Jan-Werner Müller

Not everyone who criticises elites is a populist. Those who draw a lazy equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump fail to recognise that populists don’t stop at protesting against Wall Street or ‘globalism’. Rather, populists claim that they and they alone speak in the name of what they tend to call the ‘real people’ or the ‘silent majority’. This claim to a moral monopoly of representation has two consequences that are immediately deleterious for democracy.

Far from concentrating minds, Brexit has been treated as yet another distraction in an EU facing multiple threats of disintegration. At last autumn’s summit meetings, convened to address the refugee crisis, other member states made clear their view that dealing with the UK was like trying to manage a narcissistic child. Ten years ago, London might have had a different vision for Europe and been taken seriously, even rallied other member states. Now Britain is seen not just as inward-looking, but as selfish and sullen. Cameron has removed the UK from the project of determining the Union’s future as a whole.

Never before have the struggles among national elites been as visible to the public as they were in the early weeks of this summer, when Greece almost left – or was made to leave – the Eurozone. Never before has an assertion of national popular will, as expressed in the Greek referendum of 5 July, been flouted so thoroughly and so quickly by the enforcers of European economic orthodoxy. Never before have the flaws of the Eurozone been so clearly exposed. We can expect more Greek drama before too long: the real struggle over the Eurozone – and the EU more broadly – is just beginning.

There​ has been much hand-wringing, even a sense of political panic, since the European elections. ‘Anti-establishment’ parties now occupy – so it’s said – a third of the Parliament. But there is a world of difference between Ukip, which just wants to be done with meddling foreigners, and what in essence are anti-austerity, but not anti-European, parties such...

The word ‘party’ – as in ‘political party’ – is in bad odour across the West, though for different reasons in different places. In the United States, everyone from the president down seems to lament the polarisation of politics and the rise of partisanship. But then hostility to parties is nothing new in American history; ‘if I could not go to heaven but with a party,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘I would not go there at all.’ Europeans tend to be less in thrall to the ideals of the one indivisible nation. They worry about the opposite problem: that the parties are all the same.