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The two events of 2016 bound to have the
greatest repercussion in Europe in the near fu-
ture – British voters’ approval of Brexit in June
and the election of Donald Trump as president
of the United States in November – have much
in common. Both victories were fuelled by up-
swings of nationalist, exclusionary sentiment
bordering on xenophobia, nostalgia for a glori-
ous past that will never return and the rejection
of globalisation, a phenomenon that has tend-
ed to level inequalities throughout the world.
Both were also achieved by manipulating the
anxieties and fears of broad segments of the
public and disseminating falsehoods: in other
words, by means of the tactics of populism.
In Europe, at the same time and in step with
and bolstered by these two key events, there
has been a significant rise in support for right-
wing political parties that has gone from being
mere threat to a hard reality in Poland and
Hungary and has the imminent potential to
spread to other, more relevant countries. The
current attempts of these ultra-nationalist and
anti-European parties, some of which are not
new (the Austrian FPÖ having been founded in
1956, the French FN in 1972, the Danish DF and
the True Finns in 1995 and the Hungarian Jobbik
in 2003), to exploit the economic, security and
refugee crises in which Europe is currently mired
to woo greater numbers of militants and voters
could well have grave and lasting consequences
for the future.
The question is no longer whether to advo-
cate a faster or slower pace of European inte-
gration or specific common policies intended to
solve the challenges we face or even to imple-
ment one strategy or another that might possi-
bly mitigate the effects of globalisation. What is
now at stake is not the European Union per se
but democracy itself: the values and principles
on which our coexistence is based and the insti-
tutions and rules developed under the auspices
of democratic welfare states that have under-
pinned the progress this continent has achieved
since the Second World War.
Globalisation and protectionism
Globalisation is not a new phenomenon. The
geographic scope of commercial and political
relations has progressively expanded through-
out history, the regional focus of the Roman and
Han Empires eventually giving way to interre-
Populism and nationalism
versus Europeanism
José Enrique de Ayala