The populist nostalgia of Hobbesian security

One effect of the medial mainstreaming of extreme positions is the revival of authoritarianism as a political alternative to deliberative and representative democracy. Confronted with the ‘hexagon’ of existential threats communicated in conspiratorial narratives about Europe, sizable parts of the electorate turn to political forces promising stability. As Molder outlines in this volume, conspiracy theories support the spread of a culture of fear and thus can justify totalitarian or authoritarian policies. Strong imaginaries pretend to provide easy explanations when people feel threatened and insecure. Trapped in an eternal trade-off between freedom and security, Zygmunt Bauman argued, the pendulum has swung back to Hobbes in a ‘retrotopian’ longing for an external, heteronomous and coercive authority (Onnerfors, 2019). Such an external authority not only promises contractual security, but also a paradoxical release from the suffocating freedom of choice that has apparently dominated the previous (neo) liberal world order. As individual autonomy is thus readily surrendered to a new Leviathan, so too is the complexity of advanced rule of law as a means of mitigating different societal interests and safeguarding civil liberties happily abandoned. What this implies in concrete terms can be studied in real-time in Poland and Hungary, where the independence of the judiciary (and of academia) is being systematically dismantled by populist governments, putting them at odds with EU standards. On a subtler level, as Madroane illustrates in her chapter on Brexit, expert knowledge is being rejected in favour of simplistic decision-making processes that promise to channel the unmediated ‘will’ of the people, even concerning profoundly complex matters such as international trade and European integration. This push towards neo-authoritarianism feeds into the populist revival around the globe in which leaders such as Trump, Bolsanaro, Duterte, Orban, Erdogan, Putin and the like promise to act as strongmen of the people, undisturbed by checks and balances of expert opinion, economic realities, and scientific evidence.

As Krouwel and van Prooijen argued, there is a measurable correlation between populist Euroscepticism and conspiracy belief, both of which are inherently related in their rejection of traditional elites, democratic procedures that include checks and balances, and the representation of multiple interests in complex compromises. Bojovic demonstrated how conspiracy theories as ‘prescriptive narratives’ establish clear demarcations between ‘us - the people’ and ‘them - the conspiring elites’ and how they influence populist meaning-making and identity-formation alike. Bergmann’s chapter explored how populist parties and actors ‘have been able to by-pass the previously powerful gatekeepers of mainstream media, and instead bring their combative and polarizing political messages directly to the public’, undermining domestic democratic as well as supranational institutions such as the EU. In the case of Hungary, Langer demonstrated the use of conspiracy theories in the top-down consolidation of populist rule in a rhetoric of fear and enemy images. Molder and Jakovic highlighted how such a ‘culture of fear’ has become a factor in the international system, in which populist regimes engage in status and symbol politics through repeated disinformation and destabilization campaigns, undermining trust in the negotiated order of international politics. Concerning Greece, Tsotsou illustrated how conspiracy narratives in the media communicate populist narratives of victimisation in which domestic policy failures are blamed on international agency. ‘Eurovilification’ and ‘Eurofundamentalism’ are described by Blanusa et al. as two sides of the same coin of political trade-offs appealing to the divergent interests of different voter blocks.

Taken together, the affinity between conspiracist meaning-making and the populist style of politics is a stable factor influencing contemporary electoral behaviour and preferences and is probably the one that is the most difficult to disentangle. What is worse, as we argue in the final part of this concluding chapter, is that this relationship seems to promote a profound realignment of the spectrum of political preferences in a new and contradictory dystopian politics of fear with few avenues leading towards a more positive alternative future. First, however, we need to examine a complex tension related to the idea of Europe.