Chapter 7 describes Macron’s statist response to the COVID-19 crisis. Macron’s statist turn, like that of Sarkozy in response to the 2008 financial crisis, went well beyond the imperatives of crisis management. Indeed, Macron embraced a statist-protective mission, symbolized by his pledge to spend “whatever it costs” to protect the French. Chapter 7 illustrates Macron’s shift through four sets of actions: (1) the projection of state power and spending in public health; (2) the creation of expensive new programs to keep French businesses afloat during the crisis and direct their strategies over the long term; (3) a recommitment to social anesthesia policies, including policies that Macron had sought to eliminate; (4) a dramatic increase in public spending, deficits, and debt. Chapter 7 also describes Macron’s illiberal response to a more recent crisis, the surge in energy costs beginning in fall 2021, which prompted him to freeze natural gas and electricity rates, launch a €50-billion plan to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, and renationalize the country’s main electricity operator. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the ways in which the contestation of liberalization shaped the 2022 elections, both Macron’s reelection as president and his surprising setback in the ensuing legislative elections.

Chapter 8 teases out some of the broader theoretical lessons of the French case. The chapter distills the effects of dirigiste legacies in France into a general set of hypotheses about the sources of contestation of liberalization and shows how these hypotheses might apply to East Asia and Latin America. Chapter 8 also probes ways in which governments might diminish contestation by improving the process and substance of liberalization: the process, by moving away from skinny governance and enlarging the circle of participants to include an array of stakeholders; the substance, by ceasing to equate economic liberalization with giveaways to companies and the affluent and making more of an effort to ensure an equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of liberal reform. Chapter 8 concludes by discussing the links between France’s contested liberalization and the rise of illiberal populist parties. If Anglo-American neoliberalism is widely blamed for surging populist movements, French resistance to liberalization has likewise failed to keep populists at bay. For this reason, finding a version of economic liberalization that is fair, inclusive, and widely accepted is critical, not only for limiting contestation, but also for protecting the health and well-being of French democracy.

Chapter 3 analyzes the party-political legacies fueling the contestation of economic liberalization. Because of France’s dirigiste past, it is not just the left that is ambivalent toward economic liberalization, but also the right. The French right was in power during the heyday of the dirigiste system, so statist and nationalist principles became central to its economic outlook. In addition, leaders of the right emerged from the upheaval of May 1968 upheaval with a deep fear of strikes and protests. Finally, much like the left, the right never developed a legitimating discourse for economic liberalization, instead blaming it on external forces, notably European integration. Because of these legacies, the right has been an inconsistent backer of economic liberalization. Chapter 3 describes several characteristic behaviors of the right that foster the contestation of economic liberalization both in the streets and within governing circles: (1) a nationalist understanding of the economy that leads to extensive intervention to prevent foreign takeovers of French companies; (2) a fear of social upheaval that inclines conservative governments to retreat from reforms in the face of strikes and demonstrations, thereby encouraging further protests; (3) a fair-weather liberalism that gives way to statist revival in times of economic crisis.

Populism is unlikely to be effective where the masses are already incorporated into well-established programmatic parties. However, this chapter shows that deep socioeconomic crises can disrupt those political linkages, providing an opening for populism. The sudden rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in the early 1930s provides the main narrative for this chapter. Long frustrated in both his armed and electoral attempts to gain power, the fallout of the Great Depression in 1929 and Germany’s own banking crisis of 1931 shocked many Germans, especially on the right, out of their existing political affiliations. Hitler, the master demagogue, was ready to take advantage through a sophisticated propaganda machine. In most other cases across interwar Europe, the populist strategy was ineffective. Less severe crises left most the populace embedded in their existing ties to bureaucratic and patronage-based parties.

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical premise to explain the formation of identity-based hierarchies to justify social exclusion. Bilateral relations between India and Bangladesh and differential neoliberalism in the two countries reproduce a social hierarchy that serves to socially exclude Bengali Muslims. This exclusion, the chapter contends, can be explained by analyzing how neoliberal ideas shape identity markers – religion, language and culture, geographical importance, and their intersection – which in turn affect biopolitics. In tandem with the fact that Bengali Muslims share cross-border ethnic ties with the majority of Bangladeshis, the minority-migrant complex turns the Bengali Muslim into a group that can be strategically excluded, included, scapegoated, or rendered invisible. In turn, it reveals the contradictions in society: scapegoating is an inward-looking, nationalist, and state-centric strategy because it is geared towards maintaining government control and popularity (albeit based on a constructed foreign threat); neoliberal policies are outward-looking and "decentralized" because of the rhetoric of open markets and individual freedom. Their easy co-existence effectively privatize violence, as emboldened non-state actors turn into purveyors of oppression in response to neoliberal shifts.

Chapter 2 explains how the neoliberal logic of open borders (re)produces liminal identities in the Bangladesh–India borderlands where such neoliberal ideas confront and contend with national security and the nationalist desire for closed borders. The border participates in both fashioning a Bangladeshi Other to be strategically targeted as criminal, and its porosity helps maintain kinship ties and friendships across the border. The attention given to the border makes it clear that in contrast to the mainland, borderlands are fluid spaces with fluid identities with a more nuanced, even humane, sense of belonging and de facto citizenship. Using a qualitative approach, this chapter highlights the lived experiences of borderlanders near land ports and in the chhitmahal areas to show how people have to perform a variety of identities in order to access even the most basic necessities because of uneven neoliberal development. The changing nature of border trade and increased formalization amidst “enhancements” to support a militarized border creates a curious inversion of neoliberalism in the borderlands; although seemingly contradictory, the desire for open borders and mobility sits alongside the necessity of a closed border to gain from petty trade.

Even if populism is not simply an illiberal ideology, it is bad for democracy. Because populists are not constrained by power-seeking party elites, they are more likely, on average, to erode civil liberties and judicial and legislative constraints on their authority. At the extreme, populists so erode these constraints that they cross the threshold into authoritarianism. The best defense against this democratic rollback is not to be found in policy alone. Rather, institutional changes are needed that incentivize power-seeking politicians to create and sustain bureaucratic parties. The conditions that produced the mass membership parties of the twentieth century have essentially passed. But a new generation of programmatic political organizations could sustain democracy well into the future, taking advantage of new tools to map how we live and work, integrating people across space, and forging new civil and political spaces.

After the Second World War, countries across occupied Europe were faced with the challenge of restoring political stability at home and peace abroad. Although extremist sentiment had not disappeared, moderate elites resolved to choke it off at the source by building robust bureaucratic parties that could incorporate the masses. Christian democratic parties on the right and moderate social democratic parties on the left took power all across the continent, ushering in an unprecedent period of stability. Yet with the economic stagnation of the 1970s, this consensus began to unravel, giving rise to the emergence of populist alternatives. This chapter departs from existing explanations for this turnaround. It shows that the populist strategy was always most effective in the patronage-based party systems of southern Europe. In northwest Europe, in contrast, bureaucratic parties have adapted, substituting professionalized service provision for mass membership and participation.

Mass democracy went into abeyance with the demise of the Roman Republic. With the revolutions in America and France in the late eighteenth century, the masses asserted their political presence with a vengeance. Although both revolutions began moderately enough, they quickly diverged. In America, patronage became the predominant means of winning and keeping power. In France, in contrast, politics was soon dominated by a series of demagogues, from Danton to Robespierre. Rather than looking to ideology, this chapter proposes that the difference was due to the lower cost of patronage as a means of political incorporation in America compared to France. American elites had more than a century of working in the limited franchise democracy of British America prior to its "democratization." In France, in contrast, French elites had no such legacy on which to build. French institutions instead precluded the building of political parties, rendering direct appeals to the masses, especially those in the capital, cost-effective. The recurrent cycle of populism in France was interrupted only with Napoleon’s combination of popular appeal with the reimposition of centralized, executive power: a popular dictatorship.