Ilana Hartikainen, one of HEPP's founding members, will be defending her doctoral dissertation on Friday 6 June, 2025. The defense will take place at 12.00 at the Kielikeskus Juhlasali (Fabianinkatu 26), and there will be coffee and refreshments served afterwards outside the hall. This is an event of the Horizon-funded CO3 project.
The title of her thesis is "Populist challenges to liberal democracy as an element of the mnemonic hegemony in Czechia and Slovakia". You can read the abstract below and eventually download the thesis through HELDA. Kevin Deegan-Krause of Wayne State University will serve as the opponent, and Emilia Palonen will be the custos.
We are holding two other public events connected to the dissertation - keep reading for more information about them!
Dr. Deegan-Krause will be presenting at the HEPP seminar on Monday 2 June; you can read more about his presentation here. This event will take place at 14.00-16.00 at Unioninkatu 37, Faculty Room (1066).
We are very happy to present a full-day interdisciplinary syposium on Czech and Slovak history and politics on Thursday 5 June, from 9.30-15.00. The speakers include Tim Haughton, Professor of Political Science at the University of Birmingham, local researchers whose research touches on Czechia and Slovakia, plus visitors from Charles University in Prague. You can see the full program here. This will be a hybrid event, so you can join through Teams here or at the link below.
This dissertation sheds light on the relationship between populism and liberal democracy by approaching both through a discursive lens. I conceptualize liberal democracy not as a set of practices and institutions, but rather as discursively constructed guiding imaginary, posed as a foil for non-democratic regimes for decades, that has hegemonic status. I then propose viewing it through the lens of collective memory by considering the given country’s experience with it in the past. Each of the articles here relies on a case study of one of an ideologically varied range of populist parties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, two countries with an intertwined history but with very different mnemonic (that is, memory-related) stances towards democracy. Liberalism and democratic humanism have been embedded in the hegemonic understanding of ‘Czechness’ since the 19th century, informing both the democratic First Republic in 1918-1938 and the post-communist Czechoslovak and eventually Czech states. Now, however, after years of disillusionment, numerous populist movements have contested this liberal democratic hegemony from a wide range of ideological positions. Democracy was never linked to the Slovak nation, and with no Slovak democratic past to fall back on, post-1993 Slovakia has witnessed both a series of autocratic-leaning leaders from ideologically varied populist parties, including a significant number of right-wing and far-right parties, several of which have found success at the parliamentary level. Together, the two provide a fascinating contrast. Through Czechia, this research can explore how populism makes counter-hegemonic claims to power; through Slovakia, it can explore hegemonic movements as they attempt to establish hegemony.
Two of the articles in this thesis explore the mnemonic dimension. One studies populist contestation of the hegemonic liberal democratic memory culture, and the other explores how populist mobilizations can, on the other hand, bolster liberal democracy through mnemonic articulations. The remaining three articles explore a variety of discursive repertoires that can constitute a threat to liberal democracy on an ontic level, specifically technocratic populism, tribalism, and racialized conspiracy theories. All of the articles rely on social media data, as social media is the space where people are most likely to encounter and interact with political parties and leaders in their everyday lives. All rely on a methodological foundation of Laclaudian discourse analysis, but each uses a different heuristic device within this overarching framework. Four of the articles use Facebook data from either the party leaders or the party pages in question, as Facebook remains the most popular social media network in the two countries, while the final book chapter uses material from Instagram to study visuality in populist movements.
Theoretically, this dissertation steps into two burgeoning discussions by pulling them together: the relationship between populism and democracy, and the nature and contestations of mnemonic hegemony. I argue that liberal democracy can be part of the mnemonic hegemony, if, for example, a current liberal democratic state has a positive mnemonic orientation towards a liberal democratic state in its past or if it celebrates figures or events linked with liberal democracy. I also approach populism discursively; I follow Laclau and Palonen in viewing populism as form rather than content, as a ‘mode of articulation’ that articulates an antagonistic frontier across society, which is then heightened by affect. I argue, in line with the discourse theoretical approach, that populism as such does not threaten liberal democracy, but that certain populism movements can threaten liberal democracy on an ontic level if they articulate it as part of their constitutive alterity. Returning to collective memory, populist movements – which are counter-hegemonic in nature – can threaten liberal democracy on a discursive level if they rely on rhetoric that attacks its position as a hegemonic imaginary by contesting hegemonic memories of it or the discursive elements linked with it. If collective memory forms a crucial part of liberal democracy as a hegemonic imaginary, studying mnemonic contestations by populist actors can provide more nuance on their stance towards democracy.
This event is co-funded by the CO3 project, which is funded by the European Commission through Horizon Europe. Any views expressed here only reflect the views of the speakers, not the position of the European Commission.