Narrative Practices of Exchange: Europe in the face of Exclusionary Populisms

As Europe continues to live within and through the consequences of demagogic populism, a reminder of how politics can be built from grassroots may prove crucial to the survival of the European project. Engaging with the work of Paul Ricoeur throughout, and drawing on political theory and recent Catholic theological and practical theological interventions, the chapter seeks to understand and respond to European populisms through the frame of narrative. Narrative offers a tool to analyse populisms that manifest in exclusionary ways;
it characterises the hermeneutic lenses of Ricoeur’s understanding of European plurality and exchange; it represents the utopian, future-oriented result of concrete civic and political encounters, pointing onward to what may (still) be possible. This analysis ultimately relies on an understanding of the human person as constituted narratively, and so summoned to act and narrate with others in political community, through theory and practices of exchange and encounter.