Hegel in a postcolonial world: Populist authoritarianism, postcolonialism, and the master–slave dialectic

The paper seeks to offer a Hegelian-inspired normative explanation of the utilization of postcolonial arguments by authoritarian states to challenge Western norms. In the last decades, several authoritarian politicians like Modi and Erdoğan have used postcolonial concepts to justify a range of questionable essentialist and nationalistic policies of new imperialism. Whereas scholars and policymakers have identified this phenomenon as pragmatic manoeuvring by politicians, they have failed to either incorporate the role of the West in their analysis or explain the efficiency of this rhetoric within national contexts. The previously successful practice of retreating to universal Western norms has become impractical due to the overall lack of consensus on existing social hierarchies and Western values. Since the increasingly popular practice appears as a contextual epiphenomenon of a globalized issue, broader frameworks are required to make sense of these increasing distortions of postcoloniality. As such, the paper argues for a Hegelian approach that positions the West/Europe and the populist authoritarian states in a master–slave dialectic. The dialectic offers a normative and rational reading of this problematic postcolonial phenomenon, one that not only shows the past and contemporary circumstances of its formulation but also helps us eliminate or, more realistically, understand the phenomenon. It also incorporates in the analysis the role of domestic factors and the inter-subjective influence of the West/Europe on the formulation of a postcolonial identity and discourse. Furthermore, the paper argues that populist and authoritarian governments do not manage to overcome the master–slave dialectic but instead exploit it to maximize their political gains. Hence, after placing Hegel’s master–slave dialectic in the international relation corpus, the paper uses a dialogical model to examine the Turkish Justice and Development Party’s postcolonialist colonialism and show the benefits of the master–slave dialectic in analysing the phenomenon.