followers are victims of democracy fatigue who see electoral politics as the best way to exit democracy itself. This hatred and this exhaustion find their natural common ground in the space of cultural sovereignty, enacted in scripts of racial victory for resentful majorities, national ethnic purity and global resurgence through the promises of soft power. This common cultural ground inevitably hides the deep contradictions between the neoliberal economic policies and well-documented crony capitalism of most of these authoritarian leaders and the genuine economic suffering and anxiety of the bulk of their mass followings. It is also the terrain of a new politics of exclusion, whose targets are either migrants or internal ethnic minorities or both. As long as jobs, pensions and incomes continue to shrink, minorities and migrants will continue to be obvious scapegoats until a persuasive political message emerges from left liberal voices about restructuring income, social welfare and public resources. To be realistic, this is not a short-term project, but it has to be a medium-term priority of the highest order. Here, since Europe is on the cutting edge, I conclude by returning to the old continent.

Where is Europe headed?

The first is that Brexit is only the most recent version of a long and recurrent debate about what Europe is and what it means. This debate is as old as the idea of Europe itself. The question of Europe's boundaries, identity and mission has never been resolved. Is Europe a project of Western Christendom? Is it the child of Roman law and empire? Or of Greek rationality and democratic values? Or of Renaissance humanism and secularism? Or of Enlightenment universalism and cosmopolitanism? These alternative images have struggled with one another for centuries and remain the subjects of deep division. They are images espoused by different classes, regions, states and intellectuals at different times, and none of them has ever been completely hegemonic. Neither has any of them moved out of the picture entirely. They have also coexisted with bloody internal wars, massive religious schisms, and brutal efforts to eliminate minorities, strangers, heretics and political dissidents. This combination of factors continues to be relevant today.

European liberal democracy is on the verge of a dangerous crisis. Democracy fatigue has arrived in Europe, and is visible from Sweden to Italy and from France to Hungary. In Europe too, elections are becoming ways to say ‘no’ to liberal democracy. In this scenario, Germany is at a major and risky crossroads. It can use its remarkable wealth, economic stability and historical self-consciousness to hold up the ideals of the European Union, to offer a welcome to refugees from Africa and the Middle East, to pursue peaceful solutions to global political crises, and to use the power of the euro to expand the scope of equality both within its borders and in Europe more generally. Or it can also exit, close its borders, hoard its wealth and let the rest of Europe (and the world) solve its own problems. The latter may be the message from the German right, but it would be a foolish option. Global interdependence is here to stay and German wealth is as dependent on the global economy as anyone else's. The ‘exit’ solution would not be good for Germany. It has no choice but to push for a democratic Europe, and a democratic Europe is a vital resource in the worldwide struggle against authoritarian populism.