Differentiating degrees and manifestations of populism in foreign policy

There is increasing interest in the significance of populism in foreign policy, with a growing literature focusing on the significance of populism itself, as distinct from the thick ideology it adheres to. For example left and right populist parties and actors are said to display a shared aversion to the transfer of sovereignty to ‘globalist elites’ beyond national borders, or to a US or Western dominated international order. They are also said to show a common tendency to centralise and personalise foreign policy processes. Yet scholarship on populism and foreign policy is complicated by competing approaches to conceptualising populism in general, and a consequent difficulty in categorising populist actors. A wide range of political leaders are categorised as populist. But are politicians as diverse as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Victor Orban all populist in the same way, and with the same significance for foreign policy? I argue for two moves that will help us to make more nuanced analyses of the role of populism in foreign policy. First, we should complement existing approaches to studying populism with more interpretive methodologies that engage with the complexity of the world views and motivations of political actors, and the potential for those to change over time. Based on this approach we should resist the temptation to label political actors in binary terms as ‘populist’ or ‘not populist’ – with all the loaded implications in terms of legitimacy – and think in terms of degrees of populism that apply to parties or individuals. I argue that it is particularly important regarding international politics to differentiate between politicians that use populist rhetoric primarily for strategic ends, and those for whom populist ideas genuinely shape their ideology or world view. Second, we should take more explicit account of both domestic and international constraints on the office holder’s ability to bring a populist agenda to bear on a state’s foreign policy. Domestic constraints include the political structure of the state – system of government, checks and balances etc. – as well as the time the office holder has in power. International constraints refers to the room for manoeuvre a national government has in foreign policy, defined by their state’s relative power and position in the international system. These two moves enable us to position ‘populist’ political actors on two indices: the extent of their populist ideology, and the extent of their room for manoeuvre. A politician that scores high on both will have the greatest potential to revise their nation’s foreign policy and cause disruption in the international system. I will present how this framework may help us analyse and predict the foreign policy significance of populism with respect to specific examples.