3b. Political ideologies in the 21st century

25th May 2018

Political ideologies in the twenty-first century

(Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 2003, p17-20)

Since the late twentieth century a series of political, social and cultural upheavals has refashioned the world in which we live, creating the impression that history is ‘speeding up’. With hindsight, the two hundred years from the Fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or, more briefly, the period from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, appear to have been characterized by continuity and relative stability, at least by comparison with the uncertainty, even shapelessness, of the contemporary world. Marx’s comment that ‘All that is solid melts into air’, made in 1848, has come to have an eerie but unmistakable relevance. For some, these developments mark the passing of the ‘age of ideologies’, implying that the major ideologies are now, effectively, disengaged from the political world they once interpreted and helped to shape. Such arguments are examined in the final chapter of the book. At the very least, the major ideological traditions are having to adjust to, and are in some cases are being redefined by, a series of new and often interlinked challenges. The most significant of these are the following:

The changing world order
Postmodernity and ‘post-isms’
Globalization

The changing world order

World order has been significantly changed as a result of the end of the Cold War, brought about by the collapse of communism in the eastern European revolutions of 1989–91, and, more recently, by the advent of global terrorism (see p. 304). The ‘long’ Cold War – or what Hobsbawm (1994) referred to as the ‘short’ twentieth century, 1914–91 – was marked by an ideological battle between capitalism and communism, which was significantly intensified by the emergence of the USA and the Soviet Union as rival superpowers in the post-Second World War period. The ideological ramifications of the collapse of communism have been profound and wide-ranging, but remain the subject of debate. The earliest and initially most influential interpretation was that the demise of communism had left western-style liberal democracy, particularly in its US form, as the sole viable ideological model worldwide. This view was advanced though the so-called ‘end of history’ thesis, discussed in Chapter 11. Such developments have certainly had a profound affect upon socialism. Revolutionary socialism, especially in its Soviet-style, Marxist-Leninist guise, appears to be a spent force, both in the developing world and in post communist states. Democratic socialism has nevertheless also been affected; some argue that it has been fatally compromised. In particular, the failure of central planning has weakened faith even in more modest versions of ‘top-down’ state control, forcing democratic socialists to accept the market as the only reliable means of generating wealth. These developments are examined in greater detail in Chapter 4.

The ramifications of the end of the Cold War have not been confined to socialist ideology, however. For example, far from bringing about the victory of universal liberalism, the collapse of communism has resulted in the emergence of a range of ideological forces. Chief amongst these have been nationalism, particularly ethnic nationalism, which has displaced Marxism- Leninism as the leading ideology in many postcommunist states, and religious fundamentalism, which, in its various forms, has had growing influence in the developing world. Moreover, even ideologies that were meant to profit from the ‘death of socialism’, notably liberalism and conservatism, have been affected in sometimes odd ways. To some extent, the strength and coherence of liberalism and conservatism in the twentieth century had derived from the fact that they were defined in opposition to a socialist or communist ‘enemy’. For instance, the new right emerged in the late twentieth century to express general antipathy towards ‘creeping socialism’, and particular hostility towards Soviet communism. The collapse or retrenchment of their traditional enemy means that in the twenty-first century liberalism and conservatism are each becoming more shapeless and differentiated.

September 11, 2001, the date of the devastating terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, has widely been interpreted as ‘the day the world changed’. However, it is less clear how it has changed and what its implications are, or might be, for the major ideologies. The advent of global terrorism has undoubtedly had major international and national consequences. Internationally, under the auspices of George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’, the USA has adopted an increasingly forward and, in some respects, unilateralist foreign policy. Examples of this include the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nevertheless, the ideological consequences of such actions are difficult to predict. On the one hand, if the ‘war on terror’ succeeds in constraining or destroying anti-western religious militancy and in toppling those who give it support, it may, in the long term, help to universalize liberal-democratic values and institutions. On the other hand, in line with Samuel Huntington’s (1993) ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, it may provoke a still more bitter anti-American and antiwestern backlash and further strengthen fundamentalist religion. At a national level, global terrorism has served to bolster the state generally and, in particular, to ground state authority more firmly in its capacity to protect citizens and maintain security. In The Shield of Achilles (2002), Philip Bobbitt thus argued that the state is essentially a ‘warmaking institution’. To the extent that the terrorist threat establishes the primacy of order and state security over a concern with civil liberties and individual rights it may be associated with a drift towards conservatism and the erosion of liberal sensibilities.

Postmodernity

The birth of political ideologies can be traced back to the processes through which the modern world came into existence. The process of modernization had social, political and cultural dimensions. Socially, it was linked to the emergence of increasingly market-orientated and capitalist economies, dominated by new social classes, the middle class and the working class. Politically, it involved the replacement of monarchical absolutism by the advance of constitutional and, in due course, democratic government. Culturally, it took the form of the spread of Enlightenment ideas and views, which challenged traditional beliefs in religion, politics and learning in general based upon a commitment to the principles of reason and progress. The ‘core’ political ideologies, the ones out of which later ideologies emerged or developed in opposition to – liberalism, conservatism and socialism – reflected contrasting responses to the process of modernization.

If the major political ideologies were, in their various ways, products of modernization, the transition from a modern to a postmodern society cannot but have profound significance for their roles and character. While modern societies were structured by industrialization and class solidarity, postmodern societies are increasingly fragmented and pluralistic ‘information societies’ in which individuals are transformed from producers to consumers, and individualism replaces class, religious and ethnic loyalties. Postmodernity, sometimes portrayed as late modernity, has both thrown up new ideological movements and transformed established ones. The former tendency has been reflected in the growing importance of so-called ‘lifestyle’ and ‘identity’ issues, linked to the rise of postmaterial sensibilities and the declining ability of class to generate a meaningful sense of social identity. This has been evident since the 1960s in the growth of new social movements – the peace movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement, the green movement and so on – and in the emergence of new ideological traditions, notably radical feminism and ecologism. New ideological thinking has also been stimulated by attempts to blend established ideological traditions with the ideas of postmodernism (see p. 323). This has given rise to variety of ‘post-isms’, examples of which include ‘post-liberalism’, ‘postMarxism’ and ‘post-feminism’. These are each discussed in their appropriate chapters. The prospects of postmodernism displacing conventional ideological thinking altogether are examined in Chapter 11.

Globalization

Globalization is a slippery and elusive concept. The major theme in globalization is the emergence, in Kenichi Ohmae’s (1989) words, of a ‘borderless world’, the tendency of traditional political borders, based on national and state boundaries, to become permeable. Globalization thus reconfigures social space in that territory matters less because an increasing range of connections have a ‘transworld’ or ‘transborder’ character. Obvious examples of this include the greater ease with which transnational corporations are able to relocate production and investment, the fact that financial markets react almost immediately to economic events anywhere in the world, and the emergence of so-called global goods, such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s beefburgers, Nike running shoes and Starbucks coffee houses, that are available almost worldwide.

Globalization affects political ideologies in a variety of ways. First, it has major implications for nationalism and for other ideological projects that are based upon the nation. For example, political nationalism, linked to national self-determination, may have become redundant in a world in which nation-states operate in ‘post-sovereign’ conditions. On the other hand, forms of cultural, ethnic and religious nationalism may be strengthened by the fact that the state is losing its capacity to generate political allegiance and civic loyalty. Modern liberalism and social democracy have been compromised by the declining viability of national economic strategies, such as Keynesian demand management, and conservatism is having to grapple with globalization’s tendency to weakening tradition and national identity. Second, globalization is by no means a neutral ideological force in its own right. Rather, it has gone hand in hand with neoliberalism, in that it has strengthened the market at the expense of the state. Third, globalization has generated a range of oppositional forces. These include a strengthening of religious fundamentalism in the developing world, where globalization is often viewed as form of western or specifically US imperialism, and an anti-globalization or anti-capitalist movement in the developed world that has drawn, variously, on the ideas of socialism, anarchism, feminism and ecologism. The idea of globalization as ideology is discussed in Chapter 11.