Resize Text: T here are authors who claim that a populist revolution has already started in the new democracies of Europe—countries that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, aspired to join or joined NATO or the European Union. If that is the case, the implications are serious.
Studying the situation in the new democracies of Europe is especially tempting for at least three reasons: They exhibit in a more direct form some political, mostly populist tendencies that seem to be bulging all around Europe; they seem politically closer to Western countries and can help us better understand what is going on in Western Europe; and new democracies are still considered the weakest point of the West—most of them remain the main object of interest to both an increasingly powerful and aggressive Russia and the forces of fundamentalist Islam.
The term populism is easily confused because of its wide and indiscriminate usage. Apart from its mostly historical use for concepts and activities connected with the Populist Party in the United States, it usually has a negative connotation and is used to define political trends that claim to express the needs and desires of common people, usually by challenging the governing elites and by promising things that cannot be delivered. However, the term is also used by politicians who have missed addressing some important issues to castigate their adversaries for managing to address these issues and gaining politically as a result.
In Europe, the term has gradually come to mean something that exhibits characteristics of what used to be called in a very broad sense “fascisoid”—an amalgam of antidemocratic, statist, xenophobic, ethnocentrist trends, which oppose representative institutions, free initiative, competition, and a number of “Western values” like diversity, tolerance, and freedom of expression. Such a definition seems to be pigeonholing populism into a convenient, well-known ideology that can be conceived of as an atavistic—and highly unpleasant—occurrence. The unfolding of strong tendencies in this direction in Eastern Europe, however, seems to provide new insights for the critical assessment of this phenomenon.
Thomas Shillinglaw was a vice president and assistant general counsel of Corning Incorporated, having retired in 2006. He is a 1971 graduate of Stanford Law School, at which time he also received an M.A. from Stanford in Russian and East European Area Studies.
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