The Open Society and Its Enemies Revisited

Openness and liberalism have spread at an accelerated rate in the last decades, which in turn fuels counter-movements. These nationalist, populist and religious fundamentalist movements are promoting an exclusive identity and social closure. My thesis is: The problem is not the situation itself, but rather several paradox effects of the open society, or more precisely, the discrepancy between expectations and reality.

Openness within a society means that the opportunities for minorities and disadvantaged groups to participate in society are improving. At the same time more and more of these people talk about discrimination. And at an advanced stage openness means, that national identities and social privileges are re-negotiated. So the central effect of an inclusive society is a higher potential for conflicts, while the opposite is expected. The outward openness has a similar paradox effect: the symbolic west is becoming increasingly more and more important, and in the same time the western countries are losing their dominance and privileges. Especially nations or groups who historically seen themselves as having a right to a dominant global or national position seem to be prone to populism. Additionally, while income inequality between countries may have been reduced, inequality within countries has risen. This is only a selection of paradoxical consequences and counter-intuitive relations of the open society.

This paper presents the thesis that the unexpected consequences of openness leads to different kinds of an identity-based social closure as a central characteristic of our time. Based on the approaches of Zygmunt Bauman, Alan Coser and Karl Popper the social and global ambivalences are described, which founded the rise of populism.