We are the People!

[Nentsia]

Populism, Nationalism, and Fascism


I'm going to bore you with more words on the Populist phenomenon that I'm mostly trying to understand myself, and writing these things helps myself with that. One question that continues to bother me is the relationship between Populism, Nationalism, and Fascism. We often hear people compare Populists to Hitler or Mussolini (Trump was often a target of analogies with Hitler), the arch-populist Juan Peron is often labelled as a specific kind of ''Latin American Fascism'', and many populists seem to display nationalist tendencies: Peron drew on nationalism, the Venezuelan Accion Democratica, the Peruvian Apristas, the Bolivian MNR - all examples of leftist nationalist Populist movements in Latin America in the 1950's and 60's. Even left wing Socialist populists like Hugo Chavez drew on Venezuelan nationalism quite a lot: he named his ''revolution'' after the founding father of Venezuela, he always waved with a mini version of the Venezuelan constitution, and the most important symbol of his movement were the Venezuelan colors.

In Europe, early 19th century populists like the French Boulangistes in France, to the Front National today drew on nationalism. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands claims to protect Dutch culture and national identity from being destroyed by ''Islamism'', and in similar fashion populists in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Britain, and Turkey all either draw on regional separatism or nationalism. Are populists, by definition, nationalists? Or is nationalism, by definition, a form of populism?

And does that mean that Fascism, in the forms of Mussolini and Hitler, form a more extreme variant of Populism? By the scholarly definitions of both Fascism and Populism, both phenomena draw upon the principle that a single movement, a single leader even, can instinctively reflect and therefore represent the will of the masses, and is therefore entitled to usurp all power. Both movements tend to strive to what the French philosopher, Claude Lefort, called ''totalitarian unity'', where ''the people'' is represented through one movement, one ideology, and one leader. All forms of division or plurality are viewed with suspicion, or become outright intolerable. Contrary to the Fascists however, few Populists have gone around beating up political enemies or exterminate an entire people. So there are differences, and they are quite fundamental.

One of the reasons, I think, that populism and nationalism so often overlap, is because of our understanding of the concept ''popular sovereignty'' that emerged in the late 18th century enlightenment. This concept lies at the core both of nationalism and populism, which could not have existed if the concept Popular Sovereignty had not been invented. The concept basically holds that within a given state, ultimate power should lie with the people living within that state. Ideally, the people, or most of them, within that state belong to the same ''nation'', because this ethnic or cultural affinity will help cement the individual members to each other and breed a sense of mutual solidarity and belonging. The ideal state then, is a ''nation-state'', rooted in the nation, the people, who are sovereign. The state reflects the interests of the nation. In the ideal world then (by which these philosophers meant Western Europe), all nations are given statehood and live according to their own laws and wishes in a brotherly harmony with other free nation-states. Smaller nations, however, were not yet considered worthy of their own statehood: they were too ''immature'' to run their own affairs and were better off as some autonomous minority in a larger state.

This is where populism and nationalism, and even socialism in some cases, overlap: they want to represent the interests of ''the people'' and after 200 years ''the people'' has become synonymous with ''the nation''. Even when populists like Peron or Trump specifically talk of the ''working class'', they do so with the underlying idea that this specific group forms the national ''heartland'' or the ''core'' of ''the people'', just like 19th century nationalists became particularly obsessed with the lifestyles and interests of the peasantry, which because of its simplicity and poverty, seemed to represent the nation in its purest and most uncorrupted form. In similar fashion then, both populists and nationalists (and sometimes also socialists), are particularly concerned with ''restoring'' purity; cleansing the country of alien influences that have ''corrupted'' national values and morality. Especially regarding the political system, nationalists and populists view it as corrupted and wish to restore it to its former glory by delivering it (through their movement) directly into the hands of ''the people'' again.

But I believe there are differences. For populists, issues like national identity, culture, and immigration, may be a tool to quickly mobilize voters when these issues are particularly important while the political establishment does not dare to properly address them. Nevertheless, Populists will one way or another, always be inclined towards some form of nationalism because they believe that it is the Nation they represent, and they believe that it is the Nation that is under siege from both internal and external threats: foreign powers (American Imperialists/Russia/The West/the EU), a cosmopolitan (de-nationalized) elite (Wall Street/the London City/the international Jewry/Globalization), and the internal enemies that undermine the Nation from below (immigrants, unemployed (profiteers), criminals, internationalists (socialists, liberals, communists).

A nationalist movement is in its turn often inclined towards populism, believing in the moral unity and purity of ''the people'', and claiming to defend its interests against both internal traitors and foreign threats. The difference lies in the ideological department, I think. A purely populist movement is usually ideologically eclectic, for ideology is not its main concern. Its main concern is usually some political issue that the establishment does not address. Populists ~always~ seek to change the political course of the country, and the established parties have become so entrenched in the existing political climate that they do not offer this change as an option in the elections. Populist movements are therefore mobilized around this goal of changing a prevailing political climate, and the content of their ideas is more fluid and reactive. Opponents would call this ''incoherent'', while the populists themselves would argue they simply reflect ''common sense'' or ''what everyone wants, but only they offer''.

Nationalism, until the late 19th century, was primarily the domain of a handful of European intellectuals. The movement began in the early 19th century as a progressive, liberal, and revolutionary movement, advocating the radical message of national self-determination and popular sovereignty. This kind of nationalism reached its peak with the Italian unification wars, the Risorgimento. A different philosophical current within nationalism, invented by German philosophers, represented a more popular oriented and less politically oriented form of nationalism, known as ''Völkisch'' nationalism. Where the liberal nationalists saw the Nation primarily as a political entity, worthy of a set of natural rights, the Völkisch treated the nation as a natural given, a community organically shaped through its common history, experiences, geography and climate, and therefore rooted in tradition and posessing a mystical sense of community and shared instincts. This branch of nationalism in particular cherished the peasantry as the core of the Nation, unaffected by foreign influences, uncorrupted by material wealth, and culturally and morally pure. This Völkisch nationalism, originally Populist in its view of the Nation as a morally superior and unified entity, turned into conservative nationalism by the 1900's, stressing the state (monarchy) and the nation as expressions of history and cultural tradition, and opposing democracy, socialism, Jews and industrialization as threats to national unity and cultural identity. The Nation and state came to stand for the natural or even divine order, and therefore permanence. Ironically enough it was France, not Germany, where this conservative, ethnic nationalism became the most powerful in the 19th century. The Franco-German War and the French political crises of the 1870's and 1880's led to an obsession among right-wing intellectuals and aristocrats with the supposed decline of France, and they stressed the need to take measures against the further national degeneration of France.

In almost all countries, Völkisch nationalism evolved into a justification for war and empire-building. The Völkisch belief in the moral superiority of their Nation, was supplemented by ideas that God had created the Nation and that it therefore had a special divine mission or role in this world to fulfill, such as liberating other peoples and spreading civilization across the globe. Particularly in Poland this was a dominant trend, as Polish nationalists quite literally came to believe that Poland was the ''Christ among Nations''. World Wars, genocides, and De-colonization have contributed to the decline of such overly Messianic nationalisms, but ethnic Nationalism seems resurgent since the end of the Cold War, with the Yugoslav Wars being the most catastrophic outcome of it. Ethnic nationalist movements, such as Front National in France, and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, have adopted populist strategies, but always keeping their nationalist program in mind. Front National has been in existence since 1972, and was unique at the time of combining a program that embraced representative democracy with a nationalist agenda of defending French culture against alien influences and representing the interests of the ethnic French people. It remained a marginal party for a decade, until immigration started to become a political issue in the 1980's. Front National was one of the few, or only, political party that both opposed immigration and at the same time distanced itself from anti-democratic Right-wing extremism. Since then, Front National has focussed almost entirely on the topic of immigration, because that is the issue that can mobilize votes. But beyond trying to change France's immigration policy, the Front National has a much broader and defined political ideology and program which makes it a decisively nationalist party. Purely populist movements lack this broader ideology, and if they have one at all, its eclectic and hard to define. Historians are still battling with eachother whether Peronism for example, was more Leftist, Centrist, or Rightist, and in similar fashion people argue whether the Dutch PVV, or Donald Trump in America is Right wing or Left wing. Nationalists are much less difficult to place in the political spectrum, populists will always spark controversy - which is precisely their goal, because they wish to rise above such labels in order to appeal to the entire electorate and cut through established lines of division.

In typical fashion then, Populists manage to attract both leftist and rightist voters. In my own country for example, the populist PVV draws its potential pool of voters from the two extremes of our political spectrum: the liberal-conservative VVD, and the formerly Maoist Socialist Party. In America Donald Trump, although decisively more popular among Republicans, appealed to many people who in the past were Democrats. Donald Trump himself was a former Democratic supporter, and the Republican establishment didn't even recognize him as a Republican. In a similar fashion Juan Peron confused everyone in Argentina. In some cases, populists like Silvio Berlusconi do deliberately side with some political camp, such as ''the Right'' or ''the Left'', but in order to position themselves in opposition to what has been identified as the political color of the establishment. This doesn't mean their policy proposals correspond to it.

Fascism


The relationship between Populism and Fascism is different from that with nationalism. Nationalism has some ideological overlappings with populism, but populism is not hindered by doctrines or ideology, other than that it seeks to reclaim power for the people from a set of internal enemies that have usurped power and wealth at the expense of the true people. Nationalism is ideologically more static, may have populist leanings, and might become politically dominant using a populist strategy. Fascism and populism, are in my view both expressions of the same problem: a democracy in crisis. Both Fascists and populists are reactions to a sense of political failure, and a desire to restore the nation. And they share the same belief that this process of regeneration can be carried out by a natural leader, who ''understands'' what needs to be done. Thats where the similarity basically ends. Fascism is of an entirely different magnitude, and it is essentially a revolt to democracy itself, whereas populists often claim to restore democracy, rather than overthrow it. More importantly, for the Fascists the restoration of global power or lost territories/empires forms the most important goal, whereas most populists couldn't care less about that. Their focus lies on domestic issues.

Fascists have however adopted populist strategies to come to power, such as Hitler. Anti-semitism was not as important in the Nazi election campaigns in the 1920's and 30's as sometimes is believed. The main issue in the Nazi election campaigns was their anger at the corrupt German elite, the treasonous incapacity of the German political elite, and the foreign domination as embodied in the Versailles Treaty. Anti-semitism, if it was touched upon, featured with anti-capitalist sentiments, accusing Jewish bankers and the international Jewish finance elite of robbing and stealing from the German people. Later on, the Jews came to represent the Communist threat, another internationalist enemy that threatened to enslave the German people. The Nazi Party was deliberately elusive: it was named National Socialist to suggest a social program to appeal to workers, yet the ''National'' conveyed the message that it was non-Communist and therefore posed no threat to the German middle class. It adopted a bright red flag, with a symbol that had no particular meaning at all - not in Europe. Its program contained 25 simple points, not particularly different from other nationalist parties in Germany. The party posed as a ''workers' party'', and opposed capitalism, and at the same time praised the middle class, the shopkeepers, and the German farm owners, presenting their party as virulently anti-socialist, anti-communist, and an enemy of the big industry that competed with the small shopkeepers. This was a deliberate strategy of Hitler, who once stated that political ideas only interested him if they were capable of inspiring the masses. Mussolini took a similar stance, and once famously proclaimed that his ''program'' consisted of ''bashing the heads of the Marxists''.

For the Fascists, ideas and political programs were all subordinate to the goal of conquering power. They were obsessed with a Darwinian-inspired fear that their nation was degenerating, and would be too weak to survive the struggle for survival. Anticipating on the next world war (Mussolini reasoned that since eternal peace had never been attained, its a moral duty to prepare for the next war), the Fascists believed their movement was the only one that truly understood what needed to be done to restore, strengthen and prepare their country for next world war. Power belonged to the strong, the weak would perish. All means were permitted to win the support of the masses in order to come to power. Such perverted and fatalistic world views are absent among purely populist movements. Any comparison between Trump and Hitler, for example, is therefore superficial and will not increase our understanding, rather cloud it with irrational fears. It could even, as shown in my previous post, incite people to assassinate populist leaders.

Slobodan Milosevic


One unique case that contains a mixture of all three elements, populism, nationalism, and fascism, is Slobodan Milosevic. After the sudden death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980, the leader of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation, a power struggle followed. The Serbian communists came to dominate the Federation, to the resentment of the other, richer republics such as Slovenia and Croatia. Slobodan Milosevic stood at the head of the Serbian Communists, and his strategy to become the new Tito of Yugoslavia was to transfer more and more federal power and resources to Serbia, where he was firmly in control. His ambition to create a Serbian-led Yugoslavia aroused separatism in Slovenia and Croatia. Croat nationalism in turn, increased fears among Serb communities related to the memories of WWII, during which Croat Fascists had exterminated Serbians with the help of the Nazis.

Amidst this disintegration of Federal Yugoslav authority, democracies emerged in the constituent republics, where local political elites held elections and liberalized the media to validate their nationalist agenda with popular support. In similar fashion, Slobodan Milosevic and his Socialist Party of Serbia dropped all Communist aims and instead promised to restore the territories, power and wealth of the Serbian people that were once taken from them by the Croats and the Muslims. Before this, Milosevic had never displayed any sense of nationalism. He transformed into one almost overnight out of opportunistic reasons. When in 1991 Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, Milosevic responded by sending the Serbian divisions of the Yugoslav army to prevent it. Several months later, his army invaded Croatia, also a separatist republic. Serbian militias were formed in Croatia to defend the ethnic Serbian communities from Croat aggression. When Bosnia also followed, the Bosnian Serbs in turn separated from Bosnia and declared their wish to unite with ''Greater Serbia''. Milosevic supported the creation of Bosnian-Serb militias and helped them with the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian territories they believed rightfully belonged to the Serbs. Bosnian muslims were deported, starved inside concentration camps, and women were raped in specially designated rape houses. The Serbs eventually started massacring the Muslim men, culminating in the massacre at Srebrenica where some 7,000 Muslim men, living within a UN compound, were deported and murdered under the eyes of UN peacekeeping forces.

Following NATO bombardments in 1995 a peace accord was made, but in 1998 war erupted again as Serbian militias and armies tried to prevent Albanian separatism in Kosovo, through the use of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The NATO intervened again, directly bombing Belgrade in Serbia. Milosevic subsequently lost the elections in his country of 2000 and was arrested and extradited to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2003. He died before ever hearing the verdict. His political opportunism, manipulations, ethnic nationalism, and his appetite for war continues to puzzle scholars. Most scholars however, agree that Milosevic was a genuine narcissist, obsessed with power. Narcissists posess the strange capacity to not just love themselves, but to love their own community as an extension of themselves. In their mind, their own glory and the glory of their community coincide, and they are willing to become careless killers in pursuit of both personal and collective power. For the Serbian people, Milosevic became a natural leader because he, amidst the decline of Yugoslavia, stood for unquestionable loyalty to the Serb people and the promise to advance Serbian interests against both internal and external threats and enemies. Milosevic' populism consisted of the People, which meant the ethnic Serbs, whose interests he claimed to defend against Yugoslavia's internal enemies who were held responsible for its collapse, and against the Western Imperialists who aided the internal enemies. These imperialists were embodied by NATO, the UN, and Western Europe. Milosevic' message basically boiled down to ''We, the Serbs, against the World''.

This typically populist message was supplemented by a large dose of ethnic nationalism, glorifying the Serbian history, stressing the need for cultural, and even racial purity, and particular attention for historical injustices, territorial losses, and warnings for Serbian decline and extinction. The growing Serbian obsession with its decline, and the need for internal cleansing and military conquest to reverse this process, is a key element of Fascism. When war eventually began, it quickly turned into a genocidal one, for the Serb (but also the Croat) forces had become imbued with the idea that Serbian survival depended on the physical and cultural annihilation of the Bosnian muslims.