One of the greatest forces shaping politics in recent years has been the global rise of populism and the movements coming with it that aim to enact stringent rules on immigration, restrict free trade, overturn austerity measures, and restrict the power of international institutions. A recent study based on the speech analysis of politicians indeed found that the number of populist leaders had doubled over the past twenty years.
At its core, populism is a language, according to historian Michael Kazin, whose speakers “conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage” and “view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic.” In this vein, populist policy proposals often contradict the advice of scientists, economists, and other experts.
The global rise of populism has become an increasing concern for many with notable apprehension, for example, expressed about the future of liberal democracy in a world where a corrupt elite are demagogued against the ordinary masses. What is the future of constitutional checks and balances if more governments take moves like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to overhaul independent judiciaries? With a free and independent press also under legal, financial, and social pressure by many governments, what is to become of protections for individuals and minorities?
Globalization as the source of trouble
In light of these risks, there has also been more attention devoted to understanding why this rise of populism is occurring and how it can be prevented. Globalization, in particular, has been presumed to be a major contributing factor linked with the rise of populism. Globalization, if not managed appropriately, can lead to economic and social dislocations (e.g. lost jobs and income from manufacturing and resource extraction) that marginalize certain segments of a population.
One possible source of these grievances has been explained in the form of the “elephant curve”, a graph first created by researchers Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, which highlights the unequal prosperity gains in the world economy from 1988 to 2009.
The chart shows the simultaneous economic growth of the world's middle income groups and the ultra-wealthy and the lack of prosperity gains for the 80th-90th percentiles that are largely considered to represent the lower and middle classes in the more developed countries of the world.
This central observation from the graph has been employed to make sense of the growing wave of populist anger that has driven support for entities like the Five Star Movement and the League in Italy and the Trumpification of the Republican Party in the U.S. A squeezed middle class in the developed world, not experiencing the same income gains from globalization as the top one percent in their own countries and the thriving middle classes of newly industrializing countries, have presumably turned to anti-globalization, anti-elite, and pro-nativist political parties to right these wrongs.
The nuanced link between globalization and populism
My recent research examining the case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the European Union though illustrates that the association between globalization and populism is more nuanced than commonly conceived. While globalization can uproot economic and social structures, aggrieving subsets of a population in the process, the “interdependences and entanglements between and within countries—and the sociomaterial practices therein—may also alter the economic rationales and associated decision-making landscapes of actors in a manner that enables populist policies to be mitigated or stymied”.
The case of GMOs in Europe is, in fact, more familiarly associated with the type of populist politicking mentioned at the outset of this article. The EU regulatory framework has come to mandate labeling of GMO foods, a stringent risk-assessment process for transgenic crops that provides protections for human health and the environment, and strict coexistence rules intended to prevent transgenic crop contamination on farmland.
These policy developments, in turn, reflect the increasingly anti-GMO strident stances of political parties in Europe. While the politically dominant Christian Social Union of Bavaria, for example, once advocated in favor of GMOs on account of economic benefits that come from research and innovation, its newfound advocacy against transgenic crops in the 2000s and 2010s with appeals to prairie populism and protection of Bavarian landscapes was criticized by elites as “scaremongering” and “cheap propaganda” detrimental to the economy .
Likewise, in France, while policy views of government in the early 1990s tended to reflect the positive opinion of scientific risk assessments conducted by experts that favored the approval of transgenic crops like GM maize, by 1997, political leadership came to reverse these stances and opposed GMOs as “primarily a problem of agricultural policy and especially the autonomy of our farmers in relation to the business strategies of large global food groups”.
These shifting policy stances came at the same time that advocacy groups emerged criticizing GMOs on various grounds. In Europe, groups like the radical-left farming association Confédération Paysanne (CP) opposed GMOs as one example of the predatory capitalist practices in agriculture and the homogenizing effects of liberal globalization that represented a threat to local cultures. European food identities and traditions were pitted against GM crops that “are unnecessary, risky and profit large multinational companies at the expense of small scale and sustainable farming” and benefit “big business” over “people and the planet”.
Yet the policy debate over GMOs has not reflected a linear relationship between globalization and populism. While transgenic crops have generally been characterized by populist politicking in Europe, a key exception in recent years has involved the continued reliance of EU farmers on GMO animal feed soybean imports coming largely from Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. In my study, I find that globalization in this particular instance, in fact, has aided in curbing populist tendencies.
In the case of GM soybeans, the trading interdependencies developed over the past century between the Americas and Europe through the removal of soybean tariffs in the GATT, combined with European topographies and climates that are not conducive to soybean cultivation as crops that exist as short-day plants, have created the socio-material conditions that curtail populist anti-GMO sentiment. As of 2011, soybeans were only cultivated on around three percent of EU arable land. Consequently, around 60 percent of the EU’s total protein animal feed needs are achieved through imports.
This continued demand for soybean imports by livestock farmers in Europe, meanwhile, has been reinforced by both global and local consumer preferences, including rising meat consumption and the growing use of soybean-derived biodiesels as a source of energy. China, for example, has come to constitute 60 percent of the soybean export market in recent years in the context of growing pork and poultry consumption by an expanding middle class in the country. Providing the essential amino acid lysine to livestock, the soybean has become a fundamental ingredient enabling EU farmers to meet this increased global demand for high-quality livestock.
Faced with the alternative of non-GMO animal feed with a price premium of five to twenty percent, European farmer groups like the politically powerful Bavarian Farmers Association, while generally advocating for a GMO-free Europe, have continued to exclude animal feed from their own definitions of what GMO-free means. A spokesperson of the Bavarian farmer group noted to me that “we know that we need to import GMO soybeans for feeding our animals”.
As I point out in my research article, “what is significant to emphasize is that on account of the reliance of farmers in the EU on animal feed imports from these countries, the politics of South America and the United States and the widespread cultivation of transgenic crops that emerged” from national debates in the countries “have engendered vast implications on the protein options availed to European farmers and what it means, in turn, for a European farmer to be GMO-free” and whether to advocate in favor or against GMOs.
Following the coordinated lobbying of European feed manufacturers, grain traders, the oil and protein industry, farmers, and biotechnology lobbies, sparked by the rejection of numerous ships at EU ports containing unauthorized GM content and the higher costs for feed that resulted, the EU decided to relax the zero-tolerance threshold on the import of unapproved GM feed to allow for a low-level presence of trace amounts of adventitious GM varieties.
A conclusion that can be drawn from this case is that globalization does not necessarily need to lead to grievances that rile populations but rather it can also contribute to resolving problems and consequently curtailing the formation of populist movements. This is to say that “rather than steering issue debates in a linear direction toward populism or nonpopulism, globalization can better be characterized as functioning to reorder relations in the world and bring into the fold novel entanglements between the economies, norms, practices, and sociomaterial backgrounds of different places”.
Following from this, depending on how these global and local relations are honed and steered, there are opportunities for reorienting and structuring globalization to make it more inclusive and consistent with the economic needs and social norms of different societies.
In the case of plant biotechnology in Europe, this means stepping away from the seemingly linear causes of the technology’s rejection across the continent and instead examining the complex relations that have brought us here.
It means engaging with the industrial models of agriculture and the meat-intensive diets that have been central to shaping the transgenic crop application market, largely defined by herbicide and insect resistant crops that are unappealing to European consumers and advocacy groups, in the first place.
And it means recognizing that in a world of economic entanglements that political decisions cross borders and raise critical questions about the need for transnational movements like the environmental cause.
Elsewhere, with an eye towards ameliorating concerns of populations that have been excluded from the economic gains of globalization, policy prescriptions often include recommendations to ensure that the benefits of free trade and globalization are better shared between and within populations and that dislocations are addressed through skills retraining and strong social safety nets.
It is indeed a more nuanced understanding of the globalization-populism nexus that is needed to be heeded and engaged with if policymakers are to address the concerns of populaces and ensure that the potential economic and social benefits of globalization are to be realized rather than hindered through more populism and more economic and political walls.