Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Peter Učen: Approaching National Populism
Peter Učeň rational institutions) through the unification of the people with political power, combined with a disdain of formal institutions and pluralist representative democracy, and an organic and undivided vision of the ‘people’” (Blokker 2005, 378). Rather than rejection of democracy, or its pathology, populism is then to be seen, in line with this reasoning, as democracy’s distinct reinterpretation - a “particular style of argumentation” (Blokker 2005, 386-7). It is assumed to rest on a “rather one-sided and particular view of democracy, emphasising its emancipatory, redemptive features” (Blokker 2005, 379) related to the popular sovereignty heart of democracy.4 In this view, populism is not an ideology in itself. Event though it may be able to provide the “core superstructural, politico-philosophical premises”, it fails “to include the ‘translation’ of the latter into a set of institutions, such as those found in liberalism as a political doctrine and its institutional derivations” (Blokker 2005, 378). Accentuation of ‘impracticality’ of populism as ideology constitutes a major difference relative to the most recent thought within the studies on populism, which has expressed itself in concepts that unlike previous ‘global’ definitions, or populism-as-political-style arguments, seek to define the phenomenon in a ‘restricted’ way. They see it simply as the distinct interpretation of the political, and, thus, as a distinct political ideology, and only then as a complex socio-political phenomenon of a multifaceted nature with numerous characteristics. The above-mentioned Mudde’s definition falls into this tradition along with a bit more elaborated argument by Stanley (2006). Stanley considers populism to be “an ideology characterised by four core concepts the interaction of which delineates a distinct interpretation of the political”. These are concepts as follows: “The existence of two homogeneous units of analysis: ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ (the units of the political); the antagonistic relationship between the people and the elite (the structure of the political); the idea of popular sovereignty (the normative justification for preferring the interests of the people over the elite)”, and “the positive valorisation of ‘the people’ and denigration of ‘the elite’ (the moral justification for this preference)”. The author holds that “populism should be regarded as a distinct ideology in that it conveys a particular way of construing the political” (Stanley 2006, 1). Under this approach, populism, being so-called ‘thin-centred’ ideology with a small number of core concepts, is an easily combinable set of ideas. It is typically encountered in ideological appeals of the populists in combi-18
