25 results in Claiming the People's Past
1 - Don’t Mention the Holocaust: The Alternative für Deutschland and Its Engagement with Pasts, Histories, and Memories
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
In the context of postwar Europe, Germany was long an exception (Decker and Hartleb 2006). Unlike in neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark, or Poland, for example, in Germany, until fairly recently, populist parties and movements did not play a major role. Only with the emergence of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) did populism become a significant political force in German politics. Founded on 6 February 2013, the party only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament in the September 2013 federal elections. Within the next 12 months, it successfully contested the elections for the European parliament and in the East German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.
The AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, was a professor of economics who pursued a neoliberal political agenda and advocated for Germany to leave the Eurozone. While the economic policies of Lucke and other AfD founders attracted many followers in the wake of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the AfD's meteoric rise between 2013 and 2019 was largely due to its ability to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with official attempts to value cultural diversity and with Germany's asylum and immigration policies, particularly the Merkel government's decision in 2015 to not close Germany's borders and to admit more than a million asylum seekers over a two-year period. In the 2017 federal elections, the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes and became the third-largest party in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. Although immigration did not feature prominently in the next federal election campaign, in September 2021 the AfD was largely able to consolidate its position; in Saxony and Thuringia, it finished ahead of all other parties.
In terms of its elected representatives, its members, and its voters, the AfD has included and appealed to a wide range of people, from social conservatives at one end of the spectrum to sympathizers of the New Right at the other. The AfD's heterogeneity has been a strength because it has broadened the party's appeal, but it has also been a weakness because the AfD has always been riven by factional conflicts.
Introduction: Towards a Theory of Populist Historical Reason
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A switch was flicked, and a hologram, 8 metres long and 2 metres wide, appeared. Under the impressive India Gate of New Delhi, on 23 January 2022, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated a hologram monument of the politician and military leader Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) (ABP News 2022). The statue celebrates the controversial, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic Bose for his defiance of the British during the independence struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. It fits with the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) agenda to show that ‘the history of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved the country’ (Times of India 2021). Modi's party seeks to challenge a supposedly ‘elitist’ and ‘colonial’ narrative of Indian history (Khan et al. 2017; Zachariah 2020). The BJP finds examples in ‘heroes’ such as Bose, uses DNA to claim a link between contemporary Hindus and India's first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and treats ancient Hindu scripture as fact and not myth (Chapter 5; Jain and Lasseter 2018).
Sixteen thousand kilometres away from New Delhi, a different populist ‘politics of history’ unfolded over the past two decades. Evo Morales, the leader of the left-wing populist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and the first indigenous president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, promoted a policy of anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal ‘cultural and democratic revolution’ to inaugurate a ‘new phase of history’ after colonialism (Morales 2006). By performing highly mediatized political ceremonies at indigenous heritage sites such as his alternative ‘spiritual’ inauguration at the Tiwanaku site, by celebrating figures such as eighteenth-century indigenous rebel Túpac Katari (c. 1750–1781), and by using indigenous notions such as pachakuti (the future in the past), Morales attempted to ‘decolonize’ Bolivian history (Dangl 2019; García Jerez and Müller 2015). Grand symbolic gestures were familiar to Morales, too. On 21 June 2014, his government installed a counterclockwise running timepiece on the Congress building of La Paz. Symbolizing that Bolivians must ‘undo their history’ and challenge colonial standards, this ‘clock of the south’ invited them to ‘think creatively and disobey Western norms’ (BBC News 2014). Although the MAS started out along ethno-populist lines and was dominated by Quechua-speaking indigenous people, it never defined this indigeneity in strict exclusivist terms.
3 - Mujib’s Two Bodies: Memorial Populism in Bangladesh
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Sheikh Mujib had no ears, no cheeks, no jaw, no nose, no brows and no forehead. He was just a face, a face without features. When he looked at Sheikh Mujib, [the barber] saw himself. That happened to every citizen in the country.
—Neamat Imam (2015: 55)Introduction
In Neamat Imam's 2015 novel The Black Coat, the reader follows the path of a former Bangladesh Liberation War journalist and his charge, a rural migrant adept at impersonating Sheikh Mujibur Rahman amidst the raging famine of 1974. Imam takes stock of the populist potential of Sheikh Mujib by portraying him as both the exalted leader and every Bengali. In effect, he has no features as he subsumes the whole people.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the leader of the Bangladesh Awami League (AL), the principal national liberation party during Bangladesh's independence struggle and currently still the country's ruling faction. With the end of British colonialism in the subcontinent and the partition of India in 1947, the eastern part of Bengal became East Pakistan, a province geographically separated from its West Pakistan counterpart. The Pakistan period is often remembered in Bangladesh as the second period of colonial rule. Mujib became the leading figure not only within the AL but for the entire independence struggle, which eventually culminated in the 1971 Liberation War. Although imprisoned for nearly the entire war, he became known as the Father of the Nation and was attributed the honorific title ‘Bangabandhu’ (Friend of Bengal) by his followers.
After independence, Mujib was lauded as the country's first president and later prime minister. However, unable to resolve the high levels of internal conflict and graft in the early years after independence, and following a devastating famine in 1974, Mujib saw his attraction and that of his party erode. In 1975, Mujib moved towards a one-party model to maintain control over his crumbling polity and to control AL greed more directly. Before his plan could be fully executed, he – and his whole family, apart from his daughters, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana – were killed in a coup attempt in August 1975 (Ali 2010: 55–113).
4 - Poland Besieged: Prawo i Sprawiedliwość and Its Politics of History
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
After the demise of the communist system in 1989, Poland experienced a rapid and largely successful transition to the market economy and liberal democracy. The democratic institutions, although newly established, seemed well grounded and, for a long time, were not overtly contested by any major political forces, including post-communists. The challenge to the Polish version of the liberal, representative democracy came with the rise to power of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, or PiS). The latter, founded in 2001, governed for the first time in 2005–2007 and, later, in 2015–2023. The first period was relatively short and could be seen as forming the concepts and methods which were fully implemented only after the second accession to power. The policy of the PiS has been aimed at subverting the rule of law, especially the division of powers and the independence of the judiciary. The core of the rhetoric of the PiS has been the claim of representing ‘the nation’, which so far was mute, culturally neglected, and economically exploited. The PiS presents itself as the first Polish party that embodies the interests and values of ‘average people’ versus elites, provinces versus large cities, ‘true’ Poles versus cosmopolites, and traitors acting on foreign orders (Germany, the European Union [EU]). The indispensable element of its discourse is the condemnation of allegedly corrupt, inept, post-communist, or liberal elites that ruled Poland for most of the time after the 1989 breakthrough (Kim 2021; Sadurski 2019). The key features of the politics and ideology of the PiS place this party, despite many important differences, among other European populist movements of right-wing and nationalistic orientation. The PiS is often seen alongside the Hungarian Fidesz, whose example it openly declares to follow, the French Rassemblement National, the Fratelli d`Italia, and even, to some extent, the Alternative für Deutschland, although any allegiance with the latter is deliberately avoided.
The specific trait of the PiS as a political and social movement is the importance of culture and religion as sources of mass mobilization and identification and, consequently, its political successes and resilience in holding power. Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik coined the expression ‘symbolic thickening of public culture’ to refer to the specific cultural grounds from which the Polish version of populism arose and benefited (Kotwas and Kubik 2019).
Part II - Key Features of Populist Historical Reason
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Acknowledgements
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Frontmatter
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15 - Does Populism Challenge the Expertise of Academic Historians?
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- By Allan Megill
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.
But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.
About the Contributors
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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7 - Populist Islamism in East Africa: Elaborating Alternative Futures from Idealized Pasts
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.
This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.
This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).
Foreword: Is There a Distinctly Populist Perspective on History?
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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The past few years have seen many kinds of inflation – among which there is an absolutely inflationary use of the word ‘populism’. Politicians, pundits, and, yes, also scholars tell us incessantly that we live in the ‘age of populism’ and that we are witnessing (or, for that matter, might be crushed by) a ‘populist wave’. The outcome of this inflation has been that many phenomena for which we have rather precise concepts – think of nativism, nationalism, and protectionism as obvious examples – are now labelled ‘populist’. This failure to distinguish impairs our political judgement. It has also arguably inflated the power of populism itself – it now appears that populism is omnipresent and that it is somehow an unstoppable political movement (after all, who can really stop a ‘wave’, let alone what Nigel Farage at one point called a ‘tsunami’?).
Against this background, one wonders whether looking for particularly populist approaches to history might not strengthen the unfortunate trend of conflating populism with all kinds of other phenomena. It is indeed problematic to label political positions that have, at best, an elective affinity with certain kinds of populism as populist as such; it is also misleading, in my view, to declare particular policies (let us say, on immigration or trade) populist as such. However, the case of history is different, and this volume shows why.
Populists, I hold, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the real people’. This appears to suggest no particular stance on policies nor, for that matter, commitment to any particular historical narratives. And yet this claiming of a monopoly of representation, usually phrased in moralistic language, does have two pernicious consequences, and these eventually also relate to the framing of history. First, and rather obviously, populists claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies, or even about values, for that matter (which are, of course, normal and ideally even productive in a democracy); rather, populists say more or less directly that their political opponents are corrupt characters who are betraying the people (sometimes they label them outright as enemies).
5 - Memory, History, and the Politics of the Hindu Right
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
If, in writing history, we constitute the past and structure collective imagination, then the specific way we narrate the past becomes important in defining the shape of the national memory we produce and the vision of the nation that comes into being. This chapter looks at the way the Hindu right in India frames its history and envisions the nation. It suggests that we not only unpack the framing tropes of that historical imagination, but also the practices that reflect its attitude to the craft of history writing and the place of the historical profession within society. Populist regimes everywhere seek to refigure what counts as history.*
The internal dynamics of the Hindu right have always been shaped by a contradictory dialectic between constitutional politics and extra-constitutional activism, between the seemingly moderate and the aggressively militant voices. This conflict has unfolded differently over the decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hindu right could not expand its electoral base, though it continued its work at the popular level, opening schools where Hindutva history and Hindutva culture were popularised, doing social work, forming cultural and social organizations that were committed to the ideals of Hindutva. Even as late as 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not able to win more than two parliamentary seats. Disappointed with electoral politics, desperate to expand its social base, many within the Hindu right felt the need for a militant movement to forge an aggressive Hindu identity. L. K. Advani emerged as the aggressive face of the right – leading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s to build a temple for Rama, a major Hindu deity, in Ayodhya – and Atal Bihari Vajpayee appeared as the moderate voice. While Advani's efforts helped forge an assertive masculine Hindu identity, Vajpayee managed to form a coalition government in 1996.
In the early years of this century, during the time that Vajpayee was managing an embattled central coalition, Narendra Modi was fine-tuning a new militant Hindutva in Gujarat as the chief minister of the province. By 2014 he appeared as the unchallenged populist right-wing leader of India.
16 - National Memory, Moral Remembrance, and Populism
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- By Lea David
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941:
Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’ According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: ‘What should I do with them?’ And the mufti replied: ‘Burn them’. (Beaumont 2015)
The past is a rich resource for populist exploitation as it is directly linked to moral boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter focuses on the questions of how national memory and moral remembrance have an effect on populism's moral and ethical relations to the past. According to Cas Mudde (2004), probably the most influential scholar on populism, morals are central to the populist appeal. Populism is a political stance that juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Populism relies on morals that determine ‘the pure’ and ‘the righteous’ values; hence, it is directly linked with disputes over the interpretations of the past. The rise of populism, which began in the 1970s and grew considerably in the 1990s and onwards, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. This is because the populist revelations on what are ‘pure’ and ‘righteous’ values always lean on allegedly ‘true’ and so far ‘hidden’ understanding of what transpired in the past. Hence, as we will see, historical revisionism and claims over victimhood and suffering are the bread and butter of every populist appeal.
Though the term ‘populism’ was first reported in American newspapers in the 1890s in the context of the rise of the People's Party (Kaltwasser et al. 2017), the scholarship on populism has grown considerably since the 1970s creating a dense and fertile field. One of the first definitions of populism was offered by Gino Germani, an Italian intellectual referring to it as a multi-class movement, which ‘usually includes contrasting components such as the claim for equality of political rights and universal participation for the common people, but fused with some sort of authoritarianism often under charismatic leadership’ (Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 5).
10 - Populism, Presentism, and the Prospects of Critical Historical Thinking in Russia
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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The ability to hear and understand the people, to see them through and through, to the full depth, and to act in accordance is the unique and main virtue of the Putin state. It is adequate to the people, along with the people, which means that it is not subject to destructive overloads from the counter currents of history.
—Vladimir Surkov (2019)Introduction
The current Russian government is revising the constitutional system and essentially curtailing the work of democratic institutions. In the process, it is increasingly turning to history as a means of self-legitimation. During the 1990s, which were difficult years for the economics of the country, ruling elites showed an indifference to history. Since the early 2000s, however, this indifference has been replaced, in the words of Alexey Miller, with ‘the escalation of historical politics’ (Miller 2012: 255), which has reached its peak in the third and fourth terms of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The authorities impose a correct picture, from their point of view, of the historical past with the help of school textbooks, large-scale multimedia projects, such as ‘Russia: My history’, and memorial laws (Koposov 2017: 207–299; Kurilla 2021), and even recently adopted amendments to the constitution.
In this chapter, I analyse the Russian government's uses of history. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss two theoretical questions: First, can the Putin regime be considered populist, and, if so, what are its defining features? Second, what uses of history are characteristic of contemporary populism and its Russian variant? I will claim that Russian uses of history can be characterized as conservative, drawing on a particular kind of presentism. After David Armitage, I would call this ‘teleological presentism’ (Armitage 2020). In the second section, I will show how this essentially conservative regime of historicity works in the Russian context by focusing on the use of the idiom ‘historical Russia’. This phrase is increasingly used today in official rhetoric when explaining domestic and foreign policy agendas. In the third and final section, I present my vision of an alternative historicity, which could become a challenge for the kind of presentism produced by the current Russian government.
13 - Historiographic Populist Emotivism
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
It would be a stretch to claim to write about populist philosophies or theories of history because populism does not possess the kind of reflective systematic coherence that distinguishes philosophical theories. Still, it is possible to identify, I argue, a distinct populist attitude to historiography that can be derived from a political theory of populism. This attitude to historiography is expressed by the rhetoric, speeches, and speech acts such as tweets of populists from different parts of the world and different ends of the political spectrum.*
There is a great, indeed ever-increasing, variety of theories of populism. Even within the confines of this volume, no single theory or meaning of populism is accepted by all. I have advocated a theory of populism as the politics of the passions (Tucker 2020). Accordingly, I argue that populism approaches historiography as a narrative expression of the passions projected on the past. This passionate-emotive attitude to historiography generates corresponding values that judge competing historiographies according to their passionate intensity that expresses ‘authenticity’. Finally, I consider the more recent populist use of perspectivism, constructivism, and dialectics to confuse and silence its potential critics.
Populism
Populism, as I understand it, is the rule of political passions. This fits the classical Greek understanding of demagoguery and the Roman understanding of populism with the exception that populism is not exclusively of lower classes because elites are just as likely to succumb to their passions, while the common people may project their passions on elitist leaders. These passions override political interests and shape political beliefs. Pure passions tend to be self-destructive – for example, when people become very angry and burn their homes, start wars that hurt them more than their enemies, or demand economic policies that gratify immediately but generate inflation or accumulate debts that destroy the economy. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999: 337) puts it, ‘Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest.’
Harry Frankfurt (1988: 11–25) distinguished first-order desires from second-order volitions, wills about desires, what a person would like their desires to be and not to be.
8 - Historical Consciousness in the Age of Donald Trump: Populism, Evangelicalism, and the Typological Imagination
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- By Oz Frankel
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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Introduction
For admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump's presidency signified a rupture, whether a revelatory inflection point on the brink of a national calamity or a nightmarish transgression of norms and dereliction of duty. Back in 2015, he was the ‘chaos candidate’. Ever since he amplified and dramatized a sense of crisis with the rhetoric he unleashed to announce threats and denounce enemies, both foreign and domestic, as well as through the venues he chose to engage the public, whether large public rallies or daily cascades of tweets (Moffit 2015). The crisis turned more acute and tangible towards the end of his presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of protests following George Floyd's death. It climaxed with the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when belligerent language and populist rage turned into political violence.
Conflict, crisis, and the sense that a momentous shift is afoot, that the present in some sense is already historic, prompted an intense, both overt and implicit, engagement with the past in American public life. Allusions to the past proliferated in an effort to justify, condemn, or simply comprehend Trump, his politics, and his demeanour. The past, its memory and pedagogy, the meaning of national symbols, and questions about the mnemonic function of the state fed heated disputes and political skirmishes, especially over race and the legacy of slavery. While history was deployed in a volatile political landscape, invocations of the past – from whatever political camp – also indicated a desire for legibility and predictability, facing perceived threats, endemic insecurities, and a perennial gap between expectations and the reality of American life.
This chapter employs Trump and his tenure in the White House to explore the contours and content of the populist historical imagination in the contemporary United States of America (USA). A populist streak is discernible in American politics dating back to the 1830s. Historically, the term ‘populism’ carried a somewhat different valence in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. However, the current political moment signifies a convergence, exemplified, for instance, by Trump's cult of personality and authoritarianism; both were less pronounced in previous iterations of American populism.
6 - Perpetuum Mobile: Neo-Ottoman Nostalgia as an Impossible Machine of Conquest
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 121-137
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Summary
Introduction
Populism rarely travels alone. As cases such as Narendra Modi's ‘Hindutva’, Brexit's ‘Take Back Control’, and Donald Trump's ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’ show, populism often travels with nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian populism takes its fuel from neo-Ottomanism, a nostalgic rewriting of the Ottoman past, exemplified by the Conquest Rallies, massive public manifestations commemorating the conquest of Constantinople; the government-endorsed television series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, depicting the modest beginnings of the Ottoman Empire; and the Panorama Museum of Conquest, a state-led interactive museum, intended to ‘transport’ audiences back to 1453. How does authoritarian, right-wing populism pair so well with nostalgia? What is the ‘lost state’ that the Ottoman nostalgia so yearns to bring back, and what emotions go into its making? This chapter answers these case-specific questions while extrapolating that both nostalgia and populism, specific to and exemplified through this case, rely on binaries such as good versus evil, us versus them, and a glorious past versus a crumbling present. Together, these nostalgic and populist binaries create an ideal type, namely nostalgic populism. Nostalgic populism is a common modality of populist historicities and therefore requires close attention. Drawing from the 2020 reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, I argue that the nostalgic populism in Turkey, which operates simultaneously through nationalist and imperialist logics, showcases three discursive characteristics vis-à-vis history:
1. Legalization of history: Nostalgic populism uses history as a legal precedent and as a legitimizing mechanism for policy. In the case of the Hagia Sophia, the regime refers to national sovereignty and Mehmed the Conqueror's will regarding the Hagia Sophia to present the reconversion decree as lawful.
2. Monopolization of history: The regime asserts its claim as the only legitimate one, declaring continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Because Mehmed the Conqueror saved the Hagia Sophia, a marvel, from the state of decay and ruin – the result of Byzantine neglect – Turkey, as the heir of the Ottoman Empire, reasons it has the main claim on this monument.
3. Revivification of stolen history: While other countries and the previous regimes in Turkey neglected Ottoman history, the Justice and Development Party, or the AK Party (hereafter AKP), gives the people the ‘right’ kind of history, a history the people have been deprived of thus far.
Part I - Global Varieties of Populist Politics of History
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
- Published online:
- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 29-30
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Index
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
- Published online:
- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 331-343
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14 - ‘You Feel Me Bro?’ The Role of Emotions in the Construction of Collective Identities in Populism, Nativism, and Ethnic Nationalism
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- By Chris Lorenz
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 267-287
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Summary
Introduction
There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.
Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).
In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.
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