Professor Thanos Veremis warns of the dangers of populism

by Yukon Damov, First-year CERES MA student

Greek historian Thanos Veremis offered a diagnosis of the state of the contemporary Western world in a lecture delivered at the Munk School of Global Affairs on 23 March 2017 – and his view was not positive.

Rather than warning of external threats like Russia, terrorism, or climate change, Prof. Veremis focused on disintegration from within.

“We are undergoing a period of crisis in the Western world. Once again in our history, we have come to a dead end and look to the past for creativity,” said Veremis. “Furthermore, a self-indulgent populism casts an ominous shadow across our path.”

The lecture was sponsored by the Hellenic Heritage Foundation and the Hellenic Studies Program of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Professor Veremis is an eminent figure in Greek academia. He earned his Ph.D. at Trinity College, Oxford, and has been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard. He is professor emeritus of political history at the University of Athens and a founder of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).

“ELIAMEP, to me, is probably the best think-tank, not just in Greece, but in the Balkans,” said Prof. Robert Austin, coordinator of the CERES Hellenic Studies Program. “If you study Greece or if you study the Balkans and you haven’t encountered Professor Veremis’ work, then you’re reading the wrong books.” Greece: The Modern Sequel (with John Koliopoulos, 2002) and The Balkans: Construction and Deconstruction of States (2005) are just two of the titles to his name.

The scope of Veremis’ lecture was equal to the ambition of its title: “The West in Search of Its Identity in Three Simultaneous States of Mind: Pre-Modern, Modern, and Post-Modern.” We are, he said, in a “time-warp” occupying each state of mind. The theme of his lecture was the revival of past differences in present times, citing the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, when “myths of the past were revived by the Serbs and Croats to give meaning to a hapless strife between them.”

Nationalism is another renewable source of conflict, he said, as its extremist proponents vie for parliamentary power.

“Future peace is nevertheless dependent on the outcome of a clash between pre-modernity and its fundamentalist creeds, on the one hand, and modernist and post-modernist ideologies on the other,” continued Veremis, using Islamic terrorism and Jewish Zionism as examples of the former and the European Union (EU) for the latter.

The EU, as a symbol of post-modernism, stands for multiculturalism, decentralization of state powers, and “symbiotic rather than confrontational policies,” he said.

Prof. Veremis marked populism as the exacerbating factor undermining Western unity. As he defined it, populism is “a form of democracy that favours the ‘little man’, the man in the streets, the average person.” Because democracy is a system that relies on superior numbers of votes to achieve power, a populist panders to the people by “stroking their egos, their sense of self, and [their sense] of self-reliance.”

His explanation of populism contained within it a critique of mass democracy, whereby populism only increases division between the masses and the ruling elites, undermining the legitimacy of meritocracy. “Numerical superiority is certainly more desirable in elections than meritocracy,” he said. For Veremis, demagoguery – when politicians pander to, and exploit, the desires of the masses regardless of their value to society as a whole – is akin to populism.

Populism takes different forms in different regions, and the lecture returned often to the American variant, particularly in regard to liberal democracy. Thomas Jefferson was among a ruling class that “abdicated” its responsibility, Veremis said , in favour of the American farmer, “the paragon of American democracy.”

Veremis’ concern that politicians are unable to govern responsibility in the face of populism was directed primarily at the European context. As a tactic for gaining power, populism’s effects are limited, he argued. “The metastasis into the substance of politics, however, can prove deadly for democracy.”

The practical solution to the crisis, according to Veremis, is further EU integration. “The fate of our continent is not in our stars, but in the stars of the EU’s blue banner,” he said. He called for the establishment of a European finance ministry capable of streamlining national budgets and determining the size of the public sector.

He ended on a positive note: “Western civilization has been challenged by a death wish before. In spite of dire predictions it survived to this day. We are convinced that its wish for life will prevail once more.”