Populism and the politicisation of foreign policy

Abstract

Populists in power often resort to the politicisation of foreign policy to generate domestic support. This article explores this process. First, it conceptualises populist politicisation of foreign policy. Second, it develops expectations on how such politicisation will take place: the distinctive features of populism (the intensity of populist discourse, the relative weight of anti-elitism and people-centrism, and a transnational understanding of the ‘people’ or the ‘elite’) will have an impact on how foreign policy is politicised. The empirical analysis focuses on selected public speeches and tweets by two populist leaders from the Global South: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Narendra Modi. The analysis reveals huge differences: the more populist Erdoğan emphasises anti-elitism and extensively resorts to the politicisation of Turkish foreign policy by constructing foreign threats. Modi is less populist and his discourse emphasises people-centrism; as expected, he only marginally politicises foreign policy, highlighting the greatness of the Indian nation.

Displays of anger in Turkish political discourse: a hard choice between cultural norms and political performance of anger

“…4 The resulting corpus comprised 326 political speeches, consisting of 700,575 words. To follow the diachronic change in expression of anger in discourse, we created two subcorpora by taking the antigovernment Gezi protests 5 in 2013 in Turkey as a turning point after which Erdoğan's populism was intensified through the adoption of an increasingly antagonistic, authoritarian, conspiratorial, and nativist discursive style (Destradi et al, 2022;Ekşi & Wood, 2019;Taş, 2022). Table 5 shows the breakdown for the Pre-2013 and Post-2013 subcorpora.…”

Populism, jihad, and economic resistance: Studying the political discourse of Iran's supreme leader

“…There is a scholarly debate over defining populism. This study uses a definition based on the constructs of “people” and “elite” (Destradi et al, 2022) that incorporates Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser's (2013) minimal definition of populism. In this definition populism is described it as “a thin‐centered ideology” that divides the society into two equal and opposing camps of “pure people” and “corrupt elite.” In this definition, politics should be a manifestation of the common will of the people.…”

The United States facing allies’ populist blackmail: Why the Philippines and Turkey threatened to realign with China and Russia

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“…110 On the domestic front, Erdogan framed the Syrian war, and Washington's support to the YPG, as a strategic manoeuvre by Western imperialist forces to fragment and exert control over the Middle East. 111 President Erdogan also suspected that the United States was behind the 2016 attempted military coup against his regime. This suspicion poisoned the relationship between the two countries and seriously affected their bond of trust.…”