My interest with the concept populism began in 2003, after observing the similarities between the divisive political discourses the governments of Taiwan (Republic of China) and Venezuela were articulating. As I was living in Taiwan during that period, and keeping myself updated on the escalating tensions in Venezuela (before and after the failed April 2002 coup); this led me to investigate why the phenomenon of populism was thriving in two developing countries that are geographically apart, with different histories, cultures, attitudes and values.

To conduct a comparative analysis, with the intention to provide important insights into how popular-democratic ideology works in two diverse settings, seemed to be an uncharted territory. I realised that a comparative element looking for common logics in two apparently different empirical cases could be a contribution and enhance a better political awareness of contemporary populism. However, in order to take this beyond a conventional descriptive analysis, I had to find a theoretical method that could relate to both cases and describe these commonalities. I decided to enrol in a MA in Comparative Politics at the University of Nottingham where I started this qualitative research in my dissertation entitled ‘Populism in Taiwan’ – employing Laclau’s theoretical approach to populism. I felt that the theoretical argument the Taiwanese Prof. Hwang Kwang-Kuo (2003) proposed, which is based on the breakdown of Confucian hierarchy failed to provide the tools for explaining key elements like the dynamics of political articulation and how discursive practices succeed in mobilising sectors of the population that have felt antagonised and excluded for many years. Ernesto Laclau’s categories such as ‘logic of difference’ and ‘logic of equivalence’ offered a viewpoint to comprehend how pro-independence political forces crystallised a collective anti-Chinese frontier (i.e. the Kuomintang – KMT as invaders, suppressors, corrupters, supporters of unification, etc., mixed with threats from the Communist Mainland China) therefore effectively labelling ‘Them’ as the enemy of ‘Us’: the people of Taiwan.

As Laclau points out, equivalential popular discourses divide, in this way, the social (the people) into two camps: the powerful against the underdog. Therefore, we are no longer dealing with different (referring to the logic of difference) unfulfilled demands but a “fighting demand.” With ‘equivalences, popular subjectivity, dichotomic construction of the social around an internal frontier, we have all the structural features to define populism’, as Laclau details in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy.

Influenced by Laclau’s theoretical approach, I decided to continue my studies at a doctoral level in the Ideology Discourse Analysis (IDA) programme – known as the ‘Essex School’ Laclau founded in the early 1980s – where I received a fully funded ESRC scholarship. I met Ernesto shortly after his return from Venezuela, weeks before Chávez’s re-election in December 2006. He realised my relationship with Venezuela and showed interest in my claim that his theory explained the nature of populist practices in an Asian country. This developed into a series of discussions in his house in London, me describing the nature of populist politics in Taiwan, draft chapters of my PhD thesis contextualising the emergence and crystallisation of Chavism, analyses of the discourse both political camps articulated, and first-hand material gathered during my ethnographic fieldwork visits in Venezuela, e.g. concerning the Cuban healthcare programme named Barrio Adentro. As he was not my supervisor, Ernesto kindly offered to stand as an internal examiner for my PhD Viva. This in-depth research has been converted into my book Populism in Venezuela.

The theoretical category ‘dislocation’ is a lens that sheds valuable light on the operations that make populist practices effective. Laclau points out that ‘every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which both denies that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same time’. In other words, ‘Them’, which is the outside for Laclau, ‘threaten identities’, but they also provide the ‘foundation on which new identities are constituted’, as detailed in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. For example, the February 28, 1947 uprising of Taiwanese against the KMT, which resulted in a massacre of thousands of native Taiwanese, is a traumatic past event populists regularly used to mobilise grassroots supporters, demanding the realisation of a “true identity” the KMT authoritarian rule suppressed for many years. This also applies to Venezuela. On February 27, 1989, days after the implementation of neoliberal adjustments, the popular mass, the mob to some, protested. This event, known as the ‘Caracazo’ that involved five days of looting and violent unrest in major cities, was a clear sign of social desperation in a deeply dichotomised society. The number of casualties is thought to be 3,000. Again, this dislocatory event was instrumental for the rise of Chavismo as the “true” identity of Venezuela’s previously excluded population.

Another Laclauian category is ‘empty signifier’. The universal (or totality) identification embodying a plurality of demands in the equivalential chain requires an impossible object. Laclau notes that this ‘hegemonic identity becomes something of the order of an empty signifier, its own particularity embodying an unachievable fullness’. Laclau adds in On Populist Reason that this totality ‘cannot be eradicated but that, as a failed totality, it is a horizon and not a ground’. Phrased differently in Emancipations, ‘an empty signifier can, consequently, only emerge if there is a structural impossibility in signification as such, and only if this impossibility can signify itself as an interruption (subversion, distortion, etc.) of the structure of the sign’. In other words, an empty signifier (e.g. words, images, symbols) crystallises the populist collective will/horizon of particularities. For example, after the 2000 election of a pro-independence party in the presidency, the nationalist term ‘Taiwanese Consciousness’ (台灣意識) has become an abiding empty signifier, even though the “full” realisation of this identity is unachievable. Also, when the February 4, 1992 coup failed, Chávez’s Por ahora (For now), announced during a one-minute national ‘live’ media coverage speech to other military officers that they lay down their arms in other key positions in the country, which became an influential socio-political catchphrase. Por Ahora signified no surrender. The phrase became an ‘empty signifier’ that effectively totalised all their differences (e.g. miscellaneous demands). It was constructed by labelling the outside as evil: a repressive regime.

The opportunity to engage fully with Laclau’s theoretical approach to populism and constitute instances of populist politics in two dissimilar cases, has given me the framework to identify and uncover characteristics of this phenomenon. For example, terms Adam Morton presents in his post ‘What is this thing called passive revolution?’ and elsewhere, for example engaging Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘passive revolution’, gave me new useful tools to reassess the empirical material analysed in my book Populism in Venezuela. By mixing Ernesto Laclau’s theoretical categories with the Gramscian terms Adam Morton provides, I provide a theoretical alternative for assessing the extent to which a political project can be described as populist, which is now published in my article in Latin American Perspectives, ‘From Passive to Radical Revolution in Venezuela’s Populist Project’, available here.

Laclau’s theory of populism has played a critical role in my research. Without his theoretical insights and captivating character, I could not have expanded my initial observations of populist practices to this level. Beside his theoretical legacy and rich intellectual input outside academia, Prof. Laclau also contributed to the training and development of students and researchers from different parts of the world – thanks to the IDA programme he founded. His death is a great loss.

¡Muchas Gracias Profesor!

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