The Politics of Europe’s Panic – A Conversation with Francesco Trupia

The CEU Democracy Institute’s annual conference, with the title Imaginary Exhaustion? asked to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion, and how we might rebuild our collective imagination to shape more hopeful democratic futures. The panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety had three guests: Kristijan Fidanovski, Attila Melegh and  Kasia Narkowicz. They unpacked the genealogies and present-day legacies of the “demography as destiny” mantra and examined how manufactured fear corrodes democratic imaginaries from within. In our podcast, Francesco Trupia explained the logic behind this panel.  Demography has become an extremely important watchword in today’s political debate. (…) The idea was to have this conversation on how migration is shaping political debate in Europe, where we have a crisis of liberal democracy. The panel revealed the tension between the overload of data and the overconfidence in narratives. On one hand, demographers and statisticians such as Kristijan Fidanovski reveal the demographic decline, ageing societies, and migration flows. On the other hand, as Attila Melegh, Kasia Narkowicz or Francesco Trupia argue, we witness a certain fascination with  narratives, often which end in claims about civilizational survival, cultural replacement, or other statements that use pathos instead of reason. The solution to solve this tension, lies in intersectionality. As Francesco Trupia stated for Review of Democracy, “intersectionality and interdisciplinarity (…) can really help us unravel this data (…) and perhaps to not fall into the trap of identity politics, which sometimes uses data in order to double down on certain people and to pursue certain vested interest by manipulating this data.” The misleading interpretations could also be a part of this problem. Our conversation expands on his previous Review for Democracy podcast with Marina Simakova, where they discuss how Gramsci’s ideas were co-opted by the contemporary far-right. In our episode,  Francesco Trupia, expands this argument and gives the example of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who provide a mimicry interpretation of Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. “The far-right actors and those who are supporting the concept of remigration, for instance, are openly using leftist and Marxist philosophers to express their ideas.” Then, our conversation moves to his research. Based on his fieldwork, Francesco Trupia argues that the experiences of minority could provide us with a different lens on democracy that majoritarian perspectives systematically miss. Francesco Trupia is a postdoctoral researcher at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest and Adjunct at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. His research focuses on the intersections of democracy, memory politics and minority groups in Southeast and Eastern Europe. The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Lilit Hakobyan  edited the audio file. Photo: Daniel Vegel / CEU Democracy Institute