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Abstract
In the last three decades, the rise of a populist challenge to the liberal political mainstream exposed how shallow the supposed victory of global liberalism was, even in its heartlands in Europe and North America. Exclusive nationalism and nativism, identity politics, critiques of globalisation and internationalism, and calls for democratic re-empowerment of the demos have converged politically on a new locus of inflated territorial, indeed ‘border’ sovereignty, aligning the call of ‘taking back control’ on behalf of a radically re-defined community (‘we’) with a defensive re-territorialisation of power along existing fault lines of nation-statism. In this paper, I argue that the very same call has become the new common political denominator for all populist platforms and parties across Europe. I argue that populists across the conventional left–right divide have deployed a rigidly territorialised concept of popular sovereignty in order to bestow intellectual coherence and communicative power to the otherwise disparate strands of their anti-utopian critiques of globalisation. In spite of significant ideological differences between so-called right- and left-wing populism, in the short-term the two populist projects have sought to stage their performances of sovereigntism on, behind or inside the borders of the existing nation-states.
Highlights
In the last three decades, the rise of a populist challenge to the liberal political mainstream exposed how shallow the supposed victory of global liberalism was, even in its heartlands in Europe and North America
Even at the very peak of scholarly optimism as to potential of globalisation to erode the grip of the nation-state over sovereign power and territory, Saskia Sassen painted a mixed picture as an alternative to the simplistic zero-sum confrontation between internationalism and nationalism
Between critiques of globalisation and internationalism, of transnational or supranational or even federal reconfigurations of power and of eroded identities, the territorial nation-state has somehow managed to emerge as the unlikely survivor of the backlash against the post-war liberal global order
Summary
Back in the heady days of the early 1990s, the Scottish professor of law Neil MacCormick made a passionate case against a sovereign-based legal and political international order. Even at the very peak of scholarly optimism as to potential of globalisation to erode the grip of the nation-state over sovereign power and territory, Saskia Sassen painted a mixed picture as an alternative to the simplistic zero-sum confrontation between internationalism and nationalism She did argue that ‘sovereignty has been decentred and territory partly denationalized’; but she added an important caveat: Sovereignty remains a feature of the system, but it is located in a multiplicity of institutional arenas: the new emergent transnational private legal regimes, new supranational organizations (such as the WTO and the institutions of the European Union), and the various international human rights codes. In the face of all these and other challenges to its territorial constitution, the contemporary state is not necessarily less powerful—but it is significantly less sovereign in effect
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