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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Increasingly, many people in democracies are turning to a strongarm politics for reassurance against globalization, uncertainty and precarity. In countries ranging from the US and the UK to Brazil, India and Turkey, support has grown for a nativist politics attacking migrants, minorities, liberals and elites as enemies of the nation. Is there a politics of belonging that progressive forces could mobilize to counteract these trends?
After Nativism takes up this question, arguing that disarming nativism will require more than improving the security and wellbeing of the ‘left-behind’. The lines drawn by nativism are of an affective nature about imagined community, with meanings of belonging and voice lying at the heart of popular perceptions of just dues. This, argues Ash Amin, is the territory that progressive forces – liberal, social democratic, socialist – need to reclaim in order to shift public sentiment away from xenophobic intolerance towards one of commonality amid difference as a basis for facing existential risk and uncertainty. The book proposes a relational politics of belonging premised on the encounter, fugitive aesthetics, public interest politics, collaboration over common existential threats, and daily collectives and infrastructures of wellbeing. There is ground for progressives to mount a counter-aesthetics of belonging that will convince the discontents of neoliberal globalization that there is a better alternative to nativism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Grounds of Belonging
Introduction
Lived Identities, Imagined Community
People’s Nation, Civic Nation
Conclusion
2. Street Affinities
Introduction
Embodied Affliction, Contiguous Affinity
Choreographies of Forbearance
Abjection, Flight, Organized Care
Situated Affordances
Conclusion
3. The Intimate Public Sphere
Introduction
Thinking the Public Sphere
Digital Unruliness
Public Truths and Trust in Expertise
Conclusion: In the Public Interest
4. Aesthetics of Nation
Introduction
Romantic and Civic Nationalism
Aesthetics of Breach
Conclusion
Coda
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Coda
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
To Usha, Sam and IslaFor the light you shine
After Nativism
Belonging in an Age of Intolerance
Ash Amin
polity
Copyright © Ash Amin 2023
The right of Ash Amin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5732-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number 2023931316
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.
However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This book has been written under the dark shadow of Covid-19. I started to write it in March 2020, shortly after returning from the field in Delhi. There followed many months of isolation in my cubbyhole at home, trying to grapple with ways of getting past the corrosions of nativist nationalism without losing my findings on the lives of slumdwellers and the homeless in Delhi. Thinking in isolation for so long was not easy, but I was helped by the opportunity to escape to Uppsala for three months in Summer 2021, and to Naples and Turin for five weeks in Spring 2022. I am enormously grateful to the Swedish Research Council for awarding me the 2021 Olof Palme Visiting Chair, which took me to Uppsala University, where my host Anders Ekström created the perfect environment for me to continue writing the book amid many stimulating conversations with him and his partner Marika Hedin, and at a seminar hosted by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. For the Italian escape, I thank Giovanni Laino and Enrica Morlicchio for bringing me back to Naples, the city I love for its many inventions against aversion, and I thank Michele Lancione and Francesca Governa for gathering a stimulating body of young scholars in Turin to interrogate my ideas on the affordances of place. These ideas were greatly influenced by my month in Delhi just before lockdown examining the dwelling practices of the poor and their effects on subjectivity and sociality. Without the guidance of Maan Barua, Shaunak Sen and Gufran Alam, this inquiry would have faltered and I could not have hoped for a better assistant in the field than Gunjesh Kumar.
The writing was not always lonely and bewildering. I have benefited hugely from comments on parts of the book from Anders Ekström, Nigel Thrift, Michele Lancione, Maan Barua, Gunjesh Kumar, Colin McFarlane, Ravi Sundaram, Peter Phillimore, Veena Das, Tim Gardam, Patrick Wright, Isabel Airas, Maria Hagan and Philip Lewis. I am grateful to them all, as I am to attentive audiences at online and offline presentations in Naples, Turin, Rotterdam, Delhi, Uppsala, Stockholm, Tromsø and Cambridge. Two anonymous readers selected by Polity Press read the whole draft, one of whose stiff comments prompted me to rewrite the whole book after gentle but stern persuasion from John Thompson to offer a clear and original argument. I cannot judge if I have succeeded, but the criticisms and suggestions were invaluable. Finally, someone stuck with me during the isolation forced by the pandemic has been my partner Lynne Brown, who has had to suffer more than her fair share of doubts, irritability and absent presence. She has done so with patience and encouragement and my gratitude to her is immeasurable. There can be no denying, however, that the weight of the pandemic and the terrible times we live in has been hard to bear. This book offers a glimpse of how things could be different.
Introduction
What credible narrative and aesthetic of belonging could progressive forces mobilize to counteract today’s sways of strongarm nationalism preying on popular animosities of secession and aversion? That is the question addressed in this book. Populations in the old and recent liberal democracies are turning in large numbers to a politics of native nation for reassurance against precarity, uncertainty and displacement. Think alone of developments in the last decade in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Poland, Hungary, France, Italy and Turkey, where across their differences in secular or religious nativist drift, a consensus has grown deriding elites, migrants, minorities, liberals, experts, professionals and cosmopolitans as the enemies of the nation. These figures are openly attacked on the street and in media and political life for corrupting the democratic process, sacrificing the national economy, destroying national cultural identity and social cohesion, and betraying the interests of a historic peoples. The developments are dangerous and punitive, with strong echoes of the animosities that culminated in the victories of fascism and Nazism in the early twentieth century. Today’s discontents see the figures of suspicion as protagonists of a defunct liberal order that should be replaced by an illiberal one entrusted to a strong leadership ready to suppress dissent and constitutional legacies, tighten the boundaries of the nation, promote indigenous interests and communicate directly with the people. Across the countries named above, this leadership has got stronger and more organized, carried into government by the votes of hundreds of millions of people, or circling close to the corridors of power and influence.
In the ballot box and public opinion, the givens of liberal democracy are being tested by a politics of authoritarian nativism with its own affective and institutional machinery. As Jan Willem Duyvendak and Josip Kešić (2022) argue, liberal ideas are falling silent or themselves veering towards a discourse of deserving citizens and undeserving subjects in order to claim the ground of nativist populism. The slim victories of social democratic parties have the ring of liberalism surviving by virtue of just enough electoral fear of the consequences of xenophobic nationalism, not conviction in the plural, open and democratic society as the site of prosperity, wellbeing and security. It is ironic that the steady ascendancy of progressive attitudes over the decades recorded by social surveys, especially among younger and urban populations, towards consumerism, nature conservation, and sexual, cultural and personal liberty, is no proxy of popular conviction in liberal democracy as a political necessity and staple of national belonging. Perhaps this is because of a mounting perception that liberal democracy has betrayed the material interests, sense of place and voice of ‘ordinary’ citizens. But it is also because the progressive mainstream – liberal or social democratic – has lost its voice and verve, pushed by nativist populism towards a drawbridge politics of selective welfare, populist appeasement and border closure to secure its electoral survival. It has not responded by developing a clear and compelling narrative of the good society premised on the reciprocities of cosmopolitan engagement, generalized wellbeing and democratic expansion. It has not laid out an imaginary of what it means to belong beyond the strictures of closed national and historical community. In the gap, nativism has managed to insert nationalism and old-country traditions into the heart of popular understanding of the good society, untroubled by another counternarrative of belonging. It has made capital out of ‘democracy fatigue’ (Appadurai, 2019).
This book argues that disarming nativism will require more than assuring the material and existential security of the left-behind disenchanted with liberal democracy. The regeneration of distressed neighbourhoods, cities and regions, the fairer allocation of decent, secure and well-paid employment, the reduction of wealth, ownership and access disparities, and the removal of multiple deprivations faced by the disadvantaged through composites of welfare support covering basic income, educational, health, service and shelter needs, are all important elements of a political economy of social and spatial justice needed to dampen the discontentment feeding nativism. While recognizing the necessity of such a politics of social equity, this book’s primary argument is that the lines of the future drawn by nativism are of an affective nature about imagined community, with questions of belonging and voice lying at the heart of popular perceptions of just dues. This is evident in the strained democracies in battles of identity appearing at the centre of putting America or the UK ‘first’ since the Trump years and the Brexit referendum, in Hungarian and Polish responses to the EU and liberalism discussed as matters of national autonomy and cultural heritage, and in debate in India on the country’s prosperity and security posed in terms of the choice between Hindu nationalism and secular pluralism. Public senses of wellbeing have become closely intertwined with sentiments of imagined community, exactly in the ways theorized by Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Mark Billig for resurgences of nationalism in earlier times.
This is the territory that progressive forces – liberal, social democratic, socialist – need to reclaim so as to shift public sentiment away from xenophobic intolerance amid scarcity towards one of convivial coexistence and common effort amid shared risk and uncertainty, from which new understandings of belonging might settle. Building on relational ideas of belonging premised on the encounter (e.g. in the writings of Judith Butler and Marilyn Strathern) the book argues that progressives should develop a political imaginary of belonging projected from the ground of everyday negotiations of difference. A clear – and credible – alternative to defining community as the closed indigenous nation would be to press for a relational definition premised on the reality in modern nations of multiple and shifting geographies of encounter and affiliation (rather than to turn to benign forms of civic patriotism as anti-nationalist parties have tried, largely unsuccessfully). These geographies, for most people and places in the liberal democracies, turn out to be transnational, plural and evolving, as well as lived negotiations of distance and difference and not just of proximity and sameness stemming from long global histories of colonization, migration, travel, communication and consumption. A sense of nation – it is suggested – could be fostered from these geographies by recognizing constitutive plurality and difference and projecting community as the challenge of building a shared sense of place, common purpose and collaborative encounter amid the pluralities of belonging. There are many cultural crossings of the everyday that could be foregrounded as the measure of community and its cohesion, against nationalist mythologies of the homogeneous and autarchic nation. This is the first of three lines of argument in the book for a new politics of belonging.
The second relates to finding ways in the public sphere for ‘common practice with others’, to cite Isabelle Stengers (2015a), so that the trend facilitated by the digital media of vocalization in public from all social and spatial quarters can be harnessed for collective ends. Nativism, with its derision of experts, elites, professional politicians and bureaucracies, thrives on the fiction of direct communion between the people and their advocates; one sustained by a vastly expanded public sphere whose digital platforms inflate small communities and fringe concerns, amplify parallel worlds of opinion to the detriment of cross-dialogue and the general interest, and leave communities feeling connected, empowered and politically significant. Because it is unruly and fragmented, the public sphere does not – nor can it – exist as the arena in which democracy is enhanced through open and vigorous debate and healthy checks between delegated institutions and a civically minded citizenry, as envisaged by its pioneers such as Walter Lippmann, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Chantal Mouffe. Yet it remains all powerful and influential, key to political outcomes in the expressive society, and an important site of belonging based on the multitude of claims and attachments coursing through it. The book suggests that a progressive politics of belonging could seek to reinforce a neglected dimension of the modern public sphere, which Anders Ekström (2021) describes as its legacy of publicness oriented towards the common interest. Backed by strident reforms to curb the power and influence of platform providers as well as to outlaw violent and hateful speech, the public sphere could be rebuilt as a meeting place where multiple forms of expertise and intelligence – professional and lay, expert and experiential – come together to address matters of common concern. The collaborations struck between professionals, communities, experts and decision makers during the Covid-19 pandemic are a good example of such publicness, as are experiments of living with or mitigating the climate crisis through collaborations across spatial and epistemic boundaries. A culture of publicness building as a form of belonging would begin to neutralize the war of small worlds and corruptions of democratic debate typical of the digital public sphere of centrifugal animosities.
The book’s third line of argument, following writing on how popular sentiments of belonging form in enactments of myths of nation, is to urge progressives to build an aesthetics of imagined community from the cultural conciliations of lived experience. Nativism’s strength derives from its raw imagery of good insiders and bad outsiders, homely pasts and scary futures, secure traditions and disruptive invasions giving affective expression and energy to the misgivings of populations feeling entitled but betrayed. Its resurgence in the liberal and illiberal democracies has been greatly facilitated by a powerful archive of sounds and images of homely nation, proud tradition, secure borders and sovereign citizens. Nativism’s opponents find themselves on the back foot, unable to muster popular support for a counteraesthetics of belonging celebrating individual rights, democracy and the law, modernity and cosmopolitanism, or varieties of civic or moral patriotism. Sceptical of the chances of such an aesthetics of nation, the book proposes a more organic and syncretic aesthetics composed of arts publicizing the ongoing history of border crossings of all kinds making life and community. It suggests that anti-nativists should work at making visible and enchanting the archive of affirmative practices of coexistence, past and present, that expose the flimsiness of an aesthetics of national purity and isolation. Pursued as a dissident aesthetics for a new kind of society in exactly the same way as the nativist cause has successfully presented its mission, they could turn to diverse art forms to give form to the many practices of convivial coexistence, fugitive cohabitation and compassionate susceptibility that can be found among strangers, to the provisions of the shared infrastructural, natural and social commons that enable collective survival, and to the chains of formative connection across national, social and ecological boundaries whose severance weakens the human stock wherever located. Importantly, like past times of radical cause such as the nascent feminist, anti-colonial and labour movements with their distinctive iconography, progressives could develop a political aesthetic intended to move hearts and minds, moving on from tired repetition of the nostra of liberal or social democracy. Scanning our times, there are lessons to be learnt from the world environmental campaign’s efforts to mount a media aesthetic that has proved highly effective in altering public opinion and sentiment. In this third argument for a new politics of belonging, the book makes no pretence of subalterns vanquishing hegemons, only the assumption that as public feeling grows for the myriad forms of coexistence and kinship within and between the species, nativist imagery of secessionist indigeneity will make less and less sense to people.
The book is organized into four chapters. The first chapter opens with a pen portrait of nativist developments across the old and new democracies. The aim is not to compare the varieties of strongarm nationalism, nor to provide anything like a comprehensive coverage, but to exemplify their commonalities of imagined nation and the threat posed by them to the legacy of liberal nation. The main body of the chapter sets out a counter-narrative of belonging for progressive movements to pursue based on making more of everyday negotiations of difference in urban neighbourhoods that contradict nativist fictions of conflict, and mobilizing a discourse of imagined nation as confluence of multiple relational geographies, opportunity of contiguous diversity and difference, and commons of civic engagement. While of such a cultural politics of belonging, the chapter accepts that any weakening of popular support for nativism also requires a political economy committed to generalized wellbeing and reduced inequality, the traces of which are provided in the conclusion of the book.
The second chapter, building on urban negotiations of difference and commonality portrayed in chapter 1, turns to the challenges of belonging posed by conditions of poverty, rudimentary infrastructures and a divisive biopolitical environment. Drawing on field evidence in an informal settlement and among the homeless in Delhi, the chapter examines subject positions and social relations challenged by harsh material circumstances making for resentment and abjection, overshadowed by a divisive Hindu nationalist politics pitting citizens against each other through clamorous declarations of the values, traditions and subjects that count and those that do not, such as secularism, cultural mixture, the inactive and Muslims. The chapter shows how cutting across these circumstances there are important mediations of place – ecological, infrastructural and institutional – that intervene in shaping the wellbeing and sense of belonging of the poor. These include fragile bridges of welfare and mutuality formed amid marginality through neighbourly exchanges, emergent infrastructures and services, shared place attachments and accommodations of spatial density. Such mediations, evident in the informal settlement in South Delhi, are absent in the inhospitable open spaces of Old Delhi where the homeless camp out, their fortunes and outlooks shielded from national conjugations of imagined community only through the protections offered by a stretched network of charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The third chapter takes up the politics of voice at the heart of nativist complaint about the elitist exclusions of liberal democracy leaving majorities feeling like strangers in their own land. While one obvious option for progressive forces is to make the people’s voice the gauge of a functioning polity by strengthening direct and participatory democracy, ensuring greater political transparency and accountability, and working to decentre power to multi-stakeholder regional assemblies, the chapter chooses to focus on the (digital) public sphere, because of its enormous contemporary significance as an arena of popular participation and site of nativist mobilization. It sees the public sphere as pivotal to perceptions of imagined community and as tightly woven into the political arena. The chapter sets out its case and steps for strengthening in the public sphere dispositions of publicness, shared interest and care for the commons, after discussing the difficulties of harnessing the principles of rational or agonistic deliberation, and the possibilities for regulating its digital platforms and infrastructures against malfeasance. While the case for a politics of publicness is made without any assumptions of guaranteeing the progressive cause, it is considered essential for strengthening a culture of collective orientation in a public sphere that has become powerful and ubiquitous.
The fourth chapter lays out its argument for a new aesthetics of imagined community. It summarizes the visual and sentimental biases working in favour of a politics of nation premised on the return of a golden age of proud indigeneity, and explains why an existing counter-aesthetic of republican, cosmopolitan or civic nation will not succeed in matching the power of the nativist aesthetic. It outlines another course giving expressive form and rhetorical energy to the long archive of everyday border crossings, distant connections and collective orientations that make identities but remain neglected in narratives of nation. The case is made for a minor aesthetics of belonging that makes visible relational connections in the undergrowth of cultural life, in the process weakening the hold of nativist myths of imagined community and giving aesthetic momentum to the realities of plural nation.
In a short conclusion, the book looks past its proposed narrative of belonging premised on the relation, to a political economy of managed markets, welfare equality and social inclusion able to underwrite the lives and livelihoods of the left-behind in ways that temper aversion and resentment. Here the book joins progressive arguments pressing for meaningful interventions to ensure welfare parity, equality of opportunity and economic redistribution, stop the spread of falsehoods, hate and harm, counteract easy scapegoating and unfounded claims, democratize and decentralize political and economic power and place professional and lay expertise and intelligence in collaborative dialogue. Its distinctiveness, however, lies in propositions of belonging able to rework public understanding of imagined community, social coexistence and public encounter, exposing claims of foreign contamination, lost sovereignty and cultural dilution as the hype of shadowy forces advancing their own interests at the expense of the democratic and convivial. The propositions are not offered from an empty ground but from interactions that already exist in the prosaic doings of infrastructures and services, collective welfare programmes, neighbourhood and municipal initiatives, encounters in public space, existential affinities with unknown others, including nonhumans, and countless collaborations in schools, workplaces, places of worship, clubs and associations. In presenting community as a yet to be made boundary crossing with others to collectively face an uncertain future, the book’s aim is to dislodge the staging of nation as identity drama.
If the book reads as a polemic, it is to encourage a new politics of imagined community able to channel the social furies and displacements of our times away from nativist regressions riddled with animosity towards the plural and open society. In the absence of a clear and compelling counter-aesthetic of nation, many of the struggles of class, gender, sexual, racial and post-colonial freedom and equity won over the last half century risk being eroded, left without affective momentum and ideational unity, anachronized by the drumbeat of nativist nationalism. This is already happening, evident in popular endorsement of nativist dismissal of the achievements of liberal and social democracy as disunifying and counter-progressive, against the strong and proud nation. So, the book’s polemical tone arises from an acute sense of urgency to safeguard hard-won protections of social justice, cultural freedom and political inclusion. In laying out new terms of belonging, however, the book stops short of discussing their delivery, not only because of important differences of nativist and progressive confrontation and organization in the democracies under strain, but also because it is hard to identify the prime movers given widespread official liberal and social democratic silence towards the cultural politics of nativism. Echoing Rebecca Solnit’s argument (2021) that hope amid alarming political neglect to tackle the climate emergency may lie in the ability of people around the world as demanding citizens and organizers of counter-experiments to force the official centres of power to act, an imaginary of belonging based on tangible relational practices and affects may play its part in waking up the stupefied centres of politics.
1Grounds of Belonging
Introduction
This is not a safe time to be a secular liberal or foreigner in many European countries, and for that matter, in other democracies such as the US, Turkey, India and Brazil, upended by nativist nationalism. After enduring long periods of austerity, rising inequality and welfare austerity, majorities in the old and new democracies are sensing a moving cast of subjects as the enemies of the nation, a threat to collective wellbeing, identity and autonomy. Persuaded by swashbuckling nativists such as Trump, Orbán, Erdoğan, Meloni, Le Pen and Bolsonaro to be the deserving ‘somewheres’ whose future has been stolen by deracinated ‘anywheres’, majorities feeling left behind are seeking salvation in the return of the homely and indigenous nation protected by the autarchic state. They have been convinced by nationalists that the removal of the discrepant is required to preserve self and community, its meaning kept conveniently malleable to include immigration, cultural pluralism, international federation, liberalism, experts, elites and even germs as the true sources of national problems such as poverty and inequality, social and regional division, cultural disunity and political weakness. The simple repetition of the associations seems to suffice as proof, straight out of the playbook of past ethno-nationalist attacks on particular subjects and cultural orientations. Like them, nativists and their publics find themselves busily justifying the ‘unpleasantness’ of xenophobia, border controls and identity checks as an imperative of national salvation returning sovereignty to a neglected people. By sleight of hand many unsubstantiated connections are being made, with devastating consequences for those identified as threats, from migrants and minorities to liberals and cosmopolitans.
This story of recovered sovereignty is proving popular to disgruntled citizens because it promises a political settlement working directly for the ‘people’, cleared – in some understandings – of the impediments of liberal democracy, including the parliamentary process, an independent judiciary, a critical press and free debate. It offers the charm of a popular democracy of direct communion between a historical population and a post-political cadre of rough, tough, charismatic individuals fired by patriotic fervour. The bitter irony is that in the name of popular democracy is proposed a demagoguery tearing into representative politics, legal and expert authority and democratic discussion, and into a raft of subjects and citizens tarnished as threats and misfits. It is true that the tonalities and intensities of nativist nationalism in Europe and beyond are far from uniform. Its reach into the political life of different countries is varied, as is the strength of its commitment to illiberalism and its incorporation into government. But it is disturbingly uniform in its aversion to migrants, refugees and minorities, with public and political discourse in the democracies obsessing about migration numbers, the motives and rights of refugees and the loyalties of migrants and minorities, quick to declare limits to national carrying capacity and the mixture of identities and cultures. It is uniform in its nostalgia for a mighty and mythic past free of non-indigenous peoples and traditions, and its contempt for the modern in its various guises, including science and expertise, liberal and deliberative democracy, legal, constitutional and bureaucratic conventions, the educated, professional and cosmopolitan sections of society, and elites, financiers and ‘big business’ accused of siphoning off riches and opportunities. It is uniform in its commitment to a politics of wild fabrications, moral outrage and violence towards those people and precepts that stand in the way of strongarm nationalism, its shock troops ready to tear down the ways of liberal democracy.
These are some of the common threads between otherwise distinctive forms of nationalist rebirth with their particular grievances, declared enemies and invocations of lost legacies of greatness. In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s populist momentum preyed on anger against a past of metropolitan bias, slum and countryside poverty, socialist leanings and government and industrial corruption, while Trump’s megaphone of Making America Great Again finds ears among the disenchanted working classes, upcountry evangelists and old settlers told to have been betrayed by open borders, the liberal establishment and the erosion of White power. In Poland and Hungary, the far right, firmly ensconced in government, makes a virtue of illiberal democracy, quick to impose curbs on free speech, the law and constitutional freedoms won after the collapse of state socialism, endorsed by a hard-done-by population promised the greatness and security of past times of resistance against the invasions of conquerors, communists, non-Christians and market modernizers. In a spectacular reversal of India’s post-independence commitment to secular democracy and the plural nation, the Modi government and its Hindu nationalist cadres, spread in every nook of the state apparatus, public sphere and civil society, have shifted popular understanding of belonging as a battle between rightful Hindus and wronging Muslims, the deserving poor and usurping elites and intellectuals, and precolonial wisdoms and Western corruptions. The turnaround has won the support of hundreds of millions of Hindu slumdwellers, rural poor, manual workers, urban middle classes and businesses seeing new opportunities in the cleansed nation. In France, the republican nationalism of Le Pen has gradually grown into a nationwide movement supported by a substantial proportion of the electorate demanding immigration controls, freedom from the EU, a better deal for the white working class and derecognition of Islam and France’s Muslim heritage. The aggressive nationalism of Salvini and Meloni in Italy is no different, expect perhaps in its more veiled defence of republicanism to appease the Catholic population and in its recourse to a fiction of national greatness anticipated by Mussolini’s fascists. In the UK, the nativism unlocked by the Brexit referendum is driven by an English nationalism feeding on colonial fantasies of grandeur, island isolationism and disenchantment among many communities left behind by exclusions of work, welfare, income and voice in recent decades, interpreted by the Right as the product of the unregulated economy, EU membership, immigration and elite power.
These nativist campaigns draw on distinctive histories of grievance and redemption, yet after their growing collaborations and shared international platforms (Shroufi, 2015), their rants against liberal democracy and the open society and their versions of strongarm nationalism and popular sovereignty increasingly look the same. They project the same image of the sequestered and cohesive nation and they share an oiled machinery of hate and nostalgia to build popular momentum behind their cause (Mishra, 2017). They act as though behind them blow the winds of change through democracies troubled by globalization, austerity and inequality. Into this century, they have secured considerable electoral success and traction in popular political culture, unruffled by moments of electoral defeat, whether Le Pen’s in France, Trump’s in the US or Bolsonaro’s in Brazil. Echoing past campaigns turning mass disaffection into hope through loose and caustic associations, aggrieved majorities are seeing nativism as the bearer of prosperity and wellbeing, casting social democracy, liberalism and cosmopolitanism as the sources of social misery and national decline (Connolly, 2017; Hochschild, 2018). In or out of power, nativist nationalism has found its momentum, telling people who believe themselves to be hard-done-by indigenes that their identity and sovereignty has been stolen by migrants, minorities and cosmopolitans, in enacting a national drama staging majorities as victims and these others as perpetrators and then promising unity and stability through the bonds of tradition, cultural homogeneity and homeland welfare. It has returned the politics of imagined community to the centre of national conversations on almost everything, ranging from questions of identity, cohesion and belonging, to those relating to the political economy of prosperity and security, and the character of state sovereignty and the democratic society. The tones of national identity have become the passing point of public discussion on the big matters of statehood, citizenship and wellbeing.
In this discussion, noticeably absent has been the offer of a counter-narrative of belonging that offers compelling reasons to protect the open, deliberative and cosmopolitan society, or indeed, any other alternative to the nativist imaginary of nation. Blinded by the thymotic rage and wild claims of nativism, paralysed by the surge of popular support for it, and reticent to enter a public discussion of national identity so dominated by ethno-nationalists, progressives have tended to shy away from this terrain. Their reaction to the predicaments of the left-behind and disaffected, and to the drumbeat of homeland protectionism and cultural preservation, has been to look to take the sting out of nationalism by improving the material circumstances of communities drawn to it. They have tended to turn to a politics of social inclusion and national cohesion based on public investment and community empowerment programmes, improved income and welfare support for those less well-off and at a disadvantage, and redistributive measures of various kinds to reduce inequality (without addressing its causes in the free reign of markets, as suggested later in this chapter), while muttering in their collar about the positives of patriotism and keeping quiet about the benefits of multiculturalism and internationalism. There has been little effort to mount a strong counter-culture of belonging and sovereignty to nativism. For example, in the name of a fairer and more equitable society, the British Labour Party produced an election manifesto in 2019 replete with interventions to step up public ownership, regulate the economy, redistribute wealth, reduce regional and social inequality and maintain international connections, but left the electorate none the wiser about the vision of the good life on offer. Perhaps the Party was too scared to broach the delicate question of imagined community in a turbocharged Brexit environment and, indeed, a tide of English nationalism swept the Conservatives into power once more.
