Foreign Policy as the Continuation of Domestic Politics by Other Means: Pathways and Patterns of Populist Politicization

Abstract

This article argues that populism in power translates into a greater tendency to politicize foreign policy, in the sense of defining and articulating foreign policy preferences in opposition to political predecessors, using foreign policy as an instrument and ground to battle political opponents, and over-prioritizing domestic incentives and considerations over external ones. Paradoxically, compared to other classical determinants of foreign policy, how populism relates to domestic political competition has received scant attention. Yet, populist actors’ strategies in dealing with political opposition are at the same time distinctive and consequential. This article advances a typological theoretical framework shedding light on the pathways, patterns, and implications of populist politicization, which it illustrates empirically with reference to the case of Poland.

Este artículo argumenta que el populismo en el poder se traduce en una mayor tendencia a politizar la política exterior, en el sentido de definir y articular las preferencias en materia de política exterior en oposición a los predecesores políticos, de utilizar la política exterior como instrumento y terreno para combatir a los oponentes políticos, y de priorizar en exceso los incentivos y las consideraciones internas sobre las externas. Paradójicamente, la forma en que el populismo se relaciona con la competencia política interna ha recibido escasa atención en comparación con otros determinantes clásicos de la política exterior. Sin embargo, las estrategias de los agentes populistas para hacer frente a la oposición política son, al mismo tiempo, distintivas y consecuentes. Este artículo propone un marco teórico tipológico que pretende arrojar luz sobre las vías, patrones e implicaciones de la politización populista, la cual ilustramos empíricamente con referencia al caso de Polonia.

Cet article avance que le populisme au pouvoir se traduit en une propension accrue à la politisation de la politique étrangère, en termes de formulation et d'articulation des préférences de politique étrangère en opposition de celles des gouvernants précédents, d'utilisation de la politique étrangère comme un instrument et une arène pour attaquer les opposants politiques, et de priorisation à l'excès des considérations et motivations de politique intérieure au détriment des dynamiques et finalités internationales. De façon paradoxale, en comparaison des autres déterminants traditionnels de la politique étrangère, la façon dont le populisme se rapporte à la compétition politique nationale n'a reçu que peu d'attention. Pourtant, les stratégies des acteurs populistes à l'égard de l'opposition politique sont à la fois distinctives et portent à conséquence. Cet article propose un cadre théorique typologique qui met en lumière les vecteurs, caractéristiques et implications de la politisation populiste et qui est appliqué empiriquement au cas de la Pologne.

After being elected into office, populist actors seize the reins of their countries’ foreign policy while remaining engaged at the same time in domestic political competition, though now with a view to retain rather than conquer power. The way they engage in the latter is bound to have repercussions on how they conduct the former. Populism is, indeed, defined and characterized by a distinctive manner of “practicing adversarial politics” (Urbinati 2019, 38)—that is, of representing, battling, and mobilizing against political opponents. As documented by the scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis, the type of strategy chosen by governments in dealing with political opposition is in turn a key mediating factor in how and to what extent domestic politics’ affects foreign policy (Hagan 1995, 130; Hudson 2014, 153). The way governing populists relate to their political competitors and predecessors is therefore likely to be an important parameter in how populism influences foreign policy and thus requires analytical attention. How does populism feed the politicization of foreign policy? Of what kind, in what ways, and with what implications?

The foreign policies of populist actors have recently become the focus of a vibrant and fast-expanding scholarly literature (for an overview, see Destradi, Cadier, and Plagemann 2021; Chryssogelos et al. 2023; Wajner and Giurlando 2023). A first, seminal line of research has analyzed how and whether populism translates into specific preferences, dispositions, or orientations in foreign affairs (“populist foreign policy”) (Chryssogelos 2017; Verbeek and Zaslove 2017; Plagemann and Destradi 2019). Another, more recent line of investigation has examined how populism relates to some traditional determinants of foreign policy, such as leadership traits, operational codes, role conception, political ideology, national identity, or historical memory (Cadier and Szulecki 2020; Özdamar and Ceydilek 2020; Wehner and Thies 2021; Friedrichs 2022; Ostermann and Stahl 2022; Thiers and Wehner 2022). Yet, in this context, the effects of populist governments’ domestic political strategies—another classic determinant of foreign policy—have, by contrast, received little attention. This is somehow paradoxical considering that, by definition, populism is grounded in and emerges from domestic politics and that populist actors’ tendency to politicize foreign policy once in office is one of the features best documented across cases and regions—from India to the US and from Argentina to Hungary (Chryssogelos 2017, 16; Destradi and Plagemann 2019, 717; Wojczewski 2019, 296; Visnovitz and Jenne 2021, 684; Fouquet 2023, 10). The few FPA works looking into the domestic political strategies of populist actors provide valuable insights but rarely focus on adversarial politics as such. Daniel Wajner (2022) has shed light on how governing populists seek internal legitimacy by projecting the “people” transnationally and by identifying enemies abroad, while Stephan Fouquet (2023) has shown that the personalistic–plebiscitarian nature of populist mobilization leads populist actors to be guided by political opportunism and the desire to maximize popular support in foreign policy decision-making. I argue, however, that confronting political opponents is precisely at the core of these populists’ legitimation, mobilization, and popularity-maximizing strategies and that it needs, therefore, to be made central in theorizing their effects on foreign policy.¹ Similarly, while there is a near intuitive consensus in the literature that governing populists tend to politicize foreign policy, the patterns, pathways, and implications of this politicization have rarely been specified, let alone theorized or systematically examined empirically. The two notable exceptions in this regard—Angelos Chryssogelos (2019) documenting patterns of “nationalist re-politicization” and “societal re-politicizations” in Greece and Sandra Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş (2022) contrasting “anti-elitist politicization” and “people-centric” politicization in India and Turkey²—have not exhausted the topic as they focus on a specific, issue-oriented, and elite-focused form of politicization. It does not amount to the sole—or, this article argues, necessarily the main—type of populist politicization, and, as such, the latter invites additional theory development (Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş 2022, 489; Ostermann and Stahl 2022, 17).

I argue that populism translates into a greater proclivity to use foreign policy as the continuation of domestic politics by other means.³ More specifically, the logics of differentiation, mobilization, and salience inherent to populism feed populist actors’ tendency to define their foreign policy preferences and choices in opposition to those of their political predecessors (“counter-step foreign policy”); invest foreign policy as an instrument and as a ground to battle political opponents (“battleground foreign policy”); and over-prioritize domestic political considerations over external ones in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy (“subdued foreign policy”). As such, more than from an ideological or political commitment to move it to the realm of public choice (or “back to the people”), populist politicization proceeds from using foreign policy as a repertoire, terrain, and instrument in dealing with the political opposition.

The article begins by setting forth a framework theorizing three pathways and three corresponding patterns of populist politicization of foreign policy. In doing so, it builds on an action-oriented and opponents-focused conceptualization of politicization borrowed from public policy, on a syncretic approach to populism as a political practice that relies on insights from comparative politics, and on the FPA scholarship on opposition politics and its effects. Combined, these lenses allow reaching a two-step theoretical objective: theorizing (a) governing populists’ distinct ways of relating to political opposition and (b) how it spills over and shapes foreign policy. Subsequently, the data and method employed are presented, as well as some elements of context on the empirical case. Methodologically, the article relies on a building-block approach to typological theorizing (George and Bennett 2005, 233–44) and on a case-study analysis of Poland. Central Europe stands out as a region that is often regarded as a “laboratory” of populism in power (Enyedi 2020), yet it has rarely been studied under the prism of populist politicization of foreign policy. Finally, the typological patterns and pathways of populist politicization, and their implications, are illustrated empirically by examining the foreign policy practices of Poland’s populist right-wing government in power from 2015 to 2023. In conclusion, and so as to increase their generalization potential, these frameworks and findings are confronted with other national and regional cases of populist governments, with the help of the available scholarship.

The approach chosen allows the article to make a three-fold contribution. First, it advances the theorization of the relationship between populism and foreign policy by building on a syncretic approach to populism as a representational and mobilizational practice: while most studies rely on the ideational or discursive conceptualizations of populism, this article also builds on insights from the politico-strategic and, to a lesser extent, stylistic approaches. Second, the article contributes to the broader discussion on the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy, one that has been largely dominated by the scholarship on party politics (see, for instance, Raunio and Wagner 2020; Hofmann and Martill 2021), while by contrasts the strategies of government in dealing with political opposition have received less (recent) attention. Third, the analysis adds to the literature on the politicization of public policy and of foreign policy in particular. It documents patterns of action-oriented and government-initiated politicization, while most studies focus on issue-oriented and non-executive politicization.

Politicization, Populism, and Foreign Policy

Action-Oriented, Government-Initiated and Opponents-Focused Politicization

If a “Sartori Concept Stretching Competition” was to be organized in political science (see Sartori 1970), both politicization and populism would be strong contenders. Starting with the first, variegations in scholarly conceptualizations notably stem from differences in terms of level and object of analysis: individual political behavior, national political system, or international institutions such as the EU (Zürn 2019). The few studies available on the populist politicization of foreign policy (Chryssogelos 2019; Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş 2022) mainly rely on conceptual approaches developed for the third level, that of regional or international governance. There, politicization is authoritatively defined by Michael Zürn as “the making of collectively binding decisions a matter or an object of public discussions” (Zürn 2014, 50) and, elsewhere, as “moving something into the realm of public choice” (Zürn 2019, 978). Another seminal definition reasoning at the same level identifies the “expansion of actors and audience” in political decision-making as one of the empirical benchmarks of politicization, along with “salience” and “polarization of opinions” on a given issue or policy domain (de Wilde, Leupold, and Schmidtke 2016).

However, there is little evidence that populist governments seek to meaningfully broaden the public debate about, or involve a greater number of actors in, their foreign policy decisions (for instance, by organizing referenda, public consultations, or meaningful parliamentary debates), except maybe when it comes to migration. On the contrary, populists tend to centralize foreign policymaking, sideline civil society actors and foreign policy administrations, and castigate political opponents as traitors to disqualify their inputs. This invites turning to another conceptualization of politicization, namely, the one developed by the literature in public policy analysis for the national political level, which in fact appears better tailored to FPA’s middle-range theoretical focus. In this article, politicization is thus understood as “the use of public policies by elected representatives as a political resource in the competition to exercise political power” (Hassenteufel and Surel 2008, 81; see also Hassenteufel 2011, 157-186). It remains about “making previously unpolitical matters political” (Zürn 2019, 978), but the main entrepreneurs of politicization are governing actors rather than non-governing ones. In addition, in this understanding, politics (or the political) is conceived as an “activity, action or conflict” rather than as a “sphere, system or field” (Wiesner 2021b, 4). Such action-based (rather than spatially connoted) conception of politics leads to approaching politicization as an active use of contingency in “creating controversy, conflict, contentiousness, or contestation” (Wiesner 2021a, 268) and allows paying attention to the politicization not just of issues but also of actors (Déloye and Haegel 2019).

In paving the conceptual ground toward theorizing how populism feeds the politicization of foreign policy, it appears useful to briefly reflect on how it can be distinguished from non-populist politicization or even technocratic de-politicization. The opposition with the later dynamic, which amounts to removing an issue from the sphere of political debate (for instance, by invoking its technicality), is rather straightforward. It is interesting to note, though, that technocratic de-politicization and (governing) populist politicization originate at the same level and invites, therefore, the same empirical focus—namely, governments’ actions, documents, practices, and speech acts (Wiesner 2021a, 271). De-politicization has been identified as the “dominant model of statecraft” (Flinders and Wood 2014, 135) in the twenty-first century, not least as it allows reducing decisions costs associated with ideological controversies, and the baseline expectation for contemporary governments should therefore be to de-politicize rather than politicize foreign policy. Populist governments thus seem to stand out as an exception in that sense. To be sure, instances of non-populist politicization of foreign policy exist and have notably been thoroughly documented by the scholarship on diversionary war (for an overview, see Pickering and Kisangani 2005). But these insights precisely help distinguishing and delineating patterns of populist politicization in the sense that the latter, as will be demonstrated below, are not of a diversionary nature: Foreign policy is used not to deflect but to re-focus attention on domestic politics. More generally, the difference between non-populist and populist politicization is also situated in the various motivations (building policy coalitions or retaining political power) and strategies (accommodation, insulation, or mobilization) identified by the scholarship on oppositional politics and foreign policy (Hagan 1993). Comparatively, non-populists relate more to the first motivation and make greater use of the first two strategies than populists (see blow).

As made clear by this brief discussion, the difference between populists and non-populists in how or whether they politicize foreign policy has less to do with a strict demarcation (either/or) than with a greater tendency (more/less)—just like the domestic and the foreign have to be thought as two ends of a continuum (Rosenau 1997). This in turn invites conceptualizing populism in terms of degree or, in other words, as a practice (see Chryssogelos et al. 2023, 15–17).

As populism remains an essentially contested concept and as its relationship to politicization is undertheorized, I chose to combine various conceptual lenses rather than adopting one over the others. This allows casting a wider net in identifying possible patterns and pathways of populist politicization of foreign policy. More crucially, I contend that these various lenses are complementary to the extent that they all have something to say about how populist actors relate to political opposition and, more generally, act in domestic politics, as well as about the implications for their foreign policy. Three distinctive populist logics—pertaining to differentiation, mobilization, and salience—can be identified in particular.

Populist Logic of Differentiation and Counter-Step Foreign Policy

The discursive, stylistic, and ideational approaches to populism all suggest that populism is less about being something than about not being something. First, following Ernesto Laclau, populism can be understood as a logic of political articulation (or discursive practice) by which the identity of the “people” as underdog is constructed in opposition to the “elite” as power (Laclau 2005; Panizza and Stavrakakis 2021). The populist discourse constructs a chain of equivalence between unsatisfied social demands and through the “identification of social negativity” (Laclau 2005, 38), that is, by castigating the power seen as frustrating these demands in the first place. In that sense, populism very much amounts to an othering discourse: “there is no populism without discursive construction of an enemy—the ancien regime, the oligarchy, the Establishment or whatever” (Laclau 2005 39). The “power” in opposition to which populists in office discursively construct their political identity can refer to cosmopolitan elites or supranational institutions, but also to previous governments and political opponents, though this has received less attention in the literature.

Foreign policy provides both a repertoire and a terrain for these articulatory practices. On the one hand, populist actors tend to amalgamate the domestic establishment and political opponents with foreign Others as “collaborative ‘enemy of the people’” (Wojczewski 2019, 296). On the other hand, they project the structural logic of populist discourse onto the international sphere and represent their non-populist predecessors as having served the interests of the “elite” of, and kept the country down as an “underdog” on, the international scene (Cadier 2021). Both feed a politicization of foreign policy in the sense of articulating foreign policy contents with reference to domestic politics and notably lead populists to define their foreign policy in opposition to that of their predecessors.

The stylistic approach, which also understands populism as a practice but places the emphasis on aesthetic, embodied, and mediatized performances, suggests a similar logic of differentiation and pattern of definition in opposition. Populism’s stylistic transgression is established and affirmed in its antagonistic relationship to “proper” ways of doing politics: Populist actors rely on the sociocultural “low” and on “bad manners” to embody, and appeal to, the “people” against the technocratic “elites” (Moffitt 2017; Ostiguy 2017). This populist “plebeian grammar” and antagonistic logic tends to be reproduced at the level of government in the ways of exercising public authority and making decisions (Ostiguy and Moffitt 2021, 50–51). Populist governments can thus be expected to use their foreign policy performances to mark a stylistic rupture with the “elites” and to define their foreign policy style in opposition to that of their political predecessors and opponents.

Rather than as practice, the ideational approach conceptualizes populism as a “thin ideology,” that is, as a mental map or logic of political imagination (Stanley 2008; Hawkins et al. 2018). Though its explanatory focus is at the cognitive rather than discursive-performative level, its insights confirm populism’s inherent logic of differentiation and how it might feed the politicization of foreign policy. One of the common and defining coordinates of the populist mental map is anti-pluralism: Populists consider that they and they only are the true representatives of the “people” and, as a consequence, they tend to regard any political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate (Müller 2016). Added to its characteristic Manichean logic (Mudde 2004, 544), the populist mental map can thus be expected to translate into certain cognitive and psychological dispositions toward perceiving, interpreting, and defining foreign policy with reference to political opponents. Donald Trump’s apparent obsession with vilipending and exiting Barrack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievements—from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran to the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership—stands out as a paragon of such counter-step foreign policy.

I contend that the logic of differentiation inherent to populist political discourse, style, and imagination means that populist governments have a greater tendency to define their foreign policy identity, posture, and preferences in opposition to those of their political opponents and predecessors. This can be studied in two ways. First, through the content analysis of populist governments’ documents, speeches, and statements and the examination of how often they mention, and emphasize contrast with, their political opponents or predecessors in relation to foreign policy. Second, through within-case comparison and by analyzing existing contrasts with non-populist predecessors in terms of foreign policy outputs, performance, and implementation.

Populist Logic of Mobilization and Battleground Foreign Policy

Populism is not only a distinctive way to represent or perceive political opponents but also to deal with them. Following the politico-strategic approach, populism can be conceptualized as a distinct set of “methods and instruments [for] winning and exercising power” (Weyland 2001, 12). In this regard, populist actors exercise political authority based on “direct, unmediated, un-institutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (Weyland 2001, 14). This means, however, that they need to constantly mobilize their base and renew the loyalty of their supporters—hence populist actors’ tendency to treat “governing as a permanent campaign” (Müller 2016, 77). To intensify plebiscitarian and non-institutionalized support, populist actors notably “seek to direct the people toward a heroic mission,” such as “combating dangerous adversaries” at home and abroad (Weyland 2017, 58). They notably “declare war on” and “relentlessly attack” the political establishment (Weyland 2022, 17, 20). In other words, the castigation and de-legitimizing of political opponents is central to the populist logic of mobilization and self-legitimation. Foreign policy provides a privileged terrain for such tactics, for it offers a platform to project heroism and offers a cast of external villains or dangers that can be linked to domestic adversaries.

Though not concerned with populism as such, the work of Joe Hagan allows specifying further the various types of strategies available to governments in dealing with the political opposition, the conditions in which they are activated, and the repercussions they might have on foreign policy. He distinguishes between three such strategies: accommodation (bargaining, compromising, or avoiding controversies with the opposition), insulation (ignoring, overriding, or suppressing political opposition), and mobilization (confronting the opposition to mobilize support for, and assert the legitimacy of, the regime and its policies) (Hagan 1993, 6–8; 1995, 128–32).⁴ As transpires clearly from the preceding discussion, populism firmly corresponds to the latter type, whereby governments “emphasize foreign threats in a way that also discredit domestic opponents” (Hagan 1993, 7). By contrast, it appears antithetic to the first two strategies' tendencies to, respectively, “avoid domestically controversial actions” or “insulate foreign policy issues from domestic politics” (Hagan 1995, 128, 131). Interestingly, in his cross-national comparative analysis, Hagan finds that the mobilization strategy is more commonly activated in autocratic regimes than in democratic ones. The fact that, though operating in democratic settings, populist actors rely on such strategy speaks to their distinctiveness in how they politicize foreign policy. Furthermore, Hagan shows that the choice of strategies is generally contingent on the location, strength, and intensity of the political opposition. In situations where the opposition is “distrusted” and “unlikely to be accommodated”—as is structurally the case for populism as explained above—“foreign policy is correspondingly a viable means for unifying the public and discrediting domestic adversaries” (Hagan 1995, 130). In other words, the legitimization logic and mobilization imperatives inherent to populism feed the politicization of foreign policy in the sense of putting the latter at the service of confronting domestic adversaries (battleground foreign policy). More concretely, this can translate into two patterns. On the one hand, populist governments are likely to use foreign policy issues to attempt to make their political opponents look “bad” (i.e., dangerous, treacherous and incompetent). On the other hand, populist governments can be expected to hunt down and root out from existing foreign policy structures their political adversaries and their affiliates. Several populist governments have in fact engaged in a systematic and large-scale personnel overhaul of their foreign ministries to disempower career diplomats but also to replace those seen as close to the previous government with political loyalists (Lequesne 2021; Taş 2022a; Müller and Gazsi 2023).

In sum, I contend that the logic of mobilization inherent to populism means that populist actors have a greater tendency to use foreign policy as a terrain and instrument to battle their domestic political opponents. This can be studied and operationalized in two ways. First, through qualitative content analysis and the examination of how often foreign policy is invoked in relation to attacking, discrediting, or delegitimizing political opponents or predecessors. Second, by investigating the extent to which foreign policy decisions and implementation are aimed at weakening the latter.

Populism and the Over-Prioritization of Domestic Politics over Foreign Policy

Populist actors’ drive to define and use foreign policy in opposition to their opponents or predecessors is complemented by, and reinforces, a proclivity to treat this realm as subjugated to their domestic political objectives.

By essence, foreign policy boils down to “mediating the two-way flow between internal and external dynamics” (Hill 2015, 28). Stated differently, it entails arbitrating between domestic and external considerations in formulating and implementing foreign policy. In analyzing the parameters and determinants of this arbitration, some scholars have emphasized the role of structural factors. Gerry Alons (2007)argues, for instance, that, in middle power liberal democracies, external and internal polarity will determine whether domestic or international incentives take precedence in preference formation. According to her model, however, the high level of internal polarity prevailing in Poland (i.e., a state-dominated domestic structure where the government has the ability to pursue policies against the will of societal actors) (Gerry Alons 2007, 216) should have led the PiS government to prioritize external interests and objectives, contrary to what has been the case, as is detailed below. This suggests that populism might be a factor in this context. Other scholars, instead, place the emphasis on agent-level factors and shed light on how decision-makers’ cognitive dispositions, heuristics, and political strategies affect how they integrate domestic political considerations into their foreign policy calculations. Faced with “countless political issues that compete for their attention at any point in time,” governing actors will indeed “concentrate their cognitive capacity [and the aforementioned arbitration] primarily on issues which are amongst their uppermost concerns, that is, which they consider most salient” (Oppermann and Spencer 2013, 42). In particular, Alex Mintz (1993) suggests that decision-making in foreign policy is characterized by a sequential process, whereby leaders begin with eliminating the option that would heavily damage their domestic political prospects (non-compensatory phase) before selecting remaining options based on their utility in other substantive dimensions (e.g., strategic, diplomatic, economic, social, etc.) (compensatory phase). On his part, Fen Osler Hampson (1984) showed that decision-making elites will have a greater tendency to privilege domestic political considerations in defining and acting upon foreign policy crises when they feel vulnerable politically at home. In light of the analytical angle adopted in this article, I focus here on these agent-level factors in investigating how populism influences the arbitration between domestic and external incentives.

The inherent logic of populism—whether conceptualized as a political strategy, discourse, or thin ideology—leads populist governing actors to regard and treat domestic political considerations as more salient. First, the volatility and precariousness of plebiscitarian and non-institutionalized support make populists especially vulnerable, which leads them in turn to over-prioritize the domestic political realm and the structural imperative of permanent mobilization. As documented by Fouquet (2023, 6), populism “foreshortens time horizons on the quickly moving indicators of domestic politics” and incites to “use policies as instrument for scoring immediate political points”: Populists do not move beyond the political and non-compensatory phase of foreign policy decision-making. Similarly, as a logic of articulation, populism seeks above all to “hegemonize the [domestic] public sphere” (Panizza and Stavrakakis 2021, 22), that is, to impose an ideal, universal, and exclusive representation of the social. Relatedly, in their foreign policy discourse, populist actors tend to place the emphasis on societal security more than on other components (e.g., military, economic, environmental, etc.) (Löfflmann 2022). Finally, as a logic of political imagination, populism is above all concerned with defending the sovereignty of the “people” and its “heartland” (Taggart 2000), which mainly evokes the national or domestic realm. For populists, the priority is often more to preserve the state from external influences than to transform its external environment —hence their relative disinterest in foreign policy and international affairs.

I contend that populist actors have a greater tendency to over-prioritize domestic political incentives and considerations over external ones in the formulation and conduct of foreign policy. This can be studied and operationalized in two ways. First, through process-tracing and by examining the respective influence of domestic political and external factors in explaining a concrete foreign policy decision. Second, through qualitative content analysis and by tracing possible discrepancies between populist actors’ stated foreign policy objectives and actual foreign policy outputs.

Case, Data, and Methods

The paper builds on a case study analysis of Poland, where the populist radical right party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość—PiS) has been in power from 2015 to 2023. This case is relevant to the empirical and theoretical analysis of populist politicization in several ways. First, Poland can be regarded as a “most-likely” case when it comes to the influence of populism on foreign policy because the PiS has been in control of executive power (government and presidency) for eight continuous years. Second, the case of Poland allows disentangling the dynamics of politicization and personalization—which often find themselves associated in the literature—as PiS’ all-powerful leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has not been holding any executive functions during that time (except between October 2020 and June 2021). Third, the Polish case provides an opportunity to illustrate the specific, action-oriented understanding of politicization adopted in this article, as well as to unpack the sequential links between technocratic de-politicization and populist re-politicization.

In terms of empirical data, the article builds on a qualitative content analysis of official documents, speeches, and public statements from PiS leaders and policymakers, as well as on semi-structured interviews with Polish diplomats, governmental advisers, and experts (including some affiliated with PiS). In the selection of texts, the emphasis has been placed in particular on declarations to the domestic press, as this is where politicizing practices can be expected to be more apparent.

When it comes to methods, the paper adopts a “building-block” approach to typological theorizing and relies on within-case congruence. Typological theories “identify recurring conjunctions of mechanisms and provide hypotheses on the pathways through which they produce effects” (Bennett 2001, 1517). In this context, pathways are understood as “analogous to syndromes in pathology” (George and Bennett 2005, 235). Typological theorizing allows “making complex phenomenon manageable by dividing it into variants or types” (George and Bennett 238) and, as such, appears well suited for emerging research programs and theory development (Elman 2005, 298). Typological theorizing is, indeed, open to the possibility that the same outcome (in our case: politicization) can manifest itself in different variants (in our case: foreign policy patterns) and can arise through different pathways or values from the same variable (in our case: populism and its various inherent logics). As such, this approach allows working through the logical implications of the theory while integrating the multidimensionality of both patterns and pathways of politicization and studying them in conjunction. Congruence and a case-study analysis of Poland are used to illustrate and test the (typological) theoretical expectations set forth.

Poland’s Domestic Political Context and Politicization Dynamics

By definition, any analysis of politicization dynamics and adversarial politics ought to be a situated one. Three specific features of the Polish domestic political context have been conducive to the politicization of foreign policy by the PiS government and therefore deserve mention.

The first contextual characteristic takes roots in the post-communist transition and its interpretation and representation by PiS. As explained by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley (2020, 379), the transition “raised higher-order questions about the very legitimacy of political actors” and “their lack of resolution is one of the major causes of the fundamental cleavage in Polish party politics.” More than the “regime divide” (opposing former communists and dissidents), it is the “transition divide” (opposing various factions of the opposition who had ideological divergences and competing for influence) that has had a lasting structuring effect on Polish politics (Bill and Stanley 2020, 383). The PiS considers that the conservative, religious, and patriotic wing of the opposition has been unduly sidelined to the profit of the “liberals” and the “left.” Since the 1990s, Kaczyński has in fact repeatedly suggested that a secret deal had been struck between the communist apparatchiks and the liberal opposition in the context of the Roundtable discussion, whereby the former would have agreed to relinquish their political power in exchange for retaining their economic assets in the new regime.⁵ The narrative about the transition has become a cornerstone of the party’s political mythology and has tainted the way it relates to its political opponents. As noted by Alex Kazharski (2022, 118), the “real or imagined links of the “liberals” or the “left” to the ancien regime are used to stigmatize and delegitimize political rivals and their political agendas.” The party constantly denounces them as illegitimate and seems obsessed with, not so much “elites” in general, but more specifically the liberal elites that emerged from the transition—and in particular those that came to compose the Civic Platform Party (Platforma Obywatelska [PO]) and the governments it led between 2007 and 2015. This is confirmed empirically by a region-wide analysis: In comparison to other Polish, Czech, or Slovak populist parties, “attacks on the homogenous ‘elite’ played a smaller role than other core elements of populism” in PiS political rhetoric, which has “focused on a specific rival rather than employing a general anti-establishment campaign” (Engler, Pytlas, and Deegan-Krause 2019, 1323).

Relatedly, a second feature pertains to the mode of governance of the previous PO government (2007–2015). Bill and Stanley (2020, 381, 379) characterize it as grounded in the “meta-politics of moderation” and as “benignly neglectful monism”: a technocratic and conflict-avoiding managerialism that denied the legitimacy and credibility of alternatives to neoliberalism. PiS denounced this mode of governance as removing a number of political, economic, and cultural questions from the public sphere—and sought to change this state of affairs once in power. In this sense, in Poland as in other European countries, populist politicization amounts at least partly to a re-politicization (Chryssogelos 2019). More generally, as explained again by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley (2020, 382),

the de-politicization of the public sphere as a result of tranquil, efficient technocratic governance […]has moved contestation to the meta-political sphere, where political battles are still fought not only over who has the best ideas, but over who has the right to have ideas at all

Hence, added to the afore-described “transition divide,” the succession of technocratic de-politicization and populist re-politicization has fed the polarization of Polish politics, both in its traditional sense of “conflict” over the “fundamentals” of politics (Sartori 1970, 14) and of “political intolerance” (Schedler 2023).⁶

The third and final domestic political characteristic that ought to be taken into account is, as suggested by Hagan, the location and strength of the opposition. During the first mandate of the PiS government (2015–2019), Donald Tusk, the head of the previous government and most powerful PO politician, held the function of President of the European Council. Their political archenemy's leading and personifying one of the EU institutions certainly fed the PiS government’s politicization of Poland’s European and foreign policy. This was only reinforced by the fact that Donald Tusk himself did not refrain from using his position and influence in Brussels to occasionally weigh in on the Polish domestic political game. As we will see, the PiS government’s uncompromising attitude in EU politics has thus proceeded not just from “populist euroscepticism” (Csehi and Zgut 2021), but also from the desire to mark a rupture with, and carry forward the battle against, the PO government and its still-active leader.

This brief contextualization endeavor has led to identifying three opportunity structures for the politicization of foreign policy in Poland: polarization of domestic politics, preceding de-politicization, and the strength of the opposition. This paves the way for the empirical analysis of how the PiS populist government has seized upon them, but these opportunity structures can also be regarded as mediating conditions when applying the proposed theoretical framework to other national contexts.

The Politicization of Poland’s Foreign Policy Under PiS

In analyzing the politicization of foreign policy in Poland, I focus on the PiS government’s actions and declarations with regard to a number of key policy areas: the EU, Germany, Russia, and the United States. The objective is to discern the various patterns of politicization and foreign policy types theorized above (counter-step, battleground, and subdued) and see how they are linked to the corresponding pathways and populist logics (differentiation, legitimization, and prioritization).

PiS Counter-Step Foreign Policy on the EU and Germany

The policy areas where change has been most salient under the PiS government—namely, the attitude toward European integration, the strategy inside the EU, and the relationship with Germany (Cadier 2021)—are precisely those where the previous PO government (2007–2015) had built its distinctive foreign policy brand. As it was regarding the EU’s structural funds and internal market as a crucial vector for its domestic agenda of economic modernization, the PO government had made of installing Poland in the EU core its cardinal foreign policy objective (see, for instance, Sikorski 2012). To this end, it cultivated a close bilateral partnership with Germany—more than any previous Polish government—and amended the representation of that country in Polish official discourse, from over-powerful historical neighbor to indispensable leader of Europe. Though to a lesser extent, it also sought to upgrade its ties with France by signing a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Paris and a contract to buy fifty military helicopters from Airbus (while Warsaw had generally been opting for American manufacturers when it comes to armaments). Finally, the PO government invested in the instruments of EU external action (such as European Defense or the European Neighborhood Policy) and depicted, more generally, Poland’s anchoring and activism in the bloc as a way to further its national security (Cianciara 2022).

When it suceeded the PO in power, the PiS government constantly, methodically, and explicitly sought to reverse these policy directions and initiatives. Not only was there an almost symmetric contrast in the European and German policies of the two governments, but PiS foreign policy actors also explicitly emphasized and claimed this contrast when articulating their foreign policy preferences and justifying their foreign policy choices.

Rather than as a power-maximizing opportunity for Poland, the PiS foreign policy executive tended to represent the EU as a liability or threat. Prime Minister Szydło castigated the “folly of Brussels elite”; foreign minister Waszczykowski called on the necessity to “radically reduce the level of trust” and “introduce a negative policy” toward the EU; and President Duda likened EU membership to Poland’s nineteenth-century occupation by foreign powers.⁷ The negative characterizations of the EU in yearly programmatic speeches by PiS foreign ministers, more than under any other Polish government since 1989 (Zuba 2021), also provide evidence in that sense.

When it comes to its strategy inside the EU, rather than installing Poland in the first circle of EU powers, the PiS government sought to “withdraw from the EU mainstream” (Zwolski 2017, 175) and build an alternative core around initiatives such as the Bucharest Nine or the Three Seas Initiative. A PiS foreign policy adviser justified this position by opposing it to that of the previous government: The latter’s “desire to fit with the EU mainstream” and conviction that “Poland should speak with one voice with other member states” were, in his view, wrongly conveying the image of a country “not able to act by itself.”⁸ More concretely, the PiS government overturned several of the aforementioned decisions taken by the previous executive: It backtracked on European defense projects such as Eurocorps and pulled the plug on the helicopter deal with Airbus.

Most crucially, the PiS government downgraded Germany as a foreign policy partner. To the contrary, it relentlessly denounced Berlin’s political, economic, and cultural influence in the EU and re-emphasized Germany as a historical other. Rather than using it as a vector to increase Poland's influence in Europe, the PiS government largely defined its European policy in opposition to Germany and sought to build a counterweight to its power (Balcer et al. 2017, 3–4). To the PO foreign minister famously quipping in 2011 that he was now “fearing German inaction more than Germans in action” (Sikorski 2011), the PiS foreign minister opposed a quasi-symmetric denunciation of German “imperialism” in Europe and an insistence that “the EU needs not German leadership, but German self-restraint.”⁹ More generally, PiS affiliates have often articulated their government’s policies toward Germany as a necessary corrective of those pursued by the previous executive (see, for instance, Grajewski 2015). The party largely built its political brand around the rejection of the quotas decided at the European level during the 2015 refugee crisis, which it depicted as imposed on Poland by Germany with the help of the PO government. Similarly, the measures aimed at “re-polonizing” the national media landscape targeted German-owned companies above all and were presented as made necessary by the fact that the Tusk government had acted as a “Fifth column” of German interests in these and other sectors.¹⁰ Finally, though not directly pertaining to foreign policy as such, the PiS government’s “counter-step” attitude was also particularly salient when it comes to its historical policy and its stated objective of overturning the “pedagogy of shame” purportedly promoted by the PO executive (Cadier and Szulecki 2020).¹¹ For instance, after his government took over and ostentatiously reformatted the Gdansk World War II Museum created by the PO executive, the PiS Deputy Minister of Culture argued that “changes were necessary because the original exhibition purportedly adopted a German point of view” (cited in Siddi and Gaweda 2019, 10). The PiS leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, was even blunter: He claimed that the museum was “Tusk’s gift to Angela Merkel” (cited in Jaskułowski and Majewski 2023).

In sum, on the EU and on Germany, the PiS government clearly and explicitly sought to take the counter-step to its predecessor: It often articulated its foreign policy preferences and choices in opposition to those of the PO government, and it presented its own policies as a corrective. In other words, in line with the populist logic of differentiation, it used its foreign policy communication and actions to mark a contrast with its political adversaries. This contrast is salient not just in terms of rhetoric but also in actual policy decisions, and, in this sense, the theoretical approach proposed complements the available scholarship on the PiS government’s foreign policy by accounting for why policy change was most salient in relation to the EU and Germany in particular.

Foreign Policy as a Ground to Battle PiS Political Opponents: Denigration by Foreign Association and Political Purging at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The PiS government regularly used foreign policy as a terrain and instrument to attack, discredit, and weaken its political opponents. In particular, it made a point of representing these opponents as dangerous, treacherous, and self-serving, and of rooting out their affiliates from foreign policy structures.

In light of its role in Poland’s security imaginary, Russia stands out as an all-designated topic for denigration by foreign association. While in the opposition, PiS had constantly accused the PO government of being guilty of negligence, if not complicity, in the crash of the Polish presidential plane in Smolensk in 2010,¹² which the party and Jarosław Kaczyński in particular publicly attribute to Russia. Once in power, even though a previous independent investigation had concluded to an accident, the PiS government re-opened the case and tasked the controversial and conspiracy theory-prone former Minister of Defense, Antoni Macierewicz, to conduct a new assessment on the topic (Koschalka 2020). More generally, PiS policymakers and advisers have often depicted the PO government as being “soft” on Russia and as exposing, thereby, Poland to the Russian threat. A PiS adviser described Donald Tusk’s exit from national politics to take the helm of the European Council in 2014—the year of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Eastern Ukraine—as a “desertion in times of threat.”¹³ The PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński more explicitly associated Tusk with Moscow by claiming that his “point of view often coincides with Russian propaganda” and that he has often been on the “wrong side” when it comes to confronting Russia.¹⁴ The efforts at suggesting a collusion between the PO government and Russia re-doubled in the perspective of the legislative elections of Fall 2023. The public television TVP, which the PiS turned into a mouthpiece for its political communication, aired in the summer of that year a multi-episode documentary (“Reset”) serving that narrative. The PiS government pushed, and the PiS-controlled lower chamber adopted, a bill on countering Russian influence in Poland, which would have allowed banning from public office individuals suspected of being under such influence (Tilles 2023). This legislative act was soon renamed “Lex Tusk” by national and international commentators, as it was clear that it was targeting first and foremost the PO leader, and in fact the EU launched a legal probe into it (Foy 2023). Finally, less than a month before the election, the PiS Minister of Defense Mariusz Błaszczak released and used classified documents dating from 2011 to attack the (then in office) PO government and accuse it of being ready to “give up half of Poland” in the event of an invasion by Russia.¹⁵ Several Polish military experts criticized this politically motivated move for its divulgation of secret information on the country’s defense plans, posture, and doctrine.

These attempts at delegitimization by foreign association especially stand out when it comes to Russia, because in terms of policy substance, there was little difference between the policies of the PO and PiS governments and because Poland is, more generally, the European country where the political class is probably most cohesive in its hostility toward Russia. Beyond Russia, the PiS leadership has accused its political opponents of serving the interests of other foreign groups or external powers, be they global cosmopolitan elites or other historical foes such as Germany. This was put most bluntly by Jarosław Kaczyński when, in Parliament, he addressed PO representatives in these terms:

You are the external party today, you are compromising Poland, you are against Poland. You are and have always been.¹⁶

The Rule of Law infringement procedure launched by the EU Commission was also articulated in these terms by the PiS leadership: Kaczyński suggested that the EU Commission and the domestic opposition were working together in “attacking” Poland,¹⁷ while President Duda warned that “liberal-left elites” were trying to remove Poland’s government by using people trained by the communist secret services and support from Western Europe (Tilles 2020).

Finally, PiS policymakers and advisors voiced accusations of covetousness against the previous government in relation to EU institutions and foreign actors. They suggested, for instance, that the PO government’s pro-European policy was largely motivated by the desire to secure prominent positions in Brussels for two of its leading figures, Tusk and Sikorski (Grajewski 2015, 74). More generally, Kaczyński suggested that the opposition was “was working under foreign orders” and “cynically counting on fortunes that they will earn by enslaving Poland.”¹⁸

The transposition of populist oppositional politics to foreign policy did not only manifest itself in rhetorical attacks, but also translated into endeavors to dislodge from, or sideline in, foreign policy structures the civil servants that were deemed close to the previous government. On the one hand, several such diplomats were relegated to minor or dead-end positions within the Ministry, with some even having to leave the career.¹⁹ In addition, the PiS government published a list of about sixty-six diplomats accused of having collaborated with the secret police during the communist regime, leading to the dismissal of fifty-one of them.²⁰ On the other hand, the PiS government introduced a structural reform of the diplomatic service that facilitated the appointment of political loyalists in the foreign ministry.

In sum, the PiS government largely moved the battle against its political opponents to the realms of foreign policy topics and institutions. The populist logic of legitimization and mobilization led it to seek to build support for its policies and assert its own legitimacy by attacking its political predecessors and adversaries with reference to foreign policy, notably by associating them with foreign powers. This led, in turn, to anchoring certain representations of foreign policy themes and actors on the basis of their domestic political utility rather than substantive features.

Poland’s Foreign Policy and PiS Over-Prioritization of Domestic Political Goals

In running and implementing Poland’s foreign policy, the PiS government clearly prioritized internal considerations over external ones.

First, it is noteworthy that the topics on which the PiS government adopted an “uncompromising” or even “confrontational” posture at the EU level (Balcer et al. 2017, 31) mainly related to its domestic political, rather than foreign policy, agenda. For instance, it vetoed several EU external action texts on the ground that it took issue with the definition of “gender equality,” which is linked to its domestic conservative agenda.²¹ By contrast, in spite of its strong Atlanticist orientation and active courting by the Trump administration, the PiS government did not break ranks with other EU member states on issues such as trade or Iran.

Second and most crucially, in several instances, the PiS government adopted positions that served its domestic political strategy while being detrimental to the country’s foreign policy interests—or even to the PiS government’s own foreign policy preferences. In particular, the PiS government did not hesitate to jeopardize Poland’s position and image in the EU for the sake of battling its political opponents. After the PiS government failed to rally any member state (not even Orban’s Hungary) in preventing the re-election of Donald Tusk at the helm of the European Council, the then PiS foreign minister denounced the election process as “rigged.”²² This amounted to casting a shadow on the legitimacy of the EU’s highest intergovernmental setting, where Poland is itself a deciding member.

The precedence given to expected domestic political gains over foreign policy costs was salient even on topics that ranked high among the PiS government’s foreign policy priorities. For instance, some of the PiS governments’ domestic initiatives led to strained relations with their highest valued foreign policy partner, the United States. This is true of the closure of the liberal channel TVN24 (owned by the American group Discovery) or of the so-called “Holocaust Law,” which prompted Washington to impose a temporary ban on presidential-level visits (see Cadier and Szulecki 2020). Finally and interestingly, an analyst who had served as foreign policy advisor to both the PiS and PO governments noted that, on Germany, the former was harsh in public rhetoric but rather accommodating in private negotiations, while the opposite was true for the latter.²³ This suggests that the PiS government used foreign policy first and foremost for its signaling and mobilizing potential in domestic politics, and then tried to compensate for this through backchannel diplomatic exchanges.

In sum, the populist logic of salience provides a theoretical explanation to Polish analysts and practitioners’ concurring view that the PiS government treated foreign policy as “secondary” or “subordinated” to its domestic political objectives (Balcer 2016; Kuźniar 2016) and that Kaczyński in particular was “not interested in foreign policy” but saw it instead mainly as a domestic instrument.²⁴

Conclusion

Once in power, populist actors tend to approach the two-level game of international politics in a distinctive manner. They are more likely to prioritize—and go “all-in”—at the domestic table, even at the risk of weakening their hand at the international table. In addition, they tend to carry forward the domestic game at the international table, investing the latter to attack their domestic political opponents or mark a difference with their predecessors. In other words, populist actors tend to politicize foreign policy in the sense of using it as the continuation of domestic politics by other means.

This article has set forth a theoretical framework accounting for this tendency and has tested and illustrated it empirically through a case-study analysis of Poland. More specifically, relying on typological theorizing, it has conceptualized several pathways and patterns of this politicization, with the former referring to certain logics inherent to populist practice and the latter to certain ways of conducting foreign policy. The logic of differentiation leads populist actors to define and articulate their foreign policy in opposition to that of their political predecessors (counter-step foreign policy). The logic of mobilization entices populist actors to use foreign policy as a terrain and instrument for attacking and denigrating their domestic political opponents (battleground foreign policy). Finally, the logic of salience makes populist governments or leaders over-prioritize domestic considerations in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy (subdued foreign policy).

While this article has focused on the case of Poland, insights from the available scholarship suggest that these patterns of foreign policy politicization have been present in several other countries and regions where populists have been in power. For instance, the logic of differentiation and counter-step foreign policy are salient in how Trump made of re-negotiating the “bad deals” consented by its predecessors and of ending the “long nightmare of America’s economic surrender” one of its key foreign objective (Löfflmann 2022, 549), as well as in how Turkey’s AKP articulated its activism toward the Middle East as a corrective of Kemalists’ alleged negligence of the region (Taş 2022b, 2879). These two cases also very much exhibit patterns of battleground foreign policy fed by the logic of mobilization: Trump withheld the US aid to Ukraine to arm twist its government into opening an investigation on the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son (Löfflmann 2019, 122), while Recep Tayyip Erdogan has equated the political opposition to supporters of Turkish terrorism and Western imperialism (Destradi, Plagemann, and Taş 2022, 484). In Hungary, personal re-shuffles at the MFA were largely motivated by FIDESZ’s distrust of the agents having served under the previous leadership and desire to fill positions with political loyalists (Visnovitz and Jenne 2021, 691; Müller and Gazsi 2023), while in Italy, the fact that the populists’ Lega and M5S have been targeting Mateo Renzi much more than Mario Draghi in their rhetorical attack suggests they are more set on denigrating political opponents than representatives of technocratic elites. Even more so, the logic of salience and populist actors’ over-prioritization of domestic political considerations appear to be shared across the board. Belém Lopes, Carvalho, and Santos (2022, 12) show that Brazil’s Jahir Bolsonaro approached foreign policy “always [as] a matter of catering to his constituencies” and left “topics that were not fungible in terms of votes in the hands of career diplomats.” Such tendencies are also reflected in Italy’s M5S and Czechia’s Andrej Babis marked disinterest in foreign affairs, even after they made it to government (Coticchia 2021; Weiss 2021). It should be noted, however, that in these latter cases, the first two patterns of politicization appear by contrast less salient: Babis did not, for instance, seek to root out political adversaries from foreign policy structures and rarely used foreign policy themes to attack the opposition. Similarly, in their analysis of Narendra Modi’s speech, Destradi et al. (2022) find that the Indian leader has rarely politicized foreign policy in the sense of contesting the policies of previous governments and political opponents. In that sense, this article’s theoretical framework would gain from being refined further by being applied to other country cases. Future research could notably test whether the mediating conditions identified in Poland as conducive to populist politicization—namely, polarization in domestic politics, preceding de-politicization, and the strength of the opposition—help explain variations across national contexts.

This brief comparative perspective also allows qualifying the argument set forth in this article. It is not that populists always, or that only populists, politicize foreign policy in the sense of using it as the continuation of domestic politics by other means, but that they have a greater tendency to do so due to populism’s inherent logics in relating to domestic politics and opposition. From one populist leader or government to another, one or another patterns of politicization might be more or less pronounced, because the different logics feeding them might be more or less acute. Understanding populism as a practice permits to conceive it is a matter of degree: Populism is not something that populists are, but something that they do, and that they can do more or less depending on the occasion, context, or issue area. Variations can be exhibited not only within but also across logics: They are not automatically linked, and, as we saw, populist executives might mobilize one more than the other.

Populist governments’ strategies in dealing with their political competitors have been a blind spot in the thriving scholarship on the relationship between populism and foreign policy. The focus on what populist actors say, do, or believe about the “people” and the “elite” has obfuscated the way they relate, more prosaically, to their political opponents and predecessors. Yet, not only does it appear hardly satisfactory to have our analytical categories defined by the actors we study, but in addition, as this article has shown, the influence of populist oppositional politics on foreign policy tends to be at the same time distinctive and consequential. In that sense, this analytical angle has a lot to contribute to the study of populism in international relations as well as to the FPA literature on domestic politics more generally.

Footnotes

Author Biography

David Cadier is an Assistant of Professor of International Relations at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and an Associate Researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for International Studies (CERI) in Paris. His research interests lie with the foreign policies of the EU and its member states, EU-Russia relations, Central Europe, and populism in international politics.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 9th EISA European Workshop in International Studies organized in Thessaloniki in July 2022 and at the workshop “How to study the international effects of populism” organized at the University of Freiburg in July 2023. The author is grateful for the precious feedback received on these occasions, as well as for those of the two anonymous reviewers.

References