Globalization, crisis and right-wing populists in the Global South: the cases of India and Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a critique of perspectives that see the recent global rise of right-wing populism as a direct reaction to the disastrous effects of neoliberalism. By turning attention to the uneven development of capitalism and international competition, in this paper, I present a distinction between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ types of right-wing populism that take place in different zones of the world economy. Through a comparative analysis of India and Turkey, this paper discusses the particularities of the rise of ‘offensive’ populists in emerging powers of the Global South in a period of economic growth. The comparative-historical framework employed in the paper allows us to understand how the world-hegemonic crisis empowered populists by providing opportunities for upward mobility for emerging powers.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• globalization
• right-wing populism
• Global South

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kevin Marien, Logan Feingold and Aaron Spitler for their valuable research assistance; and Richard Saull, Alexander Anievas, Sahan S. Karatasli, Liz Ortel, Daniel Huebner, Tad Skotnicki, Zachary Lavenson, Ting Wang, Cindy Brooks Dollar, David Kauzlarich, Sarah Daynes and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I would like to thank various comments and suggestions received for earlier versions of this paper presented at the College of William and Mary (2019); Annual Conference of the Political Economy of the World Systems (2020); and Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (2021).

Figure 4. Turkey’s Trade Openness, 1960-2019. Source: Author’s calculations from World Development Indicators (2020).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here financialization does not refer to a capital-accumulation strategy based on the increasing share of finance, insurance and real estate in national economies (Krippner, 2005) but an uneven world-historical era that emerge after signal crises of world-hegemonies (such as Britain after 1873/96 or the U.S. after 1973/80) which the push the world-hegemonic powers and dominant capitalist enterprises to shift their profit-maximization strategy from value-production to financial speculation, intermediation and money-lending (Arrighi, 2007). In this conceptualization, although financialization produces super-profits for dominant capitalist enterprises in the short-run, it is actually a symptom of world-hegemonic crisis and decline, as observed by Fernand Braudel and theorized by Giovanni Arrighi.

2 In this paper, I do not suggest a direct causal relationship between FDI and right-wing populism. As we will see while foreign investment and cheap international credit were important elements that supported Modi and Erdoğan’s rising power discourse, their role in populist mobilization is mediated through political agency.

3 While trade openness seems to have decreased after 2012, country is much more embedded to the global economy compared to the ISI period.

4 See https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5330.html.

5 Business support for Modi during 2014 elections did not sustain long. State and business have a strained relationship in recent years (Chandra & Verma, 2020). Business has been alienated from the government to a variety of reasons including the perception of an ‘absence of “credible commitment”’ in the face of increasing state centralization by Modi (Sinha, 2020).

6 While embracing neoliberalism, Modi did not envision to just extend the growth-oriented neoliberal regime of the previous decade but make it ‘production/manufacturing based’ like the Chinese model rather than a service economy to make the growth sustainable.

7 https://www.indiatoday.in/mood-of-the-nation-survey-2020.

8 https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/narendra-modi-has-proved-being-pro-poor-and-pro-business-are-not-mutually-exclusive-4294526.html.

9 This is a contradictory project—while prioritizing the goals of capital, Modi cannot really appease most capitalists in the current state.

10 In line with this view, during the AKP era, Turkey’s trade openness – calculated as the sum of imports and exports as a percentage of the GDP – increased from 5% to 15% range in the 1960–1970 period to 45–60% range (Figure 4). According to World Bank, the increase in Turkey’s openness during the AKP era is comparable to India and China (World Bank, 2014, p. 65).

11 KONDA (2018a).

12 KONDA (2018b).

13 KONDA Raporu (2018b).

14 It is important to note that offensive and defensive populisms, presented in this paper, are ideal types. In reality, class coalitions forged by populists can include both ‘defensive’ or ‘offensive’ elements (e.g. upper castes who joined the BJP during the backlash against the expansion of India’s reservations system in the 1990s represent ‘defensive’ elements within the BJP). For concrete-historical analysis, it is more useful to consider offensive (defensive) populism’s class coalition as one more tilted towards rising (declining) groups.

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Şefika Kumral

Sefika Kumral is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She has published articles on fascism; far-right; global labor; democracy and violence.