Populism and cultural heritage policies: public statues in Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cultural heritage is a central domain for key populist themes of threats to national identity and protection of ‘the majority’ against cosmopolitan, ‘wokist’ elites. The article explores how differing government discursive strategies towards populism influence heritage policies. It takes the case of contested public statues. In France, the government has adopted a discursive strategy of ‘patriotic Republicanism’ that reduced the discursive space for contestation and policy has remained largely unchanged. But in Britain and Hungary, governments have increasingly adopted populist discourses, leading to countervailing discursive coalitions, contestation and change in agendas and decisions in both populist and non-populist directions. The proposition developed is that national governments pursuing populist discursive strategies triggers anti-populist discursive coalitions, with contestation and changes in agendas, institutions and individual decisions. Conversely, governments developing their own nationalistic discourses reduces the scope for populist ones but also leads to freezing of existing policies.