Empirical analyses show that beyond a critique of elites and the demand to restore an allegedly lost popular sovereignty, “populists” have very little in common. Emmy Eklundh, Frank A. Stengel and Thorsten Wojczewski argue that we can only make sense of this if we understand populism not as an ideology with a fixed essence but as a way of doing politics.
Since the 2016 Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States, populism has been a hotly debated topic in both public and academic discourse. One reason for the sustained attention in the media is the assumption that populists of various stripes – from Bernie Sanders and Syriza on the left to Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Rodrigo Duterte on the right − present a challenge to liberal democracy and the rule of law as well as multinational cooperation (including European integration), free trade and the liberal world order itself.
Populism as a way of doing politics
In a recent study, we examine to what extent the expectation of similar populist (foreign) policies holds up under scrutiny. Most of the media discourse as well as some academic studies use “populism” either as a catch-all term for any non-centrist politics or as a synonym for the far right. This regularly leads to a conflation of populism and related phenomena, such as nationalism/nativism, authoritarianism, socialism or neoliberalism.
Instead, and drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s discursive approach to populism, we argue that rather than understanding populism as an ideology that can be expected to translate into policy, it should be seen as a “political logic” – a “way of articulating” or framing political demands.
This reformulation of populism shifts attention away from specific populist contents to the process of mobilisation. Populism constructs an antagonism between “the people” and unresponsive elites who block the will of “the people”, with the result that advocates of disparate demands (such as social justice or immigration control) are united against the non-responsive government blocking their demands. In this way, populist projects strive to create a wider appeal to a broader audience.
Populists agree on very little
A number of empirical studies have shown that the overall picture is much more complicated than the story of the “populist threat” suggests. In fact, there is very little populists agree on besides a general critique of elites and the demand for a restoration of popular sovereignty. Not all populists are anti-immigration or illiberal, populists are not universally opposed to international organisations and multinational cooperation, and not all populists attack democratic institutions and the rule of law.
In fact, these and other policy preferences are predominantly rooted in far-right ideology. Based on the strict belief in a natural order of inequalities, the far right’s foreign policy outlook conjures a struggle between the ethnoculturally or racially defined political community against internal and external enemies.
Far-right discourses employ a racist and xenophobic mode of “Othering” through which minorities and migrants are constructed as “foreign” and “dangerous”, and the securitisation and militarisation of border and immigration policies are rationalised.
As the far right opposes the “liberal belief in human universality” in favour of particular and exclusionary identities, it contests regional and global organisations that challenge these identities, and it is reluctant to contribute to multilateral burden-sharing and public good provision or even consider the wellbeing and rights of others. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy embodies this chauvinistic nationalism that promises to shield and defend the nation against “foreign” or “globalist” interests.
The widespread association of “populist foreign policy” with opposition against human rights, multilateral cooperation or migration has contributed to the mainstreaming of the far right by providing unintentional legitimacy to its claim that these positions represent the frustrated will of the “common people”. At the same time, it has discredited leftist political forces that employ the populist logic to advance radically different political projects.
Defying expectations
Our empirical analysis shows that Bernie Sanders and Podemos not only defy common expectations of populist policies, but that they often pursue the exact opposite of what is thought of as typical for “populist” foreign policy. Both Sanders and Podemos have advocated for multinational, internationalist and pro-immigration foreign policies.
Their domestic policies have not been marked by attacks on democratic institutions but by the goal to broaden democracy. This challenges not only common understandings of populist (foreign) policy but also the broader conception of populism as an ideology that has (universal) effects across different cases.
In sum, there is little evidence that populism as such has any universal effects on policy. Certainly, it is a stretch to claim that “populism” in itself is a threat to either liberal democracy, multinational cooperation or the liberal world order. Populism simply lacks the ideological substance that could have this universal effect. Instead, populism is best understood as a way of framing non-populist political demands, ranging from the far left to the far right, and from support for liberal democracy to illiberal authoritarianism.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in International Affairs.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: miss.cabul / Shutterstock.com
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