IAPSS Section - Democracy, Identity and Power

Democracy, identity and power. Behind the “veil of abstraction” enhanced by innumerable studies addressing them, these notions are cornerstones for understanding central features and challenges in contemporary politics. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy has produced a domino effect, waxing and expanding across the planet at a nimble rate, becoming the pivotal system of government adopted by states. At the beginning of the third millennium the widely-known political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the so called “victory of liberal democracy”, as most governments around the world started to uphold fundamental rights, more individuals were able to freely cast their votes, and civil society commenced to engage in dialogue with political actors. However, in the last five years liberal democracy has been gradually shattering by the thus termed “identity politics”. The massive waves of migration that reached Europe starting from 2015 raised a big challenge to the concept of national identity, propitiating the upsurge of populist and extreme nationalist movements. Moreover, the accentuating economic and social gap generated by globalization, the abuses of the “established elites”, among other phenomenon, have fuelled even more the populist discourse, challenging the traditional understanding of democracy, its practice and theory. Hence, what we observe today can be rather referred to as new nationalisms. The rise of the varieties of new nationalism and its implications on international politics requires posing some key questions in order to attain a more sophisticated level of understanding. What is new nationalism, who are the new nationalist leaders and what are the similarities and differences between the new nationalisms and its predecessors? How can we interpret and classify new nationalisms taking populism, authoritarianism and ethnicism into consideration together with new nationalism? Finally, what are the potential ramifications of new nationalism on political mobilization, electoral behavior, political systems as well as on global governance and international relations?