Roundtable on Populism and Perpetrator Studies: Introduction

Abstract

The last decade of the twentieth century was bookmarked by two works that captured important parts of its Zeitgeist. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama celebrated the ‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’, leading to nothing less than the ‘universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’, or in short: ‘the end of history as such’.1 The opposite bookend was Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s analysis of globalisation and its discontents in Empire, in which the very same multitude that sustain the oppressive forces of globalisation are also capable of subverting it, creating new democratic forms ‘that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.’2 Notwithstanding their wildly different political and philosophical outlooks, what these analyses had in common was a sense of optimism, cultivated in the Global North emerged victorious from the Cold War, that things were going to get better, that the worse was over. Globalised capitalism and dominant political liberalism in the North, exemplified in the Anglosphere by Clintonomics and New Labour’s Third Way, held sway during a decade marked by the ostensibly limitless possibilities for economic and democratic development offered by the rise of the Internet. In this context, even remembering past genocides acquired an optimistic flavour, with the consolidation of the Holocaust at the centre of memory culture in the Global North becoming a sign of cosmopolitan memory, stretching across national borders and uniting Europe and other parts of the world.3 Seen from the vantage point of the present, it is fair to say that those predictions have not aged particularly well, and that we are in a very different phase marked by the decline of the Anglo-American liberal order, the return of ethnonationalism, and the substantial weakening of democracy around the world. The rise of populist leaders promoting authoritarian agendas and their corrosive impact on the rule of law, the