Introduction: The sceptre and the spectre

Ghiţa Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (1969: 1) began their classic edited collection on populism by paraphrasing Marx and Engel’s famous opening line: ‘A Spectre is haunting the world — populism’. However, it was not quite the entire world that was being haunted in the late 1960s. Looking through the case studies in Ionescu and Gellner’s book, we find chapters on North America, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa, but nothing on that part of the world in which most of the contributors lived and worked: Western Europe. By contrast, the present volume focuses exclusively on that area. This reflects the fact that while the likes of Ross Perot in the United States, Preston Manning in Canada and Pauline Hanson in Australia have all attracted sporadic attention as new populist leaders, the main area of sustained populist growth and success over the last fifteen years in established democracies has been Western Europe.