The ‘left behind’ and pessimistic nostalgia
The fear of being ‘left behind’ is strengthening resurgent xenophobia and presenting an important choice for proponents of social cohesion.
Professor Colin Crouch FBA
The phrase ‘the left behind’ has become commonplace in descriptions of people who have been voting for xenophobic populist parties across several European countries, for Brexit in the United Kingdom, for Donald Trump as the president of the United States. Cliché though it is in danger of becoming, it contains some important truth, particularly when understood in an extended way.
In a most obvious sense, ‘the left behind’ are those living in economic depression and poverty, or ethnic minorities suffering from discrimination. However, these are not the main defining characteristics of the supporters of xenophobic causes. Instead, these are found mainly among the old and the less well educated; and also among the inhabitants of small towns and larger, formerly industrial or mining ones, that have failed to find activities in the specifically ‘modern’ parts of the post-industrial economy, or which simply lack the wide diversity of employment opportunities found in big cities. These are sometimes quite prosperous people who feel that the areas where they live are likely to become left behind by the growth of the high-technology post-industrial economy; or they might be people who are uncomfortable with various changes taking place in cultural practices. This might mean discontent with increasing contact with ‘foreigners’, whether through immigration or relations with international organisations, or with the changing roles of women and attitudes to sexuality.
Viewing ‘the left behind’ in this more extensive way enables us to explain some otherwise puzzling issues. Why was the vote for Brexit not just concentrated among the declining, former industrial cities of the English north, but also among the prosperous small towns of the south? Why — as Philip Manow has found¹ — was support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany’s 2017 parliamentary elections concentrated, not just among voters in the formerly communist east of the country, but also among secure, socially insured workers in western Germany’s highly successful industrial areas? Why are voters in the largest cities, with the highest concentrations of ethnic minorities and immigrants, the least likely to vote for parties whose main message is hostility to multiculturalism? Why are people who hold hostile attitudes to immigrants also likely to resent the expanding role of women in economic and public life and to hold generally conservative attitudes on such issues as the discipline of children²?
Those who feel left behind in these various ways are likely to feel pessimistically nostalgic, looking back to a time now lost, whether real or idealised, when life favoured them more. At any time there will be people who feel like this; the important point is when and how these feelings become politicised, what Eduardo Campanella and Marta Dassù have called ‘weaponised nostalgia’³. Dassù, observing the US and the UK from the vantage point of being the Italian deputy foreign minister from 2011–2014, was mainly concerned with the emotions behind Trumpism and Brexit. But today movements of weaponised nostalgia also dominate governments in her own country, and in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, Brazil and Russia. They have been part of or crucial supports to governments in Austria, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland, and are making or have made major impacts on politics in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, various parts of central Europe and the European Parliament itself, most recently in Spain, and until 2019 in Greece. In western Europe, only Ireland and Portugal seem to lack significant socially conservative, xenophobic, often also anti-feminist movements.
The importance of nostalgia and pessimism in distinguishing voters for xenophobic, far-right parties from other voters has been studied in depth with reference to eight western European countries by Eefje Steenvoorden and Eelco Harteveld⁴, using data from 2012, at an early stage of the current xenophobic resurgence. The countries concerned were Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Nostalgia and pessimism were particularly strong among far-right voters in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. The authors point out that various liberalising movements have been generally stronger in those countries than in the other three.
Looking further back in time, the most significant movements of pessimistic nostalgia were Nazism and fascism following the First World War and subsequent inter-war economic crises. For a lengthy period after their defeat in the Second World War most politicians avoided arousing such emotions. Movements of that family existed only at the margins: Poujadistes, various national fronts, nationalist and anti-minority parties, the post-war revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
The xenophobic resurgence we are now witnessing has moved from the margins to the centre of politics. It is nothing like the vehement violence of fascism and Nazism, but it is part of the same broader political family. When nostalgia and pessimism are politicised they, quite logically, produce demands for various kinds of exclusion. If the future seems to offer little, the best one can do is to hold on to as much of what one possesses as possible. This can most easily be achieved by restricting the range of persons who have access to the diminishing pool of life’s good things, limiting it to those who resemble oneself. Outsiders are then defined. Pessimism and nostalgia being emotional states, the identification of outsiders and demands for their exclusion become clothed in rage and hatred, leading (again logically) to both isolated and organised acts of violence. Very few political movements thrive on pessimism alone; they must always point to the sunny uplands to which a nation can aspire — once it has carried out the necessary tasks of exclusion of outsiders and of the foreign powers and organisations who are presented as impeding fulfilment of the national destiny. Exclusion is therefore central to future success.
Accounting for the current wave of pessimistic nostalgia
It is fairly easy to explain why the early 21st century is becoming one of the periods in which pessimistic nostalgia is successfully weaponised, at least in the western world. First, the move of the advanced economies into post-industrialism has produced considerable upheaval, removing what seemed to have been certainties from many people’s lives. While automation and robotisation are probably the main causes of the decline in industrial employment, globalisation has also been involved, which provides some useful ‘foreigner’ targets among both developing economies and immigrants. Second, the financial crisis of 2007–8 showed another dark side of the internationalisation of the economy, and suggested that public authorities were unable to keep economic life secure. Until that moment, even many people who might have felt left behind in various ways could at least count on becoming a little better off each year. That is no longer the case. Third, waves of immigrants and refugees coming into the western world from poorer countries have provided easy targets for those feeling a need to restrict access to the good things of life in a declining world. Particularly salient have been refugees from war- and famine-torn lands in North Africa and the Middle East, among whom have been minuscule but deadly numbers of terrorists.
These sources of insecurity and declining trust in the capacity of public authorities to ensure stability have appeared after a prolonged period of dominance by liberal attitudes, favouring the admission of various kinds of ‘outsider’: the formation of multicultural societies; the entry of women into spaces previously reserved to men; a growing role for international organisations in what many people had believed to be their ‘sovereign’ national affairs. Further, this has all been taking place during a period in which the original political identities of class and religion forged in the creation of democratic industrial societies have been losing their relevance, leaving many people without a clear sense of who, politically, they are — unless it is as members of a particular nation.
It must not be assumed that an individual sharing one or other element of the spectrum of pessimistic nostalgia will necessarily share them all; someone hostile to immigration is not necessarily hostile to international co-operation or to the advance of women. Also, adopting even several of these positions does not necessarily mean that someone is pessimistic or nostalgic; they might simply dislike the various objects of pessimistic discontent for other reasons. There is however a Gestalt here, an ensemble of beliefs and attitudes which can fall together within a pessimistic framework, especially when individual beliefs are related to a lack of optimistic possibilities in a person’s local economic geography. It is the coming together of various exclusionary attitudes with local economic pessimism that forges serious collective movements from what might simply be a scattering of individual moods.
For those seeking to improve social cohesion, the rise of politicised pessimistic nostalgia presents a choice. One option is to accept the exclusionary cohesion that the xenophobic movements demand and engage in a purge of outsiders and foreign influences. Those who reject that path confront a more complex task. At one level it is to argue for the virtues of the open, welcoming society and to expose the narrowness and hatred rife in societies that seek exclusion. This stance might lack the emotional potency of nationalism and xenophobia, but it has emotional and moral force, especially among those who feel that they will gain from an open future. It would however be a mistake to expect any final historical triumph for either set of values in this struggle. Advantage will swing from side to side over the years; there are no final victories in culture wars. For a lengthy period after the horrors of the Holocaust it could be assumed that anti-Semitism had been completely defeated outside a tiny fringe; that position cannot be confidently held today. At a far humbler level, the world of English football had recently been congratulating itself on driving racist chanting out of the terraces. But in the changing English political atmosphere it is now returning.
Reducing the numbers of fellow citizens who are attracted by pessimistic nostalgia also depends on something more substantial: increasing the numbers of those who can feel confident and optimistic, and therefore open-hearted and welcoming, because their own lives seem to thrive in inclusive situations. This is often a matter of economic geography⁵. Pessimistic nostalgia is least likely to affect people who can see that their town or region has a place in the advanced post-industrial economy — and not a place merely hosting call centres, warehouses and back offices — or at least that where they live offers a wide range of future prospects. This is not easy to achieve, but recognising the nature of the issue is the first step to tackling it. Many sectors of the new economy have distinct preferences for certain kinds of city — mainly capitals and other locations with cultural and other forms of attractiveness. They draw to those relatively few cities the young and dynamic from everywhere else. This can leave whole parts of countries with little to expect from the future. Meanwhile the favoured cities themselves become too large and crowded to be liveable.
It was once thought that post-industrial societies would be altogether more benign and cohesive than their industrial predecessors. The inequalities, class antagonisms and dirty, dangerous work typical of industrial society would vanish. For some time it has been clear that post-industrialism is producing new inequalities, among geographical locations as well as among occupational groups. It now seems also that the disruption caused by the transition to the new economy is producing a bleak view of life’s prospects for many, and that at least some of them are turning to a new politics of antagonism and exclusion. To speak of ‘transitional’ problems can imply that once change has been completed, matters will settle down. Generations might however live out their lives during transitions, and permanently change a society’s politics as they do so. Further, geographical inequality, not just in a quantitative sense but in capacity to enjoy grounded optimism, may be characteristic of post-industrialism as such and not just of transition. Public policy to improve social cohesion needs to look to these substantive issues and not just to attitudes and culture, important though these are.
[1] Manow, P. 2018. Die politische Ökonomie des Populismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
[2] Ashcroft, Lord 2016. https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/; Kaufmann, E. 2017 ‘Trump and Brexit: ‘Why it’s again NOT the economy, stupid’, LSE blog. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/trump-and-brexit-why-its-again-not-the-economy-stupid/
[3] Campanella, E. and Dassù, M. 2019. Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West. London: Hurst and Co.
[4] Steenvoorden, E. and Harteveld, E. 2017. ‘The appeal of nostalgia: the influence of societal pessimism on support for populist radical right parties’, West European Politics, 41, 1: 28–52.
[5] Crouch, C. (forthcoming) ‘Territorial inequalities and xenophobic movements in post-industrial societies’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, special issue on ‘Inequalities, territorial politics, nationalism’.
