Across Europe, centre-left parties are a shadow of their former selves. This chapter argues for a voluntarist approach to understanding the left’s decline. It argues for the causal import of the dilution of the left’s traditional profile or “brand,” namely its shift to the centre on economic issues, the weakening of its class-based political appeals, and its growing association instead with ‘progressive’ positions on non-economic issues during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This transformation created a disjuncture between voters’ preferences on key issues and the policy options and political appeals offered by centre-left parties. The representation gap that emerged between centre-left parties and low-income, non-college-educated voters created an opportunity for other parties to capture such voters over time, particularly as new voters came into the system with very different views of what centre-left parties stood for. As a result, over the course of a generation right-populist parties replaced centre-left ones as the largest parties of low-income, non-college-educated voters in Western Europe.

Chapter 1 introduces the key research question of whether the European Court of Human Rights has the appropriate equipment to respond to authoritarian populism in its position of ultimate interpreter of the European Convention on Human Rights. It sets out the analytical and disciplinary framework, situates the project in a broader field of scholarship and summarizes the upcoming s.

Chapter 2 uses historical perspectives on the Court to argue there is a close nexus between the Court’s foundational role of protecting the right-based conditions the democratic process and the threat of authoritarian populism. However, while this role was conceived as protecting against existential threats to democracy (the ‘alarm bell’ against totalitarian threats), the question remains whether the Court’s interpretive equipment is apt to tackle insidious threats to democracy, such as authoritarian populism.

This chapter reads the Moroccan novelist and theorist Mohammed Berrada’s literary-critical memoir Mithla ṣayf lan yatakarrar (Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated, 1999). A former Souffles contributor, Berrada laments an Arabic in Summer that is recognizable as the emotionally potent, transregional Arabic that propelled the Moroccan avant-garde. Berrada’s memoir, which moves between Egypt and Morocco, ties this Arabic to the Egyptian president and charismatic Arab nationalist leader Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser’s 1956 Suez speech as the unrepeatable origin of anti-colonial, Arab revolution. In Summer, Arabic was once transregionally alive, but it is lost in the present. Summer makes the narrative of this loss – at once linguistic, political, historical, and emotional – the necessary task of the Arabic novel at the end of the twentieth century. Revisiting themes of gender and corrupted language, Summer expresses nostalgia for Nasser as a benevolent, Arab nationalist strongman and for the emotional experience of decolonization. In its theory of the Arabic novel after Arab nationalism, Berrada’s memoir imagines itself relaying the solitary voice of an author (who also reads transregional Arabic novels about the end of revolution) to his distant, equally isolated Arab reading publics.

Chapter 10 offers a summary of the structure, methodology, and findings of the book. It highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the investigation, in particular how a philosophically grounded argument can bear upon the reasoning of the Court while simultaneously addressing a pressing societal challenge.

This final chapter opens with the universal adoption of the principle of the nation’s right to self-determination, which, applied in the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, was meant to stabilize international relations and which turned the central tenet of nationalism into a cornerstone of international law. In a European continent purportedly divided into ethnoculturally defined nation-states, the culture of nationalism continued to be operative. Many post-1918 nation-states slid (partly because of an unresolved ambiguity between civic and ethnic definitions of the nation) from parliamentary and constitutional governance towards authoritarianism and dictatorships. Meanwhile, a new cultural medium emerged: cinema. This medium is surveyed to explain the remarkable survival of nationalism across the totalitarian dictatorships and devastating wars of the mid-century, and across the internationalist and anti-totalitarian recoil that dominated the post-1945 decades. It is suggested that this survival, and the renewed contemporary dominance of nationalism as an ideology, is due in large part to its ability to shift back and forth between anodyne and virulent states, latent and salient. The alternation between those states served to proclaim the nation’s charisma both as a merely cultural (unpolitical) feel-good factor and as a political imperative, a commanding, inspiring validator for belligerent heroism.

At first glance, Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) remains a marginal figure within US political discourse. However, this chapter argues that revisiting Kelsen is crucial if we are to understand present-day intellectual tendencies supportive of autocratic threats to US democracy. A neglected, yet pivotal, anti-Kelsenian moment proves decisive among influential right wing intellectuals, so-called ‘west coast’ Straussians based at California’s Claremont Institute, who enthusiastically supported Donald Trump and embraced his authoritarianism. The lawyer and Claremont affiliate John Eastman, for example, worked to prevent a peaceful transfer of power to then President-elect Joe Biden in 2020 to keep Trump in power. Trump’s Claremont Institute defenders have absorbed crucial facets of Leo Strauss’s critical rejoinder to Kelsen: Strauss’ longstanding anti-Kelsenianism has morphed into their subterranean anti-Kelsenianism. To validate this claim, the chapter revisits Strauss’ complicated theoretical dialogue with Kelsen, while also highlighting crucial moments in the arcane history of postwar American Straussianism. What is gained theoretically, and not just historically or politically, by doing so? The Claremont Institute’s apologetics for Trump corroborate Kelsen’s worries that attempts to revive natural law under contemporary conditions invite autocracy.

This chapter explores how Richard Hofstadter’s scholarly work on populism in American history – and his broader theory of populism as a “paranoid style” – was received by his historical contemporaries and how it continues to shape popular and academic perceptions of populism and the American radical right. Hofstadter argued that disparate movements in American history, from the nineteenth-century Populist Party to McCarthyism during the 1950s, were driven by “status anxiety” and a conspiratorial mindset characteristic of populism. In so doing, Hofstadter introduced concepts such as “status anxiety,” “paranoid style,” and “populism” into the popular lexicon, popularizing a Cold War liberal critique of radical political movements as irrational and misguided. While contemporaries such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset supported his views, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn criticized Hofstadter’s account of U.S. populism. By the late 1960s, Hofstadter himself moderated his stance, acknowledging the limitations of his psychosocial theory of populism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Hofstadter’s work, while offering valuable insights, has led to analytical blind spots in understanding the structural and ideological dynamics of the American radical right.

This epilogue explores the legacy of the idea of liberal democracy in twentieth century French thought and its impact on contemporary (liberal) democratic theory. After being pitted against “Caesarism” during the Second Empire, liberal democracy was redeployed to confront new adversaries: “totalitarianism” in the 1930s (Raymond Aron) and “populism” from the 1980s onward (Claude Lefort). In each of these periods, French liberals employed a two-pronged strategy: they criticized degenerate forms of democracy as corrupting popular sovereignty and manipulating public opinion. At the same time, beginning in the 1950s, French liberals redefined popular sovereignty as an abstraction to make it safe for liberal democracy, all the while championing a free public opinion as the best way to engage citizens in politics beyond elections. Today, democratic theorists in France (Pierre Rosanvallon) and elsewhere (Jürgen Habermas and Nadia Urbinati) continue to defend liberal democracy as the rule of public opinion.

This chapter examines how narratives of corruption are mobilized by two very different political actors in Latin America: marginalized rural farmers and free-market think tank elites. We show that, for each group, corruption is both a central element of political discourse and a tool for shaping state–society relations and advancing particular interests. Their narratives serve to define the boundaries of corruption, interpret the state, and drive and justify political action within changing historical contexts – for Colombian farmers, a state that has become newly consequential to their lives; and for right-wing think tank elites, a left turn in regional politics. The comparison demonstrates that while each group uses similar narratives, their different social positions and networks shape the actions they take in response: Farmers rely on clientelist networks to access the few state resources left to them by elite corruption, while elites engage in a hegemonic struggle against leftist populism. Paradoxically, even while sharing a strikingly similar understanding of corruption, each group condemns the practices of the other as corrupt. This analysis underscores the ubiquity of corruption as a strategic and moralizing tool in Latin American politics.

The rise of right-wing populism has provoked a variety of responses. This chapter engages with one such response: Chantal Mouffe’s ‘left populism’. Mouffe’s call for an anti-essentialist, agonistic politics that can shift away from the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism which underpins right-wing populism is welcome. And yet our concern is that it risks being trapped by its reification of the nation-state. It may also miss the international dimensions of right-wing populism, including how forms of relation between states and corporations figure in its rise and stabilisation. We explore an approach which does not locate politics primarily as a fight over control of the identity and institutions of the state, but which begins in transnational resistance and collective action. We take up Featherstone’s account of transnational solidarity to frame a study of resistance to the Adani conglomerate. In our argument, this can be understood as an example of collective action not reliant on pre-existing (national) identities. Drawing on Featherstone’s account of solidarity as a lens invites us to consider whether transnational practices which decentre the state may offer resources to tackle the international aspects of populism’s rise, and the company-state nexus central to right-wing populism.