 I am delighted to welcome Kass Mouda to the IIA and to Ireland and to start together a conversation on the surge of populist fever across Europe and the challenge that this raises for the future of democracy as we know it. This reflection is one which the IIA is going to actively advance over the next few months through a series of speaking events that will commence next week with a presentation by Timothy Gartenash and then there will be a series of speaking events going into the new year. So understanding populism, the roots of it, the dynamics of that phenomenon is important. It is equally important to grasp the complexity and the diverse reality that the term encapsulates and for a start it is important to get our definitions and concepts right. So I have no doubt that Kass Mouda's presentation is going to set us on the right conceptual tracks. Indeed Dr. Kass Mouda is a leading scholar in the field of political extremism. I think that his interest started with Western Europe and then expanded to Eastern Europe and then further afield to America, North and South and even to Israel. Dr. Mouda has published, has authored a number of not worthy books, so general books on populism, on the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe and then also a couple of monographies including one I believe on the left populist party Syriza in Greece which could give us ground for an interesting discussion on the Irish situation and the possible similarities between Syriza and Sinn Fein. So Kass Mouda is currently associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He's also a researcher in the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo. He writes very regularly for newspapers and he is very active on the social media. The core question at the heart of Kass Mouda's work is one which I believe calls on all of us who cherish democratic values and civil liberties. So that question is how can liberal democracies as they defend themselves against the challenges of extremism, how can they avoid undermining their core values and institutions or in other words, how can the liberal ward off the barbarian without self-barbarising. So these are I believe questions that Kass is going to address in his presentation. So before inviting him to speak I would ask you to switch your mobile phones to silent mode please. And nevertheless you are encouraged to tweet and with the handle at IIA which is a hallmark of reasonable and informed debate. Thank you very much and thank you for this invitation. It's nice to be in Ireland, one of the countries I don't know so much about and that's always good to be here because then I learn 20 minutes very short for an academic so it's going to be a very basic presentation which is mainly thought of as an introduction to have a conversation afterwards. As said I think terminology is important and even though it's often seen as something academic and that only academics all the time fight about what things really mean without actually knowing what we talk about we can't really normally talk about it. And so I think the problem that we have at the moment is that while populism is the buzzword of the early 21st century without any doubt increasingly more and more of the debate is actually about nativism rather than about populism. And so let me define these two terms and explain how they are related and how they are different. Now populism was for a very long time a truly contested concept in the sense that not only did people disagree about the exact details of it but they actually completely disagreed about what it was. And so for some it was a movement, for others it was a regime, for others it was a style or an ideology. So it's not just like conservatism where we binary all think about a set of ideas or an ideology and then we disagree about what exactly that ideology is. Now we actually totally disagreed about what populism was in essence whether it existed. Over the last couple of years I think that disagreement is becoming less and less and most recent authors not only in Europe but also in the Americas are seeing populism first and foremost as a set of ideas. And that set of ideas focuses on a fundamental opposition between the people and the elite. There's virtually not a definition that doesn't have that in it. But then there is a debate about what separates the people and the elite and what that set of ideas is whether it's a rhetoric, a discourse or whether it's actually a full blown ideology. My personal definition is that populism is an ideology that sees society as being fundamentally divided into two homogeneic and antagonistic groups the pure people and the corrupt elite and at once politics to follow the general will of the people. And so what's important here is that I do believe it's an ideology I think that is a set of ideas that informs not just campaigns to grab power but also once populist parties are in power it will inform what type of policies they will implement and how they justify them. Second it's a moralistic distinction. The people and the elite, the distinction is not class like a Marxism and it's not about money, it's not even about which position necessarily hold, it's about morality. The people are pure and the elite are corrupt. Second it's monist. So the people is, it's not the people are, they are one. All the people share exactly the same interests and values. Similarly all the elite are corrupt. And in line with that they believe that the people have a general will that they all want the same thing. And therefore that politics can be made that are good for everyone in the same way. Because of that distinction, the moralistic distinction compromise is frowned upon because if the pure compromise with the corrupt the pure get corrupted. On top of that while populism to a certain extent accepts democracy in the most minimal terms as in popular sovereignty and majority rule the idea that the people elect their own leaders they do not support liberal democracy because they don't see any legitimate minority. After all there's only one group that is homogeneous, the people the only group that is accepted to exist outside of that is the elite and they're corrupt. And the corrupt don't deserve the protections of minority rights or rule of law. Now nativism is a term that is best captured as xenophobic nationalism. Unfortunately it's a term that almost exclusively exists in the US American literature as well a little bit in the Australian literature and actually doesn't have equivalence in other languages like Dutch, German or French. But nativism is xenophobic nationalism which is best captured in an infamous slogan of the streets of the early 1990s in Germany which is Deutschland in Deutschland aus Lenderhaus or Germany for the Germans, foreigners out. Nativist want their state for their people and consider anything that is alien, non-native be that people or ideas as threatening. Now many contemporary populist parties are indeed also nativist. This is a group of parties I call the populist radical right, parties like von National, FBE, AfD, Lega, etc. But importantly not every populist party is nativist. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain for example are not nativist. In fact both are among the most pro-immigrant parties in their country. And not every nativist is necessarily populist. At the moment one of the most nativist parties in that place is to say a zoo in Bavaria which are not populist. The difference between the two is that populism speaks about a vertical opposition. It's within the own people, between the people and the elite. Whereas nativism speaks about a horizontal opposition. Between our ethnic people, the ethnic us and the ethnic them. So those are different oppositions. There's virtually no nativist that argues that the elite is of an ethnic other. No one argues that it's the Muslims that control the Netherlands. They might argue that the ethnic Dutch politicians are pandering to Muslims at the expense of the own people. So populism and nativism are different things. Now how important is populism today? You can answer that question at two levels. First, populism doesn't only exist at the elite level. It's not just something that is spewed by parties. You can actually measure it at the individual level through surveys. It's very hard because populism overlaps partly with just a general pro-democratic discourse after all like the will of the people and partly with anti-establishment sentiment. Both of these are very broadly shared. In pro-democracy obviously, 80-90% of the population. And in various countries, the vast majority of people are anti-establishment too. In any case, for the studies that we have, there are large pluralities if not majority's whole populist sentiments, at least to some degree. If you look at what we normally do, political parties and how much support they get then if you would look at the debates over the last couple of years you would think that they're phenomenally important. On average though, populist parties within the EU gather roughly 15% of the vote. I just want to stress that 85% of people vote for non-populist parties. That seems to be completely missed. Because those 15% of the people who vote for populist parties have been implicitly made into the people in much of the media and political discourse. It is they who define what the people are concerned about. It is they who define who are the real authentic people whereas we liberals in the big cities live in a bubble. It's not to say that populist, authoritarian and nativist sentiments don't stretch further than 15% of the population. But it is important to keep in mind that on average the biggest populist party in the country is the third biggest party. And yet probably a three-quarters of everything that we write about politics is about populism. It's not about the centre-right or the centre-left. Now, averages are fine, but of course Europe has many differences. There are five governments at the moment that are led by a populist party and therefore have a populist prime minister Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and Greece. Three of them are coalitions. And four have a populist in government as part of a coalition, generally the junior partner, Austria, Finland, although it's switching Denmark and Bulgaria. And so at a certain level you could argue that the centre holds. 85% doesn't vote for the populist. 19 of the EU governments do not have the populist. The biggest political groups in European Parliament are non-populist groups. And yet that's not the case. To a certain extent we live in a populist era or what I've called in 2004 already a populist zeitgeist. And to be more exact, increasingly we live in a populist radical right era. Populism or aspects of populism, aspects of authoritarianism and aspects of nativism have become absolutely mainstream. Just think about the discourse about the so-called refugee crisis, which is full not just by populist radical right parties but even by mainstream politicians and media of ideas of threat to the cultural homogeneity or even balance of European countries. They're rife with speculation about the link between immigration particularly refugees and terrorism. And they're rife with betrayal or at the very least incompetence of the established elite. And that is where the real power of populism is. And again I would argue at this point in time the power, the agenda setting power. So they decide not just what we talk about but how we talk about it. And here populism is again secondary to nativism because we're actually not so much talking about how the elite have failed and how we should solve that. We're talking about how threatening the ethnic other is and how we should solve that. How should we protect our societies? And I think that is really where the core is today. I'll give you an example from my own country which is the Netherlands which is the country that together with Denmark has shifted most radical from kind of a beacon of liberalism in the American sense, progressiveness in the European sense to really right wing politics where the radical right itself is radical right populism is rarely really in power but the mainstream parties either govern with their support or largely on the basis of their agenda. In the summer of 2015 the so-called refugee crisis started. Large numbers of asylum seekers came through most notably the Bolton Rat. Our Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, was at that moment in the U.S. about one and a half hours south of where I live in Atlanta doing what he does best, mainly advertising his big businesses like Heineken and others. He didn't have any position on what was happening for more than a week but someone else did. He had builders, our most important export product and probably the most important Islamophobe in the world. He had builders defined the whole situation of asylum seekers for the Netherlands. He called it a crisis. He called it a threat. He put the link to Islam and to terrorism. And that was by a large mainstream, partly problematized by journalists saying, well, he had builders said that this is threatening, what do you think? And then Mark Rutte came back and because Mark Rutte is a problem solver, he said okay, so there seems to be a problem. It's a refugee crisis. They're threatening our security. So I'm going to solve this. That is where the power relationship is. So if we're talking about a populist era, we're talking about a populist era because the non-populist give the populist this power. And this is why I'm less somber than what at the moment is this whole crisis of democracy literature, which is a coterie industry which is making way more money than I do with my reasonably optimistic story. But I think it's a very American story. I think the situation in the U.S. is potentially more problematic than Western Europe in particular. But it misses the point. It misses the point that it's still the mainstream parties, the non-populist parties that hold almost all of the power. It's them that decide that they give in to the myth that the populist radical right voter is the people. And the reason why, and I'm not arguing that this is A, not problematic, or B, not long-lasting, I don't think anything will change until the European elections of 2019, which are going to be about the embattled status quo versus the emboldened populist as the 2014 elections were, as the 2009 elections were. But let me just take you back to the two months after the victory of Emmanuel Macron. At that point in time, there was broad speculation about populism being that, about the real people actually supporting the mainstream agenda. And I still believe that if the German elections would have had a free 4% different outcome, with, say, the 3% higher and half-day 3% lower, we would have a completely different debate. Because at that point in time, people would have said, well, you see, Merkel is still popular, despite what she did. I have days problematic, but under 10%, so it's not really a big force. So a lot of this is hype. It is hype. And the reason that it is hype, and that is where the real problem of democracy, I think liberal democracy is today, is not because of the strength of the populist. It's the weakness of the liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrats don't have a discourse, and importantly, they don't have an ideology anymore. Many leaders, I honestly believe, don't fully understand what the system of liberal democracy is and why minority rights, rule of law, separation of powers are crucial to the system. On top of that, we all know by now that the center-left has lost its ideology. That has been debated for decades now, since Blair and going back to Clinton. The center-right actually has a similar ideological crisis. To a certain extent, the center-right at the moment is going through its Blair-right moment. It has given up on its old ideology. It has bought into pragmatism, and it's winning elections with it. But it's winning elections on the basis of someone else's agenda. And just as new labor has become irrelevant, because in the end it just did what the center-right did, I believe that the center-right, if it continues like this, will become irrelevant too, because it is, in large extent, doing what the radical-right does. And it will never do it as well. And so where we are today is still for most cases, I'm not talking with Hungary-Poland, in most countries it is still the game of the liberal Democrats. They still have the power and the opportunity to redefine themselves, and thereby redefine politics. And the struggle is not about weakening populism. If we weaken populists, we still have a weak liberal democracy. Yet if we strengthen liberal democracy, then by definition populism will be weakened. Thank you.