Emilia Palonen

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at University of Helsinki

This chapter explores the cases of two generations of Budapest School through Georg Lukács and Ágnes Heller as transnational intellectuals, and by doing so, investigates from a post-foundational perspective the articulation of Europe through practices. What emerges isa Europe both imagined and physical, divided and asymmetrical. Crucially, it comes...

As in most parts of Central and Eastern Europe, there is a tradition in Hungary of changing street names and memorials in the wake of major political transitions. This article focuses on the change of street names and memorials, i.e. the city-text, in Hungary’s political capital, Budapest, between 1985 and 2001. The city-text in Budapest became a l...

This article investigates the polarisation that dominates Hungarian politics and divides the political spectrum into two hegemonic camps. It explores frontier-building in Hungarian politics since 1989 in order to further an understanding of recent political developments. The aim of this paper is not to discuss the demands of regular political riots...

Hungary once represented a school-book case of transition to democracy. Now it offers insights into both contemporary Europe and theories of populism and nationalism. Resisting the traditional linear perspective to transition and a ‘demographic’ view of democracy, this article explores the relationships among democracy, populism and nationalism. Th...

The year 2017 witnessed a government crisis as one of the coalition government’s parties, or at least its parliamentary group, the True Finns (PS) split. The Sipilä government pushed through a regional reform package and social and health services reform that would be organized at the regional level instead of at themunicipality and small regions l...

This chapter is designed to introduce you to qualitative approaches to populism. Qualitative research pays special attention to detail, history, and context, enables us to explore the multifaceted nature of populism, and provides heuristic tools for case studies and comparative analysis. Qualitative research often relies on interpreting people’s ex...

Parliamentary elections in 2023 brought in a discourse on debt. Power was passed from the Marin I to the Orpo I government. This was historically the most right‐wing government to date in Finland, whose formation also took historically long but finally united both the populist‐nativist right with the liberal right in the same coalition. The ministe...

Public spaces facilitate interactions among people from diverse backgrounds and serve as arenas that offer valuable insights into societal dynamics. They have the potential to promote inclusion, yet they can also foster exclusionary practices. Focusing on the years 2022 and 2023, and the cases of Vienna and Helsinki, this article examines how diffe...

Political communication on social media has become a vital part of democratic politics. This direct method of communication with voters has particularly been used by parties often classifed as populist, but it has increasingly become more relevant for parties of all types. This multi-country study investigates political Twitter communication across...

In this volume we focused on Twitter communication in May 2019 in seven European Union member states where the European Parliamentary elections were held. The chapters reveal that the elections were linked to several national issues and elections. The data we drew on is a sample sourced by particular hashtags, which we and our country experts saw a...

Context, variety and genealogy are among the contributions historical studies generally make to populism research. This chapter argues that there is another, as yet almost untapped, resource in historical approaches, namely a theory of moral economy that, when stripped of normative presumptions and idiographic limitations, can improve our understan...

The chapter introduces the data collection process and methods used in the study. The main dataset was assembled form material collected from seven EU countries that represented so-called Twitter countries during the 2019 EP elections: the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, Ireland and the UK. The countries cover the South-North and Centr...

The chapter discusses the political context in Finland during the 2019 EP elections and introduces the political communication environment of the country. Particular attention is given to the role of Twitter in Finnish political communication and populism in country’s party field during the twenty-first century. The empirical Twitter analysis focus...

In 2022, Finland applied for NATO membership as a reaction to Russia's attack on Ukraine with full parliamentary support. The Marin government pushed through reforms, which in the autumn got contested. Frictions emerged within the government in anticipation of the general election in 2023. In January 2022, the first regional elections were held, wi...

Prompted by recent scholarly debates on the distinction between populism and nationalism, we elaborate on the Laclaudian understanding of populism as an antagonistic form of us‐building/community‐making that relies on the extension of equivalential chains between demands. From this heuristic perspective, populism can be understood as an empty form...

Public debates and controversies over monuments, memorials, and place names have become contentious focal points for struggles over historical memory and social identity. This special issue critically examines the spatial politics involved in the making, unmaking, and remaking of memoryscapes conceived as assemblages of memory-objects, practices, a...

In 2021, Finland implemented the long‐planned health, social and rescue services reform under the new regional governance framework. The Covid‐19 vaccinations were issued and the pandemic governance debated as the minister responsible wanted to maintain tighter control. Pandemic fatigue was emerging and measures were lifted in October, only to be r...

The radical right often appears as anti-science. In this chapter, we explore how science and knowledge have a key role to play in the Finns Party, a radical right party with connections to the wider alt-right field in Finland and abroad. It appears to us that science is in fact hotly debated, criticized along its own political lines, and it gains s...

This article discusses discursive transformations in the performance of the government and the “hashtag landscape,” studying Twitter discussions and the female-led government of one of the youngest Prime Ministers in the world, Sanna Marin of Finland. Among the countries in Europe, Finland has been, in the period of analysis of March 2020 to Januar...

This chapter explores populism in Nordic countries where there is a long tradition of heterogeneous, populist parties with incompatible political ideologies transforming over decades. Populist parties have emerged as a reaction to dominant thinking in each of the political contexts. Theoretically, generating a typology between populist parties, peo...

Rise of populist politics in the 21s century calls scholars and politicians alike to reflect upon the question of how politics and democracy have been understood. Drawing on the theory of hegemony, this article establishes a distinction between democracy and ‘demography’ as a key line of conceptualization in politics. It highlights a central misund...

Käännös suomeksi Ernesto Laclaun artikkelista "Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity" (1992): "Universalismi, partikularismi ja kysymys identiteetistä". Käännös: Emilia Palonen ja Jouni Tilli.

Artikkelissaan Universalismi ja partikularismi: kysymys identiteetistä? Ernesto Laclau korostaa yleisen ja erityisen paradoksista yhteenkietoutumista: kun samaistumme jonkin yksittäisen kanssa, siitä tulee yhteinen, mutta jokainen erillisyyttä korostava identiteettiväite hakee tunnustusta yleisemmältä tasolta. Hän paljastaa niin erillistävien kuin...

Tässä artikkelissa annan näkökulman politiikan ja populismin tutkimiseen merkityskamppailuna. Populismiin liittyvät hegemoniakamppailut, vallalla olevien jakolinjojen haastaminen ja uudelleen määrittely. Kehittämäni retorisperformatiivisen diskurssiteorian ja soinilaisen perussuomalaisuuden analyysin avulla näytän, kuinka populismi on erityinen mer...

This chapter introduces a rhetorical-performative analysis as a tool for exploring urban symbolic landscape and populism and hence deals with relationality and materiality from the postfoundational perspective. It connects the articulation theory of cultural theorists Stuart Hall or political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and spatial...

Rapid social change, multicultural challenges, social inequality, and the way different kinds of threat are disseminated by the media for public imagination, have given rise to populist protests and appeals to cultural values, usually combining anti-elite and anti-immigrant nationalism with nationally and locally bounded demands for social justice....

The term is on everyone's lips these days: shortcomings and limi-nality of traditional politics are blamed on it. The proliferation of the phenomenon commonly referred to as 'populism' is interesting because of its multifaceted character. Exploring instances of populism we can find similarities but contend that 'populism' exists in variations rathe...

In so far as populism is a mode of articulation, it exists also outside traditional party politics and gets entangled with other meaning making, affective ties, symbols and identifications. In this chapter the author shows, through the Guggenheim Helsinki case, how populist rhetoric and logic of articulation penetrated debates on cultural policy-or...

The year 2016 saw the consolidation of the turbulent centrist-populist-bourgeois government in Finland. It was a year of controversy and debate, starting from the labour reform focusing on the right to same-sex marriage, minority rights, and ending in controversies regarding the national broadcasters and interpretations of constitutional law.

A Working Paper is a first-draft-journal paper or contribution, a research report, a workshop presentation or an essay. Generally speaking, it should have the potential of a full quality paper that is in progress. This can be detailed and formulated by the author(s) within the paper (footnotes) or in an appendix including questions, open points, di...

Politics in Hungary since 1989 has been focusing on nation-building. Each government has had a license to articulate what it is to be Hungarian, in the public realm with public funds. While current political debates are heated and focus yet again on defining Hungarian national identity, this article takes a distance from contemporary politics. It s...

Commemorative ‘city-text’ — including street names and memorials — in Hungary has experienced transformations with every major shift in power-holding elites and their ideologies. This chapter examines street names in Budapest, showing how the ‘city-text’ is a mixture of local, national and transnational elements. Focusing on the transnational, it e...

In Debate with Kari Palonen is a collection of 48 essays written by scholars from a great variety of research fields. All essays discuss the scientific contributions of the Finnish political scientist Kari Palonen, from his views on political thought to the understanding of conceptual change and the study of politics as an activity. The essays crit...

What is Europe? What are the contents of the concept of Europe? And what defines European identity? Instead of only asking these classical questions, this volume also explores who asks these questions, and who is addressed with such questions. Who answers the questions, from which standpoints and for what reasons? Which philosophical, historical, r...

Politics in Hungary since 1989 has been focusing on nation-building. Each government has had a license to articulate what it is to be Hungarian, in the public realm with public funds. While current political debates are heated and focus yet again on defining Hungarian national identity, this article takes a distance from contemporary politics. It s...

This article investigates H ungary, a new democracy in E ast‐ C entral E urope and a whistle‐blower in the recent world economic crisis. A dramatic budget deficit was revealed after the elections of 2006 when the prime minister admitted the government had “lied day and night.” The “transition to democracy” was a result of round‐table talks that bro...

A mega-event is a replicant: local copy of a global model. The European Capitals of Culture (ECC) is an an- nual mega-event, currently usually held in two European cities. This paper argues it has three particular dimensions, recognisable from the European Union’s policy. First designed to articulate a European identity, it has been a mover for loc...

Introduction of the Laclau and Mouffean thinking.

Within the European Union at least since the failed referenda on the EU constitution, there has been a strong realization that nationalism has been strengthened in the European countries, even in Western Europe, which has been seen as the civilized counterpart of the nationalistic Eastern Europe. In my paper I look at the construction of political...

"An enthusiast of the Revolution once proposed transforming Paris into a map of the world: all streets and squares were to be rechristened and their new names drawn from noteworthy places and things across the word." Pursue this in imagination and, from the surprising impression made by such an optical-phonetic image of the city, you will recognize...