Description
This paper explores the theoretical challenges posed by the rise of populism for International Relations (IR), employing a classical realist framework. While there is a rapidly growing IR literature on populism, this scholarship has so far shun IR theories and instead relied on theories of populism in its analyses of the role and effects of populism in world politics. Drawing on Hans Morgenthau’s international thought, we argue that his concept of the political can provide important insights into the domestic and international causes of populism and enable us to formulate a normative critique of the political potentials and dangers inherent in populism. Informed by an effort to recognize the centrality of power and antagonism in politics, while avoiding the Schmittian conclusion that enmity and violence are the essence of the political, Morgenthau understands politics as interest defined in power and postulates that openness and indeterminacy are the very essence of politics that must be defended. Against this backdrop, we discuss how populism is a reaction to depoliticization processes in foreign policy and world politics, ranging from technologization and scientification to the hegemonization of neoliberal ideology, and evaluate to what extent populism is suitable for re-politicizing politics and preserving it as an open and critical space of public political debate.
