Populism and Postcolonialism

Adrián Scribano, Maximiliano E. Korstanje, Freddy Timmermann López, Freddy Alex Timmermann López

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032087641
• eBook ISBN: 9780429602191
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book investigates the interconnections between populism and neoliberalism through the lens of postcolonialism. Its primary focus is to build a distinct understanding of the concept of populism as a political movement in the twenty-first century, interwoven with the lasting effects of colonialism.

This volume particularly aims to fill the gap in the current literature by establishing a clear-cut connection between populism and postcolonialism. It sees populism as a contemporary and collective political response to the international crisis of the nation-state's limited capacity to deal with the burst of global capitalism into everyday life. Writings on Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Italy, France and Argentina offer regional perspectives which, in turn, provide the reader with a deepened global view of the main features of the multiple and complex relations between postcoloniality and populism.

This book will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists as well as postgraduate students who are interested in the problem of populism in the days of postcolonialism.

1 Populism, religion and the many faces of colonialism

Ongoing struggles for “the people”

Joanildo Burity

A struggle for “the people” is under way across Latin America, and religion is very much part of it, whether through emerging actors or the underlying logics of the dispute. For nearly three decades a vigorous, but non-linear, process of pluralisation has made way for emerging minority social actors. Among the latter, evangélicos have featured permanently and controversially. Having grown significantly (though at different rates in the region), this religious minority rose to public visibility bent on redrawing cultural and political boundaries and facing head-on their identified adversaries. One way of understanding this phenomenon is to look at it as a double self-inscription: onto the national identity/culture (as opposed to being seen as an alien religion) and onto the public arena of debate, leadership and government.

Such a process has been predictably shot through with controversy and contestation but has fairly clearly succeeded. Evangélicos – and particularly, among them, as a majority within a minority, Pentecostals – are now both recognised and reckoned with. Emerging at the juncture of a general expansion of claims to representation and participation, following the return to civilian rule and democratisation of Latin American societies, they are in the game of constructing “the people”. This raises questions about the recent politicisation of religion in Latin America in connection with what Laclau called “the populist reason”. How to understand evangelical/Pentecostal discourse and public engagements? To what extent do this clearly popular form of religion and its ordinary mouthpieces and activists express an undoing of subalternity? How can one understand the clear divide between them and already-known activist forms of religious practice and the disputes between the two camps? What sort of politicisation is this, in the face of recent developments in which evangelicals/Pentecostals seem to represent the hard core of an extreme right politics in Brazil and not unrelated positions in other Latin American countries?

In what follows, I will explore these issues as demonstrated in three related cases: the emergence of Pentecostalism as popular and public religion; ecumenical transnational networks of socio-political activism; and the travails of democratisation in the context of a new religion/capitalism assemblage in the South akin to what William Connolly called the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” (Connolly, 2008). Given the salience of recent epistemic debates on the situatedness and critical edge of knowledge, which search for an authoritative voice from the Latin American context, I will begin with some theoretical notes on the debate on postcoloniality in relation to social and political activism of minorities and religion. I will then explore the two forms of self-inscription mentioned above and move on to examine their connections to the clear configuration of a fierce religious right-wing discourse at odds with older forms of Protestant public engagement in the region that could be called ecumenical.

Subalternity, decolonisation, populism and the recent rise of minority religion in Brazil

The contemporary debate on subalternity and decolonisation in Latin America has nothing to do with the mere assertion of the legitimacy of a “deficient” path in relation to a metanarrative of North Atlantic historical development – liberal, capitalist and Eurocentric, some sort of postcolonial pride. Rather, it is about a double movement: (a) the refusal of the parameters of analysis and evaluation that articulate this metanarrative; and (b) the identification of the same processes previously qualified as “deficient” in the societies that would be loci of this metanarrative.

Thus, on the one hand, the subalternising narrative is subtracted, returning it as criticism and diagnosis of the societies that produced it. An agency is asserted that “levels” the field by articulating a voice and assigning its supposedly deficient features to the majority order. The (re)emergence of populism, notably right-wing in the last fifteen years in Europe and, in recent years, in the United States, reveals a symptom of this North Atlantic “deficiency”. There are others, such as the self-assertion of ethnic and religious minorities in the heart of these societies, who are increasingly impossible to identify as merely “external” to them (migrants, terrorists, missionaries), whether for their settlement (diasporas comprising several generations, national or religious identities that have long been present and now reactivated or transfigured), or for their wish to remain and to claim legal, political and cultural hospitality.

The critical edge of the decolonisation argument today lies in the understanding of the local, cross-border and global dynamics historically experienced by peripheral, postcolonial societies as a plot that spreads and traverses so-called central societies. As in the colonial past itself, this occurs despite widespread epistemic triumphalism and cultural and political arrogance in the metropolises and their academies. The experience of prolonged crises, never resolved by incomplete transitions, or of disaggregative ruptures, bellicose and/or technocratic political authoritarianisms, so often associated with the postcolonial world, became an inseparable part of the old colonising societies. The puncturing of its physical and symbolic boundaries by instability; multitemporal practices and ways of life; identity heterogeneity; the need for engagement in difficult and uncertain negotiations to (re)conquer basic rights or prevent them from being subtracted; difficulty in resisting processes that “come from without” and impose themselves in a naturalised way; and reversibility of achievements and stabilisations are all marks of our time. They thus allow for the “return” of the colonial gaze onto the colonisers themselves. But they also constitute conditions and procedures by means of which a subordinate voice is affirmed in search of autonomy, justice and recognition. Places and agencies traditionally seen as adversaries or indexes of an outdated past are once again activated, supporting the articulation of that voice, or rather, a plurality of voices.

It is not possible to reproduce here the details of this operation, which is at once epistemic and sociopolitical. I want to focus on two aspects in this work: the discourse on the “deficient” nature of postcolonial politics – exemplified in the signifier “populism” – and the construction of the imagination and social bond – exemplified in the signifier “religion”. In the following paragraphs of this section, I will try to articulate the decolonising gesture concerning these two signifiers, which, given the simultaneity of the critical, epistemic and sociopolitical operations, must be seen not only as concepts but also as signifiers rhetorically managed by different social actors. If this section will focus more on the conceptual articulation of the two terms, the following will explore its interface with the performative and symbolic articulation.

Let us begin with a succinct presentation of the question of populism. The academic doxa is blatantly critical of what the term describes: populism is a heteroclite set of political practices of mobilisation and manipulation of the masses or a multiple and contradictory ideology, in which the defence of the people is often mounted by those who are not even part of it, as regards existing social hierarchies. Populism is demagoguery, mobilisation of passions, disrespect for institutions, and legal and representational procedures built in the wake of liberalism and socialism. Populism would be indicative of backward stages of political development, pre- or undemocratic. In the last decades, populism has also become a term of accusation against counter-cyclical economic policies, redistributive social policies, cultural policies of recognition, and policies of expansion and stimulation of social participation. It slowly grew into the big enemy of neoliberal and institutionalist discourses.

The discourse on populism, anyhow, clearly expresses an academic (and liberal political opponents’) uneasiness about the affirmation or defence of “the people” articulated by those who claim to be populist or are accused of being so. It is thus inseparable, in its intellectual as well as political enunciations, from the determination of this contested entity, the people. Contrary to this interpretation, the work of Ernesto Laclau and a number of others referenced in it or in (critical) dialogue with it (Laclau, 2005; Barros, 2009; Arditi, 2014; Laclau, 2014; Biglieri, 2017; De Cleen et al., 2018; Finchelstein and Urbinati, 2018), insists on a formal approach to populism: instead of distilling a common meaning or conceptual core present in all/most cases identified as populist, or focusing on it as a movement, analysis should focus on the formal traits of the phenomenon. Populism is a “political logic” (Laclau, 2005, p. 150).

The language used by Laclau can raise questions. First, given the oscillation between “a people” and “the people”. Second, because of the use of people between scare quotes. This could be seen as an ambivalence to be corrected. But as it happens, the second aspect denotes only the maximum degree of extension of the chain of equivalences that has already begun in the articulation of something less than a universal representation of the reconciled or emancipated community, or of a project of radical transformation of society. The distinction can actually be productive and highlight distinct instances of application. Let me start by quoting some of Laclau’s formulations:

[a] when relations of equivalence between a plurality of demands go beyond a certain point, we have broad mobilisations against the institutional order as a whole. We have here the emergence of the ‘people’ as a more universal historical actor, whose aims will necessarily crystallise around empty signifiers as objects of political identification. There is a radicalisation of claims which can lead to a revolutionary reshaping of the entire institutional order.

(Laclau, 2014, p. 151)

[b] The sans papiers want to have papiers, and if the latter are conceded by the state, they could become one more difference within an expanded state. In order to become ‘universal’, something else is needed – namely, that their situation as ‘outsiders’ becomes a symbol to other outsiders or marginals within society; in other words, that a contingent aggregation of heterogeneous elements takes place. This aggregation is what I have called a ‘people’.

(Ibid., p. 159)

[c] My argument is that the construction of the ‘people’ as a collective actor entails extending the notion of ‘populism’ to many movements and phenomena that traditionally were not considered so. And, from this viewpoint, there is no doubt that the American civil rights movement extended equivalential logics in a variety of new directions and made possible the incorporation of previously excluded underdogs into the public sphere.

(Ibid., pp. 173–174)

The distinction between “the people” and “a people”, in quotes a and b above, the use of the signifier “people” in quotation marks and the attribution of the concept of populism (here in quotation marks, in unusual fashion in Laclau’s work) warrant two conclusions that will be consequential in my subsequent discussion of the question of religion: (a) if “the people” is the name of a politically constructed collective actor, this actor should not be confused with the mass of citizens of a national state or with its general population, and must be specified, characterised, narrated contextually; (b) “a people” describes an equally politically constructed collective actor, but one that has not asserted itself or become the locus and the name of a general refusal of the institutional order, presenting itself as aspiring to this function, but still situated on a terrain where other actors may be more successful in this intent. More than that, “the people”, Laclau argues in Populist Reason, strictly speaking, is not a referent of a group, but a way of building the unity of the group. It is not an ideological expression, but a form of relationship between social agents (Laclau, 2005, p. 97). How, then, does this construction take place?

Laclau does not start with a substantive definition of the people, but proposes that, as we are faced with a relational process, the construction of the people, of a people, be analysed from the articulation of demands, or rather from the passage of requests to claims, due to non-attendance or dissatisfaction with the form or the extent of fulfilment of these demands by the institutional order. The fulfilment of demands includes them as differences internal to the system, thus “pacifying” them. Rejection or partial compliance with them may lead, depending on the rhythm, delay or virulence with which the demands are answered, to the perception that there are other demands equally unsatisfied, partially met in an unjustified or unacceptable way, or plainly dismissed, and that they are equivalent through their common opposition to the established order. It is the crystallisation of these equivalences and their opposition to a common enemy that Laclau identifies as the elementary process of populism’s formation.

We will see in the last section that the rising tide of recent right-wing populisms in Europe, the United States and Brazil indicate a variant of this formal description, which refers to the manifestation of reactive responses to experiences of identity displacement of traditional actors or failure of the hegemonic order. But here, it is worth outlining the basic contours of the Laclauian discursive approach. It is the equivalential articulation of unmet needs, constituting “a broader social subjectivity” (Laclau, 2005, p. 99), which defines the beginning of the constitution of a people “as a potential historical actor” (ibid.). But only the beginning. This is not yet a sufficient characterisation. For the articulation is not automatic or independent of an agency and the emergence of a “stable system of signification” (ibid.). A project that points to and seeks to institute a new hegemony: a “popular identity” (ibid., p. 102).

Distinct from an institutionalist articulation, which “attempts to make the limits of discursive formation coincide with the limits of the community” (ibid., p. 107), as differences within the system, populist articulation draws a boundary dividing society into two camps. “The ‘people’ in this case is something less than the totality of the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality” (ibid., pp. 107–108). In populism, a party that sees itself as underprivileged, a plebs, intends to be/represent all the members of the community, the populus, in the terminology inherited from Roman law: a part for the whole (ibid., p. 108).

I have argued, in previous works (Burity, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2017), that in the context of a broad activation of political subjectivities alongside the democratising processes across Latin America, since the 1980s, there has been a growing politicisation of religion. This has brought to light new public actors, the most successful being the evangélicos (largely comprising Pentecostals, but also naming historical Protestants). Brazil has been the most significant case in the region, but the examples are everywhere (Freston, 2008; Barrera Rivera and Pérez, 2013; López Rodriguez, 2014; Wynarczyk et al., 2016; Pérez Guadalupe, 2017). Given the invisibility of Pentecostalism as a public phenomenon, and the internal competition with traditional Protestantism, the activation of a politicised Pentecostal identity and what came after involved a process of self-assertion that was from the beginning both relational and contested. It was a response to the possibilities opened by the final stages of the struggle for democracy as of the late 1970s, but also the expression of their own fear of a left-wing advance that might restrict religious freedom and of mistrust from politicians and radical social activists who would only see in them conservatism, subservience and a likely threat of “confessionalisation of politics”.

In carving a space for themselves in the midst of myriad m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Populism and postcoloniality: Geopolitical experiences
• 1. Populism, religion and the many faces of colonialism: Ongoing struggles for “the people”
• 2. Parody, satire and the rise of populism under postcolonial criticism: A French and an Italian case
• 3. Neoliberalism and populism in Argentina: Kirchnerism and Macrism as the two sides of the same coin
• 4. Vox of whom? An assessment of Vox through discourse analysis and study of the profile of its social base
• 5. From Jorge Eliécer Gaitán to Alvaro Uribe: A brief exploration of populism in Colombia
• 6. The social question in the twenty-first century: A critique of the coloniality of social policies
• 7. Losing the battle to take back control? Clashing conceptions of democracy in the debate about Brexit
• 8. Populism and neoliberalism in Chile
• 9. The game of disillusion: Social movements and populism in Italy
• 10. Intercultural critical reflections on postcolonialist-decolonialist and populist theories from Latin America and Ecuador
• 11. Populism: The highest stage of neoliberalism of the twenty-first century?
• Index