Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Peter Učen: Approaching National Populism
Approaching National Populism direct appeal to the heterogeneous masses in an attempt to attract popular support across various societal and class divides. Cumulative as they were, such approaches often produced all-encompassing definitions trying to cover all traits of populist politics. Those concepts largely failed the test of empirical reality when, for example, some populist leaders in the 1980s and 1990s adopted neo-liberal economic measures. In direct opposition to economic interventionism of the classic populists of the 1950s, neo-populists successfully combined neo-liberalism with populist appeals to masses. Efforts to define populism leaning against policies and social demography survived the shift of the focus of populist studies from Latin America to the West European radical right. While the ‘old’ spirit often persisted, the change of the focus also entailed a shift in the outlook. Originally, also the radical right populism had been primarily characterised in terms of policies and social support; the whole industry has been build around the analysis of ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ aspects of the radical right parties’ emergence and success. Research into the western radical right, however, stimulated theorising on populism as such - preferably without being preoccupied with policies and political demography. The endeavour has yielded, inter alia, conceptual returns which resigned on global ambitions, hence localised their definitional efforts in the context of modem liberal democracies of the West. These studies seem to have inspired the consensus on that populism has primarily something to do with (or has something against) democracy which is commonly referred to as liberal and representative. Marked by noteworthy inroads into social theory and theory of democracy3, some of the new conceptualizations apparently reacted to the seemingly vanishing conclusiveness of the policy- and social support-based definitions. Given the notable differences in the policies and the social support between the Latin American and West European populists, the shift also reinforced the belief that the workable way of conceptualizing populism should mainly rely on the analysis of the way populists address the people. Hence, characteristics of populism as a political style and a “set of distinct arguments” (Blokker 2005, 378) came to define the area of populist studies. Blokker summarised the arguments at issue as following: “The distinctive set of populist arguments includes an absolute prioritization of the people, its political participation (however defined) and its sovereign will, anti-élitism and an antiestablishment attitude, a claim for radical freedom and ‘direct democracy’, a reenchantment of the alienated people (an alienation which is deemed the result of the artificial constructions of legal-17
