Science-related populism referring to Europe: narratives of dominance and sovereignty

ABSTRACT

In 2021–2022, the European Commission held the Conference on the Future of Europe, aiming to provide a platform for EU citizens to voice their visions for the Union's future. Simultaneously, concerns about the rise of populism and mis(dis)information have grown, significantly affecting the daily lives of Europeans and challenging democracy. This prompts the question: do cohesive populist visions for Europe exist? This article delves into a subset of populist narratives that express distrust in mainstream knowledge production frameworks and explores their connection to depictions of Europe through discourse analysis of 24 publicly available online documents opposing vaccination and 5G technology. It is argued that these narratives can be understood through science-related populism (Mede, N. G., & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473–491). The analysed narratives consistently depict an antagonistic dichotomy between the noble people and corrupt elites, and they perform crisis in the face of the perceived dominance of illegitimate elites. However, both science and the EU do not unequivocally align with the contested elites. Their position in this dichotomous vision is influenced by the perceived morality of the scientists and a nationalist framework for interpreting Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Science-related populism; EU; anti-5G; anti-vax; dominance
• sovereignty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Supplemental data for this article, consisting of the analysed documents, and MaxQDA codes can be accessed online at https://osf.io/tfe2k/?view_only=304ed803d5e64c04961214ce8af1834a.

Notes

1 All the analysed documents are available as supplemental data at https://osf.io/tfe2k/?view_only=304ed803d5e64c04961214ce8af1834a.

2 Stop 5G. Stay connected but protected.

3 E.g. ’IV deklaracja światowego szczytu Covid’ visible on the Polish Internet, is a translation from ‘Global Covid summit – declaration IV’ (https://doctorsandscientistsdeclaration.org/).

4 E.g. in July 2021, the then Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education Przemysław Czarnek issued a document (signed by the Polish President in November 2021) called ‘Academic freedom packet’, which protects pseudoscience and disinformation as valid expression of the freedom of speech. The Committee in Ethics in Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences commented this legal act as follows: ‘It creates an opportunity for abuse in the form of legitimizing non-scientific, unscientific or anti-scientific views as the subject of a scientific dispute’. (PAN Statement 2/2021)

5 The list of the analysed documents with hyperlinks and their texts is available as supplemental data at: https://osf.io/tfe2k/?view_only=304ed803d5e64c04961214ce8af1834a.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020-EU.3.6 under Grant agreement 822419 and the National Science Centre, Poland under Grant agreement 2021/05/X/HS6/00316.