Economic crisis & the rise of right-wing governments in the world.

History is repeating itself. Economic crisis have always led to the emergence of right-wing and sometimes racist governments in Europe and the world. The leading cause of the rise of Hitler and Mussolini’s Fascism in the 1930s in Germany and Italy is related to the economic breakdown and the spread of dissatisfaction and poverty in Europe due to the financial crisis and rampant inflation in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. The post-corona financial crisis, the consequences of the war in Ukraine, and the threat of the global value chain have cast a shadow on Europe.

How is history repeating itself because of the economic crisis in the world?

None of the economic systems would ever surround themselves with Fascism, and no society would ever give the country’s freedoms and future into a dictator’s hands. Received forces of evil surrounded Germany. The exploitation of fear from the French to the West and the Russians to the east would break the spirit of the German people. In Italy, Benito Mussolini used alliance with the Catholic Church unions and the industry bosses to gain political power. Along with brute force against his political opponents, Mussolini’s form of Fascism was gradually built with 11 years of severe political manoeuvring. Both Hitler and Mussolini took advantage of the political environment to form new lofty ideals faces am an ideal that would lead to a second escalation in the early 20th century. 

World War I ended very badly for the Prussians. They were broken into smaller nations. Lands we are taken from them. These methods of wealth gathering from previous investments were seized away from them. Any possible modes of financial stability we are looking bleaker with the continuance of the reputations coming out of the Great War. Even when the new Germany did create wealth, the French would take it away from them because of overdue payments. There was no financial hope because the French Verso were relentless with their strict enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles. The French leaders’ enduring vengeance towards Germany after World war first was eventually waived by the Germans.

Moreover, this history repeated as the US government and all other systems of the world implemented expansionary fiscal policy through tax cuts and increased expenditure to “stimulate demand and support employees throughout the economy.” (Arner, 2009). In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed in 2009, which led to the creation of a $787 billion stimulus and relief program to combat the adverse economic impact of the financial crisis (Duignan, 2019). They guaranteed deposits and bank bonds to raise investors’ confidence in the financial markets. They also purchased ownership stakes in some banks and financial firms to prevent bankruptcies that could have worsened the financial crisis. (Arner, 2009).

 The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) began in the United States in 2007 as the subprime mortgage crisis due to the collapse of the US housing market. According to Sargunam, Kumar & Mary (2016), “a situation in which the financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value” is a financial crisis. The systemic financial crisis led to the failure of numerous investment and commercial banks, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders. It led to a technical recession in the US. By early 2009, American households experienced a fall in their net worth by about “$17 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms,” a loss of 26 percent since its peak in mid-2007. (Duignan, 2019). The unemployment rate climbed to 10% as 7.5 million people were retrenched. The crisis propagated globally, resulting in severe liquidity contraction in global financial markets. When this crisis had a severe impact worldwide, it was called a global financial crisis.

Economic crises are getting worst globally.

Global economic architecture is fundamentally fragile and has multiple internal contradictions which emanate from different economic and financial crises in different periods, H.P Minsky. Similarly, Marx asserted that the sustainability of the existing hegemonic economic structure depends on continued revolutionizing and modernizing means of production and more labour exploitation. However, because of this process, the absolute and relative surplus value is generated, which creates wealth; additionally, because of the destructive patterns of the global structure, the wealth shifts in a few hands, which makes and favours the global elite and sends the rest of the society into the swamp of hunger and poverty. 

The global economic recovery is facing significant headwinds amid new waves of COVID-19 infections, persistent labour market challenges, lingering supply-chain challenges, and rising inflationary pressures. After expanding by 5.5 percent in 2021, the global output is projected to grow by only 4.0 percent in 2022 and 3.5 percent in 2023, according to the United Nations World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) 2022, which was launched today. 

The robust recovery in 2021 – driven by solid consumer spending and some uptake in investment, with trade in goods surpassing pre-pandemic levels — marked the highest growth rate in more than four decades. However, the momentum for growth – especially in China, the United States, and the European Union – slowed considerably by the end of 2021, as the effects of monetary and fiscal stimuli began to recede and major supply-chain disruptions emerged. Rising inflationary pressures in many economies are posing additional risks to recovery. With the highly transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19 unleashing new waves of infections, the human and economic toll of the pandemic is projected to increase again. “Without a coordinated and sustained global approach to contain COVID-19 that includes universal access to vaccines, the pandemic will continue to pose the greatest risk to an inclusive and sustainable recovery of the world economy” noted Liu Zhenmin, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Right-wing extremism and how can it be stopped?

Right-wing extremist rhetoric does many things. It often pits elites against ordinary people in ways that place blame for economic troubles squarely on the shoulders of governments. When people experience economic precariousness, they can be more vulnerable to that rhetoric. However, even more importantly, we see extraordinary levels of isolation, loneliness, depression, and anxiety among young people. This is a generation that spends more time alone than any previous cohort. They are eager for connection and meaning and are vulnerable to rhetoric that promises them a sense of belonging, purpose, and a way to contribute to a cause more significant and better than themselves. This is the same dynamic that motivates foreign fighters to join Islamist extremist groups—the idea that they can be a part of something and that their lives will have meaning and purpose, whether that is to restore sacred geography like the Caliphate or rescue white people from dying out as a race. 

The language of ‘white genocide’ and ‘ethnic replacement’ (as cited by the New Zealand terrorist, for example) captures this quite clearly because it is paired with a call to action. This is not to say that all young people are vulnerable to extremist rhetoric. However, more young people than ever today are lonely and anxious and want a sense of connection. That increases the number who will be vulnerable to extremist promises of meaning and purpose.

Stopping right-wing extremism will require a multi-pronged solution. Most governments emphasize increased law enforcement solutions, monitoring, surveillance, and intelligence efforts. This is important, of course. Nevertheless, it is also important to remember that intelligence solutions will always be a band-aid. We also need preventative solutions, which will require working within the mainstream to remind people what the core values of democracy are and what it means to live in an inclusive democracy. We need school programs and educational initiatives that increase empathy and cross-cultural understanding. We need serious funding initiatives that will not only fund preventative programs but will also fund research to investigate what works. 

Conclusion

Right-wing extremism is of such concern that when the top international security policy-makers met at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, they ranked it among space security, climate security, and emerging technologies as the top global security threats. Across the globe, the pandemic has led to the rise of many problems, which include economic, social, and political problems. Among these, the rise of rightist groups and extremist ideologies has been a concerning trend in various parts of the world. Rightist groups have used the pandemic’s circumstances in southeastern Europe to extend their messages to broader audiences. While the trends have become prevalent in several countries in the region, the common themes revolve around the rise of right-leaning ideologies and encouraging extremism in members of these groups.