Description
Lately, there has been a growing interest in the role of ideologies in International Relations (IR). While this scholarship has shown how ideology impacts on foreign policy and world politics, it predominantly reduces ideologies to belief systems that influence policy preferences and outputs. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse theory (PDT), this article aims to complement this research by drawing attention to a different dimension of ideology in foreign policy: the attempt to mask over the discursively constructed character of social reality and thereby promise to satisfy ‘our’ – ultimately unfulfillable – desire for ontological wholeness and security. The article discusses how foreign policy can be used for this ideological operation by narrating it as a political practice that can either make ‘our’ nation-state whole (again) or threaten its very being and survival. Through this re-conceptualization of ideology, the article also relates the study of ideology to the concepts of identity and affect in IR and shows how the illusive promise for whole identities and social orders drives the affective investment in specific political projects. The article illustrates its arguments through an analysis of the nexus between foreign policy and ideology in the discourses of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States.
