Popularising Unpopular Values in the Populist Age: A Narrative Framework for EU Responses to Populism

The last seventy years have been building a progressive narrative of enhancing the values of human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe and across the world. The European Union has been both a driver and a beneficiary of this narrative, building a closer political Union on a foundation of shared values. Amid political, and economic crisis, however – this narrative is dying. Across the EU, and particularly in the UK, Hungary, and Poland, populist groups have capitalised on turmoil, deforming the value of democracy to become a tool of manipulation by claiming to represent the ‘true people’ against the elite and EU. The positive narrative of shared values, guaranteed to all and most valuable to the most vulnerable, has been attacked by negative, nationalist, exclusionary and isolationist rhetoric. Populist rhetoric has maligned rights as an instrument to be (ab)used by the minority against the popular will of the majority. Democracy and rights are forced into false conflict with one another, as destructive populist forces rot systems from within: attacking and undermining institutions founded upon respect for the rule of law. This paper explores value-driven narratives which can inform EU policy and institutional responses to populism: from engagement to exclusion, adaptation to isolation. It interweaves these narratives with the crisis of identity among EU citizens, and the lack of unity reflected in the sense of the ‘otherness’ of EU. It argues that such a narrative is needed to underpin institutional responses to rule of law backsliding in Hungary and Poland, and proposes a narrative framework for the European Union to leverage its strengths to re-popularize values as a unifier in an increasingly divided Europe.