Extreme-Right Populism and International

This course addresses one of the major political challenges of our times. Over the past generation, more scholarship, political analysis and journalism has been devoted to extreme-right parties than all other parties families combined. This course seeks to understand what effect such parties have had on concrete foreign policies of influential countries around the world. To do so, it scholarly research, policy analyses, case studies, journalistic accounts, visiting experts and student contributions. The course begins by reviewing foundational scholarly research and journalistic work about the nature, sources and pathologies of extreme-right populism, but spends most of the time discussing what concrete and consequential effects of such parties on foreign policy—a topic scholars have barely addressed. Those effects vary greatly across countries and issues. For example, most people believe President Trump’s term in office had—and a hypothetical second term would have even more—considerable impact on US foreign policy and global politics. On the other hand, in Italy extreme-right populists currently dominate government and in Austria they have been in the government for about half the last quarter century, with relatively little impact. Other countries seem to be somewhere in between. Since scholars have written far less about this, and many of these issues are ongoing, we draw on a wider range of materials. We don’t know what the future will bring—but few deny that the consequences of populist movements are potentially large and that the world will probably be facing this challenge for some time to come. The course will include meetings with a selection of prominent politicians, decision-makers, policy experts, consultants and scholars involved in these issues.