What explains the growing divide between elites and the broader public in democracies across Europe and the United States? In this episode of International Horizons, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck joins RBI director John Torpey to discuss the rise of populism, the limits of globalism, and the tensions between democracy and capitalism.

Drawing from his recent book, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (Verso, 2024), Streeck examines how market forces, technocracy, and the erosion of national sovereignty have fueled discontent across the transatlantic world. He also reflects on the educational divide shaping political cleavages, the challenges posed by immigration, and the implications of U.S. foreign policy and security commitments in Europe and beyond. The conversation explores the shifting foundations of the postwar international order and the prospects for a more democratic and egalitarian global system.

Below a slightly edited version of this podcast episode

Transcript

John Torpey 

In the aftermath of recent elections in the United States and Germany, Americans and Europeans seem more divided than since the end of World War Two. The Trump Administration is barring and treated European visitors with the prospect of a decline of interaction and tourism from abroad, perhaps especially from Canada, the new leader of the Germans, meanwhile, has been among those leading the charge for Europeans to develop their own joint security policy, something Trump has promoted very strongly. The post war order appears to be in ruins, while the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, smolders, and populism is the order of the day. So what’s going on here? Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’re fortunate to have with us today. Wolfgang Streeck, that’s S, T, R, E, E, C, K, Streeck, former director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Streeck studied sociology in Frankfurt am Main, and at Columbia University. From 1988 to 1995 he was Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And from 1995 to 2014 he was director, as I’ve mentioned, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. He’s a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent book is called Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism, published in 2024 by Verso, and he was profiled in the New York Times last fall, soon after the re election of Donald Trump. So thanks so much for being with us today, Wolfgang Streeck.

Wolfgang Streeck 

Thanks for having me.

John Torpey 

So in this New York Times profile, the critic Christopher Caldwell wrote of your latest book, Taking Back Control?, quote, “The left strike argues must embrace populism, which is merely the name given to the struggle over an alternative to globalism, with globalism collapsing under its own contradictions, all serious politics is now populist in one way or another.” Can you explain for us and for the our audience, your argument in Taking Back Control?

Wolfgang Streeck 

Well, it’s a fat book and and it’s not just only there’s not only one argument in it, but of course, one thing that I’m asking quite at the outset is: what actually is populism? And historically, I think it’s a battle metaphor of the elites against the masses, so to speak. The masses are the populists or those who, who are the people. That’s the same listening to demagogues who are telling them they are right and the others are wrong. To me, to me, a concept is explained by its opposite. What’s the opposite of of populism? To me, it’s elitism, and elitism comes with the centralization of social systems, the de democratization, the replacement of popular reasoning with theoretical certainty. Would also say the replacement of democracy with technocracy and what I call marketocracy. Now, for a number of decades, and sort of the turning point might be 1980, we’ve seen a world that has become ever more centralized, where the original instrument of national of democracy, national sovereignty was sort of replaced with the dominance of one state over others, and the subjection of political systems to market pressures and huge, huge business enterprises. That’s all sort of part of this of the stuff of the confrontation between some, between attempts to restore something like bottom up control in a world in which top down governance has all too long sort of taken over. The function of democratic, not just not just will formation, but democratic self rule and self government. And that’s basically the question that I’m asking in the book, how can that tendency be redressed? So is that the point of Caldwell’s comment that all politics, all serious politics today, is in some sense populist. Yeah, it is, it is populist in the sense that it has to, it has to look at the restoration of the power of normal people, ordinary people over their lives, rather than this sort of strange combination of what Schumpeter calls the creative destruction of traditional forms of life and the imposition of such destruction by large enterprises as well as large state. In that sense, in the book, I’m trying to combine theories of democracy and political economy with theories of international relations and the international system. So maybe, if there’s something interesting in the book, then it is this attempt to reconcile two different approaches to social science, one being the comparative analysis of national political economies, and the other, studying their relationship in a global context, together with other political economies and the the processes parallel or contradictory that are going on in these two, on these at least two levels. Is that, is that too abstract? I don’t think because, because, after the book came out, these interesting things come up that suddenly everyone in the world is sort of tired of, or in the western world, is tired of the United States sort of telling countries what their security needs are, and the obvious failure of the proxy war in Ukraine as an example of the need for less centralized, less technocratic, more democratic way of ruling both nations, national societies and the international system.

John Torpey 

So if I understand correctly, I mean at least part of the argument is that, whereas it was once insisted that there’s no democracy without capitalism today, democracy and capitalism have become at odds with each other, at least. And I wondered if you could say, why did that happen? And what has what have been the consequences?

Wolfgang Streeck 

Yeah, I never bought this, this idea that democracy and capitalism are sort of birds of the same feather. In fact, they function according to two very different principles. A democracy is a world in which one, in which the rule applies that one man or one woman, man slash, and one vote. Whereas in markets, the rule is $1 one vote. Markets are extremely inegalitarian systems, whereas democracy thrives on the idea of equality and of equal rights of everyone, regardless of rich or poor. In democracy, me and Elon Musk are just two people, but in capitalism, Elon Musk is something very, very different from me. We have almost nothing in common. So, no, the marriage of democracy and capitalism is historical, you get shotgun, shotgun marriage. It was always sort of at risk of divorce. So, for example, in the 1930s when countries, Nation-states emerged that tried to be democratic, Germany, other places then, then you immediately had had a big conflict over, where is democracy to apply, and where does it have to end, and what sort of rights of property can be made subject to political contestation and what not, what is to be constitutionally protected from the will of the people, so to speak. In fact, the Democrats, or democratic movement were always afraid that the big ones would get up against them, and democracy replace it by some kind of authoritarian regime. If that sounds, if that sounds familiar today in the United States, it is intended to be familiar. And on the other hand, in the same way in which the people, usually socialist trade unions, parties in Europe and so on, were afraid of the state, operators, the military, the nobility, what was left of the nobility, the rich sort of ganging up against them in the same way, the rich and the powerful in society were afraid of the masses using the right to vote and to elect a government by majority rule so penetrating their prerogative and taking away from them the capital that they claimed they owned. But as you know, so the class struggles of the 20th century, there were quite a few people who argued that the capital of a society cannot be owned by a few people. It is the capital of that society and that whatever the rights of directing that capital in production and managerial function as you wish, the property rights with respect to capital must lie with the people. Here, we back at populism, because it is the same word.

John Torpey 

So a lot of people, it seems to me, and perhaps Thomas Piketty most particularly, have seen this divide as basically defined in educational terms, the divide between the people and the elites. And I wonder, and that seems to, in fact, have been shaping electorates in very significant ways, certainly in the United States. So I wonder whether you know, you agree with his, you know, understanding of the of the reshaping of the electorates of these societies, and is it primarily a kind of education polarization?

Wolfgang Streeck 

Yeah, yeah. See, see, mass education was one of the principal objectives of egalitarian democratic politics, so that everybody should have a chance to learn and to benefit from having learned something. Now let me, let me use the United States as an example, but, but there’s also other countries where it basically works the same way. Then suddenly it turns out that these institutions that should have produced, sort of the capacities for equal citizenship and equal citizenship, not just in politics, but also in markets. That these institutions tended to become, sort of rather than open, they tended to become more closed, in part because suddenly it cost a lot of  money to go to university, or because we discover that class, social class, creates growing up in different sections of a class, divided society sort of creates or fails to create certain capacities that are necessary for rising up or for equal participation. Let’s put it that way. And then suddenly this important idea of social mobility based on acquired capacity in an egalitarian educational system, suddenly that idea changes into the the rise of a class of teachers, journalists and so that begin to develop an identity of their own, telling the rest of the world what their interests are based on their superior insights that they have acquired by turning into a Brahmin elite, as Thomas Piketty goes, and that sort of divide in lifestyle, in a modern society, access to education is access to an important means of production. And the moment that the means of production are in the hands of some sort of you say, unified class or homogeneous social stratum, then suddenly you see conflict where there was supposed to be a common effort to civilize a society by, yeah, you can say enlightenment or egalitarian admission to citizenship in the democratic. As I said, one man, one vote. Mind you that the assumption of citizenship is that each of us, each of us the, let’s say, the world view of every individual is worth exactly the same as the life experience of every other individual. That is very hard to combine with an inegalitarian educational system, where, as a sort of side effect, you learn that you are smarter than the others, and that being smarter gives you access to being employed by a fancy law firm, rather than as janitor in your local public school.

John Torpey 

Indeed. So this sort of growing educational divide in the society, I think, also plays a significant role in one of the more important political issues that has divided these societies, and certainly in the United States in recent years, and that is the issue of immigration. And it seems to me that, you know, there’s been this split whereby the more educated see immigration as an issue that they should be more open about, and that excluding people is bad and could be racist and character and that sort of thing. Whereas less well educated people are more or less enthusiastic about it. They may see it as an economic threat. They may see it as a cultural threat, but in any case, they’re not necessarily that enthusiastic about it. And you know, this puts us in a in front of a conundrum, because most of these societies also have very low fertility rates and need more people. So we’re in a kind of a mess, it seems to me, on this particular issue. I wonder what you would say about that.

Wolfgang Streeck 

Yeah, we could talk about this for ours. That is really one of the conundrums and of all of our time now. Now there is a sort of moralistic reasoning about this, which is goes like this: the established way of life in your society, especially if it is the established way of life of the lower classes, is not worth being being defended. There is a better way of life, which is called colorful, diverse, and everyone the same, so that these life worlds, as we can call them, sort of become morally obliged to open up to vast individual diversity of people living sort of in together. And people lose confidence that the world into which they have grown will be the world that they will hand over to their children, or even will be the world in which they can move because they know, they know the language and the way you interact with with each other. Then that I would call the imposition of an imagined universalist worldview on people who consider their way of life a collective good that simplifies, that simplifies their life and so on. But that is not the whole story. That sort of story can be told in moral terms. Don’t defend your economic advantages, because there are so many people hungry in the world, and they have the right to come and share with you, if you live in a big, modern house  in the upper, in upstate New York, then that is a comfortable way of thinking about things. Now, if you look at at immigration societies, then you see that, you see a very strange phenomenon that especially immigrants, that, let’s say last generation immigrants, who have had a very hard time getting a foothold in their new society, are often very critical of of additional immigration. You saw this in the last election in the United States, and that’s completely clear, because they have sort of worked very, very hard to establish themselves. They’ve seen their friends and relatives sort of failing and pushed by the wayside by the mainstream or of society. And then they are, they are being challenged by the next wave of immigration, which are willing to work for even less than they were willing to work in order to get into the same positions that they have sort of got for themselves. People need to know whether they belong in a society. If you keep telling them that wherever you are that is only provisional, and something can happen, and you have to tolerate that happening for higher moral reasons. Then you are in trouble, and you get a lot of trouble, and then finally, I would say what I detest most about this discourse is how they talk about countries where people flee from, run away from, in order to get into a place like the United States, where there will be janitors, where at home they might have been, they might have been university professors, because we are all equally smart, right? We’re all equally smart. Now, why do these people leave their countries and go to a place like the United States, where they have almost no rights in if, if they are in bad luck? And I tell you: because we have a world trade system that makes it impossible for these countries to take back control, as you, as you might say, to develop themselves, to become champions in their own way. So, for example, we also have a world finance, financial system in which the local elites, and never think that in these countries, there’s no money or capital. It’s only that that capital is being sucked out by the local elites and invested in Wall Street or in Switzerland, or in other places. And we build a world financial system which makes this attractive for them, which in fact makes it possible for these unending instances of cases in which you push so called development aid into a country, only to notice five weeks later that there was a huge amount of capital coming from these countries located in Swiss banks. Yes, so I wonder whether the problem isn’t really to give people in the places where they are a chance to develop collectively by developing a position in the global system that allows them to be independent. And, for example, prevent their very rich and some of the poorest countries in the world are places where some of the richest people in the world sort of rule the place. Shouldn’t, shouldn’t we think about rather than how we accommodate refugees or immigrants to how we built a world in which they don’t have to immigrate, in which they can stay with their families, rather than you read about situations in the United States where people who have a family at home in Central America move to the United States, because they remain illegal, they can never go back, but, but they send months, for months, for months, they send money to their wives and their and their children, which they haven’t seen for 10 years because they are afraid of crossing the border and they can’t get back. Is that something that can be morally condoned? Absolutely not.

John Torpey 

So very interesting. And you described the book as having a kind of geopolitical or international relations dimension to it, or the analysis to have such a dimension. And I wonder now whether we could turn a little bit to the issue of transatlantic relations, the relationship between the United States and Europe. I mentioned in the introduction that there’s been, you know, seems to be a pretty decisive falling out. Donald Trump was re elected. He inherited a situation in which the United States was backing Ukraine as long as it takes, and now he seems to be pulling out of those kinds of guarantees. And there’s a major divide between Western Europe, at least, and the United States. That seems to be, you know, a re, re organization of the international system. And, you know, achieving, perhaps a long standing goal of American presidents to get Europeans to, you know, organize their own security. So I wonder, you know, how you see all that, and where you think that the implications this has for the Ukraine war and for the outcome of that conflict.

Wolfgang Streeck 

Yeah, one, one shouldn’t, one shouldn’t pretend that Trump is so much different from his predecessors. And now the discourse in Europe is like we were protected by the United States, and now suddenly they won’t protect us anymore. But, but that is, I mean, this is the old elite of the American bread, European elite, raised in the relationships of transatlanticism and in a world view in which the United States is the place where the good things come from. Culture, technology, they all go to the United States to study. I was a professor at an American university. Now these are people who have never asked themselves a question like the following: how is it possible that the United States has by far the best universities and research centers in the world, while at the same time having, by far one of the worst secondary education system in the world, if you look at the high school system and what it is capable of producing. And the answer is, the United States is a place that lives off inputs that it can sort of suck out of the rest of the world where it is present. It has a financial system that has become the financial system of the world. Most importantly, it has, all in all, 700, 750 military bases abroad, one of the two biggest ones in Germany, 40,000 American troops with their families, an unknown number of nuclear warheads. In a country like and then the Germans say, “yeah, they are protecting us.” It was never really clear and could not have been clear to what extent that American nuclear umbrella actually would have worked had it been called into into operation. What I mean to say is this, if after the Second World War, the United States were sort of trying to build a world on itself that was basically honoring the lessons of the New Deal, which were like: yes, if you want to remain a rich country, we have to be an egalitarian country. We have to have social institutions that bring people into the mainstream of a democratic society, to what extent that was Roosevelt or the need to win the war, or after the war, to recognize that there were no there were now people who came back from the battlefield and who were capable of handling guns and who finally wanted an end to a society that could have, could be unemployed or racist or whatever, and then you suddenly, you see how this country over the years, by both sort of asserting its control over the rest of the world, first by lenient trade regime, and then increasingly, increasingly by military means. And then, rather than being sort of this benevolent hegemon who stands for peace and democracy, slowly turns into a society that becomes dependent on ruling over other societies, where the two main institutions of that society become the very international, or three very internationalized science system, very superior military system, and the financial system, the rule of the dollar, in the in the global, in the global economy and the, I almost I say in the book, that that I expect that for an empire, and the center of an empire, the balance between the senior it draws from being the Empire and the costs of that empire slowly shifts in the direction of the costs, and then it becomes really dangerous for the rest of the world, like now, where Trump, I think, recognizes that being the ruler of the world is no longer profitable for that society, and that now the rules of the world have to be changed so that they so that the United States can can recover from the effort. See, 750 military bases is a lot of staff, and it costs a lot, cost a lot of money, and you need to collect volume. And Trump is totally open on all this. Basically, what he says is: we cannot afford anymore to pretend to be that benevolent hegemon that, in parenthesis, we never were since the 1980s at least, yeah, at least if not, if not since the end of the of the Bretton Woods voluntary system. So, so here’s, here’s my, my point on this, then part of the imperial role of the United States was breeding so national elites, so in the fashion of pro-American dependents, so to speak. Yeah, they all, they all somewhere, spent, spend time in the United States. They were, they are invited to spend half a year at Harvard, to be zoned. And, you know, and I don’t have to tell you this, this is the everyday functioning of that, of that sensor has been for a long time, and now it can no longer do it.

John Torpey 

Well, it sounds a little bit like the sort of famous line from the novel The Leopard, that if we want everything to stay the same, everything is going to have to change.

Wolfgang Streeck 

Although we don’t know if you really want everything to stay the same. See what, what I think as a European today, if, if you look at at the map, and you see Europe, Europe is only a sort of Peninsula, or Western Europe a peninsula of a much larger continent, which we could call Eurasia. The question that we are facing now is, how do we move from, in 1990 we moved from a Cold War iron curtain that divided Eurasia, sort of somewhere in Europe between Western and Eastern Europe included German, yeah. And now after 1930 suddenly, there is this attempt on the part of the United States and friends to unite, to unite Eurasia under American auspices by basically subdividing the Russian empire into its pieces, using the West Europeans to help them do this. And one thing that strikes me about the United States, incidentally, is that it can conduct a foreign policy in a most in a most diligentic way, because it never suffers from the effects of its diligentism. Nobody can imagine Iraq after the American intervention, Iraq sending the Iraqi fleet up the Potomac to ask the defeated United States to deliver a good, good old Bush Roman too, so that the Iraqis can transport him to to Den Haag and try him for war crime. That is totally, completely impossible. The United States can do what they want. They never have to pay the bill, that, that is why they can have this idea, this Brescinski idea, that you can actually go to Russia, like, like Napoleon thought, like Hitler thought, you can go to Russia and carve it up, and then you have Eurasia in your hands. Yes, it’s a disaster, but not a single American has paid for it with his life. It’s only those Ukrainians who do, yes. So, to me now, in Europe, the question is: how can run, organize this world, which we might call the Eurasian continent, so that we have not again, not again, an Iron Curtain separating Western Europe from Russia, which is what is now beginning to become the desire of our national government. We keep the Ukrainian war cooking and rehab ourselves, and the Russians are sort of confined behind the Western Russian border. How can we avoid this and replace this with a vision of a peaceful coexistence of different types of countries in this world in which what Gorbachev called, and Putin incidentally repeated, Eurasian continent, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Isn’t that the very important question that we have to address if we want to somehow be sure that they know not just ourselves, but also our children, will survive?

John Torpey 

A big challenge and obviously major questions that are going to face us for the foreseeable future. But that’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Wolfgang Streeck of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, for sharing his thoughts on recent political and geopolitical developments in Germany, Europe and the United States and beyond. Look for International Horizons on the New Books Network, and remember to subscribe and rate international horizons on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.