Analele Universității din București, Seria Stiințe Politice, nr. 1/2016, pp.

103-119
ISSN 1582-2486
http://anale.fspub.unibuc.ro/

POPULISM, COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RECONFIGURATION

OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

CAMIL-ALEXANDRU PÂRVU

Abstract: The present paper questions one of the widespread diagnostics of European
and North-American politics, according to which the emerging political cleavage – in the wake of
the dissolution of the classical left-right distinction – pitches different declinations of sovereignty-
focused populism versus various forms of cosmopolitan transnationalism. In the European case,
this form of political cleavage is deemed to explain some of the current reconfigurations of
member states’ policies and political parties in relation to immigration, as well as an increasingly
popular contestation of the EU exemplified by Brexit; in the US, it would explain the rise of
political figures such as Donald Trump. Against this popular view, this paper seeks to shed light
on a more nuanced understanding of the dichotomy, grounded on Robert Dahl’s original
distinction between the scope and the domain of democratic politics. Whereas the opposition
holds when it refers to their incompatible notions of legitimate political membership, it becomes
much less coherent when viewed as pertaining to political agency.
Keywords: populism, cosmopolitanism, democracy, inclusion, Europe.

It has become a pervasive feature of the recent literature in political

science to acknowledge that ‘populism’ is now a central political concept. This
prevalence is replicated also, to a similar extent, by its presence in the media.
Notions of ‘populism’ are now mobilized in most academic (Canovan, 1999;
Canovan, 2004; Kaltwasser, 2012; Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004) and journalistic
efforts aiming to make sense of an undoubtedly critical series of developments
in both European and US politics over the last decade. This aspect has been now
extensively theorized and recorded, with all the major journals of the discipline
fostering various perspectives on it. Furthermore, ‘populism’ is not only a
popular, emerging category, but also one that is especially resilient: despite its
notorious definitional instability, there is a clear and steady academic and non-
academic interest that is set to continue for as long as a better suited concept is
not readily available.
This article aims to go beyond the common steps of registering the
ubiquity of the concept and then decrying its conceptual failures1. What is

1
For an in-depth analysis of the conceptual ambiguities of populism, see (Pârvu, 2015) and
(Pârvu, 2012).
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increasingly important, I claim, is the next level of scrutiny – namely,

understanding the construction of the emerging political cleavages that take
populism as a central term of reference. More specifically, there is in the recent
literature an increasing tendency for construing a normative distinction between
populism and cosmopolitanism, where these two terms are taken to denote
fundamentally distinct sets of basic framing commitments concerning
citizenship, legitimacy, political agency, and democratic politics in general.
This distinction is considered to be now structuring both the basic social
conflicts in contemporary western democracies, and the corresponding
realignment of the existing and new political parties.
Nowhere near as popular as ‘populism’ in common parlance, ‘cosmopolitanism’
is, however, similarly positioned at the forefront of the emergent normative and
empirical accounts within political theory and related fields. The body of
literature consecrated to the various definitions, perspectives, adjectives and other
debates on cosmopolitanism is impressive and growing (Beck, 2006; Benhabib,
2006; Brock & Brighouse, 2005; Delanty, 2009; Ingram, 2013). Furthermore,
cosmopolitanism seems to have become a very promising framework of
interpretation for existing political phenomena that were previously seen almost
exclusively within their default nation-state contexts. Revisiting from a
cosmopolitan-driven methodological and conceptual perspective the legacies of
dissent (Cărăuș & Pârvu, 2014), or the recent waves of protests in the wake of
the global financial crisis (Pârvu, 2016), allows us to develop upon Ulrich
Beck’s influential, paradigmatic critique of methodological nationalism.
In what sense, therefore, can a relation between these two terms – populism
and cosmopolitanism – be analytically and empirically useful in allowing us to
understand some of the major lines of reconfiguration of contemporary politics?
Is there, in other words, an emerging cleavage – populism vs cosmopolitanism –
and if this is so, what is the nature of it?

The Populist Anti-Cosmopolitan Imaginary

One way to reveal this opposition is by looking into the discourses,

pamphlets and political programs of the political parties themselves. In Freedom
Party of Austria’s Graz Program, a special section is dedicated to the topic of
“Cosmopolitanism and independence”: in it, the goals of the party are presented
to be focused on “securing the sovereignty” and “fending off, if necessary, those
that become aggressive and threaten to displace our own culture”2. Hungary’s Viktor
Orban, speaking on the topic of the EU policy on refugees on March 15, 2016,
2
The full English version of the program can be found online at https://www.fpoe.at/fi
leadmin/user_upload/www.fpoe.at/dokumente/2015/2011_graz_parteiprogramm_englisch
_web.pdf
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105

hammered that “We will not allow [Brussels] to force onto us the fruits of its
cosmopolitan migration policy”, which he described as leading to catastrophic
results: “First we allow them to tell us whom we must take in, then they force us
to serve foreigners in our own country. In the end we find ourselves being told
to pack up and leave our own land.”3 Still in Hungary, in a 2013 interview
published by Jobbik’s English language website under the perceptive title “The
background of real conflict in the world”, the far-right party’s leader Gabor
Vona insists on delineating the basic cotemporary political cleavage as he sees
it: “the real distinction is not between different religions, countries and cultures,
but between communities attempting to preserve traditions and anti-traditional,
global liberalism.”4 In Jobbik’s parlance, global liberalism is a generic term that
refers to an amorphous group of entities, including various cosmopolitan
sensibilities but also the threat of the international finance. For all these parties,
the crucial opposition is, then, one between what they describe as a morally and
politically corrupt cosmopolitanism, on the one side, and nationalist, nativist
appeals to preserving or restoring national sovereignty, on the other. And
migration – especially in the wake of the refugee crisis of 2015 – operates as
both a catalyst and an accelerator of the political cleavage that opposes
cosmopolitanism and sovereignty-focused populism.
A number of recent studies have focused on this dichotomy, describing it
as essentially centered on the problem of migration and its capacity to almost
singlehandedly reshape the European political system (Lazaridis & Wadia, 2015).
To be sure, there is also a parallel evolution in the wake of the global financial
crisis of 2007, where the more egalitarian demands that press for economic
justice and greater redistribution are also present, revitalizing an important
segment of the more traditional left in Europe and the US. Indeed, the rise of
Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, with their unambiguous appeals for economic
equality and rejection of the third-way policies of the New Labour and of the
mainstream US Democratic party, have captured the hopes and imagination of
this re-energized left. The intellectual effervescence around Thomas Piketty’s
book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty, 2014) is also a testament of
this evolution. But the equally relevant phenomenon that has seen the electoral
rise of the populist political parties and movements of the far-right, is itself as
much a consequence of the financial crisis and the regulatory choices in favor
policies of austerity, as it is of the increased migratory trends following the
collapse into civil war of countries such as Syria and Libya after 2011 (Otjes &
Louwerse, 2015).
For Cas Mudde, however, writing in 2012, the rise of ‘populist radical
right parties (PRRPs)’ is misdiagnosed, and although their electoral trend is
3
See more at: http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speech
es/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-on-15-march
4
http://www.jobbik.com/background_real_conflict_world
 CAMIL-ALEXANDRU PÂRVU
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“clearly up” (Mudde, 2013, 15), their capacity to become or significantly

influence the mainstream European politics has been exaggerated in the
literature5. In his perspective, the main reason for the shift to the right in
European politics comes not from the rise of the far-right political parties
themselves, but rather from the mainstream right political parties: “Rather than
the populist radical right, it has been the mainstream right-wing that has pushed
West European politics to the right, in part in response to media and popular
responses to relatively recent developments” such as immigration and European
enlargement, corroborated with the incompetence or the collusion of the
mainstream left political parties (Mudde, 2013, p. 13). For most other observers,
however, the more recent electoral evolution of these parties is now a crucial
phenomenon of contemporary politics, and as such, a necessary part of
mainstream democratic theorizing, with a Special Issue of the journal
Democratization being recently dedicated to the problem of “dealing with
populists in government” (Taggart & Kaltwasser, 2016).

Populism and Elections

On July 1st, 2016, the Austrian Constitutional Court invalidated the second
round of the country’s presidential elections and decided that a rerun of the electoral
contest opposing far-right candidate Norbert Hofer and the independent
Alexander van der Bellen should be scheduled over the coming months. This
decision was based on the fact that the Court considered that vote counting in
several counties was fraught with irregularities. At the same time, the decision
provoked renewed anguish across Europe since the nullified elections had been
very narrowly won by Alexander van der Bellen with the slimmest difference of
votes: 30 863, or 0,6%. Norbert Hofer, who lost on May 22nd, was the candidate
running on behalf of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), a party with a
strongly anti-immigrant and a radically euro-sceptic platform. Van der Bellen
was supported primarily by The Green Alternative – GRÜNE, and while he
won with 50.3 of the votes, it was rather the rapid rise of his opponent that
marked the gravity of the elections.
Equally significant as the surprising electoral score of the FPÖ candidate
was, however, the total collapse of the traditional mainstream political parties – the
Social-Democratic Party and the Popular Party. The SPÖ and the ÖVP had
dominated for decades after WWII the political life in Austria, including in recent

5
For Mudde, the idea that populist radical right political parties are now reshaping the
mainstream politics in Europe is akin to mistaking correlation for causation, as their
relative electoral scores and political influence has not been greater, for instance, than that
of the green political parties – which have, in fact, a greater capacity to enter coalition
governments than the populist radical right parties (Mudde, 2013).
POPULISM, COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
107

grand coalitions, yet this time they only managed to collectively garner 22% of the
votes – a remarkable slide into the fourth and fifth positions for their candidates
during the first round of the presidential elections. This trajectory is still
unprecedented in European politics and, for that reason, mustered the academic
and journalistic attention as a first case in Europe where the far-right populist party
is not only close to winning the presidency, but also while being in competition with
another hitherto marginal candidate, an independent with Green movements support.
Yet the FPÖ is not really a newcomer in the Austrian politics. Indeed, in
the late 1990s it had won more votes than the ÖVP (1999) and thereafter
became its junior partner until 2005, in the coalition government led by
Wolfgang Schüssel. Despite the EU diplomatic sanctions and political boycott,
and despite the major internal strife that saw its founding president Jörg Haider
leave the party in order to create a new one, the FPÖ was rather resilient and
managed to pull a significant comeback during this latest round of elections,
when it garnered a much larger percentage of the votes (27% in 1999; 35% and
then 49,7% in 2016). Norbert Hofer was recorded in the wake of the second
round as saying that “it could well be the case that after counting postal votes
that we’re not quite at the front, but I’d say we’ve won anyway” […] “we’ve
made history. Eleven years ago this party had just 3% ... today every second
Austrian voted for the FPÖ.” (Oltermann & Connolly, 2016)
Migration was the key theme of the electoral campaign in the Austrian
presidential elections. Aside from the size of the migratory flow, the tabloid
press in Wien pressed on the notion that the migrants (that were refused the
status of refugees since they traversed ‘safe countries’ before attempting to cross the
Austrian border) were also criminals of a kind that made them incompatible with
‘European civilization’. Their crimes, widely reported as monstrous on the tabloid
front pages, led to calls for the reconsideration of the Austrian penal code – too
lenient in face of such unbridgeable cultural incompatibility. Chancellor Werner
Faymann (SPÖ) massively contributed to the normalization of an anti-immigrant
rhetoric through his own incongruent political evolution: whereas in the early
months of the refugee crisis he had named Orban’s policies vis-à-vis the refugees as
similar to the Nazi policies of deportation6, he subsequently made a U-turn and
allied himself with the same Orban in condemning the German chancellor Merkel
for her open policies sympathetic to the plight of refugees. This was later followed
by his abrupt resignation as chancellor, just a few days before the election, a move7
that contributed to the moral discredit and political collapse of the centrist parties –
the SPÖ and the ÖVP.

6
Austria’s Faymann Likens Orban’s Refugee Policies to Nazi Deportations | Reuters.
(n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2016, from http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-migrants-
idUKKCN0RC0GY20150912
7
Shock as Austrian Chancellor Faymann Quits. (n.d.). Retrieved May 26, 2016, from
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36245316
 CAMIL-ALEXANDRU PÂRVU
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The near-win of a far-right political party in Austria is not a singular

phenomenon, of course. On the contrary, it is part of a wider landscape of
electoral progress by similar parties, exemplified also by the rise of Donald
Trump as the Republican Party nominee for the US presidential election in the
same year, the ineluctable surge in popularity of Marine le Pen and the Front
National in France (universally presumed now to be a certain presence in the
second round of the 2017 presidential elections), as well as by a series of local
and regional wins in mid-2016 for such parties as the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S)
in several cities in Italy (where Virginia Raggi and Chiara Appendino were
elected in June 2016 mayors of Rome and Turin) and Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) in the German Länder of Saxony-Anhalt (where it reached
24,2% of the votes), Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg. In effect,
the presence of movements and parties such as AfD and PEGIDA (Patriotische
Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) in Germany, which was
hitherto considered practically immune to this type of development,
spearheaded the notion of a now transnational emergent political cleavage
centered on populism as resistance to immigration and Euroscepticism.
Such parties, candidates and movements (with the notable exception of
the 5 Star Movement that has, for now, maintained overall a cautious ambiguity
on the topic) have consistently posited control of immigration as their chief
concern. This has led most observers to concentrate on the way in which
populism, construed this way, is primarily an exclusionary type of movement,
as it is centered on excluding what they perceive to be illegitimate residents
from the proper body of the political community, on sharply marking who is
‘in’ and who should be ‘out’, citizens vs aliens, natives vs immigrants, whites vs
ethnic or cultural minorities etc.

Assessing the Opposition

According to the classical accounts of cleavage theory (Lipset & Rokkan,

1967), emerging political cleavages and realignments in the party system
configuration are essentially the result of the evolution of the underlying social
conflicts: political parties adapt to the medium and long term shifts in the
positioning of the major social groups. In this sense, if concerns with immigration
and dissolution of sovereignty have become central tenets of contemporary
European societies, political parties are bound to readjust so that they articulate
these concerns as the building blocks of an emerging political cleavage.
The perspective adopted in this article examines populism and
cosmopolitanism less in terms of measuring dominant political attitudes and
identifying their origin, but rather in terms of the internal normative and
conceptual consistency of the terms and of their relation within the purported
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109

cleavage. The reference framework for the analysis is constituted by Robert

Dahl’s conceptualization of the domain and the scope of democratic units (Dahl,
1989). In the wake of his decades-long contribution to democratic theory, this
distinction between the domain and the scope of democratic units has recently
surged as a major intellectual source for developing accounts concerning both
the cosmopolitan interrogations concerning the possibility of a global demos
(Arrhenius, 2005; Espejo, 2014; Miller, 2009), as well as revisiting theories of
populism (Rovira Kaltwasser, 2014).
According to Robert Dahl, the domain of democracy refers to the
composition of the democratic demos, and is the answer to the question, ‘Who
should be included?’ Or, in a shorter version, ‘Who decides?’ The scope of
democracy, on the other hand, is about the range of decisions that the demos is
able to decide upon, and is the answer to the question, ‘What can the demos
decide?’ These basic questions precede, in his view, the more detailed accounts
of democracy. They represent the foundational presuppositions that inform
much of the contemporary democratic theorizing. This is why, according to
Dahl, we are customarily insufficiently aware of the type of paradoxes that
these premises of democratic thinking actually generate8.
In effect, for Dahl “we cannot solve the problem of the proper scope and
domain of the democratic units from within democratic theory. The criteria of
the democratic process presuppose the rightfulness of the unit itself. If the unit
is not proper or rightful – if its scope or domain is not justifiable – the unit itself
is not proper or rightful simply by democratic procedures” (Dahl, 1989, p. 195).
As such, the problems of domain and scope of democracy cannot be
disentangled from each other – as they seem to be mutually determining. In
other words, one cannot think what range of matters is under the authority of a
group or demos unless one has already decided the composition of that group.
Conversely, the composition may be determined according to the issues that are
at stake. In fact, for Dahl the answer to the paradox may be outside democratic
theory, but at the same time “it would be a mistake to believe that nothing more
can be said” about the distinction and its implications for democratic theorizing
(Dahl, 1989, p. 207).
Indeed, in what follows I examine the distinction between populism and
cosmopolitanism as it is structured by the two democratic presuppositions –
concerning democracy’s domain and scope. While in terms of defining
democracy’s domain, populism and cosmopolitanism are definitely at odds, the
picture of their construction of democracy’s scope is much more complex.

8
I have written elsewhere extensively on the nature, forms, and implications of Dahl’s
paradoxes of democracy’s domain (Pârvu, 2014).
 CAMIL-ALEXANDRU PÂRVU
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Cosmopolitan Inclusion, Populist Exclusion

Political theorists such as Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas have

consistently worked during the last years with the assumption that variants of
populism and cosmopolitanism are the main elements of an increasingly
relevant political cleavage. Relevant for engaged intellectuals such as Habermas
and Beck is that they invested themselves not only in the theoretical elaborations
of normative and empirical accounts of cosmopolitanism; they also insisted, in
recent years, that cosmopolitanism, in some of its guises, can and should also
work as antidote to the mounting challenges brought about by the rise of
populist and nationalist movements and the electoral successes of the far-right
political parties. In this sense, they amplified the notion of a contrast and of the
political urgency to understand its meaning.
To Beck, the idea that ‘natives’ have special rights over nation and
territory as delimited by borders is part of a historically anachronistic vision.
“The separate worlds and spaces maintained by territorial nationalism and
ethnicism are historically false”, he writes. “If we trace the great migrations of
peoples back far enough, it becomes evident that, exaggerating somewhat, there
are no indigenous peoples. Every native began as a foreigner who drove out the
previous natives, before claiming the natives’ right to protect themselves against
intruders as their natural right” (Beck, 2006, p. 68). Conversely, legal and
cultural permeability to migration is a key indicator of cosmopolitanization. The
latter term is used by Beck in contrast with cosmopolitanism in order to
describe the distinction between a philosophical project (cosmopolitanism) and
the actual practice of becoming cosmopolitan and living in a cosmopolitan way
without necessarily being aware of it or aiming to do so (cosmopolitanization);
or, put otherwise, cosmopolitanization is about facts, whereas cosmopolitanism
is about norms. In this perspective, “cosmopolitanization means a ‘forced’
cosmopolitanism that transforms the experiential spaces of the nation-state from
within often against their will, beyond awareness, parliamentary elections and
public controversies, so to speak as a side effect of flows of migration,
consumer choices, tastes in food or music or the global risks”.
Cosmopolitanization generates also anti-cosmopolitanization, as it “explodes
taken-for-granted understandings and intuitions of national society and politics
which have become second nature.” (Beck, 2006, p. 101)
The main focus of this “conflict-laden dialectic of cosmopolitanization
and anti-cosmopolitanization” (Beck, 2006, p. 102) resides in the issue of
migration. In effect, for Beck, “migration will become the key political theme
and a matter of survival for a Europe open to the world” (Beck, 2006, p. 109),
because ultimately, migration makes possible the cosmopolitan imagination, by
narrowing the distances and increasing the awareness of interdependence. In
this setting, one of the “crucial prerequisites [of a cosmopolitan approach] is
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111

learning to see with the eyes of the respective other, in our context: looking at
migration through the migrant’s eyes” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014, p. 153).
In a similar vein, Jürgen Habermas, in discussing the criteria for
evaluating the justification of the notion of universal obligations that transcend
the borders of nation-states concerning migration, asserts that “the moral point
of view obligates us to assess this problem impartially, and thus not only from
the one-sided perspective of an inhabitant of an affluent region but also from the
perspective of immigrants who are seeking their well-being there” (Habermas,
1996, p. 511). This condition does not appear, to Habermas, hopelessly remote
from actual practice: on the contrary, in fact, he deems the cosmopolitan
condition itself to be within reach: “Even if we still have a long way to go
before fully achieving it, the cosmopolitan condition is no longer merely a
mirage. State citizenship and world citizenship form a continuum whose
contours, at least, are already becoming visible.” (Habermas, 1996, p. 515)
However, for David Miller, such arguments lack a certain condition of
determinacy: in his view, even in the morally straightforward case of refugees
(who have anyway a stronger argument for immigration than economic
migrants), it is not very clear what particular obligation states have: “Refugees
have very strong claims to be admitted somewhere, based on their human rights,
but may not have strong claims against this particular state” (Miller, 2015, p. 403).
Similarly, this focus on criteria of inclusion and exclusion is a central part
of most reputable definitions of populism. A constant part of populist
movements and populist rhetoric is precisely a sharp polarization, namely the
opposition between the people and the elites, or the people vs a certain
antagonistic notion of ‘the other’. For Nadia Urbinati, two essential aspects of
populism are precisely polarization and contestation of representative
institutions. “Polarization as a simplification of social pluralism into two broad
factions – the popolo and the grandi – was since its inception the main character
of populism, its Roman feature.” (Urbinati, 2014, p. 146) Defining the people
becomes, in this sense, the very central rhetorical stake of populism, with an
intensity that distinguishes it from alternative political ideologies and styles
(Canovan, 2005). As such, populism is a radical theory of democracy’s domain,
one that insists on an exclusionary framework for defining it, centered on its
polarization mechanisms.
There are, with respect to democracy’s domain, two important reasons for
the prevalence of the dichotomy populism-cosmopolitanism in the recent years.
One is, as mentioned above, that much of the political discourse of populist
parties and movements is focused, especially in Western Europe and the US, on
the promise of reigning in immigration. As such, these movements put forth
versions of nativist and autochthonist politics in which the promise of a racially
and ethnically homogeneous nation is defended against the groups that are
perceived as essentially different and intruders. Cosmopolitans, by contrast,
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usually relativize the national bonds and construe a vision of a global community
of fate that endows upon all of us both rights and responsibilities that traverse
the historically contingent political and physical boundaries of the nation-states.
The second reason is that, in many ways, both cosmopolitanism and
populism are construed as theories of political membership, where the matter of
inclusion and exclusion of rightful members and nonmembers is paramount. In
other words, their core normative principles and political positions are seen as
ultimately boiling down to their suggested criteria of legitimate inclusion.
Whereas populists insist that such criteria should be narrowly, jealously guarded
in order to preserve the homogeneity and primacy of ‘the people’ seen in a
sharply polarized opposition to the elites, cosmopolitans adopt a variety of
positions that delineate the notion of a dual membership, one defined by the
states and one defined as universal; furthermore, typically cosmopolitans may
see the latter as normatively more relevant and as potential ground for judging
the legitimacy and justice of the otherwise historically contingent limits of the
former type of citizenship – defined by nation-states.

Democracy and Its Domain

In a sense, many of the recent innovations in democratic political theory

were focused on the question of democracy’s domain, expanding it, further
refining the inclusion criteria, questioning and challenging the existing ones,
etc. For instance, much of the corpus of theories of democratic deliberation and
deliberative democracy are, in their core normative concern, theories of
democratic inclusion, that is, theories of the proper meaning of democracy’s
domain (Habermas, 1998). Should the relevant inclusion criteria be ones based
on aggregations of given, existing interests and preferences – or rather, as
proponents of deliberative democracy prefer, should these criteria be instead
based on standards of rational justification? (Benhabib, 1996; Bohman & Rehg,
1997) Admission to the relevant, legitimate, reasonable pool of reasons and
interests is, in this deliberative democracy perspective, the crucial normative
concern of democratic inclusion. At the same time, most controversies about the
deliberation standards within deliberative democratic theories revolve around
the claims that such standards are barriers for actual inclusion and participation,
and that in setting the admissibility criterion so high it is precisely the members
of the marginal communities and minorities that are de facto excluded from the
justificatory project, as they are less able or willing to translate their vernacular
claims into the analytical, public reason-oriented vocabulary of the theories of
deliberative democracy (Honig, 2007; Pârvu, 2009).
Elsewhere, theories of democratic recognition insist on the relevance of
struggles for recognition in challenging the dominant framing assumptions of
POPULISM, COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
113

liberal democracy. Whereas the latter asserts formal and neutral criteria for
democratic inclusion, the former put forth the notion that formerly marginal or
excluded groups have now a central role in reclaiming their political identity as
well as in contributing to the collective political identity of the political community.
It is not simply a matter of challenging the formal criteria of political
membership – but also, on a deeper level, the claim for a right to define the
central political identity (as well as the formal membership criteria) of the wider
polis – by including in that (now, plural) identity, the new types of political
identity that were at the same time challenging the traditional political terms. As
such, the politics of recognition may aim to alter the formal, legal policies and
mechanisms of inclusion – for instance, though affirmative action policies; but the
wider stakes of this perspective reside in the capacity to transform the vocabularies
of political identity and membership, as these have been articulated through the
demands for recognition (and claims against misrecognition).
Distinct from the claims for redistribution that informed the main
political cleavages of the post-war social-democracy in Europe, the claims for
recognition are less concerned with class, social and economic regulation and
taxation policy; rather, these are focused on the importance of cultural
recognition: in the word of Axel Honneth, “a great many contemporary social
movements can only be properly understood from a normative point of view if
their motivating demands are interpreted along the lines of a ‘politics of
identity’ – a demand for the cultural recognition of their collective identity”
(Fraser & Honneth, 2003, p. 111).
Difference and identity are the key terms of the politics of recognition –
and they can be read, I claim, fundamentally as claims for revising the criteria
of membership – in either symbolic or formal terms – of the relevant political
community. As such, they are part of the larger, ongoing debate on democracy’s
domain, as defined by Dahl.
Recent debates on the nature and limits of political representation – and
the oft-mentioned contrast between participation and political representation
that is mobilized within more radical theories and social movements – also
focus especially on matters of inclusion. In a sense, the crucial questions in
many recent studies on political representation – such as Andrew Rehfeld’s The
Concept of Constituency (Rehfeld, 2005) take as their primary normative task
that of re-defining the key notions of constituency, delegation, or accountability –
in order to make the resulting representative arrangements more inclusive. The
widening literature on ‘mini-publics’ as ‘mini-populus’ (Goodin & Dryzek,
2006; Niemeyer, 2011) similarly debates the statistical relevance for large-scale
deliberative democracy from small-scale experiments where controlled
sampling and notions of representativity operate as an indirect mechanism of
democratic inclusion.
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As a last example, the burgeoning literature on the cosmopolitan moral

and political contingency of borders – a literature that has all the more relevance
in the wake of the migratory crises in the Middle East and in Europe over the
last years, translates a substantial part of its normative concerns as ultimately
boiling down to a problem of inclusion. Arash Abizadeh, for instance, writes
that “[a]nyone who accepts a genuinely democratic theory of political
legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral
domestic right to control and close the state’s boundaries, whether boundaries in
the civic sense (which regulate membership) or in the territorial sense (which
regulate movement)” (Abizadeh, 2008, p. 38). Furthermore, he insists that “only
a recognition that the demos is in principle unbounded can yield a coherent
theory of democratic legitimacy” (Abizadeh, 2012, p. 868). His argument is that
political borders and physical frontiers – which limit not only the political
access to membership in a community, but also physical access – cannot be
legitimate insofar as they are justified only to the existing members of that
political community. While the moral premise of the argument is similar to the
one put forth by Habermas and Beck above, Abizadeh pushed the argument to it
radical political conclusions. In this sense, he claims, “applying the democratic
principle of legitimacy […] requires that political power be legitimized to all
subjected to it, to the constitution of political boundaries – which always subject
both insiders and outsiders”, making thus the case for the political inclusion of
the foreigners and immigrants that are coerced by the very existence of the
borders9 (Abizadeh, 2012, p. 868).
The premise of political theorists pressing for greater inclusion – based
on deliberation, recognition, or other grounds – is that inclusion of previously
excluded groups and identities is a key condition for enhancing the democratic
credentials of the political community. The major problem of contemporary
democracies, such theories assume, is that they are not inclusive enough. Each
of these theories identifies a certain constituency – that for social, historical or
cultural reasons was not fully participant into the democratic community to the
extent to which it was justified, and suggests principles of membership that
rectify such lack.
Similarly, many of the contemporary studied of populism focus on its
exclusionary dimension – the fact that populist movements insist in positing
‘the people’ vs the elites, or the immigrants, or against specific minorities,
singled out as not really belonging to the core – authentic – body of the people
(Gherghina, Mişcoiu, & Soare, 2013). In other words, these studies indirectly
treat populism as pertaining mainly to the question of democracy’s domain, that
is, to the problems related to citizenship, race, immigration, gender, age,
education, etc. Populism, in this understanding, misconstrues such criteria for

9
For a rebuttal, see (David Miller, 2010).
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115

inclusion and hence represents a pathological form of politics (Taggart, 2002):

much of the populists’ appeal consists in delineating the ‘true’ Americans,
Finns, Romanians, etc. They invoke a certain heartland (Taggart, 2000) that is
not only a mythical place of geographical purity, but also the promise of cultural
and ethnic homogeneity.

Political Agency and the Scope of Politics

The putative sharp opposition between populism and cosmopolitanism

rests, in an important sense, on simplified notions of both populism and
cosmopolitanism, namely notions that predominantly consist in answers to the
problem of democracy’s domain. When it comes to visions of political
membership, and their respective criteria for legitimate inclusion and exclusion,
populism and cosmopolitanism are indeed in conflict. Yet, besides this
dimension, both terms denote also theories of political agency.
Indeed, the second fundamental element of populism, besides sharp
polarization between the elites and the people, is a radical simplification of the
social and political space. This simplification goes beyond the polarization, that
is in itself a form of simplification. Rather, it is a matter of collective agency,
and builds a radical conception of it. It is, for instance, the case whenever
populist discourses include the promise to ‘solve corruption in 6 months’ or, in
the case of migration, ‘we’re going to build a wall and we’re going to stop it’.
Trump’s supporters are not only decried for their polarized and racialized view
of the meaning of being ‘an American’, but also for the boisterous insistence, at
Trump’s rallies, on chanting “Build the wall!”. As such, this is a typical promise
of recovering collective agency, a promise amplified precisely by the
incoherence or implausibility of the concrete proposal. Even if building the wall
is deemed as useless and counterproductive by experts, for this very reason it
serves as the ultimate proof of Trump’s capacity to restore political agency for
his followers. Similarly, while Brexit was assessed by a host of economic
experts as leading to major financial and economic troubles, it served as a
prefect occasion of affirming, precisely because opposed by experts, the
capacity for political agency of the voters.
For Mudde, populism has at its core the notion that politics should be an
unmediated expression of the people’s volonté générale (Mudde, 2004). My
point is wider, however. It rests on an elaboration of Dahl’s notion of
democracy’s scope, which refers to the range of issues that a group, or demos, is
capable to decide upon.
Whereas on democracy’s domain, populism and cosmopolitanism
develop visions of political inclusion that are polar opposites, especially on
topics such as migration, the same is not necessarily valid on the matter of
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democracy’ scope. Here both populism and cosmopolitanism develop notions of

political agency that may or may not be at odds with each other, and may only
differ in terms of scale, not scope. That means that where populism promises
the figure of a radical political agency at a nation-state level, cosmopolitans
tend to offer a similarly radical view of political agency, only on a much
broader scale, typically focused on the EU (Habermas) or other forms of
cosmopolitan democratic institutions (Koenig-Archibugi, 2011; List & Koenig-
Archibugi, 2010).
Indeed, in a recent interview in the wake of Brexit, Habermas has
continued to call for a “transnationalization of democracy” as the proper
response for the purpose, in “a highly inter-dependent global society, of
offsetting the loss of control that citizens feel and complain about and, indeed,
that has happened”.10 Along with Beck, Habermas thinks that the return to the
nation-state level in order to recover political agency cannot be a solution
anymore, precisely for the reasons related to the prevalence of globalized
markets. In this context, collective political agency can only be conceivable at a
supranational level, and in the European case, through even further political
integration. In order to be effective, such an integration should be eminently
political and transnational, and not focused on ‘governance’ or technocratic
regulation (Habermas, 2015).
There is no polar opposition, therefore, between the populist promise of a
massive simplification of politics through the critique of representative institutions,
impatience with the bureaucratic and procedural forms and reification of the
nation-state as site of predilection for making decisions, and cosmopolitans’
vision of a transnational democracy. Despite all the manifest differences
between these two clusters of political visions, they share an underlying notion
of rescuing a radical form of collective political agency from the current
impasse. The recent economic, financial and migratory crises have put forth
eminently opposing answers from the two distinct families, but the antagonism
resides more in their antithetical constructions of political membership and less
on their similarly ambitious perspectives on political agency.

Conclusion

The idea that populism and cosmopolitanism are the two polar opposite
elements of an emerging political cleavage is a promising idea and one that
already structures much of the theoretical premises of recent literature. Yet upon
closer inspection, the opposition is shown to rely mostly on their antagonistic

10
Core Europe To The Rescue: A Conversation With Jürgen Habermas about Brexit and the EU
Crisis. 2016. Retrieved from https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/07/core-europe-to-the-rescue/
POPULISM, COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
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construction of criteria for political membership and entitlement (Dahl’s notion

of democracy’s domain) and much less on their not so dissimilar notion of
scope, or agency. While they project notions of agency at inherently different
scales (national vs supranational), when it comes to agency both populism and
cosmopolitanism tend to be rather alternating at the same end of a political
cleavage whose opposite term is still to be defined.

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