Assessing Populism at Europe’s Margins: Pervasive, Performative, Persistent

Abstract

This special issue is a collection of articles whose authors explore different forms of populism in countries located beyond the Western core and therefore much less known to specialists in the field. The country-based case studies selected for this issue reflect diversity of populist forces in non-central polities in Europe. Each of them has a rich legacy of conflicts and controversies with major European powers, which serves as one of powerful sources of contemporary populist discourses, pushing many of them towards national reassertion and EU-skepticism. The articles collected in this issue cover a variety of aspects of populist politics. Olga Lavrinenko speaks about ‘technocratic populism’ in Hungary and Czech Republic, Alexandra Yatsyk addresses ‘biopolitical populism’ in Poland, Ionut Chiruta explores memory-based populism in Romania, Michael Cole and Silas Marker engage ideologically explicit forms of populism, with strong nationalist and ethno-religious connotations, in (correspondingly) Georgia and Denmark, and Aliaksei Kazharski with Andrey Makarychev analyze performative populism in Slovakia and Estonia. Lavrinenko’s article on technocratic populism represents a particularly tough challenge to the habitual categorizations of populist narratives as an expressive and emotive opposition to post-political / administrative / managerial policy making. In her study she argues that populism has colonized the whole political spectrum and does not respect the traditional left-right or liberal conservative divides. This assumption is also shared by Kazharski and Makarychev who conclude that in Estonia and Slovakia populist methods of gaining public visibility in the media and performatively addressing ‘the people’ are spread all across the entire political spectrum. The inscription of populist approaches and narratives into administrative and managerial logics blurs the line between populism and technocracy. By the same token, a conceptualization of populism as an “economic project” grounded in a certain type of expertise and knowledge opens new avenues for—perhaps paradoxically—examining populism from a Foucault-inspired governmentality perspective. The variety of social, cultural and political spheres where populism exposes itself as a discourse