Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Populism has often been described as one of the greatest threats to XXI century European democracies. Critical examination of this situation rises two related questions: to what extent are national democracies in European Union still democratic and how such ideologically ambiguous phenomenon as populism could be conceptualized in this context. In this paper, I relate populist “surge” to postdemocratic condition – the depolitizing practices of modern technocratic policy-making described by Chantall Mouffe, Jacques Ranciere and Slavoj Žižek. My main argument is that proper politics cannot be reduced to social administration and that the ideological nivelation of traditional parties will necessarily bring new more radical political actors able to awake political imagination of masses. To conceptualize populism I use Ernesto Laclau’s discursive theory of populism, which is anti-descriptivist in that it does not seek to find some intrinsic characteristics of populism, but rather to define it as logic of political mobilization of various political movements by their common reference to “the people”. As an illustration of fertility of this approach – combination of descriptive postdemocratic analysis and formalist conceptualization of populism – in political research, I present the case study of Lithuanian political party “The Way of Courage” as a nearly ideal example of populist mobilization under postdemocratic conditions.