Neoliberalism and the annihilation of the Social Contract in the Western World
Western liberal democracies had at their foundation an implicit social contract: following Locke’s insights, the broad idea is that people give up their executive power in order to create a political community. From there on this power is transferred to a government and citizens submit themselves to the will of the majority. This idea however has come to an end with the advance of neoliberalism and the increasing power of corporate interests over the will of the people.
One of the most striking examples of recent years is the case of Brexit. It is not so much the results of the referendum but the division of the United Kingdom in two opposing sides, neither of which seems willing (even today) to find a common ground. The outcome (as in the rest of Europe) is the reappearance of the far-right as a powerful political agent. On the one hand, the EU has failed as an institution to honour the ‘social contract’ with the people(s) of Europe. The 2015 negotiations between the Greek Syriza/ANEL government and the institutions (ECB, EC, IMF) exposed the prioritization of neoliberal financialization over the people. On the other, the outcomes of Brexit have now revealed that rather an attempt to national (and popular) sovereignty, it was nothing more than a covert attempt to transfer power to mechanisms like the Investor-State Dispute Settlement courts, enabling cooperations to impose their interests on states and governments.
Can a new politics emerge in this dystopian present? A left populist politics can create the inescapable confrontation with the very same elites (political and economic) that have annihilated any contractual character of liberal democracy and lead to a politics that will reshape national and transnational institutions.
Marina Prentoulis is Professor (Emerita) in Politics and Media at the University of East Anglia. She completed her PhD in Ideologies and Discourse Analysis at the Department of Government, University of Essex supervised by Ernesto Laclau. She has been working on strategic communications, social movements. European radical ideologies and populism. She has been involved in numerous campaigns and movements. Since 2014 she has been giving public and University lectures on Left populism, social movements and left parties and she has been contributing to OpenDemocracy, the Guardian, Red Pepper, Soundings and other international publications. She is the author of Left Populism in Europe: Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos (Pluto, 2021).
Radical politics against authoritarian and semi-authoritarian social contracts
Central Asia is an intriguing place to study authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and Janus-faced populism as they vary from European, North American, and other experiences. Both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the two cases I will focus on, have embraced authoritarian practices and neoliberal policies since the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, societal reactions to these evolving entanglements of authoritarianism and neoliberalism have differed. In Kyrgyzstan, popular mobilisations have toppled the government three times since 1991, at each occasion calling for a regime change and to “bring the state back” into the lives of people. Regardless of the common starting point in the 1990s and contrary to the development of populism, Kazakhstan quickly turned into a consolidated autocracy thanks to oil generated revenues. In the early 2000s, the political space was shut: regime opponents were physically removed, civic movements were either co-opted or repressed, and political and economic elites owned mass media. What we have today is a protracted Kyrgyz populism that seeks to enhance the state, not reduce it, unlike some present Western experiences. The Kazakh case, however, illustrates a seemingly effective authoritarian “social contract” that successfully depoliticises society in exchange for material stability. These observations form a basis for a novel theoretical inquiry into the emergence and transformation of varied entanglements of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and populism. The social contract concept can productively consider these historical entanglements in a relational fashion and away from fragmented top-down elite and bottom-up “reactionary society” perspectives. This concept can also better theorize the spatial and temporal making and unmaking of authoritarian neoliberal spaces, their resilience like in Kazakhstan, and fragility like in Kyrgyzstan. Finally, the concept’s relational approach to these entanglements puts a better focus on societal responses. The most recent cases in Kyrgyzstan in 2020 and Kazakhstan in 2022 could be seen as popular uprisings that effectuated the return of the people, long marginalised by authoritarian neoliberalism, on the public stage, even if fleetingly (Rancière 1998). These episodes of spontaneous mobilisations suggest that a populist frame, perhaps the only mobilisational frame available in repressive and semi-repressive contexts, may serve as a (provisional) form of self-empowerment for these marginalised classes. These spontaneous revolts did not establish a new way of doing politics and conducting the economy. But in the absence of any organised opposition and progressive social movements, the study of such radical politics by the people is extremely important if we are to detect any anti-authoritarian and anti-neoliberal insurgency.
Dr. Asel Doolotkeldieva is a Non-residential Fellow of George Washington University, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. As a critical political scientist, she studies populist mobilizations and revolutionary praxis in authoritarian contexts in conversation with discourses and practices of democracy, equality and social justice. She recently published “Das Volk und der starke Staat. Repolitisierung in Kirgistan” in OSTEUROPA Journal, 2024, (The people and the strong state. Repoliticization in Kyrgyzstan) and convened and guest-edited a Special Issue “Politics of popular revolts in Kyrgyzstan”, Central Asian Affairs, 2023. Presently, she is writing a book manuscript on popular uprisings and social contract in authoritarian Central Asia. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Exeter (UK) and previously worked as a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan).
Heritage, Spectrality, Populism – Undecidability and a Thought Experiment
Marking the 20th anniversary of On Populist Reason, my presentation revolves around the question of populism in the heritage of Ernesto Laclau, his spirit, and perhaps his specter. I believe it was his spirit not only to insist on relating the positivity of the social to a constitutive negativity — the impossibility of any social object gaining ‘full presence’ — but also to aim at conceptualizing the ontological consequences as formally as possible. I this he tended to downgrade the hauntological effects of radical negativity, and he can be seen as undecided between the spirit of conceptual clarity and the specters of negativity. Laclau’s heritage—as any heritage — is not pure, obvious, or univocal. This is not least the case with the concept of populism.
Appreciating undecidability, I start from the two main lines of interpreting Laclau’s concept of populism: the purely formal Helsinki concept vis-à-vis a more particular, “ontic” concept. The latter can be given both a more straightforward historical content, i.e., the US American history of populism as a left-wing, progressive movement, and a less historically specific, but still ‘ontic’ content. If the purely formal is true to Laclau’s spirit of conceptual purification, the ontic can, perhaps paradoxically, be interpreted as more in line with a constitutive haunting by the negative. From these quite different possible conceptualizations, I introduce two more speculative ones. The third “conceptualization” (in quotation marks) is, paraphrasing Derrida, Populism—if there is such a thing. This would be a more radical way of relating populism to negativity: reading the ongoing failure of agreements in conceptualizations and the very dissemination of populisms (in the plural) as a sign that it is an undecidable in political life. Moving on from there, the fourth has the character of a thought experiment: asking whether populism might be thought of as coming, as a specter—not only haunting (struggles, exclusions) but also carrying a promise (of popular will and equality).
Allan Dreyer Hansen is a political theorist at the department of Social Science and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. He has been working on populism in a Laclaudian discourse theoretical perspective for several years. He has led a research project on In the Name of the People: Popularity, Populism and Democracy, and is a part of the Nordic POL-AID research project on Polarisation, Affect, Identity: Nordic Populism and the Media Landscape, led by Liv Sunnercrantz. He is primarily interested in theoretical aspects of populism, such as its conceptual history and the question of its ontological (or rather ‘hauntological’) status.