Cynical Politicians and Tribal Identities

An interview with political scientist Marlene Wind on the tribalization of Europe

Marlene, thanks for joining me. I really enjoyed your book on the tribalization of European politics! Would you like to tell us a little bit about your background?

I'm a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen. This book comes out of a visit that [former Catalan President] Carles Puigdemont made to Copenhagen, where I was asked to debate him at the University. And I actually tried to get out of that commitment because I was a bit afraid. It was the first appearance he had in public after he fled to Brussels. There was a lot of attention, a lot of journalists, a lot of people, a lot of guards. And we were warned that he might be arrested because there was an arrest warrant on him. So, the whole thing could have been dramatic.

I questioned him. There was a lot of Spanish journalists in the room. And they were really excited about my questioning. And I ended up on the front pages of the Spanish newspapers because I quizzed him about basic things. Do you want a Europe of 500 states? Should we all go back to being small tribes that cannot embrace each other anymore? I also asked him, what is democracy to you? I asked him: Is it democratic to launch a referendum where so few people show up and that is illegal and against the Constitution? Do you think that's a fair thing to do? Is that democracy to you? So, I was frank and provocative. I also told him: I'm the professor and you're the student, and I'll quiz you and see if you can answer.

When this hit the front pages in Spain, I was approached by a publisher in Spain, and they wanted me to write kind of a small book on my thoughts about separatism and European integration. Although I'm not an expert on Spanish politics as such, I'm an expert on identity politics, on nationalism, on integration, on sovereignty and all these issues. After thinking about it, I said, I'll try to do it. It came out in Spanish first, and then it came out in English, and it's actually going to be published in several other languages as well.

The book ended up being a bit longer, not just about Catalan issues. So, it ended up being a broader book about this tendency we see these years where political leaders use identity to create “us and them” narratives. It is based on the idea that we are special and we cannot embrace anyone else. These identities can only include those who speak the same language and have the same ethnicity. I was already working in my research on nationalism and rule of law in Eastern Europe, but I also talk about Brexit in the book. There was this idea that there was something in common in these different movements, including populism.

My background is that I'm a British person who lives in Barcelona, so I feel like I've got a double dose of tribalization.

I agree with you. Yes.

We often see people who get drawn into tribal identities get so passionate about them that it becomes very hard to have a meaningful conversation with them. It makes them vulnerable to fake news and conspiracy theories. They treat the loyal opposition as enemies of the people and so on. How do you feel that we should be moving forward from this?

I think currently we have some very cynical political leaders. Look at the UK, with Boris Johnson, who clings to power just because he wants power, not because he's interested in changing the society or doing good for a lot of people. He uses cynical strategies like lying and building up enemies. So, it's become common in modern politics to have leaders who use identity as a way of gaining votes. They use culture to fight for their political ideas and they know it appeals to basic feeling beyond the political.

This is rather scary in my opinion. Culture is a level below ordinary political discourse. You can always agree to disagree. But when you use culture and identity and ethnic belonging to make your argument about who is a stranger and who is part of our community, I think it becomes a very dangerous thing.

And I really think that we need to address that and we need to talk about it, because currently we take them seriously as ordinary politicians who run for office. But in reality, they are not ordinary politicians. They are cynical. They want to create “us and them” identities to polarize societies. That's their base. That's the way they gain power and stay in power. And I think that we need to call them out and debate how can we get democracy back on track. Because I don't think democracy is sound when it's based on constantly making enemies and polarizing societies. And that is really what we are seeing right now.

Also in my own country. I'm not pretending that this is something that is only in Eastern Europe, UK or Spain. In Denmark, [centre-left Prime Minister] Mette Frederiksen says Denmark and the Danes all the time. It’s all about appealing to the tribe.

One of the things that resonated me when I read your book was the discussion about protecting the rights of the individuals and minorities and dissidents as a core part of liberal democracy. I read Karl Popper’s book on the open society when I was a young philosophy student and it genuinely changed my life. Throughout the Catalan crisis, the nationalists were using democracy as a slogan. I thought it was very dangerous because they were talking about populism instead of liberal democracy. Nobody went and defined democracy.

Absolutely. The separatists go to the streets and make a lot of noise and appeal to the foreign press pretending their rights and democracy is being crushed. That's been their strategy. They constantly say they are not allowed to vote on their own future when they well know that they have ordinary democratic channels to work out conflicts. And they have just not been used in this case. I think that it's problematic. Some politicians are cynically using this split as a way of gaining power and maintaining power, whereas a lot of Catalan people have ancestors in other parts of Spain and feel that this is a very destructive way of doing politics.

We've mentioned populism. Obviously, Brexit and the Catalan independence movement and what we're seeing in Eastern Europe are all very populist as well as very nationalistic. They divide the world into the true people and the traitors. But populism is a much wider category. You also get left-wing populism, with people like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Pablo Iglesias in Spain. You can’t accuse them of tribalism, so it seems to be two overlapping problems. Would you agree with that?

Yes, populism is both on the right and on the left part of the aisle. Also in Greece, during the financial crisis, you had a left-wing populist movement. It’s not just reserved for the right wing. But tribalism is about language and ethnicity, so that's a different thing. And tribalism in my understanding is also an activist movement - it's something you are practicing.

I think that the right wing is combining classical populism with tribalism and that makes it even worse. It's impossible to join if it's tribal. It will always be impossible to join if you're not a member of the tribe. So, it's also even more exclusive than any other types of populism. The interesting thing about the Catalan case is that we both have this on the right and on the left. You use cultural language to build up your own power base, and then you use it to marginalize, for instance, Spanish-speaking people in schools.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. As usual, when dealing with Catalan nationalism, the comments have been disabled. I explain why nationalists react so badly to criticism here. And, no, Spain isn’t a fascist state.

Further reading

The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values by Marlene Wind

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