National Populism at Large

The expression and concept of ‘national populism’ originates in the schol­arship and journalism on the so-called radical or extreme right in Western Europe which in the post-war decades started to challenge the mainstream consensus in some Western European polities.

Often considered a sort of anti-democratic extremism, even an offshoot of fascism, the extreme/radical right¹ came to be studied per se around 1980s and 1990s, when their political presence proved to be sustainable and its access to power attainable. Various approaches have attributed to the parties concerned - in different ways, combinations, and with various degree of accuracy - a range of defining features, such as extremism, nationalism, anti-democracy, xenophobia, racism, authoritarianism, protest, populism, economic neo-liberalism, welfare chauvinism, anti-immigrant atti­tude, and the like.

Why, then, did national populism become so common a shortcut for the politics of the radical right? That ‘given’ name certainly reflects the nature of the threat the parties in question pose to the mainstream politics. Hence it also speaks volumes about those who have bestowed the name rather than about solely the referent itself - the parties of the radical, populist, author­itarian and nationalist right.

While none of the above attributes of the radical right has been new to European politics, upsetting novelty of the radical right was a combination of those attributes and their resonance among some segments of electorate. In order to understand the nature of the radical threat, we have to see into a number of assumptions underlying the post-war European consensus.

In a typical Western European polity, the left (the Socialists or Social Democrats), by and large, converged with the right (the Christian Democrats or the Conservatives) on liberal democratic norms of the form and contents of their respective national politics, on the welfare state as the basis for eliminating social unrest in societies (social equalisation as an addition to the equality of rights), and on a gradual and negotiated transfer of some prerogatives from the nation-states (and their governments) to the supranational level of the European Union.

A full account goes far beyond the scope of this text, but it might be useful to introduce some facts testifying the nature of the radical right chal­lenge: In terms of citizenship, they started to call for its reinterpretation in nativist terms; it defied the notion of citizenship as a result of merely legal procedures. That was more than just a response to the influx of immigrants from diverse cultures to western societies. Relative to the form and con­tents of politics, the radical right came to employ in its appeals the whole range of topics that were considered off-agenda until then, such as ‘sancti­ty’ of liberal rights removed from the sphere of popular vote. Finally, con­cerning European integration, it was persistently portrayed by the radical right as a danger to the true national interest.

As for ‘national populism’, populism became a shortcut for all anti-lib­eral elements of the radical right politics, namely its disregard for established norms of political conduct, denigration of elites and the way they represent popular interests as failing or even treacherous. Nationalism, then, was iden­tified as a threat to certain ‘supranational’ tools envisaged as furtherance of the socio-economic development of European nations. In doing so, the main­stream intuited the two most serious challenges to their legitimacy.

To sum up, except for being ‘the right’ - that means despising the idea that all people be equal as the result of the state intervention - the radical right also espoused nationalism and populism in their criticism of estab­lished actors, norm and ideas within European polities. Interpreting the political in terms of then national and juxtaposing the people and elite, the radical right posed a serious threat to the ‘regular’ way of doing politics in the societies at issue.

Going back to the helpful concepts, in his important contribution Mudde (2007) draws a line between the radical and extreme parties (of the right) and defines the core ideology of the populist radical right.

According to his argument, the populist radical right (PRR), being nom­inally democratic yet challenging some key elements of liberal democracy, such as constitutional protection of minorities, should be for the purposes of analysis segregated from the extreme (right) parties. The latter are known to attack the sancta sanctissima of democracy itself, its popular sovereign­ty heart. Not only PRR ought to be confused with the extreme right; it also belongs to the different class than the Right which is radical, but not pop­ulist. Finally, he provides arguments for treating differently also other pop­ulist parties which are not radical right.

Regarding ideology, Mudde first defines PRR as a form of nationalism. Its essence is an expression of a nationalist persuasion called nativism. Then he identifies the ideological core of the PRR as a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.

Nativism stands for “an ideology, which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation state. The basis for defining (non-) ‘nativeness’ can be diverse, e.g. ethnic, racial or religious, but will always have a cultural component” (Mudde 2007, 19, original emphasis).

Concept of nativism analytically covers nationalism, xenophobia, (and also racism, as nativism can, but need not, include the racist attitudes), anti­immigrant stances as well as the welfare chauvinism from the above list of traditional characteristics of the radical right. Hence, it is true essence of the PRR which therefore can be narrowly defined as the politics of nationalism.

Another core ideological feature of PRR is authoritarianism understood as “the belief in a strictly ordered society, in which infringements of author­ ity are to be punished severely. In this interpretation, authoritarianism includes law and order and ‘punitive conventional moralism’... It does not necessarily mean an antidemoctratic attitude, but neither does it preclude one” (Mudde 2007, 23, our emphasis). Authoritarian nature of the PRR pol­itics explains, among other things, many secondary and derived character­istics of PRR linked to its organizational forms and leadership style.

The final indispensable ideological core concept of PRR is populism conceived as “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimate­ly separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure peo­ple’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2007, 23, our emphasis).

Even intuitively, it is not hard to understand how and why this ideo­logical combination - a version of ‘identity politics’ promoted by the PRR – is so alien to the European liberal-democratic mainstream.

In the context of Slovakia, only the Slovak National Party (SNS), and the defunct true Slovak National Party (PSNS), can be classified as the pop­ulist radical right. Given that SNS does not exhaust the class of Slovak political forces that espouse both populism and nationalism, we have to continue our search for the meaning of the Slovak national populism in other quarters as well.

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