ABSTRACT
Introduction The central concept of populism is based on the assertion that we should place our trust in the common sense of the ordinary people to find solutions to complicated problems. Mudde (2007) explains populism as
an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people versus the corrupt elite, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volente general (general will) of the people
(2007: 543)
while for Betz (1998) and Eatwell (2000) the main belief behind populism is the idea of measuring social value in relation to individual social contribution. In other words, populism rejects the established system and supports the idea of the many (people) (see the Introduction chapter). The definition of populism adopted for the purposes of this chapter is based on Albertazzi and McDonnell’s (2007) approach, where populism is: ‘an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogenous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice’ (2007: 3). The populist discourse captured in this chapter focuses on the discourse of the ‘others’ by inter alia political parties, organisations and individuals (bloggers) that together construct the Counter-Jihad Movement (CJM). More specifically, in the case of the CJM, the ‘people’ is perceived as a homo genous and prominently defined group with ethnic and cultural characteristics, while ‘others’ are Islam and Muslims. In other words, the groups that line up to the CJM are unified by the belief that Islam and Muslims are posing a fundamental threat to the Western world. This is being supported by Huntington’s (1993, 1996) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ thesis, which was first published in an article in Foreign Affairs and later as a book. Huntington argued that, after
the end of the Cold War, Islam would become the biggest obstacle to the Western domination of the world and that war will result from the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions. In order to more extensively understand the construction of the CJM and the reason it has managed to represent such a variety of actors, we turn to Laclau’s (2005a) work on populism and hegemony. In his work Laclau underlines that populism arises from political and social demands, which are addressed by an actor that manages to support and argue in favour of these demands and where ‘the people’ is not just an ‘ideological expression’, but rather a ‘real relation between social agents’ that establishes the unanimity of the group (2005a: 73). Laclau’s (2005a) research focuses on criss-crossing the link between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, where ‘particular’ refers to the actors/social groups and ‘universal’ is the understanding that the ‘particulars’ constitute more than simply the environment they operate within. ‘Hegemony’ for Laclau (2001) is ‘the type of political relation by which a particularity assumes the representation of an (impossible) universality entirely incommensurable with it’ and therefore the hegemonic link ‘presupposes a constitutive asymmetry between universality and particularity’ (2001: 5). In the case of the CJM, the discourse of the movement demonstrates a populist tendency through the ‘anti-Islamisation’ rhetoric (the ‘othering’ of Muslims) and appeals to the West (‘the people’). As extensively analysed in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (2005), Laclau underlines that popular discourses divide the social space:
[T]here is no emergence of a popular subjectivity without the creation of an internal frontier. The equivalences are only such in terms of a lack pervading them all, and this requires the identification of the source of social negativity. Equivalential popular discourses divide, in this way, the social into two camps: power and the underdog.
