Intolerance and Populism

Abstract

The present-day populist intolerance toward foreigners, in particular migrants and refugees, is an essential element in the new international political playfield. It shares some features with the classical intolerance from the ages of religious wars of early modernity, and the resulting analogies in demands for toleration.

In order to systematize the issue one needs to appeal to a wide, more ordinary, less traditionally philosophical, notion of toleration and intolerance. The first encompasses acceptance and even supports as part of such active toleration; the second then follows suit, and counts non-acceptance, and complete lack of active support as marks of intolerance. What is needed is a two-sided effort: the factual-explanatory work on explaining the new forms of intolerance, and the more theoretical work on proposing the right notions of toleration and its contrary. We argue that the wider notions are the most useful one.

Armed with such notions, we turn to the populist treatment of migrants and refugees. The populist intolerance shows teeth at each stage of migrants-refugees progress toward the normal life away from their home. Interestingly, the main remedies for the populist intolerance have been already formulated in international legal documents. These documents, prominently the Marakesh compact, point to the active toleration (in the sense defended here), as the right kind of treatment, and as protecting human rights of migrants and refugees and offer concisely formulated guidelines for action. The chapter appeals to these guidelines both in diagnosing the ills of intolerance, narrow and wide, and in proposing wide toleration-guided remedies.