How the rise of populism brings many risks, but also potential benefits
Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu says some unwinding of globalisation may ultimately benefit the developing world, but the process, if chaotic, will undermine democratic institutions and good policymaking
There was bound to be a reckoning between local and global forces for the control of the destinies of nations. Illustration: Craig Stephens
For decades, political risk has been synonymous with developing countries and emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The rise of populism in the Western world redefines the notion of political risk and teaches that risk has no permanent address.
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Mitigating the risk requires avoiding arrogance towards those embracing populism. A dismissive response leaves us unable to manage implications for democracy and all issues of economic development in poor countries. Those who oppose populism must engage with it rationally in the political space with the force of their own ideas.
Political populism, characterised by a desire to assert domestic sovereignty and rejection of the “cult of the expert”, owes its rise to increasing rejection of the conventional wisdom by citizens who feel left behind by globalisation trends favouring the elite.
The backlash was inevitable. To the extent that the idea of a “borderless” world diminished the voices of local populations and amplified the powers of bureaucratic global elites in Brussels or Washington, there was bound to be a reckoning between local and global forces for the control of the destinies of nations. These tensions, especially as they affect immigration, jobs and trade, have been long in the making, brought to the fore in an explosive manner by the Brexit referendum. The British vote to leave the EU confounded conventional wisdom and strengthened the hand of the anti-globalists.
The phenomenon of globalisation, while not dead, is in decline in political and economic life, with Chinese President Xi Jinping ( 習近平 ) left as its unlikely champion. For globalisation, whatever its virtues, was neither a benign phenomenon nor an agnostic one. It’s an agenda with global winners and losers, facing challenges from within industrialised countries, once prior champions, because large populations found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation’s inescapable logic – the cost-benefit analyses of labour and supply chains and technologies that are the chief culprit in the death of the salaryman with lifelong job security.
