In what sense left behind by globalisation? Looking for a less reductionist geography of the populist surge in Europe

Abstract

In what sense left behind by globalisation? Looking for a less reductionist geography of the populist surge in Europe

The revenge of the places that don’t matter (and what to do about it)

“…Such reactionwhich was already evident in places like Thailand or some Latin American countries in the mid-2000spitches not so much the rich against the poor, as would have been envisaged by those focusing on interpersonal inequality (i.e. Piketty, 2014), but lagging and/or declining regions against more prosperous ones (Gordon, 2018). This political and territorial conflict, which has acquired greater notoriety since the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK, the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the USA, the 2016 Austrian presidential election, the 2017 French presidential, and the 2017 German general elections, threatens to derail the very economic and social stability at the heart of the prosperity of the most dynamic cities and regions.…”

“…The reaction is coming from politics rather than economics. Populism as a political force has taken hold in many of these so-called spaces that don't matter, in numbers that are creating a systemic riskwhat Aoyama et al (2018) andvan Bergeijk (2018) call deglobalization (see also Gordon, 2018). Although the attention to the rise of populism has massively grown since the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as president of the US, populism is nothing new.…”

“…Nowhere was this polarisation more evident than in big cities, where globalisation had both engendered an economic elite in sectors such as finance, insurance, or technology, together with an impoverished underclass whose task was and is to service the elite (Sassen, 2001). If there was going to be a challenge to the system, it surely had to come from rising interpersonal inequalities in cities (Gordon, 2018). The poor could revolt any time: "Inequality in the ownership of capital brings the rich and poor within each country into conflict with one another far more than it pits one country against another" (Piketty, 2014: 56).…”

Explaining ‘Brexit capital’: uneven development and the austerity state

“…In conjuncture with all this, the political strategy undertaken by the 2010-2015 Coalition government to impose a programme of austerity -'an excuse to dismantle social programs' (Krugman, 2012)rather than one of state-backed investment inevitably led to a fiscal starvation of provincial regional economies. It resulted in a drastic cut of 14 per cent in the public-sector workforce of England's North East: a merciless approach particularly given how, amid the frenzy of the North Atlantic financial crisis, New Labour had intervened with public money to save Britain's major banks while facilitating the Bank of England to feed 'quantitative easing', in effect boosting the London job market by 18 per cent while further enhancing the lavish spending power of the capital's über-rich (Gordon, 2018;Hazeldine, 2017). Further, through punitive cuts in tax credits and housing and disability benefits alongside savage reductions in local government funding (Toynbee & Walker, 2017), the austerity state has impacted disproportionately on people in older industrial areas, jaded seaside resorts, and now by-passed towns such that 'by 2016, there were causes enough for a protest vote' (Callinicos, 2017;Watkins, 2016, p. 10).…”

Introducing ‘Brexit Geographies’: five provocations

“…Invariably, and notwithstanding the fact that the Leave campaign attracted affluent rural voters, Brexit came to be associated with the politics of the urban 'left behinds'. In this sense the vote to Leave has been characterized as a 'revolt of the rustbelt' (see MacLeod and Jones in this collectionand Bromley-Davenport, MacLeavy, & Manley, 2018;Calhoun, 2016;Dorling, 2016;Ford & Goodwin, 2017;Goodwin & Heath, 2016;Gordon, 2018;Hazeldine, 2017;Hobolt, 2016;Jensen & Snaith, 2016). Globalization, neoliberalism, inequalities, the global financial crash and austerity have combined, it seems, to effect a growing dissonance between representative democracy and popular sovereignty (Jessop, 2018).…”