The spectre of populism

Well, it would seem that there is another very different spectre haunting Europe in the 21st century, but it is no longer communism. That clearly has been consigned into that proverbial dustbin of history. But there is another dangerous ‘ism’ threatening the liberal world order, and that ‘ism’, of course, is something that has come to be known as populism. Of course, there have been varieties of populism in the past: Russia had its own species of the same during the 1870s and 1880s; a similar though politically less radical version of populism grew up in the United States during the 1890s and reappeared in different iterations several times thereafter (McCarthyism was in its own way a populist revolt against liberalism); and then, of course, there were the many varieties of populism, which as a student I was told was the main problem in Latin America during the post-war years. Peronism in Argentina was, it seemed, a particularly nasty kind of populism – largely, I gathered, because Peron liked speaking to the masses and did not much like the British. So, in some regards the study of what is known as populism is not new. Indeed, I can well recall reading my first book on the subject in 1969 when I was studying politics; and that was a rather fine LSE study edited by the very great duo of Ernest Gellner and Ghiţa Ionescu, titled Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics.

So we might conclude that there is nothing new here. But that would be wrong; for clearly there is something rather significantly new happening in the modern world. For one thing, the populist ‘problem’ (if that's what it is) appears to have migrated towards Europe where it did not have much of a hold before; and for another, it has assumed a much more widespread form. Indeed, whereas previous populisms were specifically national in character, this new populism has assumed a more international form.