Multifaceted nationalism and illiberal momentum at Europe’s eastern margins: an introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay frames the set of politically challenging issues that the advent of populist movements raised for specific nation states and the whole Europe. Based on critical engagements with the extant literature in such disciplines as comparative politics, political philosophy, international relations, regional studies and critical geopolitics, this short article offers the interpretation of the contemporary populism as illiberal nationalism, and underscores its deeply political challenge to the post-political core of the EU project.

KEYWORDS:

• populism
• illiberalism
• nationalism
• the political

This special issue is one of the multiple attempts to peer into and – hopefully – unpack perhaps the most acute challenges confronting contemporary regimes of power in a wider Europe and reshaping political systems in many countries of the continent. These challenges come in different versions and under different names, each being subject to critique and contestation: right- and left-wing populism, national conservatism, or illiberal democracy. The variety of these concepts attests to the deep transformations within the fabric of contemporary European societies and makes scholars rethink the post-Cold War hegemonic understanding of liberal democracy as the dominant (post-)political paradigm destined to expand from its traditional hotbed in the West to other regions.

So far populism seems to be the most frequent generic characterization of the groups and movements on the rise in Europe and beyond it, and the titles of the articles collected in this special issue reflect the popularity of the term. However, our intention in this collection of papers is to stretch analysis beyond the conventional accounts of populism as an anti-elite and extra-institutional appeal to the general public for the sake of its mobilization against incumbent power holders (De Witte, 2018), and look for more nuanced meanings inherent to this term.

Having said that, we deem that the notion of populism mostly reflects the form in which this appeal is embedded, while the crux of the content constitutes a radical repoliticization of what might be dubbed European post-political order (Norman, 2017) grounded in technocratic policies of administrative and managerial elites. One may agree with Slavoj Zizek that

populism is inherently neutral: a kind of transcendental-formal political dispositive that can be incorporated into different political engagements … Populism is the Lacanian objet a of politics, the particular figure which stands for the universal dimension of the political, which is why it is the royal road to understand the political. (Zizek, 2006, p. 553)

Against this backdrop, the rise of populism might be seen as one of the facets of the political which is ‘an ontological dimension of each and every identity because ‘it’ is constituted in and through its necessarily antagonistic relations with diverse others’ (Wenman, 2003, p. 60). To put it differently, ‘the political cannot be reduced to governmental rationality or the composition and dynamics of power, for it indicates philosophy, a system of meaning/intelligibility within which ‘politics’ manifests itself’ (Puumala, 2013, p. 952). Consequently, ‘the attempts to eradicate political primacy from society are therefore not plausible’ (Thornhill, 2007, p. 514).

At least from the times of Hans Morgenthau political theorists (mostly of realist background) harshly criticized the liberal perception of politics as ‘something that can eventually be suppressed’ (Cozette 2008, p. 670). More contemporary authors confirmed the widely spread belief that ‘liberalism represents a desire to evade, displace, or escape from politics’ (Galston, 2010, p. 386) and achieve the ‘post-political foreclosure … where consensus is already established (Rawlsian liberalism) or is to be established in the long run (deliberative democracy)’ (Paipais, 2014, p. 361). It is in this sense, that illiberal nationalism challenges the whole model of Europe where ‘potential issues are kept out of politics, whether through the operation of social forces and institutional practices or through individuals’ decisions … to secure the acceptance of the status quo’ (Sepos, 2013, p. 265).

The left academia made its own contribution to debunking liberalism, basically through problematization of the concept of ‘people’, seen not as Michel Foucault’s ‘population’, but rather as a collective political subject-in-the-making. Nowadays, indeed, political agency is coming back, which explains, in particular, an interest to Ernesto Laclau’s theorizing among some authors of this issue. In this sense the rise of anti- or post-liberal agendas vindicates the validity of the left-wing political theory that for decades insisted on focusing academic debate on agency and subjectivity, as opposed to liberal and constructivist prioritizing of structural – normative and institutional – factors of societal change. In a more politically charged language, Slavoj Ziziek predicted that post-politics would ultimately engender the rise of radical and extremist attitudes and appeals to violence.

Therefore, the gist of populism is the denial of liberal ideology in general and its disavowal of politics in particular. More specifically, the political momentum constitutive for all possible models and versions of today’s populism is re-articulated from at least two different perspectives gravitating towards each other – nationalist and illiberal. These two pillars of contemporary populism betray its profoundly hybrid nature: on the one hand, it reasserts the virtues of nation state-based politics against global elites and supranational institutions; on the other hand, it militates against the liberal project with its cosmopolitan values of tolerance, inclusiveness and multiculturalism.

The transformation of illiberal nationalism from a marginal phenomenon into a universally recognized power contender and challenger to the existing system of post-political governance requires a return to the old debate of depoliticization and repoliticization as an important cognitive tool to understand the populist phenomenon of illiberal nationalism. As Alex Kazharski argues in his analysis of Slovakia, the popularity of radical movements can be interpreted as a societal reaction to post-political, or technocratic and largely depoliticized management in the absence of divisive debates on substantive issues touching upon long-term aims and far-reaching strategies, as opposed to policies and tactics. In this context, it is Brussels that incarnates the spirit of post-politics against which most of illiberal nationalist forces revolted. In Hungary – analyzed in this issue by Daniel Hegedus – the EU, on the one hand, has structurally constrained the Orban regime, yet, on the other hand, ‘also contributed to its survival and, paradoxically, plays a regime supporting function’ (Bozoki & Hegedus, 2018, p. 1181). Yet in the Baltic states, depoliticization seems to be more functional: ‘EU accession provided incentives to depoliticize some key aspects of the politics of democratic transition’ (Cianetti, 2018, p. 324) to make reform less dependent of parties or individuals in power.

However, the least discussed problem starts with the recognition of ‘a multi-layered understanding of the political’ and its ‘multiple ontologies’ (Beveridge, 2017, p. 598). In other words, ‘there is no stable core of the political’ (Ungureanu, 2008, p. 310), and it can crop up in an endless variety of ways. Concomitantly, political order ‘is never a definite, once and for all, done deal: a modus vivendi is always an ongoing achievement, and to some degree potentially precarious and susceptible to being undermined by any of the infinite variety of life’s contingencies’ (Horton, 2010, p. 440). It is exactly through this prism that one should understand and unpack the current repoliticizing force of illiberal nationalism as a complex trans-ideological agglomeration of different forms of resistance to the liberal idea attacked both from the right and left flanks, and is also a subject of intrinsic mutations. A good example at this point might be Matteo Salvini with his transformation from a regionalist/localist crusader against Italian central government to a staunch defender and promoter of Italian national interests vis-à-vis the EU core. Other examples include Volen Siderov, the leader of the nationalist ‘Ataka’ party in Bulgaria who at the beginning of his political career in the 1990s was adhering to pro-Western liberalism and multiculturalism, and was skeptical about nationalist ideas (Sygkelos, 2018, p. 589). Viktor Orban seems to be one more former post-Communist liberal turned conservative, and even Vladimir Putin on the outset of his political career in the beginning of the 1990s was part of a largely pro-liberal – by Russian standards – elite.

Are these trajectories from liberal to illiberal flanks of political spectrum – but never in the opposite direction – a threat to democracy, or an intrinsic part of the democratic process? Arguably, given the hybridity of the phenomenon of populism, both answers seem to make sense, depending on region-specific political circumstances. That is why it is that important to deploy different forms of illiberal nationalism in various regional settings in an attempt to find the specificity of its national manifestations. This is what this special issue tries to achieve through looking at how nationalist and illiberal components of populism operate in particular political milieus of EU’s eastern margins.

Of course, there are voices in the academic debate arguing that when it comes to the populist wave, not much difference exists between east and west of Europe, or north and south. Indeed, constituencies supportive of national populist parties might appear in economically advanced countries (such as Germany) and victims of economic hardship (for example, Greece), in ‘old’ EU member states (France or Italy) and those who joined the EU only a decade-and-a-half ago (Hungary and Poland). However, the dynamics of illiberal nationalism shows several important distinctions across Europe.

One important regional feature might be related to different agendas of illiberal nationalism. As a recently published book argued, ‘issues driving the West European radical right, that is immigration and insecurity, do not correspond to the agenda in the East which is much more centered on historical grievances or narratives, the role of national minorities (in the face of very low levels of immigration), and border questions’ (Minkenberg, 2017, p. 6). With all due recognition of the validity of the east–west comparisons in this domain, we would however like to reformulate this argument: right-wing nationalism in Europe’s east does capitalize on the overall sense of growing insecurity stemming from the refugee crisis and the diminishing ability of national governments to control borders, yet securitization of immigrants remains mainly symbolic due to their low numbers in all EU’s eastern member states. Of much stronger impact for domestic constituencies in Central Europe are starkly actualized traumatic conflicts with immediate neighbors (which is particularly acute for Poland’s relations with Ukraine and Germany) and negative campaigning against liberal lifestyles, including biopolitically explicit measures against LGBT communities, same-sex marriages, sexual education at schools, and abortions. Anyway, multiculturalism as a major source of existential insecurity remains a major issue for Central European illiberal nationalists, yet the sources of insecurity have much more to do with neighbors and ‘domestic others’ than with issues of race or intrusion of non-Christian religions.

Secondly, the ascendance to power of nationalist and largely anti-EU forces in countries with established democratic institutions (such as, for example, Italy) do not directly challenge the modus operandi of democratic institutions, while in a weaker institutional environment ideas of nativism, jingoism, xenophobia and intolerance tend to alter the functioning of democratic norms and rules. It is in this vein that media freedom, checks and balances, and state’s regulation of civil society organizations reemerge in Hungary and Poland as major issues of concern for local liberal constituencies and the EU. Within this analytical frame one of the most challenging questions is what happens to populists when they come to and stay in power for more than one electoral cycle. In particular, Daniel Hegedus’ article in this issue tackles this question with reference to Hungary where the ruling Fidesz party ‘proceeded to dismantle liberal checks and balances; skew the electoral process in its own favor; extend partisan control over state agencies, media and civil society; and develop a harshly anti-liberal ideology, which de-legitimises left-wing and liberal competitors as foreign to the national community’ (Cianetti, Dawson, & Hanley, 2018, p. 244). A similar trend is detectable in other countries such as, for instance, Macedonia: ‘Consistent with other countries that have succumbed to illiberalism, the Macedonian ruling parties turned to extralegal methods to consolidate their electoral gains. These include outright fraud, the use of state resources for partisan advantage, and the sort of strategic manipulation of elections’ (Crowther, 2018, p. 752).

Thirdly, another important distinction relates to particularly intricate connection between populist nationalism and discourses on decolonization as an important element of political debates in former socialist countries. It is at this point that one may discern interesting – and still far from mainstream in the academia – attempts to look at illiberal nationalism in former subaltern countries of Central and Baltic Europe from the post-colonial viewpoint. An interesting example at this juncture could be Bulgaria where illiberal nationalism is nurtured by the memories of submission to the imperial Turkey, while Poland’s mainstream discourse – largely influenced by the ‘Law and Justice’ party – heavily emphasizes the subjugation of the Poles to both German aggression and the later Soviet sway. National versions of illiberalism popping up at Europe’s margins portray their homelands as protectors and defenders, if not saviors of Europe, thus challenging their peripherality in and for the continent. These attempts are particularly strong in the case of Hungary, a country where public opinion for years was marked by ‘emphatic rejection of Trianon’ (Mares & Havlik, 2016, p. 325), a treaty that in 1920 put an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

References to post-colonial theorizing – touched upon, in particular, in Stefano Braghiroli’s and Vassilis Petsinis’ piece in this special issue – open an interesting explanatory pathway to study the functioning of illiberalism in the context of transformations taking place in the Baltic states. The cases of Ukraine (Taras Kuzio in this issue), Russia and Kazakhstan (Irina Busygina) geographically extend the regional variations of illiberal nationalism beyond the EU into the space conventionally known as ‘post-Soviet’.

Seen from the illiberal nationalist perspective, the core–periphery dynamics has security dimensions too. In particular, Braghiroli and Petsinis in this issue refer to the reemerged concept of Intermarium as a project aimed at radically reshuffling and restructuring geopolitical space from the Nordic Europe to the South Caucasus. In this regard what we have earlier called – though in a different context – ‘Illiberal geographies’ (Makarychev & Yatsyk, 2018) might become an important element of the ongoing discussions about post-liberal international order.

Thus, diverse approaches to populism and its nationalist illiberal core seem to open promising and still unexplored roads to critical engagements not only with the field of international relations, but also with such disciplines as regional studies and popular geopolitics. They might be helpful in detecting the symptoms and traces of populism in vernacular discourses and practices of communication dispersed all across the society, and constituting fertile grounds for their instrumentalization by populist power brokers. These inspiring research perspectives urge us to look at different modes of political representation beyond political institutions. In particular, Monika Bartoszewicz paid attention to performative and artistic underpinnings of Polish and Czech populism which might remain less visible from the institutional perspective. A similar approach is taken by Andrey Makarychev and Vladimir Sazonov in their study of counter-hegemonic imageries and narratives in Estonia. The critical engagements with grass-roots/popular discourses confirm the complexity of the ‘populist reason’ (Laclau, 2005) as a hybrid phenomenon which paradoxically combines freedom with illiberalism, authoritarianism ‘and legitimized social exclusion’ (Brown, 2018, p. 61). This trans-ideological hybridity is politically consequential for Europe as an object of infinite redefinitions which, as this special issue shows, are particularly demanding and insistent at EU’s margins where various country-specific populist manifestations are meant – time and again – not only to reshuffle the center – periphery structure of relations, but also to reconsider the meaning of Europe away from its liberal and post-national core.