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Introduction: Populism and International Relations
Abstract
Populism has lately experienced a meteoric rise to become one of the most widely used terms not only in International Relations (IR) scholarship and a supposedly defining feature of both domestic and world politics. The introduction sets out the motivation for this book’s critical intervention into debates on populism in IR and beyond. It offers a brief review of IR research on populism and identifies a series of empirical and conceptual limitations that have contributed to an often hyperbolic and problematic usage of the term as a general descriptor for non-centrist politics of different persuasions. It then outlines how this book seeks to address these limitations by developing a new research agenda for the study of populism in foreign policy and world politics and moving beyond the predominant focus on right-wing populism and single-country and -region studies. The final part of the chapter provides an overview of the selected cases, method and data material and the individual chapters.
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This paper seeks to advance the study of the nexus of populism and foreign policy by showing the connection between the personality traits of the leader and the foreign policy behavior of the state that they represent. It focuses on the political personality profiles of two populist leaders who can be characterized as antiplural, Hugo Chávez and Donald Trump, as a way to empirically further substantiate the recent research agenda on populism in world politics. The paper builds the two populist leaders’ political profiles through the use of the leader trait analysis approach. It contends that there are patterns in populist leaders’ personalities that can act as key drivers of their noncooperative and conflict-inducing behavior in foreign policy. The results show the characteristics that appear as the strongest predictors of their behavior in the international arena are their low task orientation and high focus on relationships.
The discursive domain of (in)security is integral to nationalist populism, as documented in the political rhetoric of Donald Trump. This article combines insights from political psychology on blame attribution with scholarship in International Relations on security narratives to show how the reframing of national identity through a populist security imaginary elevated internal ‘enemies of the people’ to an ontological status of equal, or even superior standing to that of external threats to national security. Portraying internal and external Others as equally existential threats endangering the ‘real’ United States informed both foreign policy choices and mobilised voters through an affective persuasion of audiences, actively dividing society for political gain. Populist appeals to resentment, fear, and anxiety constituted a shared affective space between Trump and his followers that provided a source of mutual ontological reassurance and the legitimation of America First measures from immigration restrictions to trade protectionism and a Jacksonian foreign policy.
This article characterizes and analyses variations in Poland’s foreign policy under the Law and Justice (PiS) government with a view to shed light on the distinctive influence of populism. I argue that this influence has mainly to do with the ‘politics of representation’, understood both in the sense of meaning production and of theatrical performance. Building on the discursive and stylistic approaches to populism as well as on the post-structuralist literature in Foreign Policy Analysis, this article conceptualizes populism as a set of representational practices in domestic politics that spill over, and affect, foreign policy. By promoting distinct representations of Self and Other in international affairs and by investing foreign policy making as a site to perform a rupture with technocratic elites, populist practices contribute to enable or constrain certain policy choices and mode of diplomatic actions. In Poland, this has translated into a securitization of the EU, a partial de-Europeanization of the national interest and a re-shuffling of partnership prioritizations, as well as in disruptive and ‘undiplomatic’ comments on the part of the PiS foreign policy executive.
This article examines how communicative practices, emotion, and everyday experiences of insecurity interlink in processes of populist political mobilization. Combining insights from international security studies, political psychology, and populism research, it demonstrates how populist political agents from the right of the political spectrum have constructed a powerful security imaginary around the loss of past national greatness that creates affinities with the experiences of those who feel disempowered and ties existential anxieties to concerns with immigration, globalization, and integration. As we show, within the populist security imaginary, humiliation is the key discursive mechanism that helps turn abstract notions of enmity into politically consequential affective narratives of loss, betrayal, and oppression. Humiliation binds together an ostensibly conflicting sense of national greatness and victimhood to achieve an emotive response that enables a radical departure from established domestic and international policy norms and problematizes policy choices centered on collaboration, dialogue, and peaceful conflict resolution.
Cet article examine la mesure dans laquelle les pratiques de communication, l’émotion et les expériences quotidiennes d'insécurité sont liées aux processus de mobilisation politique des populistes. Il allie des renseignements issus d’études internationales sur la sécurité, de la psychologie politique et de recherches sur le populisme pour montrer la manière dont les agents politiques populistes de droite ont construit un puissant imaginaire de la sécurité autour de la perte de la grandeur nationale passée. Cet imaginaire crée des affinités avec les expériences des personnes qui se sentent mises à l’écart et associe les anxiétés existentielles à des préoccupations liées à l'immigration, à la mondialisation et à l'intégration. Comme nous le montrons, dans l'imaginaire populiste de la sécurité, l'humiliation est le mécanisme discursif clé qui permet de transformer des notions abstraites d'inimitié en récits de perte, de trahison et d'oppression qui font appel à l'affectif et ont des conséquences politiques. Cette humiliation associe deux sentiments ostensiblement contradictoires, celui de grandeur nationale et celui d’être victime, qui amènent à une réaction émotive conduisant à s’éloigner radicalement des normes politiques nationales et internationales établies tout en trouvant problématiques les choix politiques centrés sur la collaboration, le dialogue et la résolution pacifique des conflits.
Este artículo investiga de qué manera las prácticas comunicativas, las emociones y las experiencias cotidianas de inseguridad se conectan con los procesos de movilizaciones políticas populistas. Combinando los conocimientos de los estudios de seguridad internacional, la psicología política y la investigación del populismo, demuestra cómo los agentes políticos populistas de la derecha del espectro político han construido un imaginario de seguridad poderoso en torno a la pérdida de la grandeza nacional pasada, el cual crea afinidad con las experiencias de aquellas personas que sienten que carecen de poder y relaciona las ansiedades existenciales con las preocupaciones por la inmigración, la globalización y la integración. Tal como lo presentamos, dentro del imaginario de seguridad populista, la humillación es el mecanismo discursivo clave que ayuda a convertir las nociones abstractas de la enemistad en discursos afectivos de derrotas, traiciones y opresiones que son relevantes en términos políticos. La humillación une un sentido ostensiblemente opuesto de grandeza nacional y victimismo para lograr una respuesta emotiva que permita la divergencia radical de las normas políticas nacionales e internacionales establecidas y problematiza las elecciones políticas centradas en la colaboración, el diálogo y la resolución pacífica de conflictos.
In the last two decades, far-right populists have formed governments all over the world. However, systematic analyses on how far-right leaders recreate their countries' foreign policy identity are still underdeveloped. In this article, we analyse how far-right populist leaders use their conservative identity-set to align with other right-wing governments and how they use the same conservative repertoire to deal with ideological rivals. More precisely, we argue that these leaders tend to overemphasize a deep conservative identity-set towards other far-right populist governments, something we call ‘thick conservative identity’. This profoundly conservative identity-set is composed of three national role conceptions: anti-globalism, nationalism and anti-foe. However, they do not repeat this identity-set towards ideological rivals, preferring to use a more nuanced and contradictory one, something we call ‘thin conservative identity’. The trigger of such difference is the anticipated mutual expectation of conservatism between Ego and Alter, in which Ego mimics Alter's deep conservatism. We use Jair Bolsonaro's alignment with Donald Trump and Bolsonaro's relationship with China as illustrative cases. We use the main concepts of role theory to understand both how conservative alignments are created and how far-right governments deal with ideological rivals.
Over the past decade, we have seen the rise of populist nationalist heads of state across a number of important electoral democracies—all of whom have made some version of the promise to make their countries ‘great again’. However, scholars are divided over whether these leaders' sometimes bombastic rhetoric has consistent or predictable effects on state foreign policy. This article introduces a framework for mapping the effects of populism and nationalism in foreign policy. In doing so, it draws on Essex School discourse analysis and sociological frame analysis to argue that representational crises at the sub-state level increase the popular resonance of ‘sovereigntist frames’ that diagnose the causes of perceived gaps in representation of the ‘authentic’ sovereign community at the international level and enjoin chief executives to resolve these gaps through revisionist foreign policy practices. The ethno-nationalist master frame prescribes policies and practices of lateral revisionism (conflict with neighbours or rival states), the populist frame prescribes systemic revisionism (conflict with allies and the international ‘establishment’), while the ethno-populist frame prescribes omni-revisionism (conflict with both). The article illustrates the effects of these disparate sovereigntist movements across three paired case-studies drawn from Europe, Latin America and the United States. It concludes that nationalism has greater destructive effects for the international system when combined with populism, demonstrating the importance of distinguishing nationalism and populism conceptually in order to isolate their separate and combined effects on foreign policy.
How do populists conduct foreign policy? The existing literature on populism focuses mainly on domestic patterns, and until recently the foreign dimension of populism has been largely overlooked. This paper aims to fill theoretical and empirical lacunae by mapping patterns of change and continuity in the formulation of geopolitical and economic international policy among Latin-American populist governments. Striving to conduct a systematic comparative analysis, this paper explores three waves of populist foreign policies in Latin America (classic, neoliberal, and progressive). While it is difficult to highlight a unified phenomenon, the findings reveal that several ‘unifying’ elements indeed exist: they are manifest in the tendency of such governments to jointly (re)construct transnational solidarities for legitimation purposes and to adopt economic foreign policies with a pragmatic bent. Moreover, in opposition to the two first waves of populist governments, the most recent wave has embraced personalist styles, emotional public diplomacy, and clientelist techniques with support networks abroad, thus actively projecting the domestic patterns of populism to the regional and global levels in an attempt to leverage both domestic and international legitimacy. This study offers critical lessons for IR scholarship’s increasing engagement with populism, contributing to the lively debate regarding the rise of populist trends across the globe.
Although populism does not dictate a coherent ideological or programmatic agenda, some of its elements still leave distinct marks on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper argues for the study of populism in its tangible policy impacts and scrutinizes the nexus of populism and foreign policy in contemporary Turkey under President Erdoğan’s rule. Despite the abundant references to the ‘people’ in the populist rhetoric, it identifies personalization in foreign policy decision-making, nationalization in foreign policy implementation, and civilizationalization in the foreign policy discourse. Having established the patterns of populist foreign policy from a wider reading, this study then examines, generally, how populism has informed Turkish foreign policy and, specifically, Turkey’s approach to the recent border disputes over the gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Populists have lately been at the forefront of securitisation processes, yet little attention has been paid to the relationship between populism and securitisation. This paper investigates the role of securitisation in populism, exploring how the populist mode of securitising differs from traditional securitisation processes. It argues that securitisation is inherently embedded in populism which embodies a particular style of securitisation with a distinct set of discursive and aesthetic repertoires. The populist invocation of societal security and their claim to defend the fundamentally precarious identity of ‘the endangered people’ necessitate an unceasing construction of new threats. Aiming to discredit ‘elitist’ securitisation processes, populism invests in a specific construction of the referent object, the securitising actor and their relationship to the audience. The populist securitising style also carries a distinctive aesthetic centred on ‘poor taste’, sentimental ordinariness and unprofessionalism, examining which can widen our understanding of the aesthetics of security.
The term populism has recently gained visibility in the media and policy world to describe the foreign policy principles, rhetoric and strategies of political actors in the United States and some European states. Yet, populism is nothing new in Latin America where it has enjoyed a long tradition among leaders of various countries. Populism has thus far largely been treated as a national phenomenon with few international manifestations. Thus, this article adopts the concept of populism and its core components such as anti-elitism, the people, and the general will within a role theory framework to trace the foreign policy roles that populist governments play as a first step to improving our knowledge on the nexus of populism and foreign policy. We examine this framework in the context of the foreign policy of Carlos Menem of Argentina and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
This article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric during his presidential campaign and presidency has affected US foreign policy in the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns. Looking at two case studies – the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit and the US role in the counter Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) campaign, it is argued that Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has failed to accurately describe or legitimate his administration’s counterterrorism strategy, as per the conventional wisdom. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has largely been aimed at creating a sense of crisis (as populism requires) to mobilise his domestic base. In making this argument about the purpose of Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, not only does the article contribute a new perspective to the extant literature on elections, rhetoric, and US foreign policy, but also to the burgeoning scholarship on governing populists and their foreign policies. Although these findings could be unique to Trump, the article’s novel framework – combining International Relations and populism scholarship to elaborate on how the foreign arena can be used to generate a state of perpetual crisis – can hopefully be applied in other contexts.
The 2014 European Parliament elections were hailed as a "populist earthquake," with parties like the French Front National, UKIP and the Danish People's Party topping the polls in their respective countries. But what happened afterwards?
Based on policy positions, voting data, and interviews conducted over three years with senior figures from fourteen radical right populist parties and their partners, this is the first major study to explain these parties' actions and alliances in the European Parliament. International Populism answers three key questions: why have radical right populists, unlike other ideological party types, long been divided in the Parliament? Why, although divisions persist, are many of them now more united than ever? And how does all this inform our understanding of the European populist radical right today?
Arguing that these parties have entered a new international and transnational phase, with some trying to be "respectable radicals" while others embrace their shared populism, McDonnell and Werner shed new light on the past, present and future of one of the most important political phenomena of twenty-first-century Europe.
This paper intervenes in the debate about the so-called ‘populist danger’, whose proponents claim that populism constitutes a threat to democracy, European integration, the West, the liberal international order, or all of the above. This paper argues that this argument is severely misguided – with significant consequences for research and political practice. The core problem is that claims of a ‘populist danger’ are based on an exceptionally vague conceptualization of populism that fails to clearly distinguish between left and right, moderate and radical, authoritarian and genuinely democratic versions. In doing so, they not only ignore decades of populism research but also create the impression that actors like Bernie Sanders, Donald J. Trump, Victor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, the Greek Syriza and Spanish PODEMOS (who in fact pursue vastly different and even outright contradictory policy goals) are all variations on a single (populist) theme. Moreover, because advocates of the ‘populist danger’ thesis like Jan-Werner Müller insist that populism as such is inherently anti-pluralist, they hamper efforts to meaningfully distinguish between threats to be countered and legitimate complaints to be taken seriously. This is not just of purely academic interest because any policies based on such an understanding of populism are bound to fail – and potentially backfire. Against this background, the article argues that populism as such is neither inherently anti-democratic nor per se democratic, and using the term to assess the potential dangerousness of certain actors is highly problematic.
As populists have formed governments all over the world, it becomes imperative to study the consequences of the rise of populism for International Relations. Yet, systematic academic analyses of the international impact of populist government formation are still missing, and political commentators tend to draw conclusions from few cases of right-wing populism in the Global North. But populism – conceptualised as a ‘thin’ ideology based on anti-elitism and anti-pluralism – takes different shapes across world regions as populists combine it with different ‘thick’ ideologies. To reflect such diversity and gain more systematic insights into the global implications of populism, we focus on cases of populist government formation in the Global South. We find that populists in power are not, per se, more belligerent or less willing to engage globally than their non-populist predecessors. Factors like status seeking or a country's embeddedness in international institutions mitigate the impact of populism. Its most immediate effect concerns procedural aspects: foreign policymaking becomes more centralised and personalised – yet, not entirely unpredictable, given the importance of ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populist parties and leaders. Rather than changing course entirely, populists in power reinforce existing trends, especially a tendency towards diversifying international partnerships.
Contemporary populist movements have inspired political pundits in various contexts to opine on the resurgence of victimhood culture, in which groups demonstrate heightened sensitivity to slights and attempt to evoke sympathy from third parties to their conflicts. Although reference to victimhood’s politics oftentimes surfaces examples of egregious microaggressions, when victimhood claims are scaled up to the realm of nationalisms, oftentimes so too are their consequences. Current literature on victimhood in international politics, though, lacks a unifying theorisation suitable for the comparative analysis of victimhood nationalisms as important identities in the international arena. This gap prevents scholarship from investigating how the severity of perceived or real suffering relates to the formation of victimhood, as well as how victimhood nationalisms legitimize the projection of grievances onto third parties, potentially sowing new conflicts. This article theorises victimhood nationalism as a powerful identity narrative with two key constitutive elements. First, drawing on the narrative identity approach, it outlines how victimhood nationalisms are constructed via narrations of perceived or real collective trauma. Second, it argues that victimhood nationalist narratives, unlike other narratives of collective trauma, break down the idealized victim–perpetrator relationship and project grievances onto otherwise uninvolved international actors, including other nation-states. The article concludes by offering comparative case studies of Slobodan Milošević’s and David Ben-Gurion’s respective invocations of victimhood nationalism to illustrate the empirical applicability of this theorization, as well as victimhood nationalism’s importance in international politics across time and space.
In an era increasingly defined by insecurity and populist politics, India has emerged as a forceful ontological security provider under the leadership of Marendra Modi. If ontological security is about finding a safe (imagined) haven, then ontological insecurity is about the lack of such a space in narrative terms. Drawing on Lacanian understandings of ‘the imaginary’ as something that can fill and naturalize this lack of space, the article is concerned with how memories, places and symbols of narrative identity constructions are used in populist discourse. More specifically, it attempts to understand the relationship between ontological insecurity and the imaginaries of populist politics in India. In so doing, it argues that the re-invention of ‘nationhood’, ‘religion’ and ‘Hindu masculinity’ along gendered lines has created a foundation for governing practices aimed at ‘healing’ a number of ontological insecurities manifest in Indian society. It specifically looks at how the Modi doctrine has formulated and expanded its foreign policy discourse into one that privileges populist narratives of nativism, nationalism and religion as forms of ontological security provision at home and abroad, but also how everyday practices can challenge such narratives, thus allowing different imaginaries of the Indian state. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
What kind of foreign policy do populists execute once in power? Based on the existing literature, we conceptualize populism as a set of ideas whose two core elements are anti-elitism and antipluralism. From this we develop a set of hypotheses regarding both substantive aspects of foreign policy as well as foreign policy–making processes of populist leaders in government. An analysis of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy record serves as a first plausibility probe of our hypotheses. We find that our concept of populism carries most explanatory value in the procedural aspects of foreign policy making as well as in its communication, less so in those aspects relating to the goals or substance of foreign policy. Whereas foreign policy under Modi's populist leadership is highly centralized and personalized, the traditional foreign policy establishment, including most notably the Ministry of External Affairs, has lost some of its previous authority. Engaging the Indian diaspora abroad emerged as another characteristic of populist foreign policy making. By contrast, the case of India does not confirm our hypothesis regarding a preference of bilateralism over multilateralism, nor does populism necessarily preclude investing in global public goods.
Populists are often identified based on their behavior, but the discursive element of their identities is also a frequently observed characteristic of this type of leader. We examine the determinants of populist foreign policy rhetoric in the case of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. We argue that a leftist populist leader like Chávez will focus on anti-imperialist themes and consider two mechanisms that may indicate the conditions under which he will use them: diversion, which would typically be expected from a populist, and capacity. We use time series analysis of rhetorical data scraped from the entire corpus of Aló Presidente— Chávez’s weekly television series- to test our hypotheses. The evidence supports the capacity mechanism, that Chávez is emboldened to use anti-imperialist rhetoric when the price of oil is high. His rhetoric thus matches his resources and ability to provide domestic and international goods to support his own identity as a protector and savior of the common people from domestic and global elites engaged in the imperialistic enterprise.
This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse-theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate ‘elite’. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as a signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term ‘populism’ itself: how it is invoked, by whom and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and ‘populist hype’, and reflect upon academia’s own relation to populism and anti-populism.
Populist forces are increasingly relevant, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the phenomenon. The main goal of this Handbook is to provide the state of the art of the scholarship on populism. The Handbook lays out not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Handbook is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world with chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the post-Soviet States, and the United States. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various issues both from scholarly and political viewpoints. Analysis includes the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements, and technocracy. The fourth part encompasses recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and revolution. With each chapter written by an expert in their field, this Handbook will position the study of populism within political science and will be indispensable not only to those who turn to populism for the first time, but also to those who want to take their understanding of populism in new directions.
The close empirical connections between populism and nationalism have naturalised a rather misleading overlap between the concepts of populism and nationalism in academic and public debates. As a result, the relation between the two has not received much systematic attention. Drawing on the poststructuralist discourse theory originally formulated by Laclau and Mouffe, this article differentially identifies populism and nationalism as distinct ways of discursively constructing and claiming to represent “the people”, as underdog and as nation respectively. These distinct constructions of “the people” can also be identified and highlighted from a spatial or orientational perspective, by looking at the architectonics of populism and nationalism as revolving around a down/up (vertical) and an in/out (horizontal) axis respectively. Building on this framework, the article then concludes that the co-occurrence of populism and nationalism should be studied through the prism of articulation. Again, a focus on discursive architectonics allows grasping how different political projects construct different discourses by connecting the building blocks of populism and nationalism in particular ways. The study of these articulations, based on a clear distinction between populism and nationalism, is a necessary step in further deepening our understanding of the complexity and variety of populist politics.
The rise of nationalist populism, its challenge to representative democracy and the populist impact on the liberal international order have emerged as one of the most significant phenomena in international politics in recent years. This special issue brings together a group of researchers from a wide range of theoretical, disciplinary and epistemological backgrounds, including political science, populism studies, foreign policy analysis and critical security studies, to examine the international dimension of populism and the practical impact of populism on foreign policy and international security. Empirically and conceptually, it presents audiences in political science, international relations and related disciplines with a timely review of the scope of research on populism in international relations. Our specific aim is to explore and evaluate what challenges a populist mobilisation of anti-elitism and anti-globalism presents to both the contemporary study of international politics, and the structure of the international system and key actors within it.
The success of anti-establishment parties across Europe has fueled debate on the role of populism for foreign policy and its contemporary contestation. The almost-election of Marine Le Pen to the French presidency in 2017, the successes of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany's 2017 and 2021 federal elections, and the central role these populist radical-right (PRR) parties henceforth play in structuring political debate make their wider foreign policy positions an issue of central concern. Yet, we still lack a thorough understanding how populism and radical-right ideology jointly produce a distinct foreign policy positioning beyond European integration. This article tries to narrow this gap by conceptualizing PRR positioning on trade, climate change, development policies, hegemony, and security and defense issues. The comparative analysis of official documents and voting behavior reveals only subtle differences between the Rassemblement national and the AfD, while demonstrating broad commonalities that have the potential to inform research across other cases and world regions on PRR parties’ foreign policy positioning.
This article analyses the relationship between conspiracy theories, right-wing populism and foreign policy by shedding light on the affective force of conspiracy theories in mobilising ‘the people’. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, it conceptualises conspiracy theories as fantasies that promise to satisfy subjects’ desire for a complete identity by accusing ‘hidden’ forces of blocking this perceived-to-be-lost but ultimately unattainable sense of ontological wholeness. The article argues that conspiracy theories allow populists to appeal to voters through emotive narratives which offer a dualistic outlook on global politics and (1) blame the conspirators for such feelings of lack, (2) transgress the conventions of the mainstream discourse by appealing to the obscene, and (3) valorise the populist actor for uncovering the plot against popular sovereignty and thereby promising to make ‘the people’ whole again. While conspiracy theories have been studied in other disciplines, International Relations scholarship has paid very little attention to them and, if at all, discussed their role in the context of the United States. This article illustrates its arguments with the case of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany and examines the role of conspiracy theories and foreign policy in its attempt to stage itself as ‘true’ representative of the German people.
What is the role of ‘populism’ in Donald Trump’s foreign policy? Defining populism as a framing style that constructs antagonisms around ‘the people’ and their adversaries, this article explores Trump’s rhetoric in relation to his efforts to shift US grand strategy away from its traditional investment in the liberal international order. Based on an approach grounded in the ontological commitments of critical discourse analysis, it examines three interlocking frames: (1) the ‘corrupt’ elites of the establishment ‘swamp’; (2) the anti-globalist, ‘America first’ agenda; and (3) poor deal-making responsible for the United States ‘losing’ in international affairs. In responding to declinist themes and anxieties, Trump’s populist rhetoric frames a Jacksonian ideological approach based on nationalism, mercantilism and a reliance on coercive power.
Populists are on the rise across the globe and claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ that are set against the establishment in the name of popular sovereignty. This article examines how populist discourses represent ‘the people’ as a referent object that is threatened and the form and implications of this populist securitisation process. Drawing on securitisation theory and poststructuralism, the article understands populist securitisation as a discursive practice that propagates a politics of fear, urgency, and exceptionality in order to mobilise ‘the people’ against a ‘dangerous’ elite and normalise this antagonistic divide of the social space. While the proposed theoretical framework aims to clarify the relationship between poststructuralist and securitisation theory and capture the nexus between populism and security, the case of populism broadens the scope of potential subjects of security and poses important challenges to existing theoretical assumptions about security as something designated by states’ representatives and ‘security experts’. The article develops and illustrates its arguments with a case study on the (de)securitisation moves in the populist discourse of Donald Trump.
The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist critique of populism, not as a distinct mode of politics, but as an analytical and political concept. As such, it seeks to redirect our attention away from populism, understood as a politics ‘out there’, towards the academic theoretical debates that have given this analytical term a new lease of life and propelled it beyond academic circles into the wider public discourse. In this context, the article develops two broad arguments. The first is that the two prevailing conceptions of populism are marred by anaemic conceptions of power, collective agency and subjectivity and, as such, are unable to present us with a convincing account of why this form of radical politics emerges in the first place, who its protagonists are, and how they come together in collective struggle. The second is that our current frenetic deployment of the term as a blanket descriptor for radical politics of all persuasions does not bode well for feminism politically . For both reasons, I conclude that feminists need to resist the current ‘populist hype’.
Employing a discursive understanding of populism and combing it with insights of poststructuralist international relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article examines the conceptual links between foreign policy and populist forms of identity construction, as well as the ideological force that populism can unfold in the realm of foreign policy. It conceptualizes populism and foreign policy as distinct discourses that constitute collective identities by relating Self and Other. Identifying different modes of Othering, the article illustrates its arguments with a case study on the United States under Donald Trump and shows how the Trumpian discourse has used foreign policy as a platform for the (re)production of a populist-nationalist electoral coalition. Unlike common conceptions of populism as an ideology that misrepresents reality, the article argues that the discourse develops its ideological appeal by obscuring the discursive construction of social reality and thereby promising to satisfy the subject's desire for a complete and secure identity.
International courts, like domestic courts, protect liberal limits on majoritarianism. This sometimes puts these courts in a position to protect the property rights of the “corrupt elites” that are targeted by populists or the civil liberties of those who are targeted in domestic populist identity politics. Moreover, populism offers an ideology to attack the authority of a court rather than just its individual rulings. An empirical examination illustrates the plausibility of this argument. A large number of backlashes against international courts arise from judgments that reinforce local populist mobilization narratives. Populist backlashes against international courts are not just about sovereignty but often follow efforts to curb domestic courts, usually for similar reasons. Yet populist backlashes do not always succeed, either because populist leaders do not follow up on their exit threats or because populism is too thin an ideology for creating successful multilateral reform coalitions.
Despite the significance of the subject, studies on the foreign policy preferences of European populist radical right leaders are scarce except for a handful of examples. Are European populist radical right leaders more hostile than other world leaders or comparatively friendly? Do they use cooperative or conflictual strategies to achieve their political goals? What are the leadership types associated with their strategic orientations in international relations? Using the operational code construct in this empirical study, we answer these questions and depict the foreign policy belief systems of seven European populist radical right leaders. We test whether they share a common pattern in their foreign policy beliefs and whether their foreign policy belief systems are significantly different from the norming group of average world leaders. The results indicate that European populist radical right leaders lack a common pattern in terms of their foreign policy belief systems. While the average scores of the analysed European populist radical right leaders suggest that they are more conflictual in their world views, results also show that they employ instrumental approaches relatively similar to the average group of world leaders. This article illuminates the microfoundations of strategic behaviour in international relations and arrives at conclusions about the role of European populist radical right leaders in mainstream International Relations discussions, such as idealism versus realism. In this sense, the cognitivist research school complements and advances structural accounts of international relations by analysing leadership in world affairs.
The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), launched by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, seeks to construct a transnational left political project to ‘democratise Europe’. Its construction of a European ‘people’ against an international elite raises questions about the potentials of populism beyond the nation-state. Building on a discourse-theoretical distinction between populism and nationalism, the article asks whether DiEM25 is a truly transnational populist movement. Through an analysis of the movement’s manifestoes, speeches, press releases and published interviews with DiEM25 leaders, the article shows how DiEM25 constructs a ‘European people’ in opposition to an international ‘elite’, how DiEM25 oscillates between speaking for national ‘peoples’ and a transnational ‘people’, and how it negotiates its populism, nationalism and transnationalism. The article contributes to the theorisation of populism beyond the usually assumed nation-state level and shines a light on the potentials and limitations of transnational populism as an as-yet understudied political development.
There is today a growing sense of a global rise of populism. Right-wing populist leaders and parties claim to represent the people and pit them against a “corrupt” elite and “dangerous” Others. However, the international dimensions of populism remain largely unexplored in the populism and international relations (IR) literature. By analyzing the relationship between foreign policy and populism, this article seeks to show how the phenomenon of populism can be integrated into IR theory and how IR scholarship can inform debates on populism. The article argues that poststructuralist IR, with its focus on foreign policy as a boundary-drawing practice that demarcates the Self from the Other, allows us to study how populist actors can use foreign policy as a site for the reproduction of their claim to represent the people. To grasp this, the article identifies different discursive strategies through which the people/elite antagonism can be constructed and interacts with other antagonisms such as the inside/outside divide of nationalism. It illustrates its arguments with a case study on India's foreign policy discourse under the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, who has promised to purify India from a corrupt elite and pursue an “India first” policy.
In 2015, it seemed all but certain that President Obama would succeed in ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Senate approval during his last year of office. The TPP, the largest regional trade accord in history, would have set new terms for trade and business investment between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. However, despite record-breaking corporate spending and broad support for the TPP among democrats and republicans, the TPP encountered domestic challenges when the 2016 US presidential campaign featured two popular, anti-trade candidates. The political climate abruptly shifted and the TPP was never introduced to Congress for ratification leading to a surprising failure for President Obama’s signature trade initiative. This chapter examines the surprising failure of the TPP and the rise of economic populism—anti-trade rhetoric that specifically targeted the free trade agreement during the 2016 presidential campaign. The chapter examines the rise of populism through the 2016 presidential candidate narratives of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to examine how an anti-TPP story came to signal a commitment to the working class and American identity against a rising China.
This article conceptualizes populism as a discourse of international relations that arises as response to state transformation, a phenomenon that encompasses changes in both state-society relations and the norms defining the appropriate practice of statehood. The current surge of populism is a response to one such transformation: the internationalization of state elites and their insulation from popular scrutiny. Populism does not simply address material and cultural dislocations that internationalization entails. Crucially, its distinct discursive logic allows these partial social demands to adopt the moral claim to representation of the ‘real people’ and so counter the universality of the international norms that underpin state transformation. Beyond the current conjuncture of state internationalization, this conceptualization accommodates iterations of populism in various regional and historical contexts of state transformation, making it a promising basis for the further comparative study of populism.
This volume illustrates the diversity of populism globally. When seeking power, populists politicize issues, and point to problems that need to be addressed such as inequalities, the loss of national sovereignty to globalization, or the rule of unresponsive political elites. Yet their solutions tend to be problematic, simplistic, and in most instances, instead of leading to better forms of democracy, their outcomes are authoritarian. Populists use a playbook of concentrating power in the hands of the president, using the legal system instrumentally to punish critics, and attacking the media and civil society. Despite promising to empower the people, populists lead to processes of democratic erosion and even transform malfunctioning democracies into hybrid regimes. The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism provides instructors, students, and researchers with a thorough and systematic overview of the history and development of populism and analyzes the main debates. It is divided into sections on the theories of populism, on political and social theory and populism, on how populists politicize inequalities and differences, on the media and populism, on its ambiguous relationships with democratization and authoritarianism, and on the distinct regional manifestations of populism. Leading international academics from history, political science, media studies, and sociology map innovative ideas and areas of theoretical and empirical research to understand the phenomenon of global populism. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Carlos de la Torre; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
Based on the rise (or return) of populist parties in Europe, theories of populism have re-entered political and academic debates. In particular, Ernesto Laclau’s works have gained renewed status as plausible explanations for why and how new parties form. However, an adoption of Laclau’s framework onto current events carries several implications, which will be the focus of this chapter. First, there is an increased tendency to use Laclau’s work as an instruction manual, rather than as merely a social theory. For instance, Podemos in Spain have openly announced the influence of Laclau on their political program, and emphasized the need for articulating a chain of equivalence to create a counter-hegemonic political force, “the people.” Second, the theory of hegemony as used by new populist parties in Europe reinforces the idea of political subjectivity as aligned with the national sovereign. A counter-discourse against the hegemonic practices of the European Union has been intertwined with an increased focus on national autonomy, which does not heavily discriminate against more reactionary nationalist currents. This chapter concludes by arguing that using Laclau’s theory as a roadmap could be adopted also by non-emancipatory projects, thus misappropriating Laclau’s proposed intentions, and once again making national sovereignty the phantasmatic political goal.
What does populism look like beyond the nation-state? This article introduces the concept of transnational populism as a way of understanding how populists construct “the people” above the national level, thus disentangling the oft-conflated concepts of populism and nationalism. It defines transnational populism, distinguishes it from international cooperation between populists and provides illustrative examples from across the globe to demonstrate what it looks like in practice. The article also addresses why transnational populism is so rare, arguing that “the people” of transnational populism is far more difficult to construct than nationally bounded conceptions of “the people”. To flesh out this claim, the article draws Ernesto Laclau’s work on populism together with the work of those authors associated with the “constructivist turn” in political representation, exploring the role of both audiences and constituencies in answering representative claims made on behalf of the transnational “people”. Finally, the article turns to the role of media—both old and new—in broadcasting and (more problematically) answering transnational populist claims.
Populist forces are increasingly relevant, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the phenomenon. The main goal of this Handbook is to provide the state of the art of the scholarship on populism. The Handbook lays out not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Handbook is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world with chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the post-Soviet States, and the United States. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various issues both from scholarly and political viewpoints. Analysis includes the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements, and technocracy. The fourth part encompasses recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and revolution. With each chapter written by an expert in their field, this Handbook will position the study of populism within political science and will be indispensable not only to those who turn to populism for the first time, but also to those who want to take their understanding of populism in new directions.