Liberal Democracy and the Future of Openness
Essay · James Hampshire on Why the Neoliberal Order Is Collapsing — and What a Material Politics of Difference Could Look Like After It
Why Is the Liberal Democratic Compromise on Immigration Breaking Down?
Political scientist James Hampshire traces the long arc from postwar openness to today's nationalist closure. Three intersecting shocks — the rise of China, the collapse of the rules-based order, and the domestic backlash against neoliberal globalization — have ended the era in which liberal democracies balanced economic openness with rights-based migration. What follows, Hampshire argues, is a tilt away from universalism toward discretionary openness driven by economic interests, and a far right that hardens boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. Liberal cosmopolitanism has no answer. A material politics of difference — multiracial coalitions built around shared economic interests — might.
Essential points in this essay:
Liberal democracies have long been caught between openness (economic demand, human rights) and closure (political pressure); the neoliberal era resolved this through stratified migration regimes that courted skilled workers and fended off the poor and the displaced
Three intersecting shifts — the rise of China and economic nationalism, the collapse of the rules-based order, and the backlash against neoliberal globalization — are now dismantling that compromise; the result is closure, selectivity, and a far right reasserting hierarchical orders
Liberal cosmopolitanism and corporate multiculturalism cannot answer racialised ressentiment because they have almost nothing to say about inequality or class; a material politics of common interests, exemplified by Zohran Mamdani’s New York coalition, offers a different path
About the author: James Hampshire is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex and Deputy Editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. His research focuses on the politics of immigration in liberal democracies, including the structural contradictions between economic, rights-based, and nationalist pressures.
It is an axiom of the literature on immigration to liberal democracies in the Global North that governments face conflicting, even contradictory, imperatives of openness and closure. Liberal democratic states are caught between economic forces and human rights that pull them towards admitting immigrants, and political forces that push them towards closure.
From Postwar Openness to Neoliberal Selection
During the second half of the twentieth century, immigration to liberal democratic states was driven by demand for labour and human rights obligations embedded in the postwar international order, such as the rights established by the 1951 Refugee Convention. Governments opened routes for migrant workers and permitted, or at least tolerated, rights-based migration, including refugees, asylum-seekers, and family reunification migrants. During the era of neoliberal globalization following the end of the Cold War, liberal democracies began to restrict access to asylum, using a range of extraterritorial measures that put ‘refuge beyond reach,’ and they developed increasingly selective and stratified systems to manage economic migration, ‘courting the top and fending-off the bottom.’
Three Shocks: China, the Collapsing Rules-Based Order, and the Backlash
Today, the neoliberal order is being transformed by three intersecting developments. First, the global economy and thus the distribution of geopolitical power has been transformed by the rise of China. The Trump administration has abandoned neoliberal globalization in favour of economic nationalism: trade deregulation is out, tariffs and economic sanctions are in. Neoliberal globalization is being replaced by what Branko Milanovic calls ‘national market liberalism,’ neoliberalism minus the internationalism. Second, the ‘rules-based order,’ always more honoured in the breach, has collapsed. From the invasions, torture, and surveillance of the ‘war on terror,’ to Western powers’ support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and the Trump administration’s kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign state, it has become impossible to deny what many in the Global South have long known: the rules don’t apply to everyone. Third, the domestic political orders of liberal democracies have been transformed by a backlash against neoliberal globalization. Wage stagnation, wealth inequality, and the effects of fiscal austerity since the 2008 financial crisis have generated growing support for anti-system politics on the left and right. Across the US and Europe, far-right nationalists promise to restore a world of homogeneity, stoking fear and resentment towards immigrants and minorities. The far-right hardens social boundaries and reasserts hierarchical orders of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion.
The Nationalist Storm: Closure, Selectivity, and ‘Eurowhiteness’
What does the demise of liberal internationalism and the rise of far-right nationalism imply for openness to immigration? In many states, the success of anti-immigrant parties has mobilised demand for closure, while the demise of the rules-based order has weakened states’ commitment to human rights. The Trump administration has suspended visas for 39 countries, dismantled the asylum system, and sent ICE militias into cities. Since 2015, the EU and its member states have built border walls and razor-wire fences, used illegal pushbacks, and struck deals with autocrats to keep migrants from Europe’s borders. The European Commission, long a bastion of technocratic neoliberalism, claimed to be ‘protecting our European way of life’ as its civilizational project turned to ‘Eurowhiteness.’ The nationalist storm batters all migrants, though some are affected more than others. The super-rich, highly skilled and those able to pay international student fees are relatively protected, while the rights of asylum seekers and family migrants are abrogated.
“Liberal democracies are tilting away from universalism and towards discretionary openness driven by economic interests.”
Neoliberal elites tend to dismiss anti-system politics — of both left and right — as ‘populism,’ the expression of emotive, irrational, and atavistic attitudes by a ‘basket of deplorables’. In blaming populists, liberal elites exonerate centrist politics and overlook or deny the maladies of neoliberal capitalism. It is hardly surprising that neoliberal elites are unable to make sense of our current moment, since it is they who enabled massive concentrations of wealth and oligarchic power under globalization — ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ as Peter Mandelson, friend of Jeffrey Epstein and architect of New Labour, put it — and it is they, as much as the right, who have selectively applied what even one G7 Prime Minister now admits was the ‘useful fiction’ of the rules-based order.
Beyond Liberal Cosmopolitanism: A Material Politics of Difference
Unwilling to challenge the power of capital or entertain substantial redistribution of wealth, liberals place their bets on deregulation and big tech to kickstart growth and escape from a zero-sum political economy. Nor do liberal theories of multiculturalism, minority rights or integration offer a way to make sense of the far-right attack on difference, since they have almost nothing to say about the politics of stagnation, socio-economic inequality, or class relations. Liberal cosmopolitanism is the ‘class consciousness of frequent travellers,’ while liberal multiculturalism has devolved into corporate EDI initiatives and dematerialised identity politics. Meanwhile, mainstream politicians wrap themselves in flags and adopt nationalist discourse in a doomed attempt to reduce far right support. Liberalism does not have an answer to the racialised ressentiment that is sweeping across democracies. As Lea Ypi argues, the problem isn’t immigration, but the failure of liberal democracy itself.
“The problem isn’t immigration, but the failure of liberal democracy itself.”
In November 2025, New Yorkers elected a 34-year-old democratic socialist Muslim, born in Uganda, to be their mayor. New York is not America, and America is not the world, but Zohran Mamdani’s victory points the way to a politics that might yet address the failures of neoliberal democracy. Mamdani’s campaign, his voter base, and inaugural committee, showed how a multiracial, multiethnic, and multifaith coalition could be forged through a material politics of common interests. His was a victory built on free buses, universal childcare, and rent freezes, funded by raising taxes on the wealthiest. In our increasingly complex and diverse societies, with vast economic inequalities, a politics of difference must build multiracial coalitions that challenge both the architects of neoliberal capitalism and the insurgent far-right. The stakes could not be higher. The future of openness, difference, and democracy itself depends on it.
James Hampshire is a Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex, and Deputy Editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. He is the author of Citizenship and Belonging: Immigration and the Politics of Demographic Governance in Postwar Britain, and The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State, as well as numerous articles on immigration politics and policy. He is currently writing a book on the political economy of immigration to Britain.
Futures of Difference is produced by Steven Vertovec at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science (formerly the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity).