![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The politics of populism is the politics of belonging. It reflects a deep challenge to the liberal democratic state, which attempts to maintain social boundaries (as an imperative of state capacity) but also allow immigration. Boundaries—established through citizenship and norms of belonging—must be both coherent and malleable. Changes to boundaries become sites of contestation for exclusionary populists in the putative interest of “legitimate” citizens. Populism is an inevitable response to liberal democratic adjustment; any liberal democracy that redefines citizenship opens itself to populist challenge.
Notes
1 That is, when it stems from a political will not enforced by courts (which is, itself, a reflection of the norm of upholding rule of law).
2 Rawls (Citation2005) argues that those that refuse the principles of liberalism have exceeded the bounds of “reasonable pluralism,” though this does not change the fact that the state lacks little in the way of instruments to counter them.
3 “In France,” according to Le Pen, “we drink wine whenever we want. In France we do not force women to wear the veil because they are impure. . . . In France, we get to decide who deserves to become French.” Agnew and Cassany Citation2017.
4 “Nederland Weer Van Ons!” See https://www.pvv.nl/nederland-weer-van-ons.html (accessed 24 May 2018)
5 Alba Citation2005 permits these boundaries to be “bright” or “blurred.”
6 Billig Citation1995; Bonikowski Citation2016.
7 See, for example, Agnew Citation1994.
8 Walzer Citation1983 notes that political membership is the first “good” distributed to individuals in a society; other goods, like income or benefits, depend on that prior status of eligibility. Similarly, Benhabib Citation2002 criticizes Rawls for failing to recognize immigration in considering only birth-based roots of civic membership.
9 The substantial literatures in political theory (e.g., theories of multicultural citizenship) and comparative politics (e.g., studies of consociationalism) preserve the importance of coherence but allow for ethnic heterogeneity.
10 Thus, where these “fees” are high (e.g., language tests, long residency durations), acquisition of citizenship is a costly signal to the state and the public that the membership criteria have been met.
11 Miller Citation1999 acknowledges that this “coherence” can take many forms: associations can be “solidaristic,” “instrumental,” or based on “citizenship.”
12 Even in the quintessential ethnocultural German case, Brubaker (Citation1992) shows that instrumental choices were made by Romantic elites who deliberately selected German ethnoculturalism as the founding script for the new state in the late nineteenth century.
13 This boundary redefinition has been part of a broader phenomenon, described by British Prime Minister David Cameron as “muscular liberalism,” whereby a genuinely liberal country “believes in certain values and actively promotes them” (Cameron Citation2011).
14 In addition to other institutional features, such as the lack of an independent judiciary.
15 Some political theorists have interpreted these not as competing but complementary interests, e.g., liberal nationalists (Tamir Citation1995) and constitutional patriots (Müller Citation2007).
16 Hopkins Citation2019.
17 Clinton Citation2018.