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Populist (de)legitimation of
international organizations
KILIAN SPANDLER AND FREDRIK SÖDERBAUM*
International Aairs 99: () –; : ./ia/iiad
© The Author(s) . Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Aairs. This is
an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited.
Ever since the end of the Second World War, international organizations (IOs) have
been a bedrock of multilateralism, both at the core of the so-called liberal inter-
national order and at its margins. Given that populism in its currently dominant
right-wing variant is usually associated with a strong emphasis on nationalism and
sovereignty, many observers are convinced that the rise of populism in world
politics poses a challenge to the legitimacy of the liberal international order and
multilateral cooperation. This belief is by no means unfounded. An increasing
number of heads of government—such as former US president Donald Trump,
former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, the former prime
minister of the United Kingdom—draw on a populist repertoire to challenge,
weaken or withdraw from established IOs.
However, experts on populism have cautioned against portraying populists
as unilateralists or oversimplifying their foreign policies. While populist leaders
may contest certain IOs, they often come out in support of others. For example,
several populist leaders such as Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India)
and Rodrigo Duterte (the former president of the Philippines) have endorsed
cooperation under the UN’s climate framework. Even the Trump administration
remained an active participant in many important IOs.
To explain these contradictions, this article investigates how state leaders use
populism as a source for legitimating and delegitimating IOs. As the introduc-
tion to this special section points out, legitimation and delegitimation are crucial
ways of influencing the workings of IOs, because legitimacy is a key tool for
* This article is part of a special section in the May issue of International Aairs on ‘Legitimizing interna-
tional organizations’, guest-edited by Tobias Lenz and Fredrik Söderbaum.
Mark Copelovitch and Jon C.W. Pevehouse, ‘International organizations in a new era of populist national-
ism’, The Review of International Organizations :, , pp.–, https://doi.org/./s---
; Stephan De Spiegeleire, Clarissa Skinner and Tim Sweijs, The rise of populist sovereignism: what it is, where it
comes from, and what it means for international security and defense (The Hague: The Hague Centre for Strategic
Studies, ). (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on
Jan. .)
Sandra Destradi, David Cadier and Johannes Plagemann, ‘Populism and foreign policy: a research agenda
(Introduction)’, Comparative European Politics : , , pp.– at pp.–, https://doi.org/./
s---.
Sandra Destradi and Johannes Plagemann, ‘Populism and International Relations: (un)predictability, person-
alisation, and the reinforcement of existing trends in world politics’, Review of International Studies :, ,
pp.–, https://doi.org/./S.
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Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum
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ensuring their eectiveness. According to existing legitimacy research, actors
usually (de) legitimate IOs by constructing arguments about whether they eec-
tively provide collective goods (functional or performance legitimacy) and how
responsive they are to key stakeholders (procedural legitimacy). In focusing on
these liberal legitimation standards, scholars have disregarded the possibility that
populist leaders may draw on entirely dierent standards and norms when (de)
legitimating IOs. Based on theoretical scholarship on populism, we argue that
populist leaders seek to transform the normative premises of debates about IO
legitimacy by basing their (de)legitimation primarily on the representative quali-
ties of the IOs. While work on domestic political institutions has long acknowl-
edged claims about representation, these issues have largely been overlooked by
scholars of IO legitimation. Logically, prior to conventional functional and
procedural legitimation, representational legitimation critically interrogates IOs
by asking on whose authority they speak, in whose interest they act, who they
are made up of, and what they stand for. By doing so, populist leaders promote
standards of legitimacy that contest dominant liberal norms. This allows populist
leaders to link their (de)legitimation of IOs to their goal of portraying themselves
as the ultimate representatives of ‘the people’.
We therefore argue that populism enters debates about IO legitimation
primarily through the representative claims of state leaders. While populism is
often regarded in a rather simplified manner as politics guided by public opinion,
we contend that populist leaders do not simply react to anti-IO sentiments in the
broader public when (de)legitimating IOs, but actively try to convince audiences
about the relevance of alternative legitimacy standards. Populism, which we
understand as a mode of framing political discourses, oers leaders a way of artic-
ulating latent grievances among key audiences in terms of an antagonism between
‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, and directing those grievances toward specific IOs.
This argument resonates with recent research that finds that government commu-
nication has a strong influence on public perceptions of IO legitimacy. In line
with these premises, we focus our inquiry on one specific analytical perspective,
agent-based legitimation, within the larger agents-audiences-environment (AAE)
framework developed by Tobias Lenz and Fredrik Söderbaum in the introduc-
Tobias Lenz and Fredrik Söderbaum, ‘The origins of legitimation strategies in international organizations:
agents, audiences and environments’, International Aairs :, , pp. –.
Jonas Tallberg, Karin Bäckstrand and Jan Aart Scholte, eds, Legitimacy in global governance: sources, processes, and
consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), https://doi.org/./oso/...
For exceptions, see Daniel F. Wajner, ‘The populist way out: why contemporary populist leaders seek trans-
national legitimation’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations :, , pp.–, https://doi.
org/.%F; Daniel F. Wajner and Luis Roniger, ‘Populism and transnational projec-
tion: the legitimation strategies of Pink Tide neo-populist leaderships in Latin America’, Comparative Political
Theory :, , pp.–, https://doi.org/./-bja.
Michael Saward, The representative claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp.–. For a rare treat-
ment of the international dimension, see Pieter de Wilde, ‘The quality of representative claims: Uncovering
a weakness in the defense of the liberal world order’, Political Studies : , , pp. –, https://doi.
org/./.
Lisa M. Dellmuth and Jonas Tallberg, ‘Elite communication and the popular legitimacy of international organ-
izations’, British Journal of Political Science :, , pp.–, https://doi.org/./S.
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Populist (de)legitimation of international organizations
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tion to this special section. This perspective emphasizes the strategic agency of
political decision-makers as a crucial source of IO (de)legitimation. In exploring
these endogenous origins, this approach contrasts with audience-based perspec-
tives, in which agents reactively consider the normative beliefs of key audiences,
as well as environment-based (de)legitimation, where agents emulate arguments
about other IOs that are deemed highly legitimate.
To illustrate how leaders use populism for the (de)legitimation of IOs, we
employ a comparative research design covering three cases: incumbent Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the
former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. This approach allows us to demon-
strate that leaders across a broad political spectrum consistently use representative
claims to impose the ‘people vs elite’ logic on discourses about IO legitimacy.
Specifically, populist leaders employ two representational frames—popular sover-
eignty and popular identity. Based on these frames, they question the liberal norms
that conventionally undergird procedural and functional legitimation while at the
same time persuading audiences of the validity of popular identity and sover-
eignty as alternative legitimacy standards, which follows the agent-based logic
of (de)legitimation. Populist representational frames thus enable direct (de)legiti-
mation of IOs based on claims about their representative qualities. At the same
time, these frames allow populist leaders to challenge and replace the conventional
liberal legitimacy standards with a specific populist inflection by demanding that
IOs should provide governance ‘for the people’ and ‘by the people’, rather than
for/by detached elites.
The empirical focus of our study is on regional IOs, since these are particu-
larly intense sites—and simultaneously objects—of populist (de)legitimation
strategies. This is evidenced by the ongoing politicization of EU membership by
European populist leaders, from Marine Le Pen in France to Orbán in Hungary,
as well as the competition over regional initiatives during the so-called ‘Pink
Tide’ of populism which swept across Latin America from the early s. In
spite of this focus on regional IOs, however, we also seek to glean insights into
IOs more generally, especially with regard to how they are aected by populist
delegitimation. From a populist vantage point, what is primarily wrong with
many established IOs is not that they lack transparency or are ineective, but that
their procedures and functions reflect a liberal, elitist order and fail to represent
‘the people’. Consequently, we argue that stakeholders of established IOs will do
little to address populist delegitimation if they continue to rely on procedural
and functional legitimation based on conventional legitimacy standards while
sidestepping more fundamental representational questions of sovereignty and
identity. Instead, defending established IOs requires their stakeholders to take up
the populist challenge by engaging in more fundamental debates over the organi-
zations’ purpose and mandate.
The article is structured in the following way. First, we review the literature
on populism and legitimacy in international cooperation, showing that there is
Lenz and Söderbaum, ‘The origins of legitimation strategies in international organizations’.
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Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum
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still very little research on populist legitimation of IOs. The next section develops
the analytical framework of representational legitimation frames, and situates
our approach within the broader theoretical landscape. Next, we elaborate the
research design and methodological considerations before presenting a compar-
ative empirical analysis of the cases of Orbán, Chávez and Duterte. The final
section draws broader conclusions from the study for research on populism as well
as on legitimacy in global governance.
Existing literature on populism and legitimacy in international cooperation
While existing scholarship has generated many insights into the sources, drivers
and consequences of legitimacy in IOs, it has not suciently considered the impli-
cations of the rise of populists to power. Instead, the most influential parts of
the literature have often focused on dimensions of legitimacy that resonate with
liberal conceptions of international order. From this perspective, procedural and
functional legitimacy have received considerable attention, but without problem-
atizing dierent conceptions of the core constituencies and beneficiaries of IOs.
The current wave of populism has challenged these dominant liberal underpin-
nings of IO authority.
Recent advances beyond the dominant liberal institutional perspective should
be acknowledged, for instance research on the ‘dark sides’ of international and
regional cooperation as well as on the strategic use of IOs by political leaders
and governments—either for the purposes of regime survival, regime-boosting
or legitimacy-boosting, or as a smokescreen for achieving narrow interests.
However, this literature focuses primarily on authoritarian instead of populist
regimes. Furthermore, it usually examines how international cooperation fosters
domestic regime legitimacy, rather than how illiberal actors engage in the
(de) legitimation of IOs.
To address this gap, we look to the emerging literature that has started to
unpack and analyse the nexus between the domestic and international dimensions
of populism. Daniel Wajner, for example, argues that populist leaders’ interna-
tional (de)legitimation strategies externalize their domestic political strategies.
This research suggests that international cooperation may play an important role
in populist leaders’ politics, not just as an object of critique but also as a substantial
feature of their foreign policy. However, most scholars have studied the particu-
larities of populist foreign policy in dierent parts of the world and there is a lack
Tallberg et al., Legitimacy in global governance; Jonas Tallberg and Michael Zürn, ‘The legitimacy and legitima-
tion of international organizations: introduction and framework’, The Review of International Organizations,
vol. , , pp.–; Klaus Dingwerth, Antonia Witt, Ina Lehmann, Ellen Reichel and Tobias Weise,
International organizations under pressure: legitimating global governance in challenging times (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, ).
Maria J. Debre and Lee Morgenbesser, ‘Out of the shadows: autocratic regimes, election observation and
legitimation’, Contemporary Politics : , , pp. –, https://doi.org/./..;
Fredrik Söderbaum, Rethinking regionalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ).
Angelos Chryssogelos, ‘Populism in foreign policy’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ).
Wajner, ‘The populist way out’.
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Populist (de)legitimation of international organizations
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of organized and systematic research on populist (de)legitimation of IOs. Even
when comparative perspectives are adopted, this is often for the sake of teasing
out dierences between ‘thick’ variants of populism, rather than interrogating
common trends and approaches. The idiographic orientation of existing scholar-
ship has prevented generalization and theory-building as well as the formation of
empirical knowledge about how populists engage in the (de)legitimation of global
and regional IOs. The following section develops a theoretical framework that
allows a first step in this direction.
Approach and framework: representational frames of (de)legitimation
Our conceptualization understands populism as a mode of framing political issues
for the purpose of obtaining and sustaining public support. In line with common
usages in the social sciences, we define frames as sense-making tools through
which actors—in our case, the populist state leaders—organize reality in ways
that connect it to existing knowledge, ideologies and normative dispositions. At
its core, populist framing relies on the construction of a morally pure people and
the corrupt elite as antagonistic group identities. Populist leaders then legiti-
mate themselves as embodying ‘the people’ in their fight against ‘the elite’. We
can see this in its purest form in Hugo Chávez’s dictum: ‘I am not myself, I am
the people’. Populism, in this understanding, is not merely a politics of passively
following the demands of ordinary citizens—it is a discursive strategy that polit-
ical elites use to influence public perceptions and beliefs. This emphasis on elite
agency brings it into natural association with agent-based legitimation in the AAE
framework introduced by Lenz and Söderbaum in the introduction to this special
section. Elite agency is also compatible with theories that emphasize populism’s
stylistic and performative elements. Complementing these works, our framing
approach provides an analytical focus on the substantive themes of legitimation
that populist leaders employ.
Because frames have multiple functions—they define problems, diagnose
causes, enable moral judgements, prescribe solutions and motivate action—they
are important ways in which actors organize (de)legitimation discourses. Framing
helps leaders justify and ‘sell’ foreign policy decisions to key audiences as part of
their broader political quest. But what do specifically populist (de)legitimation
Destradi and Plagemann, ‘Populism and International Relations’.
Paris Aslanidis, ‘Is populism an ideology? A refutation and a new perspective’, Political Studies : suppl.,
, pp.– at p..
Robert M. Entman, ‘Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm’, Journal of Communication :,
, pp.–, https://doi.org/./j.-..tb.x.
Erin K. Jenne, ‘Populism, nationalism and revisionist foreign policy’, International Aairs :, , pp.–,
https://doi.org/./ia/iiaa.
José Pedro Zúquete, ‘The missionary politics of Hugo Chávez’, Latin American Politics and Society :, ,
pp.– at p., https://doi.org/./j.-...x.
Benjamin Mott, The global rise of populism: performance, political style, and representation (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, ).
Entman, ‘Framing’, p..
Bart Bonikowski, ‘Ethno-nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment’, The British Jour-
nal of Sociology :S, , pp.S–S at p., https://doi.org/./-..
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Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum
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frames of IOs look like? Theories of populism suggest that populists will mainly
frame IOs in terms of representation. Benjamin Arditi, for example, sees populism
as a ‘mode of representation’ that constructs an intimate connection between the
populist leader and ‘the people’, and sees the former as a ‘vehicle for the expression
of the popular will’. The notion of representation comprises dierent aspects. In
a basic sense, it refers to the idea of being formally authorized to speak for someone
and acting in that person’s interest, which could be subsumed under procedural
and functional legitimacy. In a deeper sense, however, it is a process of ‘rendering
present, bringing into presence through a substitute’. Representation therefore
has formal and substantial, but also descriptive and symbolic elements—all of
which can confer legitimacy to an actor or institution.
Whether or not a subject represents a constituency is not given a priori but
depends on successful ‘representative claims’—speech acts that follow a basic
grammar in which a claim-maker (here: the populist leader) argues that a subject
(here: the IO) stands for an object (here: the IO’s constituency and its interests)
or fails to do so. Such claims can have powerful legitimation eects because
they invoke democratic ideals. While proponents of liberal democracy ascribe the
function of representation primarily to political institutions, populist framing
depicts those institutions as undemocratic and argues that the leader is the only
authentic representative of ‘the people’. Accordingly, we define legitimation
frames as representational if they contain representative claims about IOs, i.e.
arguments about whose authority the IO acts on (formal representation), in whose
interest it acts (substantial representation), who it is made up of (descriptive repre-
sentation), and/or who it stands for (symbolic representation). Using representa-
tional legitimation frames allows populist leaders to embed their (de) legitimation
of IOs in the ‘people vs elite’ logic of populism. They can legitimate IOs by
depicting them as embodiments of ‘the people’ and acting in pursuit of the popular
will, or delegitimate them by portraying them as symbols of a reviled liberal inter-
national order, dominated by detached elites acting against ‘the people’s’ interests
without popular control and participation. Either way, by making claims about
the representative qualities of an IO the populist leader also makes implicit repre-
sentative claims about themselves. If the IO represents ‘the people’, it is because
it is authorized and controlled by the leader as the trustee of ‘the people’; if it
does not represent ‘the people’, the populist leader will challenge its authority
on behalf of ‘the people’. Populist leaders’ (de)legitimation of IOs thus has the
ultimate purpose of legitimating their own rule.
Representative claims are used by actors across the political spectrum, but
research indicates that opponents of established political orders are often better
at using representative claims to challenge those orders than established actors are
Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the edges of liberalism: dierence, populism, revolution, agitation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, ), p..
Arditi, Politics on the edges of liberalism.
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The concept of representation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ).
Saward, The representative claim, p..
Nadia Urbinati, ‘Political theory of populism’, Annual Review of Political Science , , pp.–, https://
doi.org/./annurev-polisci--.
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at using them to sustain support for it, which confirms the connection between
populism and representation stipulated in theories of populism. Our empirical
analysis shows that implicit or explicit representative claims are indeed perva-
sive in populist leaders’ discourses around IOs. Thematically, the claims can be
organized into two main frames: popular sovereignty and popular identity.
With regard to the first frame, popular sovereignty, the leader’s role in ‘taking
back control’ for the voiceless by circumventing established representative insti-
tutions has been identified as an essential feature of populist politics. Beyond
domestic contexts, this translates into narratives that see popular sovereignty as
threatened by IOs that encourage the delegation of authority to centralized and
supranational international institutions. Angelos Chryssogelos goes as far as to
say that ‘whether defined along national, regional or transnational lines, “sover-
eignty” is probably the term that most accurately captures the populist logic of
international aairs’. To be sure, the genealogy of popular sovereignty has a
distinct liberal dimension, connected as it is to the emergence of republican nation-
states and contractualist political philosophy. However, populist leaders provide
a particular spin on the principle by detaching it from notions of institutional
representation and pitting ‘the people’ against sovereignty-usurping elites. From
this perspective, the hegemonic liberalism advanced primarily by western states
and liberal elites, which supports the idea of IOs intruding into member state
aairs, appears as anti-sovereigntist. At the same time, populist leaders legitimate
IOs that are compatible with popular notions of sovereignty and protect or even
enhance the leader’s role as guardian of ‘the people’s’ interests.
Regarding the second frame of popular identity, populism relies on the notion
of ‘the people’ as an ‘imagined community’. Through mythical narratives of
virtue and authenticity, ‘the people’ are constructed as the ultimate constituency
of all populist politics. They are imagined as a community threatened in their
authenticity or sheer existence, ‘held back by the collusion of foreign forces and
self-serving elites at home’. This Other of ‘the people’ is frequently characterized
as liberal or ‘globalist’. ‘The elite’ is said to act against the interests of ‘the people’
through inter- and supranational institutions. Although scholars frequently
Pieter de Wilde, ‘Representative claims analysis: theory meets method’, Journal of European Public Policy :,
, pp.–, https://doi.org/./...
Urbinati, ‘Political theory of populism’.
De Spiegeleire et al., The rise of populist sovereignism, pp.–.
Chryssogelos, ‘Populism in foreign policy’, p..
Angelos Chryssogelos, ‘Undermining the West from within: European populists, the US and Russia’, Euro-
pean View :, , pp.–, https://doi.org/./s---; Wajner, ‘The populist way out’,
p..
Cas Mudde, ‘The populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition :, , pp.– at p., https://doi.
org/./j.-...x.
Margaret Canovan, ‘Taking politics to the people: populism as the ideology of democracy’, in Yves Mény and
Yves Surel, eds, Democracies and the populist challenge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –.
Je D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, ‘The liberal order is rigged: fix it now or watch it wither’, Foreign
Aairs :, , pp.– at p..
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, ‘The global dimensions of populist nationalism’, The International Spectator :, ,
pp.– at p., https://doi.org/./...
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characterize ‘the people’ as a ‘homogeneous’ or ‘monolithic’ category, such
identities may very well be multi-layered. Populists politicize identity, but do not
necessarily perceive regional and national belonging as a zero-sum game. Invoking
transnational bonds may help reinforce the ‘people vs elite’ antagonism—for exam-
ple, by summoning solidarity against a common enemy. This suggests that populist
leaders will endorse cooperation if it represents counterhegemonic or defensive
projects, sometimes even within broader institutional frameworks such as the EU.
Taken together, the popular sovereignty and identity frames constitute a form
of representational (de)legitimation in line with the populist political logic. In
relation to Lenz and Söderbaum’s AAE framework, such representational legiti-
mation is agent-based, rather than audience- or environment-based. The leaders
attempt to persuade audiences to view IOs’ legitimacy in terms of popular sover-
eignty and identity, instead of passively adjusting to audiences’ pre-existing
normative demands or copying established legitimation strategies from successful
IOs. While populist leaders need to frame their claims in a way that resonates
with potential audiences such as domestic voters, by ascribing sovereignty and
identity to ‘the people’ they essentially construct their audience in the speech
act itself rather than addressing it as a pre-defined entity. In doing so, their
(de) legitimation strategies can transform the normative grounds of debates about
IO legitimacy in favour of the ‘people vs elite’ antagonism.
Research design and methodological considerations
In this section we compare the legitimation frames of three populist leaders:
Viktor Orbán, the late Hugo Chávez and Rodrigo Duterte. They were purposely
selected from among the list of populist heads of state and government identi-
fied in the ‘Populism in power’ database. First, we excluded those leaders whose
period in power ended before in order to reduce the potential eects of
historical context. From the remaining leaders, we chose three whose cases
showed maximum variation in terms of ideological orientation and geographical
location. Orbán’s nativist nationalism makes him an exponent of Europe’s current
wave of far-right populism. Chávez was arguably the icon of Latin America’s ‘Pink
Tide’ of populism, with strong socialist overtones. Duterte has been associated
with an ideologically flexible form of populism that is often seen as a specifically
south-east Asian variant. Our rationale for this selection was that a comparison
of the most dissimilar cases would make for a robust test of our arguments about
populist (de)legitimation as an agent-based process. Leaders who are situated in
dierent regional contexts and at dierent positions on the political spectrum need
to speak to considerably dierent audiences, and previous research has suggested
Mudde, ‘The populist Zeitgeist’, p..
Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, ), p..
Cf. Thomas Legler, ‘Gobernanza regional: El vínculo multilateral’, Foreign Aairs Latinoamérica :, ,
pp.–.
Cf. Saward, The representative claim, pp.–; Urbinati, ‘Political theory of populism’, p..
Jordan Kyle and Brett Meyer, High tide? Populism in power, 1990–2020, paper (Tony Blair Institute for Global
Change, ).
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that prevalent forms of populism in Europe, Latin America and south-east Asia are
to a certain extent sui generis phenomena. If we still find common patterns across
all cases, we can assume that the leaders’ strategies are oriented towards persuading
their respective audiences of the legitimacy standards that their populist discursive
strategy prescribes, rather than passively responding to the normative demands of
their audiences.
We performed online searches to sample public statements (speeches and inter-
views) by these leaders that include references to IOs. We found these statements
on websites of governments and IOs as well as in news archives. Video material
was also included. Since we are interested in populists in power, we specifically
looked at statements from the respective leaders’ most recent periods of incum-
bency—from for Orbán (including statements made until April ), from
to for Chávez and from to for Duterte. Overall, we analysed
speeches by Orbán, by Chávez and by Duterte. We also included
quotes in secondary literature to make up for imbalances in corpus size for the
individual leaders. In a loose adaption of frame-analysis techniques, we carried out
a thematic analysis of the statements with the objective of uncovering patterns in
how the leaders (de)legitimated a range of regional IOs. Using the theory-based
expectations about populist framings of international cooperation as a herme-
neutic framework, we identified sections of the texts that referred to IOs and
coded their depictions of those IOs. We then gradually refined our coding where
we found that the framing did not map onto our initial ideas. For example, we
initially treated anti-liberalism as a distinct frame, but eventually realized it was
more plausible to treat it as a sub-theme within the two main frames of popular
sovereignty and popular identity. Finally, we revisited the coded text to identify
any representative claims within it, using the standard grammar mentioned above
as a hermeneutic tool.
Comparative analysis
While there are some important dierences, which can in part be explained by
ideological leanings, the populist leaders organize their (de)legitimation of regional
IOs around the two frames expressing the core populist logic of the ‘people vs
elite’ antagonism. The first two subsections below present the findings from the
three cases in terms of these two frames, while the third subsection provides a
comparative summary that discusses the representative dimension of the frames.
Cas Mudde and Cristobál Rovira Kaltwasser, Voices of the peoples: populism in Europe and Latin America compared,
Working Paper (Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, ); Richard Robison and Vedi R.
Hadiz, ‘Populism in Southeast Asia: a vehicle for reform or a tool for despots’, in Toby Carroll, Shahar
Hameiri and Lee Jones, eds, The political economy of Southeast Asia: politics and uneven development under hyperglo-
balisation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp.–.
For Orbán’s speeches, we relied on the ocial English translations. For Chávez, we relied on the original Span-
ish version. For Duterte, we analysed speeches published in English, either on the website of the government
of the Republic of the Philippines or in the media. The data collection and analysis builds partially on Fredrik
Söderbaum, Kilian Spandler and Agnese Pacciardi, Contestations of the liberal international order: a populist script of
regional cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
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Popular sovereignty
Although all three populist leaders draw to some extent on nationalist rhetoric,
there is no evidence that this automatically translates into unilateral foreign policy
stances. On the contrary, populist governments tend to endorse and actively
engage in regional IOs when the latter promise to enhance, rather than threaten,
sovereignty. The empirical findings demonstrate that populists frame and judge
regional IOs specifically in terms of popular sovereignty. Populists ascribe a major
value to regional IOs in so far as they support their mission of tying politics to the
will of ‘the people’. An important common theme in populist leaders’ statements
is that regional IOs should preserve the autonomy and independence of the leader
to pursue policies on behalf of ‘the people’, free from external domination.
Viktor Orbán portrays himself as working to re-establish national sovereignty
in the EU, taking the power from supranational elites in Brussels and giving it
back to national governments. However, from his perspective, Hungary is not
anti-EU; rather, it is opposed to liberal EU politicians who disregard the nation-
state and the people it is supposed to represent. A key trope of Orbán’s narrative
is that pro-migrant, pro-integration elites undermine the sovereignty of Hungary
and its virtuous people with their imperial project of a United States of Europe,
which reveals his framing as one of popular sovereignty. ‘Those who do most to
endanger the future of Europe’, he proclaimed in , ‘are not those who want to
come here, but the political, economic and intellectual leaders who are trying to
reshape Europe against the will of the European people’. Orbán describes Europe
and the EU as being divided between sovereigntist-nationalists, like Hungary and
its fellow members of the Visegrad Group (V, a regional alliance that unites
the leaders of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), and feder-
alist-supranationalists, who promote regional integration at the expense of the
nation-state. Accordingly, Orbán has legitimized the V as a representative of
the Central European peoples and as the vanguard in the eort to (re-)establish
popular sovereignty within Europe and the EU.
Hugo Chávez, who in his speeches addressed a region that had been heavily
marked by a colonial past, promoted himself as a leader who would bring sover-
eignty back to the Latin American people. His regional strategy did not just aim
to delegitimate US hemispheric institutionalism, embodied by the Organization
of American States (OAS) and the initiative for a Free Trade Area of the Americas
‘Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s “State of the Nation” address’, Visegrád Post, Feb. , https://visegradpost.
com/en////prime-minister-viktor-orbans-state-of-the-nation-address-full-speech/. See also Edit
Zgut and Robert Csehi, ‘Orban’s peacock dance’, Aspen Review, Aug. , https://www.aspen.review/
article//orbans-peacock-dance/.
‘Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s State of the Nation address’, Miniszterelnok.hu, Feb. , https://www.
miniszterelnok.hu/prime-minister-viktor-orbans-state-of-the-nation-address/.
See for example ‘Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech on the nd anniversary of the revolution and
freedom fight’, Visegrád Post, Oct. , https://visegradpost.com/en////viktor-orban-confronts-
globalism-and-brussels-in-view-of-upcoming-european-parliament-elections-full-speech/.
‘Viktor Orbán’s speech at the Visegrád Group conference “The Future of Europe”’, About Hungary, Jan.
, https://abouthungary.hu/prime-minister/viktor-orbans-speech-at-the-visegrad-group-conference-the-
future-of-europe.
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(FTAA); it also included the creation of a new regional institutional architecture
with the clear objective of excluding the United States. Several regional IOs in
which Venezuela took a leadership role were characterized by a strong role for
heads of state coupled with a low level of organizational autonomy, sometimes
described as ‘interpresidentialism’. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of
Our America (ALBA), in particular, was explicitly designed to reinforce the self-
determination and sovereignty of Latin American peoples with a plan of integra-
tion that would counteract the hegemonic economic policies of the US, the World
Bank and the IMF. As his main organizational vehicle for this strategy, Chávez
promoted ALBA as an anti-imperialist alternative to the FTAA. In , when
Venezuela ocially joined the Mercosur trade bloc, Chávez hailed the accession
as a ‘defeat to American imperialism’ and announced that he would ‘politicize
Mercosur’, arguing that it should not be ‘a project of the elites’ and steering it
towards anti-neoliberalism in the interest of ‘the people’. The same rationale
underlay his involvement in the creation of the Community of Latin American
and Caribbean States (CELAC) in , which he legitimated as a Latin American
organization, free of any US influence, that would replace the OAS. Chávez’s
appeal to popular sovereignty also informed his delegitimation of the Andean
Community (CAN). When terminating Venezuela’s membership of the CAN,
Chávez argued that it made no sense ‘for Venezuela to remain in the CAN, a body
which [served] only the elites and transnational companies and not “our people”
[…]’. By delegitimating what he asserted were unrepresentative IOs in this way,
he implicitly advanced a claim of being the true representative of ‘the people’.
Rodrigo Duterte’s legitimation and delegitimation strategies resembled those
of Chávez in that he deployed anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist rhetoric to
challenge the US and western interests. He argued that the experience of coloni-
zation made it imperative for Filipinos to preserve sovereignty. Duterte promised
Daniel F. Wajner and Luis Roniger, ‘Transnational identity politics in the Americas: reshaping “Nuestramé-
rica” as Chavismo’s regional legitimation strategy’, Latin American Research Review :, , pp.–,
https://doi.org/./larr..
Thomas Legler, ‘Post-hegemonic regionalism and sovereignty in Latin America: Optimists, skeptics, and an
emerging research agenda’, Contexto Internacional : , , pp. –, at p..
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Declaración conjunta [Joint declaration], Havana,
Dec. ; ‘Principios fundacionales del ALBA-TCP’, Granma, Dec. , Art. .e, , https://www.
granma.cu/mundo/--/principios-fundacionales-del-alba-tcp------.
M. A. Bastenier, ‘Caribbean Mercosur: Venezuela’s entry to the trade bloc highlights pivotal role Chavez
plays in the region’s politics’, El País, Aug. , https://english.elpais.com/elpais////ineng-
lish/_.html.
‘Venezuela joins South America trade bloc’, AP Archive via YouTube, July , www.youtube.com/
watch?v=H-vtdXk; José Briceño Ruiz, ‘El MERCOSUR y el ALBA en la estrategia de integración de
Venezuela’ [MERCOSUR and ALBA in the Venezuelan integration strategy], Cuadernos Latinoamericanos
[Latin American Notebooks] :, , pp.–.
‘Celac pode ser alternativa à OEA, diz Chávez’ [Celac could be an alternative to the OAS, says Chávez], RFI, Dec.
, https://www.rfi.fr/pt/americas/-com-cuba-e-sem-eua-america-latina-cria-nova-organizacao.
Carlos Malamud, ‘Venezuela’s withdrawal from the Andean Community of Nations and the consequences for
regional integration (Part I)’, Area: Latin America, vol. , , pp.– at p..
Julio C. Teehankee, ‘Duterte’s resurgent nationalism in the Philippines: a discursive institutionalist analysis’,
Journal of Current Southeast Asian Aairs :, , pp.–, https://doi.org/./.
Dwight de Leon, ‘Don’t compromise sovereignty, says Duterte on th year of Magellan’s arrival’, Rappler,
March , https://www.rappler.com/nation/duterte-wants-filipinos-reject-compromise-sovereignty-
magellan-expedition-commemoration-/.
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to reorient the country’s foreign relations away from its traditional dependency
on the US and towards national interests and the benefit of ordinary citizens,
thus questioning the Philippines’ longstanding commitment to the so-called
liberal international order. To be sure, populism alone cannot explain this shift
away from the US (and towards rapprochement with China), driven as it was by
strategic geopolitical considerations. However, Duterte used populist framings to
legitimate the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) within
this overarching vision for Philippine foreign policy. He represented regional
cooperation in the ASEAN framework as a means of preserving the independence
of the Philippines against the US as the former colonial power and of regaining
the autonomy of its people. In his speeches within ASEAN forums, he recalled the
principles of the group’s founders, such as mutual respect for independence, sover-
eignty, territorial integrity, national identity and non-interference, and called for
the reconciliation of the bloc’s community-building project with the national
interests of its member states. While Duterte picked up traditional ASEAN
discourse, he gave it a particular populist flavour through frequent references to
the realities of ordinary people rather than referring to a more abstract under-
standing of national interests. He predicated ASEAN’s legitimacy on its ability
to represent their interests, saying that ‘ASEAN must do more to bring positive
change to the lives of its [peoples]’ and suggesting to fellow ASEAN leaders:
‘Together, let us cultivate [in] our peoples a sense of ownership—for them to
own the ASEAN story as their story, and to see ASEAN’s future as their own.’
Duterte thus framed the relation between national interests and regional coopera-
tion in terms of popular sovereignty, in the sense that regional IOs should serve
all member states’ citizens as their ultimate constituency. This framing resonated
well with ASEAN’s self-legitimating discourse of building a ‘people-centred’ or
‘people-oriented’ community.
Popular identity
Anchoring the notion of sovereignty, ‘the people’ are constructed as the founda-
tional constituency of populist politics. Consequently, appeals to shared values,
history and culture play a major role in populist leaders’ framing of regional IOs.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, populist (de)legitimation strategies
Richard J. Heydarian, The rise of Duterte: a populist revolt against elite democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
), p..
Bonn Juego, ‘The Philippines : Duterte-led authoritarian populism and its liberal-democratic roots’, Asia
Maior XXVIII, , pp.– at p..
‘Intervention of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte during the th ASEAN summit’, Presidential Communica-
tions Operations Oce, Bangkok, June , https://pcoo.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads///-
intervention-of-president-rodrigo-roa-duterte-during-the-th-asean-summit-plenary.pdf.
Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia, ‘Empower the ASEAN peoples, President Duterte
tells govts’, Oct. , https://www.eria.org/news-and-views/empower-the-asean-peoples-president-
duterte-tells-govts/.
‘Remarks of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte at the opening ceremony of the th ASEAN Summit, PICC,
Manila, Philippines, April ’, ASEAN, Manila, April , https://asean.org/remarks-of-presi-
dent-rodrigo-roa-duterte-at-the-opening-ceremony-of-the-th-asean-summit-picc-manila-philippines-
-april-/.
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Populist (de)legitimation of international organizations
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are often able to reconcile national identity with the construction of transnational
identities on a regional level. Regional identities can be constructed through the
notion that ‘the people’ of a region face a struggle against a common Other.
Populist leaders then legitimate the organizations as expressions of these regional
and transnational identities to bolster support both from their own domestic
constituencies and among fellow populist governments. Interestingly, we can see
evidence of these multilayered identities in all of the cases we present, which
questions simple dichotomies between inclusive and exclusive populism.
Populist leaders can draw on dierent bases of common identity: religious ties,
for example, in the case of Orbán’s invocation of Christianity as a basis for ‘Central
Europeanness’ in the V states. Orbán has energetically fostered a discourse of
‘two Europes’. The first is an ‘authentic’ Europe, grounded on values and identities
embodied by Orbán himself and attributed to ‘average’ European citizens, while
the second is an ‘elitist’ Europe based on ‘liberal philosophy’, devoid of social depth
and represented by Brussels. According to this framing, the EU has rejected its
original roots and turned into a major vehicle for the advancement of selfish and
often unpatriotic liberal interests and values. Put dierently, liberal forces are
accused of moving Europe into a post-Christian and post-national era by fostering
pro-immigration policies and jeopardizing Europe’s true values. In the context
of delegitimating the EU establishment, Orbán portrays himself as representing
authentic European identity, a ‘freedom fighter’ on a mission to redeem Europe
and recover its Christian roots. He often quotes Robert Schumann, one of the
founding fathers of the EU, saying that ‘Europe will either be Christian or it will
not exist’. Orbán has strengthened anti-liberal cooperation—especially on the
part of the V, which can be seen as protecting national values and identity against
domination from the EU’s liberal quarters. Importantly, the V has not consti-
tuted an alternative to the EU for Orbán, but has rather been a means for pushing
for reforms and legitimating a Central European vision within it.
During his time as president of Venezuela, Chávez legitimated his pursuit
of closer integration between Latin American countries by invoking a common
regional heritage that transcended state boundaries. This common sense of
belonging was rooted in Bolívarian imaginings of a Pan-American identity and the
notion of ‘Americanismo’, the idea that the common (and ongoing) anti-colonial
struggle of many Latin American countries would unite dierent ethnic groups
Ramona Coman and Cécile Leconte, ‘Contesting EU authority in the name of European identity: the new
clothes of the sovereignty discourse in central Europe’, Journal of European Integration :, , pp.– at
p.; ‘Viktor Orbán’s speech at the th Kötcse civil picnic’, Miniszterelnok.hu, Sept. , http://-
.miniszterelnok.hu/in_english_article/viktor_orban_s_speech_at_the_th_kotcse_civil_picnic.
Marc F. Plattner, ‘Illiberal democracy and the struggle on the right’, Journal of Democracy :, , pp.–
at p..
‘Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s address after swearing the prime-ministerial oath of oce’, Miniszterelnok.
hu, May , https://miniszterelnok.hu/prime-minister-viktor-orbans-address-after-swearing-the-prime-
ministerial-oath-of-oce/.
Coman and Leconte, ‘Contesting EU authority’, p..
Martijn Mos, ‘Ambiguity and interpretive politics in the crisis of European values: Evidence from Hungary‘,
East European Politics, :, , pp.–.
Ladislav Cabada, ‘The Visegrad cooperation in the context of other Central European cooperation formats’,
Politics in Central Europe :, , pp.–, https://doi.org/./pce--.
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Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum
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and multiple identities. In reviving this narrative, Chávez mainly targeted the
neoliberal and, allegedly, imperialist agenda of the global trade and financial
regime embodied by the US and the Bretton Woods institutions. This stance
is evident in many of his ocial speeches, where he used anti-US rhetoric to
dismiss criticism from North America and to legitimate left-wing Latin American
regimes, both domestically and internationally. In a famous speech delivered
to the UN General Assembly in , Chávez referred to US imperialism as the
‘greatest threat looming over our planet’ and called then President George W.
Bush ‘the devil’. Based on the narrative of solidarity against a common enemy,
Chávez legitimated regional organizations like ALBA by referring to Latin
America as ‘Our America’ (Nuestramérica) and presenting the unity of its peoples
as the only way to defeat US imperialism and expansionism. During his speech
on the occasion of Venezuela’s admission to Mercosur, Chávez characterized the
organization as representing the interests of ‘Nuestramérica’, a region he described
as the ‘Great Homeland’ and, invoking the Venezuelan anti-colonial hero Simón
Bolívar, as ‘the ueen of Nations, the Great Republic, the Great Nation or the
Great Homeland’.
For his part, Duterte’s speeches appealed to a multiplicity of identities that
faced a common threat from the imperial West, represented primarily by the US
and the IOs of the so-called liberal international order. Duterte’s populism was
built on a strong sense of Filipino nationalism, which took on an anti-American
flavour that not only stemmed from the more recent confrontations over the ‘war
on drugs’ but was also rooted in historical grievances. However, his nation-
alism did not preclude broader regional identities. On many occasions, Duterte
emphasized ASEAN unity and solidarity to legitimate the organization. When
the Philippines assumed the chair of ASEAN in late , Duterte claimed that
the main goal during his country’s chairmanship of the organization would be
to ‘consolidate our community for our peoples, with a sense of togetherness and
common identity; ready and able to take our rightful place in the global commu-
nity of nations’. At the opening ceremony of the th ASEAN Summit in April
, he referred to ‘our ASEAN brothers’ and the ‘ASEAN family’, and hailed
the virtues of the peoples of ASEAN (‘some of the hardest working you will
Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Voices of the peoples; Wajner and Roniger, ‘Transnational identity politics in the
Americas’, p..
Michael Dodson and Manochehr Dorraj, ‘Populism and foreign policy in Venezuela and Iran’, Whitehead
Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, vol. , , pp.– at p..
Ronald D. Sylvia and Constantine P. Danopoulos, ‘The Chávez phenomenon: political change in Venezuela’,
Third World Quarterly :, , pp.–.
Kristin L. Brown, ‘Venezuela joins Mercosur: The impact felt around the Americas’, Law and Business Review
of the Americas :, , pp.– at p..
‘Discurso de Hugo Chávez en Mar del Plata’ [Speech by Hugo Chávez in Mar del Plata], Cadena Nacional de
Radio y Television, Nov. , www.nodal.am///a-diez-anos-del-no-al-alca-discruso-completo-de-
hugo-chavez-en-la-contra-cumbre/; Wajner and Roniger, ‘Transnational identity politics in the Americas’.
‘Hugo Chávez se pronuncia tras el ingreso de su país al grupo Mercosur’ [Hugo Chávez speaks after his
country’s entry into the Mercosur group], NTN via YouTube, July , https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=OBGLkWmZBg.
Teehankee, ‘Duterte’s resurgent nationalism in the Philippines’.
Republic of the Philippines, ‘Speech of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte during the closing ceremony of the
th and th ASEAN Summits and related summits’, Ocial Gazette, Sept. .
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find anywhere, willing to endure great sacrifices’) to justify putting them at the
centre of ASEAN’s community-building, and underlining ‘the leading role of
the country in articulating and performing political and imagined pan-ASEAN
identities’. Duterte also invoked the notion of ‘Asian values’, a concept advanced
by Asian intellectuals and politicians in the s to emphasize distinctive regional
civilizational traits and challenge western universalism. In addition, he used
ASEAN as a vehicle to portray himself as defending ‘the people’ against the vice of
illegal drugs, which ‘challenge […] the safety of our people’. Constructing the
illicit drug trade as a threat to societal cohesion as well as to regional community-
building, he revived the vision of a ‘drug-free ASEAN’ during his chairmanship.
Responding to accusations of human rights violations in his ‘war on drugs’ by the
Obama administration as well as the EU and the UN, he refuted liberal cosmo-
politanism as a perceived imposition of a biased human rights agenda by western
actors and pointedly skipped ASEAN meetings with the UN and the US in
. Positioning ASEAN as a counterweight to western meddling resonates
with ASEAN’s historical purpose of strengthening member states’ regimes against
external interference, but also gives it a populist inflection by tying it to the well-
being of the ‘ordinary’ people.
Summary: representational legitimation frames among populists
The comparative analysis illustrates that populist leaders use agent-based (de)legit-
imation to actively change the normative basis on which IOs are judged, instead
of passively reacting to audience demands as outlined in the conventional audience-
based perspective. Our analysis shows that they do so by using representational
frames, which implicitly or explicitly ask on whose authority these organizations
act, in whose interest they act, who they are made up of and who they stand for.
By emphasizing the legitimacy standards of (popular) sovereignty and (popular)
identity, the three populist leaders contest the liberal and functional standards on
which these other forms are conventionally based (see table ). Our analysis reveals
a distinct populist legitimation pattern in which regional IOs are justified on the
basis that they help to re-establish popular sovereignty and improve the everyday
lives of citizens—e.g. Europe as the ‘home of nations’, ALBA as an alliance ‘for the
‘Remarks of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte at the opening ceremony of the th ASEAN Summit’.
William Peterson and Reagan Romero Maiquez, ‘“Yesterday’s dreams, tomorrow’s promise”: performing
a pan-ASEAN archipelagic identity at age ’, in Marcus Cheng Chye Tan and Charlene Rajendran, eds,
Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, politics and the contemporary (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp.–
at p..
Heydarian, The rise of Duterte.
Rosette Adel, ‘Duterte urges ASEAN anew: Redouble collective eorts vs drugs, other threats’, PhilStar,
June , www.philstar.com/headlines/////duterte-urges-asean-anew-redouble-collective-
eorts-vs-drugs-other-threats.
‘Remarks of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte at the opening ceremony of the th ASEAN Summit’.
Juego, ‘The Philippines ’; Pia Ranada, ‘Duterte threatens to slap UN rapporteur if she probes drug
war’, Rappler, Nov. , https://www.rappler.com/nation/-duterte-threat-slap-un-rapporteur-
callamard/.
Paterno Esmaquel II, ‘Duterte skips ASEAN-US Summit in Laos’, Rappler, Sept. , https://www.rappler.
com/nation/-duterte-skips-asean-us-summit/.
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peoples of Our America’, and a ‘people-centred’ ASEAN. Undergirding these ideas
are identity-based frames that aim to portray ‘the people’ as a morally pure constit-
uency of the leaders’ regional cooperation initiatives. Some organizations are thus
legitimated as expressions of national and transboundary identities, while others
(including some global IOs) are seen as carriers of elitist cosmopolitan ideas that
threaten popular identities, the latter being rooted in various amalgamations of
cultural and religious anities, ethnonationalism or shared historical experiences.
Exploring how these representational frames relate to conventional forms
of legitimation helps us understand why populists endorse some IOs while
challenging others. Representational legitimation does not (necessarily) replace
procedural and functional legitimation—in fact, in the statements we analysed,
populists did use those forms as well. For example, Orbán criticized the EU for
failing to solve the ‘migration problem’. However, at least in populist (de)legiti-
Table 1: Comparison of representational (de)legitimation frames
Popular sovereignty Popular identity
Viktor Orbán
Europe as the ‘home of
nations’
Cooperation should re-
establish national sovereignty
vs disenfranchisement by
EU-style post-national
supranationalism
Hungarian nativism, European
and Christian identity
‘Authentic Europe’, ‘Central
Europeanness’, solidarity against
threat to moral purity of ‘the
people’
Hugo Chávez
ALBA: Regionalism ‘for the
peoples of our America’
Cooperation should preserve
hard-fought independence
against neo-colonial forces
and achieve equal distribution
of cooperation benefits to all
social groups
Revolutionary Bolívarianism
and Nuestramérica
Latin American community,
solidarity against threat of
imperialist and expansionist
North America
Rodrigo
Duterte
ASEAN as a people-oriented
community
Cooperation should preserve
autonomy despite great-power
influence and empower the
peoples of ASEAN member
states
Filipino nationalism and the
‘ASEAN family’
‘ASEAN centrality’, unity and
solidarity against threat of
external (western) interven-
tion, cooperation to fight drugs
which are a threat to society
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mation, representational frames are logically prior to these other forms in so far
as they may transform the legitimacy standards on which their procedural and
functional arguments are based. Populist representational frames orient judgement
of the procedural and functional features of organizations away from liberal and
towards what Lenz and Schmidtke call ‘communitarian’ legitimacy standards in
this special section. Orbán’s critique of the EU’s procedures and performance on
migration, for example, was subsumed under the frames of popular sovereignty
and popular identity. He argued that immigration was threatening the ‘existence
of Europe’s free, Christian and independent nations’ and asserted: ‘If it is true that
the people do not want the current insane immigration policy from Brussels—and
indeed they oppose it—we should make room for their voice, and listen to what
they have to say.’ Accordingly, he criticized plans for formal quotas as disre-
specting the will of ‘the people’, instead favouring voluntary and non-binding
arrangements as exemplified by the V.
While our analysis is limited to regional IOs, it also allows some insights into
broader (de)legitimation dynamics. Our approach helps explain the empirical
observation that populist leaders tend to endorse regional over global IOs. It
appears that regional IOs can more easily accommodate populist standards of
formal, substantial, descriptive and symbolic representation compared to global
ones. Due to their limited membership and the idea that they serve a territorially
defined constituency, regional IOs are easier to initiate and control by a single
populist-ruled state or a small regional coalition of populists, as demonstrated by
the examples of the V and Venezuela’s leadership in ALBA. The geographical
scope of a regional IO also makes it easier to portray its policies as benefiting a
specific ‘people’, as implied, for example, in the slogan ‘a people-centred ASEAN’.
Regional IOs can be depicted as embodiments of a transboundary but exclu-
sive identity, such as Nuestramérica, ‘Central Europe’ or the ‘ASEAN family’. By
contrast, global IOs are often associated with elitist and cosmopolitan (‘globalist’)
identities, and populist leaders often position regional IOs as venues for collec-
tively defending the integrity of territorial communities.
However, this endorsement of regional IOs only holds as long as they do not
contradict the notion of popular sovereignty. Orbán’s criticism of EU suprana-
tionalism is a case in point. Likewise, where cross-border popular identities are
weak, as with India and its subcontinental neighbours, populist leaders may shun
regional cooperation, as Narendra Modi’s lack of interest in the South Asian
Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has demonstrated. In short,
while we can see certain anities between populist notions of representation and
regional—as well as low-authority—IOs, it is impossible to establish any clean
causality. Country size and status are potential mediating factors. For example,
middle-sized countries such as the ones studied here may be more inclined than
major powers to take up regional leadership roles.
See Tobias Lenz and Henning Schmidtke, ‘The normative diversity of discursive legitimation in international
organizations’, International Aairs :, , pp.– at p. .
‘Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s State of the Nation address’, .
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Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum
International Aairs 99: 2, 2023
Conclusion
In the post-liberal world, ideas about legitimate global governance have become
more contentious, and yet existing research on legitimacy is strongly geared
towards liberal norms. Therefore, it fails to account for (de)legitimation by populist
state leaders, which is usually articulated in opposition to liberal norms. In this
article, we have remedied this shortcoming by arguing that populist leaders use
representational (de)legitimation frames in a way that problematizes and contests
established legitimacy standards. In terms of Lenz and Söderbaum’s AAE frame-
work, populist representational legitimation is agent-based, as it is driven by the
leaders’ strategic agency and aims to actively shape audiences’ legitimacy beliefs
instead of passively adapting to their demands. The empirical analysis in this
article has focused on the discourses relating to foreign policy—and specifically to
regional IOs—of three high-profile populist leaders: Viktor Orbán, Hugo Chávez
and Rodrigo Duterte. Obviously, foreign policies are influenced by a myriad of
factors that are not reducible to populism, and we find a certain variation in terms
of the leaders’ actual engagement with regional IOs. However, the comparison
provides evidence of common framing patterns that uncover the representa-
tional dimension of populist leaders’ (de)legitimation strategies: by framing their
judgements of the organizations’ authority in terms of popular sovereignty and
identity, the leaders evaluate them based on their purported position in the ‘people
vs elite’ antagonism. This approach is in line with, and reinforces, their domestic
strategies of obtaining and sustaining political support. While our finding of
similarities across the political spectrum should not be overstated, it does provide
a counterpoint to arguments that right- and left-wing populism are so fundamen-
tally dierent that they lead to diametrically opposed foreign policies. Their
positioning on the political spectrum does not as such make populist leaders more
pro- or anti-IO in general. Their stance rather results from considerations about
how the mandate, design and policies of specific IOs relate to their master frames
of sovereignty and identity.
Our study suggests a range of policy implications for IOs, at both the regional
and global levels. While delegitimation is first and foremost a rhetorical phenom-
enon, if successful it can seriously aect IOs’ ability to address today’s trans-
boundary challenges. Unpacking populist (de)legitimation tells us something
about the kind of international order populists envision—one in which insti-
tutionalized cooperation is possible but cosmopolitan identities are rejected and
authority is firmly vested in state leaders as the representatives of ‘the people’.
Those IOs which do not fit this vision, and their stakeholders, will need to find
ways to address the populist challenge. The one-sided focus in research and policy-
making on performance and procedural aspects of legitimation, and the accom-
panying reluctance to address issues of sovereignty and identity, do not bode well
in this respect. Populist leaders do not argue that IOs’ decision-making structures
Lenz and Söderbaum, ‘The origins of legitimation strategies in international organizations’.
Bertjan Verbeek and Andrej Zaslove, ‘Populism and foreign policy’, in Rovira Kaltwasser et al., eds, The
Oxford handbook of populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
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Populist (de)legitimation of international organizations
International Aairs 99: 2, 2023
are unresponsive or that their policies are totally ineective, but rather demand
that they be responsive to and provide policies benefiting ‘the people’ instead of
liberal ‘globalist’ elites. In other words, the key question is not so much whether
IOs work, but for whom they work.
By emphasizing popular sovereignty and identity over liberal standards,
populist delegitimation is much more dicult to address than contestation based
on performance and procedural aspects. For example, the Trump administration’s
delegitimation of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic had
little to do with either performance or procedure, but related instead to the body’s
purported deference to China. Another example is the debate surrounding Brexit,
where ‘Remainers’ have often focused on the material benefits of remaining
within the EU, while arguably missing that British sovereignty and identity were
the real motivating factors for Brexiteers. Unless global and regional IOs and their
stakeholders take up the populist challenge and acknowledge the representative
dimension of legitimation, it seems that the traditional functional and proce-
dural justification of IO authority is losing a significant part of its legitimating
power. Rebuking populists for being unilateralists (which they may not be) or for
not subscribing to liberal normative standards (which they will not do) appears
counterproductive and may very well strengthen the populist cause. After all,
rejection of the liberal international order lies at the very core of populist self-
legitimation. Instead, those trying to meet the populist challenge need to engage
in more fundamental debates over the very purpose and mandate of these IOs.
This does not imply giving in to demands to return all sovereignty to nation-
states, but it does require the adoption of political stances. As de Wilde puts it,
IOs and their stakeholders ‘need to articulate more clearly who is responsible for
what, to what end, and as part of which societal struggle’.
de Wilde, ‘The quality of representative claims’, p..
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