Description
Populism is often portrayed as having drastic consequences for states’ conduct of foreign policy. The view that the rise of populists, such as Orbán in Hungary and Trump in the US, is seen as a challenge to the world order confines populism to so-defined illiberal politics. This overlooks that populist political approaches can also be identified in so-defined liberal democracies, as the new political logic of contemporary times, cutting across parties’ traditional ideological divides. In this paper, we propose to use Bickerton and Accetti’s description of technopopulism to analyse the rise of populist tendencies in Italy and France, particularly focusing on their foreign policy. By showing that there is no antithesis between the ideals of technocracy and those of populism, Bickerton and Accetti have opened a field of enquiring for leaders who claim legitimacy both from assertions to competence and from direct popular support, independently of intermediary institutions. Technopopulism has yet to be applied to the field of foreign policy, a gap which we aim to fill here. Using the framework of discourse analysis based on Hansen’s method, we analyse foreign policy discourses in two countries that have had important technopopulist movements, particularly with the rise of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy and Emmanuel Macron in France. We look at three types of discourses in both cases – official discourses such as speeches and foreign ministry communications, semi-official discourses such as editorials and interviews of key participants, and wider political discourses in popular culture. We show that technopopulist modes of governance have had a profound impact on foreign policy decision-making in both cases, and compare the lessons learned.
