Pamela Ballinger’s Keynote and Jeremy Walton’s Comments: Insights from “Memory and Populism from the Margins”
Author: Laura Mafizzoli
As we begin the new year with renewed energy, we would like to enclose Pamela Ballinger’s (University of Michigan) keynote lecture, “Istria and the Borders of Populism: From Frontier Fascism to Anti-Nationalist Populism.” At the end of this post, we also include Jeremy Walton’s (University of Rijeka) written response and reflections on Pamela’s lecture, which he has kindly agreed to share. As advisory board members of our project, their contributions to Mempop’s inaugural conference, “Memory and Populism from the Margins,” held in Prague in December 2024, were invaluable. Pamela and Jeremy provided inspiring and thought-provoking insights into the relationship between memory and populism, drawing on their extensive knowledge of the Istrian context and the memory politics that have shaped the Julian March region (the border zone between Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy).
Pamela’s reflections engaged with Mempop’s overarching goal of challenging the prevailing assumptions that Central and Eastern Europe are sites of unprecedented resurgences of populism, illiberal nationalism, and increasing authoritarian forms of government. Drawing from her extensive research in the Julian March region, Pamela explored two pivotal historical episodes that significantly inform “Italy’s divided memory” and “animate contemporary forms of mnemonic populism (Kornelia Kończal)”. The first one, “Frontier Fascism”, is the period that coincided with Italy’s acquisition of these territories post-WWI, following the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. The second one, “The Transformative Events of 1943-1954” was when Italy first lost de facto and then de jure control over Istria and its territories in Dalmatia. Through her analysis of these two crucial historical moments, Pamela engages with Mempop’s call to question temporal framings that regard Central and Eastern European socialism merely as a post-socialist consequence and invites broader questions for all scholars researching memory and populism in Istria and beyond:
- Was Istrian regionalism, which arose after 1992 as an alternative or counter to exclusivist ethnonationalism and the instrumentalization of the past, possibly a form of anti-national populism? Was it an expression of grassroots populist sentiments emerging from ordinary people living in a transnational borderland periphery?
- How might we reconsider historical experiences of populism and their associated ideologies (e.g., fascism within state socialism), and what insights could such analyses contribute to our understanding of populism today?
In her reflections on a quote by Claudio Magris in his book Danube, which states: “Time is not a single train, moving in one direction at a constant speed; every so often it meets another train, coming in the opposite direction from the past, and for a short while, that past is with us by our side in our present”, Pamela also notes that this raises questions of “the time horizons of populist imaginings and their durability”. She asks:
- At what point does the past—or better, our imaginings of it—come alongside us and inform our present? Can we leverage this perspective to consider the kinds of temporal bricolage characterizing many populist movements, which scholars like Taggart have described as chameleon-like?
Jeremy Walton engaged with the questions raised in Pamela’s insightful lecture, touching upon several themes from her keynote. He discussed the relationship between populism and liberalism, irredentism, and the multiple temporal dimensions Pamela refers to as the “multiplicity of pasts.” These pasts coexist and are drawn upon by contemporary populist narratives, which are not solely rooted in 20th-century historical events, but also in imperial legacies.
We encourage you to listen to Pamela’s keynote lecture and read Jeremy’s response below, along with his reflections on the lecture, for a deeper understanding of these themes. We would like to express our gratitude to Pamela and Jeremy for their wonderful contributions to our conference!
Jeremy Walton (Photo: D. Kumermann)
Jeremy Walton’s Keynote Response
To begin…
First, let me thank both Johana for the invitation and the exceptional opportunity to share a conversation with all of you, and to Pamela for this immensely thought-provoking keynote. A caveat—these comments are disparate, perhaps fittingly, and will surely not do justice to the richness of Pam’s exposition. A second caveat—given our shared fascination with Istria and the Julian March, it is tempting to offer a response focusing on the textures and tribulations of this fascinating region, which is after all one of MEMPOP’s foci (and it’s a pity, again, that Laura Mafizzoli can’t be with us). But I’ll do my best not to narrow my vision to our common preoccupations. With these provisos in hand, then, I’d like to begin with a quote from the same author whom Pam invokes, and whose work happens to be one of my own passions, Claudio Magris. I’m pleased that Pam includes Magris in her essay, as I tend to think of his sensibility as the opposite of populism in every respect. Not that he’s elitist—quite the contrary. Rather he is anti-populist the sense that he cultivates a passion for divergent memories and subaltern histories, for both the contradictions and syntheses of the past. Fittingly, in The Danube, Magris offers an apt reflection on both populism and criticism of populism: “Standardized haughtiness towards the masses is a typically mass type of behaviour. Anyone who speaks of general stupidity must know that he is not immune, since even Homer occasionally nods…” Now, this is by no means the end of the story about populism, but I take it as a salutary caution to all of us, as we attempt to approach the memory politics that populism mobilizes. Haughtiness is a temptation in the face of the reductions and essences that populism trucks in—but it represents a political and intellectual foreclosure of its own.
Liberalism and populism
This brings me to the first, and most important theme, that I want to highlight in relation to Pam’s keynote: the relationship between liberalism and populism. My suspicion—or perhaps my conviction—is that most of us (and, as ever, what are the constituents of this ‘us’?) rely on default liberal positions and arguments as a response to populism. As Magris suggests, however, this default liberalism, with its characteristic haughtiness, is itself a mass phenomenon that is deeply entangled with the very mass culture that it inveighs against. In this sense—and I think that Pam would agree—populism can be understood as a constitutive.
Other of liberalism, the disavowed object through which liberalism itself achieves substance and self-understanding. Therefore, it is not surprising that the default image of populism is rightwing, despite noble attempts to theorize leftwing populism. To quote from Pam: “The pervasiveness of this language of pathology around populism reflects the frequent association of populism with right-wing movements, particularly in Europe. That said, critical theorists of populism, including Ernesto Laclau, have rejected this language of pathology…(yet) observers tend to present populism as existing in an inherently dialogic relationship with liberalism, e.g. a kind of necessary counter-part to liberalism.” This is perfectly stated, I think, and sets up a productive dynamic that MEMPOP is ideally situated to explore: the relationship between “actually existing” populism and populism as a liberal fantasy that demarcates the frontier between polite and intolerable politics.
A sidenote: there is a major discussion to be had here that I want to flag, without delving into deeply: if rightwing illiberalism seems almost definitionally populist at this point in history, what of leftwing illiberalism? The Cold War was defined by the conflict between illiberal leftism and ostensibly liberal republicanism, but one Fukuyamian effect of the aftermath of 1989 was to render liberal premises hegemonic among the left, at least for a time. That time now seems to be over. However, it remains difficult to conceptualize either redistribution-oriented leftwing socialism or recognition-oriented wokeism as “populist”. One reason for this, I suspect, has to do with the contrasting modes of historicity that define leftist and rightwing politics. This is a massive topic, so I can only touch on it briefly here, but I would still like to suggest that the sticky entanglement between the Right and populism is inseparable from the claims on the past that rightwing populists make, and that leftists broadly eschew. This brings me to my next crucial theme, what I call:
Irredentism of the past
(Rightwing) populism as an irredentist project that targets the past. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about irredentism this week, mostly because I spent Friday in Rijeka discussing the legacies of Gabriele D’Annunzio and their limits. Irredentism is typically defined spatially: It is a project to “redeem” regions of ethnonational belonging that are outside the nation itself by incorporating them, violently if need be. Yet the verb redeem also implies a certain temporality and a certain historicity—irredentism aims not only to redeem territories, but also times past. It is here that the restorative nostalgia of Mussolini’s Mare Nostrum, Putin’s Kievan Rus, and Trump’s Make America Great Again share a common grammar and lexicon.
One of the most striking sites that I have encountered in recent years—and here I will indulge in a Triestino and Istrian fascination—is Trieste’s Museum of the Risorgimento, a fascist relic that features allegorical murals of all of the “redeemed” cities of the Julian March, Istria, and Dalmatia, including Gorizia, Aquileia, Trieste itself, Parenzo (Poreč), Pola (Pula), Fiume (Rijeka), and Zara (Zadar)—only unredeemed Spalato (Split) is depicted but unnamed. A better representation of irredentism is difficult to imagine, yet one must ask: Is such a museum display populist? It feels awkward to call it so, both because of the staid official atmosphere of the museum and, perhaps more importantly, because it is unclear who, if anyone, takes these images seriously these days. And this brings me to my final point:
(To what degree) Is the medium the message?
We have long resided in a post-McLuhan world, of course, but this question strikes me as especially crucial to MEMPOP’s work. There is a particularly paradoxical aspect to the way in which radically new means and modes of communication have produced radically homogenized images of the past. Not only is the question of audience and reception crucial—the very consolidation of the “audiences” and “publics” of populism (though not only populism) is unimaginable outside of the media environment we now inhabit. Pam reflects on this process brilliantly: “Yet as I deepened my understanding of the region’s history, I realized that while the vocabulary used to describe the experience of leaving Istria after WWII had acquired new glosses – most notably, that of ethnic cleansing – both the content and structure of many narratives (written and oral) demonstrated striking continuity with irredentist narratives dating back to the 19th century. Accounts of persecution and martyrdom under Austria, for example, provided a durable template for Istrian narratives of suffering denationalization at the hands of proponents of Yugoslav socialism. What had changed was the reception of these stories.” The reception for so many stories is changing radically, at a pace that we have yet to appreciate, much less theorize—the labour of tracking this process is perhaps the most fundamental task ahead for MEMPOP.
To conclude: An anecdote from Istria
Several years ago, I had the privilege to be the sole audience, the sole recipient, of a strange story in Istria. My family and I frequently holiday in the miniscule village of Zamask, not far from Motovun/Montona. Down the hill from our habitual lodging, a ramshackle farmhouse abuts a dusty crossroad. While walking one evening, I befriended the elderly man who lives there alone after an encounter with his dyspeptic dog. I was surprised to learn his name: Dušan, a characteristically Serbian handle in a predominantly Catholic region. After a few minutes of small talk, Dušan insisted that I come inside to the kitchen for a nescafe and, more importantly, so that he could show me “something interesting”. I am preternaturally unable to resist something interesting, so I consented. After preparing the instant coffee, he opened a drawer a removed some silverware. They featured a coat-of-arms of the Italian army—as he explained, they dated from the period of fascist rule in Istria. Now, I cannot begin to comprehend the layered historical emotions that lead a possibly Serbian Istrian farmer to invest value in fascist-era cutlery. I am sure, however, that comprehension lies in appreciation of what Pam dubs “the broadest multiplicity of the pasts”—and I’ll close by saluting and seconding her call to draw this multiplicity of pasts into our conversations and sensibilities, both today and in the future.