Societies, not least in Europe but also elsewhere, have been undergoing a complex series of tests and challenges in recent decades. Some observers, in more specific terms, argue that we are going through a ‘poly-crisis’, which includes the global financial-economic crisis starting in 2007, the subsequent migration crisis, the rise of terrorism, and, in the last two years, the global pandemic. What these various crises have in common is that they put societies to the test in terms of revealing the radical uncertainty underlying ‘normality’, and of the existing societal arrangements. As the legitimacy of established knowledge is questioned and challenged, the contingent nature of the social world becomes evident. Present times can in this be understood as constituting a kind of societal laboratory. For sure, the fact that societies are in a state of flux means there are possibilities for (radically) reimagining societal arrangements, but we equally witness the emergence of reactionary forms, strong manifestations of resentment, and propositions of societal closure and exclusion.
In the contemporary era, this is particularly evident in relation to the political and societal underpinnings of democracy. The widespread attention for populism might be excessive, but its centrality to current debates proves the uncertainty that many experience with regard to the functioning of our democratic societies. In a related way, in recent years we have seen an evermore prominent reaction to societal acceleration and rapid change in the form of manifestations of what some call ‘uncivil society’, ‘backlash movements’ or more generally societal mobilisation around conservative political values. Such phenomena may at least in part be read as attempts to recreate the alleged certainty of confined ethno-cultural communities and a critique of the vagaries and uprooted nature of the globalised, interconnected, cosmopolitan world.
Important sources of uncertainty include neoliberal governance and austerity policies, the precarization of the livelihoods of many, the (politicisation of) migration, the challenges in relation to societal security due to terrorism, the undermining of sanitary security due to the pandemic, and, last but not least, the threatening of habitat security due to the climate crisis. These various crises have, in this, spawned a range of political reactions, which in a variety of ways criticise the existing order and status quo. Reactionary politics are often informed by what could be called a ‘politics of fear’ (Wodak, 2015, 2020), which projects uncertainty onto specific scapegoats, such as migrants, decries the decline of specific cultures and values, or bemoans the loss of national sovereignty. Calls are often made for the return of a strong sovereign state, which is to protect citizens and safeguard their security, while globalisation is criticised as undermining people’s livelihoods and socio-economic opportunities. Clearly, a return of the state has also been prominent – even if often in an ambiguous manner – in the recent Covid-19 policies. That said, different national governments’ decisions or acute considerations in for instance Austria, Germany, or Italy to establish a legal requirement for its people to be vaccinated, or indirectly pushing this through regulations (Verordnungen), while only allowing double vaccinated people to enjoy consumerist lifestyles (e. g. going into cinema, theatre, or shops), generates new questions on how governance becomes authoritative. Heribert Prantl (2021), alluring to the German situation, calls it ‘Fundamental Rights in Quarantine‘ (Grundrechte in Quarantaene). The boundary between the new normal life and ‘populist’ advancements becomes blurred as any legitimate critique of the current state of pandemic measures is potentially tabooed when shamed as only fed by ‘vaccination’ deniers (e. g. Querdenker and so forth). When does authority become authoritarian?
In this context, populism pretends to provide clear answers (by denying the pandemic, or by calling for the radical closure of borders), but frequently turns out to be an unsettling force in many societies. It regularly involves a critique of the establishment and incumbent elites, and criticises the accelerated transformation of modern societies through globalisation, transnationalization, migration, and technological advance. The populist critique is in some cases, however, not reducible to a criticism of traditional party politics and power elites, and the way the latter – in parasitical manner – have profited from neoliberal governance while destroying the social tissue. Some versions of populism show strong affinity with ultra-conservative, religious ideas, in particular more radical fringes related to ‘illiberal conservatism’ or rightwing ‘conservative populism’ (Datta, 2018; Gwiazda, 2021; Varga and Buzogany, 2021). Such (ultra-) conservative manifestations may appear to pose a more profound challenge to the liberal democratic system and idea as such. By mainstreaming radical ideas, conservative, religious forces articulate a broad resentment against modern achievements, and at times put into question distinctive dimensions of modern society as it emerged in the Enlightenment (and as such had been the object of study of many of the classical sociologists). A core argument is clearly the loss of meaning or disenchantment that contemporary processes involve. Many of these conservative manifestations of populism seem to call into question core dimensions of the heritage of modernity (if understood in a liberal sense): individualism, pluralism, tolerance, modern rationality and rational science, human rights, and individualist understandings of human freedom and autonomy. Forms of nostalgic populism seem to tap into the Romanticist tradition which modernity equally spawned, invoking the (alleged) certainty and security, and hierarchy, of the traditional community, and stressing a culturally centred understanding of society. In some ways, the uncertainties of current times can be grasped in (even if surely not reduced to) the structural tensions between rationalist, reason-based, and instrumental views of the world and cultural, value-based understandings (echoing Weber’s famous distinction). Contemporary times are hence of great interest and inspiration for cultural and political sociologists.
All contributions in the current issue speak in one way or the other to the uncertainties of late modern society, particularly acute in the current pandemic times. The first article, by Jason C. Mueller, explicitly addresses crisis management in the context of the coronavirus in the United States. From the perspective of Cultural Political Economy, which regards the current situation as a kind of ‘real-time laboratory’, Mueller explores Trump’s policies in order to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump initially questioned the authority of scientists and experts in his downplaying of the severity of the crisis, and prioritised market-based approaches to the detriment of public health. The crisis as such amplified tensions between federal and state-level as well as local community responses, and the post-Covid-19 landscape may lead to a kind of realist resignation and/or forms of nationalism and protectionism but might also induce a radical re-imagination of our societies into the direction of a more robust form of equality.
In Manuel Cervera-Marzal's contribution, he engages with the French civil disobedient and anti-globalisation movement Les Désobéissants, which defies the establishment through its protests. Through an ethnographic study, Cervera-Marzal highlights the theatrical and spectacular form of protests that the Désobéissants pursues, following a ‘political-spectacle’ logic. Rather than pursuing a rationalist approach in trying, for instance, to maximise numbers of people mobilised, the movement seeks media-attention through spectacular protests. Cervera-Marzal’s argument is that such a spectacular strategy has distinct implications for the movement as such. According to Cervera-Marzal, the exclusive attention of the media for the charismatic activist Xavier Renou has stimulated a hierarchization of, and division within, the movement as well as a form of domination. His research questions the relation between the media and grassroots politics. The logic of hierarchization is clearly in tension with the principles of an egalitarian movement, undermining its inclusive, horizontal, and disobedient practices by following the external logic of the spectacle. Ultimately, the negative logic of personalisation and theatricalisation of politics seems to stem from the profit-driven competition in the media, reinforcing a trend of ‘audience democracy’ but also highlighting a dependence of civil disobedience on public exposure.
Nicolas Hubé and Martin Baloge equally address the French context, in their timely discussion (given the pending French presidential elections) of the complexities of French populism in a political system in flux. In France, populism is often collocated with rightwing, conservative, and nationalist parties. Following Cas Mudde and others, the authors sustain however that populism should be understood as a thin ideology, and may hence relate to different sides of the political spectrum. In their article, they discuss both the rightwing Rassemblement National and the leftwing Front de Gauche/France Insoumise, parties that were both part of the political earthquake of the most recent presidential elections. The authors show that populism is diffused on both the right and left ends of the French political spectrum, and affinities can be found across the political landscape, including for instance regarding an anti-elitist and anti-media rhetoric. While almost all political parties seem now in one way or the other to articulate populist arguments, a key question becomes: what is populism a symptom of?
The following article addresses the very much related issue of politics of fear. Whereas Ruth Wodak, for example, tackles its discursive production, the article by Janne Autto et al. puts socio-linguistic analyses to socio-empirical practice: it examines Finnish parliamentary debates on a government programme with a radical austerity logic in June 2015. Though the article deals with a specific country case-study, the authors’ discussion has clear comparative value in identifying 5 registers of justification for the austerity programme (including, e.g. ‘security’, but also ‘threat to national sovereignty’ and ‘vulnerability’). These registers of justification channel nuanced aspects of fear encompassing political argument and debate. These findings might very well have repercussions for other parliamentary debates, for example in the context of Covid-19 measures, where security and safety may easily become the main lens through which to adjust majority rationalities.
John Glenn, Anthony Mckeown, and Dang Hai Bui critically discuss the uncertainty created by the thinking and discourse on resilience. While resilience is supposed to help overcome forms of vulnerability in the face of stresses and rapidly changing environments, Glenn et al. argue that the resilience discourse, co-opted by neoliberal elites, is rather a form of mystification of the causes of vulnerability and the structural determinants of change. By reifying change as inescapable and by depoliticising its causes, the resilience discourse de facto encourages people to ‘absorb processes which render them vulnerable’ through for instance emotional management, to become more flexible, and radically change their lives. Through a critical realist and Marxist lens, Glenn et al. attempt to put into relief the real-life processes that increase vulnerability and call for their repoliticization so as to make resistance possible.
The two book reviews in this issue tie into some of the themes outlined earlier, and which will likely stay with us for time to come. Zehra Çolak discusses Ruth Wodak’s (2020) second and updated edition of ‘The Politics of Fear’. Whereas the first edition was published before Trumpism, the recent edition explicitly covers the unashamed shift to mainstreaming far-right rhetoric. Here, the focus is on macro-political discourse, including the problematising of anti-Sorosism in Hungary. Further, Wodak’s book analyses the ways social media co-produce anti-Semitism and racism. While referring to Wodak’s argument, Çolak summarises, ‘breaching of shared norms and rejection of established values is not only threatening the post-war European project but also becoming normalized in countries across the world, such as in India, Brazil, Turkey, the US, and the Philippines.’
Uncertainty, fear, and a lack of control shake hands in a tumultuous twenty-first century world. Samuel Lee Yu-Sum introduces Hartmut Rosa’s book ‘The Uncontrollability of The World’ (2020). The concept of ‘resonance’ is at the core of Rosa’s intellectual trajectory. As Lee Yu-Sum argues, ‘Resonance, in short, manifests as an experience of self-efficacy that constitutes a mutual connection between the subject and the world. Rosa suggests four different but interconnected aspects that are worth careful scrutinizing. They are visible, accessible, manageable and useful.’ The book challenges the human wish to control an unbound world, which manifests itself in different forms of (capitalist) crisis, and where the current Covid-19 pandemic – continuing since 2020 – is but one of many.