A Provocation on Populism

Abstract

European democratic backsliding is often discussed as an Eastern pathology rooted in a failed post-socialism. Such discussions ignore the illiberal record of the post-war West: unpurged fascism, Italy's exclusion of its Communist Party, French populism, to name a few. Of course, most pressing currently is the radical right’s recent record gains in western states. The essay argues that Euroscepticism and illiberalism are structural to European integration itself, visible from the ECSC's technocratic disregard for Belgian miners through De Gaulle’s “empty chair” and decades of British resistance to political Europeanization. Respecting East West historical differences, nevertheless the provocation explores the common thread of mainstream parties' failures including a conflation of market liberalism with democratic governance. The essay closes on a discussion of the consequences of Germany's selective invocation of EUropean values toward the war in Ukraine versus in Gaza. From the perspective of European “values,” such selective application only fosters the illiberal condition. Illiberalism is not a failure of the European mission, but what that mission becomes whenever its bearers stop expecting to be held to it.