Populists in the shadow of great power competition: Duterte, Sukarno, and Sihanouk in comparative perspective
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231173866 |
| Author | Deepak Nair |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231173866
European Journal of
International Relations
2023, Vol. 29(3) 723 –750
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231173866
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Populists in the shadow of
great power competition:
Duterte, Sukarno, and
Sihanouk in comparative
perspective
Deepak Nair
Australian National University, Australia
Abstract
This article takes the study of populism beyond political parties and individual leaders
and foregrounds coalitions in the making and unmaking of populist projects. It compares
Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines with figures of an older vintage in
postcolonial Southeast Asia—the Cold War neutralists President Sukarno of Indonesia
and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, neither of whom fit neatly within dominant
frameworks of populism in International Relations (IR). Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s
conceptualization of populism as a “discursive and stylistic repertoire,” I argue that
the projects of Duterte, Sukarno, and Sihanouk embody populism in general and are
suggestive of a distinct type vis-à-vis right- or left-wing party and individual populists.
Specifically, these are populists who presided over ideologically diverse coalitions in
contexts of intrusive Great Power competition. This comparison advances the study of
populism in IR in three ways. First, rather than populist political parties and leaders, this
article focuses on populists crafting coalitions in contexts of weak party milieus. Second,
it draws on a capacious conceptualization of populism (as repertoire) which pushes
beyond exclusively “ideological,” “strategic,” and “discursive” conceptions and better
accounts for the empirical diversity of this phenomenon outside Euro-American shores.
Third, this article highlights a novel pathway by which international politics shapes the
fates of populism. The three cases show how a strident discourse of anti-colonialism
glued populists’ diverse coalitions at home, while populists’ external alignment choices
and efforts to steer “independent” foreign policies exacerbated coalitional fault lines,
straining, if not unraveling, their projects.
Corresponding author:
Deepak Nair, Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College
of Asia & the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Email: Deepak.Nair@anu.edu.au
1173866EJT0010.1177/13540661231173866European Journal of International RelationsNair
research-article2023
Article
724 European Journal of International Relations 29(3)
Keywords
Populism, Southeast Asia, coalitions, non-alignment, great power competition, foreign
policy, Cold War
Introduction
Rodrigo Duterte’s electoral victory to the Philippines’ Presidency in 2016 added
Southeast Asia to a contemporary populist conjuncture in world politics. While populism
as a political phenomenon is by no means new to Southeast Asia (Aspinall, 2015; Kenny,
2019; Mizuno and Pasuk, 2009; Pepinsky, 2017, 2020), Duterte’s triumph vividly illus-
trated patterns observed in different world regions where anti-establishment political
figures have won elections by directly energizing a base of supporters with a discourse
of crisis and a disruptive political style. Little surprise, then, that journalistic and schol-
arly appraisals mention Duterte in the same breath as other recent populists: from Recep
Erdoğan in Turkey and Narendra Modi in India, to Donald Trump in the United States,
Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
While Duterte rightly belongs to this company of 21st-century populists, these com-
parisons gloss over some instructive and intriguing differences. For one, Duterte’s pop-
ulism was not mediated by party institutions in the same way as Erdoğan, Modi, and
Orban. There is a reason why Duterte’s Partido Demokratiko Pilipino–Lakas ng Bayan
(PDP-Laban) enjoyed none of the name recognition or prominence of Erdoğan’s Justice
and Development Party, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and Orban’s Fidesz. Duterte’s
populist movement took root in a context where political parties lack ideological and
programmatic platforms and turncoatism is rife (Kenny, 2019; Thompson, 2016).
Second, and in lieu of a party, Duterte’s populism was based on a coalition of actors and
institutions which, in its initial period, was ideologically diverse, combining elements of
the left with their historical antagonists, the police and the army. This diverse coalition
unraveled with the ejection of the left and Duterte’s deepening reliance on the military—
making him less Erdoğan who secured civilian supremacy over a Kemalist military
(Castaldo, 2018) and more Bolsonaro who bunglingly leaned on the military to protect
his regime (Hunter and Vega, 2021). Nonetheless, the brief bridging of ideological foes
marked off Duterte from monochrome left- and right-wing party populisms in other parts
of the world. Third, and perhaps most strikingly, Duterte stood somewhat lonely as a
populist re-orienting his country’s domestic and foreign policy in the context of intrusive
Great Power competition. Again, populists elsewhere too have called into question old
alliances and courted old foes as new friends—consider the outreach to Russia and China
by Eurosceptic and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)-sceptic European popu-
list leaders and parties (Varga and Buzogany, 2020). What is different in the Philippines’
case, however, are the incidences of armed assault on the Philippines’ sovereignty in the
South China Sea by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the prospect these skir-
mishes could spark off proxy militarized superpower confrontation.
Given these differences, I argue that a more revealing set of comparators for the
Duterte presidency are supplied from within the arc of Southeast Asia’s postcolonial
international history.1 I suggest that Duterte’s populism shared a great deal in common
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