The Comeback of Populism. Transatlantic Perspectives

This volume addresses what is arguably one of the hottest debates in recent years – the rise of right-wing populisms across the Western world in the 21st century – while at the same time framing it through one of its most obvious, but often least understood, consequence, which is the crisis of transatlanticism. The transatlantic project can be best described as the political and cultural imaginary that was actively developed by the United States and Europe in the post-war period of the 20th century and that led to the articulation of discourses of Europeanism, liberal and social democracy, and the investment in a set of ideals shared across the Atlantic, and that built on an already-existing posit of values, cultures and mutual influences. The last decade has made visible – sometimes in shocking ways – the progressive breakdown of this consensus by the rise of right-wing populisms and the resurgence of discourses of hegemonic or ethnic nationalism, retrotopias – to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term – that seek to recover (lost) heritages and identities. In Europe, these have been accompanied by the agitation of Eurosceptic sensibilities, successfully channelled, for example, in the Brexit crisis; more broadly, the populist turn is usually associated to the ascendancy of ‘unconventional’ political leaders like Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro, to name but a few. Despite this recent surge, the contributions to this volume help to locate the notion of populism within a prior and longer history, as well as examine the diverse ideological and political affiliations of other populisms (not always necessarily right-wing or authoritarian) and the nuances that can be observed in different geographical regions of the world