Mitigating Populism in Regional Orders: The EU’s and ASEAN’s Responses

While research on populism and institutions has shown how populist leaders contest, instrumentalise, and politicise regional organisations (ROs), less is known about how ROs respond to populist challenges from outside their region in times of order transition. Building on recent advances in Populist Regionalism that disaggregate populist engagement with ROs into four paths, this chapter compares ordering responses to external populist challenges, such as from the Trump administrations, in two contrasting actors: the EU and ASEAN. We argue that populism has not only become a systemic challenge to the core values and ordering associated with both actors, but also activates a range of ordering resources and counterstrategies through which ROs seek to mitigate populist pressures and associated structural stress. Rather than being passive victims of populist actors, ROs emerge as active agents in adapting to the boundaries and consequences of populist challenge and alternative order visions. We apply process tracing of both ROs and their interventions to trace key episodes of ordering adaptation to populism from the outside, focusing on the period 2016-2026. We find that ordering environments condition both the strategies of populist leaders and the capacity of ROs to shape order under pressure. For the EU, higher levels of populist pressures from EU-outsiders are associated with greater executive outreach from the European Commission. For ASEAN, confrontation with populist ASEAN-outsiders is limited and illuminates fragmented ordering approaches. In conclusion, the lens of RO responses to populists from outside reveals the differential capacities of actorness and adaptation, which are shaped by competing visions of order.