Populism and the Second Great Transformation: Neoliberal Globalization, the European Union, and the Crisis of Democracy

Europe currently faces the strongest wave of transnational populist mobilization since the interwar period. This wave not only generates new social movements and political parties, but poses a fundamental challenge to the reproduction of representative-democratic political systems in general.

The paper offers a Laclaudian reading of contemporary populism through the lens of Polanyi’s theory of the double movement. I locate populist mobilization at the convergence of two identifiable, though not wholly independent vectors: The first is the hegemony of neoliberal globalization and its crises which greatly increase the risks to the social existences of regular people; the second is the trend towards apolitical democracy which virtually guarantees that regular politics will not be able to generate reembedding mechanisms to counter neoliberal disembedding. Especially the legitimacy crisis of the European Union and the concomitant renationalization of European politics cannot be divorced from the fact that the EU has failed to evolve into anything resembling a protective shield against globalization’s negative externalities and is instead perceived as globalization’s local branch.