Vol.:(0123456789) Studies in Comparative International Development https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-021-09333-w 1 3 Populism and the Past: Restoring, Retaining, and Redeeming the Nation Iza Ding 1  · Dan Slater 2  · Huseyin Zengin 1 Accepted: 5 May 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract Populism and nationalism have been described as major threats to democracy. But ambiguities linger over their conceptual boundaries and overlaps. This article devel- ops a typology of nationalist narratives to historically situate the recent global rise of populist nationalism. Specifcally, we identify three common types of historical experience with empire that have shaped contemporary expressions of nationalism by populist leaders: imperial power, where a nation’s forerunner was the leading polity in a regional or global empire; imperial subject, where a nation was ruled and dominated by an imperial power, and imperial holdout, where a nation battled of imperial encroachments with relative success. Collective memories of these divergent imperial experiences are associated with three distinct types of national- ist narratives today: restorative nationalism in former imperial powers, redemptive nationalism in former imperial subjects, and retentive nationalism in former impe- rial holdouts. We illustrate this typology in three major cases of twenty-frst-century populism: Turkey under Erdogan, the Philippines under Duterte, and Thailand under Thaksin. We tentatively contend that restorative nationalism is an especially likely conduit for greater political disruptions at home and abroad. Keywords Populism · Nationalism · Empire · Collective memory · Asia * Iza Ding yud30@pitt.edu Dan Slater dnsltr@umich.edu Huseyin Zengin huz36@pitt.edu 1 University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 2 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, USA