First Annual Conference of the UWK-IDM Project European Dis/Orders: “Borders” – Università degli Studi di Trieste (Trieste, Italy), 22 November 2024

The “European Dis/Orders” project investigates concepts of order and crisis narratives, both theoretically and through selected case studies. It is grounded in the notion that democracy is a dynamic process, while critically examining populism as a force that capitalises on the promise of order. The case studies explored crisis phenomena and discourses, with particular focus on the East-Central and Southeastern European regions.

On 22 November 2024, the First Annual Conference of the joint project took place in Trieste in partnership with the University of Trieste.

Organised by:

Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe, Vienna
University for Continuing Education Krems (Danube University), Krems

Concept, Idea & Organisation by:

Mag. Dr. Christina Hainzl, University of Continuing Education (Danube University)
Dr. iur. Dr. phil. Péter Techet PhD, LL.M., M.A., Institute for Danube Region and Central Europe

Introduction

Through interdisciplinary and international dialogue, the conference critically analysed the construction and narration of borders, particularly in relation to populist trends in European politics, climate change, and migration. One of the conference’s core aims was to identify and discuss potential processes of de-bordering (Entgrenzung) in the spheres of politics, law, environment, and the arts.

Borders are not inherent; instead, they arise from political, social, or geographical processes. They do not merely function as barriers; they can also serve as points of connection. Borders represent a space of encounter, sometimes seen as a “non-place.” They are dynamic; they shift through observation and reconstruction. Despite their fluid nature, borders are often perceived and depicted as rigid and unchanging entities.

“Borders” are marked on maps, constructed in political discussions, negotiated within societies and artistic contexts, and sometimes crossed – whether they vanish due to climate crisis or are breached in the context of migration.

“Borders” can be physical, legal, or societal, and they also serve to emphasize and perpetuate differences and inequalities. The act of “border-drawing” symbolizes the process of establishing and reinforcing these divisions, which can contribute to social, political, or cultural tensions.

The inaugural conference of the “European Dis/Orders” project explored the following questions:

How do “borders” shape identities?
How are “borders” negotiated in society?
How are “borders” produced in discourses?
How and why are “borders” constructed?

Throughout the conference, borders were examined as social constructs and political narratives from multiple disciplinary viewpoints. They were also deconstructed through both historical and contemporary case studies. In line with the overarching themes, the conference addressed the concept of borders from diverse perspectives.

Participants from the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia delivered presentations on topics including migration in the context of the climate crisis; historical constructions of identity beyond national borders in the Upper Adriatic region—particularly in relation to social policy, and populist migration narratives, with case studies from Hungary, Serbia, and Italy.

Panels

Panel 1: “Border” as Contradiction (Debates on Climate Change and Migration)

Borders represent a key tension in debates on climate change and migration. Climate change is inherently cross-border. The geographical borders of nation states cannot prevent the onset or increasing severity of climate hazards. The same borders play a key role in how we understand migration linked to climate change, with changes in how people migrate increasingly being recognised as a societal consequence of climate change. The border takes on a pivotal role in the discourse, with international cross-border migration receiving the largest share of public and political attention, although empirical research stresses that internal migration within national boundaries is much more prevalent in the context of climate change. Nevertheless, the border has come to represent control and prevention, which absent legal instruments to allow people opportunities to move presents a hurdle to mobility that itself creates precarity and feeds into vulnerabilities of people trying to move to cope with climate impacts.

This panel focussed on the role of borders in debates on climate change and migration and the productive effects of bordering practices on people impacted by climate change.

Sarah Haider-Nash (University for Continuing Education Krems): The Border and the Other in European discourses on climate and migration
Giovanni Bettini (Lancaster University): Towards climate nomadism? Displacement and escape in the face of planetary crises
Simona Capisani (Durham University): Challenge or Opportunity? Climate Migration, The International Order & a Right to a Livable Space

Panel 2: “Border” as Identity (Identity Conflicts in the Upper Adriatic Region)

The Upper Adriatic region is situated at the intersections of state, linguistic, and national-cultural borders that have been perceived, constructed, and transcended throughout history. Identities in this context are not closed entities but rather situational and historically contingent on self-positionings, i.e. essentially constructions. Categories such as “Italians,” “Croats,” and “Slovenes” have been predominantly external attributions, associated with varying advantages or discriminations over time. Ethno-national categories often overshadowed other identities (such as religious, social, or political ones).

This panel explored how identities in the Upper Adriatic region have been negotiated and constructed, and how new borders have emerged through identity constructions.

Laura Lee Downs (European University Institute): The association Assistenza all’Italia Redenta and the social management of teachers’ labor in Italy’s northeastern borderlands, 1919-1940
Daša Ličen (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts): Animal Welfare and Social Boundaries in late Habsburg Trieste
Francesco Toncich (University of Ljubljana): Making New Borders, Legal Belonging and Mobility through Public Health in the post-Habsburg Alps-Adria Macro-Region: A Transnational Perspective (1918-1924)
Gabriele Mastrolillo (University of Trieste): The debate over the Upper Adriatic Border between the Italian and Yugoslav Communist Parties during the Partisan War

Panel 3: “Border” as Crisis (Exclusionary Discourses and Networks of Populism)

Populism promises “unity” and “order,” making it fundamentally anti-pluralistic. The object of right-wing and left-wing populist discourses (“the people”) is created and sustained through exclusions against “others” and “dissenters.” By referring to a “unified people,” populisms exclude representative forms of politics in a pluralistic society (such as parliamentary systems) as well as institutions of minority protection (such as constitutional jurisdiction controlling legislative majorities). They create virtual divisions between “majority” and “minority” through the act of drawing borders.

This panel examined populist discourses and “border”-drawing against the “others” / “foreigners.” This involved concrete case studies from Italy, Serbia, and Hungary.

Roberta Altin (University of Trieste): Migrations in the Trieste Borderland: ‘Border’ to order or to otherness?
Melanie Jaindl (Independent Researcher): Visual Securitization of Borders and Others: An Intersectional Approach to the Fence in Subotica / Röszke
Elisabeth Donat (University of Continuing Education Krems): Cross-border cooperation as key resource during crisis and beyond: Focus groups with regional MPs in four European countries
Mattia Zulianello (University of Trieste): Understanding Populism: Between Myths and Reality

Outcomes

The conference explored how boundaries emerge in societal discourses and political practices, using a series of compelling case studies.

The first panel questioned the role of the nation-state in light of the transnational challenges posed by the climate crisis and related migration. The concept of “nomadism” was examined as a potential societal response to the declining significance of states. The discussion critically addressed whether the climate crisis is fundamentally transforming the traditional notion and essence of statehood, thereby enabling cross-border, grassroots political action.

The second panel presented various historical studies to illustrate how and why identities were constructed in the Northern Adriatic region. The discussion focused on how this area—currently divided among three states—could develop a shared culture of memory politics and serve as a laboratory for historically rooted multiculturalism.

The third panel offered a theoretical overview of populist narratives, followed by critical analyses of several case studies, with a particular focus on migration policies in Southeastern Europe. The discussion emphasized that border regimes themselves are manifestations of populist discourse.

Important takeaways from the discussions:

Borders are discourses, not realities.
These discourses are reinforced by populist rhetorics and strategies, promoted through nationalist politics of memory, and enforced through legal border regimes.
Identities are not bound to borders; therefore, it is possible—especially by invoking shared local histories—to transcend boundaries and break open national clusters.
The climate crisis, in particular, challenges the effectiveness of border regimes—and by extension, that of nation-states—because it demands a transnational response and triggers transnational migration.

Papers

Panel 1: “Border” as Contradiction (Debates on Climate Change and Migration)

This panel focussed on the role of borders in debates on climate change and migration and the productive effects of bordering practices on people impacted by climate change.

Sarah Haider-Nash (University for Continuing Education Krems): The Border and the Other in European discourses on climate and migration

The linked phenomena of climate change and migration have gained notoriety in public discourse as well as part of policymaking agendas at a variety of political levels. The policy discourse in Europe however hinges on the assumption that migration in the context of climate change always originates in the Global South, thus only touching Europe through immigration from countries feeling the brunt of climate impacts in the Global South. Borders therefore play a key role in the European policy discourse surrounding migration and climate change, whereby the European Union external border and internal national borders are treated as equivalent. The border thus becomes something to be protected from unwanted incoming migration, in a discursive process that contributes to Othering the nebulous figure of the incoming climate migrant and setting them apart from the European. The pervasiveness of this discourse leads to it being prevalent, not only in security-laden discussions about the border explicitly, but also within proposed policy options that are being proposed to provide protection to people moving in the context of climate change. This contribution draws on the example of a ‘Climate Passport’ that was proposed and debated in the German parliament. Although not implemented, it was intended as a protection instrument that could allow people most impacted by climate change impacts to cross the border and gain citizenship-like rights in Germany. While resting upon a humanitarian impetus, the discourse surrounding this proposal included the same hyper-focus on the German border and problematic assumptions about the individuals who would have become climate passport holders. Indeed, a key logic upon which the proposal rests is that people severely impacted by climate change impacts do not wish to migration internationally in response, therefore working to increase domestic support for the instrument by downplaying its utility, relevance, and popularity for the very people it is designed to protect.

Giovanni Bettini (Lancaster University): Towards climate nomadism? Displacement and escape in the face of planetary crises

How will climate change intersect with human migration? This question has gained significant traction in recent years, gesturing towards fundamental issues concerning sovereignty, habitability, mobilities, and ultimately justice. However, most often the question has been answered by extending into the future today’s forms of migration. Instead of re-imagining how (im)mobility might or should look like once climate change really kicks in, the figure of the climate migrant / refugee has been mobilised as presage of the ‘migration crises’ to come. Thereby, today’s unequal socio-ecological constellations and constrained geographies of mobility, displacement and immobilisation, are projected into an even direr future.

Drawing on nomadic theory (as introduced by Deleuze and others), this intervention problematizes two key tenets of this deadlock, i.e. the biopolitical nexus state – territory – citizenship and the reification of the figure of the migrant, which I argue are underlying ingredients of mainstream framings. Working with the figuration of ‘climate nomadism’, this intervention suggests a de- and reterritorialization of discourses on mobility, as well as a shift towards the political subjectivity of those (not) on the move. The provocation of ‘climate nomadism’ aims to contribute untangling how future mobilities are imagined from the deadlock of currently dominant discourses.

Simona Capisani (Durham University): Challenge or Opportunity? Climate Migration, The International Order & a Right to a Livable Space

In recent years, IR literature has increasingly explored ways in which climate change poses a threat to the international order. In this context, climate migration is often mentioned as a potential contributor to increased conflict.

Here, I suggest another way in which climate migration challenges the international order. The argument I make is normative. I argue that climate change effects on human migration constitute a set of circumstances that might render the territorial state system illegitimate. Why? The state system, which has existed for the past few centuries under Westphalian rule, is the existing social practice of cooperation under which human societies are organized. It was created for the purpose of peace, stability, and realization of basic rights. It is morally legitimate only if its organization ensures that this purpose is met. Thus, exclusion from all states is illegitimate, because that would go against these aims. In this sense, protection against exclusion from the state system is a basic right: it comes first, it precedes other rights including states’ sovereignty over their territory. I argue that this right against arbitrary exclusion amounts, in essence, to a right to a liveable space for individuals. This is where the right to a liveable space comes from.

I argue that the right to a liveable space is well suited for addressing climate mobility. Why is that? I see three reasons.

First, this right ensures that people keep their reciprocal relationship to space. So, it is not restricted to displacement: for instance, it also establishes a requirement to increase the agency of immobile populations so that the choice to stay remains.
Second, the right to liveability provides grounds not just for ex post protection, but also for preemptive protection. For instance, it requires facilitating voluntary migration if migration decreases the risk of exclusion from the state system.
Third, the right to a liveable space bypasses controversial issues of responsibility attribution. Why? Because responsibility is addressed to the state system itself, not to any given state. This is because when the right is violated, it is not due to any one state’s failure to act, but rather due to the structure of the state system under climate stress.

Climate change makes apparent the need for reforming the existing protection regime for climate mobility to ensure the legitimacy of the international order. In this context, the right to a liveable space, both normatively and empirically grounded, helps support broader and more accurate institutional governance for climate mobility.

I showed how the current primary focus of institutions is inconsistent with the empirical evidence documenting effects of climate change on mobility. Instead, a new framework can account for obligations to address both migration and immobility and recognizes ex-ante and ex-post claims to protection.

Finally, I showed that the Paris Agreement provides an avenue for implementing a right to liveability, but it cannot do that as is. So, I propose two ways that would ensure that climate mobility is fully covered under the PA.

Panel 2: “Border” as Identity (Identity Conflicts in the Upper Adriatic Region)

This panel explored how identities in the Upper Adriatic region have been negotiated and constructed, and how new borders have emerged through identity constructions.

Laura Lee Downs (European University Institute): The association Assistenza all’Italia Redenta and the social management of teachers’ labor in Italy’s northeastern borderlands, 1919-1940

From the early 1920s until 1944, the Association Assistenza all’Italia Redenta (hereafter Italia Redenta) organized and managed what would become the largest network of privately-run preschools in Italy’s northeastern borderland with Yugoslavia, the Julian March. These schools were an important source of basic health and welfare provision to thousands of needy children during the interwar years. Those who delivered these social benefits were none other than the preschool teachers themselves, whose lessons were interwoven with a series of welfare services that each of them provided daily. These included a hot lunch, which the teacher herself prepared from dried ingredients provided by the association, the cod-liver oil cure that she dispensed to those children deemed “pre-tubercular” (a full 40% of the schools’ population by 1930) and the bread that she distributed to the very poorest children each day to take home to their families.

My lecture explores the multipronged socio-educative and political action that Italia Redenta asked its teaching staff to undertake, from instructing the region’s youngest children to assuring their basic health and welfare needs to serving as the nation’s ‘avant-garde’ of pro-Italian propaganda in this multilingual and multiethnic borderland. But it does so in service of larger aim: that of understanding the association’s evolving strategies for socially managing its ever-expanding teaching staff across the interwar period.

It may seem surprising to study a philanthropic association through the lens of its labor and social management policies. But historians and sociologists of philanthropy have shown in some detail how approaches to labor management, including those of social management (which blends coercive managerial strategies with some social benefits), have long circulated across the worlds of state, business/industry and associations; they have shaped and reshaped all three worlds through a circuit of exchanges.[1]

In the case of Italia Redenta, it is the ties between state and associational actors that are most strikingly evident, but it is worth recalling that many techniques of governance, from accounting to personnel management, were inspired by managerial techniques that were first developed in offices and on the factory floor. Moreover, the circulation has run in both directions, with institutions, techniques, ideas and projects devised by associations being taken up by industrial or state actors.[2]

The question of socially managing preschool teachers’ labor in a highly contested border region offers a hitherto unexplored context for thinking about how strategies of social management, which have hitherto been studied in national, and, occasionally, global or transnational contexts, might become party to larger political struggles for national dominance in multicultural and multiethnic borderlands. As we shall see, the case of Italia Redenta is particularly instructive in this regard.

References:

Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, Sandrine Nicourt (eds.), Les ressorts des modes de gestion des associations, Entreprises & histoire, 2009/3.
For examples of associational innovations influencing both state and industrial practices see Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender division in the French and British metalworking industries, 1914-1939, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1995.

Daša Ličen (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts): Animal Welfare and Social Boundaries in late Habsburg Trieste

As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, and far more so in the second, members of the aristocracy and bourgeois elite began to develop new ethical concerns regarding animal welfare. The new empathy towards animals took organizational form in voluntary associations that attracted aristocratic and bourgeois men and women in urban settings. In 1852, one of the first such associations were born in the busy port city of Trieste (in Slovenian: Trst).

In my presentation, I will examine the previously unexplored segment of Trieste’s past, the Animal Protection Association (Società Zoofila), as one of the earliest and most influential voluntary associations against animal torture in the Habsburg Empire.

The members, drawn from the upper social strata—especially the bourgeoisie in Trieste—spent much of their time condemning the customs and practices of the working class and rural communities. They repeatedly accused them of “immorality” and even “inhumanity”. Yet, the nineteenth century guardians of the “animal kingdom” were not as compassionate as they may appear at first glance. In reality, animals had often been protected before the abolition of slavery and the implementation of the first measures safeguarding children from the worst forms of exploitation in factories. Advocates for animal rights, firmly convinced they were doing good, encouraged the working class and rural population towards compassion for animals from the comfort of their villas while listening to their canaries and caressing their well-groomed dogs. The members believed it was their moral duty to influence the practices of the lower classes, not least through shame and punishment.

In my case study, the treatment of animals is seen as a tool in the bourgeoisie’s broader effort to establish its lifestyle as the societal norm. The way the expanding bourgeois class cared for their animal companions became a means of reinforcing one of the nineteenth century’s most significant developments: the creation of a social boundary between the bourgeoisie and the working and rural populations.

Francesco Toncich (University of Ljubljana): Making New Borders, Legal Belonging and Mobility through Public Health in the post-Habsburg Alps-Adria Macro-Region: A Transnational Perspective (1918-1924)

In November 1918, the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the drawing of borders between the new successor states fragmented one of Europe’s largest political and administrative spaces, including its health system. This shift created a paradox: although the successor states adopted national citizenship policies based on internal homogeneity, large segments of the population within the new borders did not belong to any of the new nationalities and had no entitlement to the new citizenships.

Medical practice within public general hospitals and psychiatric institutions became a key instrument for reshaping the legal affiliations and mobility of patients now considered “foreigners” through forced naturalisation or expulsion. Such cases were especially pertinent following border demarcation in Central European regions, which had, for centuries, been characterised by multicultural, multilingual societies with significant internal and international mobility.

My case study compares two new post-Habsburg borderlands: the area between the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (SHS) and the Kingdom of Italy, and the area between the SHS state and the First Austrian Republic. It presents two distinct situations: firstly, the occupation of the former Austrian Littoral by Italy, where a substantial non-Italian (Slovene- and Croatian-speaking) population resided; and secondly, the division of the Styria region, which led to the separation of a previously unified, bilingual (German- and Slovene-speaking) area.

Beyond the classic perspective of “biopolitics,” which centres on the activities of states and authorities, my case study also examines interactions with local populations, as well as the agency of “patients” who, in various ways, struggled to autonomously manage diseases within the new borderlands. These patients were able, at times, to resist top-down state practices and even to exploit the new circumstances to their advantage.

Gabriele Mastrolillo (University of Trieste): The debate over the Upper Adriatic Border between the Italian and Yugoslav Communist Parties during the Partisan War

TBA.

Panel 3: “Border” as Crisis (Exclusionary Discourses and Networks of Populism)

This panel examined populist discourses and “border”-drawing against the “others” / “foreigners.” This involved concrete case studies from Italy, Serbia, and Hungary.

Roberta Altin (University of Trieste): Migrations in the Trieste Borderland: ‘Border’ to order or to otherness?

Based on a synthesis of 70 years of migration in the border area of Trieste, this paper highlights the importance of adopting an approach that takes greater account of the temporal dimension and the layering of different migratory processes. To avoid the pitfalls of populism and media sensationalism surrounding migration, the ‘reflexive turn’ in migration studies emphasises the need—particularly from marginal areas such as borders—to consider migration in local contexts as a “total social fact”.[1] This perspective encompasses transnational connections and interactions with earlier layers of migration, embedded in local contexts through a holistic approach.

The construction of the border as a material, political, and symbolic space reveals national and European policies, translating them into practices of inclusion or exclusion of migrants.[2] By rejecting rigid dichotomies, the migratory stratification approach compels social scientists studying migration and social change to focus [deon ‘what remains’ and the process of stratification, rather than solely on ‘what is disappearing’ or ‘making way for something else.’ This approach demands observing migration as a dynamic process of continuity and discontinuity, resisting the fragmentation of facts and events from the socio-historical structures in which they are formed and stratified.

Reflecting on his experiences of crossing borders as an irregular migrant, Shahram Khosravi (2010) observes that those who do not conform to the ‘natural’ order of the nation-state[3] become stateless—people without a place or function. Such stateless individuals are reduced to “human waste” and rendered disposable.[4] Indeed, it is people, not objects, who currently are abandoned at the border.

While Europe obsessively searches for roots and constructs archaeologies of the distant past to forge a collective identity,[5] migrants in transit are treated as ‘foreign’ bodies that challenge and destabilise the national order, particularly in border regions. In both life and death, their passage often leaves no trace. The invisibility of refugees as members of no ‘cultural’ group defines them as ‘transient’,[6] rendering them potentially threatening.[7]

References

Sayad, A. 1999. La double absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré. Seuil, Paris.
Demetriou O., Dimova R. (eds.), 2019 The Political Materialities of Borders. New Theoretical Directions, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Malkki L.H., 1995 «Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things», in Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 495–546.
Khosravi S., 2010. “Illegal” traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders, Palgrave McMillan. Basingstoke-New York.
Macdonald S., 2013 Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, Routledge, Oxon-New York.
Turner V., 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Douglas M., 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Melanie Jaindl (Independent Researcher): Visual Securitization of Borders and Others: An Intersectional Approach to the Fence in Subotica / Röszke

Borders, as well as identities and news stories can be regarded as social constructs dependent on cultural, social, and political contexts. Especially, in migrant discourses we often find media narratives stipulating an “us” as opposed to “them”. However, an individual is never only a man or a woman, black or white, old or young, rich or poor, straight or gay – they are an identity at the intersection of all these attributes which positions them at a particular hierarchy dependent on social class, sex, gender, race, age and more.

My case study examines identities and media narratives around the border fence in Subotica / Röszke (between Serbia and Hungary) – the very first erected during “the long summer of migration” in 2015 – with a specific focus on the visuals distributed in Serbian and Hungarian online news media.

It is backed up by visual securitization theory, especially Lene Hansen’s concept of intertextuality, which treats security issues (like identities, photos, and media narratives) as social constructs. It will show how the framing of refugees and other migrants as either a security threat or as victims was clearly dependent on the surrounding discourses in respective countries on the one hand, and on the visual representation of intersectional identities and their surroundings on the other. It furthermore underpins how the erection of a border fence between an EU Member State and a candidate country constructed the dichotomies of “us” and “them” not only between so-called “Arab others” and Europeans, but within Europe itself and takes the migration experiences of people from the Western Balkans towards the EU and Central European states into account, especially those during and since the Yugoslav dissolution wars.

While the focus of the initial research lies solely on the events in 2015, this case study aims to include new contexts and experiences stemming from the recent migratory developments in Europe, i.e. the war in Ukraine and intersectional identities of Ukrainian refugees as opposed to refugees and other migrants simultaneously traveling on the Balkan Route. This should help to exemplify the importance of intersectional identities in Europe’s securitization of migration and hence the treatment of respective refugees and migrants.

Elisabeth Donat (University of Continuing Education Krems): Cross-border cooperation as key resource during crisis and beyond: Focus groups with regional MPs in four European countries

Dealing with borders is a key skill for citizens and politicians in contemporary Europe and beyond. In an increasingly connected world, be it in virtual or real space, borders are subject to constant negotiation and, despite all interdependencies, do not lose their significance entirely. Those who can move flexibly within this network and have recognized the need to get involved in cross-border networks in good time clearly have an advantage. This contribution examines how regional MPs perceive their region in EUs multilevel system and which role borders play in this respect. By taking a consequent relational perspective, this presentation analyses the striving of regional actors for recognition in the EU and investigates antecedents and processes of Europeanization in terms of transnational cooperation. The empirical material consists of transcripts of focus groups with regional politicians in Bavaria, Andalusia, Lower Austria and representatives from the German speaking community in East Belgium, conducted between spring 2019 to spring 2020. We developed a new technique, called “elicitated mapping”,[1] to discuss the issue of borders and place-making of regions with regional MPs. The results indicate a spectrum of approaches dealing with borders, from borders as “sacroscant” fact to borders as facilitators to connect actors that engage in Europeanization and therefore participate actively in a process that has been termed as “inevitable development”.[2]

References

Donat, E., Lenhart, S. (2023): Elicitated Mapping als Methode zur Ermittlung von Raumbildern regionaler Abgeordneter, ZQF – Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung, 2-2023, S. 253-273.
Worschech, S., Eigmüller, M., & Büttner, S. M. (2022). 1 Sociology of Europeanization: An Introduction. In S. M. Büttner, M. Eigmüller, & S. Worschech (Eds.), Sociology of Europeanization (pp. 1–26). De Gruyter.

Mattia Zulianello (University of Trieste): Understanding Populism: Between Myths and Reality

Populism is one of the key words of our time, but the phenomenon is often viewed in a stereotypical way. In MY talk, I address six main myths about populism, based on my book Capire il populismo, edited together with Petra Guasti.[1] These myths evoke the elusive nature of the concept of populism, the idea that it is inherently linked to specific political positions, its dependence on a leader figure, its emergence only in contexts of objective crises, the existence of a single type of populist voter, and its being alien to mainstream politics.

Myth 1: The Elusiveness of the Concept of Populism

The first myth is that populism is an elusive concept, too vague to be clearly defined. However, populism can be described as a system of ideas that contrasts the “pure people” with the “corrupt elite.” Despite regional and historical variations, populism has common characteristics that allow for its clear identification.

Myth 2: Populism Is Linked to Specific Political Positions

Another widespread myth is that populism is necessarily tied to specific political positions, such as the far right or the far left. In reality, populism can manifest itself anywhere on the political spectrum. This is possible due to its ability to merge with other ideological elements to construct political meanings.

Myth 3: The Dependence on a Leader Figure

It is often believed that populism necessarily depends on the presence of a charismatic leader. While leaders are often central figures in populist movements, they are not an indispensable condition. Populism can exist and thrive even through collective movements or parties without a dominant leadership.

Myth 4: Populism Emerges Only in Contexts of Objective Crises

Many believe that populism arises only in contexts of “objective” crises. While these may facilitate its rise, they are not a necessary condition. In fact, a key role is played by the perception of a sense of crisis, particularly related to the political sphere.

Myth 5: The Existence of a Single Type of Populist Voter

Another myth is that there is only one type of populist voter, often described as less educated and from lower socioeconomic classes. In reality, populist voters are much more heterogeneous, and there is no single, stereotypical populist voter.

Myth 6: Populism Is Alien to Mainstream Politics

Finally, it is often believed that populism is alien to mainstream politics and unable to survive the responsibilities of governance. However, many populist parties have now become an integral part of their countries’ political landscapes, influencing public policies and political discourse.

References

Mattia Zulianello / Petra Guasti (eds.), Capire il populismo, Segrate, UTET, 2024.