Political theorist Lea Ypi urges the Left to develop an alternative cosmopolitanism — a left-wing internationalism equipped to meet the challenges of escalating inequality, rising authoritarianism, and spiraling war. Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Meagan Day: Given the mayhem currently unfolding in Iran, it makes sense to start with the breakdown of the geopolitical order. As we watch the postwar institutions fracture or confront their own impotence — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the whole architecture of liberal internationalism — do you think we are witnessing a failure of those institutions or the exposure of the fact that they never really delivered what they promised?
Lea Ypi: A combination of the two. There is a story about those institutions that says they were always at the service of colonial patterns and a particular economic system, serving elites in the rich countries against the poorer parts of the world. But those institutions were also the result of efforts to counter the exclusionary tendencies of liberalism. They didn’t fully realize their stated value of universal freedom, but they represented an ongoing fight to extend it.
What we have now is a breakdown that people tend to understand in purely geopolitical terms — the rise of China, the crisis of the US’s relationship to Europe. But what we are really seeing is geopolitical conflict driven by ideological alignment: the rise of a right-wing worldview centered on the supremacy of the nation-state. It is ethnocentric, ethnonationalist, and rooted in a critique of liberal cosmopolitan elites.
This is a phenomenon you find in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. It’s an ideological alignment on the Right, centered on the perspective that might is right, the strong do what they have to do, and the weak suffer what they must.
Meagan Day: Is something new emerging on the global right, ideologically? Or is this similar to how the Right has always looked, only newly emboldened and unleashed?
Lea Ypi: It’s very similar to the critique of liberal cosmopolitan elites that you would have found on the Right in the interwar period, when fascism was rising. A lot of people think fascism is just conservatism, but it also has a constructive understanding of where it wants the world to be, a critique of liberal internationalism that was already there after World War I and the financial crisis.
What’s different now is that this seems to be the hegemonic critique of liberal capitalism and globalization. In the interwar period, you had another reading that was also a critique of capitalism and international liberalism, but coming from the Left, from a class perspective. Today the criticism of the status quo is coming overwhelmingly from the Right, with the mainstream left still struggling to recover its own critique of capitalism.
Meagan Day: Can you flesh out the distinction between conservatism and fascism?
Lea Ypi: It’s a distinction in methods. Fascism is a kind of revolutionary conservatism. It feels that the departure from the status quo needs to be more radical, because the status quo is too committed to liberal assumptions. Conservatism takes more of a reformist route — commitments to traditional values and customs but not this idea that you need to break the world to remake it according to some vision of the nation, civilizational superiority, and racial homogeneity that underpins a lot of fascist thinking.
Whereas in conservatism you find more compromise with the liberal order, fascism has a much more destructive and creative energy. There is a Nietzschean understanding of the relationship between morality and power in fascism that is very different from liberal universalism. Fascism, at its core, is committed to the idea that power justifies itself and that moral claims to the contrary are just the complaints of the weak.
Meagan Day: Would you say that the rise of Trumpism and figures like Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro is evidence of a rising fascist tide?
Lea Ypi: They come out of different predicaments. Orbán comes out of the failure of liberal cosmopolitanism in Eastern Europe, the financial crisis, and the shock therapy of the ’90s, while Trump and Bolsonaro emerge from their own histories. But these trajectories, which start very differently, all seem to be converging toward a more utopian fascist direction.
I don’t think MAGA actually starts out fascist. There’s a process of radicalization. These movements need a utopian vision in order to explain why they’re not delivering on policy. Why are costs and prices still so high even though you’re in power? You need long-term ideological misdirection to justify it to your constituencies — an ever-more exclusive utopia of hierarchy.
Meagan Day: What accounts for the Left’s relative failure to replicate the Right’s transnational networks?
Lea Ypi: The abandonment of the critique of capitalism as a class project. You have the environmentalist left, the feminist left, the anti-racist left, and there’s been a critique of universalism that has made it difficult to connect these identity-based struggles into one vision. Paradoxically, the Left has inherited the same culturalist approach that the Right takes to understanding conflict — saying it’s about racism or gender without fitting those critiques into a critique of the broader mode of production.
What the Left really lacks is an alternative cosmopolitanism. When I was a student in the late ’90s and early 2000s in Italy, that was the moment of the alter-globalization movement. You had the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the emerging idea of an alternative globalization. But that movement was suffocated by the hegemony of neoliberalism, which insisted that you didn’t need another politics, you just needed the right policy. All you had to do was cater to the Third Way: policy fixes, a little redistribution, compromise with economic elites.
Those of us who were on the streets were seen as ridiculous romantics who didn’t understand that the Cold War was over and there was no alternative. That’s what we lost, and that’s what we’re struggling to recover.
Meagan Day: The Left has been suspicious of the nation-state for good reason. But in recent history, it’s largely been within this context that the weak have been able to express their power. Is there anything redeeming about the nation-state?
Lea Ypi: Pragmatically, yes, because the nation-state is the site of coercive power. If you want to take and exercise power, you need to know where it resides. Otherwise, the social struggle just remains everywhere and nowhere.
But now the empire is over. The nation-state is itself a representative of the old order. Nationalism is no longer progressive even in its most favorable articulation. It’s just the exclusion of the other. People want to make distinctions between ethnic and civic nationalism, but ultimately when there is a border, there is a difference between who is in and who is out. It’s inevitably exclusionary. We are at a different moment, and we need a different kind of analysis.
Meagan Day: On that point, how should the Left position itself when speaking to a public that has serious anxieties about migration?
Lea Ypi: First, we need to change the discourse away from the moralization of migration. Migration is only a problem when it happens in asymmetrical power relations, as from the Global South to the Global North. Nobody worries about migration from Canada to the United States or from Australia to Great Britain. We only worry about migration when it reflects broader asymmetries of power. And those asymmetries are themselves the result of war, economic crisis, and environmental breakdown.
Migration is a consequence, not a cause. If you really want to solve the problem, you have to intervene at the level of its causes. And that’s where the Right doesn’t have an answer.
It’s also really important to bring out the class dimension. Borders have never been more open for some people and more closed for others than they are now, even in places where the Right is in power. When Trump was posting those images of people in chains being deported, he was simultaneously boasting about how easy it was for Russian oligarchs to get investor visas.
The golden visas, the citizenship-by-investment programs — the Right has been completely willing to open borders for the wealthy. So if the concern is really about cultural mixing and integration, why does migration become so easy for some people and so difficult for others who come from the same cultural background? Migration is a question of class, not culture.
Meagan Day: You grew up around 1989, and your memoir treats it as a very ambiguous turning point rather than a triumphant one. Is there something in the post-communist experience that gives us useful tools for thinking about this moment of instability?
Lea Ypi: One of the interesting things in the transition literature from the 1990s is the concept of the “triple transition.” Former communist countries had to build market economies, democratic states with structures of legitimation, and resolve the territorial problem. Scholars pointed out that you couldn’t have all three at the same time.
What’s fascinating is that people were saying this as though the West was staying constant. They took the best of the West — the golden age of social democracy, constraints on markets, mass-member parties — and said the East needed to catch up. But while they were having these discussions, those intermediary institutions were being completely dismantled in the West. This was the time they were destroying unions, when parties were becoming cartel parties.
It was an ideological operation that attributed the gains of Western social democracies to liberalism rather than to the labor movement, while at the same time the Thatcher–Reagan era was destroying the labor movement. What people had predicted would happen in the East — authoritarian right-wing leaders using cultural issues to distract from economic failures — ended up happening in both the East and the West. The transition went not from East to West but from West to East.
Meagan Day: Your family history involves persecution under communism and continued identification as socialists afterward. Can you talk about how that worked?
Lea Ypi: My grandfather was a social democrat and was persecuted by the Albanian communist leadership for it. But a social democrat of the 1920s and ’30s was different from what we mean by social democracy today. The social democrats of that era didn’t think democracy and capitalism were compatible. Social democracy at its origins was a much more radical project than we now give it credit for.
In places like Albania, the project of building socialism was merged with the project of building a nation-state out of the collapse of empire. That meant you didn’t have socialism built with democratic means. You had this weird hybrid: control over markets but no functioning public sphere, no democratic legitimation, no party democracy.
People sometimes suggest to me that I must not care about my own family. But I don’t see why caring about my family means siding with those my grandfather always thought were wrong. He always thought capitalism was the problem. The fact that he suffered under communism in Albania didn’t mean capitalism stopped being a problem. Staying true to my roots means not letting his enemies define what socialism means.
Meagan Day: What’s needed to rebuild the Left?
Lea Ypi: You need to settle accounts with both failures of the twentieth century: the failure of state socialism and the failure of social democracy in its nation-state-rooted version. State socialism fails because of its weddedness to the nation-state, its lack of democracy, and its neglect of first-generation freedoms such as freedom of movement, association, and expression. At the same time, we need to be really critical of the social democrats and how they compromised with capitalism.
Both failures are connected to the nation-state. An alternative needs to learn from both. We need to recover the critique of capitalism on the one hand and the critique of the nation-state on the other.
Meagan Day: What’s on your mind as events unfold in Iran?
Lea Ypi: War is the logical conclusion of the tendency to respond to political and economic crisis by vowing to make your own country great again. A worldview constructed around the nation-state is necessarily built on the idea that the world belongs to the powerful, and the powerful have a right to destroy everything that doesn’t conform. War is just that logic carried to its end point.
But what’s really interesting about this Iran war is that the United States feels no need to morally legitimize it. With this war, there is very little of the moral justification that accompanied, say, the Iraq War.
Real pacifism is only possible once you’ve overcome both problems: capitalism on the one hand, and the nation-state as an obstacle to the realization of a socialist world on the other. I do think the way forward must take the form of an alternative cosmopolitanism. That is the most coherent way of making sense of the conflicts of the globalized world.