https:\/\/www.nomos-elibrary.de\/10.5771\/0175-274X-2019-1\/s-f-sicherheit-und-frieden-jahrgang-37-2019-heft-1<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\nCurrent threats to democracy and the liberal world order from authoritarian populism are due to the failures in governance and civics that have given it fertile ground. Like terrorism, hybrid warfare, and other distributed people-centric challenges in peace and security within and beyond borders, authoritarian populism is an international strategic challenge in human security and peacebuilding. Strategies to combat authoritarian populism must: first, distinguish it as an international security challenge, including its use of strategic narratives to sway populaces; second, see it as a result of failed citizenship as much as failed government; and third, employ a strategic, service-based peacebuilding approach to governance and citizenship that is as bottom-up as top-down.<\/p>\n
It is tempting to see authoritarian populism as a problem of domestic politics. In a globalized world, however, it is also an international security problem \u2013 if only because it has proliferated in so many places at once. But there are more seismic reasons, such as a steady surge in wealth disparity and unprecedented numbers of forcibly displaced persons and international migrants. The ensuing instability and uncertainty present entry points for terrorism as well as Putin\u2019s dezinformatsiya<\/em> attacks on democratic processes, opening another front in his political war on NATO in addition to non-linear or \u201chybrid\u201d warfare on Europe\u2019s shared periphery. The compromise of Western soft power has also enabled China to challenge Western moral authority on the world stage.<\/p>\nAuthoritarian populism also exacerbates globalization\u2019s erosion of national political authority, eviscerating faith in governance and undermining Westphalian frameworks to manage peace and security, finance and trade, and information. The vulnerabilities, social grievances, and gaps in governance giving way to populism over here are much the same that hostile states and non-state illicit and extremist networks exploit over there. Whether in Central Europe, Central America, Central Asia or Central Africa \u2013 failing and fragile states are failing and fragile states.<\/p>\n
Understanding authoritarian populism as an international security challenge doesn\u2019t make it less serious, but it may make it less hopeless. No wonder NATO countries struggle with populist assaults at home as with asymmetric or hybrid warfare abroad \u2013 both their responses reflect a state-centric view of security. As with distributed, people-centric or \u201cgray zone\u201d problems of peace and security within and beyond borders, authoritarian populism demands a strategically collaborative response.<\/p>\n
While authoritarian populism feeds on the belief in the right of ordinary people to govern, it appeals to a distorted sense of entitlement of constituencies sensing loss of social dominance or the perception of minorities of systemic abandonment. Dressed as democracy for the disaffected, it eventually fails to deliver its outsized promises on the very grievances it exploits for its own power gain. Its real danger is in how it makes its victims, as in online phishing scams, unwittingly trash their own system software. The Russians, after all, haven\u2019t hacked Western social media as exploited its built-in vulnerabilities to degrade them to gain strategic and psychological advantage.<\/p>\n
Understanding narrative is fundamental to understanding this threat. \u201cNarrative is a strategic story,\u201d explained narrative strategist Ajit Maan in Narrative Warfare<\/em>. Narrative warfare is a strategic struggle over the meaning of information. \u201cWhen narratives are weaponized, they can undermine homeland security by shaking the faith of citizens in democratic institutions and the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\nNarrative is less about facts or truth and more about beliefs. It sets off powerful negative emotions like fear, ignorance, and cynicism, prompting irrational behavior. Many liberal governments and parties, vested in the rational actor theory of political behavior, struggle to push back against right-wing populist rhetoric by employing ideals, facts, reason, empathy, and awareness-raising, with often counterproductive results \u2013 and the answer to right-wing populism is not left-wing populism.<\/p>\n
If soft power is about persuasion, then narrative is actualized soft power; and, if identities are values in action, then narrative is value-based. Value-basing is essential to strategy, a process of making choices today about desired future outcomes. Values shape interests, which in turn inform strategy and policy, and then the actions of those implementing them. Identity is values in action, the connection between saying and doing. In a world swayed by narrative, the moral foundations of societies and governments wax more important.<\/p>\n
Governments, however, are not solely responsible for societal collapse \u2013 faltering civic qualifications are indicative of many countries that authoritarian populism plagues. In addition to this lagging performance in the Democracy Index, many measures show how Americans, for example, fall short as national and global citizens. The OECD\u2019s 2015 Program for International Student Assessment ranked them 40th<\/sup> of 72 countries in mathematics, 25th<\/sup> in science, and 24th<\/sup> in reading skills. With education aimed at commercial over civic preparedness, one-fourth of U.S students are at or above proficiency in civics, history, and geography. Despite interconnectivity, Americans are withdrawing from the world, in large and small. The paralyzing divisiveness of Americans at home, in turn, exacerbates their engagement gap abroad.<\/p>\nAs an international security issue, authoritarian populism is better framed as a human security challenge in strategic peacebuilding. In a larger sense, building peace is an ongoing process of maximizing stakeholders and minimizing spoilers to governance and civil society. It is also a political process in building constituency to respond to the vulnerabilities, grievances, and gaps that governments fail to reconcile. Peacebuilding is inherently a strategic process of building ground-up governance \u2013 thinking globally while acting locally. It promotes civilian resilience by helping to build collaborative platforms and narratives for cross-sector civil dialogue and learning.<\/p>\n
The answer to authoritarian populism may not be to scale down political innovation as much as to power it up. The emerging consensus, as in the Sustainable Development Goals, is that stability, security, resilience and peace and freedom are better gained, maintained, and sustained in ways more collaborative and community-based, eliciting inclusive leadership and citizenship \u2013 as informal as formal, local as global. This puts democratic societies at a distinct strategic advantage. Democratic governance is indeed an inefficient way to govern. Its value, instead, lies in harmonizing discordant interests, managing complexity and diversity, and empowering constituents.<\/p>\n
The adaptive dynamics of strategic peacebuilding apply universally. They must also leverage intergovernmental resources and regional cooperation mechanisms that democratize countries by empowering people through the promotion of local, national, and global citizenship. The European Union is perhaps the best regional model for this. In addition to more effectively coordinated policies on cross-border issues like migration, climate change, and trade, it must help enable a new narrative on European identity that all European citizens can find workable in their lives.<\/p>\n
The idea of citizenship as a base component of governance in peacebuilding has gained some traction, but citizenship as foundational to security and stability has so far seen sparse treatment in national or international peace and security institutions, research and academic centers, public organizations or agencies, think tanks and other institutions, and journals and media.<\/p>\n
Intrinsic to an evolving idea of governance, citizenship must find a new conceptual framing, moving away from inherited privilege or the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. In other words, a new, global ethos of national identity must guide national policies and laws of citizenship and immigration and assimilation, toward what the late Senator John McCain called \u201cideals and not blood and soil\u201d in his farewell letter.<\/p>\n
Democratic citizenship in a globalized world would best find value, identity, and narrative in an ethos of service to others in shared spaces. If the essential grievance of governance is inadequate public service delivery, then the gaps that give way to resentment \u2013 and the instability it engenders \u2013 are best filled by enabling and empowering grieved persons and groups to become stakeholders in the common civic enterprise. Nations of passive observers watching others make decisions easily succumb to anger, cynicism, and indifference.<\/p>\n
Citizenship that thinks globally and acts locally and fosters a more collaborative and inclusive mindset is antidote to narcissism and exclusion. Service-powered citizenship also helps people feel more empowered and hopeful, resilient to the darker narratives of exclusion and division. Good citizenship drives good governance and good leadership, morally grounded in personal and social responsibility and accountability. Walking the talk, it draws people together, overcoming divisiveness \u2013 in the United States, it could help put the unum <\/em>back into E pluribus unum<\/em>. The idea of bringing people together through a narrative of local, national, and global citizenship as heavily weighted in common denominators as in numerators is also important to European unity and identity \u2013 and the revitalization of the transatlantic community of values.<\/p>\nPopulism presents a strategic opportunity to complete globalization\u2019s dangerously unfinished work to bring people in instead of leaving them out. It is a wake-up call for establishments to try honesty as a policy, rein in corporate and lobby influence, and address long-neglected grievances \u2013 at home as well as abroad. Moreover, they must reform national narratives and legal frameworks about citizenship as a form of participatory governance and service as a rite of passage that apply equally to those who already live in their societies as those who wish to. As corporate citizens, the media also has a critical role in shaping a new narrative that balances dark news from capitals with inspiring news from communities.<\/p>\n
Answering the call to citizenship \u2013 local, national, and global \u2013 empowers people to embrace and renew the strength and promise of globalization and multicultural democratic society. Greatness is a lot of small things done well. The paradox of service-powered citizenship is that by helping others, one helps oneself. When we change ourselves, we change our communities. By changing our communities, we change our countries. And when we change our countries, we change the world.<\/p>\n