COMMENT The new global populism
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
NEW YORK - This week, the United Nations has been true to its intention to be a
global parliament, allowing fierce and spirited debate by the world's rival
factions in a unique forum where the mighty and the weak nations each have a
chance to air their points of view - even if that shows how fractious the world
community is.
Thus while the leaders of developing nations have been seizing
the opportunity to lament growing economic disparities and economically rooted
rising tensions and polarizations, the United States and other Western
governments have focused on the threats of terrorism, rogue states,
proliferation and the like.
Yet far from business as usual, what sets this year's General Assembly
gathering somewhat apart is the window it has opened onto a global realignment
consisting of many Third World nations forming a coherent anti-US bloc.
Led by Iran and Venezuela, and including Cuba, Bolivia and a host of other
nations, this bloc represents a new world political phenomenon, that is, a new
global populism.
With its transcendence of traditional right-left and secular-religious
dichotomies, the new populist bloc, exploiting a grassroots estrangement from
the dominant Western policies, valorizes its anti-hegemonic vision on several
fronts, including the cultural-war front, where so many "value" issues such as
the applicability and universal relevance of Western (neo-)liberalism for the
countries of the South are contested and even resisted.
The essence of this new phenomenon is a politics of redistributive justice,
seeking to offset the disproportionate power of the US superpower and its
politics of unilateralism, militarism and preemptive warfare, as well as to
achieve what has long been on the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement, ie, a new
international economic order. Championing trade and political multilateralism,
the firebrand leaders of Iran and Venezuela have used their populist
anti-imperialist oratory skillfully, gaining new levels of popularity beyond
their national constituencies in the contested terrain of the international
public sphere.
Theoretically, the new global populism is nourished, as Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez' display of Noam Chomsky's book in his UN speech showed, by the
counter-paradigms articulated by Chomsky, Howard Zinn and other leading
anti-war intellectuals. Here is where Third World politics meets Western-origin
intellectual dissent, a rather interesting development - that these
intellectuals are more in demand abroad than at home.
But not all is well with this new, powerful emerging trend that so many
politically dispossessed countries and people around the world cherish as a
liberating movement, a timely counterpunch to the stifling, oppressive
hegemons. On the con side, the anti-hegemony bloc has yet to articulate a fully
satisfactory alternative vision that would safeguard it from the charge of
utopianism. For instance, given the hierarchical structure of global
capitalism, how can our global populists reach their objective of economic
justice and/or equality?
The fact is, both Iran and Venezuela, as principal members of the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), are fully integrated in the world
capitalist market and thrive from a booming Western economy that recycles the
high demand for their energy exports. The OPEC nations are among the few
privileged countries of the developing world today and, hence, there is a minor
paradox in the populist, redistributive politics of Iran and Venezuela today,
insofar as the gap between the OPEC and non-OPEC nations within the South is
concerned. As a result, not everyone in the Third World is particularly
thrilled by the prospect of rising global tensions between the US and the
anti-US bloc, translating into exorbitant energy bills for poor countries.
Thus if this bloc is to grow in ranks and to enlist new participants in its
current quest to end the United States' unipolarism, it must initiate an
internal politics, such as greater energy cooperation and even subsidizing the
energy costs of collaborating states. Otherwise its objective of turning its
currently narrow membership into an expanded historic bloc will likely be
frustrated.
The opponents of these global populists, particularly in the US media, have
wasted no opportunity to label them as fascist, evil and so on, and yet the
more leaders such as Mahmud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are vilified in the
West, the more their popularity grows in the South, particularly since the
oratorical counterpunching skills of these leaders incisively fends off the
criticisms aimed at disarming them.
Thus political rhetoric, tactical power and discursive knowledge, together with
the pent-up angers at failed US policies in the Middle East and beyond, have
formed the basis for a momentous new development in international affairs,
which contains certain romanticist "back to the '60s" elements. The key
difference, however, is that compared with the secular leftism of the 1960s, we
are witnessing a religious-inspired new radicalism that is only partially
socialist.
However, there is every reason to expect a new level of interest in economic
socialism in the Third Worldist politics mentioned above. How this will compare
with the previous socialist doctrines, and the new nuances stemming from the
sacred texts instead of Marxist-Leninist or Kautskyian literature, remains to
be seen. What is without doubt, however, is that our global populist leaders,
today basking in the glory of their US-bashing from behind the UN's podium,
have their job cut out for them on the social and economic fronts. They cannot
sidestep human-rights issues of free press and free assembly and simply focus
on economic human rights, or their right to be free from hegemonic ideologies
and policies. Rather, they must articulate an alternative, coherent strategy
that meets the criteria of freedom and dignity enshrined in the UN Charter.
Not an easy task, because the survival prerogatives of our global populists,
threatened by the subversive reactions of world hegemons rattled by their
presence, seemingly dictates authoritarian measures aimed at centralizing
power. This, in turn, potentially weakens the mass and intellectual base of
power of these populist leaders and, as in the somewhat valid criticisms of
Chavez' blunt speech as "unbecoming a political leader", stings their
reputation - dehumanizing the US president as "evil" is no more appealing than
George W Bush's similar demonization of Chavez et al.
The road ahead for these leaders is indeed far from smooth, and their biggest
challenge is none other than proving that they do not represent a new breed of
demagogic authoritarian Third World leaders, but rather enlightened, tough
critics of Western hegemony who are at the same time loyal to the norms and
principles of political pluralism and democracy. And sustaining the new global
populism without recourse to inclusionary, democratic politics at home is bound
to backfire.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
