Comparative Politics

Session: B6(b) - Deconsolidation Panels: Populism and Democracy

Date: May 31, 2017 | Time: 08:45am to 10:15am | Location: POD-484 (Podium Building)| iOS / Outlook

Chair/Président: Filip Kostelka (Université de Montréal)

Discussant/Commentateur: Jim Farney (University of Regina)

Participants & Authors/Auteurs:

Benjamin Moffitt (Uppsala University) : Liberal Illiberalism? The Reshaping of Contemporary Right-Wing Populism in Northern Europe
Abstract: Populism, particularly in its right-wing variants, is often posited as a threat to the principles of liberal democracy. Yet a number of recent cases of right-wing populism from Northern Europe complicate this characterization: rather than being directly opposed to the liberal pillar of liberal democracy, these cases reconfigure traditionally liberal defenses of discriminated-against groups – such as homosexuals or women – in their own image, positing these groups as part of ‘the people’ who must be protected from ‘the elite’ and their associated others, and presenting themselves as defenders of liberty and ‘Enlightenment values’. This position is most clearly exemplified by Dutch populist Geert Wilder’s claim that “we have been too tolerant of the intolerant”. This paper examines this novel situation, outlining these cases and exploring what they mean for the relationship between populism and liberal democracy. It argues that while right-wing populist actors in Northern Europe may only defend such minorities in order to opportunistically attack their enemies – in many of these cases, Muslims and ‘the elite’ who allegedly are abetting the ‘Islamization’ of Europe – it marks an important discursive shift in terms of how ‘the people’ are articulated and represented – a shift linked to the political culture and party environment of these countries. By couching illiberal policies in a liberal package, these Northern European right-wing populists articulate a form of ‘liberal illiberalism’, and in doing so, throw into doubt the strict division of the two separate pillars of liberal democracy.

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Mojtaba Mahdavi (University of Alberta) : East Meets West Again? Right Wing Populism and the Question of Neo-Liberal Paradigm
Abstract: The recent growth of populist right wing movements/parties in the West and the rise of religious and/or nationalist counter-revolutionary forces in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are evident. This paper asks two questions: To what extent the ascendency of neo(liberal) paradigm has contributed to the rise of right wing populism in global scale? Second, does the liberal paradigm provide a solution to this problem? The paper demonstrates how and why neo liberal policies and paradigm have immensely contributed to the rise of right wing populism. It also sheds light on the limits of liberal paradigm of democracy. It builds on the literature by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s alternative discourse of radical democracy (1985), Jacques Derrida’s powerful concept of democracy-to-come (2010, 2005) and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy ( 1996). It argues that the liberal paradigm undermines the social character of democracy. More specifically, It overlooks the twin pillars of social elements of democracy, namely social justice and societal empowerment. Social justice and societal empowerment give substance and a tangible meaning to the abstract, ahistorical, and often elitist concepts of rights, liberty, and democracy. Social elements of democracy liberate demos from an elitist, state-centric, and, more importantly, a market-driven democracy. The social pillars of democracy facilitate a bottom-up, grassroots approach to democratization, help empower the ordinary people and, more importantly, disarm and defeat right-wing populist demagogues whose rhetoric of social justice often misleads the masses. The papers shows cases both from the West and MENA to support the

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Kate Korycki (University of Toronto) : Memory Games and Populist Elections: The Case of Poland
Abstract: In this work I offer an alternative reading of the recent (2015) election results in Poland by engaging the concept of collective memory. In so doing I illuminate the recent populist political moment. I make three claims. First, I claim that programmatic identities of Polish political parties are weak. Despite this weakness political competition remains fierce because parties fashion enduring political identities given by their temporal orientation and their judgment of communism. Second, I claim that the field of the political competition predicated on the turn to the past and on moral opprobrium is the particular achievement of the party that has just (in 2015) captured political power in Poland. The party narrated the country’s main problem as that of communist state capture (or incomplete transition). It claimed that (former-) communists and their post-dissident allies captured political, material and symbolic levers of power. This way of presenting the problem gave the wining party access to the language of crisis and it polarized the field. It cast political opponents as essential enemies, and it cast the narrators as country’s saviours. Third, this achievement was possible because the party currently in power narrates communism as evil, in that it is essentially and existentially anti-Polish: it presents it as equal to Nazism, it makes it foreign and it makes it coincidental with Jewishness. It then launches such discursive ‘weapon’ against its current day counterparts.

Paper or Poster / Communication ou Présentation visuelle

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