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Populism, nationalism and revisionist foreign policy
ERIN K. JENNE
*
More than 15 years ago, Cas Mudde declared the world to be in the grip of a populist
Zeitgeist.
1
While right-wing populist parties have been racking up wins at the ballot box for
decades, lately we have seen a rising number of populist nationalist heads of state, including
US President Donald Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, UK Prime Minister Boris
Johnson, Indian President Narendra Modi, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Czech
Prime Minister Andrej Babiš—each of whom has made some version of the promise to make
his country ‘great again’. Analysts have variously described them as neo-nationalists,
2
authoritarian populists,
3
populist nationalists, paternalist populists,
4
and right-wing
populists
5
—the neologisms pile up as scholars attempt to make sense of this seemingly new
style of leadership. How should we understand this apparent trend?
6
More importantly for the
purposes of this article, what effect, if any, does this new type of leadership have on state
foreign policy?
International Relations (IR) scholars have long theorized the foreign policy effects of
nationalism.
7
Although there is limited consensus on how nationalist leaders come to power to
*
This article is part of the special section in the March 2021 issue of International Affairs on ‘New directions in
foreign policy analysis’, guest-edited by Amnon Aran, Klaus Brummer and Karen E. Smith.
1
Cas Mudde, ‘The populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition 39: 4, 2004, pp. 541–63.
2
Maureen A. Eger and Sarah Valdez, ‘Neo-nationalism in western Europe’, European Sociological Review 31:
1, 2015, pp. 115–30.
3
Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit and authoritarian populism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Ian Klinke, ‘Geopolitics and the political right: lessons from
Germany’, International Affairs 94: 3, May 2018, pp. 495–514; Daniel W. Drezner, ‘Immature leadership:
Donald Trump and the American presidency’, International Affairs 96: 2, March 2020, pp. 383–400.
4
Zsolt Enyedi, ‘Paternalist populism and illiberal elitism in central Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies 21:
1, 2016, pp. 9–25.
5
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, ‘What unites right-wing populists in western Europe? Re-examining grievance
mobilization models in seven successful cases’, Comparative Political Studies 41: 1, 2008, pp. 3–23; Paul
Blokker, ‘Populist nationalism, anti-Europeanism, post-nationalism, and the East–West distinction’, German
Law Journal 6: 2, 2005, pp. 371–89.
6
Right-wing populism is a broader conceptual category that includes cultural components such as
authoritarianism and social conservatism. This article focuses specifically on the foreign policy effects of
populism and ethno-nationalism at the state level because these discourses serve the specific purpose of
reconfiguring the idealized boundaries of the state—delimiting the vertical boundaries of the demos and the
horizontal boundaries of the ethnos, respectively. Reconfiguring the idealized sovereign can radically change the
state’s foreign policy priorities on the international stage as well as its strategy for pursuing them.
7
In this article, I use the term ’nationalism’ to refer specifically to ethno-nationalism, a discourse that holds that
the state belongs to the dominant ethno-national group, excluding ethno-national ‘others’ from the sovereign
community, as opposed to inclusive or unifying nationalisms. I define ethno-populism (a contraction of ‘ethno-
nationalist populism’) as a discourse that holds that the state belongs to the dominant ethno-political group,
excluding both political and national ‘others’. For simplicity’s sake, I use nationalism and ethno-nationalism
interchangeably throughout the article.
begin with, there is a rich body of work on how nationalist office-holders drive foreign policy
once they are there. Highly nationalist leaders are believed to be more aggressive and hence
war-prone because nationalism promotes hegemonic groupism, prioritizes ethnic ties across
state boundaries, and leads to the overestimation of one’s own military capabilities—
increasing the likelihood that interstate crises will lead to war.
8
Scholars of populism, for their
part, have written extensively about how and why populists rise to power as well as the
impact of this style of leadership on domestic politics.
9
However, there is little agreement on
the foreign policy effects of populism.
10
Scholars have recently sought to fill this lacuna,
arguing that populist leaders adopt protectionist and isolationist foreign policies with the aim
of protecting the ‘underdog’ people from the ravages of globalization or the usurpation of
power by supranational bodies such as the UN or the EU.
11
However, critics have pointed out
that populist leaders do not always pursue economic protectionism: exceptions include the
neo-liberal populist governments of Argentina’s Carlos Menem, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and
Brazil’s Fernando Collor.
12
Nor are they consistently isolationist, as the contemporary
populist nationalist governments of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Jarosław
Kaczyński make clear. What this suggests is that the foreign policy effects of populism are
likely to be found at a higher level of abstraction—in diplomatic practices rather than a
coherent foreign policy doctrine or grand strategy.
13
8
For an excellent summary of the mechanisms by which nationalist ideology influences foreign policy-making,
see Harris Mylonas and Kendrick Kuo, ‘Nationalism and foreign policy’, in William R. Thompson, ed.-in-chief,
Oxford research encyclopedia of politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
9
The global rise of populism has been attributed to a number of factors, including the growing divide between
the rich and poor and the growing political visibility and participation of ordinary people, aided by social media
and the spread of communications, information and networking capabilities. For an accessible overview of this
literature, see Rogers Brubaker, ‘Why populism?’, Theory and Society 46: 5, 2017, pp. 357–85.
10
See Christina Schori Liang, ‘Europe for the Europeans: the foreign and security policy of the populist radical
right’{?}, in Christina Schori Liang, ed., Europe for the Europeans: the foreign and security policy of the
populist radical right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 19–50; Bertjan Verbeek and Andrej Zaslove, ‘The
impact of populist radical right parties on foreign policy: the Northern League as a junior coalition partner in the
Berlusconi governments’, European Political Science Review 7: 4, 2015, pp. 525–46; Johannes Plagemann and
Sandra Destradi, ‘Populism and foreign policy: the case of India’, Foreign Policy Analysis 15: 2, 2019, pp. 283–
301; Paul Taggart, ‘Populism and representative politics in contemporary Europe’, Journal of Political
Ideologies 9: 3, 2004, pp. 269–88; Paul Taggart, Populism, ‘Concepts in the social sciences’ (Buckingham: Open
University Press, 2000).
11
For an essential review of the literature on populism in foreign policy, see Angelos Chryssogelos, ‘Populism
in foreign policy’, in Thompson, ed.-in-chief, Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. See also Rosa Balfour,
Janis A. Emmanouilidis, Catherine Fieschi, Christopher Hill, Timo Lochocki, Marie Mendras, Cas Mudde, Mari
K. Niemi, Juliane Schmidt and Corina Stratulat, Europe’s troublemakers: the populist challenge to foreign
policy (London: European Policy Centre, 2016).
12
Kurt Weyland, ‘Neoliberal populism in Latin America and eastern Europe’, Comparative Politics 31: 4, 1999,
pp. 379–401; Kenneth M. Roberts, ‘Latin America’s populist revival’, SAIS Review of International Affairs 27:
1, 2007, pp. 3–15.
13
Populism and nationalism have variously been defined as ideas or ideologies, strategies and styles/repertoires.
For an indispensable survey of definitions of populism in the field, see Bart Bonikowski and Noam Gidron,
To investigate these effects—both separately and together—I combine insights from
sociological framing theory and Essex School discourse analysis to show how political agents
exploit representational crises to justify radical shifts in state foreign policy.
14
I argue first that
both populism and nationalism may be conceptualized as sovereigntist ‘movements of crisis’
that emerge in reaction to perceived gaps in the representation of certain groups within the
state.
15
Political agents respond to these perceived gaps by invoking discursive frames that
mobilize support by prescribing a ‘correction’ or revision of foreign policy to align with the
interests of the idealized sovereign community. While following similar logics, nationalist
and populist discourses function along orthogonal lines: nationalist rhetoric excludes national
‘others’ on an in–out dimension, while populist rhetoric excludes political or economic
‘elites’ on an up–down dimension.
16
In both cases, leaders make a symbolic commitment to
the designated in-group that their interests will be consistently prioritized in state policy.
17
These frames diagnose the problem—incomplete sovereignty—and prescribe ‘foreign policy
revisionism’, which can be understood as policies and diplomatic practices by which state
leaders either symbolically or materially privilege the interests of the in-group on the
international stage.
The article proceeds in four parts. The first part reconceptualizes populism and
nationalism as sovereigntist movements organized around antagonistic discursive frames. The
second makes the link between these frames and foreign policy revisionism. The third
illustrates the utility of this model across different temporal and geopolitical contexts, using
paired comparisons of nationalist, populist and populist nationalist (which I term ‘ethno-
populist’) foreign policy-making in, respectively, Hungary and Albania in the 1990s;
Venezuela and Greece in the 2000s and early 2010s; and the United States and Hungary in the
‘Multiple traditions in populism research: toward a theoretical synthesis’, American Political Science
Association, Comparative Politics Newsletter 26: 12, 2016, pp. 7–14.
14
The Essex School includes a broad range of poststructuralist approaches to the study of discourse founded on
the ideas that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe set out in their canonical work, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). In On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005), Laclau argued
that populist movements emerge when representational crises elevate political agents who articulate unsatisfied
social demands together in an ‘equivalential chain,’ ‘interpellating’ the frustrated masses into a collective
‘people’ whose interests are opposed by antagonistic ‘elites.’
15
Harold R. Kerbo, ‘Movements of “crisis” and movements of “affluence”: a critique of deprivation and
resource mobilization theories’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 26: 4, 1982, pp. 645–63.
16
For similar formulations, see Benjamin de Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘Distinctions and articulations: a
discourse theoretical framework for the study of populism and nationalism’, Javnost—The Public 24: 4, 2017,
pp. 301–19; Benjamin de Cleen, ‘Populism and nationalism,’ in Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart,
Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy (eds), The Oxford handbook of populism (Oxford University Press,
2017), pp. 342–62.
17
This may be accompanied by political competition, as incumbents compete with movement entrepreneurs for
political relevance through rhetorical action.
2010s. The final section offers a summary evaluation of this exercise and suggests further
avenues of research.
Populism and nationalism as sovereigntist movements
I begin by proposing that populism and nationalism are both forms of sovereigntism (also
referred to as souverainism or sovereignism), a political ideology or doctrine that calls for the
acquisition of or increase in the political independence of a territorially defined community
such as a region or state.
18
Sovereigntism is most commonly associated with movements to
gain state or quasi-state status, such as the French Québec sovereignty movement in Canada;
the Welsh independence movement in the United Kingdom; and the Puerto Rican
sovereigntist movement in the United States, in which the term soveranista (‘sovereignty
supporter’) denotes a person who favours statehood for Puerto Rico. However, sovereigntism
is also used to characterize movements within consolidated states against supranational
organizations, such as ‘Euro-realists’ who oppose a more integrated European Union. It is this
latter definition—movements for greater sovereignty of an existing state—that will concern
us here.
Sovereigntist movements can be defined as campaigns of self-governance for an
idealized political community. Even in consolidated democracies, sovereigntist movements
can sometimes overtake politics in the wake of events that generate crises of public
confidence. During these critical junctures {6}, popular demands mount for a new kind of
political leadership that will ‘rupture with an existing order’
19
to address perceived gaps in the
in-group’s exercise of sovereignty. While there is emancipatory potential in such movements,
social upheaval can also create a demand for ‘pathological leaders’ who create a
‘transferential lock’ with ‘wounded’ followers who ‘seek the biased view of the world they
present’.
20
For instance, the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez came to power in 2000
on a platform of ending corruption and a system of two-party patronage after the hegemonic
parties that had governed the country for decades suffered a calamitous drop in support during
the economic upheaval of the 1990s. Chávez and other army officers became ‘instant heroes
18
‘Sovereigntism’ is derived from ‘sovereignty’, which Stephen Krasner defined as a ‘political organization
based on the exclusion of external actors from authority structures within a given territory’: Stephen D. Krasner,
Sovereignty: organized hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 4.
19
Laclau, 122.
20
Rose McDermott, Presidential leadership, illness, and decision making (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), pp. 22–3. A ‘transferential lock’ in this context refers to the pathological phenomenon by which the
followers’ desires and feelings are projected onto or transferred to the leader, while the leader countertransfers
their desires and feelings onto the followers.
to a surprisingly large number of Venezuelans due to the fact that ‘they had tried to do
something to get rid of a despised president’.
21
In other cases, embattled incumbents ‘gamble
for resurrection’ by remaking themselves into the very revolutionary leaders demanded by
their constituents.
22
This is the path taken by Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and
Vladimír Mečiar, who transformed themselves from socialist to ethno-nationalist leaders in
response to the collapse of their socialist ethno-federations.
23
In their rhetoric, sovereigntist leaders use populist, ethno-nationalist and ethno-
populist frames to inscribe firm lines between the in-group and the out-groups who violate the
former’s sovereignty (see table 1). These discursive frames perform two functions that
concern us here. First, they establish the boundaries of the authentic sovereign community.
Second, they serve as generalized problem-solving templates in foreign affairs. According to
Gamson and Modigliani, a frame is a ‘central organizing idea for making sense of relevant
events, suggesting what is at issue’.
24
If an issue or event is successfully framed in a certain
way, the listener is more likely to interpret the fact pattern in the way suggested by the framer.
The listener is also more likely to favour a response that follows the prescriptive logic of that
frame. John Snow and Robert Benford refer to this as diagnostic framing.
25
Frames are vital
to grassroots political mobilization, for they help to crystallize collective perceptions about
particular events and generate a sense of emergency that requires direct political action. Snow
and Benford write that movement entrepreneurs use frames to ‘turn the heads’ of movement
participants; if they succeed in changing collective understandings of an issue, we say the
frame has ‘resonance’. When deployed in a given issue area, frames can be used to diagnose
problems, identify solutions and prescribe responses. Master frames, finally, are universal
stories that transcend the particularities of any individual context.
26
The civil rights frame or
the humanitarian intervention frame, for example, are universal logics that are meant to apply
21
Michael Coppedge, ‘Explaining democratic deterioration in Venezuela through nested inference’, in Frances
Hagopian and Scott P. Mainwaring, eds, The third wave of democratization in Latin America: advances and
setbacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 289–316 [311].
22
Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Jr, and Barry R. Weingast, ‘The rationality of fear: political opportunism and ethnic
conflict’, in Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder, eds, Civil wars, insecurity, and intervention (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 261–302.
23
V. P. Gagnon, The myth of ethnic war: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2006); V. P. Gagnon, ‘Ethnic nationalism and international conflict: the case of Serbia’, International Security
19: 3, 1994, pp. 130–66.
24
William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, ‘Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: a
constructionist approach’, American Journal of Sociology 95: 1, 1989, p. 3.
25
David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, ‘Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization’,
International Social Movement Research 1: 1, 1988, pp. 197–217.
26
David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, ‘Master frames and cycles of protest’, in Aldon D. Morris and Carol
McClurg Mueller, eds, Frontiers in social movement theory (Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 133–55.
to any case that generally meets the parameters of that frame. Because they can be evoked in
simple words or phrases, frames are modular and malleable, meaning they can be deployed
across a variety of political contexts and articulated with other frames as well as with deeper
ideologies such as socialism or democracy.
27
Table 1: Sovereigntist mobilizational frames
Ethno-nationalist
frame
Populist frame
Ethno-populist
Frame
Identity appeals
Ethnic identity
Political identity
Ethno-political identity
Goals
Promote interests of
the national group
Promote interests
of the political
group
Promote interests of core ethno-
political group
In-group
All those with
membership in
the nation
All those with
membership in the
political group
All those with membership
in the ethno-political group
Out-group
National ‘others’
and other nations
Elites; ‘the
establishment’
Elites and national ‘others’,
sometimes working in concert
Populism and nationalism, being modular in form and with universal applicability, are
exemplary master frames.
28
They function through what Rogers Brubaker calls ‘antagonistic
re-politicization’, by which political agents reconfigure the imagined sovereign ‘self’ through
radical ‘othering’.
29
At both domestic and foreign policy levels, such frames are used to
establish a more restrictive definition of the idealized sovereign community; to identify
threats to the exercise of sovereignty by that community (most often originating in the
27
On how nationalism serves as a thin-centred ideology, see Michael Freeden, ‘Is nationalism a distinct
ideology?’, Political Studies 46: 4, 1998, pp. 748–65.
28
For scholarship on populism and nationalism as mobilizational frames, see Manuela Caiani and Donatella
della Porta, ‘The elitist populism of the extreme right: a frame analysis of extreme right-wing discourses in Italy
and Germany’, Acta Politica 46: 2, 2011, pp. 180–202; Sofia Vasilopoulou, Daphne Halikiopoulou and
Theofanis Exadaktylos, ‘Greece in crisis: austerity, populism and the politics of blame’, Journal of Common
Market Studies 52: 2, 2014, pp. 388–402; Paris Aslanidis, ‘Populist social movements of the Great Recession’,
Mobilization: An International Quarterly 21: 3, 2016, pp. 301–21; Paris Aslanidis, ‘Is populism an ideology? A
refutation and a new perspective’, Political Studies 64: 1 (Suppl.), 2016, pp. 88–104; Robert S. Jansen, ‘Populist
mobilization: a new theoretical approach to populism’, Sociological Theory 29: 2, 2011, pp. 75–96; Mark R.
Beissinger, Nationalist mobilization and the collapse of the Soviet state (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Jens Rydgren, The populist challenge: political protest and ethno-nationalist mobilization in
France (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003).
29
Brubaker, ‘Why Populism?’. See also De Cleen and Stavrakakis, ‘Distinctions and articulations’.
‘other’); and to prescribe solutions to these problems. The ethno-nationalist frame calls for
dominance of the state by the core ethno-national in-group. The objet petit a is national
sovereignty.
30
Ernest Gellner wrote that nationalism ‘holds that the political and the
national unit should be congruent’ and, further, that ‘nationalist sentiment is the feeling of
anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its
fulfilment’.
31
This implies two things. First, there should be a one-to-one fit between political
and national boundaries, meaning that non-members of the national group should be excluded
from the polity, and members (such as ethnic kin in neighbouring countries) should be
included in the polity. Second, the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled’ should be drawn from the same
national community, meaning that colonialism or neo-colonialism are illegitimate forms of
government. This frame tells us ‘who belongs to the people that enjoy equal rights before the
law and in whose name should the state be ruled, now that kings and caliphs have to be
replaced by a government “representing” the nation’.
32
By contrast, the populist frame calls for granting or returning sovereignty to the
political in-group, whose exercise of self-determination is thwarted by elites or the ruling
class. Its objet petit a is popular sovereignty, namely governance by popular will. When state
leaders appeal to ‘the people’, they are referring to the particular political group with which
they are aligned. According to Laclau, ‘the people’ in this context is an ‘empty signifier’ that
can be used to denote a range of different social groups, depending on the identity of the
speaker as well as the political context in which the speaker is situated.
33
In populist framing,
‘the people’ are not adequately represented in the government because special interests or
elites are actively subverting the people’s ‘will’ to serve their private interests.
34
A populist
frame represents politics as ‘predominantly antagonistic, dividing society into two main blocs:
the establishment, the power bloc, versus the underdog, “the people”’.
35
Both right- and left-
wing populists ‘use sovereignty as a discourse of popular mobilisation’.
36
30
In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, objet petit a is a fantasy, the ‘object-cause’ (or unattainable object)
of desire that we are unconsciously compelled to pursue in the hope that attaining it will give us a sense of
ontological completeness that we had as infants, before entering the symbolic realm of discourse. For a concise
summary of this concept, see Lewis Kirchner, ‘Rethinking Desire: The Objet Petit A in Lacanian Theory,’
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 53: 1, 2005, 83-102.
31
Ernest Gellner, Nations and nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 1.
32
Andreas Wimmer, ‘Dominant ethnicity and dominant nationhood’, in Eric P. Kaufmann, ed., Rethinking
ethnicity: majority groups and dominant minorities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 43.
33
Laclau, On populist reason, ch. 4.
34
Aslanidis, ‘Is populism an ideology?’ pp. 98–9.
35
Yannis Stavrakakis and Giorgos Katsambekis, ‘Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of
Syriza’, Journal of Political Ideologies 19: 2, 2014, pp. 119–42 at p. 137.
36
Aristotle Kallis, ‘Populism, sovereigntism, and the unlikely re-emergence of the territorial nation-state’,
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11: 3, 2018, p. 288.
The ethno-populist mobilizational frame, finally, combines ethno-nationalist and
populist logics by restricting the boundaries of the idealized sovereign further still to include
only ‘the people of the nation’.
37
In this frame, the in-group is denied self-determination
because establishment elites have prevented the transmission of the people-nation’s will into
policy, while national out-groups threaten their claim to rule over a given territory. A complex
mobilizational frame, ethno-populism calls for the elevation of the ethno-political in-group
against both ‘elites’ and national ‘others’ or ‘enemy nations’, who are often believed to be
working in concert.
Sovereigntism and foreign policy revisionism
Both populism and nationalism can serve as potent sources of foreign policy revisionism. IR
scholars have traditionally defined revisionism as efforts by aspirant hegemons to unseat or
displace incumbent hegemons through a process known as ‘power transition’.
38
However,
there is no a priori reason to believe that hegemonic incumbents such as the United States
could not also be revisionist, or that hegemonic challengers such as China could not be status
quo orientated. Extending this logic still further, one can argue that any state (not just
incumbent or aspirant hegemons) may be revisionist, so long as it seeks to change the
international order or radically change its status in that order.
In this spirit, I define foreign policy revisionism as state practices aimed at
fundamentally reconfiguring a state’s position in the international system and/or relative to
neighbouring states. To capture these effects, we must extend our analytical gaze beyond the
traditional focus on foreign policy outputs to include the repertoire of diplomatic practices
that sovereigntist leaders use to represent the interests of the ‘authentic’ sovereign community
on the international stage.
39
Foreign policy revisionism may be further subdivided into lateral
37
Dani Filc, ‘Latin American inclusive and European exclusionary populism: colonialism as an explanation’,
Journal of Political Ideologies 20: 3, 2015, pp. 264–8.
38
In power transition theory, aspirant hegemons are by definition revisionist in that they seek to overturn the
international status hierarchy, usually through war with the incumbent hegemon. See Edward Hallett Carr, The
twenty years’ crisis, 1919-1939: an introduction to the study of international relations (London: Macmillan,
1946); A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The war ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For
newer conceptualizations of revisionism that take a broader approach, see Randall L. Schweller, ‘Bandwagoning
for profit: bringing the revisionist state back in’, International Security 19: 1, 1994, pp. 72–107; Steven Ward,
Status and the challenge of rising powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Stacie E. Goddard,
‘Embedded revisionism: networks, institutions, and challenges to world order’, International Organization 72: 4,
2018, pp. 763–97; Alexander Cooley, Daniel Nexon and Steven Ward, ‘Revising order or challenging the
balance of military power? An alternative typology of revisionist and status-quo states’, Review of International
Studies 45: 4, 2019, pp. 689–708.
39
‘Practices’ may be defined as ‘socially meaningful patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less
competently, simultaneously embody, act out and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on
the material world’ (Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, ‘International practices’, International Theory 3: 1,
and systemic variants (see figure 1). Systemic revisionism includes state foreign policy or
practices aimed at withdrawing the state from international organizations, regimes or alliances
as well as altering international institutions. This can be contrasted with lateral or territorial
revisionism, in which a state seeks to ‘correct’ its boundaries or fundamentally reorder its
relations with neighbouring states. Lateral revisionism covers not only classical irredentist
policies such as annexing territories outside state borders, but also hardening state borders
with neighbours, increasing immigration restrictions and imposing bans on asylum-seekers.
Figure 1: Foreign policy matrix
The ethno-nationalist frame is more likely to come to the fore in the midst of threats to the
ethnos, such as state succession crises or demographic shifts that appear to endanger or
weaken the status of the dominant ethno-national group. Political problems are framed as
2011, p. 4). This article focuses on the material and symbolic foreign policy practices used by state executives to
redress perceived gaps in their constituents’ representation on the international stage. For an overview of the
wider field of practice studies of career diplomats and other foreign policy practitioners, see Vincent Pouliot and
Jérémie Cornut, ‘Practice theory and the study of diplomacy: a research agenda’, Cooperation and Conflict 50:
3, 2015, pp. 297–315.
struggles by the national in-group against national ‘others’ that can be resolved only by
strengthening transborder support for co-ethnics in a second state, following a more
exclusionary foreign policy based on the interests of a narrower ethnic coalition, escalating
tensions with other nation-states and/or adopting more restrictive policies on national
immigration.
40
In these and other ways, nationalist leaders use lateral revisionism to elevate
the preferences of the national in-group to the foreign policy level by favouring the national
in-group relative to out-groups, either symbolically or materially. This effect is clearest in the
case of annexing ‘lost’ national territories abroad, but it is also evident in the creation or
hardening of border walls that ‘simultaneously legitimize and intensify other internal
exclusionary practices of the sovereign state . . . by providing a material manifestation of the
abstract idea of sovereignty’.
41
The populist frame, by contrast, is more likely to come to the fore in the context of
perceived threats to the demos, meaning that large segments of society come to believe that
the political system no longer represents their interests. Paris Aslanidis writes that populist
leaders rise to power during crises because they offer radical solutions to real, systemic
problems.
42
In representational crises, the idea spreads that the entire political establishment
(both foreign and domestic) is corrupt, and there is a need for a new, revolutionary leadership.
During such periods, sovereigntist movements form around demands for genuine political
representation. Non-nationalist (inclusionary) populists argue that working-class people
constitute the legitimate sovereign community and that economic elites must be excluded
from government so as not to interfere with popular self-governance.
43
At the international
40
John Hutchinson, Nationalism and war (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Stephen M. Saideman, The
ties that divide: ethnic politics, foreign policy, and international conflict (New York: Columbia University Press,
2001); Stephen van Evera, ‘Hypotheses on nationalism and war’, International Security 18: 4, 1994, pp. 5–39;
John L. Comaroff and Paul C. Stern, ‘New perspectives on nationalism and war’, Theory and Society 23: 1,
1994, pp. 35–45; Andreas Wimmer, Waves of war: nationalism, state formation, and ethnic exclusion in the
modern world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); John A. Hall and Sinisa Malesevic, Nationalism
and war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Gretchen Schrock-Jacobson, ‘The violent
consequences of the nation: nationalism and the initiation of interstate war’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 56: 5,
2012, pp. 825–52.
41
Reece Jones, Border walls: security and the war on terror in the United States, India, and Israel (London:
Zed, 2012), p. 4. See also Elisabeth Vallet, Borders, fences and walls: state of insecurity? (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2016); Wendy Brown, Walled states, waning sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010). Erecting walls or fences on state borders is a salient performance of lateral revisionism. Ethno-populists
often combine physical borders with nativist immigration policies—materially and symbolically excluding non-
nationals from access to the national homeland.
42
Aslanidis, ‘Is populism an ideology?’ p. 99.
43
Explicitly transnational populist movements have also emerged in recent years, where ‘the people’ are
understand to cross national boundaries: an example is the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25).
See Benjamin de Cleen, Benjamin Moffit, Panos Panayotu, Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘The potentials and difficulties
of transnational populism: the case of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25)’, Political Studies
68: 1, 2020, pp. 146–66.
level, the populist mobilizational frame prescribes a radical break from past foreign policy
practices; populist leaders promise to ‘“rupture” with the existing unjust order’.
44
When these
new (or newly reborn) revolutionary leaders take the place of the incumbent leaders, they are
expected to right the ship by, among other things, implementing the type of foreign policy
that serves ‘the people’. In practical terms, this creates pressures for systemic revisionism,
meaning that state leaders are expected to claw back sovereignty from domestic and foreign
elites by rejecting the authority of supranational organizations such as the EU or UN or
excluding transnational advocacy networks, foreign NGOs or other foreign actors that
frustrate self-governance. It might also mean turning away from traditional allies who are
seen as limiting the sovereignty of the political in-group over the affairs of the state.
45
The ethno-populist frame, finally, emerges in response to converging threats to the
demos and ethnos. It is most likely to resonate when the dominant ethno-political group
perceives a growing menace both from above (the ‘establishment’ or elites) and from outside
(hostile nations or national ‘others’). In ethno-populist framing, disloyal members of the
ethno-national in-group are suspected of having colluded with hostile nations or national
‘others’ to frustrate the general will. Disloyal elites are believed to put the interests of national
‘others’ such as minorities and immigrants over the interests of the national in-group. In
response to these dual threats to sovereignty, grass roots demands rise for ethno-populist
leaders who are willing to place greater restrictions on the encroachment of national ‘others’
and to serve as a counterweight against elites who seek to subvert the will of the national in-
group. At the foreign policy level, ethno-populist leaders cooperate with other nations and
support international institutions only when doing so serves the interests of their support base.
They also tend to court fellow system-revisionist leaders to bolster their leverage. In the
absence of countervailing opportunities or constraints, ethno-populist leaders engage in both
lateral and systemic revisionism (what I term omni-revisionism) on the international stage.
Figure 1 depicts the four ideal-type foreign policy stances.
The case evidence
To show these logics in action, I conduct three paired comparisons of six nationalist, populist
and ethno-populist chief executives from the 1990s to the 2010s. Each paired comparison
44
Francisco Panizza and Romina Miorelli, ‘Populism and democracy in Latin America’, Ethics and
International Affairs 23: 1, 2009, p. 40.
45
When examining the impact of these frames on policy, policy constraints may come into play, including
divided power and veto players at the domestic level, and geopolitical and economic pressures at the
international level. Space constraints prevent systematic consideration of these important mechanisms here.
follows the logic of most-different systems design (MDSD), according to which I compare
two cases each of nationalist, populist and ethno-populist leaders from different settings to see
whether they engaged in the same or similar foreign policy practices. A positive finding
indicates support for a generalized causal pathway.
46
Following the logic of most-similar
systems design (MSSD), I have also included two Hungarian governments in this set of cases
to show that, in the same country with the same leadership, different forms of sovereign crisis
yielded strikingly different foreign policy practices.
Within each individual case, I use pattern-matching to demonstrate how the diagnostic
and prescriptive elements of each frame aligned with the logic of each leader’s signature
foreign policy outputs.
47
In concrete terms, this means examining each leader’s foreign policy
actions for evidence that a given discursive frame was operative.
48
To trace this
correspondence, I draw on excerpts from each leader’s public addresses and look to see what
policies they are used to justify; each interpretation is then triangulated using primary and
secondary sources. By examining the relationship between rhetorical frames and foreign
policy practices, I assess whether notable shifts in foreign policy practices in each mini-case
‘fulfil’, either materially or symbolically, the prescriptive logic of that master frame.
Although the conclusions from this brief analysis are necessarily only tentative, taking a
wide-lens approach reveals striking regularities in the functions of populist, nationalist and
ethno-populist frames across different temporal and spatial contexts.
Nationalist foreign policy: Hungary and Albania in the 1990s
By the early 1990s, nearly all the post-communist governments of eastern and central Europe
had committed their societies to radical economic and political reform and their states to align
with the western liberal order. Nonetheless, urgent questions remained about both their
external borders and, especially, their relations with their neighbours. Although located in the
same region, Hungary and Albania were at different levels of economic development in this
post-independence period. They also faced different geopolitical challenges: Hungary was
able to integrate quickly into western security institutions, whereas Albania’s chances of
46
Carsten Anckar, ‘On the applicability of the most similar systems design and the most different systems design
in comparative research’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 11: 5, 2008, pp. 389–401.
47
Pattern-matching is a classic qualitative technique of causal analysis whereby the investigator proposes an
empirical pattern that should be observed in a given case if a theory is valid and ‘matches’ the hypothesized
pattern to the observed pattern of events or features of the case to determine the degree of ‘fit’ between theory
and empirics. See Robert K. Yin, Case study research and applications: design and methods (Newbury Park,
CA: Sage, 2017), ch. 5. A match implies that the investigator can be somewhat more confident in the theory.
48
Alan M. Jacobs, ‘Process tracing the effects of ideas’, in Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, eds, Process
tracing: from metaphor to analytic tool (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 69–70.
joining NATO or EU were viewed as extremely remote. Moreover, they had very different
political cultures and institutional legacies: Hungary had been a Soviet satellite state and
Warsaw Pact member, whereas Albania had been an isolated state under the repressive rule of
Enver Hoxha. Although untroubled by internal separatism, the cases of post-communist
Hungary and Albania—two countries with large diasporas in neighbouring countries—offer
insights into how national sovereigntist movements can develop over concerns for transborder
ethnic kin, activating similar practices of lateral revisionism.
The first popular protests in Hungary occurred in 1988, outside the Romanian
Embassy, in response to reports that Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu had been
attempting to assimilate Transylvanian Hungarians through a plan of ‘systematizing’ minority
settlements. The reformist communist chair of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs
announced that Hungarians abroad ‘constitute part of the Hungarian nation’ and ‘have every
right to expect Hungary to feel responsibility for their fate and to speak up for them’.
49
{9} As
opposition groups began to organize public demonstrations against the Romanian dictator, the
János Kádár regime sought unsuccessfully to quash the protests out of respect for a fellow
Warsaw Pact country, even attempting to enforce a ban on national holidays to suppress the
movement.
50
Before long, however, nationalist sentiment became widespread. A public
opinion poll in 1989–90 showed that 85 per cent of Hungarians believed that Hungary should
assist the Hungarian minority in Romania because ‘they need help’.
51
In response to perceived threats to the ethnos, all six major parties elected to
parliament in 1990 called for assistance to be given to endangered ethnic kin. The liberal
nationalist Hungarian National Forum (MDF) emerged victorious from the elections and
introduced a new foreign policy of joining western organizations and liberating ethnic
Hungarians outside the state’s borders.
52
MDF Prime Minister Jószef Antall declared himself
‘in spirit’ to be ‘prime minister of 15 million Hungarians’ (not just the 10 million within
Hungary’s borders), designating the entire transborder Hungarian community as the national
in-group. This ethno-nationalist frame guided the foreign policy priorities of the new state. As
premier, Antall ‘pursued a policy that was virtually the polar opposite of that of the
49
Kossuth Rádió, 2001, as cited in Szabolcs Pogonyi, Extra-territorial ethnic politics: discourses and identities
in Hungary (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 83.
50
Gale Stokes, The walls came tumbling down: the collapse of communism in eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), p. 95.
51
Myra Waterbury, Between state and nation: diaspora politics and kin-state nationalism in Hungary (Cham:
Springer, 2010).
52
Zsolt Enyedi, ‘The role of agency in cleavage formation’, European Journal of Political Research 44: 5, 2005,
pp. 697–720; Béla Greskovits, ‘Rebuilding the Hungarian right through conquering civil society: the civic circles
movement’, East European Politics 36: 2, 2020, pp. 1–20.
communists. The government put the fate of the ethnic Hungarians first in its foreign policy
aims, causing some degree of alarm in the host-states.’
53
Following the dissolution of the
Warsaw Pact, Hungary did not normalize diplomatic relations with Romania until 1996, when
the Hungarian minority party was invited into the ruling coalition. Hungary’s treaty talks with
Slovakia also stalled over discriminatory policies against ethnic Hungarians in language and
education. At the same time, an Office on Hungarians Abroad was set up to institutionalize
ties with Hungarian minorities abroad. In 1998, Fidesz party leader Viktor Orbán was elected
prime minister on the same liberal, ethno-nationalist platform of defending Hungarians in
neighbouring countries and gaining entrance to western clubs such as NATO and the EU.
Neither Antall nor Orbán was a populist, however. While proclaiming their commitment to
champion the interests of Hungarians abroad, both leaders consistently prioritized their
alliance commitments to the West over concerns for their co-ethnics. During the 1999 NATO
air war against Yugoslavia, for example, NATO officials requested that the Hungarian
government grant airspace to US F-18 Hornets, which proceeded to target ethnic Hungarian
towns in northern Yugoslavia. Foreign Minister János Martonyi justified the government’s
action in the name of its liberal credentials: ‘This is exactly the kind of NATO we wanted to
join 10 years ago, one that stands for a certain set of values.’
54
Likewise, when the Venice
Commission condemned Hungary’s Status Law, which would have given extensive benefits
to ethnic Hungarians abroad on the basis of ethnicity, Fidesz MPs agreed to water down the
law. As liberal pro-western Atlanticists, government leaders were unwilling to pay too high a
price for lateral revisionism.
Post-communist Albania, like Hungary, was a state with a transborder diaspora of
millions. For decades, Albania had languished as a hermit state with closed borders—even to
co-ethnics in neighbouring Yugoslavia. What brought an end to Albanian autarky was the
spectacle of Serbian discrimination against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. In 1989, Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milošević enacted a series of laws that restricted the sale of property to
ethnic Albanians, changed Albanian street names to Serbian, shut down Albanian newspapers
and radio and television channels, created financial incentives for Serbs and Montenegrins to
move to the province and revoked Kosovo’s provincial autonomy.
55
Growing discrimination
53
Robert J. Patkai, ‘Hungarian minorities in Europe: a case study’, Ecumenical Review 47: 2, 1995, p. 218.
54
Michael J. Jordan, ‘NATO enlists a reluctant Hungary into Kosovo War’, Christian Science Monitor, 2 June
1999, https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0602/p6s1.html. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs
cited in this article were accessible on 4 Dec. 2020.)
55
Erin K. Jenne, Ethnic bargaining: the paradox of minority empowerment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2007), pp. 169–70.
against Kosovar Albanians galvanized a nationalist movement within Albania. In the
Albanian elections, Democratic Party candidate Sali Berisha—a northern Gheg with diasporic
ties in Kosovo—proclaimed that the party ‘cannot accept the division of the Albanian nation
as eternal’, an injustice that he promised to rectify as president.
56
In other words, the Albanian
in-group was threatened by the Serbian out-group, and Albania must rescue them. This
framing translated into diplomatic support by the Albanian government for Kosovo Albanian
separatism: when the shadow Kosovo government organized a successful referendum for
independence in September 1991, Albanian Premier Ramiz Alia immediately recognized the
proto-state—the only UN member country to do so at the time. Leading intellectuals within
Albania proposed a project of re-establishing Greater Albania, and Berisha was elected
president in 1992 on the promise to ‘bring down the Balkan wall’ between Albania and
Kosovo.
57
However, the ethno-nationalist impulse of Albania’s first democratically elected
government was ultimately outweighed by an even stronger imperative to secure western aid
and integrate into NATO and the EU. Gjevori writes that Albania ‘was expected to have a
non-revisionist regional policy supporting the status quo to gain favour with the international
community’.
58
The following year, Berisha proclaimed that ‘Albania has not sought, does not
seek and will not seek any change in existing borders’.
59
The Albanian Academy of Science
made a call for Greater Albania in 1998, but later retracted it.
60
Throughout the 1990s,
Tirana’s policy was to support self-determination for Kosovar Albanians, except in so far as
doing so fell afoul of western, particularly US, preferences.
In different geopolitical settings, then, Hungarian and Albanian foreign policy
followed a pattern of lateral but not systemic revisionism; governments in both countries
supported their co-ethnics in response to demonstrated threats to their well-being, except
when doing so conflicted with their commitments to their western allies.
56
Ilir Kalemaj, Contested borders: territorialization, national identity and imagined geographies in Albania
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 188.
57
International Crisis Group, Kosovo: the view from Tirana (Brussels, 10 July 1998), pp. 2–3,
https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/balkans/kosovo/kosovo-view-tirana.
58
Elvin Gjevori, ‘Kin state non-interventionism: Albania and regional stability in the western Balkans’, Nations
and Nationalism 24: 1, 2018, pp. 171–93.
59
Quoted in Rilindja Demokratike, 3 Feb. 1993; see also Kalemaj, Contested borders, p. 189.
60
Stephen Saideman and R. William Ayres, For kin or country: xenophobia, nationalism, and war (Columbia
University Press, 2008), p. 205.
Populist foreign policy: Chávez in Venezuela and Tsipras in Greece
By contrast, populist chief executives are more likely to emerge in countries gripped by crises
of political representation. Non-nationalist (or inclusionary) populist leaders have been most
prevalent in semi-peripheral societies that have ethnically diverse, socio-economically weak
populations that are inclined to support emancipatory movements against global financial
institutions and their foreign backers.
61
In the late 1990s and 2000s, inclusionary populist
heads of state emerged as part of the ‘pink wave’ in Latin America and south-eastern Europe,
as mounting societal pressures favoured movement entrepreneurs who demanded a revolution
on behalf of the authentic ‘people’ against exploitative elites.
62
To maximize contextual
variation across this paired comparison, I use the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela
and former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece to show how inclusionary populist
framing informs foreign policy practices. On different continents, and in different geopolitical
settings and political systems, both leaders railed against ‘the establishment’, but not against
national ‘others’. In-groups and out-groups were defined in political rather than ethnic terms
(see Table 1).
In Venezuela, the crisis leading to the victory of Hugo Chávez’s Fifth Republic
Movement (FRM) in the 1998 elections was a severe economic decline that led to a rapid
collapse in electoral support for Acción Democrátia (AD) and Social Christian Party
(COPEI)—hegemonic parties that were once foundational to Venezuelan democracy but later
came to be seen as a corrupt duopoly.
63
As a presidential candidate, Chávez promised to run
the government in the interests of the people and offered a clear alternative to the status quo.
64
Chávez said in interviews that ‘the people are the fuel of the engine of history’ and that his
‘movement would serve [the] interests . . . of the majority, those of the “poverty-people”—the
marginalized classes. That’s where our movement is headed, that’s what it feeds itself from,
61
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, ‘Exclusionary vs. inclusionary populism: comparing
contemporary Europe and Latin America’, Government and Opposition 48: 2, 2013, pp. 147–74 at p. 164.
62
Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the political arena: critical junctures, the labor movement and
regime dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Carlos de la Torre, Populist
seduction in Latin America (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2010); Inglehart and Norris, Cultural backlash;
Mudde and Kaltwasser, ‘Exclusionary vs. inclusionary populism’.
63
Michael Coppedge pinpoints the beginning of the decline in popular support for the regime in 1983, when the
two parties—once widely ‘equated with democracy’—began to see a steep drop in electoral support from a high
of 32 per cent in the 1980s to a low of 5 per cent in the late 1990s. See Coppedge, ‘Explaining democratic
deterioration in Venezuela’, p. 308.
64
Robert A. Huber and Christian H. Schimpf, ‘Friend or foe? Testing the influence of populism on democratic
quality in Latin America’, Political Studies 64: 4, 2016, p. 874.
and consequently that’s where it should orient its transforming action.’
65
The Fifth Republic
movement derived its name from the French Fifth Republic, signalling that, like Charles de
Gaulle in France, Chávez intended to steer the country in a fundamentally different direction.
The in-group was the majority ‘poverty-people’ and the out-group the elites, who were
defined along class and partisan lines.
After coming to office in 1999, Chávez changed Venezuela’s foreign policy
orientation to align with the perceived interests of the political in-group—here, the poor and
indigenous Chavista majority. This meant turning away from the old leadership’s
commitment to neo-liberal Washington Consensus policies in macroeconomics.
66
Comparing
Venezuela with Iran, Michael Dodson and Manochehr Dorraj wrote that ‘leaders and the mass
public in both countries share a strong perception that foreigners seek to exert control over
their national economies’. Accordingly, Chávez ended a half-century of close ties between
Venezuela and the United States, embarking on a ‘strikingly independent and confrontational
course vis-a-vis the United States’ while pursuing ‘closer relations with US rivals such as
China and Russia, and with US adversaries like Cuba and Iran’. At the same time, he built up
regional institutions based on Bolivarian unity in order to ‘increase Venezuela’s influence in
the Western hemisphere’.
67
Throughout his tenure, Chávez staked out a strikingly non-
nationalist stance, with no hint of lateral revisionism. Speaking at the 35th Mercosur summit
in 2008, he strongly condemned the United States and the EU for their restrictive immigration
policies, which he termed ‘legalized barbarism’, and struck an accord with other Mercosur
members to extend passport-free travel to ten South American countries.
68
In the small south-east European country of Greece, meanwhile, a similarly
inclusionary populist movement grew up in the wake of the 2008–2009 financial crisis that
brought the country to the brink of sovereign default. The ‘eruption of the economic crisis and
imposition of tough austerity’ by the long-ruling Pasok and New Democracy parties ‘led to
social discontent and anger against the traditional parties and their neoliberal agenda’.
69
At the
head of this movement was the formerly marginal Syriza party, which had been founded in
65
Habla el Comandante (a series of interviews conducted with Chávez by Venezuelan scholar Austín Blanco
Muñoz), pp. 87; 80–81, as quoted in Kirk Hawkins, ‘Populism in Venezuela: the rise of Chavismo’, Third World
Quarterly 24: 6, 2003, p. 1153-54.
66
Hawkins, Populism in Venezuela, 1145.
67
Michael Dodson and Manochehr Dorraj, ‘Populism and foreign policy in Venezuela and Iran’, Whitehead
Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, vol. 9, 2008, pp. 71–2, 73–5.
68
James Suggett, ‘Venezuela urges united response to food and energy crises at MERCOSUR summit’,
Venezuelanalysis.com, 2 July 2008, https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/3610.
69
Grigoris Markou, ‘Left-wing populism and anti-imperialism: the paradigm of Syriza’, Kairos: A Journal of
Critical Symposium 5: 1, 2020, p. 38.
2004 by the radical left-wing Coalition of the Left, of Movements and Ecology (Synaspismos)
and an assortment of Trotskyist, communist, Maoist, ecologist and socialist groups. Once a
minor party with an anti-capitalist message to oppose neo-liberal globalization, Syriza became
a clarion populist voice in Greece between 2010—the time of the first bailout agreement
between Athens and its creditors—and the elections of 2012, when it rose to the status of a
leading opposition party on the slogan ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’ around the young, charismatic
leader, Alexis Tsipras. At this point, Syriza was a quintessentially left-wing populist party.
70
The movement it headed was broadly inclusive and non-nationalist, even extending promises
to refugees and immigrants. Its leaders defined the in-group as marginalized groups such as
immigrants, old people and the disabled. The in-group was, in other words, a collection of
marginalized people in Greece, while the out-group was represented by the ‘corrupt’ Pasok
and New Democracy, along with the media and the ‘bankocracy’ of Europe.
71
Syriza’s passionate anti-establishment populism was reflected in their framing of the
problem, according to which international banks and the anti-democratic structure of the EU
were responsible for Greece’s economic disaster. In 2012, Tsipras proclaimed that Greece had
become a ‘debt colony’ and a ‘European protectorate’ and called for the country to leave
NATO and close all foreign military bases on Greek soil.
72
He took office in early 2015 on a
promise to annul the agreement between the EU and Athens to impose harsh austerity
measures in exchange for a financial bailout.
73
Beyond vowing to fight against austerity
measures imposed by the ‘Troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, the government began to solicit support from the
Russian government to leverage its position against the West, seeking a back-channel with the
Kremlin in the midst of bailout talks during the summer of 2015. In hopes of securing support
from Russia, the government signed a gas pipeline deal with Moscow over EU objections that
doing so would undermine their attempts to craft a common energy policy vis-à-vis Russia.
74
Notably, however, there was no hint of lateral revisionism in Syriza’s foreign policy practices.
When Tsipras came to office, he called for integrating immigrants into Greece and granting
them citizenship; within weeks the government set about dismantling refugee detention
70
Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, ‘Left-wing populism in the European periphery’. Syriza’s leaders stood out in
the political arena for their populist attacks blaming Pasok and external actors for Greece’s budgetary crisis: see
Vasilopoulou et al., ‘Greece in crisis’, pp. 396–7.
71
Markou, ‘Left-wing populism and anti-imperialism’, p. 38.
72
Markou, ‘Left-wing populism and anti-imperialism’, p. 39.
73
Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, ‘Left-wing populism in the European periphery’, p. 126.
74
Mitchell A. Orenstein and R. Daniel Kelemen, ‘Trojan horses in EU foreign policy’, Journal of Common
Market Studies 55: 1, 2017, pp. 97–8.
centres. Mainly owing to Greece’s poor bargaining position, however, the Tsipras government
would soon accept the austerity conditions of the Troika in return for the bailout. The
subsequent move to the right by Syriza in the months and years that followed led some to
conclude that the emancipatory potential of non-nationalist populism is limited in Europe,
where left-wing ‘resistance is still mostly framed at the level of the national community’.
75
On different continents and in different political systems, populist chief executives came to
power on a tidal wave of mass disenchantment with national and international governance
structures. In response to perceived threats to the demos, the two leaders engaged primarily in
systemic revisionism organized around the imperative of resisting US hegemony and
EU/Troika dominance, respectively. In so doing, they claimed to champion the interests of a
‘people’ defined in non-ethnic terms. The variable success of populist foreign policy across
the two cases was no doubt attributable to the greater capacity of the oil-rich Latin American
country to defy anti-populist pressures from hegemonic powers.
Ethno-populist foreign policy: Hungary and the United States in the mid-2010s
Finally, I turn to contemporary sovereigntist movements that combine populism and ethno-
nationalism. Over the past decade, an increasing number of state executives have begun to
intertwine populist and ethno-nationalist frames in their mobilizational rhetoric in response to
growing demands from within the dominant ethno-national group to correct their perceived
loss of representation in the political system (the demos) as well as their loss of ethno-cultural
dominance over the state (the ethnos). This pathway is best exemplified by the post-
materialist movements in advanced societies organized around status concerns of the
dominant ethno-political group.
76
To illustrate the commonalities in ethno-populist
movements across different economic, security and political contexts, I examine the
contemporary cases of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Donald Trump’s United States.
Ethno-populism in Hungary emerged in the wake of severe political and national
crises. From 2006 to 2009, Hungary’s centre-left Socialist government began to haemorrhage
popular support owing to a series of internal party scandals and blowback over unpopular
reforms and austerity measures.
77
The Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány was
75
De Cleen et al., ‘The potentials and difficulties of transnational populism’, p. 162.
76
Inglehart and Norris, Cultural backlash.
77
Between 2006 and 2010, the Socialist party’s approval ratings fell from 43 per cent to 19 per cent in the polls.
See András Bíró and Dániel Róna, Freefall: political agenda explanations for the Hungarian Socialist party’s
loss of popularity between 2006-2010, Working Papers in Political Science 2012/5 (Budapest: Institute for
Political Science, MTA Centre for Social Sciences),
https://politikatudomany.tk.mta.hu/uploads/files/archived/7790_2012_5_wp.pdf.
eventually forced to resign his premiership in favour of a caretaker government. In the
meantime, the sovereign debt crisis hit the Hungarian economy and currency particularly
hard. With the Socialist government in shambles, Orbán easily regained power in 2010 with
an overwhelming two-thirds parliamentary majority, claiming that his voters had thereby
‘carried out a revolution’.
78
Orbán made considerable use of populist framing in office,
castigating the Socialist party as ‘elites’ who were exploiting the ‘Hungarian people’. He also
set himself against the previous Socialist government, accusing it of serving as a conduit for
foreign interests, proclaiming ‘We will not be a colony!’ and ‘Hungarians will not live as
foreigners dictate it, will not give up their independence or their freedom.’
79
For the first time
since Hungary’s democratic {15} transition, the government began to flirt with systemic
revisionism. In both rhetoric and foreign policy, Orbán’s government began to turn away
from its traditional partners, declaring that Russia, China and Turkey offered an ‘illiberal’
developmental model that Hungary could emulate.
The government executed a sharp turn toward ethno-populism in 2015, when more
than one million refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea reached Europe. Over the
course of that summer, anti-migrant sentiment spiked as images appeared in the media of
refugees running across Hungary’s borders and congregating at the Keleti train station in
Budapest on their way further west.
80
To cope with the wider refugee crisis, the EU
established a system of quotas for distributing the refugees among EU member countries. This
provided a window of opportunity for Orbán to ‘gamble for resurrection’ while countering the
recent striking electoral successes of the far-right Jobbik party.
81
In his response to the quota
system, Orbán invoked an ethno-populist frame, arguing that the ethno-political in-group (the
Hungarian people-nation) was threatened by elites at the UN and the EU who wanted to flood
the country with millions of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. The shift
towards xenophobic framing in the 2018 election campaign was only too evident.
82
78
Emilia Palonen, ‘Performing the nation: the Janus-faced populist foundations of illiberalism in Hungary’,
Journal of Contemporary European Studies 26: 3, 2018, p. 314.
79
Ian Traynor, ‘Hungary prime minister hits out at EU interference in national day speech’, Guardian, 15 March
2012. Whereas Orbán’s first government (1998-2002) had diluted the Status Law in response to objections from
the Venice Commission, his new government implemented a dual citizenship law in a single stroke against the
objections of neighbouring countries and international organizations.
80
The social aspects of the 2015 migration crisis in Hungary (Budapest: TARKI Social Research Institute,
March 2016), ch. 1.
81
By 2014, the Fidesz government had begun to lose popular support to the far-right anti-immigrant Jobbik
party, owing in part to the government’s unpopular policies, such as a proposed internet tax, and mounting
evidence of government corruption. By the mid-2010s, the government was in bad need of a new mobilizational
cause. See Agnes Batory, ‘Populists in government? Hungary’s “system of national cooperation”’,
Democratization 23: 2, 2016, pp. 283–303.
82
Palonen, ‘Performing the nation’, p. 317.
This frame translated into a set of omni-revisionist foreign policy practices. The
Fidesz government rejected the quotas for refugees that Hungary was asked by the EU to
accept in the wake of the crisis. The head of the European People’s Party, the EU’s biggest
parliamentary group, threatened to expel the Fidesz faction, and members of the European
Parliament discussed plans to suspend Hungary’s voting rights under article 7 of the EU
Treaty. Given Fidesz’s value as a junior partner in the EU’s biggest parliamentary bloc,
however, Orbán judged these threats not credible and continued to flout EU authority on the
quota system. In addition to generating conflicts with Hungary’s western allies and
international institutions, Orbán also escalated bilateral tensions with Ukraine in 2017 over
the status of its Hungarian minority, blocking NATO military exercises with Ukraine over
Kiev’s new language policy, which was considered harmful to Transcarpathian Hungarians.
In 2019, Orbán also blocked the EU’s joint resolution against Turkey’s invasion of Syria in
2019, reviving scepticism about the EU’s ability to act as a unified foreign policy actor.
83
In
defence of the Hungarian people-nation, Orbán now readily picked fights with the United
States and EU, and with neighbouring Ukraine, while also rejecting asylum-seekers, thereby
escalating conflict in both the near and far abroad.
In the United States, meanwhile, the 2016 presidential election elevated businessman
and reality TV show host Donald Trump to office on the strength of a reactionary movement
of working-class white Americans. These ‘forgotten Americans’ had experienced the dual
crisis of post-recessionary alienation from the global liberal order coupled with the daily
visible reminder in the first African-American President, Barack Obama, that European
Americans were losing their dominance in American society.
84
The movement began with the
self-identified Tea Party movement, whose sympathizers, generally older, white, conservative
and rural Americans, had come to self-identify as ‘strangers in their own land’.
85
Donald
Trump won the presidency with the support of this very same disaffected group. Berk Esen
and Şebnem Yardimci-Geyikçi write that ‘Trump’s rhetoric clearly draws on enduring
83
Markus Becker, ‘Ungarn verhinderte EU-Warnung vor Syrien-Einmarsch’, Der Spiegel, 9 Oct. 2019,
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/syrien-angriff-ungarn-verhinderte-eu-warnung-an-tuerkei-a-
1290758.html.
84
Thorsten Wojczewski, ‘Trump, populism, and American foreign policy’, Foreign Policy Analysis 16: 3, 2019,
pp. 1–20; Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin, ‘The Tea Party and the remaking of
Republican conservatism’, Perspectives on Politics 9: 1, 2011, p. 27.
85
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the American right (Newark,
NJ: New Press, 2016). For more on the nativist politics of the rural and white working class, see Justin Gest, The
new minority: white working class politics in an age of immigration and inequality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016); Katherine J. Cramer, The politics of resentment: rural consciousness in Wisconsin and the rise of
Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
resentments in American society and aims to tap into a shared animosity against “others”’.
86
Famously, Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign announcement hailed ‘the great American
people’ (downwardly mobile white Americans) who were under threat ‘like never before’
from rival countries like China and Russia who take advantage of ‘our stupid leaders’ (the
Democrats and disloyal Republicans) to win{16}.
87
In December 2015, Trump accused
Democratic leaders of allowing Muslim terrorists and Mexican criminals into the country,
calling for a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ as well as a
physical wall on the southern border to protect Americans from threats to the ethnos. In a
series of rhetorical moves, Trump reframed the political field into one in which national out-
groups conspired with political elites to subjugate the in-group—the ‘great American people’.
He repeatedly promised to ‘put America first’ by correcting flaws in international
commitments that compromised the sovereignty of the people-nation.
The new president wasted little time translating this framing into policy through a
succession of contentious performances. In his first week, he signed executive orders
directing that a wall be built along the US–Mexican border and that immediate restrictions be
placed on the entrance into the country of refugees and of foreigners from six Muslim-
majority states (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) in the administration’s first
so-called ‘Muslim ban’.
88
Besides restricting access to US territory through revisionist border
policies, the Trump administration also engaged in systemic revisionism, politicizing the State
Department by withdrawing from and sometimes even attacking liberal international
institutions.
89
In a 2018 speech to the UN, he pronounced that the International Criminal
Court was illegitimate and that ‘We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an
unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy.’
90
During his four-year tenure, Trump signalled
a shift away from multilateralism in favour of bilateral ‘deals’, withdrawing the United States
from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and asserting that Washington would only come to the aid
86
Berk Esen and Şebnem Yardimci-Geyikçi, ‘An alternative account of the populist backlash in the United
States: a perspective from Turkey’, Political Science and Politics 52: 3, 2019, p. 446 .
87
Donald Trump, Presidential announcement speech, Time Magazine, June 16, 2015,
https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.
88
Khaled A. Beydoun and Abed Ayoub, ‘Executive disorder: the Muslim ban, emergency advocacy, and the
fires next time’, Michigan Journal of Race and Law 22: 2, 2017, pp. 220–21.
89
Carla Norrlof, ‘Is COVID-19 the end of US hegemony? Public bads, leadership failures and monetary
hegemony’, International Affairs 96: 5, Sept. 2020, pp. 1281–1303; Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski, ‘The
consequence of COVID-19: how the United States moved from security provider to security consumer’,
International Affairs 96: 5, Sept. 2020, pp. 1253–79.
90
Alexis Papazoglou, ‘Trump has a peculiar definition of sovereignty,’ The Atlantic, 28 September 2019,
Trump’s Undemocratic Obsession With Sovereignty - The Atlantic.
of NATO allies that ‘paid their fair share’ in defence.
91
Trump reportedly voiced an interest in
pulling the country out of the alliance altogether, citing reservations about article 5 on mutual
defence and inequitable burden-sharing in military spending. With bipartisan resistance to
such a move in Congress, and Trump now out of office, the chances of NATO withdrawal
appear to be remote for the time being. However, it remains a distinct possibility in the future
should a new leader emerge who harnesses a similar coalition of ‘forgotten Americans’
seeking further restrictions on US immigration and multilateralism.
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In very different political systems of Hungary and the United States, reactionary
movements within the dominant ethno-political group selected for leaders who signalled their
commitment to elevating the specific interests of narrow ethno-political in-groups on the
international stage. Once in power, these ethno-populist frames translated into omni-
revisionist foreign policy practices at the leadership level.
Conclusion
This article has argued that populism and nationalism are both implicated in the broader
doctrine of sovereigntism, according to which the interests of the ‘authentic’ state
community—the people, the nation or the ‘people-nation’—must be given precedence in both
domestic and foreign policy. In the context of representational crises, sovereigntism attracts
the support of traumatized groups seeking protection from hostile forces both within and
beyond the state. Dramatic demonstrations that the sovereign community has been
interpenetrated, weakened or otherwise rendered vulnerable favour political leaders who
commit to foreign policy revisionism. Ethno-nationalist leaders are focused on revising
borders and otherwise elevating the interests of the national in-group, often with the effect of
stoking conflict in the immediate neighbourhood. By contrast, populist leaders promise to
champion the political in-group through systemic revisionism to ensure that the country’s
foreign policy serves ‘the people’. Ethno-populists, finally, equate the ethnos with the demos,
arguing that the collective interests of the dominant ethno-political group must be translated
into foreign policy through both lateral and systemic revisionism.
91
Ben Jacobs, ‘Donald Trump reiterates he will only help NATO countries that pay “fair share”’, Guardian, 28
July 2016; Emily Tillett, ‘Trump reiterates calls for NATO members to pay fair share, defeat terrorism’, CBS
News, 25 May 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-reiterates-calls-for-nato-members-to-pay-fair-share-
defeat-terrorism/.
92
Robbie Gramer, ‘Trump can’t do that. Can he?’, Foreign Policy, 16 Jan. 2019,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/trump-cant-do-that-can-he-nato-russia-congress/.
Given that many contemporary populist leaders are also ethno-nationalists, it is easy to
conclude that the two are partner concepts or that one always comes with the other, at least in
the contemporary period. Indeed, Brubaker contends that nationalism is a defining feature of
populism and therefore sits inside populism.
93
However, this conceptualization occludes the
many ‘left-wing’ populisms such as the indignados movement in Spain, the Syriza movement
in Greece and DiEM25, a European populist movement that is self-consciously
transnational.
94
In Latin America, too, populism has generally assumed non-nationalist
characteristics. Less remarked upon is that this conceptualization also ignores non-populist
nationalism. Examples of the latter include leaders such as Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili,
Armenia’s Robert Kocharyan and Hungary’s József Antall, who periodically engaged in
ethno-territorial disputes with neighbouring countries, but had little truck with populism—
instead favouring EU and NATO accession and serving as faithful western allies. What this
suggests is that nationalism by itself is likely to yield more limited foreign policy revisionism
than nationalism combined with populism. This demonstrates the benefits of following the
advice of Bart Bonikowski and his colleagues to distinguish populism from nationalism
conceptually and empirically, so as to ascertain both their independent and combined effects
on policy.
95
This brief survey of sovereigntist leaders around the world suggests a potentially
fruitful new research programme in IR organized around a few general questions. First, has
there been a overall shift in sovereigntist movements from liberal nationalism in the 1990s to
non-nationalist populism in the 2000s to nationalist populism (ethno-populism) in the 2010s
and beyond? If so, does this mean that global crises produce isomorphic effects across
different political systems, or does it mean that sovereigntist leaders learn from one another?
Second, how often do heads of state simultaneously serve as social movement leaders, and
what happens when these roles come into conflict? Understanding how dual-hatted chief
executives perform in office requires investigating the transferential lock{18} between
movement leaders and participants, as well as of how movement frames are translated into
foreign policy practices in the presence of institutional constraints. Third, how extensive are
the effects of sovereigntist movements on foreign policy? In other words, how often do
93
Rogers Brubaker, ‘Populism and nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 26: 1, 2020, pp. 44–66.
94
De Cleen et al., ‘The potentials and difficulties of transnational populism’. See also Benjamin De Cleen and
Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘How should we analyse the connections between populism and nationalism: A response to
Rogers Brubaker, Nations and Nationalism 26, 2, 2020: 314-322.
95
Bart Bonikowski, Daphne Halikiopoulou, Eric Kaufmann, Matthijs Rooduijn, ‘Populism and nationalism in a
comparative perspective: a scholarly exchange’, Nations and Nationalism 25: 1, 2018, pp. 58–81.
sovereigntist leaders’ contentious performances extend beyond mere symbolism? What these
questions have in common is that they all probe the power of sovereigntist frames to shape
not just state foreign policy but to alter—or even remake—the structure of the international
system.
