Markha Valenta: Why Geert Wilders is Not Liu Xiaobo
[Markha Valenta holds appointments in the departments of history at the University of Amsterdam and of culture studies at the University of Tilburg. Her current work concerns the politics of religious diversity in relation to global urbanism, multiculturalism and secular democracy. Her openDemocracy column is Inter Alia.]
It is rather striking, at first sight, to note how much the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Chinese Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have in common. Both threaten the political and ideological status quo of their countries; both have been legally prosecuted by their nation states for their public pronouncements; both speak in the name of democracy; both have received significant ideological and economic support from abroad; both have had their personal lives severely disrupted as a result of their public statements; and both are seen widely as martyrs for free speech. These similarities mark them out as men who at this moment have caught the pulse of the planetary transformations taking place in the practice of liberal democracy as a form of politics, social mobilisation and ambition.
Yet despite these important similarities, these two men could not be more different in the actual politics they represent: the one – Liu Xiaobo – a politics of dialogue and the other – Geert Wilders – a politics of fear. In this, they show us the two potential futures of liberal democracy in its broadest sense: as a comprehensive politics of possibility and as an excluding politics of domination. This difference reveals a crucial irony. At the same time as Liu Xiaobo seeks to enact democratic practices within China that have been a feature of western Europe for the last fifty years, Wilders makes use of Dutch democracy to promote an authoritarian style of leadership and social order remarkably similar to those promoted not so long ago under the banner of “Asian values.”
Like Singapore´s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia´s Mahathir Mohamad, Wilders embodies a form of authoritarianism that offers to strictly regulate ethnic and religious diversity, along with the social order more generally, through a stringent regime of law and order over which he would like to preside. In the process, he is willing to transform both the law and tradition in the name of honouring and protecting indigenous culture, as well as his own interests. In this sense, European politicians like Wilders are following in the footsteps of their Asian counterparts, who already in the 1990s were experimenting with effective ways of linking economic liberalism to authoritarianism, regional nationalism and civilizational self-assertion....
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It is rather striking, at first sight, to note how much the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Chinese Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have in common. Both threaten the political and ideological status quo of their countries; both have been legally prosecuted by their nation states for their public pronouncements; both speak in the name of democracy; both have received significant ideological and economic support from abroad; both have had their personal lives severely disrupted as a result of their public statements; and both are seen widely as martyrs for free speech. These similarities mark them out as men who at this moment have caught the pulse of the planetary transformations taking place in the practice of liberal democracy as a form of politics, social mobilisation and ambition.
Yet despite these important similarities, these two men could not be more different in the actual politics they represent: the one – Liu Xiaobo – a politics of dialogue and the other – Geert Wilders – a politics of fear. In this, they show us the two potential futures of liberal democracy in its broadest sense: as a comprehensive politics of possibility and as an excluding politics of domination. This difference reveals a crucial irony. At the same time as Liu Xiaobo seeks to enact democratic practices within China that have been a feature of western Europe for the last fifty years, Wilders makes use of Dutch democracy to promote an authoritarian style of leadership and social order remarkably similar to those promoted not so long ago under the banner of “Asian values.”
Like Singapore´s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia´s Mahathir Mohamad, Wilders embodies a form of authoritarianism that offers to strictly regulate ethnic and religious diversity, along with the social order more generally, through a stringent regime of law and order over which he would like to preside. In the process, he is willing to transform both the law and tradition in the name of honouring and protecting indigenous culture, as well as his own interests. In this sense, European politicians like Wilders are following in the footsteps of their Asian counterparts, who already in the 1990s were experimenting with effective ways of linking economic liberalism to authoritarianism, regional nationalism and civilizational self-assertion....