Populismo y nacionalismo: representando al pueblo como “los de abajo” y como nación

Benjamin De Cleen; Yannis Stavrakakis

doi:10.30827/acfs.v53i0.7427

Authors

Benjamin De Cleen Department of Communication Studies Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 9, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Yannis Stavrakakis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Egnatia 46, 3rd floor, School of Political Sciences, Faculty of Economic and Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus, 54124 Thessaloniki

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/acfs.v53i0.7427

Keywords:

populism, nationalism, discourse theory, Laclau

Abstract

The close empirical connections and conceptual affinities between populism and nationalism, have led to a widespread but misleading overlap between the concepts of populism and nationalism in academic debates, journalism and political rhetoric. Despite the obvious importance of the connections between nationalism and populism, their conceptual and empirical relations have received rather limited systematic attention. Drawing on the poststructuralist discourse theoretical tradition associated with Laclau and Mouffe and the Essex School of discourse analysis, this article treats populism and nationalism as distinct ways of discursively constructing and claiming to represent ‘the people’, as underdog and as nation respectively. The differences between them can also be identified and highlighted from a spatial or orientational perspective, by looking at the architectonics of populism and nationalism as revolving around a down/up (vertical-power) and an in/out (horizontal-identity and territory) axis respectively. Building on this framework, we suggest that the co-occurrence of populism and nationalism can fruitfully be studied through the prism of articulation. Again, a focus on discursive architectonics allows grasping how different political projects construct different discourses by connecting the building blocks of populism and nationalism in particular ways. The last part of the article illustrates the benefits of the discourse-theoretical approach by studying the articulation of populism and nationalism in the populist radical right’s exclusionary nationalist rejection of ethnic-cultural diversity, and in the criticisms of supra-national and multi-national politics found both on the Left and on the Right.

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Author Biographies

Benjamin De Cleen, Department of Communication Studies Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 9, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Benjamin De Cleen is an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s Communication Studies Department where he is the coordinator of the English-language master on Journalism and Media in Europe. His research is situated within critical discourse studies, and has mainly been focused on radical right rhetoric, and on the discourse-theoretical conceptualization of populism, nationalism and conservatism. Recent work has been published in journals such as Javnost-The Public, Journal of Political Ideologies, Organization, and in the Oxford Handbook of Populism.

Benjamin is the international chair of the Centre for Democracy, Signification and Resistance, an international joint research group that brings together people from the VUB, University of Ljubljana, University of Essex, Uppsala University, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Yannis Stavrakakis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Egnatia 46, 3rd floor, School of Political Sciences, Faculty of Economic and Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus, 54124 Thessaloniki

Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science at Panteion University (Athens) and received his MA degree from the Ideology and Discourse Analysis Programme at the University of Essex, where he also completed his PhD. He has worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham before taking up his position at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2006.

His research primarily focuses on contemporary political theory (with emphasis on psychoanalytic and poststructuralist approaches) and on the analysis of ideology and discourse in late modern societies (with emphasis on populism, environmentalism, nationalism and post‐democracy). He is the author of Lacan and the Political (Routledge, London & New York 1999) and The Lacanian Left (Edinburgh University Press/ SUNY Press, Edinburgh and Albany 2007) and co‐editor of Discourse Theory and Political Analysis (Manchester University Press, Manchester 2000), Lacan & Science (Karnac, London 2002), Aspects of Censorship in Greece (Nefeli, Athens 2008) and The Political in Contemporary Art (Ekkremes, Athens 2008). He has co-authored with Nikolas Sevastakis, Populism, anti-populism and crisis (Nefeli, Athens 2012). He is vice-president of the Hellenic Political Science Association and co-convener of the Populism Specialist Group of the British Political Studies Association. During the period 2014-15 he headed the research programme: POPULISMUS: Populist Discourse and Democracy.

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