The populist challenge to European Union legitimacy: Old wine in new bottles?

Abstract

The European Union's (EU's) legitimacy is currently under pressure from what is widely perceived as a populist challenge. Populists charge the EU as being undemocratic, unrepresentative, technocratic, and tied to the interests of the elite; as serving neither the will nor the interests of the people; and as simultaneously paying too little attention to the concerns of its member states while also being only timidly cosmopolitan. These claims have stimulated a debate among scholars in the social sciences on what populism is, and on the legitimacy of populists' claims. Scholars have often described populist stances as illiberal and antidemocratic (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2017; Urbinati, 2019a) and criticized them for their antipluralistic attitude (Galston, 2018). This paper aims to assess the normative and conceptual cogency of these diverse claims.

In this regard, we make three arguments. First, the critique of illiberalism and antidemocraticism does not target populists specifically, because some populists appeal to the principle of equality, solidarity and have a cosmopolitan picture of the international society. Second, a critique of the populist conception of international legitimacy should look not only at their claims on input legitimacy, but also at those on output legitimacy, and at the incoherence that characterizes their appeal to one or the other of their preferred theories of legitimacy—Rousseaueanian or Hobbesian. Finally, we suggest that what is inherently problematic in any populist claim on the EU's legitimacy, regardless of any other characterization is the way in which they conceive of the distinction between the elite and the people—a distinction that grounds their political position in international relations. We conclude that populism amounts to neither a normatively distinct approach for assessing EU's legitimacy, in terms of both input and output legitimacy, nor it is conceptually necessary to grasp internal diversities within political unions such as the EU, because the distinction between the people and the elite on which it is conceptually grounded often relies on a fallacy.

The article develops as follows. In Section 2 we contextualize our investigation within the scholarship on the EU's legitimacy and summarize how scholars have characterized populism by resorting to either thick or thin accounts. While the latter focus almost exclusively on the populist appeal to the distinction between the people and the elite, the former include illiberalism and antidemocraticism among the characteristics of populism. We then argue that developing a critique of populism by focusing on illiberalism and antidemocraticism is not distinctive of populism because, as we show in Section 3, the reality of populist movements is complex and variegated. In that section, we bring in examples from populists in Germany, Italy, and the UK to show that among many illiberal and antidemocratic positions, there are also many that show an interest in developing more democratic societies. The examples reported in this section will also be useful for a further argument we make in Section 4, where we show that associating the populist view of legitimacy to a solely input-oriented account is reductive. In fact, populists criticize the EU also with regard to output legitimacy, often accordingly to a Hobbesian picture of international relations, and not only via reference to a Rousseauean, input-oriented picture of politics. Still, both types of populist claims can be criticized when they either resort to a parochial understanding of Rousseau, or they are Hobbesian only when it suits them. Finally, in Section 5 we argue that even if populists were good Rousseaueans or good Hobbesians, their conception of legitimacy remains controversial because grounded on a conceptually problematic distinction between the people and the elite. Section 6 concludes.

To gain a better understanding of the populist challenge to EU legitimacy, one needs a clear understanding of the concepts of populism and legitimacy. Approaches to populism are not easy to pin down as they vary significantly in the literature (Mudde, 2017a; Müller, 2017; Stanley, 2008; Urbinati, 2017, 2019a; Espejo, 2017). One can broadly categorize these approaches as “thick” or “thin.” Müller's (2017, 3) canonical work uses a relatively thick account. He thinks populism has two constitutive components: (a) a critique of the elite and (b) a claim to represent a single, homogenous, and authentic people. An even thicker account is that of Urbinati (2019b), which juxtaposes populism to liberal democracy. When in power, populists exhibit authoritarian tendencies by circumventing democratic procedures and by showing contempt for political pluralism and the principle of legitimate opposition. As Urbinati puts it: “Populism in power is an ideological construct that depicts only one part of the people as legitimate” (Urbinati, 2019b, 120).

Other scholars provide thinner accounts of populism. Canovan (2004, 242), for instance, treats as populists those who claim to represent the rightful source of legitimate power: the people, whose interests and wishes have been ignored by self-interested politicians and politically correct intellectuals. Mudde (2004, 543, 2017a) treats populism as an ideology that considers society as consisting of two homogeneous and antagonistic groups—“the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”—and argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. Finally, for Laclau (2005) and Mouffe (2018), populism consists merely in “putting into question the institutional order by constructing an underdog as a historical agent.”¹

The difference between thick and thin approaches lies primarily in the constitutive role given to antipluralism (see Müller above) and antiliberalism (see Urbinati above) when defining populism. While one could share the normative preoccupations of Müller and Urbinati concerning antipluralist and antiliberal types of populism, one need not think that these normative concerns are intrinsic to populism (see Wolkenstein, 2015, 2019). Put differently, while these concerns are sound, they do not solely regard populist politics and, as we will see in Section 3, and they do not even regard all populist politics. In contrast to a thick definition, a thin account of populism has only two constitutive components: (a) it relies on an analytical distinction between the people and the elite and (b) it gives “the people” a positive normative appraisal versus “the elite.” Importantly, how the distinction between the people and the elite is drawn is peculiar to populism, as the account of the people is conceptually dependent on the account of the elite. This way of discriminating between the people and the elite distinguishes populism from mainstream democratic theory, as the latter can define the people independently from the elite.

In this paper, we define as populist every party or political entity that falls, at the very least, within the thin definition. This definition allows us to distinguish not just between populist and nonpopulist political discourses but also between normative assessments intrinsic to the thin conceptual core of populism and normative appraisals that focus more at somewhat peripheral and contingent characteristics of populism.

The sources of legitimacy are often distinguished into two types: input and output (Erman, 2016; Follesdal, 2006; Scharpf, 1999, 7–12). Political authority has input legitimacy only if it is the product of a particular procedure. It is ultimately the qualities of the decision-making procedure that render it a legitimate one. What precisely are these qualities? Classic political thinkers as different as Locke and Rousseau shared the view that a state is legitimate only if it comes about with the consent of those subject to its authority (Christiano, 1996, 2010; Estlund, 2007, 119; Pettit, 2012). There are ongoing debates among political theorists about whether such consent needs to be given by every person individually or can take some form of collective authorization and about the conditions under which consent is genuine rather than compelled and manufactured (Rawls, 2005; Simmons, 2016). What is widely agreed, however, is that consent is necessary for the autonomy characteristic of self-government (Peter, 2017). Democratic decision-making, in particular, is seen as the institutional embodiment of such collective self-government. Hence, as Schmidt (2012) succinctly puts it “input legitimacy represents the exercise of collective self-governing ‘by the people’ so as to ensure political authorities' responsiveness to peoples' preferences, as shaped through political debate in a common public space and political competition in political institutions that ensure officials' accountability via general elections.” Thus, if input legitimacy depends on the people having the right to govern themselves democratically, then populist challenges based on input legitimacy need to provide us with both an account of who the people are and of how the EU foils their will.

Output legitimacy, on the other hand, is the status a political authority enjoys when it successfully performs according to substantive standards. Again, here there is a debate among scholars, in this case as to what these standards should be (Peter, 2017). Some argue that output legitimacy depends solely on the delivery of particular goods such as security, prosperity, or status (Hobbes, 1994). In contrast, others emphasize that this list should not only be longer and include health and education but also include the liberties and equal opportunities required to access these goods equitably (Rawls, 2005; Sen, 2011). To enjoy output legitimacy, democratic decision-making, according to this approach, needs to be solely assessed based on its record in providing these goods and delivering them justly. According to this conception of legitimacy “output legitimacy describes the acceptance of the coercive powers of political authorities governing ‘for the people’ so long as their exercise is seen to serve the common good of the polity and is constrained by the norms of the community” (Schmidt, 2012; 2013). Hence, if output legitimacy is the product of the performance of political institutions measured by substantive standards, then populists need to provide us with their preferred account of those standards and assess EU institutions based on such standards. In the next two sections, we examine whether the populist critique of EU relies exclusively on an illiberal and input-oriented understanding of legitimacy.

The first terrain of contestation with the scholarship on populism regards the alleged antidemocratic and illiberal character of populists. In fact, many scholars have included illiberalism and antidemocraticism among the core characteristics of populism. In what follows, we argue that there exist versions of populism that do not give in to illiberal or antidemocratic postures and, consequently, a critique of populism grounded on these traits can be appropriate in some cases but does not target the whole phenomenon of populism. To argue so, we look at how populists develop their criticism towards the EU, by examining their stances in three European countries—Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom²—and show that they are not necessarily illiberal or antidemocratic. These examples also provide us with the grounds for a second point of confrontation with the scholarship on populism, namely that populists are not only preoccupied with input legitimacy, but rather put forward stances that concern the EU's output legitimacy.

Brexit was only the tip of the iceberg, as stances of dissatisfaction toward the EU have widely spread in recent years, including explicit calls to leave the union. At the dawn of his political career, Beppe Grillo—the founder of the Five Stars Movement (5SM) in Italy—famously stated to the press that the main topic on the political agenda should be to figure out a way to get rid of the euro as soon as possible.³ It comes as no surprise that Nigel Farage—the leader of the UK Independence Party—happily welcomed the 5SM as comrades. An alliance of the same sort occurred in 2014 between Italy's Lega Nord and Marine Le Pen's Front National, as they both shared the plan of abandoning the European currency and restoring “monetary sovereignty.”

In more recent times, many of those who used to call for an exit from the EU have turned their radical positions into stances of internal critique: we want to change Europe, they say, not to destroy it. Ambivalently enough, the German populist party AfD in the European Parliament has portrayed Nigel Farage as the one who has demonstrated that it is possible to reform an antidemocratic institution such as the EU.⁴ Farage indeed defined “the whole European project” as “not just undemocratic” but “anti-democratic”⁵ and a “prison of nations.”⁶ The 5SM, especially in its current configuration guided by Giuseppe Conte, has deeply changed its political agenda and language when it comes to international politics. For example, in an interview on the war in Ukraine, Conte has claimed that the EU is called to intervene, in order to look for a political solution that⁷.

While the narratives aiming to call into question the EU's legitimacy greatly vary with respect to which member state, and which party, they come from, they often manifest similarities in content. For example, the website opendemocracy.net draws similarities between movements such as the 5SM and Corbyn's Labour Party⁸ as they are both preoccupied with social solidarity and with reinforcing democratic participation.

Furthermore, the populist criticism toward the EU often emerges out of what they perceive as problems at the national level, such as immigration, economic decline, and so on, for which they blame the EU. It is worth noting, though, that some of the core programmatic points put forward by populist parties are compatible with the agenda of parties that we do not ascribe to the populist crew—see, for example, the institution of the basic income by the 5SM in Italy—a measure that got the favor of the Democratic Party and of other parties on the left side of the political spectrum.

The variety of the populist positions manifests not only in that they are not always illiberal and antidemocratic, but also in that their notion of legitimacy, which works as a normative leverage to criticize the EU, comprises both input and output aspects. Scholars on populism have remarked the former aspect but often overlooked the second. In fact, populists have typically resorted to the narrative of the elite versus the people to highlight the lack of democratic legitimacy of the EU: the elite, or the “Brussels bureaucrats,” populists claim, favor the interests of the bankers and the privileged and make decisions in compliance with an opaque system of alliances, without any consideration of the people's voice. For example, the AfD's members speak of “Klima-diktatur” to define the recent measures taken by the EU with regard to the environment⁹ and they similarly portray the Green Deal as an attack on societal freedom.¹⁰ Similarly, Farage declared that “we can be friends without being ruled by faceless bureaucrats.”¹¹ From the left-wing camp, the 5SM has attacked the European Central Bank, and Christine Lagarde in particular, for her positions on the coronavirus emergency in Italy, by claiming that once again the ECB embodies an obstacle, rather than a source of help, and that her declarations represent an “aggression” against the Italian state.¹²

To remedy these perceived injustices, some populists, such as AfD members, have invoked the idea of revoking the EU's centralized powers and returning to “an economic union based on shared interests, and consisting of sovereign, but loosely connected nation states.”¹³ Others have called for a European direct democracy so that the voice of the people can finally be represented and popular sovereignty achieved.¹⁴ Naturally, their definition of the people varies according to their political sympathies: “Historically, right-leaning populists have emphasized shared ethnicity and common descent, while left-leaning populists have often defined the people in class terms” (Galston, 2018, 37).

Yet, importantly, populists have attacked the EU's legitimacy with regard to its output aspects as well. One of their core claims is that the EU acts against the interests of some of its member states. For example, Italian populists have frequently argued that the EU wants to stifle their country's economic growth.¹⁵ In very similar terms, German populists have claimed the exact opposite. They portray themselves as victims of inequitable treatment on the part of the EU: for example, Maximilian Krah, member of the AfD and of the European Parliament, has recently claimed that Germany pays more than all the other member states.¹⁶ In the same vein, the AfD has denounced Mario Draghi's and, now, Christine Lagarde's “endless expropriation” of the German people.¹⁷ Others, more mildly, have claimed that the EU is providing only banal and ineffective responses to international crises, such as the war in Ukraine.¹⁸

In contrast to this picture, some populists have explicitly rejected any cosmopolitan idea of the EU and have rather defended a picture of the union in which states should defend their own interests. For example, the 5SM formed an alliance for the European elections in 2019 with four other parties¹⁹ centered on five programmatic issues that address both the input and the output aspects of the EU's legitimacy: direct democracy in Europe, the fight against bureaucracy, support for local production, anti-corruption, and a defense of national sovereignty.²⁰ Similarly, Matteo Salvini, the leader of Lega Nord, has insisted on the need to strengthen national sovereignty and to defend national identity²¹; in particular, the electoral program of MENL (Movement for a Europe of Nations and of Liberty) sees as its unifying trait “the opposition to any transfer of national sovereignty to supranational organisations and/or European institutions.”²²

The insistence on prioritizing national states is often accompanied by narratives that tend to define the people by their national identity, which, they claim, must be preserved. For example, Bernhard Zimniok, a member of the AfD and of the European Parliament, criticized President David Sassoli's request to remove the German flag from his bench in the European Parliament. Zimniok's response on Twitter was “Not with us! National pride is not a crime.”²³ In a similar tone, Michael Heaver, member of the European Parliament and of the Brexit Party, claimed that “Brexit will mean we can move forward as an independent, self-governing nation” and that he is “so proud of British people.”²⁴

The concern for the protection of national security, prosperity, and identity has often resulted in an anti-immigration attitude. Migrants, populists repeat, access the national welfare system without contributing to it via taxation; they are more competitive on the job market because they accept lower salaries, thereby replacing local workers; in addition, they contaminate local traditions by imposing their religious and cultural habits, which often result in a more pronounced tendency toward committing crimes and even terrorist attacks.²⁵ In a position typically coming from right-wing populists in particular, the EU is said to be culpable because it diminishes national sovereignty without compensating for the diminution by helping those countries that are geographically more exposed to uncontrolled migratory flows. In this vein, for example, Salvini has claimed that the coasts of Italy are the coasts of Europe and therefore Italy cannot be obliged by the EU to welcome people if the EU is not sharing the burdens of integrating the migrants.²⁶ The AfD delivers a narrative that depicts Germany itself as the victim of uncontrolled immigration, in contrast with the narratives spread by populists of Southern Europe (Arzheimer, 2015).²⁷ Yet still they agree with each other in pointing at mass migration as proof of the EU's incapacity to govern. However, not all criticism on the EU's performances has turned into an anticosmopolitan attitude. Rather, challenges to EU legitimacy from left-wing populist parties like Podemos and Syriza have highlighted the incomplete nature of Eurozone as a currency zone due to reluctance on the part of certain member-states to further EU integration and ceding national sovereignty (Varoufakis, 2017). These parties have also often put forward an inclusionary account of the people, especially with respect to immigration (Font et al., 2021).

In this section, we showed that reducing populists to a set of political movements homogeneously characterized by illiberal and antidemocratic traits, and mostly preoccupied only with repositioning the source of power in the hands of the people rather than in the hands of the elites, amounts to oversimplifying the phenomenon. Not recognizing so, we now show, runs three risks for a critique of populism. The first is to miss out the opportunity to broaden the critique of populists to their view of output legitimacy (Section 4). The second is to overlook that populists inconsistently appeal to liberal and illiberal, as well as to democratic and antidemocratic models of legitimacy (Section 4). The third is to overlook that a critique that targets the core of what populists claim regards the way in which they conceptualize the people as opposed to the elites (Section 5).

In this section, we would like to turn to what we take to be at the core of the populist challenge to the EU's legitimacy. After showing that populism is neither exclusively input nor output legitimacy oriented, we turn to what we take to plausibly be a distinct and primordial characteristic of populism. In this section we would like to examine whether the very distinction between the people and the elite, on which the populist understanding of legitimacy ultimately relies, is conceptually problematic, irrespective of its normative content.

We proceed with a conceptual assessment of populism by focusing on an account of populism that does not carry the additional normative baggage of undemocratic and illiberal conceptions of populism. Focusing on such an account, however, does not exonerate populism of critique. The very distinction between the people and the elite could be problematic for the following reasons. First, a society might be divided into more than just two groups possessing different types and degrees of social power rather than merely into the categories of the people and the elite. Second, the threshold for qualifying as belonging to one group as opposed to another might be poorly defined and identified or deliberately left open-ended. Third, not all members of either the elite or the people might possess the qualities ascribed to them by populists or these qualities might merely supervene others that have more or ultimate explanatory force or analytical value. Before we delve further into these three cases, we must add two points of clarification to the conceptual focus of this section: the first is an empirical one and the second conceptual. First, empirically speaking, one could object that all parties that invoke the distinction of the people versus the elite are also antipluralist or antiliberal or that they have at least some of the normative characteristics discussed earlier (see Section 3). A focus on the conceptual distinction between the people and the elite provides us with a conceptually coherent distinction, one could argue, but at the price of providing an empirically uninformed conception that is not particularly useful for analyzing what populists say or do.³⁰

Our response is twofold. First, empirically speaking, as we showed in Section 3, there are numerous political parties that invoke the distinction of the people versus the elite that have an anti-elitist and yet cosmopolitan stance on the EU, such as the Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn, in the United Kingdom; the SNP in Scotland; Podemos in Spain; and Syriza in Greece (Bernhard & Kriesi, 2019; Ingram, 2017, 656–58). Whatever their vices, these populist parties do not fail to recognize minority and individual rights or to acknowledge that the citizenry is not homogenous but divided along several dimensions. If this is true, then identifying populism with antipluralism fails to grasp the populism of such parties. The alternative is to claim that these parties are not populist even though they use the people-versus-elite distinction, which seems like a contradiction in terms given their own actual invocation of the distinction.³¹ Second, and relatedly, something like Occam's razor should be relevant to how we think about populism. For an actor to qualify as populist, it suffices, for analytical purposes, that they are for the people and anti-elite. If the distinction, however, between the people and the elite does not capture anything novel or unique but is merely another way to refer to distinct social, economic, or political classes, then it is conceptually redundant as a case of equivocation in the case of those parties.³²

This point of clarification enables us to get back to how populism could be intrinsically problematic conceptually and allows us to discuss the three conceptual problems mentioned at the beginning of this section in some detail. A populist who thinks that society is divided into two homogenous groups is committing a fallacy if and only if the two groups in question are not homogenous. For example, if not all members of the elite are corrupt, because some of them are virtuous, then the distinction between the virtuous people and the corrupt elite is false because of its commitment to an antecedent antipluralistic understanding of sociopolitical cleavages. The distinction is also obviously false if the people, or the elite, possess more than one quality in varying degrees and if some members of one group are wrongly assigned to the other group.

Nevertheless, is it correct to claim that all forms of the people-versus-elite distinction are necessarily conceptually problematic because society is not neatly divided into two homogenous groups? We think for two reasons that this is a premature conclusion. First, not all of those who treat the category of the people as homogenous are populists. For example, nationalists who treat a group as nationally homogenous are not necessarily populists. Hence, one could be an antipluralistic nationalist without being a populist.

Second, a populist could treat the distinction between the people and the elite as one that is compatible with treating one's “friends,” for example, as to some degree different and yet as members of the same category (e.g., all my “friends” are part of the 99% but not all of them are equally positioned in terms of income and wealth within that 99%, and they are not part of the top 1% [the elite]). A sophisticated version of populism, or in fact of any analogous political dichotomy, could aim to highlight the concentration of social and economic power in particular segments of society rather than claim that all those possessing such privileged social positions are equally corrupt. Populism is, in that sense, salvageable as an analytically useful abstraction if and only if it brackets differences within the categories of the people and the elite that do not undermine the analytical force of the distinction (O'Neill, 1996). Nevertheless, it need not be salvageable as a matter of conceptual necessity. We agree, therefore, with Wolkenstein (2015) and White and Ypi (2017) that the way populists “‘over-politicise’ the question of peoplehood” holds the risk of becoming “insensitive to the different ways claims are advanced in the public sphere.” Nevertheless, we do not think that all populist approaches run that risk, at least to the extent that social and economic power structures resemble an elite structure rather than one in which social and economic power is widely dispersed (see the debate between Mills 1956, Dahl, 1958, Bachrach & Baratz, 1962, Kaltwasser, 2014). However, even in this case, and in its most refined formulation, the distinction between the people and the elite is not the only, or arguably not the best, way to accurately conceptualize the concentration of different kinds of advantages and privileges among members of particular socioeconomic classes. The conceptual limits of populism are most evident in the case of the EU. On the one hand, those who want to motivate a statist conception of the EU are often portraying the peoples of Europe in national colors and hence downplaying the political differences within them. On the other hand, those who advocate a cosmopolitan picture of the EU are recurrently ignoring how a nascent European demos could be internally divided on the basis of conflicting economic interests (Bellamy and Lacey, 2018).

In this section, we have tried to buttress the claim that crucial to populism is the distinction between the people and the elite and the siding of oneself with the people. As the latter is a normative claim, what could be conceptually problematic in populism is how precisely one distinguishes the people and the elite and whether that distinction is the most appropriate one for accurately depicting social cleavages.

In this paper we have shown what is distinct and what is not about the populist challenge to the EU's legitimacy and questioned whether the scholarship on populism captures what is at the core of this challenge, as opposed to at its periphery. While the charge of illiberalism and antidemocraticism does not target populism distinctively, populists should be criticized regarding their conceptual distinction between the people and the elite, which grounds their understanding of the EU's input and output legitimacy. In addition, we showed that not all populists are nationalists, and not all are exclusively interested in input aspects of legitimacy. Drawing attention on the complexity of the populist panorama does not, however, undermine criticisms of populist conceptions of legitimacy. Instead, developing a critique in the terms suggested here nail populists down to the platitude of their claims. The populist challenge to the EU amounts to an inconsistent picture of EU's legitimacy that draws both from input and output accounts of legitimacy whereas the distinction between the people and elite, at its very core, is neither necessarily unique nor informative. If our analysis is correct, then it renders populism redundant as an alternative to statist and cosmopolitan approaches that also draw on input and output legitimacy claims, and the unilateral or multilateral picture of the EU that accompanies them. Populism is just old wine in new bottles, after all.