Introduction
The worldwide rise of populist governments represents one of the most crucial political
developments of recent years. In Europe in particular, a range of populist parties
and leaders have been voted into power and have formed (or joined) governments over
the past decade—this is true, for instance, in Austria, Estonia, Finland, Greece,
Hungary, Italy or Poland. As populist actors leave the opposition to seize the reins
of executive power, they have entirely new possibilities to directly shape not only
domestic policies, but also their countries’ foreign policy and European politics
more generally. This could have important repercussions on the European integration
project, on relations among European member states and with external powers such as
Russia and China, on EU policies in areas such as migration or support to democratization,
and on international norms and organizations more generally.
Yet, surprisingly, how and to what extent populist government formation (or participation)
concretely influences foreign policy has not been studied systematically so far. Particularly
after the election of Donald Trump in the United States, this question has been the
object of many (often sensationalist) comments in the media and in policy debates.
Also, the literature on the international dimensions of populism has been growing
rapidly (see below), but methodical, theory-driven and evidence-based analyses of
the impact of populism on foreign policy are still scarce. While the literature on
the domestic causes and manifestations of populism has been thriving for decades in
the field of Comparative Politics (see, among many others, Meny and Surel 2002; Rooduijn
2018; Norris and Inglehart 2019; Taggart and Kaltwasser 2016), the scholarship exploring
the implications of the rise of populism for international and regional politics is,
indeed, still in its infancy.
The interdisciplinary dialogue between, on the one hand, Comparative Politics (CP)
and Political Theory and, on the other hand, International Relations (IR) and Foreign
Policy Analysis (FPA) remains insufficiently developed and structured on these issues.
For long, the CP literature studying the influence of populism on policy-making has
failed to consider the foreign policy domain while, by contrast, migration or more
recently health have received attention (Schain 2006; Zaslove 2012; van Ostaijen and
Scholten 2014; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2015; Falkenbach and Greer 2018; Lasco 2020).
On its part, the IR literature had largely ignored the populist phenomenon altogether,
including the liberal and constructivist works studying, respectively, domestic preference
formation and ideational factors (Doyle 2016; Flockhart 2016).
The nascent and burgeoning scholarship on the nexus between populism and foreign policy
has begun to address some of these divides and limitations. Yet, several gaps remain.
First, in addition to being insufficiently interdisciplinary, this scholarship has
often lacked eclecticism in its conceptualization of populism (Chryssogelos 2017,
14). The great majority of studies have relied on the so-called ideational approach
(Balfour et al. 2016; Verbeek and Zaslove 2015; Destradi and Plagemann 2019; Wehner
and Thies 2020), a few have mobilized the discursive approach (Wojczewski 2019b; Cadier
and Szulecki 2020; Jenne 2021), but none have, to our knowledge, relied on the stylistic
or politico-strategic approaches or have sought to combine several of these conceptual
lenses (see below for an overview of these approaches). Second, most studies have
taken on to map, characterize, and generalize from the foreign policy preferences
of populist actors (Mead 2011; Verbeek and Zaslove 2017; Chryssogelos 2017; Diodato
and Niglia 2019), or to analyse how these actors have invested foreign policy as terrain
for their political practice and agenda once in power (Wojczewski 2019b; Nabers and
Stengel 2019; Biegon 2019), but few have investigated how foreign policy outputs have
been concretely affected in various national contexts. For instance, the collective
volume edited by Frank Stengel, David MacDonald and Dirk Nabers is close to the approach
adopted here for its comparative and interdisciplinary angle, but the authors stop
short of advancing systematic hypotheses or generalizations as they consider that
“differences between various forms of populism will likely also manifest themselves
in different foreign policy positions” (Stengel et al. 2019, 6). Third, most of the
scholarship on the foreign policy of governing populists has focussed on Latin America
(Sagarzazu and Thies 2019; Wehner and Thies 2020; Wajner 2021), India (Plagemann and
Destradi 2019; Wojczewski 2019a), Turkey (Taş 2020) and, especially, the US (Drezner
2019; Wojczewski 2019b; Hall 2021). Recent work on Europe has shed light on the foreign
preferences of European populist parties (Liang 2007; Balfour et al. 2016; Heinisch
et al. 2018; Coticchia and Vignoli 2020; Henke and Maher 2021) and how they have been
projected at the EU level (Van Berlo and Natorski 2019; Futák‐Campbell and Schwieter
2020; Falkner and Plattner 2020) as well as on populist parties’ sovereignism more
generally (see Basile and Mazzoleni 2020). By contrast, there has been little extensive
analysis of the national foreign policies of European populist governments and how
they have brought about changes of directions across policy areas (or not). In particular,
we lack systematic comparative insights on populist governments’ foreign policies
in Europe, while some comparative analyses have been undertaken in and across other
regions (Destradi and Plagemann 2019; Stengel et al. 2019). This is somehow paradoxical
as early research on populist foreign policy preferences was clearly EU-centric.
The special issue aims to address these research gaps by analysing the impact of populism
on foreign policy in a range of European cases. By developing a common analytical
framework and applying it across several case studies and policy areas, the special
issue makes a contribution to nascent efforts at theorizing the relationship between
populism and foreign policy, while at the same time providing empirical insights on
a number of European cases. Rather than just on populist actors’ preferences in, or
utilization of, foreign policy, we aim to shed light on how populism influences foreign
policy outputs and processes.
The main research questions guiding our analysis are the following: how does populism
impact foreign policy outputs and foreign policy making processes? What is distinctive
in the foreign policies of populist governments? Do populist governments bring about
change in their country’s foreign policy when they are in office? If so, of what kind
and under which conditions?
In order to pave the way for the case-study analyses addressing these questions empirically,
this introduction begins with discussing different conceptualizations of populism,
then reviews existing studies on its international dimensions, and finally develops
theoretical expectations about the impact of populism on foreign policy, which will
constitute as many research tracks for the individual contributions. Initial conceptual
ground-clearing is necessary for populism remains an essentially contested concept
and, more acutely, as developing a common analytical framework allows to maintain
coherence across the Special Issue while studying different countries, time periods
and foreign policy areas. At the same time, our approach to the concept of populism
is explicitly pluralistic since we believe that the diverse understandings of populism
developed in the field of Comparative Politics can fruitfully complement each other
and help us identify different manners in which populism might influence foreign policy
and international politics. In addition, each approach offers various and distinctive
opportunities to engage with a number of concepts, theories, or analytical objects—such
as securitization, post-structuralism, or diplomacy—that are associated to the IR
and FPA scholarship. This mix of coherence and flexibility allows us to gain comparative
insights, even though our in-depth case studies are not conceptualized as being part
of a systematic small-N comparative research design. Given that the field is new and
clearly under-theorized, we do not purport to advance a rigid and comprehensive set
of hypotheses about the impact of populism on foreign policy that would invariably
apply across all European cases and beyond. Overall, we do not expect populism to
translate into a range of uniform and monolithic foreign policy orientations in Europe.
Rather, based on the conceptual literature on populism and on the available scholarship
on its international implications, we set forth a number of theoretical expectations
and identify corresponding research tracks about some of the pathways and modalities
by which populism might influence foreign policy. These expectations and research
tracks pertain to: (a) the amenability to compromise; (b) bilateralism, multilateralism
and support for the EU; (c) the diversification of foreign relationships and international
partnerships; (d) foreign policy making processes and diplomatic practice. The different
contributions place varying emphasis on these research tracks depending on their relevance
in the national context studied.
Each country case-study analyses populist governments’ foreign policies in their specific
national, historical and geopolitical context, with a view to determine where, how
and when populism might have had an influence. The different countries analysed—namely
Austria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Poland—have been chosen as they constitute prominent
European examples of governing populists. More importantly, they allow for variations
across cases. This is true in terms of forms of populist participation in governments
(junior coalition partners in Austria and Greece; senior coalition partner in Poland;
all-populist coalition in Italy; constitutional majority in Hungary), of ideological
orientations (right-wing populism in Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland; left-wing
populism in Greece; sui generis populism in Italy), of time spent in office (e.g.
from more of a decade for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to a little over a year for Italy’s
‘Yellow-Green’ government), and of geographic location (Central, Southern, and Western
Europe). More generally, a focus on Europe allows for a rich set of cases of populist
governments of different political stripes that are nevertheless embedded in a similar
supranational institutional setting. The populist actors studied have not necessarily
been in power in their respective countries at the exact same time—some are still
in office, others are not—but the decade of the 2010s provides a common periodization
for the collective inquiry. Finally, while in this Special Issue the focus is placed
on populism in power as a relatively new, potentially consequential and largely understudied
phenomenon, this does not rule out the possibility that populist parties might also
have an influence on policy-making from the opposition, which has received attention
elsewhere (Schain 2006; Balfour et al. 2016; Williams 2018).
A pluralistic approach to populism
The study of populism has a long tradition in the field of Comparative Politics. In
this special issue, we adopt a pluralistic approach to populism since complementary
conceptualizations can help us gain insights about different ways in which populism
might impact foreign policy.
One of the currently most widespread understandings of populism considers it a ‘thin-centered
ideology’. This approach conceptualises populism as a coherent but narrow set of ideas
or beliefs that typically coexists alongside a full-fledged ‘thick-ideology’, like
socialism or ethno-nationalism (Hawkins et al. 2018). More specifically, in his canonical
definition, Cas Mudde (2004: 543, emphasis removed) describes populism as ‘an ideology
that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic
groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics
should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’. Such
an approach allows us to capture the commonalities of populist movements and leaders
across the political spectrum, from the far-left to the far-right and including those
that lack a clear ideological orientation, such Italy’s Five Star Movement or Czech
Republic’s ANO (these parties are sometimes associated to ‘pure’ or ‘entrepreneurial’
populism) (Mudde 2010; Zielonka and Rupnik 2020). According to such understanding,
populism has two polar opposites: elitism and pluralism (ibid.; Müller 2016). Correspondingly,
it entails two constitutive ideological dimensions, anti-elitism and anti-pluralism,
both of which might be consequential for foreign policy.
Anti-elitism is constitutive to populism as populist leaders characteristically claim
to speak in the name of a ‘morally pure and fully unified’ people (ibid: 19) as opposed
to a predatory class detached from it. Populist discourses’ highly moralistic depictions
imply a Manichean worldview in which the ‘people’ is good and elites are ‘evil’ (Mudde
2004: 543; Hawkins 2009: 1043–1044). Depending on the thick ideology that populists
espouse, but also on the political context and related opportunities, what counts
as predatory elite might vary significantly. Trump attacks the Washington establishment
(‘drain the swamp’), Euro-populists focus on EU bureaucracy, and Latin American leftist
populists aim at transnational capital and particularly at US businesses and their
domestic affiliates.
Anti-pluralism, the second core feature of populism, derives from populist leaders’
claim that ‘they, and they alone, represent the people’ (Müller 2016: 3). Depending
on the thick ideology, depictions of the people vary and are often kept vague so as
to allow for different understanding and thus maximize appeal. Yet, they routinely
involve the ‘foregrounding [of] moral distinctions between groups’ (Bonikowski 2016:
22) and the exclusion of certain parts of society, often ethnic or religious minorities.
More precisely, right-wing populists generally have an ‘exclusionary’ conception of
the people while that of left-wing populists tend to be more ‘inclusionary’ (Mudde
and Kaltwasser 2013). Thus, populists’ anti-pluralism does not necessarily coincide
with nativism: left-wing populists typically oppose ethno-nationalism. What they have
in common, though, is the claim that only they can represent the ‘true people’ and
that this excludes political competitors and their constituencies. This is reflected
in populists’ characteristic disdain for checks and balances, minority rights (ibid.:
31–32), or ‘any constraint on executive power’ (Drezner 2019: 728). Populists undermine
political institutions (Bonikowski 2016: 22; Pappas 2019) by portraying parliaments,
courts, the media, and civil society activists as elitist instruments for the control
or abuse of the true people (Müller 2016: 31).
A discursive approach to populism, as it was developed by Ernesto Laclau, understands
populism not as a set of ideas, but as a ‘logic of political articulation’: “populism
does not define the actual politics of these organisations, but is a way of articulating
their themes—whatever those themes may be” (Laclau 2005b: 44). According to Laclau,
the discursive logic of populism rests on the construction of a chain of equivalence
between unsatisfied social demands and the creation of an internal frontier dichotomizing
the social into two camps, the power and the underdog (Laclau 2005a, 2005b). By representing
the people as a coherent totality and by opposing it to the power or establishment,
the populist discursive practice contributes to the very constitution of popular subjectivity
and to the construction of the identity of the people. Bottom-up movements such as
the Yellow Vest in France exemplify well this logic: a popular subject emerged from
the aggregation of unrelated social demands on the basis that they are frustrated
and that the same source of social negativity (namely President Macron and the establishment)
is identified as being responsible. But so does the mobilization of populist discursive
strategies by parties such as Syriza (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014) or leaders
such as Trump (Homolar and Scholz 2019), who have structured their political rhetoric
around antagonistic representations of us-the people versus them-the establishment,
with implications for foreign policy.
The discursive approach, therefore, adds to our understanding of populism by shedding
light on how populist actors contribute to define (or discursively construct) the
social categories they claim to represent (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017, 305). In
that sense, this understanding of populism allows to account for the diversity and
versatility of populist actors and organizations, but also for the dynamic and productive
(or performative) nature of populist discourse. As the construction of a chain of
equivalence between heterogeneous social demands necessarily implies to “reduce their
particularistic content to a minimum”, populists rely on empty signifiers (such as
the ‘people’) that are always “open to contestation and redefinition” (Laclau 2005b:
40–41). In ‘filling’ these empty signifiers with meaning, engaging in such contestations
or redefinitions, or more generally in promoting certain representations of Self and
Other, the populist discursive practice contributes to shape the structure of signification
in which politics is debated and policies are formulated (see for instance: Wodak
2015).
Another approach defines populism as a political style, that is as a “repertoire of
embodied, symbolically mediated performance (…) that are used to create and navigate
the fields of power” (Moffitt 2017: 46). Based on the empirical observation of various
populist parties and actors across the world, Benjamin Moffitt (2017; see also: Moffitt
and Tormey 2014) inductively identified the following defining features of the populist
style: an appeal to ‘the people’ as both the audience and the subject embodied; a
resort to ‘bad manners’ and coarsened political rhetoric; and a representation and
performance of crisis, breakdown, and threat. The stylistic approach is close to Pierre
Ostiguy’s (2017) socio-cultural understanding of populism. According to Ostiguy, political
appeals can be meaningfully differentiated as ‘high’ or ‘low’, with populism decidedly
and consistently opting for the latter. Populists’ ‘flaunting of the low’ celebrates
the concrete, personalized, particularistic, and informal rather than the abstract,
impersonal, universal, and formal. Populism in this understanding politicizes socio-cultural
differences—‘publicized tastes, language, and modes of public behaviour’ (ibid. 80),
as illustrated in official pictures of Donald Trump offering absurd quantities of
American fast food at a White House reception or Matteo Salvini’s shirtless posing
on Italian beaches. Like the other two, the stylistic approach has the advantage of
including both left- and right-wing populists as well as populists parties or movement
with less clear political orientation. It also facilitates capturing interesting aspects
of contemporary populist leaders’ political communication with important repercussions
for international affairs—as, for instance, the public use of undiplomatic language,
the employment of social media for foreign policy communications, or the emphasis
on personal bonds between world leaders.
Finally, a last conceptual approach understands populism as a political strategy,
that is, as a set of methods or instruments mobilized by actors in their endeavour
to conquer or retain political power. In this understanding, populism is a way to
pursue, rather than a ground to define, political goals. According to Kurt Weyland,
political strategies are defined by the manner in which they build political support
and structure political participation: in that sense, populism is characterized by
the reliance on personalized power and “direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support
from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (Weyland 2001: 14). Robert Barr
(Barr 2009: 44) expresses the same idea and defines populism as a “mass movement led
by an outsider or maverick seeking to gain or maintain power by using anti-establishment
appeals and plebiscitarian linkages”. The politico-strategic approach allows to account
for the diversity of populist movements, but also for their opportunistic and often
erratic political positioning (Weyland 2017). It has mainly been developed with reference
to Latin America, but would gain from being applied to Europe as well to better understand
how populist actors use foreign policy in the context of their domestic political
strategies.
Populism and Foreign Policy: state of the art
While international factors have been taken into consideration as an explanation for
the emergence of populism (Zürn 2004; Verbeek and Zaslove 2017; Hooghe and Marks 2018),
the literature that specifically assesses the consequences of populism for international
affairs is scant. Recent analyses have started addressing the impact of populism on
specific issues, from their skepticism of international courts and multilateralism
(Voeten 2020, 2021) to their approach to international cooperation in the COVID-19
pandemic (Bobba and Hubé 2021). Henke and Maher (2021) have compared the positions
of European populist parties on defence policy. Moreover, as emphasised above, some
studies have provided valuable empirical insights on the foreign policy preferences
of populist actors, but theoretically systematic, methodologically comparative and
conceptually pluralistic investigations of the influences of populism on foreign policy
are still lacking.
Yet, the literature is growing rapidly, particularly studies grounded in the ideational
and discursive approaches to populism. One of the few analyses that assessed the impact
of populist government participation on foreign policy is Verbeek and Zaslove’s (2015)
study on Italy. They find that while in government the Northern League did not adopt
straightforward positions on foreign policy matters, that these positions were defined
by how and whether they could be interpreted as ‘protecting the people’, and that
the actual impact of the League on foreign policy decisions was largely mediated by
the structure of Italy’s political system and coalition dynamics. In another work,
the two authors develop systematic expectations about the foreign policy preferences
of populist parties (but not of populists in power) on regional integration, trade
and finance, migration, and ‘general attitude’ (understood mainly along a nationalist/isolationist/protectionist
vs. cosmopolitan continuum) (Verbeek and Zaslove 2017). Their core argument is that
populist parties will not necessarily adopt identical foreign policy positions as
their preferences appear above all determined by their ‘thick’ ideologies (ibid: 392).
In other words, radical right populist parties will have very different views on international
affairs as compared to left-wing populists, for example on topics such as immigration
or in terms of their isolationist vs. cosmopolitan attitude. In that sense, applying
the ideational approach to study foreign policy preferences often leads to displace
the analytical focus and explanation away from populism itself and towards thick ideologies
instead. For instance, Mihai Varga and Aron Buzogány (2020) argue that traditional
conservatism, much more than populism, explain the foreign policy orientations of
the Hungarian and Polish populist governments. Leslie Wehner and Cameron Thies (2020)
come to similar conclusions regarding the prevalence of thick ideologies in their
comparative analysis of the foreign policies of Menem’s Argentina and Chavez’ Venezuela.
Relying on role theory, they show that both (populist) leaders brought about change
in their countries’ international role conception, but that these changes were driven
by their distinctive thick ideologies and respective adherence to the principles of
dependency or autonomy. Populism can constitute a narrative or rhetorical frame used
to justify role choices, but it does not translate as such into a uniform type of
foreign policies (ibid. 3).
In this context, Chryssogelos (2017) calls for a comparative approach to the analysis
of populist foreign policy while searching for the elements that ‘are themselves a
function of traits of populist ideology tout court’ rather than of parties’ thick
ideologies. According to his argument, populists’ domestic anti-elitism can explain
their opposition to international elites and particularly to the US; populists’ claim
of protecting and representing the ‘people’ can explain their suspicion of international
or transnational institutions; and populists’ definition of the ‘people’ can transcend
national boundaries. While Chryssogelos uses examples from different world regions
in a first attempt to specifically address peculiarities of populist foreign policy,
he does not systematically test these propositions.
A first plausibility probe of a set of hypotheses on populist foreign policy for the
case of India has revealed that the shift to a populist government had the most immediate
impact on the process of foreign policy-making and on the communication of foreign
policy (Plagemann and Destradi 2019). By contrast, in the Indian case, populism had
only a limited impact on the ‘substance’ of foreign policy: contrary to what the authors
expected, under a populist leader India’s engagement in global governance did not
diminish, and populism did not translate into a rejection of multilateralism. Building
upon these insights, Plagemann and Destradi (2019) argue that other factors mitigate
the impact of populism on foreign policy. Based on the analysis of the foreign policies
of four countries from the Global South (Venezuela, India, Turkey, and the Philippines),
they find that the thick ideologies and the structural position of countries in the
international system seem to matter in mediating the impact of populism on foreign
policy. Yet, in all cases, populists in power tend to centralize foreign policy decision-making.
Moreover, the analysis suggests that populists in power tend to reinforce several
pre-existing trends in international affairs—a fragmentation of international alliances
in particular. In a comparative analysis of Latin American populists’ foreign policies,
Wajner (2021) shows they have tended to resort to transnational forms of mutual legitimation
and to reproduce domestic approaches to political communication.
Other recent analyses show that a Laclauian framework can also be fruitfully applied
to the study of the international implications of populism and, in particular, of
the relationship between populism and foreign policy. With reference to Narenda Modi’s
India and Donald Trump’s US, Thorsten Wojczewski documents how populist leaders tend
to use foreign policy as a site to construct and reproduce their notions of ‘people’
and ‘elite’ as well as their claim to represent the former (Wojczewski 2019a, b).
In the same vein, other authors have shown how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric
was put at the service of his populist agenda and, notably, served the function of
creating a sense of crisis, of framing the decline of the US ‘heartland’, and of instilling
ontological insecurity among the American public (Biegon 2019; Homolar and Scholz
2019; Hall 2021). This, in turn, has consequences on how populist leaders or governments
run foreign policy when they are in office. In the US, “the populist elements in the
Trumpian foreign policy [notably] manifest themselves in the contestation of the bipartisan
consensus on America’s national interest” (Wojczewski 2019b: 17). In Poland, the historical
discourse of the PiS government has reflected and reproduced the party’s populist
mode of political articulation, with some effects on the country’s foreign policy
and diplomatic relations. The common othering of domestic political elites and historical
perpetrators, and the totalization of Poland’s victimhood, have connoted the representation
of foreign policy situations, of relations with neighbours, and of the state’s identity
in international affairs (Cadier and Szulecki 2020). Finally, in her study comparing
several cases across regions and time, Erin Jenne has found that populist—and especially
ethno-populist—discursive frames correspondingly prescribe diverse forms of foreign
policy revisionism (Jenne 2021).
Building upon this literature, we aim to contribute to developing the theorization
of populism’s effects on foreign policy by connecting, on the one hand, different
approaches to the study of populism in the fields of Comparative Politics and, on
the other, the conceptual tools and methods to study foreign policy developed by the
disciplines of International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis.
Populism and foreign policy: theoretical expectations and research tracks
In this Special Issue, we study in which ways populist government formation or participation
has an influence on the foreign policy of a country. More specifically, we analyse
the individual foreign policies of populist governments with a view both to identify
what might be specific in their orientations, choices and practices as compared to
previous non-populist governments and to determine whether and how their coming to—and
exercise of—power leads to foreign policy change. In the following sections, we present
the research tracks and initial theoretical expectations that have guided our collective
inquiry. Our core contention is that populism can be expected to influence a country’s
foreign policy, but that it can do so in different ways across cases and even policy
areas, and that such impact will be mitigated by other factors.
Analysing the differences with previous non-populist governments and the changes brought
upon in a country’s foreign policy allows identifying the potential influence of populism.
The FPA literature appears useful in particular to study the modalities, varying degrees
and potential sources of foreign policy change (Goldmann 1988; Hermann 1990; Holsti
1982; Welch 2005). Charles Hermann (1990) offers a typology of foreign policy change
differentiating between ‘adjustment changes’ (modulation of the same policy), ‘program
changes’ (change in methods or means), ‘problem changes’ (change in goals) and ‘international
orientation changes’ (fundamental shift in the actor’s role/activities in international
politics). When it comes to the drivers of change, the FPA literature identifies a
number of potential factors and emphasises their dynamic interactions. For instance,
Kjell Goldmann (1988) sets forth a model distinguishing ‘sources of change’ (e.g.
changing environmental conditions or learning from previous policies), ‘processes
of change’ (e.g. re-thinking by individual leaders or changes in the composition of
the foreign policy system) and ‘stabilizers’ mediating change (e.g. cognitive, administrative
or international). Through its different case studies, the Special Issue sheds light
on how populism acts as, or relates to, sources, processes and stabilizers of change.
In line with the FPA scholarship, we do not expect populism to act as a single determinant
of foreign policy choices or orientations; rather, we study it in interaction with
other factors. In particular, the various contributions identify factors that have
mitigated, overridden or amplified the influence of populism on foreign policy, such
as external structural conditions and geopolitical pressures, domestic institutional
and constitutional architectures, and the thick ideologies of the populist parties
or leaders studied.
While individual contributions integrate relevant mediating factors, the thrust of
this introduction’s conceptual endeavour lies with advancing a number of research
tracks and theoretical expectations about where and how populism might influence foreign
policy outputs and processes. We do so below by drawing on the different approaches
conceptualising populism and on the nascent literature reflecting on its international
dimensions. These expectations and research tracks have guided this Special Issue’s
collective inquiry and are further illustrated, substantiated and adjusted in the
following individual contributions. They address populists’: (a) amenability to compromise;
(b) bilateralism, multilateralism and support for the EU; (c) diversification of foreign
relationships and international partnerships; (d) foreign policy making processes
and diplomatic practice. These four angles are not necessarily exhaustive—there might
be other policy areas or modalities whereby populism influences foreign policy—nor
equally valid or important across cases. It has thus been left to authors to identify
which research tracks are most relevant in the respective national contexts studied
and which policy areas have exhibited variance as compared to previous non-populist
governments.
Amenability to compromise
Among foreign policy observers and in the media, one common assumption about populist
actors is that they will adopt a less compromising posture in foreign policy as compared
to that of non-populist governments and, overall, anecdotal evidence tends to confirm
this impression.
In theoretical terms, different approaches to populism would also lead us to expect
populists in power to pursue a more confrontational foreign policy as compared to
their predecessors. Populists’ Manichean worldview, highlighted by the ideational
approach (Hawkins 2009: 1043) will lead them to depict the world in highly moralistic
terms, as a battle of good vs. evil, black vs. white. This, together with populists’
claim to be the only possible representatives and defenders of the ‘true people’ (Müller
2016: 3) might make them less amenable to compromise in international disputes. The
literature on populism as a political style also highlights that populists will tend
to conjure up crises (Moffitt 2017) and employ an antagonistic, rather than consensual
discourse (Ostiguy 2017). Similarly, the discursive approach suggests that the populist
logic of articulation rests on the permanent discursive construction of an ‘other’
or ‘enemy’, whether internal or external. This is likely to translate into a confrontational
rhetoric towards (certain) other international actors and to shape antagonistic representations
of identities. Finally, the politico-strategic approach highlights that populists,
after forming governments, need to keep mobilizing their followers. International
crises may be particularly suitable to generate domestic support, as is highlighted
by the literature on the diversionary theory of war and the ‘rally around the flag
effect’ (for an overview and a criticism of existing scholarship, see Tir 2010). Indeed,
after they have themselves become part of the governing elite, populists need to keep
constructing enemies.
Yet, previous research suggests that shifts to populist governments do not automatically
lead to foreign policies that are indiscriminately more conflictive or less amenable
to compromise. Relying on operational code analysis, Özdamar and Ceydilek (2019) find
that while European Populist Radical Right leaders tend to be more conflictual in
their worldviews, they tend to be as cooperative as average world leaders when it
comes to their ‘instrumental approaches’. Insights from the Global South suggest that
populist governments will pursue a more conflict-prone foreign policy only vis-à-vis
countries that are directly associated with a particular section of the population
that populists exclude from their definition of the ‘true people’ (Destradi and Plagemann
2019). Finally, the picture is mixed as regard populist parties’ attitudes towards
the use of force and intervening in other states’ internal affairs. In the realm of
defence, their degree of support for military capabilities and solutions appear largely
mediated by their thick ideologies and by national strategic cultures: for instance,
most populist radical right party support higher defence spending while left-wing
populist parties generally adopt pacifist postures, and while most populist parties
tend to favour territorial defence, some support external force projection and military
interventions against terrorist groups (Falkner and Plattner 2020; Coticchia and Vignoli
2020; Henke and Maher 2021; see also Wagner et al. 2018).
Given these contradictory findings, case studies in the special issue explore whether,
in which ways and under what conditions, populist government formation or participation
might lead to less cooperative policies.
Bilateralism, multilateralism and support for the EU and other International Institutions
One of the areas in which populism seems to have the greatest impact on international
affairs in recent years is that of multilateral institutionalised cooperation. Brexit
and the Euroscepticism of most European populist parties seems to epitomize populist
actors’ aversion to international organizations, as do recent examples of populist
governments undermining or withdrawing from global multilateral institutions and regimes
(such as the Trump administration pull-out from the United Nations Human Rights Council,
the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement.
In theoretical terms, from the perspective of the ideational approach, we could expect
populists’ suspicion of international institutions to mirror their hostility to domestic
political institutions, which they habitually accuse of hindering their supposedly
direct connection to the ‘people’ (Chryssogelos 2018). More generally, as noted by
Chryssogelos (2017), populists represent “a reaction to processes of dilution of popular
sovereignty”: “‘sovereignty’ is probably the term that most accurately captures the
populist logic of international affairs” (see also: Basile and Mazzoleni 2020). Similarly,
the discursive and stylistic approach would lead us to expect populist governments
to articulate their identity or posture in opposition to the EU as a technocratic
‘establishment’. Finally, from the point of view of the politico-strategic approach,
we can expect populists to make use of voters’ suspicion of far-away transnational
elites operating within highly formalized institutional settings to gain political
support domestically. Thus, overall, we can expect the formation of populist governments
to have a detrimental impact on countries’ multilateral engagement.
Yet, also in this field, previous research reveals that the effects of populism are
not necessarily clear and straightforward. Verbeek and Zaslove (2017) have shown that
some populist actors—those they characterize as ‘populist market liberals’—are actually
rather supportive of European integration. More generally, it is worth recalling that
although Eurosceptic in their political discourse, the populist governments of Hungary
and Poland have not come close to putting their country’s EU membership into question.
Furthermore, cases from the Global South reveal that populists’ ‘thick ideology’ or
their striving for international status gains might lead to a surprising willingness
to engage in international and regional institutions: Venezuela’s Chávez promoted
his distinct brand of regionalism in South America as a counterweight to the United
States, while India’s Modi was not more averse to regional multilateralism than his
non-populist predecessor (Plagemann and Destradi 2019). Finally, while populist governments’
sovereignism often leads them to invoke the principle of non-interference in state’s
domestic affairs, they do not necessarily uphold it in practice, as testifies by the
Hungarian and Polish government’s policies towards Ukraine and Belarus, respectively.
Hence, more research is needed on populist government’s positions in and towards multilateral
organisations and regional integration. In this context, the special issue sheds light
in particular on populist government’s attitudes towards both, bilateral vs multilateral
diplomatic formats and the EU and European integration. In doing so, contributors
notably distinguish between shallow criticism of the EU or other multilateral organizations
at the rhetorical level and more substantial policy shifts.
Diversification of foreign relationships
Another issue that seems particularly relevant for the study of populists in power
in Europe is their potential alteration and diversification of international partnerships
or alliances. Italy’s pan-populist coalition was the first Western European government
to formally subscribe to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Populist governments in
Central Europe have denounced the influence of EU institutions and of Germany and
have invested instead in closer ties with Russia (for Hungary) or in alternative regional
frameworks (for Poland) (Varga and Buzogány 2020). Finally, the Global South populist
governments analysed in Destradi and Plagemann (2019) all try to reduce dependence
on a single ally and to diversify their international relationships in order to achieve
greater room to manoeuvre for their respective countries.
In the West, populists’ diversification of relationships is likely to dovetail with
a more general questioning of some core ‘liberal’ principles on the part of populist
leaders—from free trade to liberal democracy. More generally, populists desire to
break with long-established foreign policy principles or prioritisation of international
partners, which were adopted or favoured by the much-despised previous elites. Similarly,
the new representations of Self and Other promoted by populist discourse are likely
to have repercussions on how the actions, intentions and roles of other actors are
perceived and interpreted.
Against this backdrop, the special issue analyses populist governments’ choices and
policies in terms of international partnerships and alliances.
Foreign policy-making: centralization, personalization, and communication
Besides foreign policy outputs, it is also important to analyse continuity and change
in the processes and practices of foreign policy making. Ideational anti-elitism as
well as discursive and stylistic drives for differentiation are likely to make populists
uneasy with conventional foreign policy-making, which has for centuries been the domain
of an exceptionally elitist community of unelected bureaucrats (diplomats), surrounded
by a strategic community of think tankers, retired officials, academic experts, and
often lower-ranking politicians. Furthermore, the literature on populism as a political
style also highlights that ‘bad manners’ are typical of populist leaders and, indeed,
we have had several instances of populists in power entirely disregarding diplomatic
conventions and etiquette (such as Trump, Salvini or Duterte). In addition, populists’
ideational anti-pluralism and political strategy of cultivating an unmediated link
with the people will also make them less willing to involve actors such as civil society
representatives or foreign policy (or area) experts in a consultative process. Besides
centralization, populists’ claim to personally embody the ‘popular will’ and to be
the only possible representatives of the ‘true people’ also implies a personalization
of foreign policy making (Destradi and Plagemann 2019). In sum, we expect personalization
and disregard for diplomatic etiquette to be more pronounced in populist governments
as compared to non-populist predecessors.
Yet, apart from anecdotal evidence on spectacular cases, continuity and change of
foreign policy-making processes is not easy to assess and remains largely unexplored.
Empirical research needs—and the special issue sets for itself—to identify shifts
in who the most relevant actors involved in foreign policy-making are, what role is
played by foreign ministries and to what extent populist governments deviate from
traditional diplomatic practice. Relatedly, it is important to look into the extent
to which the established foreign policy bureaucracy opposes populists’ reforms and
foreign policy ideas and what the consequences of such bureaucratic infighting are.
Furthermore, among the most visible changes of the practice of foreign policy by populists,
is the way they communicate both with foreign governments and their domestic support
base. A more direct and, perhaps, transparent communication of foreign policy may,
on the one hand, contribute to its politicization and polarization thereby complicating
consensual international agreements. Yet, it may also increase the publics’ awareness
of foreign policy issues, with unclear consequences so far.
Importantly, such changes in the processes of foreign policy making can also be expected
to have an impact on the substance of foreign policy. This can happen, for example,
through the narrowing down of foreign policy to a limited set of issues that are important
to populist leaders—to the detriment of a broader set of issue areas traditionally
covered by foreign policy bureaucracies. The marginalization of the traditional foreign
policy bureaucracy with its experience in and sympathy for the practice of multilateralism
may also deprive populist leaders of the expertise necessary for navigating the intricacies
of multilateral institutions and silence government-internal support for doing so.
Structure of the special issue
The rest of the Special Issue explores these research tracks in depth with reference
to individual case-studies (Austria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Poland). Overall,
the various contributions converge in their findings that the foreign policy of populist
governments is most distinctive in terms of foreign policy discourse and style. This
does not mean, however, that the impact of populism on foreign policy simply amounts
to inconsequential rhetoric or mere posturing: on the contrary, the authors shed light
on the different ways in which populist actors have contributed to shape policy outputs
and processes, although not in a consistent and uniform manner and not to the level
of a radical re-orientation of their country's foreign policy. Several of the theoretical
expectations presented above find support in the empirical analyses, though not equally
so across cases. Geopolitical contexts, domestic institutional conditions, coalition
dynamics and, especially, the duration in office have mediated the influence of populism
on foreign policy and help account for differences across national situations.
It is in Central Europe, where populist governments have been in power for several
years, that the effects on foreign policy are most salient. In their contribution,
Peter Visnovitz and Erin Jenne document a number of changes in Hungarian foreign policy
under Viktor Orbán, such as a more confrontational rhetorical stance towards NATO
and the EU, an investment in bilateral partnerships with China and Russia, a politicization
of foreign policy institutions, and a centralisation of foreign policy-making. They
argue that populist argumentation has been used to justify and legitimise these orientations
and, more generally, foreign policy revisionism. In that sense, Visnovitz and Jenne
show that populist rhetoric neither amounts to 'cheap talk' nor functions as way to
signal policy intent in line with constituents' preferences, since the Fidesz electorate's
views on the EU, NATO, China or Russia had been at odds with that of their government.
They also suggest, however, that years of populist political argumentation seem to
have progressively altered these popular attitudes (with aversion towards Russia and
China being increasingly supplanted by sympathy), thus shedding light on the potential
long-term impact of populism. In the same vein, in his study on Poland, David Cadier
argues that populism-induced changes under the Law and Justice (PiS) government have
pertained more to foreign policy practices than to foreign policy contents. The reliance
on populist discourse and style has led the PiS government to promote distinct representations
of Self and Other in international affairs and to use diplomacy as a site to perform
a rupture with technocratic elites. More specifically, the PiS government’s foreign
policy has been characterized by a shift in the discursive representations of the
EU (securitization) and of Poland's role in it (de-europeanisation), by a de-prioritisation
of the partnership with Germany and an investment in an alternative Central European
core, and by the resort to ‘undiplomatic diplomacy’ and marginalization of traditional
diplomatic actors. In that sense, Cadier argues that populist representational practices
shape the structures of meaning in which foreign policy is formulated, debated and
implemented and, as such, enable certain policy choices and actions while disabling
others.
The chapters analyzing cases in Southern Europe observe similar patterns but lower
magnitudes of populism’s influence on foreign policy. In his analysis on Greece, Angelos
Chryssogelos shows that the effects of populism on foreign policy have been limited,
pertaining above all to rhetoric and symbolic actions visible mainly during populist
actors’ first six months in office. His cross-temporal comparison of Andreas Papandreou
in the 1980s and the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition in 2015–2019 reveals that the former’s
maverick foreign policy in the bipolar Cold War context and the latter’s near-rupture
with the EU upon entering office were used as a domestic strategy of popular mobilization
but that both were eventually abandoned in favour of re-joining the Western mainstream.
Chryssogelos thus argues, based on the case of Greece, that populism’s distinctive
impact on foreign policy has to do with the ‘how’ rather than with the ‘what’. Populist
actors use foreign policy to embody and reproduce the antagonistic relationship between
‘people’ and ‘elites’ as well as the link between the ‘people’ and the leader. However,
populism does not constitute a major source of foreign policy change and mainly accentuates
pre-existing trends, notably in terms of personalization and centralisation of foreign
policy making. This latter, process-related dimension is also well documented in Fabrizio
Coticchia’s analysis on Italy: in the all-populist ‘Yellow-Green’ coalition government
(2018–2019), Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio constantly and ostentatiously intervened
in foreign policy domains that were not linked to their respective ministerial portfolios,
while the role and influence of the Foreign Minister and Ministry were downgraded.
Another feature of the ‘Yellow-Green’ government has been the ideological embracement
of sovereignism and a confrontational attitude towards the EU and other multilateral
institutions. Yet, Coticchia demonstrates that these positions have mainly been confined
to symbolic posturing and have not translated into changes of directions in Italian
foreign policy, because populist leaders’ appeared mainly driven by instrumental calculations
related to their domestic public image and because institutional and structural constraints
(both internal and external) prevented such changes. He suggests though that Italy’s
image in the EU has been affected in the process, thus shedding additional light on
how, even when mainly confined to rhetoric and posturing, populism may come along
with substantial reputational costs amongst other implications for foreign policy.
The last two articles of the Special Issue zoom in on policy domains, issues and processes
where the impact of populism is expected—and indeed confirms to be—most salient. Patrick
Müller and Charlott Gebauer focus on migration, a policy area where populist parties
generally have strong preferences. Analyzing Austria’s policy decision on the UN’s
Global Compact on Migration (GCM) they document a clear pattern of change. Whereas
the Austrian diplomacy had played a prominent role in the negotiations leading to
the GCM, the coalition government made up of the conservative Austrian people’s party
(ÖVP) and the right-wing populist Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) abstained in the UN
General Assembly vote on the pact in December 2018. Müller and Gebauer argue that
the populist securitization of the migration issue has led to this outcome. These
securitizing practices contribute in turn to shape public perceptions and opportunity
structures for other (mainstream) political parties with regard to various policy
options, as demonstrated by the fact that the ÖVP not only accepted and adopted the
FPÖ’s positions on the GCM but also maintained a critical stance after the end of
their coalition agreement. Finally, Christian Lequesne picks up and unpacks another
common trend in populist governments’ approaches to foreign policy making, namely
their attempt to marginalize professional diplomats and Ministries of Foreign Affairs.
Relying on a comparison of the cases of Poland, Italy and Austria, Lequesne argues
that populist actors are structurally at odds with professional diplomats and seek
to reduce their autonomy through political capture. Their success in doing so depends
on the institutional conditions prevailing in each national context. In Poland, the
PiS government took a series of measures—from recalling Ambassadors to reforming the
law on the diplomatic service—that allowed it to politically capture the career diplomatic
corps. In Italy and Austria by contrast, the existing legal frameworks, long-established
corporatist practices, and political disagreements inherent to coalition politics
prevented such outcome. As such, Lequesne’s study sheds light on the need to explore
further how populism might affect the relationship between professional politicians
and bureaucratic actors.