Adam Tooze

Adam Tooze is the director of the European Institute at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.

From his Slate Q&A with Isaac Chotiner:

[Chotiner:] Everywhere I look—from Brexit to Hungary to the rise of a populist government in Italy to Marine Le Pen making the final round in France to what’s happening in Germany right now—it all seems to fit under a similar rubric, which is the rise of right-wing populism. Do you think it’s helpful to put all of these events under the same rubric?

I’m not very compelled by the populism argument. I mean, I think at this point it’s become so much of a meme that it’s beginning to act into the world. Some of the protagonists do identify themselves as populist and they’ve been labeled as such, and so that labeling and that self-identification is beginning to exert effect. What I would agree with is to say that Europe, like the United States, has been subject to some common shocks, and the common shocks one might think of as being things like the financial crisis or the spectacular derailment of Western policy in the Middle East, in North Africa, in Western Asia, and that then creates flows of people and challenges that all these different countries and the EU, NATO, organizations like that, have to deal with.

When those sorts of entities are exposed to those kinds of common shocks, then what you see is national fault lines, national fragilities, manifesting themselves across all of those countries at the same time.

The Brexit disaster is completely predictable given the ambiguities of the relationship of right-wing Brits—and indeed left-wing Brits—to the EU. Now, that’s a completely different phenomenon from reservoirs of extreme nationalist public opinion in Hungary, which draw their historical inspiration from memes and themes of national persecution, which go all the way back to World War I and the dramatic aftermath of World War I. Modern Hungary is a shadow of what it once was, and has been throughout the 20th century, and at certain moments, nationalist politicians in Hungary can mobilize that.

And that isn’t the rhetoric of what we call Italian populism, which in fact has two distinct strands. One is the League, which is a previously regional party, which emerged out of Northern Italian resentment against everything south of Rome, and on the other hand the Five Star Movement, which is an unforeseen type of politics, which is much more modernist in a kind of freaked-out … it’s positively Californian, right, in its belief in tech, and the mechanisms of popular referenda. They then form a coalition, given the logic of European politics, with the League, which allows them both to govern, whilst in Britain the Tories are clinging onto power with the help of the most right-wing parties in Northern Ireland. Both of these are responses to the shocks that Europe has suffered since 2008. Do they add up to the same political phenomenon? I...[read on]

Visit Adam Tooze's website.

--Marshal Zeringue