The shatteredness of ideologies under a post-Fordist world order: the case of Czech Republic and Slovakia

The paper presented here tries to initiate a dispute over the question to what extent the new wave of economic populism can be regarded as right-wing. A significant explanatory power lays in the fact that those forms of economic policy and rhetoric which have emerged as a kind of response to the socio-economic crises of globalization - e.g. the case of economic and social insecurity, crisis of welfare state, growing inequality or the issue of migration - does not draw on the left-wing theoretical framework of social classes, does not speak about working class and elite. Rather, it supplies the sense of security along a personalized network between the public sphere and the business sphere and the households, meanwhile launches narrative about the possible threats of inter-cultural 'entanglement' and dominance of 'behemoths' in global markets. From that perspective, the anti-globalist political forces which offer answers on national level can really be regarded as right-wing; but from other aspect, these political strands are against some basic values of conservatism, e.g. through denying the importance of impersonal institutionalized coordination of societies, or through stressing the possibility of an intuitive economic policy. This internal shatteredness of conservative ideology can be rooted in the structure of globalized post-Fordist word order, whose decisive norm-setting institutions seem to be - turned to be or just perceived or supposed to be - TNCs, companies, network of oligopolistic market actors, and not public institutions elected and controlled through democratic ways. In such situations, belief in 'institutions above' and belief in national communities as source of social capital - two important intellectual source of conservatism - is not complementary but rather contradicting ideas. But the globalized post-Fordist word order results in similar shatteredness of left ideology - as working class dissolves into 'outsiders' and 'insider employees' - and liberalism - as free competition produces market structures not serving but hindering the completion of human rights. Present paper argues that during this ideological crisis and confluence, it seems to be rather difficult to label political responses as right- or left-wing, and proposes other - however, rather experimental and easily debatable - categories like intuitionism. Beside theoretical argumentation, the political structure of CEE countries will be also analyzed, showing that political forces representing economic intuitionism and stressing the importance of national-level responses can be originated in left-wing, post-Socialist political forces (like in Slovakia, in the Czech Republic, in Serbia or in Romania).