Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 27
by Geof Wood
Here we go again—appeasement. There is a famous photo from 1938 of Neville Chamberlain climbing down the steps from a small plane at a small airport in England, in his long black coat waving a piece of paper. It was his agreement with Hitler, after a brief meeting in Munich, declaring “peace in our time.” Hitler agreed not to expand further, while Chamberlain agreed to the consolidation of his existing territorial gains. What is it about Munich? Famous it seems for capitulation and its annual beer festival—the Oktoberfest.
Around 87 years later, we have just had JD Vance, US vice president, laying the “philosophical” groundwork for Trump’s concessions to Putin over Ukraine in his address to the Munich Security Conference—an ironic venue. It is always good to seek peace rather than war, but the question is always, at what price and in whose interests? But Vance had even deeper things on his mind—the absence of democracy in Europe, by contrast to the US. His concern was that Europe was asking the US to carry on defending values no longer compatible with its own, because European leaders had moved to the dark side in not listening to their people’s preferences, especially about migration (in effect racial purity) and other issues too– like women’s rights and gender identity. In Vance’s mind, Europe’s biggest threat was internal, from its own leadership failing in effect to keep it white and misogynous.
Beneath this crude stance by Vance lies how best to understand and apply the term: democracy. Vance quite deliberately associates it with populism, however, constructed and deployed. According to him, it is the populist opinion that European leaders are ignoring but the new leadership in North America, by contrast, is embracing. Do what the people want? Follow the polls (even if approximately three million non-white people had their votes suppressed by red states in the November 2024 US election). Stop trying to thwart the people’s basest aspirations, even if those are created by repeated blaming of bogeymen—foreigners of one sort or another.
This advocacy of populism occurs within a particular global context that applies strongly to a West losing its “colonial” domination of other regions of the world. MAGA arises out of the frustrated awareness of this retreat, a nagging fear that these regions are striking back through sheer population size and related market power, and having the nerve to be catching up technologically. A process is seen by the West as unfair and poached. Japan and other East Asian tigers were early post-war examples of this accusation, then China and latterly India, combining powerful minds and large populations with their rapidly expanding consuming middle classes (more than 300 million in India). This represents a comparative advantage through labour-intensive production enabled by domestic consumption of also exported commodities and through class inequality managed by autocracy and internal othering of minorities no matter how large scale. Instead of understanding these shifts in the global power base, the contemporary form of this retreat in Washington manifests as “racially pure protectionism,” bringing jobs back to the American people like it used to be. It does not matter that populations in the West will decline and age without immigration, weakening their comparative economic advantage even further.
This is the foundation of MAGA, and that is what Vance seeks to spread across Europe. In this respect, Vance asks, “Why can’t Europe be like America?” He cannot bear the possibility of an embrace of new globalism in Europe, the fourth industrial revolution, while at home, the US is stranded in short-term isolationism facing the prospect of inflationary under-consumption, i.e. stagflation on a grand scale. Already the warnings are out there, even from Trump himself—ordinary Americans (read: those who voted for Trump last November) will first have to “endure a period of pain.”
This is the divergence of values and prospects, arising from any optimistic European embrace of new globalism, of which Vance is so scared, Trump and Musk too, of course—the three musketeers. So, they need to fuel the rising autocratic and anti-immigration sentiments in Europe, the ones which rely upon racial othering in particular: the Reform Party in “England” (since it does not have much support in the rest of the UK), the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, Hungary with Viktor Orban, Italy with Giorgia Meloni, Slovakia already, the advance of the right-wing populism in Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands. These are all chasing their version of MAGA, aided by any violent incident now represented as evidence of the global threat to Western supremacy—the Munich car ramming was a timely gift to Vance. Any hint of Islamic militancy is a bonus for the narrative. However, the data in the US and Europe reveal much larger threats from right-wing, xenophobic violence—witness gun crimes and stabbings.
There is much to unravel. Vance represents a zero-sum game approach. Protectionism via tariffs is perfect evidence of this. The US needs to draw Europe into its retreatist dilemma for it to be shared more widely in the West. This is partly why the White House fears a rapprochement between the presently centrist UK and allies in the EU, which would help to re-balance continental political sentiment. This is why Musk encourages both the Reform Party in England and the AfD in Germany. They do not want the UK and the EU to be a bloc, acting outside the isolationist retreat formula. The present US leadership is trapped by its populist base, which created it, and they want the same for Europe. So, it has to cling to retreatist populism even though it will drag America down and deny it options to prosper in a revised new global economic order. Another way of putting this is to see America embarking upon a backward-looking mercantilism because its crude notion of democracy allows no other path. For the moment, it has the weapons to bully the vulnerable—but that is a stock of declining value in a world of cyber conflict.
The value of that piece of paper waved by Chamberlain did not last long, nor will appeasement and retreatism in the modern era. The emperor in Mar-a-Lago is increasingly without the clothes to satisfy the expectations of his tribal followers. Widespread disillusion will destroy even populist democracy as MANGA (Make America Not Great Again) replaces MAGA. Will the North American continent disintegrate into its competing blue and red states: its outward-looking coastal states (East and West) and its inward-looking stranded interior, increasingly dystopian? Will Europe suffer a similar fate? Will Munich again be seen as a misplaced disaster?
Author Dr Geof Wood is a development anthropologist and author of several books and numerous journal articles, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is also emeritus professor of international development at the University of Bath, UK./Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
