How can we decipher the nuances of today’s form of extreme nationalism? And what is new about it when compared to, for instance, the ultra-nationalism that led to fascism and dictatorships in the 20th century?

To answer that question, consider today’s nationalist political movements like you do the vegetable section in your grocery store. There are a variety of neo-national movements and leaders, but they are all metaphorically vegetables.

Varieties of neo-nationalism range from political movements and parties (think Brexit or the National Front, rebranded the National Rally, in France under Marine Le Pen), to neo-nationalist leaning governments (with wannabe autocrats like Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the evolving story of Modi’s India), to illiberal democracies (Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Andrzej Duda’s Poland and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey), to authoritarian states (think China, Russia, and North Korea at the extreme end).

Hybrids abound. But most neo-national movements, parties, and governments are characterized by some combination of right-wing anti-immigrant, nativist, anti-science, anti-globalist (sometimes couched as anti-Western), and protectionist sentiments. When in power, they seek to squelch or even eradicate criticism.

And neo-nationalist leaders often have a core constituency that includes conservative religious groups—a marriage one finds in India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and here in the U.S., but not in secular China where the Communist Party is the state religion.

Some of this is familiar. Like right-wing populist movements in the past, neo-nationalist supporters and parties are often reacting to their own sense of waning political power, and perceived declines in social status and economic opportunity. Demagogues, then, step in to feed off a desire to preserve or reclaim a seemingly lost national cultural and political identity.

In Russia, you can find such backward-looking neo-nationalism. Vladimir Putin is infatuated with asserting Russia’s power and place in the world in order to revive nationalism and reclaim in some modern form both Russia’s tsarist and Soviet empire.

But if you really want to go back to the future, go to China.

Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is a rewind to hero-worship politics. He demands increased loyalty to the party, and has built a personal cult around himself reminiscent of the founding leader of China’s Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Xi’s goals are to preserve the existing domestic political order, to restore territory seen as lost (namely Taiwan), and to pursue a new global economic dominance and increasingly military presence in Asia, and beyond. Xi’s autocratic China is also portrayed as a superior model to established democracies that seem incapable of governing.

One of Xi Jinping’s earliest nativist edicts—in 2013, just a year after assuming power—was for the Chinese people to avoid Western values and what he called the “seven unmentionables.” These included “Western constitutional democracy,” human rights, media independence, promoting “universal values” in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership, judicial independence, pro-market liberalism, and “nihilist” criticism of the party’s past.

For all the attention on autocratic regimes like Russia or China, it is the illiberal democracies that are growing the fastest in number. These are nations that often in the aftermath of dictatorships elect their leaders but have no history or culture of participatory democracy and civil liberties. Elected right-wing nationalists then establish a political environment that employs a mixture of corruption, demagoguery, and a lighter version of repressive regimes of the past, often with wide popular support.

Some illiberal democracies border on being authoritarian regimes. These are characterized by indefinite presidential terms, the repression or control of media outlets, erosion of judicial independence, the transfer of state resources to an oligarchy, and the persecution of opponents—along with the maintenance of some semblance of open elections.

Perpetually staying in power is often one major objective of neo-nationalist leaders. An example is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In a call to arms, in 2014, Orbán infamously declared the end of liberal democracy in Hungary and his intention to build “an illiberal new state based on national values.” He cited China, Russia, and Turkey as his inspiration and encouraged others to follow. Indeed, autocratic leaning states and their leaders are supporting each other, sometimes to mitigate international sanctions, other times militarily—Putin’s support of Belarus’s autocratic government being one example.

What fuels the popular support for neo-nationalism? Orbán and other protagonists leverage the politics of fear to attack and blame perceived enemies, domestic and foreign, wrapping themselves in a mantle of patriotism. Such tactics were prevalent in previous forms of extreme nationalism.

But the causes and practices of today’s breed of nationalism (and hence the prefix neo) are newer and modern, and have three accelerants.

The first is the rapid pace of globalization and the economic uncertainty and fear it produces. While globalization, and specifically the growth of transnational trade, promised cheaper goods and a rise in living standards, it also led to economic stagnation and oftentimes an actual decline in living standards among lower- and middle-income populations in regions of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and elsewhere.

The second accelerant is the pace of immigration and demographic changes among and within many countries. Today’s shifts in demography are historic, and are marked by mass immigration, mostly to Western economies, caused in part by the search for jobs as well as displacement caused by war, poverty, climate, and dysfunctional societies.

Open borders, open markets on an unprecedented scale, and the shock of the Great Recession, are all widely recognized causes for a populist reaction characterized by anti-globalism, nativism, protectionism, and opposition to immigration.

The third accelerant is the ability of a new generation of populists and demagogues to use technology and social networks to promote themselves, find allies for their movements, both at home and abroad, and attack enemies. The ease at which social media and its algorithms can distribute false narratives has added considerably to the power of political movements. Right-wing populists in many nations now bypass conventional media and build followings—like President Trump using Twitter for significant policy directives sandwiched between aspersions on political opponents.

Technology in the service of neo-nationalist leaders does not end there. In China, Russia, and in many illiberal democracies, new technologies offer paths for monitoring and punishing dissent, for spreading disinformation, and concerted efforts to subvert established democracies—what is termed sharp power.

Xi’s China, for all its backward-looking cult-making, has led both technologically and tactically. The state has imposed firewalls controlling access to websites and strict rules on what can be discussed. The 1989 events in Tiananmen Square are off limits to the web and discussion in China. So is the mass incarceration of ethnic Muslim Uighurs, again part of a nationalist drive for conformity.

Such suppression is blatantly overt, but other tools are more subtle and decidedly novel. Beijing has developed a Social Credit System using data sources, such as artificial intelligence and face recognition technologies, to give each citizen a score on their social and political conformist behavior—with the threat of penalties and even jail for those that stray. Putin’s Russia is experimenting with this in Moscow.

Combining new and more conventional forms of surveillance, like encouraging citizens to report on each other’s broadly-defined seditious activity, sometimes leads to arrests, or the loss of a job. It is not so much the number of academics, civil rights lawyers, or other pro-democracy advocates put in jail, but the message it sends to induce fear and encourage political conformity—whether in China, increasingly in Hong Kong, or elsewhere. One objective is self-censorship. And it works, particularly if practiced over a long period.

It’s crucial to note that nationalism—whether in new forms, or in revivals with new characteristics—is not solely the domain of right-wing politics. Modern nationalism also has a variant on the left side of the political divide. The left shares anti-globalist views espoused by nationalists of the right—for example that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), multilateral trade agreements, and even the EU, are conspiracies to increase inequality and erode national sovereignty. And there is intolerance for civil debate on both sides of the political spectrum.

One might also consider the nuances of nationalism that led to the Arab Spring. Nationalist movements that started with calls for participatory democracy and economic opportunity eventually resulted in religious conservative governments or new autocratic regimes—think Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and, perhaps, Tunisia since Kais Saied’s presidential coup earlier this year.

The COVID-19 pandemic should have eroded the attraction of neo-nationalists’ messaging. Think about the remarkably short period—just one year—from discovery of the virus to the creation of multiple effective vaccines. This governance and scientific success was built on decades of publicly funded biomedical research and it should have elevated the value of global collaboration and scientific inquiry.

Instead, the virus provided an opportunity to reinforce extremist views, spread fantastical conspiracy theories, and thus solidify and expand the power of savvy neo-nationalist leaders in much of the world. China used the pandemic as partial cover to crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong. In other corners of the globe, extreme nationalists used the pandemic to argue that international organizations are ineffective and pose a threat to national sovereignty.

Where is the world headed? Numerous non-profits monitor and provide data on this march of autocrats and right-wing nationalist movements. Freedom House, an NGO that monitors global freedom, has chronicled a long-term decline in democratic governments “broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies.”

Varieties of Democracy or V-Dem, which uses an extensive dataset relying on local country experts, estimates that some 68 percent of the world’s population live under autocrats and autocrat-leaning governments—up from 48 percent in 2010.

Optimists might see a few signs of slowdown in the march of neo-nationalist political leaders and autocratic-leaning governments. The desire of young people in Hungary and Poland to stay in the European Union poses a political obstacle for nativist policies. The neo-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AFD) party just lost seats in the Bundestag. Trump lost to Biden. In France, Le Pen’s party is not making major gains, at the moment.

Societies with strong democratic traditions and civil discourse may appear to be partially immune to the worst scenarios of nationalism gone haywire.  But danger lurks for both established and new democracies. Donald Trump, despite his near-coup, remains a viable political candidate and has created a playbook for Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who has insisted that he can only lose the pending presidential election if it is stolen.

Perhaps democracy is more fragile than many of us would like to think.

Writing in the midst of the Great Depression and reflecting on nationalist movements in Europe and America, Sinclair Lewis warned in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here of a dystopian American future in which a charismatic and power-hungry demagogue leverages fear and nationalism to become president. The first American writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, Lewis gave voice to a worry that fascism could emerge in arguably the world’s first modern republic as an outgrowth of economic disruption and populist anger.

The United States has an antiquated electoral process, a justice system seemingly incapable of swiftly prosecuting a treasonous political leader, and a Republican Party cheering on a possible autocrat. Only a year ago the U.S. was close to a complete constitutional meltdown instigated by a morally bankrupt neo-nationalist.

It can happen here.

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The world looks to China and sees an economic giant. But the China we ought to see is a political giant. Xi inherited a regime of pragmatic authoritarianism under collective leadership. Now that pragmatism has been superseded by ideological fervor, Xi’s project is to make his totalitarian “China Dream” of national rejuvenation and greatness a reality. For that he needs a strong and growing economy, but in his project the economic is in the service of the political. What always comes first is the perpetuation of the regime itself.

China is an economic giant, and governments and corporations obviously want to do business. But when you do, you should know that you are dealing with a dictatorship, inspired by nationalistic ideology, with a confident one-man supremo at the helm. By acting as if this kind of state is a cuddly teddy bear of benevolence, Europeans and other democratic governments have not learned much from history. Dictatorships can be soft or hard. China’s dictatorship is getting ever harder. When democratic governments want to engage with China, they should do so in ways that halt the hardening of its dictatorship.

To understand how China’s mission has changed in the last decade, look no further than Xi’s career. Elevated to party boss in 2012, he has since tightened all the reins of dictatorship. Any semblance of opposition has been crushed—even small feminist groups that were organizing protest against sexual harassment on public transport. Their sin was not in their cause, but in the act of organizing outside of the party system. Human rights lawyers have been detained or put out of business en masse. Censorship and internet control are more penetrating than ever. Internally in the Party, discipline is the mantra. All potential opposition has been silenced with the help of the anti-corruption campaign.

Xinjiang, the predominantly Muslim province in the west, has been turned into a surveillance state laboratory, with the deployment of the most advanced electronic tools of the trade. The political activist Yang Maodong was right when, in his trial in 2014, he defied the court with an eloquent defense statement in which he compared today’s China “blow by blow” to the nightmare state of George Orwell’s 1984. But there’s no real need to reach for fiction to describe what’s occurring: With both pragmatism and collective leadership gone, Xi stands on a pedestal of power previously occupied only by Mao.

In keeping with this transformation, China is no longer engaging in balanced collaboration, but rather pursuing domination. It is undermining the rule of law in Hong Kong. It is threatening Taiwan with annexation, and thus taking the position that the will of the people of a democratic country is to count for nothing. It has de facto turned 3 million of the South China Sea’s 3.5 million square kilometers into its own territorial waters, in contravention of international law and a ruling by the Tribunal of the Law of the Sea. Australia and New Zealand are on the forefront of China’s purchase of influence abroad, through persistent interference in politics, media, and universities, described in a recent Australian book as a “silent invasion.”

Beijing may not be imposing its model on others, but it is imposing something else: silence. If you want to collaborate, be you a business, an organization, or a government, you are not allowed to say or do what the men in Beijing regard as unfriendly.

Recently, Mercedes-Benz happened to mention the Dalai Lama in promotional material outside of China, met criticism in China, and quick as a flash removed all reference to His Holiness and apologized for “hurting the feelings” of the people of China.

If you cross the regime, you will be in danger of retribution, such as exclusion from operations in China. Environmental NGOs like Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and Conservation International are silent on China’s environmental destruction in the South China Sea.

To see how much norms have changed recently, consider what happened when China and Norway “normalized” relations last year. (Relations had been on ice for six years after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.) What Norway had to pay for “normalization” was a promise to undertake no action that could disturb the new harmony between the two governments. Since then, a Norwegian government whose global identity rests on its championship of democracy and human rights, has had not a word to say about human rights abuses in China.

The problem this new China poses for democracies is not the standard one of a shift in world power. Instead, the problem is the character of the rising power—repressive towards its own population and hostile to others’ liberty. A state that has annexed vast territorial waters and is threatening to annex a neighboring democracy is able to use its economic clout to buy silence on the part of countries that claim to live by democratic values and international law.

What to do? First, we must acknowledge that in China we are dealing with a totalitarian state with immense powers behind it. We must free ourselves from Western wishful thinking that, with economic growth and opening up, China will become more like us and more benevolent at home and collaboration abroad. That has not happened. Xi’s regime is exercising totalitarianism with more strategic discretion than any before it—smart totalitarianism, I have called it—but totalitarian it is.

Secondly, the democratic governments of the world need a coherent strategy for meeting the challenge of China. The liberal democracies, says the German sinologist Kai Strittmatter, must find their voice against assertive autocracy. China deals as much as it can with each country on its own, in which case most countries are small fry next to the giant. We need a collective strategy. Currently, the hope, if distant, is for the European Union to mount such a strategy, since President Trump has placed America on the sideline.

This collective strategy should have three components: engagement, affirmation of human rights, and pushback against aggression.

First, democratic institutions should engage with China on all levels, politically, economically, in science, and culturally. Non-engagement is impossible, and engagement gives some strategic leverage. There is not much other countries and outsiders can do to influence Chinese policies, but it does count that when Chinese institutions are pulled into an exchange, they are exposed to the influence of international law and standards of collaboration.

Second, we should speak up in clear language, to Chinese authorities and in public, against repression and breaches of human rights in China. This we should always do with reference to the Chinese State Constitution and to Chinese law, which are in these respects sound (although ineffective).

Third, we should speak up in clear language against Chinese aggression internationally, notably in its neighborhood, and against interference in politics and civil society in other countries. When we do this, we should refer to the many relevant international treaties and conventions that China has signed.

The sad truth is that China is and will remain a dictatorial state and that the democratic world can do nothing to prevent that. Democratization is, for the foreseeable future, not on the agenda. But we do have the capacity to hold the Chinese regime to account. The leaders are sensitive to how others criticize their regime. It is effective to stand up to the Chinese leadership with words. By holding the regime to account, we can halt or slow Xi’s transition of the regime towards irreversible hardness. We can encourage the preservation of an element of pragmatism in the PRC dictatorship.

That may not seem like much but it matters to the many in China who live in fear of repression and to activists who engage in the struggle for some more openness in Chinese society.

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