The Destabilization of the West
Right wing populist waves continue over immigration concerns. Western leaders face growing ideological shift in response to their policies.
It is no secret that ever since 2016, a wave of right wing populism has swept across the western world. Donald Trump’s election in the United States and the Brexit vote in the UK were only the beginning. Over the period between 2016-present, right wing populist groups have acquired a larger portion of the the electorate’s support in polls and elections all across western nations, including Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Poland, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Greece etc. This rise in populist ideology has been tracked by Pew Research and underlines a dramatic shift in a region that has been fundamentally predicated on the social and political values of liberalism for centuries.
The shift constitutes an undermining of the Western liberal international order. This collection of national populist movements is fundamentally recognized as an anti-globalist movement.
Over the pat 30 years, the policies of globalism have resulted in the proliferation of the EU, along with economic, military, and political cooperation between Europe and the Americas. Additionally, the expansion of NATO in order to establish a zone of peace across Europe was a valiant goal, which succeeded for a decades, up until NATO expansion to Ukraine provoked Russia to invade and end the era of peace. For the most part, western diplomacy benefited from this period of globalism as well. However, by attempting to holistically align the economic and political approach of the West through multilateral cooperation, western nations lost sight of their own citizens’ views, across a range of domestic issues.
The unipolar era from the 1990s to the latter 2010s saw an acceleration of neoliberal trade policies, including the liberalization of markets, a rollback of social protections, and the dissolution of manufacturing in the West, all in the pursuit of economic growth. This combination of growth strategies left large swaths of the electorate economically insecure and vulnerable. Right wing populists like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage stepped in and offered protectionism, strict immigration policies, and various other forms of national autonomy.
After an intense migrant crisis in the West during the early 2010s, brought about by the Arab Spring, as well as continued policies of globalism leaving Western citizens to feel disenfranchised, these right wing populist candidates quickly gained popularity. Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon from the London School of Economics’ prestigious Lloyd George Study Group on Global Governance have shown that “Western voters’ support for trade liberalization and multilateral cooperation has fallen by nearly half since the end of the Cold War”. They outline how the failure of Western governments to provide the domestic social protection that their citizens desired has resulted in a public backlash and consequentially an ideological shift amongst voters.
Immigration concerns in Ireland
Ireland, for example, experienced unprecedented riots in November, after an attack on schoolchildren by an Algerian immigrant triggered mass protests in the Irish capital. This kind of social unrest typically manifests after a bubbling up of discontent and rage amongst citizens, in this case, against the country’s immigration policy. Naturally, the fear that anti-immigrant rhetoric is couched in racist, xenophobic, or prejudiced sentiments will always persist; and it’s essential that such an approach to immigration discourse is consistently condemned. There is also no doubting that a “far-right faction”, as the Garda (Police) commissioner stated the night of the riots, contributed to the outbreak of violence and vandalism in the city. These are obviously concerns for social harmony in the country which need to be addressed.
Nonetheless, many protesters who are moderate in their views, oppose the Irish immigration policy. The number of refugees housed by the state skyrocketed from 7,500 in 2021 to 73,000 in 2022, a tenfold increase. Given that this increase occurred against the backdrop of an unprecedented housing crisis and inefficient public services, criticisms of the government’s policy have been mounting. The government has done little to appease critics of their immigration policy. Rather than addressing the moderate immigration critics and condemning the radical anti-immigrant discourse, it seems that most criticisms of the immigration policy i.e. those expressed by citizens during the Dublin riots and the protests leading up to it, are being equated with the views of the “far-right faction”. This has been the case in domestic and international media publications, leading to an Irish government crack down on “hate speech” and an obfuscation of moderate immigration criticism. A new piece of censorship legislation has been passed, the dangers of which may be overblown by some free speech defenders, but which is nonetheless an unprecedented limitation on free speech in a nation whose modern identity was built on dissent and pushback against tyranny and oppression.
Under the new law Irish citizens could face fines and jailtime for possession of literature that is “likely to incite violence or hatred” against others on the grounds of identity characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation. Even if the purpose of this new bill was admirable, simply intending to deter prejudice and hateful behavior, it does not address the protesters’ immigration concerns. Instead it seems to demonize and persecute their position further.
This response exemplifies the exact kind of dismissive approach to citizens’ concerns that lights the flame of right wing populist ideology, as outlined by the Lloyd George Study Group on Global Governance. How can Western nations quell this right wing populist shift of seismic proportions, when they are fanning the flames of right wing ideologies by implementing more restrictive and oppressive measures to curtail dissenting voices? It’s like a slow motion car crash where Western leaders can’t get out of their own way, driving moderate citizens to more extreme viewpoints by endorsing policies that don’t benefit their populous, then censoring those that protest or express dissent. The government could easily condemn far right sentiments while addressing the mass influx of migrants more pragmatically; but they seem to be avoiding meaningful policy reform by branding critics as radical, instead of engaging with their concerns substantively.
Immigration Concerns and Anti-Globalist Movements
A key component of this right wing populist pendulum swing has to do with the immigration policies of western nations. In the past decade or so since 2011, the West has had millions of migrants reach European and American shores fleeing famine, war, and persecution due to a multitude of geopolitical conflagrations. These include the Arab Spring, the Syrian war, and now the Ukraine war. Depending on the increasing humanitarian crisis in Gaza more refugees may seek asylum in Western nations still.
In an ideal world, Western nations would have enough housing, welfare subsidies, and employment opportunities to take every last refugee on earth and provide them with an opportunity to live a prosperous life. Unfortunately, there is a limit to how many migrants a country can take in, particularly over a short period of time. Most nations struggle to find housing and provide welfare subsidies to their own citizens, let alone a newly arrived batch of 300,000 migrants, like Germany took in in 2016. This is essentially the crux of the immigration debate, what is that limit? Western governments will now need to come up with coherent and bipartisan immigration polices before US, UK, and EU voters head to the polls for key 2024 elections. French president, Emmanuel Macron will finally have to abandon the centrist position he has been claiming to hold since his 2017 election, and address the growing immigration concerns of his citizens. The failure to ratify Macron’s proposed immigration bill in December 2023 highlights the polarization amongst the National Assembly in France.
The election of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands was certainly linked to his anti-immigration rhetoric, ringing yet another alarm bell of this ideological shift in Europe amongst demographics that have traditionally been left of center. The Netherlands has long been a bastion of progressive ideology which makes their rightwing shift a particularly cautionary tale.
The only way to reach a resolution on polarizing issues like immigration is to orient ourselves as individuals and social groups towards meditative discourse. To achieve this, we must maintain healthy political discourse, based on intuitive and authentic understandings of each side of the debate. The political discourse of immigration however has been heading in the opposite direction for a long time.
Immigration discourse
When discussing the Overton window, which refers to the range of acceptable views on a particular subject during a particular era, it is uncontroversial to recognize that immigration discourse has shifted dramatically in the 21st century. A better way to analyze what are acceptable positions on moral or political issues is through the prism of intergroup conflict studies, and more specifically, the field of positioning theory.
When there is conflict between groups (political parties) on moral issues, each side attempts to position themselves as morally superior within the discourse. By occupying a moral position within a conflict, it allows a group to take up certain actions and expands their rights and duties around that particular position. Simultaneously this leads to an indirect or malignant positioning of the other group as inefficient along that particular moral dimension.
For example, if you look at the evolution of immigration discourse between the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. since 2008, each group has shifted their positions dramatically, limiting their capacity for moderate and meditative discourse.
It may come as a surprise to some, but Democrats used to talk about “criminal immigrants” as the Republican party does now. The 2008 Democratic Party platform spoke about both the need to secure the country's borders and hire more Customs and Border protection agents, but by 2016, the platform only spoke about immigration enforcement in the sense that it needed to be "humane." “During the era in which immigration was largely perceived as a labour force issue, Democrats were far more divided. But as the leading labour critics dropped their concerns, immigration became more of a humanitarian and civil rights concern, and Democrats became more unified” explains npr journalist Asma Khalid. The moral position has shifted from concern for citizens safety and economic security to a strictly humanitarian approach solely based on empathy for all immigrants.
Meanwhile, University of Houston Sociologist Jessica Brown details how the Republican party’s immigration discourse has shifted radically in this decade, moving from “securing vulnerable border towns” to “stopping an invasion” and other “racially divisive appeals (RDAs)”. Between January and February of 2019 alone the Trump campaign ran over 2,200 ads on Facebook referring to the immigration issue as an “invasion”. With this positioning, Republicans have abandoned the possibility, or to use the correct terminology, have limited their rights, duties, and possible actions, regarding humanitarian based immigration discourse, instead occupying the moral position of protecting citizens and securing their safety. Any discussion of immigration from a humanitarian perspective is nearly impossible for Republicans due to the implicit moral positioning of “invasion” rhetoric.
Conversely, as Democrats have abandoned pragmatic positions on immigration discourse, framing it only as a humanitarian issue and not as economic or otherwise, they too have limited the possible rights, duties and actions they have in relation to immigration discourse. Now, moral concerns for citizen’s economic security, along with consideration of safety regarding crime and violence in border towns, is a moral position that they can not occupy, because it is occupied by the rival group in the conflict.
This is why Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton or Barrack Obama spoke of immigration as a security concern, but 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and current Democratic president Joe Biden have only discussed immigration from the perspective of empathy for migrants. It is because their group’s moral positioning within the conflict has shifted dramatically. It has left them incapable of occupying a more dynamic moral position on immigration policy.
This positioning change also explains why past Republicans like George Bush spoke of immigration as a pressing issue, but didn’t always use RDAs (racially divisive appeals). The post-Trump era has moved Republicans far away from a humanitarian position and settled them exclusively within the “citizens’ security” moral framing. It has also placed them tangentially, if not firmly, in a dangerously anti-immigrant position predicated on RDAs. Both parties have become more polarized. Their moral positioning has crystallized into increasingly extreme forms on the issue, meaning that the United States’ capacity to deal with immigration policy has been severely debilitated.
As political group conflict follows this path, immigration discourse, and political discourse at large, has lost its meditative properties. This propels group conflict and polarization further, making moderate positioning impossible for political groups, and meaningful consensus on crucial policy issues equally inauspicious.
The Western world sees political polarization being exacerbated by this degradation of political discourse within group conflicts. As this trend is compounded by the Globalism vs. Nationalism dichotomy that Western administrations are facing, some kind of course correction by Western leaders is essential. If current cabinets get a hold of the immigration issue, it should placate the right-wing populists/anti-globalist sects, and allow for a gradual return to normalcy in political discourse. On the other hand, if governments double down on the moral alienation of these right-wing populist ideologies, such as in Ireland, this worrying trend may only be in its nascent stage, with much more polarization and disharmony approaching.