 Ddweud am ychydig, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gwneud yn ymwneud yn y cyfnodol, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gwneud yn yr IIEA'r ddweud o'r Llyfrgell i ddwyloedd cyfnodol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n ddweud o Professor Shantal Mouff, ddiddordeb i'r ddweud. Shantal Mouff yw Professor yw'r Unedig yw'r Westminster, a mae'n rhaid i'r unedig ar unedig y Unedig yw'r Unedig o'r Unedig yw Unedig yw yw Unedig mewn Llaedd Americao a Llaedd Americao. Professor Mouff yw'r unedig yn cooeddir o ffwrdd o'r llyfr o'r llyfr, oherwydd y cynnwys, o'r hynny'n ddweud i'r llyfr o'r Amser hedgarau hefyd, i gael ymryd i gyrthodau cyfnodol. Mae'r llyfr o'r llyfr o'r llyfr, o'r popolism, o'r Aynyn Lincan, was published last year and I know that Chantal is going to speak about that today and the populist movement moment really that we're experiencing. Just on some procedural issues, this is a recording event. Chantal is going to talk about 25 minutes, that's okay. Then there will be a question and answer session that's not recorded but it is under Chatham House Rules to remember that as well. So I think most people coming in today would have noticed a lot of posters around so that we are experiencing a European and local election and there will be lots of debates in the future of Europe and what populism really is all about. It's really apt to have a better understanding of what's going on and how we're making sense of this. Particularly with a political upheaval, political divide or a new political divide. So we're delighted to have Chantal to speak to us today and with that I'll let you take the floor. That's okay. Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to present some consideration about, let's say, oh, I think it's the worst way to deal with populism in general. In fact, then I'm going to present what I think should be the right strategy because following the success of Brexit in the United Kingdom, victory of Donald Trump, and also know the rise of the right-wing populist movement, the media is spreading the fear that the western liberal democracies are in danger of being taken over by parties of the extreme right, as they call it, aiming to install fascist regime. What should we make of this? Well, liberal democracies are no doubt confronted with the crisis of representation that manifests itself by increasing dissatisfaction with established parties and by the rise of anti-establishment movement. This no doubt represents a real challenge for democratic politics and it can certainly lead to a weakening of liberal democratic institutions. However, I consider that categories like fascism and extreme right or comparison with the 1930s are not adequate to grasp the nature of the challenge that we are facing. They suggest that we are witnessing the recurrence of the well-known phenomenon, the return of the brown plague, as Corsham called it, and this phenomenon affects societies when exposed to economic difficulties and that, in fact, that provokes an odd burst of irrational passion. In that case, no special examination needs to be needed in order to understand why. I mean, what are the conditions that have created that? So it's like a metaphorical phenomenon, you know? Tsunami derived. We just have to resist. We don't have to really make an autocratic to try to find out are we knowing some part responsible for that. It's certainly not my intention to deny the existence of political grouping that can properly be qualified as extreme right. Fortunately, they are marginal and they do not, I consider, represent a serious threat to our basic institution. For instance, I think that is certainly not the case with the FPE in Austria or the National Front under Marine Le Pen. Or either on the variety of righting nationalist parties that are no flourishing in Europe. So I don't think it makes sense to call that fascist, eternal fascist. And I think also the problem, I find very problematic this notion of the extreme right, because the difference of the traditional extreme right, the objective of those parties which I prefer to call righting populist parties, is not to overturn liberal democratic institution in order to establish a kind of dictatorship. The strategy consists in establishing a political frontier between the people and the establishment. And it is for that reason better characterized as populist. And this is why I think they require a different type of analysis. To be sure, many people equate populism with fascism and extreme right. This is clearly the tactics used today by the elites in order to disqualify all the forces which question the status quo. And it's very easy to say if you don't like something populist. In fact today there is an inflation of the term populist and everything is populist which is in a sense questioning the establishment of neoliberal elites. To understand the growing appeal of populist parties, we need to reject the simplistic vision disseminated by the media with one populist as pure demagogy. The analytical perspective developed by Ernest Olaqlo in his book on populist reason, offers us important theoretical tools to address this question. We define populism as a way to construct the political frontier which consists in establishing the position between the two camps, dividing the society in two camps, calling the mobilization of the underdog against those in power. So to construct the frontier in a populist way, the people from the underdog from below, people from above. I think this is a construction of the frontier which is pertinent when seeking to construct a new subject of collective action, the people, capable of reconfiguring a social order experiences unjust. So in fact it's something that is adequate in certain conjunctures when there is what Gramsci will call a crisis of hegemony. Ernest Olaqlo insists that populism is not an ideology, it cannot be attributed to specific programmatic content, it's not a political regime. So it is a way of doing politics that can take various forms according to time and places, and that it is compatible with a variety of institutional forms. And here I want to insist on something that all the forms of populism are not necessarily, they can be, but they are not necessarily incompatible with liberal democratic institution. What they have in common is their opposition between the underdog and those from above, the elite, the establishment. But this is a kind of mobilization that can have democratizing result. This was for instance of the populist movement in the United States of the 19th century, was able to redistribute the political power in favor of the majority, without putting in question the basic institution of the democratic system. Populism, and that's something which I want to defend strongly, far from representing a pathology or a perversion of democracy, constitute one of its important dimension. Indeed, it refers to the dimension of popular sovereignty to the construction of a dimos, and that of course is constitutive of democracy, dimos kratos, and it is precisely this dimension which has been discarded by neoliberal hegemony. A consequence, we can say that today we live in a post democracy, and that the restoration of democracy requires some form of populist political intervention. So you can see what I'm saying is not necessarily something that threatens democracy, some form of populism might also be needed in order to recover democracy, to fight against poor democracy. What exactly do I mean by poor democracy? Let us begin by clarifying the meaning of democracy. It is known, etymologically speaking, democracy comes as I've just said from the Greek dimos kratos. That means obviously power of the people. It is a principle of legitimacy. It is not exercised in abstract. Instead, it always exercised through specific institutions. When we speak of democracy in Europe today, we refer to a specific model, we can call it the Western model, that results from the inscription of the democratic ideal in a particular historical context. This model, which has received a variety of names, modern democracy, representative, parliamentary, constitutional, they have a different way to refer to it, but it is basically characterised by the articulation of two different traditions. On one hand, the tradition of political liberalism, that is the rule of law, separation of power, the defence of individual freedom. On the other hand, the democratic tradition, which centralised these, are equality and popular sovereignty. Contrary to what is sometimes said, there is no necessary relation between those two traditions, but only a contingent historical articulation, which Canadian political theorist C.B. McPherson has shown, that articulation that took place historically at a certain time in the 19th century, through the joint struggle of the liberal and the democrat against absolutist regime. This is when this articulation was established. Some authors like Carl Schmitt, of course, have found that this articulation produced an unviable regime, because liberalism denies democracy and democracy denies liberalism. Others, like Jürgen Habermas, on the contrary maintain the co-originality of the principle of freedom and equality. I think that Schmitt is right in pointing to the presence of a conflict between the liberal grammar of equality, which postulates universality and the reference to humanity, and the grammar of democratic equality, which requires the construction of a people, the establishment of a frontier between we and they. But I think that Schmitt is mistaken to present that conflict in terms of a contradiction that must inevitably lead to pluralistic liberal democracy to set the structure. In my book, The Democratic Paradox, I have proposed to conceive this articulation of the two traditions, which are, to be sure, ultimately irreconcilable, on the mode of a paradoxical configuration, as the locus of a tension that defines the originality of liberal democracy and guarantees its pluralistic character. That is the democratic logic of construction of a people and defending egalitarian practices is necessary to define a demos and to subvert the tendency of liberal discourse to abstract universalism. But its articulation with the liberal logic also allows us to challenge the form of exclusion that are inherent in the political practice of determining the people who will govern. So liberal democratic politics consists, in my view, of a process of constant negotiation through different hegemonic configurations of this constitutive tension between liberalism and democracy, liberty and equality. This tension expressed, of course, in political terms along the frontier between right and left, and it can only be stabilized temporarily through pragmatic negotiations between political forces. These negotiations always establish the hegemony of one of them. Revisiting the history of pluralist liberal democracy, we can find that, on some occasions, the liberal logic that prevailed while in others in the democratic. Nonetheless, and this is what is important, the two logic remain in force. There was always the possibility of what I call an agonistic negotiation between right and left. And this is what I think to be constitutive specific to the liberal democratic regime and the existence of this tension and different negotiations. Well, if we can call our current situation one of poor democracy, it is because in recent years, with the weakening of the democratic values as a consequence of the implementation of neoliberal hegemony, this constitutive tension has been eliminated and the agonistic space where different projects of society could confront each other have disappeared. In the political arena, this evolution was made manifest through what I propose in my book on the political to call post-politic, to refer to the blurring of the frontier between right and left. By that term, my main consensus which has been established between right and centre-left parties on the idea that there was no alternative to neoliberal globalization under the pretext of modernization imposed, of course, by globalization as they will have it, social democratic parties have accepted the dictate of financial capitalism and the limit they impose on state intervention and on restrictive policies. The role of parliament and institution allowing citizens to influence political decisions have been drastically reduced and citizens, in fact, have been deprived of the possibility of exercising their democratic rights. Elections no longer offer any opportunity to decide on a real alternative through the traditional parties of government. Politics have become mere technical issue of managing the established order of course a demand that is better dealt with by experts. The only thing that post-politics allows is a bipartisan alternation of power between the centre-right and centre-left. All those who oppose this consensus in the centre of the cycle are described as populist and presented as being extremist, anti-democrat. So I think it is important to see why there is so much of this reference to populism because we have seen recently more and more opposition to this post-politics. So putting into question populism is to put into question post-politics. Those changes at the political level, what I call post-politics, have taken place in the context of a new mode of capitalist regulation in which financial capital occupies a central place. With the financialisation of the economy there has been a great expansion of the financial sector at the cost of cost of the productive economy. Under the combined effects of deindustrialisation, the promotion of technological change and processes of relocation to countries where labour was cheaper, many of them have been lost. Privatisation and deregulation policies have also contributed to creating a situation of endemic unemployment and workers found themselves in increasing difficult conditions. If one adds to that the effects of the austerity policies that have been imposed after the 2008 crisis, one can understand the causes of the exponential increase of inequalities that we have witnessed in several European countries, particularly of course in the south. This inequality, that's also important to realise, no longer affects only the working class but also a large part of the middle class which has entered a process of popularisation and precarisation. Social democratic parties have accompanied this development and in many places they have played a very important role in the implementation of neoliberal policies. This has contributed to the fact that the other pillar of the democratic ideal, the difference of equality because for me democracy is basically popular sovereignty and equality has been eliminated from the liberal democratic discourse. What no rules is an individualistic liberal vision that celebrates consumer society and the freedom that the markets offer. The result of neoliberalism was therefore the establishment both socio-economically and politically of what we can call a truly oligarchic regime. And it is precisely this oligarchisation of European societies that is at the origin of the success of writing publicist parties. In fact, during a long time they've been the only one who denounced this situation and promised the people that they are going to give them a voice and give them back the power that the elites have confiscated. In many countries, those writing publicist parties have articulated in a xenophobic vocabulary the demand of the popular sector which were ignored by the parties of the centre because of course they were incompatible with the neoliberal project. The social democratic parties, prisoners of their post-political dogma and reluctant to admit their mistake refused to recognise that many of those demands that are articulated by writing publicist parties are legitimate democratic demands. So this is why it's so easy, it's fashion, written of fashion. We don't have to bother about are there real democratic demands? So they refuse to recognise that the origin is a nucleus of democratic demand because it's a reaction against post-democracy. It's a call for democracy. And of course, if you accept that there are legitimate democratic demands at stake you realise that what is needed is a progressive answer to be given to those demands. But that of course is that social democratic parties cannot understand because of course that will force them to do some kind of autocratic and wonder why have we left those popular sectors without any progressive discourse available. And I think that's the reason why social democratic parties cannot understand the nature of the populist challenge. I think that the strength of writing populism comes from the fact that precisely in many countries they have been able to draw a frontier to construct a people in order to translate politically the various resistances to the phenomenon of oligarchisation which has been induced by neoliberal hegemony. Its appeal is particularly not able in the working class but it's also as a growing appeal that middle class affected by the new structure of domination which are linked to neoliberal globalisation. To design a properly political answer to understand the nature of the challenge by writing populism we must realise that the only way to find them is to give a progressive answer to the democratic demand that they are expressing in xenophobic language. I will say this on that. They are expressing in xenophobic language what are in fact democratic demands. And that is for me what is crucial. And that of course suppose recognising the existence of this democratic nucleus which exists in those demands and the possibility through a different discourse of articulating those demands in a progressive direction. And this is what I call a left populist strategy. To recognise that in the demands which are expressed by the democratic nucleus but it can be expressed in a different way. And of course it's going to depend on how you construct the people. The construct just to give you an example from France is evident that the way in which Marine Le Pen, writing populism construct the people is very different from the way in which Jean-Luc Mélenchon left populist construct the people. In the case of Marine Le Pen the immigrants are not part of the people. While in the case of Mélenchon they are part of the people and the adversary of course is not the immigrants. This is the forces, the neoliberal globalisation. Do you have some more minutes or do you want me to start? No, no, ok. So I think that let me just say here because I need to take something out. Yeah, this crisis that we are living, the crisis linked to the phenomenon of oligarchisation and post politics is an expression of very heterogeneous demands. This is why they cannot be constructed anymore on the traditional basis. The way Marx is constructing the frontier, the capital against labour, bourgeoisie against proletariat. This is definitely not something under financial capitalism things have changed profoundly. Because unlike the struggle characteristic of the era for this capitalism, when there was a working class defending a specific interest in post for this neoliberal capitalism, resistance has developed at many points outside the productive process. There are a lot of demands we do not longer correspond to social sector defining sociological terms or by their location in the social structure. Many are claimed that touch on questions related to quality of life and they have a transversal character. The demand linked to the struggle against sexism, racism and other forms of domination have also become increasingly central. This is of course what should be the people which is going to be constructed by left populist must be to establish in the term of what a book to which they have been referring to introduction of I wrote with Ernest Olaq Locke or Egemony in Socialist Strategy. We insist on the importance of creating a chain of equivalence between different democratic demands and of course this is very much the centre of a left populist strategy. We must understand that to generate all those different demands demands establish of course also a different mode of functioning. For instance, it needs to establish a synergy between social movement and some for party for because this is the way in which we are going to construct the people and of course this is why it is necessary to construct the frontier in a populist way. I insist here again this populist way can be constructed differently because the people and the establishment okay but who are the people? Are you constructed in the establishment? You know it's also something very different according to different construction. Here I want to insist to finish on some more kind of theoretical dimension which I have not yet referred to which I think is important. I think we should be aware that such a project of left populist strategy cannot be formulated without discarding the rationalist essentialist approach which is dominant in liberal democratic thinking. Such an approach prevents us from acknowledging the necessary partisan nature of politics and the central role that affects place in the construction of collective political identities. This is for me absolutely crucial, you know, the role of affect in politics and this is why the rationalist perspective which is dominant in the left, the idea that no, no, no mobilizing affect that's only what the right in populism is, that we only use arguments, you know, I think that's terribly defeating because what I call the mobilization of passion, the creation of common affect, this is something which is crucial in the construction of political identities. And I think that, again, to come back to my first point, to level extreme right or fascist, the parties that reject the post-political consensus is to condemn oneself to political impotence. The only way to fight against right-wing populist parties is to address the issue that they have put on their agenda, address them by offering them a progressive answer, able to mobilize common affect. We need to mobilize affect but mobilize them towards social justice, you know, in order to avoid them being mobilized in xenophobic vocabulary. And this is what should be the objective of the left populist strategy that aims at the recuperation and radicalization of democracy because a big difference between right-wing populism and left populism is also situated there. In both cases we can say that it's an attempt to recuperate democracy. You know, it's a fight against both democracy. We are going to give people a voice. There is, in fact, it's important to realize that one of the motor of the right-wing populism is the call for democracy. But they want to recover democracy in order to restrict it. Democracy, yes, but only for the national, for the people from, they construct the people in nationalistic way. For instance, again, in the case of Marine Le Pen, some of the elements of this course are left-wing. In a sense, for instance, she was certainly more left on certain aspect of the difference of the welfare state, again privatization than the socialist France Hollande, for instance. But welfare state yet, but only for the national, you know, not for the recovery democracy but restrict democracy to the national. Well, in the case of left-wing populism, it's also to recover democracy but to radicalize and to extend it, you know, to have more and more social groups of people to whom those ideas of liberty and equality are going to apply. So, you see, there is a very important difference there. Well, I am convinced, honestly convinced that in the next few years, the central axis of the political conflict will be between right-wing populism and left-wing populism. And it's imperative that progressive sector understand the importance of involving themselves in that struggle. It's through the constitution of another people, a collective will that resolve from the mobilization of passion in the presence of equality and social justice that is going to be possible to combat the xenophobic policies promoted by right-wing populism. So, we could see that by recreating political frontier, because this is what's at stake in what I call the populist movement, against the post-political view that there is no difference between right and left, that there is no frontier. This moment recreates political frontier. So, this populist movement that we are witnessing in Europe, in that sense, points to what I call a return of the political, a return that may open the way for authoritarian solution. And certainly, through regimes that weaken liberal democratic institutions, but also return which can also lead to the reaffirmation and deepening of the democratic values. How is it going, what's going to happen? Everything will depend on the kind of populism that emerge victorious from the struggle against post-politic and post-democracy. Thank you. Thank you very much.