Populism and the Mirror of Democracy Edited by FRANCISCO PANIZZA V VERSO London • New York First published by Verso 2005 © in the collection, Verso 2005 © in the contributions, the individual contributors 2005 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3579 10 8642 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 1-85984-489-8 (Paperback) ISBN 1-85984-523-1 (Hardback) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Populism and the mirror of democracy. - (Phronesis) 1. Populism 2. Democracy I. Panizza, Francisco 321.5'13 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Garamond Pnnted and bound in Great Britain by William Clowes Ltd, Beccles, Suffolk CONTENTS Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy 1 FRANCISCO PANIZZA 1 Popul ism: What's in a Name? 32 ERNESTO LACLAU 2 The 'End of Politics' and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism 50 CHANTAL MOUFFE 3 Populism as an Internal Periphery of Democratic Politics 72 BENJAMIN ARDITI 4 Skinhead Conservatism: A Failed Populist Project 99 OSCAR REYES 5 Constitutive Violence and the Nationalist Imaginary: 118 The Making of 'The People' in Palestine and 'Former Yugoslavia' GLENN BOWMAN 6 From Founding Violence to Political Hegemony: 144 The Conservative Populism of George Wallace JOSEPH LOWNDES 7 Populism and the New Right in English Canada 172 DAVID LAYCOCK 8 Populism or Popular Democracy? The UDF, Workerism 202 and the Struggle for Radical Democracy in South Africa DAVID HOWARTH 9 Religion and Populism in Contemporary Greece 224 YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS 10 The Discursive Continuities of the Menemist Rupture 250 SEBASTIAN BARROS Notes 275 Bibliography 317 List of contributors 339 Index 343 INTRODUCTION Populism and the Mirror of Democracy FRANCISCO PANIZZA Reading populism It has become almost a cliche to start writing on populism by lamenting the lack of clarity about the concept and casting doubts about its useful• ness for political analysis.1 Populism is a contested concept and agreements on what it means and who qualifies as a populist are difficult because, unlike other equally contested concepts such as democracy, it has become an analytical attribution rather than a term with which most political actors would willingly identify.2 But unless we perform a Brechtian gesture and abolish the people, populism is part of the modern political landscape and will remain so in the future. However, while there is no scholarly agreement on the meaning of populism, it is possible to identify an analytical core around which there is a significant degree of academic consensus. This core is both theoretically elegant and, as the contributions to this volume show, provides the basis for rich empirical analysis. After briefly surveying the main approaches to populism, I will present populism's analytical core in terms of three elements: a mode of identification, a process of naming and a dimen• sion of politics. In the following sections, I look at the conditions of emergence of populism and address three key questions necessary for understanding it: Who are the people? Who speaks for the people? How does populist identification take place? I illustrate my arguments with 2 POPULISM AND THE MIRROR OF DEMOCRACY references to cases of populist politics from the contributors to this volume as well as examples taken from studies of populism in Latin America and elsewhere. I conclude this introduction with some reflec• tions on the relations between politics, populism and democracy. What is Populism? There is little purpose in attempting to summarise the many studies of populism in the already vast academic literature on the topic. However, as part of the intellectual inquiry leading to the concept's analytical core it is important to distinguish between three ways of approaching populism, which in turn have significant internal variations. The purpose of this overview is not to look in detail at contending theories of pop• ulism, but rather to highlight the problems raised by the different approaches, as well as to draw attention to some shared assumptions that will be examined in more detail in the discussion of the concept's analytical core. For this purpose I will divide approaches to populism into three broad categories: a) empirical generalisations; b) historicist accounts; and c) (following Stavrakakis in Chapter 9, this volume) 'symptomatic readings'. The empiricist approach looks at alleged cases of populism in an attempt to extract a set of positive definitional characteristics that could provide a distinctive group of attributes to characterise the phenomenon. One of the earliest examples of this approach is Peter Wiles' definition of populism that includes twenty-four different features, which unless we are told what their mutual relation is, makes the categorisation meaningless.3 Other scholars list a more limited number of attributes and blend them together in a loosely descriptive definition, but the results are scarcely more illuminating.4 Some empiricist studies of populism construct typologies of the concept. But while typologies have a useful role to play in political analysis, if they are not built up around a conceptual core they cannot account for the common element that binds together their other• wise heterogeneous elements. Most observers assume the common element to exist when they use the term populism but, for the most part, FRANCISCO PANIZZA 3 they do so implicitly and intuitively rather than explicitly and analytically. Yet such assumptions are by no means self-evidently justifiable.5 A second approach consists in linking populism to a certain historical period, social formation, historical process or set of historical circum• stances. Typical of the historicist reading is the vast literature on Latin American populism that restricts the term to the golden era of populist politics, spanning from the economic crisis of the 1930s to the demise of the import-substitution-industrialisation (ISI) model of development in the late 1960s. This approach stresses the close association between populist politics - as a class alliance under the leadership of a charismatic leader such as Juan Domingo Peron in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico - and the ISI development strat• egy.6 While the considerable number of populist regimes that were in power in the region over that period needs to be accounted for, this restricted interpretation of populism fails to justify its self-imposed narrow geographical and temporal limits, which exclude earlier and later cases of populism in Latin America and elsewhere. In contrast with the previous approaches, a symptomatic reading of populism incorporates some of the features that characterise populism according to the empiricist and historicist approaches, but justifies their inclusion in terms of the concept's analytical core, based on the consti• tution of the people as a political actor.7 This approach understands populism as an anti-status quo discourse that simplifies the political space by symbolically dividing society between 'the people' (as the 'underdogs') and its 'other** Needless to say, the identity of both 'the people' and 'the other' are political constructs, symbolically constituted through the relation of antagonism, rather than sociological categories. Antagonism is thus a mode of identification in which the relation between its form (the people as signifier) and its content (the people as signified) is given by the very process of naming - that is, of establish• ing who the enemies of the people (and therefore the people itself) are. An anti-status quo dimension is essential to populism, as the full consti• tution of popular identities necessitates the political defeat of 6the other* that is deemed to oppress or exploit the people and therefore to impede 4 POPULISM AND THE MIRROR OF DEMOCRACY its full presence. The specific content of a given populist appeal varies in accordance with the different ways this antagonistic relationship is defined. The 'other', in opposition to 'the people', can be presented in political or economic terms or as a combination of both, signifying 'the oligarchy', 'the politicians', a dominant ethnic or religious group, the 'Washington insiders', 'the plutocracy' or any other group that prevents the people achieving plenitude. The antagonism between the people and its other and the promise of plenitude once the enemy is vanquished is neatly presented in the following popular song, sung in Peru by support• ers of Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), one of Latin America's historic populist parties: Aprista forever forward Aprista we must fight The oligarchy will eventually be defeated And there will be happiness in our motherland9 Populism is thus a mode of identification available to any political actor operating in a discursive field in which the notion of the sovereignty of the people and its inevitable corollary, the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, are core elements of its political imaginary.10 As Ross Perot put it, with striking clarity, 'We [the people]'re the owners of this country...', a statement echoed with a more rhetorical flourish by Venezuela's leader Hugo Chavez: 'I declare the people to be the only and the true owners of their sovereignty. I declare the Venezuelan people the true owners of their own history.'11