Historical legacies and the political mobilization of national nostalgia: Understanding populism’s relationship to the past

ABSTRACT

The goal of this introduction to the special issue is threefold. First, we map a nascent research field on connections between populism and the past and, in so doing, point to gaps in existing work. Second, we develop the contours of an integrated analytical framework that, addressing these gaps, reconstructs the relationship between populism and the past comparatively and on multiple levels. Our approach pays special attention to the interlinked dynamics of populist political agency, the way they employ particular, idealized, and historically embedded narratives about a nation’s past, as well as contextual and structural factors that help facilitate the success of populist nostalgia. Third, we pose novel research questions induced by our process-oriented, multi-level framework and discuss how the articles in this special issue advance this line of research.

KEYWORDS:

• European democracies
• memory politics
• nationalism
• political cultures
• populist parties

Introduction

While the rise of populist parties, actors, and governments has emerged as a key subject of political research in the last decades, the relationship between populism and history has only been addressed fairly recently as a constitutive feature of populist politics (Caramani and Manucci 2019; Tunderman, De Jonge, and Couperus 2022; Volk 2022b; Jensen 2022; Taş 2022). The long-time marginalization and only recent upsurge of this research theme in modern populism scholarship is particularly surprising given the centrality of references to the past and the role of history in many variants of populist politics—and especially among today’s empirically most relevant right-wing, authoritarian-nationalist populist actors and parties, which largely shape the resurgence of populist politics in present-day Europe.

This introductory article to the special issue seeks to provide a framework for systematically exploring the relationship between populism and the past. The article’s goal is threefold. First, we illuminate why investigating connections between populism and the past comparatively is an important task and seek to map this emerging field. Based on a critical discussion of previous research findings, we point to analytical, substantive, and methodological gaps in the existing literature that engages with the nexus of memory politics, nostalgia, and historical genealogies of contemporary populism across Europe.

Second, against this backdrop we develop the contours of an analytical and conceptual framework that, addressing these gaps, reconstructs the relationship between populism and the past comparatively and on multiple levels. Our approach pays special attention to the interlinked dynamics of (i) populist political agency and the ways in which populists construct frames and employ idealized, nostalgic, and post-factual narratives about the past; (ii) contextual politico-cultural factors featuring embedded, hegemonic, or contested discourses and narratives about a nation’s history and collective memory; (iii) as well as historical, structural, and institutional (democratic or post-autocratic) conditions, legacies, and trajectories contributing to, or helping facilitate, the success of populist nostalgia. Our integrated framework emphasizes the interplay of contextual, structural, and agency-driven dimensions, understanding their interaction as a complex process rather than one-directional or in terms of a clear-cut causal mechanism. Our approach also points to the need for more systematic comparative studies that incorporate new methods and data, and open up to the broader cultural and communicative environments affecting populist mobilizations of the past in Europe.

Third, we pose novel research questions induced by our framework and discuss how the articles in this special issue advance this line of research. It enhances our understanding of, and shines new light on, the way populists construct, politicize, and mobilize particular notions of the past; the distal historical causes of its (re)emergence in the horizon of European democracies; and populism’s general ideational make-up. In so doing, this research illuminates the political and cultural manifestations of contemporary populism in Europe and beyond. The studies presented in this special issue, then, are systematically comparative in nature, nurturing a research agenda that looks for robust theoretical, empirical, and historical payoffs in the field of populism studies.

Mapping a nascent field: reconsidering connections between populism and the past

In recent years, scholarship on populism has begun to explore the relationship between populism and the past, i.e. between, on the one hand, the consolidation of populism as a political force to reckon with, which has partly or fully restructured party systems across Europe and among liberal democracies in general (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018) and, on the other hand, historical legacies, narratives, discourses, memory politics, and the political imaginary of a ‘better’ or glorified national past. This is the case even though, as Finchelstein (2019) has noted, populism only exists in—and, one might add, with—the context of history. It is a political phenomenon that has identifiable historical roots and significant antecedents just as it relies strongly on a particular way of dealing with history, or rather the popular and institutionalized collective memories of the past. References to the past feature prominently in populist discourses and its political imaginary, just as historical legacies shape the opportunities and conditions under which populism gains political relevance. Yet, while these historical dimensions of populism are often tacitly acknowledged, explicit scholarly engagement with them is still in its nascent stage and has only of late found resonance in the field of populism studies (Chiruta 2020; Ding, Slater, and Zengin 2021; Elçi 2021; Hesová 2021; Volk 2022b), accompanied by emerging research in memory (politics) studies (Apryshchenko and Karnaukhova 2019; Balthazar 2019; De Cesari and Kaya 2019; Bourgeois 2020; Đureinović 2022; Kralj 2021; Lucksted 2022; Manucci 2019; Ferreira 2021; Schneider 2020; Rosenfeld 2021; Ugur-Cinar and Altınok 2021; Verovšek 2016, 2020b, 2020a; Zubrzycki and Woźny 2020; Wijermars 2019; Miklóssy and Kangaspuro 2021), and political historiography (Chiruta 2020; Gonçalves 2021; Finchelstein 2019; Kenny 2017; Saunders 2020; Mercer and Pattison 2022).

Within this now burgeoning field, one key research trajectory that is of relevance for the analysis of populism and the past is (European) memory politics and their contestations. Koposov (2022) finds that historical memory, as a soft-power resource in politics, has transformed in the course of the twenty-first century. Starting in the last quarter of the twentieth century, memory politics amounted to a move away from ‘self-congratulatory national narratives’ (Koposov 2022) towards the promotion of cosmopolitan memory, revolving around the formal acknowledgement of national guilt and crimes against humanity in the past.

In few places, this significant transformation of memory regimes and their recurring contestation may be as striking as in the European context. Europe had, and still has, to come to terms with deeply problematic modern legacies of total war, colonialism, (communist) dictatorship, fascism, Nazism, and the crimes of the Holocaust. In these atrocities, most European countries and many Europeans were complicit. After World War II, European societies struggled to cope with the burden of the memory of the unprecedented atrocities committed by European citizens in the twentiethcentury. They did so in different modalities and in asynchronous trajectories, partly due to their different degrees of complicity and totalitarian, autocratic, or resiliently democratic legacies.

For years, however, the crimes against humanity committed in Europe and abroad by European citizens and nations were mostly publicly downplayed, and covered by what Judt (2005) calls ‘compensatory national myth-making’. The remarkable, yet slow transformation towards more self-critical, cosmopolitan forms of public memory at odds with the glorification of a nation’s past and with the relativization or historicization of past crimes, then, was itself the result of difficult, often conflictual, long-term societal processing of national history shaped by a constant seesaw of learning and forgetting (Friedländer 1993). In particular, such transformation was the outcome of recurring public controversies about historical facts and judgments as well as public reflections about national and criminal responsibility with regard to the genocide against the Jews of Europe and European colonial atrocities (see initially Barkan 2000; Judt 2005; Levy and Sznaider 2002). Preceding and underlying Koposov’s conceptualization of cosmopolitan memory, Judt had reconstructed how the difficult and complex public processing of historical atrocities had eventually helped mainstreaming a culture of contrition. He showed how official remembrance came to include critical reflection on national identity and history—and how this cultural change paved the way for more robust democratization in Europe. In Judt’s view, indeed, this change even facilitated the gradual emergence of shared forms of European post-national identity. It did so by way of distancing collective self-understandings from aggressive ethnic nationalism, racism, and antisemitism that are irreconcilable with genuine democracies (Judt 2005).

These developments notwithstanding, the turn of the millennium witnessed a revival of nationalism and an upsurge of nationalist mobilizations by national-populist agents, movements, and parties (particularly in but far from limited to Central and Eastern European countries), which stood in conflict with the acknowledgment of national guilt for past crimes (Ryan 2014). This nationalist revival has translated into new, in several cases even government- and state-authorized renditions of a ‘white-washed’ national past. Such renditions then culminate in the exploitation of seemingly long overcome historical myths about a nation’s past, and in the manipulation of collective historical consciousness through memory laws, particularly with authoritarian populists in government, in countries, such as Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Turkey but also, to a lesser extent, in Western Europe (Lucksted 2022; Koposov 2017; Lucksted 2022). Be that as it may, the contestations and conflicts associated with memory politics and the politics of history that have shaped European post-War politics now face distinct forms of populist memory politics that target dominant cultures of remembrance. Populist memory politics, it seems, generally seek to further devaluate Koposov’s ‘cosmopolitan memory’ and, instead, rehabilitate historically discredited self-congratulatory national narratives.

A key aspect of such memory politics Taş conceptualizes as the ‘mystification of time’, or chronopolitics. Recurring similar discursive patterns can be detected when populists reconstruct time in the guise of narrations of the past, present, and future. Specific renditions of ‘peoplehood’ feature in all three temporal narratives and are instrumental to populist mobilizations more generally (Taş 2022, 139). Focusing here on the past, chronopolitics’ mystifications create a political-cultural opportunity structure for populist actors to manipulate or abuse collective memory for their political purposes. However, how these chronopolitical mystifications of time actually work in practice, how they empirically affect populist success, and why they resonate with the public and with populist voters, has not yet been systematically explored.

In addition to important first conceptualizations of the dynamics and patterns of populist memory politics, there is a growing body of literature that is concerned with the (ab)use of a specific collective memory or historical trope by populist actors (Bull 2016; Benazzo 2017; Đureinović 2022; Kończal 2020; Korhonen 2020; Richardson-Little and Merrill 2020; Soffer 2022; Griffini 2022). Aiming at ‘mnemonic manipulations’ Bernhard and Kubik (2014, 7) see the PiS party governing in Poland as an example of a particular ‘mneumonic warrior’, i.e.

political actors that treat history instrumentally to construct a vision of the past legitimizing their effort to gain and hold power by drawing ‘a sharp line between themselves (the proprietors of the «true» version of the past) and other actors who cultivate «wrong» or «false» versions of history’

(Bernhard and Kubik 2014, 17).

Riedel (2022) elaborates in recent work that a variety of recurring patterns may be distinguished when authoritarian populists employ mystifications of peoplehood and other manipulations of collective memory. Creating their own, subjective topography of memory, authoritarian populists define peoplehood within an anti-pluralistic diagnostic frame. It defines the historical ‘we’ and the historical ‘they’ in decidedly antagonistic terms and against the backdrop of a distant past. Such construed historical antagonism articulates in historical terms a core ideational component, or a defining feature, of all populist ideology: namely an anti-pluralistic conception of society as divided into two antagonistic groups, in particular a ‘corrupt elite’ opposing the ‘good people’ (Mudde 2007). In particular the latter functions hereby as a time-transcending concept. Translated into the present, and expressed in prescriptive terms, the construed (anti-pluralistic) antagonism is subsequently coupled with the populist promise of ‘historical justice’ for the (seemingly transhistorically ‘good’) people through radical change (Riedel 2022, 206): a profound political transformation that aspires to ‘restore’ an idealized past in which ‘they’ were not yet in power. In this lens, regaining the distant past, and social pride in it, signifies historical justice for the ahistorical collective of the ‘good people’—a homogenized collective entity for which authoritarian populists claim to speak.

Against this background, Riedel takes important steps further delineating and deconstructing authoritarian populists’ narrative manipulation of collective memory. If collective memory suggests that the referenced past was glorious (e.g. the British empire) and such collective memory is widely shared in society, the populist narrative will try to convince people that such glory was lost due to the unfair or unjust actions of a ‘corrupt elite’ or others who are construed as antagonistic to the ‘good people’. If dominant collective memory keeps the remembrance of the past, or its fragment, as rather infamous and discredits unqualified glorifications of national history (e.g. Nazi Germany and its unprecedented atrocities), the populist memory manipulation may employ denial or rejection (it is not us the Germans, it is the Nazis), rationalization (the Zeitgeist was antisemitic), minimization of guilt, or other methods of distorting and exploiting negative memory, historical record, and heritage. Very often the populist diagnosis of the national ‘we-group’ holds that in the more or less distant past this group was marginalized, exploited, and treated unfairly. Memory manipulations may also aim at self-(over)victimization projecting any blame or guilt outside of the national ‘we-group’, even in cases of documented historical guilt (Riedel 2022, 206–207). In this context, some recent empirical case-transcending work brings to the fore distinct sets of repertoires of (radical right) populist memory politics that downplay problematic historical legacies and collective crimes associated with national history in order to rehabilitate national glory for citizens to unambiguously identify with. Initial small-n comparative studies show that—especially right-wing—populists tend to defuse the potentially damaging connotations of the ‘dark past’ of the Shoah, fascism, and European colonialism through a positive reappraisal or outright denial of historical facts in ‘fake histories’ (Couperus and Tortola 2019). Such politicized historical manipulation may invoke actual or imagined societal taboos on discredited historical narratives to attract public attention (Couperus and Tortola 2019). In many instances, we observe that such populist memory narratives are egregiously relativistic, partisan, and post-factual, as they seek to advance a particularistic memory that white-washes history for political purposes.

Following insights by Riedel, we suggest that memory manipulations in relation to the ‘they-group’ tend to be linked to earlier definitions of the ‘we-group’ and its construed ‘peoplehood’, and diversified accordingly. The employed frames often appear to vary in relation to the ways the ‘we-group’ is defined or construed. If ‘we, the people’ are construed as a collective entity that was long subjected to autocratic rule and ‘they’, the people’s nemesis, are defined domestically—first and foremost as the ‘corrupt elite’ (e.g. the post-communists as perceived heirs of the former socialist Nomenklatura)—memory manipulations tend to focus on moralizing discourses and exploit negative memories of experienced domestic oppression. If, however, the ‘we-group’ is construed as a nation allegedly unfairly accused of national guilt, or as an ethnic nation subjected to global social change, and the ‘they-group’ is sought outside-namely in the international community, a ‘global elite’, or among immigrants—the prescriptive frame tends to focus on the oppressor or aggressor role of an allegedly alien force (possibly with alleged domestic collaborators). The simple mechanism of defining ‘us’ in relation to the dominant or endangering ‘they’ brings in a mobilization effect. And playing with fears is mastered by authoritarian populists across the board (e.g. anti-Western discourse in Russia), including real and imagined fears that are outsourced from the past (Riedel 2022, 207–208) and fears related to denigrated ‘they-groups’ allegedly operating from inside or outside, or both.

Previous research has also pointed out that another constitutive ideational component of populism—that is: the reference to an assumed unified, ‘homogenous will of the people’—features prominently in populists’ narrative manipulation of collective memory. Their challenge to cosmopolitan, self-critical memory regimes that advance cultures of contrition is not just generally at odds with the image of an unambiguously ‘good’ people. Such memory regimes are often also politically framed by populists as conflicting with the unanimous will of the ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ people’s will (Manucci 2019, 41–52).

In this context, the populist diagnostic frame tends to suggest that the preferences, needs, interests, and the assumed will of the people are often not understood very well. It thus cannot be articulated and represented by diverse elected actors or interest groups—but only by the populist politicians or who presumably lend ‘the people’ a unified voice to express its will: the ‘voice of the people’. In reference to the past, then, in populist frames, the historical interpretation of how this ‘will’ was treated previously tends to follow this line of argumentation: the will appears as ‘so far ignored’, ‘marginalized’, or ‘misused’. As a consequence, the prescriptive frame in relation to the ‘will’ of the people frequently employs both moralizing language and manipulated forms of memory narratives. More often than not, those memory narratives appear to be justified by a simplistic Rousseauian definition of democracy, which presupposes some unified general will, or by equalizing democratic will-formation with an assumed, so far oppressed homogeneous will of the majority that is ready to implement ‘historical justice’ against the historical judgment issued by ‘the elite’ or ‘others’ (Riedel 2022, 208–209). In related studies, some researchers have analyzed that (farright) populist actors and movements tend to leverage—and manipulate—ideas about the ‘founding moment’ of a nation-state or popular democracy for their own political purposes (Bull 2016; Elgenius and Rydgren 2019 Richardson-Little and Merrill 2020).

Another important strand of research has contrasted populist representations of the (noble) past to their negative portrayal of the present, often linked with histories of (national) decline. These accounts often employ the concept of ‘nostalgia’, and we think it should be given a central place in our understanding of populism’s reconstruction of the past. Innovative early work on such populist nostalgia (Betz and Johnson 2004) resonates in relevant contemporary research. Here, narratives of nostalgia are related to the ethnic composition of societies (Elgenius and Rydgren 2019), the fate of the welfare state (Schreurs 2020), the ideological rhetoric of political actors (Kenny 2017), political communication strategies (Menke and Wulf 2021), and the democratic commitment of the political establishment to the ‘common people’ (Elçi 2021). Significantly, however, these different ‘modes of nostalgia’ are typically intertwined and intermingled (Merrill 2020) and need to be better understood as to how they relate to each other in political discourses and processes. Moreover, in previous studies, modes of nostalgia (and the underlying narratives of national decline and crisis) are not always properly defined and operationalized, let alone systematically compared. This opens up many questions about different modes and types of nostalgia, their relationship, and their varying political effects and effectiveness when used by populist actors in different politico-cultural and institutional contexts.

Previous research shows, thus, that key populist claims—first and foremost the underlying conception of peoplehood and the alleged subjugation of ‘the good people’—and a certain set of post-factual historical or chronopolitical frames, including national nostalgia about a glorious past that has allegedly been unduly discredited, may complement each other. In general, they point to what we conceive as ‘elected affinities’ between populist ideology and particular types of memory narratives.

While previous studies often do remind us that memory narratives have to be explored in their specific politico-cultural contexts and may work—and succeed—in different ways depending on these contexts, systematic research on the significance of contextual factors and the situated political/discursive trajectories and dynamics of populist appropriations of memory politics and the past is limited. In particular, many studies often do not pay enough attention to politico-cultural contextualization in view of specific autocratic or democratic legacies. Furthermore, most of those studies do not offer systematic empirical evidence that allows us to assess generalizable elements with regard to the frames, forms, functions, and causes of populists’ use of memory and the past—and the way the past and its collective memory shape the conditions for populist political success.

When it comes to a specific historical legacy and related tropes, some recent research has begun to identify more specific and context-dependent mnemonic strategies by contemporary actors in relation to what we conceive as politico-cultural opportunity structures (Rensmann 2017; Manucci 2019), that is: the broader set of political, social, economic, historical, communicative, discursive, and cultural conditions favorable or unfavorable to the success of different political actors and parties beyond the conditions of party competition and the electoral market-place, narrowly understood. Focusing on the fascist past in Western Europe, Manucci (2019, 53) points to two opposed narrative logics that, respectively, close down or open up the opportunity structure for populism. The former narrative logic stigmatizes illiberal values and outlooks; it aims at the culpabilization (i.e. the condemnation of a fascist or dark past) or the heroization (i.e. the emphasis on heroic actions against fascists or autocrats) of the national past. Consequently, culpabilization and heroization, albeit to different degrees, result in the closing down of an opportunity structure for populism. The latter and opposed narrative logic, by contrast, centers on cancellation (i.e. the conscious silencing or avoidance of a fascist past) or victimization (i.e. the rejection of responsibility by stressing victimhood) in renditions of collective national memory. In these narrations of the national past, within which the stigmatization of illiberalism or authoritarianism is (very) limited if not absent, opportunity structures emerge for populism. Such distinctions may be helpful and orient research towards more systematic and broader comparisons of different politico-cultural opportunity structures for populism and populists in the horizon of dominant memory politics. In this context, Caramani and Manucci (2019) go so far to suggest that the electoral fate of populist radical right parties depends ‘on the kind of re-elaboration of the fascist past in a given country’ (2019, 2).

Identifying gaps in a nascent field: scope, regional focus, and data

Such direct causal mechanism(s) between re-elaborations of fascist history and right-wing populist success deserves further testing and discussion to be empirically validated throughout Europe. In any case, this line of inquiry takes research on populism and the past in important new directions focusing on the role of historical legacies and contextual factors for the relevance of right-wing populist politics and narratives about the past. Surprisingly, the role of historical legacies for the success and failure of populist agents, movements, and parties—and especially the history of processing and coming to terms with a violent or criminal past for the politico-cultural opportunities for right-wing populist actors—is still one of the insufficiently examined topics in relation to populism and the past. The same applies, more generally, to the relevance of autocratic and democratic legacies in populist success and the way populists are able to construct the past in light of democratic experiences, or the lack thereof.

However, on the one hand, the sole focus on agents, their rhetorical strategies, and (nostalgic) constructions of national narratives falls short of providing a more in-depth understanding of the way populists emerge—and succeed—in particular historical settings and politico-cultural opportunity structures that allow populists to make effective use of the past. On the other hand, one-directional causal mechanisms centered on the predictive qualities of regime trajectories, structural conditions, or societal processing of history for populist success tend to underestimate the important intervening role of populist agency—the way they perform, ideologically construct, and seek to ‘own’ the past. What has largely remained undertheorized and understudied is the dynamic interplay of populist agency with its rhetorical, discursive, and ideological strategies; politico-cultural opportunity structures, featuring historical autocratic and democratic legacies and their societal processing; and a variety of other contextual factors (un)favorable to the successful populist appropriation and mobilization of a mythical past.

In addition to systematic gaps that call for a new, integrated framework for the study of populism and its relationship to the past, the scope of research should be expanded in three areas. There are research voids with regard to the substantive scope of research designs, their geographical focus, as well as methodological issues of data types and data selection. First, current work still deals predominantly with radical right-wing manifestations of populist politics, as do most of the articles in this special issue. As a result, the focus of many contributions lies on nationalist or nativist—and, less frequently, authoritarian—ideology and rhetoric of these political actors. A notable exception is Bull (2016), who provides an insightful comparison between uses of memory in the discourse of the radical-right Lega Nord, Berlusconi’s neoliberal populism and the more centrist ‘valence populists’ of Italia dei Valori. More work should focus on different populisms, or populism in a broader sense: understood ideationally as a ‘thin-centred ideology’, which is based on a fundamental moralistic distinction dividing society into two antagonistic blocs, and which can be attached to the right and the left (Mudde 2007). It is crucial to compare right-wing and left-wing populists’ memory politics and uses of (national) history in order to assess potential similarities and differences. In the lens of populism as a political style (Moffitt and Tormey 2014) disruptive populist memory politics could also be adopted by a variety of political actors across the political spectrum.

Second, in terms of countries and geographical contexts studied, existing scholarship pays relatively strong attention to Central Eastern Europe (CEE), including the Balkan countries. This is understandable given the tumultuous history of the region, the painful memories of Communist dictatorship and Soviet domination in particular, and the current role of (right-wing) populists in governments in CEE, enabling populists to politicize and reshape public memory and narratives about the past more forcefully than elsewhere. Historical occurrences and populists in power have given rise to particularly aggressive ‘memory wars’ that are still ongoing and, in many cases, have been exacerbated in the wake of populist political successes. Poland—perhaps the most notorious place where these developments have unfolded—has attracted much scholarly attention (Cadier and Szulecki 2020; Karolewski 2019; Kończal 2020; Kim 2021; Ágh 2016; Vermeersch 2019), but similar trends can be observed in Hungary (Rajacic 2007; Kim 2021; Ágh 2016; Benazzo 2017; Pető 2021; Vermeersch 2019) and former East Germany (Richardson-Little and Merrill 2020). However, we can observe recurring tropes and discursive strategies that populist actors employ well beyond the CEE region. Some of the few broader systematic comparative studies, by contrast, have—individually for good reason—exclusively focused on Western Europe (Caramani and Manucci 2019). In our view, it is particularly worthwhile to compare Central, Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe against the background of their different historical legacies, experiences with democracy, and the varying roles of populist parties in government and in opposition when they mobilize the past, opposing or transforming presumed ‘elite history’.

Third, most existing analyses rely on the examination of ‘classical’ textual sources, mainly speeches and electoral manifestos. Few recent studies take a more innovative approach, looking at the representation of history in comics (Wodak and Forchtner 2014), online memes (Merrill 2020), social media utterances (Esteve-Del-Valle and Costa López 2022), and physical gatherings (Korhonen 2020; Volk 2022a). New research investigating the relationship between populism and the past—i.e. the ways the former is enabled by the latter and the latter is used and mobilized by the former— should enter broader cultural and communicative territory alongside respective methodological innovations dimensions. This applies to social network representations of the past and the grassroots distribution of fake history via new media, including popular social media sources and influencers with broad appeal among younger generational cohorts, but also to the systematic study of various cultural artifacts, images, memorials, museums, and architecture as reference points for populist mobilization or discontent.

Reconstructing the relationship between populism and the past: towards a comparative research framework

Historical politico-cultural legacies and events often seem to serve as a positive point of reference for populist actors. Such positive references to history include populists’ nostalgic constructions of national legacies and identities, and respective mobilizations of a ‘better past’. They are also embodied in populist self-constructions as heirs of the democratic revolutions against Communist dictatorships; think of Fidesz in Hungary or the Alternative for Germany party in Eastern Germany. Furthermore, specific constructions of history play a key role in populist contestations of European memory politics that have been increasingly grounded in the recognition of complicity in a dictatorial past, of national guilt in colonial and fascist contexts and, in particular, in relation to the history of the Holocaust (Judt 2005; Levy and Sznaider 2002).

At the same time, the relationship between populism and the past is far from being limited to agents’ active constructions, contestations, and active use (or exploitation) of history. History and historical legacies can also be among the key contextual factors contributing to or even driving the relative success or failure of populist politics. In particular, legacies in the development of democratic or authoritarian political cultures appear to be important variables to explain the varying success of authoritarian-populist actors in Europehistorical trajectories and the longue durée of experiences with democracy, or the lack thereof in long-lasting autocratic contexts, as well as the presence or absence of democratic constitutions and institutions over time. They are significant in order to understand general and particular enabling conditions for populist politics in different contexts, and explain some of populism’s varying success—and in particular the varying political resonance of populist memory politics and narrative constructions of the past.

What has largely been missing in addition to more systematic comparative research, however, is a more interactive, process-oriented view of the ways populists and populism can contest, appropriate, re-invent, and publicly re-shape the past in different contexts, in relation to competing political parties and narratives, and against the backdrop of different historical legacies and political (memory) cultures. In particular, we suggest that structural and contextual factors contributing to specific politico-cultural opportunities, voters (the demand side of the political process), populist agency (the populist, internal supply-side), and competing political agents (the external supply-side) should be viewed in a process-oriented, anti-static lens that recognizes interactive dynamics in the way populists can benefit from and re-shape public self-understandings of the past. The success or potential failure of populists and populist memory politics, we suggest, is often not be reducible to clear-cut, generalizable causal effects. There are a few exceptions, to be sure: for instance, the overall success of populist memory politics is less likely if there are long-time experiences with democracy as an institutional and societal practice, and a broad public recognition and societal processing of national historical guilt also tends to limit the opportunities of populist (memory) politics. However, neither is the success of such (memory) politics entirely dependent on the performance and discursive strategies employed by populist agents, i.e. the ways they construct and politicize notions of the past, nor are historical legacies and structural conditions thoroughly predictive causes that explain populist success. Instead, a crucial task at hand is to better understand the dynamic interplay between the different factors, causes, and agents, and how they operate in transforming (trans-)national political cultures. For instance, this could entail an analysis of how supply and demand side dimensions are mediated in a specific context through discursive performances by populist parties, leaders, protest movements and social media in the public sphere (Couperus, Tortola, and Rensmann 2022), and reconstructing what institutional and political counter-forces can effectively challenge populist successes. A process-oriented comparative view of populism’s relationship to the past seeks to explain varying populist reconfigurations, successes, and influences on public self-understandings of the past in view of agency, structures, and contextual factors. But such approach does not exclusively aim at, or search of, one-directional causal mechanisms—even if it may also deliver generalizable hypotheses and findings.

Moreover, a new framework for studying populism and the past should inevitably be grounded in a broader understanding of political cultures, and thus points beyond politics narrowly defined. Just as memory cultures are shaped by a broad variety of cultural (re-)sources, they also entail collective and institutional crystallizations far beyond the political realm but which nevertheless can have enormous political impact for (the success of) populist mobilizations of the past. Collective memory hereby pertains to socially constructed renderings of the past that are primarily disseminated and inflected through ordinary communication, including digital social networks. Institutional memory, by contrast, signifies more solidified, authorized, and hegemonic ways of collective historical remembrance. However, both are relevant for studying the politicization of historical memory and populist memory politics (Couperus, Tortola, and Rensmann 2022). The same applies to other, seemingly apolitical cultural artifacts, patterns, and practices, and their significance for collective self-understandings about history as a resource for populist mobilizations or the subject of populist contestations. This insight points to a cultural turn in the study of populism and should especially be extended to research on populism and past. Such a cultural turn also emphasizes the need to take note of the politico-cultural impact of structural changes in the ways we communicate in a digitalized world, or of the politicization of cultural issues and cleavages that today often overshadow other political conflicts in European democracies (Rensmann 2017, 2018; Rensmann, de Lange, and Couperus 2017; Leeb, McIvor, and Rensmann 2020). In other words, a new framework that seeks to better understand the complex relationship between populism and the past requires a broad view of politico-cultural opportunity structures and their current, ongoing transformations and reconfigurations in different societies.

We therefore suggest a framework for rethinking and examining the relationship between populism and the past—i.e. history and memory—that pays special attention to the interlinked dynamics of (i) populist political agency and the ways populists construct frames and employ idealized, nostalgic, and post-factual narratives about the past; (ii) contextual politico-cultural factors and historical legacies featuring embedded, hegemonic, or contested discourses and narratives about a nation’s history and collective memory but also various other cultural and communicative factors; (iii) structural, institutional (democratic or post-autocratic) and economic conditions contributing to, or helping facilitate, the success or failure of populist politicizations of history and populist nostalgia. Such a framework emphasizes the interplay of contextual, structural, and agency-driven dimensions, understanding their interaction as a complex process rather than one-directional or in terms of a clear-cut causal mechanism. Our approach also points to the need for more systematic comparative studies that incorporate new methods and data, while opening up to the broader cultural and communicative environments affecting populist mobilizations of the past.

We hereby propose to understand the relationship between populism and the past as multi-layered, mutually co-dependent, intertwined—and, first and foremost, as a dynamic political process. It can neither be limited to or explained by contextual factors or structural conditions alone, nor by populist rhetorical and ideological strategies of memory politics in and of itself. The populist mythologization of the past and the potential of its successful mobilization are hereby situated in (trans-)national political cultures and self-understandings that are themselves subjected to continuing transformations and contestations.

A key dimension of the populist response to societal transformations and its politico-cultural mythologization of the past is related to nostalgia. We know relatively little about the ways through which nostalgia can turn into an enormously powerful political force, in particular, for populist politics. But we attribute central significance to the concept, which seems to link a key element of societal demand for populism in times of seemingly continuous crises with populist constructions and politicizations of the past (Mercer and Pattison 2022). Early on, Betz and Johnson (2004, 324) aptly stated that radical rightist populism is ‘a backward-looking reactionary ideology, reflecting a deep sense of nostalgia for the good old days’. This observation from twenty years ago about the centrality of nostalgia appears fully applicable to mobilizations of a glorious (national) past by—especially, but not exclusively—right-wing populists today. We hereby see nostalgic nationalism, and the post-factual counter-narratives or historical revisionism, which populists employ in order to enable such nationalist nostalgia (Elgenius and Rydgren 2022) by whitewashing the national past, as intimately and comprehensively linked. Combining populist and nationalist narratives with an idealized view of the past offers potential populist supporters a hitherto unfulfilled promise of national rebirth, i.e. a break with the historically corrupted present and a restoration of the ‘golden age’ of the mono-ethnical national community. Such promised break may be situated in context of a cultural backlash against democratic social value change (Norris and Inglehart 2019). The nationalist political imaginary (right-wing) populists mobilize relies to a considerable extent on rehabilitating, whitewashing or glorifying the—pre-democratic, authoritarian or ethno-nationalist—past, which stands in opposition to critical reflections of national history and cosmopolitan memory regimes. This restorative political imaginary can employ and manipulate a broad cultural, visual, and discursive repertoire—including non-authorized, colloquial, and sometimes marginalized counter-hegemonic renditions of history—to create the idealized image of a glorious past to be recovered. The populist self-construction as ‘true heirs’ of such a past and as bearers of allegedly inalienable national historical traditions and values (Couperus, Tortola, and Rensmann 2022) leads us, finally, to suggest that the relationship between populism and the past is not just another research subfield of populism studies. Rather, we argue that constructions of the past, no matter how specifically situated, may play a crucial role for populist success in general. Moreover, particular constructions and appropriations of the past may well be essential for populism’s very ideational make-up, or core ideology, and thus a constitutive part of populism’s anti-pluralistic notion of peoplehood and democracy as popular sovereignty—and therefore populism at large.

New questions, new directions in the comparative study of populism and the past: on this special issue

A needed expansion of the scope of empirical research towards broader cross-national comparative perspectives, which also pay attention to the resonance of populist memory politics and nostalgia beyond (right-wing) populist parties proper, should be accompanied by the integration of new datasets and innovative (mixed) methods, including critical discourse analysis and the comparative analysis of survey data. Allowing for case-transcending insights into populism’s relationship with the past, the contributions to this special issue take important steps in these directions. But they also help us rethink this relationship in more profound ways, corresponding to the need for a broader framework for the study of populist politics in this context, the contours of which we have outlined here.

In particular, these studies respond to a broad set of new research questions, in line with the integrated, process-oriented framework above, that understand populist politics—and especially the potential political effectiveness of populist nostalgia—in a broadened understanding of political culture and its transformations. The articles all fit into a research agenda that theoretically recognizes the discursive, constructed, often disruptive nature of populist mobilizations of national identity and memory—as part of rhetorical strategies, ideology production, and post-factual narrative manipulations of the past. Yet, while most articles are interested in discursive uses of the past and politico-cultural narratives, they also pay attention to contextual factors and/or structural and institutional conditions. The contributions share a non-static view of these political phenomena as neither entirely or merely discursively constructed, nor necessarily reducible to straightforward causal mechanisms. They ask new questions about the different modes and types of (national) nostalgia populists employ; which role particular types of populist agents play in performing and (re-)constructing nostalgic (fake) histories and notions of the ‘good people’; why some of these agents, narratives, and myths are more successful than others or are more likely to resonate with or influence voters and public opinion—and in which historical contexts or under which conditions. And they further—and comparatively—explore how certain populist narratives about collective memory, national history, and the past in general correspond to specific political, societal, and cultural legacies that may help engender or limit the success of the former.

The seven comparative research articles in this special issue cover a wide range of cases and mostly adhere to ideational definitions of populism that see the Manichean antagonism between the virtuous people and the corrupt elite as constitutive to populist politics and its discursive logic.

Petrović, Raos, and Fila (2022) comparatively study how CEE populist actors, across countries and against the backdrop of post-communism, use the past in different ways—as mnemonic warriors or abnegators—to mobilize against EU or domestic political elites. Hilmar (2022) takes a comparative approach when analyzing the role of economic narratives as a social and critical function according to right-wing populist parties. He explores the post-1989 context of (East) Germany and the Czech Republic in how right-wing populist parties weaponize ‘popular sentiments of loss’ and present the immediate post-communist era as a rupture that robbed the people.

Debras (2022) explores how the term ‘democracy’ and its implications/associations are utilized in radical right-wing populist rhetoric via critical discourse analysis. He also highlights the importance of temporality and how it differs across nations and contexts. The case studies of the Rassemblement National in France and Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria present interesting and contrasting relations to the past and nostalgia across cases.

In his mixed-model approach, Kaya (2021) investigates the importance of discourse around heritage amongst supporters of right-wing parties in Dresden (Germany) and Toulon (France) and how it is used by these parties in periods of socioeconomic, spatial, and nostalgic deprivation. Heritage and memories are instrumentalized by right-wing populist parties to revitalize myths (such as Marine Le Pen being the new Joan of Arc) and emphasize the gap between the people and political elite.

Martín, Paradés, and Zagórski (2022, 2) present the ‘first comparative analysis of the impact of attitudes related to conflicts of the past on populist radical right voting’. They analyze comparative survey data amongst voters for radical right-populist parties in Germany, Poland, and Spain, and find that the mobilization of the past and the reactivation of past divisions is important for these parties in terms of their electoral success.

Lipiński and Szabo (2022) add to the academic debate on right-wing populism’s use of the past by studying the narrative of victimhood in speeches from parties in Poland and Hungary. By taking an ideational and discursive approach, they contrast Hungary’s focus on a single instance of perceived injustice and victimization with Poland’s focus on repeated and sustained events. In both cases, discourse around the notion of independence that leads to militant rhetoric is also explored. Combined, they reinforce a conception of the people on ethnic and cultural grounds.

Bolzonar (2022) uses a variety of primary sources in order to empirically compare the diverging attitudes of the radical-right populist parties Front National in France and Lega Nord in Italy with regard to how they have related to their authoritarian and fascist pasts, respectively. He finds that parties that do not adapt to the mainstream socio-cultural view of the past struggle to maintain voter support.

We are just beginning to understand the origins and role of populism, on the one hand, and the political mobilization of nostalgic notions of (national) history and identity on the other. It is clear, however, that both populism and populist mythologizations of the past have increased in relevance (in part quite dramatically) alongside multiple crises, and against the backdrop of changing political cultures in Europe. In many ways, the findings which the research articles in this special issue present address various layers of these multi-faceted phenomena at hand, and to a large extent these contributions complement each other. What they have in common is that they all help illuminate the relationship between populism and the past in comparative perspective, and that they recognize this relationship as multi-layered while still aiming at generalizable hypotheses or a general understanding of the phenomena at hand. In so doing, they mark the cutting-edge status of a highly relevant, yet just developing field.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our research assistants Sven Schreurs and Milena dos Santos Bendixen for their outstanding work in helping us prepare this special issue. We are very grateful to the reviewers for their constructive comments on the introduction and the articles in this special issue. Lastly, we would like to thank Prof Martin Bull and Mary Cenci for their support throughout the publishing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.