Populist challenges to EU foreign policy in the Southern Neighbourhood: an informal and illiberal Europeanisation?

ABSTRACT

Populist parties in government, such as Lega and Fidesz, have a declared interest in European Union (EU) foreign policy in the Southern Neighbourhood. Their main focus is on migration control, border management and security issues for these countries. It is thus relevant to investigate to what extent populism is shaping the development of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as it evolves from a normative-based policy towards a much more ‘interest-based’ policy. This article will examine the implications of Italian and Hungarian populist pressure on the ENP in third country contexts, using Tunisia and Egypt as in-depth case studies. The article also aims to contribute conceptually to current debates on the de-Europeanisation -or not- of EU foreign policy. The two cases illustrate how, under the influence of member states with populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in government, informal and illiberal Europeanisation is not a contradiction in terms but a real possibility.

KEYWORDS:

• EU foreign policy
• European Neighbourhood Policy
• Europeanisation
• Hungary
• Italy
• populism

Acknowledgements

I would like to warmly thank my PhD supervisor, Dr. Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués, my IBEI colleagues Diego Badell and Rocío Baeza Fernández and the NORTIA network, especially Dr. Heidi Maurer, for their precious support. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their highly valuable comments as well as to the colleagues who participated in the NORTIA panel on (de-)Europeanisation in 2019 EISA conference in Denver. This work was supported by VISIONS research project under Grant CSO2017-82622-P; and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Grant FPU17/00660. This article is within the framework of the PhD program Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations at UAB.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Adrià Rivera Escartin is a predoctoral fellow FPU at Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI).

Notes

1 Own translation from Spanish.

2 Populism as a category can be applied to a broad variety of parties, from radical left-wing parties with a human rights-based approach to foreign policy such as Podemos, to PRRPs like Lega and Fidesz (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). This article will focus in the latter since their presence in governments of member states can challenge an EU foreign policy that wants to retain a normative agenda in the Southern Neighbourhood under the concept of principled pragmatism, which implies the possibility of a liberal realpolitik (EEAS, 2016).

3 Poland could have been included as a case study given the ideological orientation of the ruling party. However, when it comes to the Mediterranean, the Polish Government had a much lower political profile compared to Salvini’s Italy and Orbán’s Hungary. In the case of Austria, the influence of the Freedom Party as a junior partner between December 2017 and May 2019 was less prominent than that of the Lega in Conte I Cabinet between June 2018 to September 2019.

4 In different contexts other authors have also noted that junior coalition members can exert a major influence in foreign policy and radicalize the position of the whole government (Beasley & Kaarbo, 2014; Greene, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research project Visions and practices of geopolitics in the European Union and its neighborhood (VISIONS) under [Grant Number CSO2017-82622-P]; and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under [Grant Number FPU17/00660]. This article is within the framework of the PhD program Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).