Populism in a Global Perspective: Who Needs Democracy?

The rise of populism in the “West” has prompted extensive academic research which often appears oblivious to populism’s historical origins and non-western genealogies. Focusing on populism as a threat to western democracies, much of the research on populism neglects variations and the different contexts within which populism operates in different world regions. In our seminar “Critically Engaging with Populism as a Global Phenomenon,” which we taught during the summer 2024 term for MA students enrolled in Global and European Studies at Leipzig University, we sought to offer broader insights into populism in a global perspective. We addressed populism by starting with the main scholarly debates in the literature, then focused in more detail on four cases, namely France, the Western Balkans, South Africa, and China.

In order to integrate the global perspective called for by this selection of cases, we had to broaden the scope and meaning of basic concepts – “democracy” turned into variations of liberal and “people’s” democracies, for example – but we also had to include authoritarian regimes. The prevalence of research on populism as right-wing populism required adjustment, not only to accommodate appeals for “leftist populist politics” as argued by Chantal Mouffe (Mouffe, 2018) and present-day examples of left-wing populism (such as the post-Great Recession parties Podemos, Syriza, and La France Insoumise), but also to incorporate historical examples, like the left-populist rhetoric surrounding the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China. Historicizing populism brought additional complexity to the concept, considering its links to fascism on the one hand and its socialist origins on the other. Despite all the puzzles and ambivalences we encountered, we left the classroom with the impression that our understanding of populism was deepened and that we had opened up new avenues for further engagement with the topic. In this article, we would therefore like to share some of our questions and reflections about historicizing populism through a global lens.