Beyond the Populist Moment: Nationalism and the Democratic Chain of Conflict

The relationship between populism and democracy constitutes one of the principal thematic foci of scholarly work on populism. The “nature” of this relationship is to this day highly contested. Although mainstream scholarship typically considers populism to be a threat to democracy, recent literature has effectively “neutralized” it. Granted, the diversity of opinions reflects theoretical and epistemological differences, but controversy outpours from ethico-political considerations as well (Laclau 2005; Rovira Kaltwasser 2012, 185). Does populism behold the embryo of democratic potential, or is it anathema to democracy? Opinions span the full spectrum. Given the acuteness of the controversy, one is compelled to inquire whether disagreements about the nature of populism are symptomatic of populism's inherent ambiguity. Is it perhaps the case that populism “resists” being grounded in the operational logic of the social sciences and the rigidity of universal values, precisely because it is governed by a constitutive ambiguity that eludes determinate definitions? The political category “the people”—so central to populist politics—far from being a static object of analysis, is an ongoing cultural construction, a field of potential antagonisms, and, therefore, the site of ongoing political projects. This is the perspective that is currently gaining momentum and which has increasingly displaced substantivist and value-laden understandings of populism (Laclau 2005; Panizza 2005). Discourse-oriented theorists and in particular those associated with the “Essex School” are at the forefront of this impetus. “Essex School” approaches highlight that populism is not reducible to any essential characteristic. Populism is, rather, understood as a political logic, whereby the social comes to be symbolically divided by an antagonistic frontier separating two oppositional camps, typically “the people” and “the establishment.” Each antagonistic frontier may encapsulate heterogeneous identities and, therefore, a diversity of political demands and imaginaries, many of which may even be “contradictory.” Populism may therefore assume a variety of forms and is entirely context-dependent. Building on these premises, recent studies suggest that populism can assume a democratic form to the extent that articulations of “the people,” as a category deployed to signify populist totalities, remain empty (Stavrakakis et al. 2017). “The people” can be deployed inclusively and incorporate all-the-more identities if it is not symbolically tied to particularistic and therefore exclusionary content, for example, ethnocentric conceptions of “the people” (see De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017). Populism is by extension understood as potentially beholding the embryo of democratic projects (Mouffe 2018; Stavrakakis 2014). From the standpoint of “Essex School” theorists, then, the democratic potential of populism inheres in the performative act of “naming” the people, which presupposes a fundamental symbolic line of conflict situated within the very “instance(s)” where “the people” is antagonistically constructed. The plausibility of populism's democratic potential has, however, also been scrutinized by recent literature that has shown that populist and nationalist elements very often intersect on a de facto basis (Heiskanen 2021), even when attempts are made to articulate inclusive conceptions of “the people” (Gerbaudo and Screti 2017). This has led authors such as Brubaker (2020) to advocate in favor of a conceptually “impure” understanding of populism, where the overlap between populist and nationalist discourses is aprioristically considered a frame of analysis. By implication, populism is de jure considered to be limitedly democratic and invariably nationalist, albeit in different degrees and qualities. In my estimation, the question of whether nationalism and populism discursively intersect either on a de jure or a de facto basis detracts attention from the political significance of this relationship, namely, that the close empirical association between nationalism and populism is itself a product of political practice and therefore power. In the absence of this realization, analysis precludes inquiry into the processes through which articulations of “the people,” “the nation,” and “democracy” have been historically produced and transformed (see Charalambous and Ioannou 2020). It is not a question of whether performative articulations of “the people” can remain empty (thus inclusive) or whether the notion of “the people” by default encapsulates nationalist discourses. Rather, populism's democratic potential hinges on a plurality of social fields, encapsulating variable sites of conflict, through which the meaning of “the people” and its interaction with its exclusionary counterpart “the nation” are ongoingly constructed. The key analytic task therefore involves the through which conceptions of “the people” and “the nation” are produced in By the literature on and nationalism as a through which populist can be the that the close association between populism and nationalism is in the logic of the The is in the of as and, by the of that are “the people” within the of “the nation” democracy as a to The analysis, which the of the that exclusionary conceptions of “the people” and “the nation” are at a plurality of fields, such as and that have historically been as of and projects. 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By substantivist understandings of populism that are with “Essex School” theorists populism as a political logic that can assume a variety of Populism when heterogeneous demands and and identities to be symbolically as of a political that is as a such as “the people” (Laclau 2005). “The people” not the of rather, a for and that it encapsulates (Laclau 2005; Stavrakakis the extent that this political an antagonistic where it is to a such as “the one can of populism. 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