Populist Representational Practices and Foreign Policy: An Analysis of the Case of Poland

Abstract

The indirect, unintended and constitutive effects of populism on foreign policy tend to escape the attention of the growing scholarship on the topic. This chapter purports to shed light on these effects through a case-study on Poland, where the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party has been in power since 2015. Populism is understood and studied as a set of performative, discursive and stylistic practices that are directly reproduced in, or indirectly spill over onto, foreign policy. As such, they shape the framework of meaning in which policies are formulated and, thereby, enable some while disabling others. In Poland, these effects have varied across policy areas. In some instances, such as on Europe or Germany, the PiS government has contested and redefined some of the core representations, identities and role conceptions in Polish foreign policy tradition. In others, such as on the US or Russia, it has sought to claim this tradition, but its domestic political practice and transgression of diplomatic norms has undermined the realization of its own foreign policy objectives. The chapter’s main argument is that populism, rather than translating into programmatic ideas about foreign policy, shapes the context in which foreign policy is formulated, debated and implemented.