State transformation and populism: From the internationalized to the neo-sovereign state?
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395718803830 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Author | Angelos Chryssogelos |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395718803830
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(1) 22 –37
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395718803830
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State transformation
and populism: From the
internationalized to the
neo-sovereign state?
Angelos Chryssogelos
Harvard University, USA
Abstract
This article conceptualizes populism as a discourse of international relations that arises as response
to state transformation, a phenomenon that encompasses changes in both state-society relations and
the norms defining the appropriate practice of statehood. The current surge of populism is a response
to one such transformation: the internationalization of state elites and their insulation from popular
scrutiny. Populism does not simply address material and cultural dislocations that internationalization
entails. Crucially, its distinct discursive logic allows these partial social demands to adopt the moral
claim to representation of the ‘real people’ and so counter the universality of the international norms
that underpin state transformation. Beyond the current conjuncture of state internationalization, this
conceptualization accommodates iterations of populism in various regional and historical contexts of
state transformation, making it a promising basis for the further comparative study of populism.
Keywords
discourse, globalization, nationalism, populism, state transformation
Received: 30th October 2017; Revised version received: 30th April 2018; Accepted: 24th July 2018
Introduction
Scholars have long considered populism a pervasive condition of democracy (Canovan,
1999; Mudde, 2004), but its current surge across the world has generated a discussion
about how populism relates to broader trends of international politics as well. In this vein,
and most prominently, the current rise of populism has been linked with globalization. To
some scholars, globalization explains populism as a cultural resistance (Kriesi et al.,
2008) while to others it is responsible for socioeconomic dislocations that in turn feed
populism (Rodrik, 2017).
Corresponding author:
Angelos Chryssogelos, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Populism/Challenges to Democracy,
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
02138, USA.
Email: achryssogelos@wcfia.harvard.edu
803830POL0010.1177/0263395718803830PoliticsChryssogelos
research-article2018
Article
Chryssogelos 23
Valuable as these analyses are, they still leave questions open. Systemic explanations
of populism as reaction to globalization can ignore important variations and contingen-
cies such as the timing of its emergence. These explanations can also suffer from concep-
tual slippage, given that the exact link between globalization and populism is usually
specified according to one’s definition of globalization and whether its economic or cul-
tural dimensions are prioritized. Even so, it is also not clear why globalization should give
rise specifically to populism or populism-infused phenomena, and not socialism or
nationalism in their pure forms. What makes populism such a pervasive feature of inter-
national relations today? And more generally, why and how does change on the interna-
tional level foster populism in national politics?
All this points to an overarching conceptual question that is the main focus of this
article, namely how to think about populism as a phenomenon and a concept of interna-
tional relations. I argue that this is most fruitfully done if we understand populism not as
a programmatic response to economic or cultural dislocation brought about by interna-
tional change (because this can be done by other pre-existing ideologies as well), but as a
distinct way of articulating societal frustrations as the demand of the ‘people’ for recogni-
tion and representation. Looked at this way, the question of the link between populism
and systemic conditions like globalization is less about policy content and more about
how international change engenders tensions in the relationship between official power
and political community.
To understand this connection between international change and the power-people nexus,
I turn to the concept of state transformation. Populism today is a response to one such major
transformation of statehood: the emergence after the Cold War of the internationalized state
whereby, in response to their ever-shrinking capacity to regulate increasingly complex
domestic societies, state elites presented the transnational nature of policy challenges under
globalization as legitimation for their migration to transgovernmental policy networks and
supranational institutions. This has changed the reference point of state legitimacy from state
elites’ vertical relationship with the political community to their horizontal cosmopolitan
relationship with equivalent elites from other states. In the process, ‘states have uncoupled
from societies’ (Bickerton et al., 2015: 312), and governing has become detached and insu-
lated from national representative processes.
State transformation entails some combination of redistribution of economic costs, a
challenge to established patterns of power-society relations, and normative moderniza-
tion that often fosters cultural alienation. With its embrace of international economic
openness, the insulation of its elites in opaque transnational governance networks, and the
prioritization of universal ideas of efficiency and rules-based governance, state interna-
tionalization translates globalization domestically as a multifaceted challenge to the rep-
resentation of political communities as source of political legitimacy. In reaction to this,
populism demands a return to re-territorialized political rule where the sovereignty of
government and people become coterminous again. Populism’s potency as a political
discourse, and its distinctiveness as a concept, is that it addresses all three externalities of
internationalization: economic-material, political-representational, and normative.
The article argues that, as a discourse of international relations, populism is a distinct
reaction to state internationalization, one that is qualitatively different from ideologies
like nationalism or socialism in their pure forms. Especially concerning nationalism, the
analysis will show that populism differs from its classical vision of the overlap between
political power, state, and nation. For populism, the territorially bounded realignment
between political power and people can only be realized against a state apparatus absorbed
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