No Space to Hide: Do Nation-State Institutions Create Populist Publics?

The widely shared – and an increasingly popular – perception in most EU member-states is that these countries are national homelands of respective ethno-nations. This observation is indispensable for understanding recent rise of populism and surge of identity politics across the wider region. Arguably, the European Union membership has been by far and large a positive factor in taming expressions of nationalism, forging functioning sovereign, yet interdependent states, maintaining political unity and upholding European standards in a range of areas: from financial and economic discipline, to installing (and, in light of more recent challenges in Hungary and Poland, maintaining) independent political and judicial institutions, as well as ensuring respect for and supporting domestic minority communities’ cultural needs. Though some concerns resurface occasionally over the expressions of national populism and/or nativism in different member-states, political institutions overall are sufficiently aligned with expectations to ensure rule of law and separation of powers in member-states of the Union. Taking stock of contemporary debates on populism the paper sets out the comparative framework of analysis: It outlines implications for the long-term prospects of legitimacy, stability and accountability of democratic systems that emerge from the design of liberal democratic member states of the EU as states of and for the majority. The Paper sets the tableau of effects the institutional bias in favour of large groups has on representation of non-dominant opinions and groups who are (bound to remain) on the side-lines of politics. It provides an institutional account of the origins of populist political entrepreneurship in contemporary EU claiming that the state institutional design favouring the dominant, especially ethno-culturally, linguistically and religiously defined segment in national citizenry, creates the opportunity to capitalise national populist and/or nativist sentiment in publics and thus poses a potential threat to states’, region’s and EU’s stability