Is Cosmopolitan Communitarianism still Possible? Was it ever?

The migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is a tragic variation of a phenomena we have seen time and again around the world: the indifference, deep ambivalence or, at worst, rage directed at “others” from homogeneous, native populations in the advanced nations. This is a defining social condition of Western Europe, the UK, and Scandinavia today and there is no need to rehearse here the many episodes that fall into this category. Influential splinter parties from UKIP in the UK to the venerable National Front in France to the Danish People’s Party to the Netherland’s Party for Freedom have constructed potent working class voting blocs around anti-immigrant and anti-Islamist platforms.

In the United States, of course, the “splinter party” is, in fact, one of the two major parties, the GOP. Millions of white, working class Americans and owners of small businesses advance a restorationist ethno-nationalist politics, not only opposed to Latino immigrants, but also to native “others”, like African-Americans and single, sexually active women who, in their view, unduly benefit from government “handouts”, be it health insurance or birth control. All the while, elderly whites vehemently defend their own welfare gerontocracy of Medicare and Social Security, which they believe they have rightfully “earned.”

Such conflicts are not merely endemic to advanced nations, but also extend to hybrid emerging polities like South Africa. Recently, violent demonstrations broke out in Johannesburg and Durban against immigrants, often from other African countries, whom native South Africans fear are taking their jobs. http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/16/africa/south-africa-anti-foreigner-attacks/ While counter-demonstrations expressing social solidarity have also been held, the pattern seen elsewhere has recurred: dominant native populations fear the loss of economic and cultural privileges–even “privileges” which themselves are, at best, relative, as in the case of South African’s black working class–to either endogenous or externalized “others.”

As a matter of historical development, we have seen welfare states and social democracies developed in then ethnically/racially homogeneous countries (UK/Western Europe/Scandinavia) and a highly federated and partial welfare state developed in the US, in which rabid resistance to its expansion is a dominant feature of the political culture. We have the interesting case of Australia, in which a welfare state has, with many challenges and continued racism, only somewhat incorporated the Aborigine natives, and where, also, the conservative major party (the Liberals, as it happens) is the only one among the advanced democracies to rival the radical extremism of the American Republican party. So Australia, too, does not quite pass the test of a fully cosmopolitan communitarianism. Perhaps Canada comes closes among today’s advanced nations, but its level of social provision is far below that of many European nations.

European welfare states/social democracies were created at a time when national populations were almost entirely native and white. For example, the Attlee/Bevan moment in the postwar UK occurred when the non-native population was less than 2%. Today it’s more than 13%. Could the NHS have been created in today’s UK or would it have faced the hysterical opposition that even the modest and incremental private insurance based Obamacare confronts in the US? To put it somewhat differently: If in 1951, the UK’s non-white population had been what it is today, would the Conservative Lion, Winston Churchill, in his last term as PM, have, instead of retaining NHS, rolled it back if he had encountered an aroused working class constituency who resented benefits conferred upon the non-white population? The same questions might be asked about the historical inception of Germany’s “social market” (with grim ironies noted) and the Scandinavian social democracies.

In what surely would have prompted the Milton Friedman of “Capitalism and Freedom” to say, “I told ya so”, the insularity of the anti-immigrant, anti-“other” working class/small business political cultures in the advanced nations is today often countered, in part, by the deracinated cosmopolitanism of the capitalist professional-managerial class. As Christopher Lasch noted decades ago (and, well, Marx, many decades before that), the capitalist class knows no national boundaries and now views any potential market, regardless of its demographic profile, as fair game. The cultural/gendered/racial anxieties of threatened workers and small business owners (who practice what the historian Steve Fraser has called a parochial “family capitalism”) are, simply, bad for transnational corporations. We need look backwards only a few weeks to the controversy over the passage of Religious Restoration laws in Indiana and Arkansas to see a salient example of this: the titans of corporate American, from Eli Lilly to Apple to even “down home” Walmart, rallied to oppose anti-gay discrimination–really just another way of imposing the hoariest of business nostrums: “The customer is always right.”

Of course, while capitalism is very good these days at expressing this kind of anodyne cosmopolitanism, it has never been so good at the communitarian portion of my post’s title. This is supposed to come from “the people,” via the second phase of Polanyi’s “double movement,” designed to tame a market economy that threatens to devour civil society and the family itself. But if the people are themselves riven by age-old fears of difference–some cultural, some economic, some, in context, entirely understandable–where will the communitarianism and its political cousin, egalitarianism, come from in the 21st century? In short, can nation who have constructed communitarian economies and cultures sustain them in the face of threats from cosmopolitanism? And can those–perhaps principally the United States–who have, in may ways, enviable, if still fraught, multi-ethnic/racial societies, ever attain the levels of communitarianism and egalitarianism reached by many European nations when they were, in fact, far more ethnically homogeneous than they are today?

These are the questions I wish to raise with my colleagues at CT and its readers.