POPULISM, COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS CAMIL-ALEXANDRU PÂRVU Abstract: The present paper questions one of the widespread diagnostics of European and North-American politics, according to which the emerging political cleavage – in the wake of the dissolution of the classical left-right distinction – pitches different declinations of sovereignty- focused populism versus various forms of cosmopolitan transnationalism. In the European case, this form of political cleavage is deemed to explain some of the current reconfigurations of member states’ policies and political parties in relation to immigration, as well as an increasingly popular contestation of the EU exemplified by Brexit; in the US, it would explain the rise of political figures such as Donald Trump. Against this popular view, this paper seeks to shed light on a more nuanced understanding of the dichotomy, grounded on Robert Dahl’s original distinction between the scope and the domain of democratic politics. Whereas the opposition holds when it refers to their incompatible notions of legitimate political membership, it becomes much less coherent when viewed as pertaining to political agency. Keywords: populism, cosmopolitanism, democracy, inclusion, Europe. It has become a pervasive feature of the recent literature in political science to acknowledge that ‘populism’ is now a central political concept. This prevalence is replicated also, to a similar extent, by its presence in the media. Notions of ‘populism’ are now mobilized in most academic (Canovan, 1999; Canovan, 2004; Kaltwasser, 2012; Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004) and journalistic efforts aiming to make sense of an undoubtedly critical series of developments in both European and US politics over the last decade. This aspect has been now extensively theorized and recorded, with all the major journals of the discipline fostering various perspectives on it. Furthermore, ‘populism’ is not only a popular, emerging category, but also one that is especially resilient: despite its notorious definitional instability, there is a clear and steady academic and non- academic interest that is set to continue for as long as a better suited concept is not readily available. This article aims to go beyond the common steps of registering the ubiquity of the concept and then decrying its conceptual failures 1 . What is 1 For an in-depth analysis of the conceptual ambiguities of populism, see (Pârvu, 2015) and (Pârvu, 2012). Analele Universității din București, Seria Stiințe Politice, nr. 1/2016, pp. 103-119 ISSN 1582-2486 http://anale.fspub.unibuc.ro/