Nationalism, populism, and political community: Alexei Navalny’s legacy amid the crisis of liberal globalism

Abstract Weaving together theories of political community and social imaginaries with the idea that populism and nationalism anchor the democratic principles of political representation and popular sovereignty in the modern state, this essay reexamines Alexei Navalny’s political trajectory and its implications at a time when illiberal forces are gaining ground. Tracing Navalny’s attempts to combine liberalism, populism, and nationalism, it interprets this trajectory as a sustained effort to reclaim the language of political representation and popular sovereignty from the Putin regime, which had appropriated it and hollowed it out. The essay views Russia’s failed transition to liberal democracy as a precursor to illiberal trends now evident across Europe and beyond. Rooting these developments in disillusionment with the post-Cold War promises of “the end of history,” it locates the source of this disillusionment in liberal globalism, which—anchored in a global social imaginary—distances itself from populist and nationalist imaginaries and, with them, from the principles of political representation and popular sovereignty that these imaginaries foreground. By analysing Navalny’s lifelong effort to make opposition politics resonant in a society where “liberal democracy” had long become associated with external imposition, the essay draws political lessons from his legacy for the Russian liberal opposition in exile, and beyond.