Unmoored: resources for the rise of right-wing populism in everyday experiences of international maritime industry workers from Croatia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić investigate how the everyday experiences of international maritime industry workers from Croatia provide resources for the rise of right-wing populism. Drawing on individual interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography, they analyse three levels of interconnected everyday experiences which provide resources for core anti-institutional commitments of right-wing populism among Croatian seafarers: 1) a nationalist political imaginary centred on the conflict between a ‘heartland people’ and pluralist institutions, and the distrust of institutions and elites resulting from ongoing state corruption/capture; 2) the labour regime of the international maritime industry marked by socio-cultural deprivation, economic insecurity and systemic micromanagement under suboptimal working conditions; and 3) the digital sociality of the ‘internet of platforms’ hostile to collective deliberation and action, fuelling the experience of collective powerlessness, which is conducive to the dominance of extreme and exclusionary members. Lastly, the authors provide preliminary notes on urgent areas of research for combating the rise of right-wing populism among international maritime industry workers.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-institutionalism
• COVID-19
• Croatia
• cultures of rejection
• international maritime industry
• right-wing populism
• social media

Notes

1 The term was first used by Michael Freeden in his article, ‘Is nationalism a distinct ideology?’, Political Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 1998, 748–65; here quoted in Cas Mudde, ‘The populist zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, vol. 39, no. 4, 2004, 541–63 (544).

2 Mudde, ‘The populist zeitgeist’; René Cuperus, ‘The populist deficiency of European social democracy’, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, no. 3, 2003, 83–109; Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press 2000).

3 Michael Zürn, A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018); Petar Bojanić, O institucionalnom delovanju: Kako je moguće ispravno raditi, pisati, hodati, disati, živeti zajedno? (Belgrade and Novi Sad: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju; Akademska knjiga 2016).

4 Anti-institutionalism and anti-politics—a concept analysed and developed by Irena Fiket, Gazela Pudar Draško and Milan Urošević in this special issue—can, in many ways, be regarded as two sides of the same coin. While anti-politics incentivizes rejection of the political process, anti-institutionalism more broadly accounts for rejection of pluralist institutions. However, the rejection of the former frequently entails rejection of the latter, and the latter always entails the former. Although the subtle difference should be preserved for fine-grained analytical purposes, the resulting political expressions of both phenomena are akin if not the same.

5 Cuperus, ‘The populist deficiency of European social democracy’; Christina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2006).

6 Mudde, ‘The populist zeitgeist’.

7 Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work: investigating the acceptability of authoritarian populism’, Ethnicities, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, 425–45 (429).

8 Perhaps the best example of this is Rijeka’s bid for European Capital of Culture 2020 under the title ‘Port of Diversity’, which utilized this branding. See the Rijeka 2020 website at https://rijeka2020.eu/en/ (viewed 6 June 2023).

9 After the pilot phase of one week (end of June 2021), we proceeded with two weeks of digital ethnography (observation without participation) during July 2021. As the research took place in the heat of the COVID-19 crisis, we decided to take a week-long break between each week of data collection. The key reason for this pacing was that specific heated topics tended to completely overtake the public discourse for a week or two. By taking breaks in data collection, we were able to cover a broader range of topics.

10 Grounded theory is a qualitative research method used in the social sciences to develop theories that are firmly rooted in empirical data. Rather than starting with preconceived theories or hypotheses, researchers begin with an initial research question and systematically gather data. Throughout the process, data conceptualization occurs dynamically, allowing the theory to ‘emerge’ from the data itself. This approach enables researchers to stay closely connected to the actual information gathered, fostering a deeper understanding of social phenomena and generating theories that are directly grounded in real-world observations. See Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine 1967); Antony Bryant, Grounded Theory and Grounded Theorizing: Pragmatism in Research Practice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2017); and Kathy Charmaz, 'Grounded theory’, in Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao (eds), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, vol. 2 (Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage 2004), 440-4.

11 Situational analysis complements the grounded theory method in social sciences with a primary focus on understanding the dense complexities of social situations and their evolution over time. Combining Strauss's ecological social worlds/arenas theory, Foucault's discourse analysis, and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes and assemblages, situational analysis puts the situation itself at the centre of the analysis. By examining a variety of interconnected elements, such as social actors, structures, processes and contexts, we are able to gain valuable insights into the context that shapes a specific situation. See Adele E. Clarke, Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory after the Postmodern Turn (Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage 2005).

12 Theo van Leeuwen, 'Three models of interdisciplinarity’, in Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (eds), A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins 2005), 3–18.

13 Harder and Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work’.

14 Alvin Goldman, 'Systems-oriented social epistemology’, in Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 189–214.

15 A social or institutional environment is ‘epistemically hostile’ if it attacks agents’ epistemic vulnerabilities. For theoretical elaboration of hostile epistemology and the seminal example of application through case studies see C. Thi Nguyen, 'The seductions of clarity’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, vol. 89, 2021, 227–55.

16 On the negative approach in applied social epistemology, see Miranda Fricker, ‘Epistemic contribution as a central human capability’, in George Hull (ed.), The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2015), 73–90.

17 Connor Mayo-Wilson, Kevin J. S. Zollman, and David Danks, ‘The independence thesis: when individual and social epistemology diverge’, Philosophy of Science, vol. 78, no. 4, 2011, 653–77.

18 We use the term ‘internet of platforms’ to refer to the current phase of the internet, in which it is dominated by ‘(1) ventures like Google and Apple, whose software provides the operating system for smartphone functions, including access to a curated collection of content and applications available via wireless broadband networks; and (2) companies like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and PayPal that have captured substantial market share for specific types of intermediary functions. […] Both types of intermediaries can achieve market dominance in a “winner-take-all” competition by creating a preferred platform standing between upstream content sources and downstream consumers.‘ Rob Frieden, ‘The internet of platforms and two-sided markets: implications for competition and consumers’, Villanova Law Review, vol. 63, no. 2, 2018, 269–320 (270–1).

19 Florian Bieber, The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2020).

20 ‘Novo, novo vrijeme’, meaning ‘New, new time’, was a popular term in Croatia for the end of Tuđman’s regime and the beginning of the second period of democratization in 2000. The term was also used as a title for a renowned 2001 documentary by Rajko Grlić, Igor Mirković and Ivan Mirković, which followed the presidential and parliamentary elections in 1997 and 2000.

21 Jasmin Mujanović, Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans (London: Hurst and Company 2018), 91.

22 Bieber, The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans, 78–82.

23 Dejan Jović, Rat i mit: Politika identiteta u suvremenoj Hrvatskoj (Zaprešić: Fraktura 2017).

24 Bieber, The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans, 80.

25 Gabriel Kuris, ‘The little anti-corruption agency that could’, Foreign Policy website, 7 August 2015, available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/07/the-little-anti-corruption-agency-that-could/ (viewed 8 June 2023).

26 Ružica Šimić Banović, ‘Uhljeb—a post-socialist homo croaticus: a personification of the economy of favours in Croatia?’, Post-Communist Economies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2019, 279–300.

27 Dejan Jović, ‘Croatia and the European Union: a long delayed journey’, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, vol. 8, no. 1, 2006, 85–103.

28 Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2014), 57.

29 The quotes from empirical material are marked as follows: individual interviews by II followed with a first letter of the name of the interviewee, focus group by FG and digital ethnography by DE.

30 ‘Frequently asked questions on maritime security’, on the International Maritime Organization website at https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Security/Pages/FAQ.aspx#What_is_the_ISPS_Code, (viewed 8 June 2023).

31 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books 2019); Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Malden, MA and Cambridge: Polity Press 2017); Paško Bilić, Toni Prug, and Mislav Žitko, The Political Economies of Digital Monopolies: Contradictions and Alternatives to Data Commodification (Bristol: Bristol University Press 2021).

32 C. Thi Nguyen, ‘Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles’, Episteme, vol. 17, no. 2, 2020, 141–61.

33 C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (New York: Oxford University Press 2020), 189–215; C. Thi Nguyen ‘How Twitter gamifies communication’, in Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Applied Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021), 410–36.

34 Mark Alfano, J. Adam Carter and Marc Cheong,‘Technological seduction and self-radicalization’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 4, no. 3, 2018, 298–322; Luke Munn, ‘Alt-right pipeline: individual journeys to extremism online’, First Monday, vol. 24, no. 6, 2019, available on the First Monday website at https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/10108/7920 doi (viewed 9 June 2023).

35 Christian von Scheve, ‘A social relational account of affect’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 21, no. 1, 2018, 39–59 (41).

36 Isabelle Blanchette and Anne Richards, ‘The influence of affect on higher level cognition: a review of research on interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning’, Cognition & Emotion, vol. 24, no. 4, 2010, 561–95; Jenny Yiend and Bundy Mackintosh, ‘The experimental modification of processing biases’, in Yiend (ed.), Cognition, Emotion and Psychopathology: Theoretical, Empirical and Clinical Directions (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2004), 190–210.

37 Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (Los Angeles: SAGE 2012), 51–76.

38 The most famous example in social epistemology regarding the influence of affect on social epistemics is the auto-censoring of unique information in group deliberation due to the unspoken or implicit threat of social sanctions. See Cass R. Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009). Furthermore, studies of division of cognitive labour and political epistemology account for the crucial epistemic role of non-epistemic factors such as selfish ambition and prejudice on the epistemic performance of groups. For seminal works, see Philip Kitcher, ‘The division of cognitive labor’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 87, no. 1, 1990, 5–22; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007).

39 Sanja Bojanić, Olimpia Giuliana Loddo, and Marko-Luka Zubčić, ‘Introduction’, Phenomenology and Mind, no. 17, 2019, 12–16.

40 von Scheve, ‘A social relational account of affect’, 3.

41 Gün R. Semin and John T. Cacioppo, 'Grounding social cognition: synchronization, coordination, and co-regulation’, in Semin and Eliot R. Smith (eds), Embodied Grounding: Social, Cognitive, Affective, and Neuroscientific Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008), 119–47.

42 Gün R. Semin and John T. Cacioppo, ‘From embodied representation to co-regulation’, in Jaime A. Pineda (ed.), Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition (New York: Humana /Springer 2009), 107–20 (114).

43 The distinction between performance is a common dilemma faced by groups that deliberated face-to-face and groups deliberating through computerized interaction was noted in Elena Rocco and Massimo Warglien, Computer Mediated Communication and the Emergence of ‘Electronic Opportunism’, Working Paper 1996-01 (Trento: Department of Economics, University of Trento 1996) and in Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2005), 93.

44 Nicole B. Ellison and Danah M. Boyd, ‘Sociality through social network sites’, in William H. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), 151–72 (158).

45 Sunstein, Going to Extremes.

46 Empirical research moreover shows that more involved Facebook users tend to share more negative emotions. See Michela Del Vicario, Gianna Vivaldo, Alessandro Bessi, Fabiana Zollo, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli and Walter Quattrociocchi, ‘Echo chambers: emotional contagion and group polarization on Facebook’, Scientific Reports, vol. 6, 37825, 2016, at https://doi.org/10.1038/srep37825.

47 Deborah A. Prentice and Dale T. Miller, ‘Pluralistic ignorance and the perpetuation of social norms by unwitting actors’, in Mark P. Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 28 (San Diego, CA: Academic 1996), 161–209.

48 See Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2005), for the seminal account of polycentric subsidiarity-based systems, and E. Glenn Weyl, ‘The political philosophy of RadicalxChange’, RadicalxChange, 30 December 2019, blog on the RadicalxChange website at https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/2019-12-30-gqx4th/ (viewed 20 June 2023), for an early treatment of the issue of non-geographic subsidiarity.

49 Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World (New York: Oxford University Press 2014); Raimo Tuomela, Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (New York: Oxford University Press 2013).

50 For the key role of collective organization, participation in self-governance, and policy feedback mechanisms in epistemic systems, see Elizabeth Anderson, ‘The epistemology of democracy’, Episteme, vol. 3, nos 1–2, 2006, 8–22.

51 On the negative approach in applied social epistemology, see Miranda Fricker, ‘Epistemic contribution as a central human capability’, in George Hull (ed.), The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2015), 73–91.

52 Indeed, Elizabeth Anderson’s argument that corporations should be scrutinized as private anti-democratic governments, which on this basis require democratic regulation, is particularly salient in the world of international maritime industry workers. See Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristina Stojanović-Čehajić

Kristina Stojanović-Čehajić is a psychologist and certified transactional analyst psychotherapist with a strong research background. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Contemporaneity at the Centre for Advanced Studies–South Eastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, where she is focusing on multimethod and mixed-method research designs. Her research interests include the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches in social science research, as well as the exploration of innovative research methods to understand human behaviour and psychotherapy outcomes. In addition to her academic work, she maintains an active psychotherapy practice. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2330-3122

Marko-Luka Zubčić

Marko-Luka Zubčić is a researcher in the fields of fundamental and applied institutional epistemology, and a consultant for creative and strategic communications. He is a lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Studies–South Eastern Europe at the University of Rijeka. His work has been published in Synthese, Phenomenology & Mind, Ethics & Politics, Philosophy & Society and in the Routledge volume Epistemology of Democracy. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7637-2455