The New Global Populism

[Jcrowley]

The new global populism
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

NEW YORK - This week, the United Nations has been true to its intention to be a global parliament, allowing fierce and spirited debate by the world's rival factions in a unique forum where the mighty and the weak nations each have a chance to air their points of view - even if that shows how fractious the world community is.Thus while the leaders of developing nations have been seizing the opportunity to lament growing economic disparities and economically rooted rising tensions and polarizations, the United States and other Western governments have focused on the threats of terrorism, rogue states, proliferation and the like.

Yet far from business as usual, what sets this year's General Assembly gathering somewhat apart is the window it has opened onto a global realignment consisting of many Third World nations forming a coherent anti-US bloc. Led by Iran and Venezuela, and including Cuba, Bolivia and a host of other nations, this bloc represents a new world political phenomenon, that is, a new global populism.

With its transcendence of traditional right-left and secular-religious dichotomies, the new populist bloc, exploiting a grassroots estrangement from the dominant Western policies, valorizes its anti-hegemonic vision on several fronts, including the cultural-war front, where so many "value" issues such as the applicability and universal relevance of Western (neo-)liberalism for the countries of the South are contested and even resisted.

The essence of this new phenomenon is a politics of redistributive justice, seeking to offset the disproportionate power of the US superpower and its politics of unilateralism, militarism and preemptive warfare, as well as to achieve what has long been on the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement, ie, a new international economic order. Championing trade and political multilateralism, the firebrand leaders of Iran and Venezuela have used their populist anti-imperialist oratory skillfully, gaining new levels of popularity beyond their national constituencies in the contested terrain of the international public sphere.

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