in the face of the trade imbalance with China. But in all these cases, today as in the past, the question of the appropriate degree of protectionism has most often been approached from a pragmatic standpoint; the only variations lie in the felt urgency of the question or in the nature of the problems to be taken into account (the issue of the environmental cost of global free exchange, for example, has taken on unprecedented importance). The defense of protectionism that lies at the heart of the economic vision of numerous populist movements is of a different order, and it is much broader in scope. It refers both to a conception of sovereignty and to a conception of political will, to a philosophy of equality and to a vision of security.
The return of political will
From the protectionist perspective, the reign of free exchange and the globalization that comes with it are not evaluated solely from the standpoint of the economic and social balance sheet that can be drawn up, either globally or on specific points. They are denounced, first of all, as being vectors of the destruction of the political will. They are accompanied by a transfer of the governing authority to anonymous mechanisms, which precludes the possibility that peoples can have sovereignty over their own destinies. They sketch out a world presumed to be governed by “objective” rules, a world that rejects as incoherent the very idea of an alternative to the existing order.3 This dispossession is aggravated by the rise in power of independent authorities that develop wherever the reign of free trade and globalization has taken hold. Where European populisms are concerned, the European Union appears as the symbol and laboratory of this perverse confiscation of popular power by expert reasoning and the invisible hand of the market. From the populist standpoint, the EU illustrates in exemplary fashion the installation of a “government by numbers” that is superseding the exercise of political will.4
This critique underlay the success of the 2016 vote for Brexit in Great Britain: Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage had presented themselves as champions of the “can do” approach that would restore to the British people an active and beneficial sovereignty over their own destiny. If Johnson and Farage also set themselves up as champions of a certain liberalism in external trade, that liberalism remained fully inscribed within a nationalist vision of the economy. On the same basis, in France, Marine Le Pen persisted in denouncing the anonymous power of the “divine market,” depicting the European organization – accused of being the “avant-garde of globalism” – as the exemplar of a “horizon of renunciation.”5 Around the same time, the author of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s economic program published a work with the evocative title Nous, on peut! (We Can Do It!),with an even more explicit subtitle: “Why and how a country can always do what it wants in the face of markets, banks, crises …”; the subtitle of its second edition (2012) presented the work as an “anti-crisis manual for the use of citizens.”6 This argument in favor of national protectionism was thus clearly intended to be embedded within a program aimed at refounding democracy, going far beyond an approach that would address the issue simply in terms of economic policy. For this reason, the argument is one of the keystones of the populist vision of the political will.
This political and democratic understanding of protectionism is also directly tied, in populist discourse, to an analysis of immigration. The development of an immigration policy is described as a process imposed on the country by the dominant classes in their quest for cheap labor, without explicit validation by any democratic decision.7 Thus, for populists, immigration entails an unacceptable bypassing of the popular will; it is the product of a capitalist strategy that has led to a downgrading and a weakening of the autochthonous popular classes. Extended to renewed control of migratory flows, the protectionist imperative is thus also viewed as contributing to a reinforcement of popular sovereignty. Here again, the political notion of sovereignty is wholly inseparable from the way economic and social questions are approached in the populist vision.
A conception of justice and equality
There are two ways to comprehend justice and equality. One is to conceive of them in terms of an understanding of relative positions between individuals, that is, to start from the different categories of inequalities that characterize individuals, whether in terms of income, patrimony, or opportunities. In this case, the goal is to distinguish potentially justifiable differences from those that it would be appropriate to reduce by means of policies governing taxation, redistribution, or enrichment of the human capital of individuals. This is the most common way of grasping the democratic imperative of equality. Another way, just as important but perhaps less often taken into account, is to consider equality as a quality of the relation between individuals (equality between a man and a woman is thus defined by the fact of living as equals, and not only in terms of distribution), and as a quality of a human community (the fact that everyone is recognized in it, that there exists a form of harmony among its members, that these members form an active polity).8 These two dimensions of equality are inseparable: no community of citizens is possible if the conditions of life are such that citizens evolve in totally separate worlds. But they are linked at the same time to specific types of institutions and politics that give them consistency.
The populist approach to this imperative of equality is characterized by two major features. First, it is polarized around the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent in terms of distributive equality, and by the same token it tends to relegate to second place all other manifestations of inequality within the world of the 99 percent (even though that world is far from homogeneous), and it simultaneously presupposes the unity of the universe of the 1 percent. Next, this approach strongly emphasizes the properly civic or societal dimension of equality, a dimension often neglected in the dominant approaches to the question. But the populist perspective does this in a quite particular way: it advances the notions of identity and homogeneity as components of a “good society” forming a democratic nation. And this is how the populist vision of equality relates to the national protectionist conception of the economy. The protectionist idea in fact presupposes that there is a well-constituted entity to be defended, an entity clearly distinguished from what is external to it. The notion of equality is thus conflated in this case with that of inclusion in a homogeneous whole. Understood in this sense, the fact of belonging to the nation institutes a form of negative equality, the form that establishes a group defined as a community distanced from other communities. This applies to foreigners in a legally self-evident way, but also, by extension, to all categories of undesirables or enemies, who end up being assimilated to foreigners. The feeling of equality is nourished in this case by a constant need to reinvigorate that distance. This contributes to relativizing the “internal” inequalities and considering them essentially as derivatives of globalism, including the expanded domain of the market, the increased mobility of individuals, the exacerbation of competition, and the liberal espousal of the differences that stem from these phenomena.
We must also recall that the development of many populist movements – and this is particularly apparent in Europe – has often been linked to the assertion of regional separatisms: regions refusing to be part of a fiscal and redistributive community that would include populations deemed no longer to be part of a common world, owing to their behavior as entities that “profit” from the welfare state. The Lega (League) in Italy9 and the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium10 are exemplary archetypes.11 One of the strengths of a movement like Matteo Salvini’s League lies in its ability to transcend the regionalist sentiment by “nationalizing” it, transferring the rejection of the South in Italy onto a critique of European institutions. The adversary is no longer “Roma Ladrona” (Rome the Thief), but the Brussels bureaucracy, drunk on regulations, an insidious machine for dispossessing peoples of their sovereignty. This is why the anti-European dimension is now one of the essential markers of populism on the continent. It gives a more modern and more readily acceptable tonality to a nationalism that is in fact highly traditional.
Protectionism as an instrument of security
Control of a border, especially by building walls or fences, is a major way of asserting sovereignty over
