Centrism After Globalisation

Following the birth of New Labour, British elections became disputes for tenure of the political centre ground. For two decades, the country’s three main parties formed distinct blocks of a progressive-neoliberal condominium — each coloured by its own ideological tradition, but all fundamentally committed to the integration of a world economy charged with fictitious capital. Centrism implied belief in the inexorability of globalisation in general, and in the cosmopolitan sovereignty of finance in particular.

None were so enthusiastic about the progressive possibilities of neoliberal globalisation as the Blairites. For Tony Blair himself, questioning globalisation was akin to debating ‘whether autumn should follow summer’. Consolidating the Thatcherite legacy of financialisation and deregulation, New Labour under Blair reflected the zeal of the convert. However, it also extended, and modulated, the form of internationalism that had predominated within Labour since the period of decolonisation.

This internationalism was premised on the idea, sometimes given a more socialistic inflection, that Britain had maintained a ‘special responsibility’ to the world after empire. And it was often promoted through the claim — formulated, for example, by Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle, but also, later, by Robin Cook — that Labour in government could marry morality with politics, that it could protect national interests for the good of all nations.

But as noted by Tom Nairn, the end of colonial empire presented a challenge to the internal legitimacy of the British state, whose archaic form Labour played a particularly decisive role in preserving, from the 1960s onwards. Bound up in Labour internationalism, then, were measures to secure Britain’s position in the world system of unequal exchange and to protect British workers from domestic competition with surplus workers emigrating from former colonies. Britain’s international projection was to be pursued through an intensification of Atlanticism, which could in turn protect the interests of British trade and finance, while extending the reach and deployment capabilities of the British military. And it was to be pursued through overseas aid, which could open and stimulate markets, and complement immigration policy in the containment of populations on the global periphery. From this perspective, insofar as they sustained an illusion of empire-by-other-means, even the most progressive elements of Labour internationalism performed a conservative function domestically.

As the transnational movement of people and capital increased through the long 1990s, Labour internationalism became inextricable from globalisation. However, in the years following the financial crisis of 2007–8, there were indications of the tendency that would direct the gaze of Labour centrists away from international concerns. The growing reticence of the US to invoke humanitarian reason in justification of its foreign policy, together with growing scepticism among British citizens towards international institutions, provided anecdotal evidence of structural transformations that can now be identified with greater confidence. ‘Globalisation is over,’ one of Starmer’s aides told The Times in April, days after Donald Trump announced the imposition of tariffs on all trade counterparties.

Trump’s tariffs on the UK have forced Starmer to consider whether his government’s energy would not preferably be expended on securing regional trade deals with Europe, rather than deepening Britain’s vassalage to the US. But his decision, in February, to cut overseas aid and increase military spending represented the clearest sign yet of a break with the tradition of Labour internationalism. Triggered by Trump’s withdrawal of American support for Ukraine and a heightened sense of urgency among European governments about the reinforcement of defence, it also suggested a prioritisation of regional positioning over global projection. But this break comes after more than a decade and a half in which fragmentation of the interstate system has accelerated, with the US contravening norms and institutions for which it once posed as guardian, in order to stave off threats to its global hegemony. Changes in the social formation of capitalist democracies that have contributed to this process have also had direct bearing on the introflection of Labour centrism.

The Political Economy of National Centrism

The relative decline of the American empire and the generalisation of insurgent challenges to the progressive-neoliberal pact should be understood as related tendencies, deriving from the inability of Western capitalism to engender the kind of dynamism that secured its global primacy in the mid-twentieth century. Along with other Western countries, the US eventually responded to the capitalist crises of the 1970s through the adoption of a debt-based model of economic organisation — neoliberalism — that exploded profits in the financial sector while squeezing industrial capitalism’s source of value: living labour. Over time, the tightening of the formal economy, brought about partly through recurrent systemic generation of unemployment, not only resulted in drastic reductions in real wages, but also pushed a growing proportion of working society into precarious informality. As this model mobilised the state as legal guarantor of the autonomy of capital, it also reduced state capacity to provide public services and social safety nets that might reproduce a labour force in increasingly precarious condition. This, in turn, was used as justification for privatisations and monetary shocks, which, far from dragging Western economies out of their long downturn, tended to deepen it.

If neoliberalism has contributed to a widespread crisis of representation, it has also contributed to a transformation in the relationship of capital to the state. A contemporary incarnation of the ‘prince-financier’ has now gained power through the growth of ‘political accumulation’. And new forms of state capitalism have reaffirmed the centrality of the nation state in international affairs. Among disparate ‘non-movements’ contesting political authority from below, the ‘return of the state’ has not produced an expansionist ideology. Rather, particularly as they have tended to the Right, it has provoked a defensive posture.

Since the middle of the last decade, this defensiveness has been evident in the rise of a new right in Britain, whose most notable political leader, Nigel Farage (now of Reform UK), promises to raise walls and close borders. In August last year, many of its exponents pursued an imagination of national purification into pogromist paroxysm. Recently elected, Starmer responded with firm condemnation. But over subsequent months, his government became increasingly draconian in its handling of immigration, drawing freely on the lexicon of the new right. In April, 136 human rights organisations signed an open letter calling on Starmer to stop using ‘demonising language’ in his discussion of migrants and refugees. But he has demonstrated even greater willingness to seek votes on Farage’s terms since Reform UK gained ground in local elections, on 1 May. Britain now risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’, Starmer admonished, ten days later, duly eliciting accusations of Powellist mimicry. Taken together with the government’s new emphasis on defence and ‘security at home’, this shift suggests not so much a tactical concession as an emerging political formation.

In contemporary Britain, racism circulates and proliferates in the superstructure, inflated by anomie, as well as the cultural legacies of empire. But it has been given force and direction in the new right by the massive expansion of precarious informal labour. That is, by a collapse of modernisation that, initiated four decades ago on the periphery, now afflicts the old metropolis of global capitalism, turning surplus populations, once instrumental to the formal economy, into superfluous populations to be discarded. The new right’s obsession with demography and replacement reflects an impulse to contain an increasingly violent war for work.

Unable to provide an economic solution to this predicament, Labour now takes a nationalist turn not only to consolidate its political position but also to ensure the stability of the British state, for which it is the most faithful guardian. A sublation of the new right’s cultural politics, ‘national centrism’ — typified by the Labour government — reflects an organic response to the disintegration of Britain’s modern work society by a hollowed-out social democratic party.

Nationalism on the Way Down

In the 1960s and 1970s, in his writings on the British state, Tom Nairn returned repeatedly to the incoherence of English nationalism. Having acted as a vector of ‘modernisation’ elsewhere, England, and the British state formed around it, never became fully modern. British imperialism ‘removed much of the need for internal reformation and dynamism . . . extending the patriciate . . .[and] imposing a conservative straightjacket on the working class’. It also caused a ‘repression and truncation of Englishness’.

Nairn argued that, originating in ‘the machinery of the world political economy’, nationalism was a product of uneven development — a reaction, particularly of those trying to catch up, to the ‘rapid implantation of capitalism into world society’. Having never been peripheral to modern development, England had not truly experienced nationalism. Nairn thus ascribed the racism of the Powellist right to ‘an absence of popular nationalism’; there was no ‘sufficiently democratic myth of Englishness’.

Following the decline of its empire, Britain’s patrician state faced a more uncertain fate. Nairn predicted its breakup, as the peripheral nationalisms within it — of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — became irrepressible. In moments when campaigns for independence from Britain have strengthened, this possibility has intensified a search among the English for their essence. However, it is the experience of decline itself that has been decisive. Hardship, insecurity, and loss have now contributed to nostalgic fantasies of grandeur. Empire has become the popular myth-identity of the English — not its actual history and legacies, with which the English far right, since Enoch Powell, has had an ambiguous relationship, but rather the sense of stability, cohesion, and potential that its received memory conveys. If the English missed nationalism on the way up, they now experience it on the way down.

As Labour retracts from the world, the managed incorporation of English nationalism into government becomes a means of shoring up social structures of the state. (In lieu of development, Nairn contended, nationalism gives the masses ‘something real and important’.) It might be that this opens new political possibilities for national-developmentalist policies, with nationalisation of some utilities, which would not reverse decline but could contribute to a degree of redistribution. But it will also charge bigoted reaction, which now enables the destruction of rights and undermines the collective organisation of workers.

Margaret Thatcher famously identified Blair as her greatest political achievement. Starmer might yet come to represent a similar victory for Nigel Farage.