The Inter and Transnational Politics of Populism Foreign Policy Identity and Popular Sovereignty Thorsten Wojczewski Full Chapter

The Inter- and Transnational Politics of
Populism: Foreign Policy, Identity and

Popular Sovereignty Thorsten
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GLOBAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
The Inter- and Transnational

Politics of Populism
Foreign Policy, Identity and
Popular Sovereignty
Thorsten Wojczewski
Global Political Sociology
Series Editors
Dirk Nabers, International Political Sociology, Kiel University, Kiel,
Germany
Marta Fernández, Institute of International Relations, Pontifical
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Chengxin Pan, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin
University, Waurn Ponds, Australia
David B. MacDonald, Department of Political Science, University of
Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
This new series is designed in response to the pressing need to better
understand growing complex global, transnational, and local issues that
stubbornly refuse to be pigeon-holed into clearly-defined established
disciplinary boxes. The new series distinguishes its visions in three ways:
(1) It is inspired by genuine sociological, anthropological and philo-
sophical perspectives in International Relations (IR), (2) it rests on an
understanding of the social as politically constituted, and the social and
the political are always ontologically inseparable, and (3) it conceptual-
izes the social as fundamentally global, in that it is spatially dispersed and
temporarily contingent. In the books published in the series, the hetero-
geneity of the world’s peoples and societies is acknowledged as axiomatic
for an understanding of world politics.
Thorsten Wojczewski
The Inter-
and Transnational
Politics of Populism
Foreign Policy, Identity and Popular Sovereignty
Thorsten Wojczewski
Coventry University
Coventry, UK
Global Political Sociology

ISBN 978-3-031-16847-5 ISBN 978-3-031-16848-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16848-2
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Acknowledgements
This book brings together the Laclauian discourse theory and poststruc-
turalist International Relations theory to examine the nexus between
populism, foreign policy and world politics. It draws on research for
a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2018-656). I
would like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust and my
host institution, the King’s India Institute at King’s College London, for
funding and supporting my research. At King’s, I would especially like to
thank Louise Tillin for her mentorship.
The book benefitted from the inputs of many people. I presented
parts of the book at numerous conferences and workshops, including
the annual conventions of the International Studies Association, the
British International Studies Association and the European International
Studies Association and a workshop “The Effects of Global Populism:
Assessing Impact on the International Order” organized by Daniel Wajner
within the framework of the SCRIPTS Cluster. I would like to thank the
participants for their comments and interesting discussions.
Small parts of the book build on earlier publications and revise and
extend theoretical frameworks, themes and arguments developed in the
following publications: Parts of Chapters 3 and 5 draw on the paper
“Populism, Hindu Nationalism and Foreign Policy in India: The Poli-
tics of Representing ‘the People’” published in International Studies
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Review 22(3): 396–422 and the paper “Trump, Populism and American
Foreign Policy” published in Foreign Policy Analysis 16(3): 292–311. I
am grateful to Oxford University Press for its permission to republish
small parts of my work here in a revised and extended form.
I offer my sincere gratitude to Frank Stengel and the anonymous
reviewers for their extremely constructive and helpful feedback and
suggestions, which helped to improve and sharpen the argument and
structure of my book. I would also like to thank the editors of the
Palgrave series in Global Political Sociology, in particular Dirk Nabers, for
their enthusiasm for this book project and for making the publication
process very smooth. At Palgrave, I am grateful to Anca Pusca for the
support and cooperation.
Contents
1 Introduction: Populism and International Relations 1

2 The Populist Challenge to International Relations:
Concept-Stretching, Methodological Nationalism
and the Omission of Popular Sovereignty 25
3 Theorizing the Relations Between Populism
and Foreign Policy: A Discursive, Poststructuralist
Approach 73
4 Addressing Shortcomings in the Laclauian
Discursive Approach to Populism: Ontology, Radical
Contingency, Affect and the Role of Populist Leaders
and Antagonism 105
5 Right-Wing Populism and Foreign Policy in the United
States, Germany and India 143
6 Left-Wing Populism and Foreign Policy in the United
States, Europe and Venezuela 205
7 International and Transnational Populism:
Cross-Border Collaboration and Identity Construction 271
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 Conclusion: Re-Conceptualizing and De-Centring

Populism in International Relations 327
Appendix 343
Index 347
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Populism and International

Relations
This book is about the nexus between populism, foreign policy and
world politics. Situated at the intersection of International Relations (IR),
Political Theory and Comparative Politics, the book provides a critical
intervention into the burgeoning IR scholarship on populism and prob-
lematizes the often hyperbolic, alarmist and sweeping usage of the term
as a general descriptor for non-centrist politics of different persuasions. It
proposes a different research agenda that moves away from the search for
the policy preferences and impact of populism and instead conceptualizes
foreign policy and world politics as potential sites for practising populism,
ranging from the articulation of societal grievances to the construction
of populist identities such as ‘the people’. For this purpose, the book
develops a theoretical framework that brings theories of populism and
IR into dialogue and connects the Laclauian, discursive approach to
populism with poststructuralist IR theory. This theoretical framework is
utilized for a comparative, cross-regional analysis of right-wing and left-
wing populist discourses in the US, Europe, India and Latin America to
capture the international, transnational and potentially global dimensions
of populism.
Recently, populism has become to be seen as one of the most signif-
icant phenomena of domestic and world politics. It is widely used to
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
T. Wojczewski, The Inter- and Transnational Politics of Populism,
Global Political Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16848-2_1
2 T. WOJCZEWSKI
make sense of the political rise of different political actors, ranging from
the election of right-wing nationalist leaders such as Donald Trump in
the US, Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to the
emergence of leftist, anti-austerity movements in Europe such as Syriza,
Podemos and the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25)
(Moffitt 2016; Kaltwasser et al. 2017; de la Torre 2019; Stengel et al.
2019). While populism used to be seen as a purely domestic phenomenon
(Taggart 2000) and its inter- and transnational aspects were largely
ignored by both IR and populism scholars, the alleged “global rise
of populism” (Moffitt 2016) has led to an increased interest in the
populist phenomenon and how it affects and is affected by foreign
policy and world politics at large. After all, the processes of globaliza-
tion and the growing authority of regional (e.g. European Union) and
global (e.g. International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization)
governance institutions have affected the relationship between political
power and legitimacy and the elites and the people, respectively, by
contributing to the erosion of state, national and popular sovereignty and
tying a government’s legitimacy increasingly to meeting regional/global
demands (Zürn 2004; Kriesi 2014; Chryssogelos 2020). The resulting
widening representational gap between power-holders and their respec-
tive political communities is a potential breeding ground for the populist
mobilization of popular grievances and anti-establishment sentiments.
The populist upsurge against what is perceived as a crisis of legitimacy
of liberal, representative democracy and an unresponsive political system
can have repercussions for foreign policy and global politics insofar as
populist actors articulate, reinforce and project popular sentiments of
political crisis, disenchantment, dissatisfaction and disfranchisement onto
foreign policy and global politics and demand political change.
The nascent and steadily growing IR literature on populism has sought
to study the potential effects of populism on and its role in foreign
policy and regional and global politics more systematically. Empirically,
this scholarship has already analysed a wide range of cases and world
regions, including the US (Biegon 2019; Wojczewski 2020a; Hall 2021;
Löfflmann 2022a), Europe (Verbeek and Zaslove 2017; Chryssogelos
2020; Özdamar and Ceydilek 2020; Destradi et al. 2021; Ostermann
and Stahl 2022; Wojczewski 2022), Latin America (Sagarzazu and
Thies 2019; De Sá Guimarães and De Oliveira E Silva 2021; Wajner
2021; Wehner and Thies 2021), India (Plagemann and Destradi 2019;
Wojczewski 2020b) and the Middle East (Dodson and Dorraj 2008;
1 INTRODUCTION: POPULISM AND INTERNATIONAL … 3
Özpek and Park 2019; Taş 2020). In addition to the predominant

research focus on populism’s impact on foreign policy preferences and
decision-making processes, IR scholarship has also inquired into the nexus
between populism and security by shedding light on how populist actors
construct, narrate or perform—ontological and physical—(in)security
(Steele and Homolar 2019; Wojczewski 2020c; Homolar and Löfflmann
2021; Kurylo 2022), conceptualized the relations between populism and
nationalism in foreign policy discourses (Wojczewski 2020b; Jenne 2021),
illuminated how the increased internationalization of the state has led to
a populist backlash against regional and global institutions (Chryssogelos
2020; Voeten 2020) and discussed the links between conspiracy theories,
right-wing populism and foreign policy (Wojczewski 2022).
This empirically rich literature has made important advancements to
the understanding of the role of populism in foreign policy and world
politics and its manifestations in different countries and regions. Yet, a
range of gaps and limitations remain. First, IR research has so far focussed
on right-wing populism and, with the main exception of Chávez’s left-
wing populist project in Venezuela (Destradi and Plagemann 2019;
Sagarzazu and Thies 2019; Wehner and Thies 2021; Thiers and Wehner
2022), almost completely ignored cases of left populism. As a result, we
know very little about how left-wing populism affects and is affected by
foreign policy and world politics, and the discourses of many left-wing
populist actors such as Bernie Sanders, Podemos or DiEM25 have so
far received no systematic attention in the IR literature. A direct conse-
quence of the omission of left-wing populism is the widespread tendency
in IR scholarship to equate or conflate populism with right-wing populism
and thus to make general arguments about populism or ‘populist foreign
policy’ based on the (almost) exclusive analysis of cases of right-wing
populism.1
Second, most of the scholarship relies on single-country and -region
studies. Hence, we lack systematic comparative studies on the relation-
ship between populism and foreign policy in different world regions as
well as on the formation of populism beyond the national state (e.g.
through cross-border cooperation or the claim to represent a transna-
tional people). The edited volume by Stengel et al. (2019), which makes
a strong and convincing case for an increased dialogue between populism
and IR scholarship, is close to a comparative approach by discussing
the inter- and transnational aspects of populism in different parts of the
world. However, due to its open and eclectic framework, the individual
4 T. WOJCZEWSKI
chapters and their insights are less suitable for making comparisons and
generalizations about populism across the globe and few of them explic-
itly address the nexus between populism and foreign policy. Destradi
and Plagemann (2019) offer a comparative analysis of “the international
impact of populist government formation”, but focus exclusively on the
Global South and include, with Venezuela, only a single, genuine case
of left-wing populism. Moreover, despite its research focus on the inter-
and transnational aspects of populism, IR scholarship has, curiously, paid
hardly any attention to populist cross-border interaction and instead
focussed primarily on the effects of populism on state foreign policy and
world politics, thus treating populism first and foremost as a domestic
phenomenon that can spill over into world politics by altering a state’s
foreign policy outlook. While the comparative politics literature has intro-
duced the concepts of inter- and transnational populism to account for the
role of populism beyond the national state (Moffitt 2017; McDonnell and
Werner 2019; De Cleen et al. 2020), these phenomena have so far not
been analysed systematically from an IR perspective.
Third, despite these empirical gaps, the major limitation of IR scholar-
ship is, however, its predominant conceptualization and theorization of
populism and the resulting difficulties in discerning populism’s actual
role in and effects on foreign policy and world politics. Not only
has the IR literature relied exclusively on theories of populism and
failed to engage with IR theories in its conceptual and empirical anal-
yses of populism in international relations, but the vast majority of
studies has relied on a single theoretical approach to populism rather
than making use of the varied theories of populism and their respec-
tive insights and different research agendas. The approach adopted
by most IR studies is the so-called ideational approach, which under-
stands populism as a “thin ideology” and seeks to capture populism’s
programmatic content, orientation and goals (Mudde 2007). Accord-
ingly, IR scholars have sought to identify and account for “the impact
of populism on foreign policy” (Plagemann and Destradi 2019: 285) and
thus how populism’s alleged ideological features—namely “anti-elitism”,
“anti-pluralism” and a “highly moralistic […] Manichean worldview”
(Destradi and Plagemann 2019: 713)—influence foreign policy prefer-
ences and the decision-making process (Chryssogelos 2017; Verbeek and
Zaslove 2017; Plagemann and Destradi 2019; Wehner and Thies 2021).
Hence, the overarching research goal is to map, describe and generalize
from the foreign policy positions of populists and to demonstrate how
“populist government formation (or participation) concretely influences

foreign policy” (Destradi et al. 2021: 663).
However, given populism’s seemingly inherent vagueness and flexi-
bility, this scholarship has struggled to capture the programmatic content
of “populist foreign policy” (Chryssogelos 2017; Plagemann and Destradi
2019) and to account for the concrete foreign policy effects of populism
(Verbeek and Zaslove 2017). Scholars have associated a ‘populist foreign
policy’ with neo-isolationism, opposition to regional integration and
multilateralism, anti-globalism, (economic) nationalism or centralization
of decision-making (Balfour et al. 2016; Chryssogelos 2017; Mead 2017;
Plagemann and Destradi 2019; Sagarzazu and Thies 2019). However,
it remains unclear to what extent any of these foreign policy positions
results from populism or rather the “thicker” ideologies (e.g. nationalism,
authoritarianism, conservatism) with which it is combined. Moreover,
scholars have either failed to account for the presence of these foreign
policy preferences in their empirical case studies or it is relatively easy
to point to a wide range of cases of populism that do not feature these
foreign policy positions. For example, while left-wing populists such as
Hugo Chávez and Bernie Sanders are, as we will see, staunch inter-
nationalists and favour a multilateral, solidaristic foreign policy, many
right-wing populist governments in Latin America have favoured neolib-
eral policies over economic protectionism (Weyland 1999; Petras and
Veltmeyer 2020)—a policy preference also generally shared by some
European populist radical right parties2 such as the Alternative for
Germany (AfD), the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) and the United
Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
What this suggests is that populism does not directly translate into any
concrete foreign policy preferences and has, at best, a very limited policy
impact, if at all. In fact, some scholars acknowledge the rather limited
impact of populism on foreign policy preferences and outcomes (see,
Verbeek and Zaslove 2017; Destradi and Plagemann 2019). However,
this has neither led to a turning-away from the ideational approach in
IR, which explicitly places emphasis on the programmatic content of
populism, nor stopped the search for “the impact of populism on foreign
policy” (Destradi et al. 2021: 663) and the association of populism
in general with concrete foreign policy preferences such as opposition
to “multilateralism and internationalism”, “immigration” and “member-
ship in international organisations and free trade agreements” (Löfflmann
2022b: 404). In fact, the dominance of this research agenda in IR is so
6 T. WOJCZEWSKI
far-reaching that, as we will see below, even studies which do not follow
the ideational approach still, at least indirectly, reify the association of
populism with certain policy preferences.
Rationale, Themes and Theoretical Approach

The present book aims to fill these empirical research gaps and address
these theoretical and conceptual limitations. It provides a cross-regional,
comparative analysis of the nexus between populism and foreign policy in
six different right-wing and left-wing populist discourses. It also takes
IR scholarship beyond the level of the national state by examining
four potential cases of populist cross-border cooperation, coalition- and
identity-building. As such, it aims to show how the phenomenon of
populism can be integrated into IR scholarship in a more fruitful way and
how an IR perspective can inform and broaden the study of populism
and take it beyond the state-level. The book’s guiding research objective
is to analyse how foreign policy and world politics affect and are affected
by different populist projects. More specifically, it seeks to address three
interrelated research questions:
(1) To what extent have international relations created conditions of

possibility for the apparent ‘global rise of populism’?
(2) What role do foreign policy and world politics play for populist
mobilization and identity constructions?
(3) What effects, if any, can populism unfold in foreign policy and
world politics and how should we conceptualize the interrelation of
populist and non-populist discourses to account for these potential
effects?
In addressing these questions, the book identifies and analyses foreign

policy and world politics in general as potential sites for practising
populism. This also includes the inter- and transnational dimension
of populism manifesting itself, for instance, in networking, interna-
tional support of populist actors in other countries, information sharing,
learning processes and the diffusion of the populist people/elite antago-
nism across state borders. For instance, the British right-wing populist
Nigel Farage gave speeches at Trump rallies in the US and Trump’s
former adviser Steve Bannon established a think tank in Brussels to rally
right-wing populist parties. The study’s expectation is that populism does

not halt at the water’s edge but has obtained an inter- and transnational
dimension. At the same time, however, populism is here not under-
stood as a monolithic phenomenon but as a flexible and loose political
concept that can be combined with very different and incompatible polit-
ical projects. As a result, the study neither expects that populism affects
foreign policy or world politics in a singular fashion nor that right-
and left-wing populists view each other as partners. Yet, it expects that
shared anti-establishment sentiments can provide an important impetus
for cross-border collaboration between, for instance, far-right actors.
Building on a discourse-theoretical conception of populism indebted
to Ernesto Laclau (2005; see also Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; De
Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis 2017; De Cleen et al. 2018)
and poststructuralist IR theory (Campbell 1998; Hansen 2006; Nabers
2015), the book proposes a theoretical framework for elucidating the
nexus between populism, foreign policy and world politics that is better
equipped to meet the challenges that the phenomenon of populism poses
to IR and to study the inter- and transnational politics of different types
of populism. Following Laclau, it understands populism as a distinct
discursive strategy that links together different frustrated social demands
and constructs a collective identity of ‘the people’ by placing them into
opposition to a common Other—the establishment or the elites—that is
accused of frustrating the fulfilment of these demands (Laclau 2005).
The most significant contribution of a discursive approach to populism
is that it moves away from identifying the content or essence of populist
politics, policies or ideology to the political logic through which populism
constructs the socio-political categories (such as ‘the people’) it claims
to represent. In short, populism is a distinct mode of framing, commu-
nicating and practising—non-populist—politics through which collective
meanings and political identities are constructed and re-produced. As the
book demonstrates, this approach has several advantages for studying the
role of populism in IR:
First, it frees IR scholarship from the circular and often pointless
pursuit of matching populism to particular policies by highlighting instead
the co-constitution of identity and policies and thereby opening up a
new research agenda that examines how political practices such as foreign
policy can be sites for the (re-)production of populist projects: for artic-
ulating popular grievances, forms of opposition, exclusion and conflicts
and thus conjuring a representational gap between ‘elite’ and ‘people’ in
8 T. WOJCZEWSKI
the realm of foreign policy or world politics at large that can be used
for the purpose of political mobilization. While existent poststructuralist
IR scholarship has shown how the state or the nation is (re-)produced
through the practices of foreign policy and international relations, this
book considers the populist notion of the people as a potential ontolog-
ical referent that can be constituted through these discursive practices.
Thus, foreign policy and world politics offer populist actors a potential
stage for the construction and re-production of a people/elite antagonism
and their representative claims aimed at constituting a collective political
identity and rallying ‘the people’ behind a particular political project.
Second, it does not a priori attribute populism a negative content,
particular political orientation or relegates its criticism of the elites and
the status-quo to the moral sphere (Mudde 2007; Müller 2016; Plage-
mann and Destradi 2019) but rather examines how the populist logic of
articulating political demands and identities through a people/elite antag-
onism can play out in different political projects and produce different
political contents. This makes it possible to treat populism, despite its
flexibility and ambiguity, as a distinct political and analytical concept and
to study its manifestations in foreign policy and world politics, while
avoiding the common tendency in IR scholarship to understand populism
(despite claims to the contrary) as a relatively monolithic phenomenon by
ascribing to it particular policy preferences.
Third, a discursive approach enables us to problematize a series of bina-
ries such as material/ideational, reality/ideology or culture/economics
on which most populism scholarship, not only in IR, is based (Mudde
2007; Norris and Inglehart 2016; Destradi and Plagemann 2019). A
discourse-theoretical approach overcomes these binaries and shows that
all subjects, objects and practices are discursive phenomena insofar as
their meaningfulness and intelligibility depends on relations of differ-
ence—the drawing of a political line between something and something
else. Consequently, instead of treating, for example, political subjects such
as ‘the people’ and economic crises as given or accusing ‘populists’ of
misrepresenting reality, a discursive approach sheds light on how such
notions emerge and become meaningful in the first place, why particular
understandings of the world are accepted as reality and the conditions
under which this seemingly objective reality begins to crumble and the
contingency of our identities and social orders is exposed, thereby making
political change possible. The book will show that populism emerges in
and re-enforces such moments of dislocation and can unfold its ideo-
logical force by offering the ultimately illusive promise that a state of
wholeness and perfection in the form of a full congruence between rulers
and ruled can be reached.
While the book argues that a Laclauian approach offers a more
fruitful conceptualization of populism and research agenda for grasping
and studying this phenomenon in IR, it also aims to address poten-
tial problems, inconsistencies and gaps in the Laclauian approach and
its applications. As we have seen, most IR studies have relied on the
ideational approach. However, there are a very few studies which have,
even if to different extents, mobilized the Laclauian, discursive approach
to study the nexus between populism and foreign policy (Wojczewski
2020a, b; Cadier 2021; Jenne 2021) or analyse populism as a response
to the internationalization of the state (Chryssogelos 2020). Although all
these studies, in principle, affirm Laclau’s postulate that populism is not
defined by a particular programmatic or policy content, some of them are
nevertheless primarily interested in discerning the programmatic “foreign
policy effects of populism” (Jenne 2021) and “the distinctive influence of
populism” on “policy outcomes” (Cadier 2021).
Jenne’s study distinguishes between “ethno-nationalist”, “populist”
and “ethno-populist” frames which prescribe different forms of “foreign
policy revisionism”; for example, the “populist frame” is associated with
“a radical break from past foreign policy practices” and “systemic revi-
sionism, meaning that state leaders are expected to claw back sovereignty
from domestic and foreign elites by rejecting the authority of suprana-
tional organizations […] or excluding transnational advocacy networks,
foreign NGOs or other foreign actors that frustrate self-governance”
(Jenne 2021: 330ff.). Unlike Laclau’s conception of populism as a polit-
ical logic, which is devoid of any programmatic content and merely articu-
lates political demands in a distinct way, Jenne suggests that populism can
unfold independent effects on foreign policy outcomes and then tests her
deductively derived hypotheses on foreign policy revisionism in different
case studies. This reasoning contradicts the notion of populism as an
articulatory practice, which is necessarily articulated with non-populist
discourses and alters—by relating, for example, populism and right-wing
politics—meaning frames. It also introduces a certain determinism and a
discourse/reality dualism which are at odds with the discursive ontology
of the Laclauian approach. Similarly, Cadier’s study ultimately misap-
propriates the notion of populism as articulatory practice and conflates
10 T. WOJCZEWSKI
populist and non-populist logics under the label of populism, when he

conceptualizes a “populist mode of articulating foreign policy” as “the
State is likely to be represented as an ‘underdog’ in a given international
or regional order and certain foreign powers othered as the ‘elite’ or
‘establishment’ frustrating its legitimate national demands” (Cadier 2021:
706).3
Thus, these works ultimately do not take us very far from the ideational
approach and the search for ‘the populist impact on foreign policy’.
They also tend to (a priori) associate populism with certain foreign
policy preferences and outcomes such as opposition to “supranational
organizations” (Jenne 2021) or prioritization of the “national interest”
(Cadier 2021). This also applies to Chryssogelos’ study that concep-
tualizes populism per se as an ultimately nationalist response to state
transformation insofar as it opposes “the universality of the interna-
tional norms” that justify “the denationalization of policymaking”, to
which “these populists juxtapose the moral claim to political represen-
tation of territorially rooted political communities” (Chryssogelos 2020:
22/26/29f.). Empirically speaking, this is certainly correct insofar as most
cases of populism are nationalistic, but, on the conceptual/ontological
level, this contradicts a discursive approach in that populism is here again
a priori endowed with a clear ideological orientation (namely, nation-
alism, opposition to regional integration, anti-universalism and moralism).
This conception of populism also rules out the possibility of transnational
populism, which transcends the borders of national states. These exam-
ples underscore the need to move away from a research agenda which
overemphasizes the policy impact of populism and the role of populism at
the expense of the non-populist discourses with which populism is articu-
lated. As we will see, the populist form of a discourse (i.e. the construction
of a people/elite antagonism) only acquires a more substantive meaning
through its articulation with non-populist discourses and cannot unfold
any meaningful effects on foreign policy without it.
While these applications of the discursive approach are arguably not
entirely consistent with Laclau’s theory of populism, the Laclauian,
discursive approach is not without problems. This book aims to address
four shortcomings in this theoretical approach:
First, Laclau’s tendency to conflate populism with politics (Arditi
2010) and more recent attempts by Laclauian scholars to conceptually
clarify populism’s ontological status (De Cleen 2017; De Cleen and
Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017). Though sharing these schol-

ars’ concern for conceptual clarity and building on some of their insights,
the book argues that their framework displays a conceptual and norma-
tive bias towards left-wing populism that runs the risk of undermining
Laclau’s formal discursive approach and thereby distorting the empirical
analysis of different types of populism.
Second, the alleged “latent voluntarism” in the conception of politics
in the Laclauian discourse theory in general, and its theory of populism
in particular (Maiguashca 2019), insofar as the postulated contingency of
the social results in a neglect of the various hierarchies, exclusions and
acts of power that shape the construction of collective identities and the
very different capacities for discursive representation. This book addresses
this issue, which relates to questions such as why a particular notion of
the people becomes dominant or why right-wing populism has emerged
as the prevalent form of contemporary populism, by developing a model
of layered discursive orders, which provide the context for the emergence
of particular discourses and set important limits on discursive agency as
well as the construction of meanings and identities.
Third, the underdeveloped notion of affect as driving force behind
populist identification processes. Though Laclau and others have turned
to Lacanian psychoanalysis to capture the role of affect and its relationship
to discourses (Laclau 1990; Stavrakakis 1999; Glynos and Howarth 2007;
Solomon 2015; Eberle 2019), these insights have so far hardly found their
way into populism scholarship (Eklundh 2017; Wojczewski 2022), but
can, as will be shown, broaden our understanding of the appeal and reso-
nance of populism by shedding light on the ways in which political actors
can animate, through their rhetoric and practices, affect and translate it
into emotions such as desire, hope, fear and anxiety and narrate foreign
policy as a practice that promises to fulfil ‘our’ desires and hopes and keep
‘our’ ontological insecurities at bay.4
Fourth, the role and agency of populist actors and the extent to which
their attempts to establish themselves as representative of ‘the people’
and frustrated popular demands pose an imminent threat to democracy.
Though Laclau claims that “the symbolic unification of the group around
an individuality […] is inherent to the formation of a ‘people’” (Laclau
2005: 100), he rather focusses on the structural (discursive) conditions of
possibility for populist leadership than the forms and features of populist
agency. Here, the Laclauian approach can benefit from an engagement
with the scholarship on populism as political style (Moffitt 2016; Ostiguy
12 T. WOJCZEWSKI
2017), which the book revisits through the lens of discourse theory to
analyse how political actors can use foreign policy and world politics as
stage for populist performances. Moreover, Laclau’s anthropomorphiza-
tion of populism coupled with the dictum, generally accepted by scholars
following his approach (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; De Cleen
and Stavrakakis 2017; Mouffe 2018), that populist discourses construct
a people/elite antagonism raise questions about the compatibility of
democracy and populism and the emancipatory potential attributed to
populism by Laclauian scholars (for a critique, see Cohen 2019; Peruz-
zotti 2019). The book addresses these issues by revisiting the often
inconsistent conception of antagonism in Laclauian scholarship and by
engaging Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonism (Mouffe 2013).
Empirical Cases, Method and Sources

The book includes six case studies and four additional in-case studies.
The choice of cases is motivated by the goal to include contemporary
forms of populism from different world regions and from the left and
the right to discern common features as well as differences between those
political forces labelled as ‘populists’ today. In doing so, the book seeks
to counter the almost exclusive focus on right-wing populism in the IR
literature and discuss, along what are typically considered ‘textbook’ cases,
cases that have received no or very little scholarly attention so far. The
case selection also serves the purpose of showing how populism can be
retained as a useful analytical and political concept against the backdrop
of the abundance of the usage of this label in contemporary academic
and public debates and recent calls to “forget populism” (Stengel 2019),
while at the same time acknowledging the substantial differences among
the discussed political actors and the problems of using a common label
to designate them.
The book analyses the right-wing populist discourses of Donald Trump
in the US, Narendra Modi in India and the Alternative for Germany in
Europe. With Bernie Sanders and DiEM25, the book then turns to two
cases of left-wing populism in the US and Europe. These cases make it
possible to compare different types of populism in the same contexts and
contrast, for instance, Sanders’ left populism with Trump’s right-wing
populism. The third case of left populism is the discourse of Hugo Chávez
in Venezuela, which is arguably the most prominent case of left-wing
populism in the Global South and used to contrast left-wing populism in
an unconsolidated, post-colonial developing country democracy with left-

wing populist projects in consolidated democracies in the Global North.
The analysis of these six cases is complemented by four additional in-case
studies, which examine the cross-border collaboration of some of these
actors through the frameworks of inter- and transnational populism: (1)
the Identity & Democracy group founded by the AfD and other Euro-
pean populist radical right parties in the run-up of the 2019 European
election; (2) Narendra Modi’s outreach to Donald Trump and European
right-wing populists; (3) the Progressive International jointly launched
by Bernie Sanders and DiEM25 in 2018; and (4) the promotion of post-
liberal regionalism, particularly the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of
Our Americas, by Hugo Chávez in Latin America.
The case selection is also informed by the book’s discourse analyt-
ical methodology. The basic premise of a discourse-analytical approach
is that language does not neutrally reflect a world ‘out there’ but plays
an active role in constituting it. The poststructuralist, discourse analysis
applied here does not reduce discourse to language but rather draws an
analogy between language and the social in that the relational and differ-
ential properties of language can be applied to all aspects of social reality
(Howarth 2002: 10/101ff.). Accordingly, social practices and institu-
tions such as foreign policy or the state are analysed as if reading a text
by studying how linguistic and non-linguistic practices establish relations
between different signifiers/elements and thereby create a field of intel-
ligibility that makes subjects, objects and actions intelligible in the first
place.
The book draws on in-depth textual analyses of primary data and thus
seeks to identify and analyse the different signifying practices through
which intersubjective meanings and identities are produced, stabilized
and contested in this body of texts. This, in turn, limits the number
of potential case studies due to language barriers but makes it possible
to shed light on how political actors use linguistic and other semiotic
means to mobilize ‘the people’ and unite them in a common polit-
ical project. It also makes it possible to examine how different political
discourses articulate and thus ascribe meaning to foreign policy, and its
subjects and objects such as international institutions and sovereignty,
rather than deriving their approach to foreign policy and world poli-
tics deductively from particular theories. For this purpose, the study
has collected and analysed a comprehensive and original textual dataset,
including speeches and statements, election and party manifestos, media
14 T. WOJCZEWSKI
interviews and tweets. In total, the dataset amounts to roughly 4300

textual sources.5
Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2 discusses the various challenges that the phenomenon of
populism poses to IR. It critically reviews the predominant conception
of populism as ideology and the resulting research agenda that focusses
on discerning the impact of populism on foreign policy preferences and
outputs. The chapter shows that this approach has not only grappled
with identifying distinctive features of a ‘populist foreign policy’, but also
contributed to the widespread problem of concept-stretching and the
corresponding populist hype, which manifests in the sweeping, alarmist
and pejorative usage of the term populism. The chapter also sheds light
on how populism poses a challenge to IR theories and core concepts such
as the state and sovereignty and the ways in which these concepts are typi-
cally studied. It argues that large parts of IR scholarship are underpinned
by state-centric, elitist and/or methodologically nationalist conceptions
of international relations, which hamper the analysis of populism.
Chapter 3 brings theories of populism and IR into dialogue and
develops a discursive, poststructuralist framework for analysing the role
of populism in foreign policy and world politics. Drawing on Ernesto
Laclau’s discursive approach to populism and poststructuralist IR theory,
it shifts the focus away from the search for the content or essence of
populism and the ‘populist’ impact on foreign policy preferences and
outputs and instead considers foreign policy and world politics in general
as potential sites for practising populism and constructing an antago-
nism between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’. Accordingly, it foregrounds
how political actors can use foreign policy and world politics to articu-
late societal grievances, forms of opposition, conflict and exclusion and
mobilize popular support for a particular political project. In keeping
with this research agenda, the chapter identifies and discusses different
discursive strategies through which a populist identity of ‘the people’ and
the populist actor as its rightful representative can be constructed and
re-produced in the realm of foreign policy and world politics. It argues
that a discursive conception of populism as a political logic of articu-
lating—and thus framing, communicating and performing—non-populist
politics along the lines of a people/elite antagonism offers analytical
tools to distinguish between populism and other political phenomena and
avoid the re-production and reification of populist claims by denatural-

izing political subjects such as ‘the people’ and exposing their lack of any
positive foundation or essence.
Chapter 4 aims to address a series of potential limitations and gaps in
the Laclauian discursive approach to populism. These shortcomings relate
to: (1) the ontological status and conceptual distinctiveness of populism;
(2) the tendency to overemphasize the radical contingency of the social
at the expense of theorizing and discussing the structural constraints in
processes of meaning and identity construction; (3) the underdeveloped
notion of affect as driving force behind the identification with and appeal
of particular populist projects; and (4) the ambiguous role of the populist
leader and its claim to represent ‘the people’ both in terms of how
populist actors successfully stage themselves as representative of frustrated
popular demands and whether the antagonistic juxtaposition of ‘people’
and ‘elite’ is compatible with or rather a threat to pluralist democracy.
Chapter 5 analyses the relationship between right-wing populism and
foreign policy. It sheds light on how the discourses of Donald Trump
in the US, Narendra Modi in India and the AfD in Germany use
foreign policy as sites for performing populism by articulating their ultra-
nationalist, authoritarian and reactionary positions along the lines of a
people/elite antagonism and staging themselves as rightful representatives
of ‘the people’. The chapter finds that all three discourses seek to estab-
lish a close link between ‘the elites’ and ‘dangerous foreign Others’ and
accuse the former of collaborating with the latter to deprive ‘the people’
of their sovereignty, voice, rights, employment opportunities, security
and identity. While the discourses of Trump and the AfD construct an
antagonism between ‘the people’ and aloof ‘globalist elites’ accused of
selling out popular sovereignty and the nation to create an illusive global,
cosmopolitan order, Modi’s discourse defines ‘the elite’ in domestic terms
and does not represent international norms, agreements and institutions
as threats to ‘the people’ but rather seeks to project Hindu India as a
universalist and supreme force of peaceful coexistence, spiritual wisdom
and human welfare. All three discourses are organized around a distinct
reactionary and affect-laden narrative structure that (a) pictures a people
which allegedly once enjoyed a complete and perfect identity, (b) accuses
the elite and the foreign Other of stealing it and (c) conjures up an
upcoming disaster if ‘the people’ do not rally behind the right-wing
populist actor and popular and national sovereignty are not restored.
16 T. WOJCZEWSKI
Chapter 6 turns to left-wing populism and examines to what extent the

discourses of Bernie Sanders in the US, the Democracy in Europe Move-
ment 2025 and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela use foreign policy as a site
for the construction of a people/elite antagonism in order to articu-
late popular grievances, conflicts and forms of exclusion and mobilize
‘the people’ for their respective political projects. While the discourses
of Sanders and, in particular, DiEM25 construct a transnational demos
alongside their civic-nationalist notions of the people, the Chavismo
discourse features a post-colonial nationalism that seeks to establish a link
between domestic elites and the foreign, neo-imperial Other located in
the US and Western-dominated international institutions and represents
them as collaborative enemy. Like their right-wing counterparts, left-wing
populists blame the establishment for popular grievances and insecurities
and seek to connect the complex policy issues and often unsettling events
of regional and world politics to the everyday experiences, frustrations
and anxieties of ordinary citizens. Though framing and practising poli-
tics along the lines of a people/elite antagonism and promising a foreign
policy that performs popular sovereignty and will address these grievances,
left- and right-wing populist discourses attach different meanings to these
signifiers and, as a result, also differ significantly in their foreign policy
outlooks. The discourses of Sanders, DiEM25 and Chávez formulate a
classical leftist foreign policy centred around themes such as internation-
alism, anti-imperialism, anti-militarism and opposition against neoliberal
capitalism.
Chapter 7 takes IR scholarship on populism beyond the state-level
by analysing populist cross-border collaboration and identity construc-
tion. Using the frameworks of international populism and transnational
populism as ways of understanding how populism can be practised
beyond state borders, it analyses four case studies: (1) the cooperation
of the populist radical right in Europe; (2) Narendra Modi’s outreach
to Donald Trump and European right-wing populists; (3) the launch
of the Progressive International by Bernie Sanders and DiEM25; and
(4) Hugo Chávez’s promotion of post-liberal regionalism through the
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas. The chapter argues
that the construction of the elite Other provides these actors and move-
ments with a potentially shared Other against which a collective political
project can be forged and that has, in the case of Europe’s populist
radical right, contributed to mitigating and overriding a purely nation-
alist mode of Othering that typically hinders international cooperation.
While the two discussed cases of left populism both feature a transnational
populist dimension, it is the Progressive International that constitutes the
most radical and ambitious form of populist cross-border collaboration
and demonstrates the possibility of a truly post-national populism that
contests and transcends state borders and national identities by seeking to
organize and represent people’s power on a planetary scale.
The concluding chapter discusses the study’s theoretical and empir-
ical implications for conceptualizing and analysing the nexus between
populism, foreign policy and world politics. It revisits the dominant theo-
rization of populism as ideology and the resulting research agenda in IR
scholarship and highlights the inherent analytical and political problems of
this approach and research focus. The chapter makes the case for recon-
ceptualizing and de-centring populism in IR. It argues that the book’s
proposed theoretical framework and research agenda, which moves away
from the overemphasis on the foreign policy preferences and impact of
populism and instead focusses on the discursive and performative aspects
of populism, allows us to retain populism as a useful analytical concept
and analyse its different manifestations and implications, without essen-
tializing populism and discussing this political phenomenon in a sweeping,
hyperbolic and pejorative way.
Notes
1. The less common tendency of making generalizations about left-wing
populism and foreign policy based on the particular experiences and
manifestations of populism in Latin America is equally problematic.
2. This book uses the term right-wing populism as an umbrella term for
different types of right-wing discourses, ranging from more moderate
to radical right discourses which articulate their political positions and
demands along the lines of a populist people/elite antagonism.
3. Cadier imposes here a populist frame on what is actually a classical
nationalist inside/outside antagonism and what could be more accurately
described as “victimhood nationalism” (Lerner 2020). Populism serves here
at best as a way of articulating a nationalistic project and the potential
effects on foreign policy result from this articulation and not populism on
its own.
4. Likewise, the IR literature on populism has so far neglected the role
of affect and emotions. Important exceptions include: Kinnvall (2019),
Skonieczny (2019), and Homolar and Löfflmann (2021). Though all these
works offer interesting insights into the affective and emotive underpinning
18 T. WOJCZEWSKI
of politics, the distinctive affective and emotive appeal of populism remains

unclear. For example, while Kinnvall (2019) uses the concepts of populism,
nationalism and nativism interchangeably and links the emotive power
of “populist politics” to “the re-invention” of “nationhood”’, “religion”
and “masculinity”, Homolar and Löfflmann (2021) develop the intriguing
notion of “populist humiliation narratives”, but link this narrative, inter alia,
to a “conflicting sense of national greatness and victimhood” and racial and
cultural “anxieties” and rely exclusively on right-wing discourses to illustrate
their arguments.
5. For the selection of the textual material, the time period of investigation
and the procedure of discourse analysis, see the appendix.
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CHAPTER 2
The Populist Challenge to International

Relations: Concept-Stretching,
Methodological Nationalism
and the Omission of Popular Sovereignty
It has become almost a cliché to begin a discussion of populism by

stating that populism displays “an essential impalpability, and awkward
conceptual slipperiness” (Taggart 2000: 1). The notion of populism as
an essentially contested concept is typically attributed to two factors: first,
the difficulties of (early) populism scholarship to arrive at a clear definition
and conceptualization of populism that can capture its distinctiveness and
allow for the analysis of the very diverse set of phenomena which have
been subsumed under this label. “A persistent feature of the literature on
populism”, as Laclau (2005: 3) rightly noted, “is its reluctance—or diffi-
culty—in giving the concept any precise meaning. […] Most of the time,
conceptual apprehension is replaced by appeals to non-verbalized intu-
ition, or by descriptive enumerations of a variety of ‘relevant features’—a
relevance which is undermined, in the very gesture which asserts it, by
reference to a proliferation of exceptions”. Second, populism has become
such a widely used concept in academia, politics and the media that it
has been deprived of much of its analytical value and often merely serves
as a pejorative catch-all term for delegitimizing certain politicians, parties
and movements that we do not like. This has led scholars to question its
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2023
T. Wojczewski, The Inter- and Transnational Politics of Populism,
Global Political Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16848-2_2
26 T. WOJCZEWSKI
relevance as empirical phenomenon and even to contemplate abandoning

populism scholarship altogether (Stengel 2019; Art 2020; De Cleen and
Glynos 2021).
These two problems also reflect in International Relations (IR) schol-
arship on populism. This chapter critically reviews contemporary debates
around populism and how the IR literature has predominantly conceptu-
alized and studied the phenomenon. Outlining the four main theoretical
approaches to populism—ideology, strategy, style and discourse—it shows
that, contrary to the notion of populism as an essentially contested
concept, there is, in fact, a general consensus that “populism include[s]
some kind of appeal to ‘the people’ and a denunciation of ‘the elite’”
(Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 5) and is characterized by a conceptual
thinness, making it possible to combine populism with a range of different
political ideologies or discourses (Mudde 2007; De Cleen and Stavrakakis
2017; Kaltwasser et al. 2017).
The chapter shows that the IR literature has predominantly followed
the so-called ideational approach to populism, which understands
populism as an ideology, and examined the impact of populism on foreign
policy and world politics in general. It shows that this approach has not
only grappled with identifying distinctive features of a ‘populist foreign
policy’, but also contributed to the widespread problem of concept-
stretching and the corresponding ‘populist hype’, which manifests in
the sweeping, imprecise, alarmist and pejorative way populism is often
discussed. Finally, the chapter discusses how populism poses a challenge
to IR theories and core IR concepts such as the state, national interest or
sovereignty and the ways in which these concepts are typically studied. It
argues that state-centrism, elitism and methodological nationalism present
in large parts of IR scholarship hamper the analysis of populism. The crit-
ical review sets out the basis for advancing a different approach to study
the role of populism in IR—an approach that is informed by Ernesto
Laclau’s discursive conception of populism and poststructuralist IR theory
and considers foreign policy and world politics as potential sites for prac-
tising populism, ranging from the articulation of popular grievances to
constructing and claiming to represent ‘the people’.
2 THE POPULIST CHALLENGE TO INTERNATIONAL … 27
Populism: Strategy, Ideology, Style, Discourse

In the contemporary literature, we can identify four different theoret-
ical approaches to populism—as strategy, ideology, style and discourse.
In contrast to the widespread notion of populism as essentially contested
concept, there is a relatively broad consensus on some of populism’s key
features such as a reference to ‘the people’ and criticism of ‘the elite’, yet
the four approaches place emphasis on different aspects of populism and
this also reflects in the different analytical categories used to conceptualize
the phenomenon.
The strategic approach understands populism as “a political strategy
through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power
based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large
numbers of mostly unorganized followers. This direct, quasi-personal
relationship bypasses established intermediary organizations or deinstitu-
tionalizes and subordinates them to the leader’s personal will” (Weyland
2001: 14; cf. also Barr 2018). While populism can feature a charis-
matic political leader who rallies ‘the people’ behind her or him, the
exclusive focus on the leader and an immediate mode of organization
is problematic, because it fails to capture cases of populism which are
not leader-centric and to distinguish populism from other phenomena
(e.g. autocracy, fascism or religious messianism), in which a leader plays a
pivotal role but which lack other central characteristics typically attributed
to populism. In particular, ‘the people’, which has given populism its
name—Latin: populus—and is the addressee of the populist appeal, is
marginalized or even completely ignored in this approach. In addition,
the assumption that populism resists or opposes institutionalization and
organization cannot account for the numerous examples of institution-
alized parties that have adopted populist strategies such as the Freedom
Party of Austria (FPÖ), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or Front National.
Finally, the focus on the preeminent leader who side-lines or disman-
tles established intermediary organizations as defining feature of populism
implies that populism is, by definition, a threat to pluralist democracy.
The ideational approach which conceptualizes populism as a thin
ideology has become the dominant approach in the literature. According
to Cas Mudde, populism is “an ideology that considers society to be
ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups,
‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that poli-
tics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of
28 T. WOJCZEWSKI
the people” (Mudde 2004: 543; cf. also Stanley 2008; Mudde and
Kaltwasser 2017). What makes populism a thin ideology is that it lacks
“the same level of intellectual refinement and consistency as ‘thick’ or
‘full’ ideologies, such as socialism or liberalism” and instead has a more
limited ambition, scope and range of political concepts (Mudde 2017:
31). While this approach highlights that populism itself offers few specific
views on political and socio-economic issues and can only in combination
with thicker ideologies form a set of ideas, attitudes and values which can
map the world, it provides no clear analytical tools with which we could
distinguish populism from its thicker ideologies and study their interac-
tion. By defining populism as an ideology that views politics as a struggle
between the pure people and the corrupt elite, the approach depoliti-
cizes populism and relegates its criticism of the elites and the status-quo
to the moral sphere. However, defining political positions, struggles and
cleavages in moral terms is hardly distinctive to populism and has, in
fact, become widespread phenomenon in contemporary politics (Mouffe
2005: 5). The approach’s moral framing of populism, coupled with the
claim that populism envisions the people as a homogenous group (Mudde
2004: 543), gives populism automatically a bad name and an anti-pluralist
orientation and limits the empirical applicability of this approach.
The main problem of the ideational approach is, however, the concept
of ideology itself. Apart from the fact that scholars following this approach
say astonishingly little about their core analytical concept, populism does
not have the features of a thin ideology,1 as Michael Freeden who devel-
oped this notion pointed out: a “long-standing, relatively durable core
concepts and ideas”, “a positive, self-aware, drive” to develop “transfor-
mative alternatives” and “the potential to become full if they incorporate
existing elements of other ideologies” (Freeden 2017: 3/5). The funda-
mentally different political actors that are subsumed under the label of
populism, ranging from Bernie Sanders and Syriza to Donald Trump and
Front National, neither feature any clear ideological coherence nor do
they seek to develop one, they typically do not call themselves populist
and they have no shared ideological history or referent (Moffitt and
Tormey 2014: 383f.; Aslanidis 2016a). This already indicates why the
search for ‘populist’ foreign policy preferences and outlooks is problem-
atic and unlikely to yield any robust findings applicable to all so-called
populist politicians and parties, as we will see later on.
The political style approach considers populism as a folkloristic style of
politics through which political actors mobilize ‘the people’ and pit them
against ‘the elite’ (Kazin 1998; Canovan 1999; de la Torre 2010). Tradi-
tionally, this approach has focussed on the language or discursive frames
employed by leaders and parties to appeal to ‘the people’. In the words of
de la Torre (2010: 4), populism is “a style of political mobilization based
on strong rhetorical appeals to the people and crowd action on behalf of a
leader. Populist rhetoric radicalizes the emotional element common to all
political discourses […] [and] constructs politics as the moral and ethical
struggle between el pueblo [the people] and the oligarchy”. Instead of
understanding populism as a set of political ideas, attitudes and values, the
political style approach conceives populism as a mode of expression or way
of communicating and, as such, populism is “a gradational property of
specific instances of political expression” rather than an essential attribute
of political parties or political leaders (Gidron and Bonikowski 2013: 8).
Typical features of a populist style, identified by scholars working in this
tradition, are a dualistic or Manichaean outlook, simplicity, disregard for
appropriateness and professionalism, and references to the ‘common’ or
‘ordinary’ people (Canovan 1999: 5–6; Hawkins 2009: 1042).
While most scholarship employing the political style approach has
focussed on language and rhetoric, scholars such as Benjamin Moffitt
and Pierre Ostiguy have further theorized and broadened the notion
of populism as a political style by highlighting the performative and
relational dimension of populism (Moffitt 2016; Ostiguy and Moffitt
2020). They understand populism as a “political style that is performed,
embodied and enacted” by populist leaders (Moffitt 2016: 3), with the
performance not simply mobilizing a pre-existing ‘people’, rather the
performative act produces what populists “claim to represent by covering
up the aesthetic gap and claiming to have direct, immediate contact with
‘the people’” (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 389). The populist perfor-
mance goes beyond the use of a particular mediatized, vernacular style of
communication, but also involves a particular mode of doing politics that
is aimed at generating a resonance and connection with the people and
distinguishing the populist leader from the elite (Moffitt 2016: 31/70ff.).
This points to the relational dimension of the populist political style. A
populist political style is first and foremost characterized by “the flaunting
of ‘the low’” in politics (Ostiguy 2017) and acted out in contrast to the
technocratic or ‘high’ style of mainstream politics characterized by appeals
to expertise, ‘good manners’, legalistic/rational arguments, formal proce-
dures and institutional mediation (Moffitt 2016: 44ff.). By performing
and embodying this political style, populist leaders seek to speak and act
30 T. WOJCZEWSKI
in a manner that has the capacity to develop a resonance within the audi-
ence and allows them to present their own leadership and simple solutions
as the only way out of a perceived crisis.
Though the political style approach is on the right track insofar as it
highlights the stylistic, aesthetic and performative aspects of populism, it
does not take us very far away from the two previous approaches. This is
because, like the strategic approach, it is fixated on the leader and reduces
populism to the top-down mobilization of the people through a colourful
and (extra-)ordinary personality, making the people passive bystanders
interpellated by populist leaders and their ideas, personality traits and
drive for power (Dean and Maiguashca 2020: 16). It also, like the thin
ideology approach, attributes populism an inherent ideational content
by, for example, typically defining the people/elite divide in Manichaean
terms and associating populism with low-culture behaviour. Unlike the
ideational approach, however, it does not say much about the ‘host ideol-
ogy’ and how it—both analytically and empirically—relates to the populist
style, thereby giving the misleading impression that populism is all that
matters in the rhetoric and performances of certain political actors. By
ascribing to populism certain essential features deductively, the political
style approach ultimately fails in reaching a minimal definition of populism
that could capture populism in its entirety and account for forms of
populism which are not leader-centric and characterized by low-culture
behaviour. The association of populism with bad manners, simplicity and
amateurism, moreover, a priori depoliticizes populism and denigrates it as
a demagogic, vulgar and irrational form of politics.
The discursive approach, as will be shown in the following chapter,
can capture important dimensions of populism identified by the three
approaches discussed so far, but avoid their main problems, namely their
inability to clearly distinguish populism from other phenomena and to
cover the variety of populisms. Devised by Ernesto Laclau and further
developed by Laclauian scholars, the discursive approach moves away
from the search for the content or essence of populist politics or policies
and instead conceptualizes populism as a distinct political logic through
which political demands are articulated and a collective political identity is
constructed (Laclau 2005; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; De Cleen
and Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis 2017). A populist discourse constructs
‘the people’ it claims to represent by linking together a series of frustrated
societal demands and blaming ‘the elite’ for frustrating these demands.
Hence, ‘the people’ is no pre-existing socio-political category but comes
into being by drawing an antagonistic frontier between ‘the people’ and

‘the elite’ and thus by framing and doing politics along this antag-
onistic frontier. By focussing on the formal structure rather than the
content of populism, the discursive approach can capture the distinctive
operational logic of populism—what all forms of populism share—and
removes all traces of essentialism and particularity (e.g. a charismatic
leader, a Manichean worldview or low-culture behaviour) that hamper
the application of the concept of populism to a variety of different but
commensurate phenomena (De Cleen 2019: 24) and attribute populism
a priori a particular, typically negative, political content or orientation.
In addition, the approach provides analytical tools to understand how
‘the people’—the core concept of populism—is created in the first place
and distinguish populism from other political phenomena such as nation-
alism and right-wing politics and examine their interaction in a particular
political project.
Populism and International Relations

Populism has traditionally been seen as a domestic phenomenon.
While IR scholarship almost completely omitted the phenomenon,
populism scholars generally presumed that “the inward-looking nature
of populism” would make populists “diffident […] in terms of foreign
policy” (Taggart 2000: 96) and paid attention to the international dimen-
sion of populism only insofar as globalization and the growing role of
supra- and international institutions such as the European Union were
named as potential explanations for the rise and electoral success of
populist politicians and parties (Mudde 2007). Yet, the identification of
globalization and supra- and international institutions as potential causes
for the rise of populism indicates that populism can have an inter- and
transnational dimension and that IR scholarship should not ignore the
phenomenon.
Populism has found its way into IR scholarship mainly in the wake
of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the
proliferation of the term ‘populism’ in the media and academic discourses
since then. The emerging IR literature has predominantly followed the
ideational approach and examined the impact of populism on foreign
policy and regional and global governance, focussing on the foreign policy
attitudes and preferences of so-called populists and how “populist govern-
ments” influence foreign policies and world politics at large (Verbeek and
32 T. WOJCZEWSKI
Zaslove 2017; Plagemann and Destradi 2019; Destradi and Plagemann

2019; Sagarzazu and Thies 2019; Coticchia and Vignoli 2020; Varga and
Buzogány 2021; Wajner 2021; Wehner and Thies 2021; Hisarlıoğlu et al.
2022).
An early study by populism researchers on the foreign and security
policy positions of European populist radical right parties already exposed
two common problems of the scholarship using this approach: (1) the
conflation of the ‘thin’ ideology of populism with the non-populist ‘thick’
ideology and (2) the unclear and ambiguous role of populism. In the
edited volume Europe for the Europeans: The Foreign and Security Policy
of the Populist Radical Right, Schori Liang (2007) identified nativism,
anti-immigration, Euroscepticism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, anti-
Zionism, anti-Islam and anti-globalization as core elements of “a common
foreign policy outlook”. As the identified policy preferences appear to
result exclusively from these parties’ far-right ideology and the study even
discusses neo-fascist parties such as the German Nationalist-Democratic
Party under the label of the populist radical right, the usage of the
concept of populism is here rather confusing than illuminating and
contributes to the widespread conflation of populism with the far-right
in academic and media discourses. Exemplifying this problem, Sagarzazu
and Thies noted with reference to the volume that “far right parties adopt
populist foreign policies” in the form of the political positions listed above
(Sagarzazu and Thies 2019: 208, emphasis added), thereby wrongly
suggesting that the latter are the product of these parties’ populism rather
than the far-right ‘thick’ ideology.
A brief look at two highly impactful studies which have set and deci-
sively shaped the research agenda on populism and foreign policy shows
how these problems outlined above haunt the IR scholarship that applies
the ideational approach. In their analysis of the foreign policy positions of
different left- and right-wing populist parties, Verbeek and Zaslove derive
these parties’ foreign policy preferences from their respective “thick”
ideologies and argue that ‘populist parties’ do not adopt similar foreign
policy positions on issues such as regional integration, trade and finance or
migration. While the authors highlight that the attached “thick” ideology
is ultimately “determining the foreign policy of the populist party” and
that there are different types of populist actors, they find it difficult to
identify common features of a “populist foreign policy” (Verbeek and
Zaslove 2017: 393/401). Thus, it remains unclear whether populism
plays any role in foreign policy and why we should discuss a range of
different actors under the label of populism and search for their foreign
policy orientations, even though there seems to be no ideological coher-
ence among them, and it is ultimately the non-populist host ideology such
as socialism or conservatism that matters. By conceptualizing populism
as an ideology and speaking of ‘populist parties’, the study produces a
paradoxical outcome insofar as it suggests that populism is the defining
feature of these political actors2 and that they share a common outlook,
while actually showing that populism is neither the central feature of these
parties and nor that it makes much sense to search for shared foreign
policy preferences.
In a first more systematic effort to theorize and empirically probe
for “the [actual] impact of populism on foreign policy”, Plagemann
and Destradi (2019) utilized the thin ideology approach to derive a
set of hypotheses about the main traits of a “populist foreign policy”:
(1) reluctance to make concessions on global governance issues that
entail high costs of blood and treasure; (2) preference for bilateralism
over multilateralism; (3) transnational understanding of ‘the people’ (e.g.
appeals to diaspora population); (4) centralization and personalization
of foreign policy-making; (5) direct appeals of foreign policy issues to
‘the people’ via social media. Though Plagemann and Destradi have
deduced their hypotheses from—what they identify as—the core dimen-
sions of populism, namely anti-elitism, anti-pluralism and Manichean
outlook (ibid.: 285), it remains unclear to what extent these features,
particularly those that aim at capturing the programmatic content of a
‘populist foreign policy’, are inherent in the concept of populism or rather
based on empirical observation. What is conceptualized here as ‘pop-
ulist foreign policy’ could equally be described as a nationalist foreign
policy and suggests that the authors had a particular type of right-wing
populism in mind when devising their hypotheses. This reflects in their
terminology and reasoning, when Plagemann and Destradi, for instance,
state that populists prioritize “the (narrowly defined) national interest” or
“regard international organizations as […] a threat to ‘the people’ and to
national sovereignty” (ibid.: 287, emphases added). By failing to theo-
rize the relationship between populism and nationalism and making the
nation the ontological referent of a ‘populist foreign policy’, the authors
contribute to the widespread analytical and empirical conflation of the
concepts of populism and nationalism. This form of concept-stretching is
34 T. WOJCZEWSKI
not the least problematic, because the ‘thick’ ideology is in their empir-
ical case the Hindu nationalist ideology of the BJP and Narendra Modi
in India.
In their case study, Plagemann and Destradi falsified the hypotheses
1 and 2 and concluded that “populism does not seem to have much
of an immediate impact on the ‘substance’ of foreign policy but that it
certainly has important consequences for the ‘style’ and the processes of
foreign-policy making” (ibid.: 297). Yet, the authors did not dismiss the
hypotheses in general or abandon their research focus on the impact of
populism on foreign policy preferences and practices, rather they argue
that the ‘thick’ ideologies and other structural variables mitigate the
impact of populism on foreign policy and have tried to further substan-
tiate this argument in other studies with more empirical cases (Destradi
and Plagemann 2019; Destradi et al. 2021).
The finding that populism has no clear, discernible effect on the
substance of foreign policy comes as no surprise to scholars familiar with
those approaches to populism that highlight its discursive and performa-
tive dimension and dismiss the notion of populism as ideology. What
is puzzling, however, is that these initial findings have not led to a
rethinking of the utility of the thin ideology approach. Despite the diffi-
culties in capturing the alleged ideational features of a ‘populist foreign
policy’ conceptually and to empirically account for shared foreign policy
positions of so-called populists, many IR scholars continue to understand
and analyse populism as an ideology and thus draw on an approach that
explicitly places emphasis on the programmatic content of populism. The
identified consequences of populism for the style and process of foreign
policy-making hint at a potentially more promising research agenda, but
the ideational approach offers neither systematic insights into the stylistic
and aesthetical aspects of populism nor the analytical tools to examine
them. By trying to capture and analyse the implications of populism
for foreign policy and global politics, IR scholarship ultimately faces a
dilemma that has shaped populism scholarship since its inception, namely,
to grasp populism’s conceptual distinctiveness and to allow for the analysis
of the very diverse set of phenomena which have been subsumed under
this label. The ideational approach with its explicit focus on ‘populist’
beliefs, attitudes and policies seems, at least in the realm of foreign policy
and world politics, not capable of solving this dilemma, but can create
new problems that hamper the study of populism.
While many scholars following this approach highlight “the diversity of

populist foreign policies and the different contexts in which it unfolds”
(Wehner and Thies 2021: 320; cf. also Verbeek and Zaslove 2017; Wajner
2021), the conception of populism as an ideology almost automatically
results in the association of populism with particular political positions
such as anti-pluralist, nationalist, anti-globalist and anti-multilateralist,
whereby populism per se is treated as a monolithic and dangerous social
phenomenon. After all, if populism did not have any shared (minimal)
programmatic outlook, then it would make no sense to define and analyse
populism as ideology. As a result, it has become a common practice in
IR scholarship to arbitrarily associate populism in general with particular
foreign policy positions and to claim for example that “[o]nce populists
gain office, their political anti-globalist, illiberal, transactional, or isola-
tionist tendencies shape foreign policy” (Lacatus and Meibauer 2022:
442). However, none of these studies actually proves that these foreign
policy positions result from populism rather than the non-populist ‘thick’
ideology and their limited empirical focus on right-wing populism further
distorts their research findings. In the first book-length IR study on
populism, Stengel et al. (2019: 2–3) have already warned about this
tendency of treating populism as a “monolith” insofar as IR studies fail
to distinguish “between left and right or moderate and extremist groups”
and “inclusionary/exclusionary forms of populism” and instead “lump
vastly heterogeneous actors and ideologies together and make a sweeping
statement labeling all of them a danger to democracy, Europe, the West
or liberal world order”. Unfortunately, this warning has been in vain and
large parts of IR scholarship have done exactly this.
This tendency has been particularly visible in the vast policy-oriented
IR literature on populism. Though many of these studies do not even
bother to define populism or employ a very imprecise conception of it,
they typically all understand populism as ideology insofar as they link
populism to a set of political beliefs, attitudes, goals and policies. Francis
Fukuyama and Robert Muggah (2018) argue that populists “appeal to
‘true’ citizens to reclaim their homeland, through border walls and trade
protectionism” and pose “a grave threat to liberal democracy, and to the
liberal international order on which peace and prosperity have rested for
the past two generations”. Similarly, Jeff Colgan and Robert Keohane
(2017) treat populists as a monolithic threat to democracy and the
liberal international order, since every “populist leader claims to repre-
sent the people and seeks to weaken or destroy institutions such as
36 T. WOJCZEWSKI
legislatures, judiciaries, and the press and to cast off external restraints
in defense of national sovereignty”. In her discussion of the challenges
to liberal internationalism, Beate Jahn equates populism with right-wing
populism, arguing that “populist movements systematically target and
aim to dismantle these achievements”: “They attack multilateralism and
put ‘America [or Britain, or France] first’; they prioritize national over
international law, citizenship over human rights; they cooperate with
authoritarian regimes; they drop free trade agreements, withdraw from
free trade blocs and pursue protectionist policies; they attempt to block
migration and travel, and thus build walls rather than bridges between
states” (Jahn 2018: 48).
In contrast to such sweeping generalizations, populism scholarship
generally agrees that populism comes in different forms and that
the demands formulated by so-called populists can, despite a shared
anti-establishment outlook and concern for popular sovereignty, differ
significantly from context to context. Due to an imprecise conception
of populism and the almost exclusive empirical focus on right-wing
populism, such nuances are often missed by large parts of IR scholarship
and instead a range of different political actors is lumped together under
the label of populism and attributed a shared reactionary, anti-pluralist
and nationalist worldview, whereby populism automatically becomes a
threat to liberal democracy and global order. As we will see in the
following section, such an understanding and discussion of populism is
both from an analytical and normative perspective highly problematic
and raises, against the backdrop of the proliferation of such accounts in
academia, media and politics, important questions for populism scholar-
ship both in IR and beyond.
Resisting the Populist Hype?

It is arguably not surprising that IR scholarship tends to use the term
populism in a sweeping, imprecise, alarmist and pejorative manner; rather
it replicates the way in which populism is often used in academic
and public discourses and embodies—what critics have called—the “pop-
ulist hype” (Glynos and Mondon 2016; De Cleen et al. 2018; Maiguashca
2019; cf. also Stengel 2019). This populist hype has three main features:
First, the excessive use of the label populism and the exaggeration of
its significance as a political phenomenon, manifesting in sensational and
hyperbolic descriptions such as the “populist wave” (Aslanidis 2016b)
or the “populist explosion” (Judis 2016). As Maiguashca (2019: 769)

observed, “there has been a meteoric rise in the use of the term populism
as a blanket descriptor for radical or ‘insurgent’ politics of all persuasions”.
This trend can be observed at least since Donald Trump’s presiden-
tial campaign and the Brexit referendum in 2016 and reflects in the
massive proliferation of books, articles and media reports on the topic
since then. The sheer volume of the media and academic discourse on
populism raises the question to what extent scholars and journalists have
themselves unleashed the ‘populist wave’ and exaggerated its signifi-
cance by “treating populism as a phenomenon ‘as such’ (rather than
as a dimension of certain sorts of politics); and relying predominantly
on the concept of populism to elucidate, diagnose and indeed explain
that very phenomenon (rather than through a more systematic refer-
ence to notions other than populism)” (De Cleen and Glynos 2021:
182). When IR scholars, for example, speak of “the foreign policies of
populist governments” (Wajner 2021), “populist leaders” and their “pop-
ulist foreign policy” (Destradi and Plagemann 2019), “the foreign policy
of the populist party” (Verbeek and Zaslove 2017) or how “populist
government formation (or participation) concretely influences foreign
policy” (Destradi et al. 2021), they foreground populism at the expense
of—to use Mudde’s terminology—the ‘thicker’ host ideologies and make
populism the central and defining feature of certain political phenomena
and actors.
Second, this problem is amplified by the widespread tendency to
analytically and/or empirically conflate populism with other concepts and
phenomena such as nationalism, authoritarianism or the radical right. In
their widely cited study Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic
Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash, Inglehart and Norris (2016: 6f.),
for example, argue—with reference to Mudde’s ideational approach—
that “populist philosophy is a loose set of ideas that share three core
features: anti-establishment, authoritarianism, and nativism” and suggest
that populism “might equally well be described as xenophobic authoritari-
anism”. This is obviously a misreading of Mudde’s work in which he seeks
to identify the main ideological features of the populist radical right and
argues that nativism and authoritarianism rather than populism constitute
the ideological core of this party family (Mudde 2007). Such nonchalant
handling of definitions and concepts is, however, rather symptomatic for
the way in which populism is often conceived in the academic discourse.
This problem also manifests in the common conception of populism as
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und des südlich davon gelegenen Landes setzte. Leicht konnte er
dann den Hauptteil unseres Kriegsmaterials und den Apparat
unserer Etappenverbindungen, die in der Hauptsache vom mittleren
Rufiji nach Liwale zu liefen, in die Hand bekommen. Ich mußte daher
auf seine Bewegungen mit unseren vor Kibata stehenden
Hauptkräften reagieren und marschierte mit dem größeren Teil
derselben nach dem Utungisee ab, um von dort aus zur
Unterstützung des Hauptmanns Otto oder zur Ausnutzung einer sich
bietenden günstigen Lage bereit zu sein.
Achter Abschnitt
Sorgen und Bedrängnisse während des
Aufenthalts im Rufijigebiet
U nser Abmarsch von Kibata ging am ersten Tage programmäßig

vonstatten. Am nächsten Tage ritt ich mit einigen Begleitern
voraus in der Erwartung, daß die Truppen, die einige eingeborene
Führer bei sich hatten, den Weg nicht verfehlen würden. In den
Kissibergen fanden wir zahlreiche Eingeborene vor, die aber sehr
scheu waren und vielfach bei unserer Annäherung ihre reichen
Reisbestände im Stich ließen. Ich habe es noch an demselben Tage
bedauert, von dieser reichen Verpflegung nichts für den eigenen
Gebrauch entnommen zu haben. Wir Reiter rasteten während der
Mittagshitze im Pori. Einige Landeskundige machten mich auf die
erfrischende, stark blausäurehaltige Mbinjifrucht aufmerksam, an der
wir uns labten. Leider wußten wir damals noch nicht, daß auch der
geröstete Mbinjikern eine vortreffliche Nahrung darstellt, ähnlich
unserer Haselnuß. Die Hitze war zum Umfallen, aber da wir im
Bereich der feindlichen Patrouillen waren, mußten wir aufmerksam
sein. Die Wasserstellen waren jetzt in der äußersten Trockenzeit
leer; nach langem Suchen fanden wir endlich einen kleinen Tümpel
zwar schmutzigen, aber von Landeskundigen als nicht
gesundheitsschädlich bezeichneten Wassers. Gegen Abend
erreichten wir die verlassene große Niederlassung. Glücklicherweise
fanden wir dort einen im deutschen Verwaltungsdienste stehenden
Schwarzen vor, der uns darüber orientierte, daß dies Ungwara,
unser für diesen Tag in Aussicht genommenes Marschziel, sei. Nach
Durchschreiten des Ortes zeigte der Mann uns einen Wassertümpel,
an dem wir Lager bezogen. Mein schwarzer Koch, der alte bärtige,
bei vielen Ostafrikanern wohlbekannte Baba, hatte mit uns Reitern
fast Schritt gehalten und traf nach kurzer Zeit, unserer Spur folgend,
ein. Schnell hatte er für sich seinen „Ugali“ (Brei) zurechtgemacht
und saß behaglich am Feuer. Wir sahen ihm neidisch zu; denn wir
hatten nichts und warteten auf unsere Lasten und die nachfolgende
Truppe. Aber niemand kam, und wir legten uns hungrig schlafen. Der
Retter in der Not nahte aber in Gestalt einer prachtvollen
Säbelantilope, die bei fast tageshellem Mondschein zur Tränke
wechselte. Fast gleichzeitig krachten die beiden Schüsse zweier
meiner Begleiter, van Rooyen und Nieuwenhuizen, der
jagderprobten Buren, die deutsch geworden waren. Wie elektrisiert
waren wir aus unseren Decken emporgeschnellt, und nach kurzer
Zeit brieten die ersten Stücke des delikaten Wildbrets am Spieße.
Am nächsten Tage erreichten wir den Utungisee, wo uns
Hauptmann Feilke erwartete und mit Brot, Kaffee und aus Wildpret
hergestellter Wurst erfrischte. Von den nachfolgenden Truppen fehlte
jede Spur. Sie hatten uns im Pori verloren und sich fast alle so
gründlich verlaufen, daß ein Teil derselben erst nach Tagen in der
Gegend von Utete unsere Telephonlinie erreichte und mit uns in
Verbindung trat. Bei der Schwierigkeit der Verbindungen war es mir
bisher nicht möglich gewesen, über den Stand unserer Verpflegung
ein zutreffendes Bild zu erhalten. Ich hatte geglaubt, am Utungisee,
bei Mpaganja sowie in der Gegend von Madaba wohlgefüllte
Magazine vorzufinden. Dies war meine Absicht gewesen, als ich aus
dem reichen Gebiet nördlich des unteren Rufiji Verpflegung mit aller
Anspannung über Mpaganja in das Etappengebiet abtransportierte.
Die Verpflegungslage hatte sich aber ganz anders entwickelt.
Im Etappengebiet war außer den Trägermassen, die zum
Abtransport der Kriegsbestände nach Süden nötig waren, noch eine
Menge Personal gehalten worden, das zum Wegebau, zum Bau von
Grashütten und zu anderen Zwecken verwendet wurde. Auch auf
den kleinen Etappenorten lagen eine Anzahl Leute herum, die auch
im günstigsten Falle nichts anderes taten, als ihre eigene
Verpflegung herbeizuholen und aufzuessen. Oft aber wurde auch
dieses Heranholen der Verpflegung noch wieder durch andere Leute
besorgt, die ihrerseits wieder verpflegt werden mußten. Es war in
vielen Fällen beinahe so, daß eine Last Verpflegung, die bei der
fechtenden Truppe nördlich des unteren Rufiji gesammelt und
abgeschickt worden war, schließlich in einem kleinen Etappenort
landete und von Leuten verzehrt wurde, die nichts oder etwas ganz
Nebensächliches leisteten. Bei den schwierigen
Verkehrsverhältnissen und den großen Entfernungen war es auch
dem tätigen und durchgreifenden Hauptmann Stemmermann, der
die Leitung des Etappenwesens übernommen hatte, noch nicht
gelungen, in diese Verhältnisse vollen Einblick zu erhalten und die
Mißstände abzustellen. Es gab auch in Afrika zuviel Leute, deren
Hang, die vorhandenen wertvollen Kräfte für nebensächliche Dinge
zu verwenden und dadurch wichtigere Dinge zu schädigen, so groß
ist, daß nur ein eiserner Besen Wandel schaffen konnte. Das
Gesamtergebnis aller dieser Hemmungen war, daß Tausende und
aber Tausende von Nichtstuern die Bestände verzehrten, die mit
großen Anstrengungen im Bereich der fechtenden Truppe
gesammelt worden waren. Die Etappe leistete nichts für die
Verpflegung der Truppe, lebte im Gegenteil noch auf deren Kosten,
und dabei stand der Augenblick in greifbarer Nähe, wo wir die
Verpflegungsgebiete, die zur Zeit von der fechtenden Truppe
gehalten wurden, aufgeben mußten. Da war guter Rat teuer. Mit
allem Nachdruck mußte auf sofortigen Anbau in dem augenblicklich
von uns besetzten Gebiete, also der Umgebung von Madaba und
Liwale, dann aber auch in den weiter südlich gelegenen Teilen des
Schutzgebietes, die voraussichtlich für die späteren Operationen in
erster Linie in Frage kamen, gesorgt werden. Aber das
Heranwachsen aller dieser Verpflegung erforderte Monate. Diese
Monate mußten wir noch am Rufiji bleiben und hier leben. Hier
waren zwar einige hundert Hektar Mais angepflanzt worden, aber
auch diese mußten erst voll heranreifen. Nicht früher durfte aus
Verpflegungsgründen die Truppe nach Süden rücken; sie mußte sich
in dem verpflegungsarmen Gebiet halten, in dem sie augenblicklich
lag.
Die Erfüllung dieser Aufgabe war schwierig. Eine Forderung
mußte sofort durchgeführt werden: das Abschieben aller Esser, die
für die Kriegführung der nächsten Monate nicht unbedingt notwendig
waren. So wurden Tausende von Trägern und Arbeitern des
Etappengebietes nach ihrer Heimat entlassen. Die großen Nachteile
dieser Maßregel mußten bewußt mit in Kauf genommen werden;
lieferten wir doch dem Feinde Tausende von Leuten, deren
Aussagen ihm ein bis ins einzelne gehendes Bild unserer
Verteilungsstärke, Verpflegungslage und inneren Verhältnisse geben
mußte. Die Verringerung des Etappenpersonals allem genügte
jedoch nicht. Auch das nichtfechtende Personal der Kompagnien
wurde verringert. Unter anderem wurde bestimmt, daß für keinen
Europäer von jetzt ab mehr als fünf Farbige zuständig sein durften.
Das klingt für europäische Ohren reichlich, aber unter afrikanischen
Verhältnissen ist für den Europäer eine farbige Bedienung wirklich
unerläßlich, also mindestens ein Mann oder Junge, der kocht und
die persönlichen Dienste verrichtet. Dazu kommt, daß alles
Eigentum an Bekleidung, Verpflegung, Decken und Zeltmaterial
dauernd mitgeführt werden muß. Wenn man bedenkt, daß im
Frieden für den reisenden Beamten auf einer größeren Safari
(Reise) elf bis dreizehn Träger außer seinen zwei bis drei
persönlichen Dienern zuständig waren, so wird man verstehen, wie
einschneidend die vom Kommando angeordnete Beschränkung war
und welchen Sturm der Entrüstung sie erregte. Glücklicherweise war
ich in der Lage, allen Einwendungen, die mir vom gesundheitlichen
und kulturellen Standpunkt aus gemacht wurden, die einfache
Tatsache gegenüberzuhalten, daß ich selbst seit Monaten statt mit
drei mit knapp zwei Lasten, also im ganzen mit vier Schwarzen,
ausgekommen und dabei gesund geblieben war. Besondere
Dankbarkeit empfinde ich noch jetzt gegen die Offiziere der Truppe,
die, wie bei so vielen anderen Gelegenheiten, die Notwendigkeit
einer unbequemen Maßregel einsahen und mit bestem Beispiel
vorangingen. Sie sahen die richtige Auffassung unserer
Offiziersüberlieferung darin, daß sie nicht besondere
Bequemlichkeiten für sich beanspruchten, sondern gerade in erster
Linie die unvermeidbaren Unbequemlichkeiten auf sich nahmen. Ich
glaube, daß von allen, Soldaten und Nichtsoldaten, bis in die
höchsten Zivilstellen hinauf, nicht einer ist, der die anfänglich so hart
bekämpfte Maßregel jetzt noch verurteilte.
Jedoch durch das Abschieben der „Esser“ allein war das
Existenzproblem noch nicht zu lösen; die Bestände langten einfach
nicht. Es war schon damals vorauszusehen, daß die
Verpflegungseinfuhr aus dem Gebiet der fechtenden Truppe, die
natürlich mit Hochdruck weiterbetrieben wurde, nicht ausreichen
würde, um uns bis zum Beginn der neuen Ernte, also bis Ende März,
zu verpflegen. Bei aller eingehenden und reiflichen Überlegung
kamen wir nicht um die Notwendigkeit herum, auch die
Verpflegungssätze herunterzusetzen, eine außerordentlich
unsympathische Maßregel, da auch der Schwarze, wenn Verlaß auf
ihn sein soll, gut verpflegt sein muß. Es entlud sich denn auch ein
neuer und sehr viel stärkerer Sturm der Entrüstung. Von allen Seiten
kamen die Schreiben und Telegramme, daß die auf täglich 600 g
Mehl festgesetzte Menge von Zerealien die für den Körper
erforderliche Kalorienzahl nicht liefern könnte. Aber auch hier stand
die unerbittliche Tatsache fest, daß eben nur soundso viel
Verpflegung vorhanden war und wir mit dieser auskommen mußten.
Die Herabsetzung der Zerealienportion war nicht zu umgehen. Im
übrigen mußten die Kompagnien und der einzelne für einen
entsprechenden Ausgleich durch die Ergebnisse der Jagd sorgen,
was bei dem wildreichen Gebiet bei einiger Rührigkeit auch zu
erreichen war. Aber in Verpflegungssachen ist nun einmal die Logik
bei vielen etwas beeinträchtigt, und für manchen war es nicht allzu
schwer, alle Schuld für die zur Zeit kaum ausreichende Verpflegung
auf den bösen Kommandeur zu schieben und selbst die Rolle
dessen zu spielen, der mit allen Kräften für die baldige
Wiederheraufsetzung des täglichen Verpflegungssatzes arbeitete.
Ich mußte dies mit Gemütsruhe über mich ergehen lassen und
machte meine Beobachtungen darüber, welche Leute imstande
waren, sich mit einer unerbittlichen Notwendigkeit abzufinden oder
welchen dies nicht gelang.
Die Ausführung dieser einschneidenden Anordnungen geriet nun
auf Schwierigkeiten. Eine Menge von Askarifrauen hatten die Truppe
begleitet, waren dann aber in verschiedenen Lagern am Rufiji
hängengeblieben, wo es ihnen gerade gefiel. Ich hatte das größte
Interesse, sie nach Süden abzuschieben, wo die Verpflegung
leichter durchführbar war. Die Transporte wurden auch eingerichtet
und die Frauen für den Marsch mit Verpflegung ausgerüstet. Aber
schon nach einem kurzen Tagemarsch blieben sie einfach liegen
und erklärten, nicht weitergehen zu können. Ihre auf längere Zeit
berechnete Verpflegung hatten sie spätestens am dritten Tage
aufgegessen und schrien nun nach mehr. Einige fielen sogar über
den Europäer her, der den Transport führte, und verprügelten ihn.
Auch unter der schwarzen Farbe machte das holde Geschlecht von
den Vorzügen, die ihm in seiner Gesamtheit mit Recht
zugeschrieben werden, nicht immer uneingeschränkten Gebrauch.
Schließlich kamen wir aber auch über diese Schwierigkeit
hinweg, und die Verpflegungsfrage löste sich leidlich. Die Askari,
denen die Lage auseinandergesetzt wurde, sahen die
Schwierigkeiten ein und waren recht verständig. Gute Jäger wurden
auf die weiten Jagdgründe verteilt und der knurrende Magen dann
von Zeit zu Zeit wieder reichlicher gefüllt. Ich entsinne mich, daß bei
uns am Utungisee unsere etwa 200 Schwarzen an einem Tage einen
starken Büffel und im Anschluß daran noch einen Elefanten restlos
verzehrten. Auch den durchziehenden Trägerkarawanen konnte
häufig ein Stück Wildbret verabfolgt werden.
Im Laufe des Februar schrumpften die Bestände unserer
Magazine, die ich mir täglich notierte, zusammen. Ich mußte
befürchten, daß ich aus Verpflegungsgründen das Heranreifen der
neuen Ernte am Rufiji nicht abwarten könnte. Dann war nicht nur
diese Ernte verloren, sondern auch die weiter südlich
heranwachsenden Bestände konnten nicht voll ausgenutzt werden.
Dort würden wir nur die gerade reifen Früchte verbrauchen und
weiterziehen, den Rest unreif stehenlassen müssen. Ein glücklicher
Zufall brachte mir in dieser Verlegenheit Hilfe. Ich ging eines Tages
vom Utungisee nach Mpanganja zu Hauptmann Tafel, der dort mit
bewährter Umsicht die taktischen und zugleich die
Verpflegungsangelegenheiten leitete. Nachts blieb ich in seinem
Lager, und er setzte mir ein sehr schönes Gericht aus jungem Mais
vor, der wie Spargel zubereitet war. So kamen wir auf die Maisfelder
von Mpanganja und Umgebung zu sprechen. Diese saßen voll von
Frauen und anderen Eingeborenen, die dort wie ein Flug Zugvögel
eingefallen waren und von der jungen, ganz unreifen Frucht lebten.
Das war so unwirtschaftlich wie möglich, aber es brachte mich doch
auf den Gedanken, im Notfalle die Maisbestände schon vor ihrer
Reife in größerem Umfange ausnutzen zu können. Dieser Notfall trat
nun sehr bald ein, und ein Versuch mit den in der Reife am weitesten
vorgeschrittenen Körnern ergab, daß diese aus einer Darre notreif
getrocknet werden und aus ihnen ein recht gutes Mehl hergestellt
werden konnte. Es wurden nun von Tag zu Tag die reifsten Kolben
abgeerntet, und da die Gesamtbestände immer weiter heranreiften,
so besserte sich die Verpflegungslage von Tag zu Tag. Schon am 1.
März konnten die Rationen auf 700 g, also fast auf die volle Höhe
des früheren Satzes, heraufgesetzt werden.
Die zunehmende Verschärfung der gesamten Kriegslage
erforderte eine intensivere und straffere Ausnutzung unserer
Verpflegungsmöglichkeiten; die ruhige und langsame
Verpflegungsbeschaffung, wie sie im ersten Teil des Krieges von den
Zivilbehörden in befriedigendem Maße geleistet worden war, war
jetzt nicht mehr ausreichend. Zweimal, bei Kissaki und am Rufiji, war
ich unvorhergesehenerweise in die schwierigste Verpflegungslage
gekommen, die Weiterführung der Operationen in Frage gestellt
worden. Eine straffere Organisation des Verpflegungswesens, die
die militärischen Notwendigkeiten erkannte, vorausschauend
berücksichtigte und schneller und durchgreifender arbeitete, war
eine Lebensfrage für die weitere Kriegführung. Glücklicherweise ließ
sich auch der Gouverneur hiervon überzeugen, und so wurde eine
aus einer Anzahl Truppenangehöriger neugebildete
Intendanturabteilung über Liwale nach Massassi vorausgesandt. Sie
richtete mehrere Unterabteilungen im Anschluß an die Nebenstellen
der Verwaltung im Bezirk Lindi ein und hat auf diese Weise Hand in
Hand mit den Zivilorganen dort den Anbau und das Ansammeln der
Verpflegung in Magazine vorbereitet und später durchgeführt. Durch
diese Einrichtung wurde die angestrebte Durchtränkung des
Verpflegungs- und Nachschubapparates mit dem unvermeidlichen
militärischen Geiste im großen und ganzen erreicht.
An Bekleidung war in damaliger Zeit kein fühlbarer Mangel, und
auch Waffen und Munition waren ausreichend vorhanden.
Wegen der Umgehungsbewegung des Feindes bei Mkalinzo, wo
starke Truppenmengen festgestellt worden waren, hatte Hauptmann
Otto das Gros seiner Abteilung von Kungulio aus nach Süden
verschoben. Nördlich Mawa deckte er das reiche Verpflegungsgebiet
von Madaba und die vom Utungisee über Mawa dorthin laufende
Transport- und Telephonstraße. Am 24. Januar 1917 wurde
Hauptmann Otto nördlich Mawa von mehreren Bataillonen der
Nigeriabrigade angegriffen. Der mit schweren Verlusten geschlagene
Feind wurde mehrere Kilometer durch den Busch verfolgt bis zu
einer verschanzten Stellung, in der er Aufnahme fand. Von Kibata
her waren die Truppen des nach unserem Abzug dort belassenen
Hauptmanns Schulz, die gelegentlich verstärkt und abgelöst wurden,
nach Kämpfen in der Gegend Kibata-Utete-Kissiberge allmählich
nach Ungwara zusammengezogen worden. Stärkere Kräfte —
festgestellt wurde eine Infanteriebrigade — waren ihnen gefolgt.
Trotz seiner numerischen Überlegenheit verliefen die einzelnen
Gefechte für den Feind meist ungünstig und recht verlustreich.
Hauptmann von Lieberman, Hauptmann Goering, Hauptmann Koehl
und zahlreiche Patrouillenführer schlugen häufig um das Doppelte
und mehr überlegene Abteilungen Inder oder schwarzer Soldaten
vollständig und erbeuteten Gewehre, Maschinengewehre und
Munition. Der lange Krieg hatte eine große Anzahl tüchtiger
Unterführer erzeugt, und das Beispiel, wie es der später gefallene
Oberleutnant Kroeger gab, rief unbegrenzte Unternehmungslust und
Wagemut hervor. Ohne nach der Stärke des Feindes zu fragen, war
er häufig mit wenigen Mann im dichten Busch dem Feinde sofort mit
aufgepflanztem Seitengewehr und Hurra zu Leibe gegangen und
hatte so auch bei den Askari Schule gemacht. Verschiedene farbige
Patrouillenführer taten sich hervor, und wenn später der brave
Effendi der 4. Feldkompagnie mit seiner Patrouille eine ganze
indische Kompagnie in selbständigem Gefecht schlug, so verdanken
wir dies der hier bei Ungwara durchgemachten Schulung.
Die Gefahr für unsere über Madaba und Liwale nach Süden
gehende Verbindung durch einen starken Feind, der westlich Kibata
stand, war zu offenkundig, und es war notwendig für uns, für
ausreichenden Schutz zu sorgen. Dies bedingte eine allmähliche
Verschiebung unserer Kräfte vom Rufiji aus nach Süden um so
mehr, als die Verpflegungsbestände im Gebiet dieses Flusses sich
ihrem Ende näherten und die großen Regen vor der Tür standen.
Es war von besonderer Wichtigkeit, die Gebiete des Rufiji nicht
vor dem Einsetzen dieser großen Regen zu räumen. Gelang dies, so
stand ein erheblicher Zeitgewinn für uns zu erwarten, da während
der Regen selbst und in der Zeit nach ihnen die Operationen
notgedrungen stillstanden, die Feldfrüchte, besonders der Mtama
(Hirse), also ausreifen konnten.
Als die Wanderungen der Ameisen gezeigt hatten, daß die
großen Regen bevorstanden, war vorbeugend vom Kommando
befohlen worden, daß Frauen, Kinder und Nichtkombattanten in
möglichst großer Anzahl auf das Nordufer des Rufiji übergesetzt und
von dort weiter nach Daressalam transportiert wurden. Daß diese
durch die Regen und die Verpflegungsmaßnahme bedingte
unvermeidliche Maßnahme viele Mißbilligung hervorrief, darum
durfte ich mich ebensowenig wie bei anderen Entrüstungsstürmen
kümmern. Ich stehe aber auch jetzt noch auf dem Standpunkt, daß
das frühzeitige Abschieben dieser Leute mehr in ihrem eigenen
Interesse lag, als daß sie noch einen Teil der Regenzeit im
aufgeweichten Boden oder in überschwemmten Wohnungen ohne
ausreichende Verpflegung hätten zubringen müssen.
Die Regen, die Ende März einsetzen, waren 1917 ganz
besonders stark. Unser etwas erhöht liegender Lagerplatz am
Utungisee wurde zu einer Insel, von der aus der Verkehr durch den
Wald zum Rufiji nur durch Boote möglich war. Eine Anzahl Leute ist
während der Regenzeit im Walde ertrunken, andere flüchteten sich
tagelang auf die Bäume. Das Wasser stieg so hoch, daß es in
Mpanganja in die erhöht liegenden Wohnräume der Europäer und in
die Lazarettgebäude eindrang und allen Unrat in Bewegung setzte.
Ein Verbleiben von Frauen und Kindern, Kranken und Verwundeten
war ganz unmöglich, und so mußten sie sich nach dem Abzug der
Truppe an die Engländer wenden, die auch in Würdigung der
Notlage für Verpflegung und Abtransport sorgten.
Das Gros der Truppe marschierte rechtzeitig aus den
Überschwemmungsgebieten des Rufiji und des Utungisees nach
Süden weiter, nachdem sie aus der am Rufiji vorhandenen
Verpflegung fast bis auf das letzte Korn Nutzen gezogen hatte. Der
Abmarsch vollzog sich ganz allmählich und staffelweise; in Mpotora,
das Hauptmann Rothe mit seinen zwei Kompagnien, die die
Portugiesen bei Newala geschlagen hatten, in einem verschanzten
Lager besetzt hielt, sammelte sich der größere Teil der Truppe. Am
Rufiji blieben nur kleinere Abteilungen, die sich allmählich bis zur
Stärke von Patrouillen schwächten. Vier Tagemärsche östlich von
Madaba bot sich den Abteilungen Koehl und Goering Gelegenheit zu
erfolgreichen Unternehmungen gegen feindliche Abteilungen, die am
Westrande der Matumbiberge standen. Aber allmählich wurden alle
unsere Abteilungen nach Mpotora herangezogen, und nur
Hauptmann Otto blieb in dem höher gelegenen Gebiet von Madaba
stehen.
Neunter Abschnitt
Das Ende der Grenzenverteidigung auf den
Nebenschauplätzen
M ajor Kraut war im August 1916 von Kilossa aus schrittweise auf
Mahenge ausgewichen und hatte bei Kidodi am Ruaha nur die
Abteilung Schoenfeld belassen.
Die Truppen des Hauptmanns Braunschweig traten unter Befehl
des Majors Kraut. Von diesen war Ende Mai 1916 Hauptmann
Falkenstein mit der 5. Feldkompagnie von Ipyana, Hauptmann
Aumann mit seiner Kompagnie aus Gegend Mbozi unter dauernden
kleinen Scharmützeln in Richtung auf Lupembe und Madibira
zurückgegangen. Gegen den mindestens eine Brigade starken,
nachdrängenden Feind mußte unseren schwachen Abteilungen ein
Halt gegeben werden. Ende Juni 1916 war deshalb Hauptmann
Braunschweig, der sich in Dodoma befand, über Iringa entsandt und
durch Kompagnien, die von den Kondoatruppen und von
Daressalam herangezogen wurden, auf fünf Kompagnien gebracht
worden, einschließlich der beiden Kompagnien aus Langenburg.
Auch 100 Mann der „Königsberg“-Besatzung (aus Daressalam) und
eine Feldhaubitze gehörten zu seiner Abteilung. Bei Malangali nahm
er den Angriff des Feindes an und brachte diesem anscheinend
auch erhebliche Verluste bei. Dann aber räumte er die Stellung und
ließ die schwer transportierbare Haubitze stehen, nachdem sie
unbrauchbar gemacht worden war. Braunschweigs Lage wurde
dadurch erschwert, daß in seinem Rücken ein großer
Wahehehäuptling aufstand und mit allen Leuten und Vieh zum
Feinde überging. Hauptmann Braunschweig wich dann in einer
ganzen Reihe kleiner Nachhutgefechte auf Mahenge zu aus und
wurde dem Major Kraut unterstellt. Nach zahlreichen kleinen
Gefechten hielten dessen vorgeschobene Abteilungen im großen
und ganzen die Linie des Ruhudje- und Ruahaflusses. In dem
reichen Bezirk von Mahenge war die Verpflegung ausgezeichnet,
auch nachdem ein großer Teil des westlich des Ruhudje belegenen
Reisgebietes aufgegeben war. An diesem Fluß, bei Mkapira, hatte
der Feind ein starkes befestigtes Lager bezogen. Wenn dieses auch
durch einen gewaltsamen Angriff bei unseren Mitteln nicht
einzunehmen war, so bot sich doch Gelegenheit, auf den Feind
durch das Abschneiden seiner nach Lupembe führenden Verbindung
so einzuwirken, daß er wegen Nahrungsmangel aus seinen
Verschanzungen herauskommen mußte.
Askari
Major Kraut überschritt mit fünf Kompagnien und einem leichten
Geschütz den Fluß und bezog im Rücken des Feindes, quer über
dessen Verbindungslinie, auf einem Kranze von Höhen befestigte
Stellungen. In der Front des Feindes deckten schwache Truppen
das nach Mahenge zu gelegene Flußufer. Leider waren die
Befestigungen unserer einzelnen Kompagnien so weit voneinander
entfernt, daß in dem schwer passierbaren Gelände eine rechtzeitige
Unterstützung nicht gewährleistet war. Am 30. Oktober 1916 vor
Tagesanbruch wurde die auf dem rechten Flügel stehende 10.
Kompagnie durch einen umfassenden feindlichen Angriff überrascht.
Der Feind drang sehr geschickt auch von rückwärts in die Stellung
der Kompagnie ein und setzte unter schweren Verlusten für uns die
Maschinengewehre außer Gefecht. Auch auf dem linken Flügel
wurde die Kompagnie des Oberleutnants von Schroetter von allen
Seiten angegriffen und mußte sich mit dem Bajonett unter Verlust
des leichten Geschützes und eines Maschinengewehres den Weg
nach außen bahnen. Bei den schweren Verlusten, die der Feind
erlitten hatte, hätte Major Kraut trotz diesen teilweisen Mißerfolgen
auf dem westlichen Ufer des Ruhudje bleiben können; aber auch in
seinem Rücken, nach Lupembe zu, wurde Gefechtslärm bei der ihn
deckenden 25. Feldkompagnie hörbar. Irrtümlicherweise glaubte
Major Kraut an einen starken Angriff auch von dort her und ging
deshalb auf das östliche Ruhudjeufer zurück. Zu seinem Erstaunen
waren die starken Befestigungen des Feindes bei Mkapira nach
einigen Tagen verlassen, der Feind nachts abgezogen. Nähere
Untersuchung ergab, daß der Gegner bei dem vorhergehenden
Gefecht sehr schwere Verluste erlitten hatte. Doch war hierdurch
sein Abzug nicht zu erklären; die Lösung dieses Rätsels ergab sich
erst später durch das Erscheinen des Generals Wahle, mit dem bis
dahin jede Verbindung gefehlt hatte.
In Erwartung der Anfang 1916 einsetzenden großen Offensive
waren die Verstärkungen, die vorübergehend zum Viktoriasee, nach
Ruanda, zum Russissi und in das Tanganjikagebiet entsandt worden
waren, zurückgezogen worden und zu unseren, im Gebiet der
Nordbahn stehenden Haupttruppen gestoßen. Es mußte für diese
Nebenkriegsschauplätze eine einheitliche Kriegführung geschaffen
werden; zu diesem Zweck wurde ein „Westbefehl“ unter
Generalmajor Wahle geschaffen, der im allgemeinen von Tabora aus
diese Operationen leitete und in Einklang miteinander brachte. Im
April und Mai 1916, als die britischen Hauptkräfte im Gebiet des
Kilimandjaro ihren Aufmarsch vollendet hatten und nach Schluß der
Regenzeit in südlicher Richtung weiter vordrangen, begannen auch
auf diesen Nebenkriegsschauplätzen Engländer und Belgier von
Muansa, vom Kiwusee, vom Russissi und von Bismarckburg her
konzentrisch auf Tabora vorzudrücken. Unsere schwachen
Abteilungen wichen auf diesen Ort zu aus.
Major von Langenn ging von Tschangugu zunächst auf Issawi
zurück und zog hierher auch Hauptmann Wintgens von Kissenji her
heran. Den nachdrängenden beiden belgischen Brigaden wurden
gelegentlich in günstigen Rückzugsgefechten erhebliche Verluste
beigebracht. Das deutsche Detachement wich dann weiter auf
Mariahilf aus. Die Gefahr, die das Vordringen der nachfolgenden
starken belgischen Kräfte für unseren Bezirk Bukoba in sich schloß,
war von Hauptmann Gudovius richtig erkannt worden. Als im Juni
1916 stärkere englische Truppen über den Kagera vordrangen, wich
er mit seiner Abteilung von Bukoba nach Süden aus. Bei der
Schwierigkeit der Verbindung und des Nachrichtenwesens geschah
ihm hierbei das Unglück, daß ein Teil seiner Truppe am 3. Juli in der
Gegend von Ussuwi auf starke belgische Streitkräfte stieß.
Hauptmann Gudovius selbst fiel, durch schweren Unterleibsschuß
verwundet, in Feindeshand. Das Gefecht nahm für uns einen
ungünstigen Verlauf und war verlustreich. Doch glückte es den
einzelnen Teilen der Abteilung, sich nach Muansa und nach
Uschirombe durchzuschlagen.
Mitte Juli 1916 gelang den Engländern die überraschende
Landung etwa einer Brigade in der Gegend von Muansa. Auch dort
kam es zu einigen für uns günstigen Teilgefechten, dann aber wich
der Führer, Hauptmann von Chappuis, in Richtung auf Tabora aus.
In der ungefähren Linie Schinjanga-St. Michael machten die Truppen
aus Muansa sowie diejenigen des Majors von Langenn und des
Hauptmanns Wintgens erneut Front und wiesen mehrere Angriffe
der Belgier ab. Kapitän Zimmer hatte in Kigoma den Dampfer
„Goetzen“ versenkt und den Dampfer „Wami“ gesprengt. Er wich
dann langsam längs der Bahn nach Tabora zurück. Ein gleiches tat
die Kompagnie des Hauptmanns Hering von Usumbura aus. Die
Annäherung der Operationen an Tabora gab dem General Wahle
Gelegenheit, rasch Teile der nördlich Tabora stehenden Truppen
heranzuziehen, mit der Bahn zu einem kurzen Schlage nach Westen
vorzuschieben und schnell wieder zurückzutransportieren. Die 8.
Feldkompagnie schlug bei dieser Gelegenheit westlich Tabora ein
belgisches Bataillon gründlich, und auch Abteilung Wintgens griff
überraschend und erfolgreich sowohl westlich wie nördlich Tabora
ein. Diese Teilerfolge waren manchmal recht erheblich, und der
Feind verlor an einzelnen Gefechtstagen Hunderte von Gefallenen,
auch wurden mehrere leichte Haubitzen im Sturm genommen.
In der Gegend von Bismarckburg war am 2. Juni 1916 die 29.
Feldkompagnie in ihrer befestigten Stellung auf dem Namemaberge
durch überlegene englische und belgische Truppen umstellt worden.
Beim Durchbruch durch diese geriet der tapfere Kompagnieführer
Oberleutnant d. R. Franken schwer verwundet in Gefangenschaft.
Leutnant d. R. Haßlacher wich Schritt für Schritt auf Tabora zurück.
Er fand südlich dieses Ortes in einem Patrouillengefecht den
Heldentod.
So waren im September 1916 die Truppen des
Westbefehlshabers im wesentlichen um Tabora versammelt, und es
war der Augenblick zu einem im großen und ganzen festgelegten
Ausweichen in südöstlicher Richtung gekommen. Von den letzten
Operationen und von der Einnahme Taboras am 19. September
1916 erfuhr das Kommando erst sehr viel später. Vorderhand
bestand keine Verbindung mit dem Westbefehlshaber; diesem war
bekannt, daß bei einem Ausweichen unserer Hauptkräfte die
Gegend von Mahenge vorzugsweise in Betracht kam. Entsprechend
richtete General Wahle seine Märsche ein. Für den Transport von
Gepäck und Verpflegung konnte anfänglich die Eisenbahn benutzt
werden. Dann marschierte die östliche Kolonne unter Major von
Langenn auf Iringa, die mittlere Kolonne unter Hauptmann Wintgens,
bei der sich auch General Wahle befand, auf Madibira und die
westliche Kolonne unter Oberleutnant a. D. Huebener auf Ilembule.
So stießen sie auf die von Neulangenburg nach Iringa führenden
Verbindungen und die an dieser Straße liegenden Magazine des
Feindes. Die Abteilung Huebener verlor die Verbindung und
kapitulierte, nachdem sie bei Ilembule Ende November durch einen
überlegenen Feind eingeschlossen war, nach tapferem Gefecht.
Abteilung von Langenn hatte das Unglück, bei einem Flußübergang
in der Nähe von Iringa durch einen Feuerüberfall überrascht zu
werden und dabei viele Leute zu verlieren. Auch der dann
erfolgende Angriff auf Iringa brachte ihr Verluste und führte nicht
zum Erfolg.
Abteilung Wintgens überraschte in der Gegend von Madibira
mehrere feindliche Magazine und Kolonnen, erbeutete hierbei auch
ein Geschütz und Funkenmaterial. Ihr mehrtägiges Gefecht von
Lupembe führte bei aller Zähigkeit nicht zur Fortnahme dieses Ortes
und seiner Bestände. Der Einfluß des Vormarsches der Abteilung
Wahle auf die Kriegslage in der Gegend von Mahenge machte sich
sofort geltend. Die augenscheinlich recht guten feindlichen Truppen,
die aus ihrer festen Stellung bei Mkapira am 30. Oktober den
erfolgreichen Ausfall gegen Major Kraut gemacht hatten, fühlten sich
in ihrem Rücken aufs äußerste bedroht, räumten ihr festes Lager
und zogen wieder nach Lupembe zu ab. General Wahle übernahm
nun den gemeinsamen Befehl bei Mahenge.
Ende November 1916 waren die Truppen des Westbefehlshabers
Generals Wahle um Mahenge gruppiert. Von hier aus leitete er die
sich ungefähr bis Ssongea-Lupembe-Iringa-Kidodi erstreckenden
Operationen.
Es ist erwähnt worden, daß seit Juli 1916 jede Verbindung mit
General Wahle aufgehört hatte; erst im Oktober 1916 traten seine
Patrouillen südlich Iringa in Verbindung mit denen des Majors Kraut.
Erst jetzt, also nach dem Gefecht von Mkapira, erfuhr Major
Kraut und durch diesen auch das Kommando den Anmarsch des
Generals Wahle; ganz anders aber stellte sich die Entwicklung der
Lage in den Augen des Feindes dar. Dieser mußte in dem
Vormarsch der Kolonnen des Generals Wahle gegen die englische
von Iringa nach Langenburg führende Etappenstraße und der
zufälligen gleichzeitigen Bedrohung Mkapiras durch Major Kraut eine
großangelegte, gemeinsame Operation sehen, die seine Truppen
bei Mkapira in große Gefahr brachte, auch nachdem Major Kraut
wieder auf das östliche Ruhudjeufer zurückgegangen war. Er entzog
sich dieser durch schleunigen Abzug von Mkapira in westlicher
Richtung nach Lupembe.
Die Kolonnen des Generals Wahle sammelten sich zunächst im
Raume von Lupembe-Mkapira. Von der am weitesten westlich
marschierenden Kolonne des Oberleutnants Huebener fehlte jede
Nachricht; ihre Kapitulation bei Ilembule wurde erst viel später
bekannt.
So willkommen die Verstärkung der Westtruppen war, so traten
doch Schwierigkeiten in der Verpflegung hervor, und es wurde
notwendig, einen größeren Raum, der sich fast bis Ssongea
erstreckte, für die Verpflegung auszunutzen und zu belegen. Die
Abteilung des Majors von Grawert rückte nach Likuju, an der Straße
Ssongea-Liwale, diejenige des Majors Kraut in die Gegend von
Mpepo, und Hauptmann Wintgens schloß eine feindliche Abteilung
ein, die bei Kitanda in befestigtem Lager stand. Bald regte sich der
Feind zum Entsatz dieser Abteilung, aber die Entsatztruppen wurden
mit schweren Verlusten abgeschlagen. Gleichzeitig entwickelte sich
die Lage bei der Abteilung von Grawert außerordentlich ungünstig.
Es war dem Feinde gelungen, das Vieh dieser Abteilung
fortzutreiben. Da auch sonst in der Gegend die Verpflegung knapp
war, hielt Major von Grawert, wohl in Überschätzung der
Verpflegungsschwierigkeiten, seine Lage für hoffnungslos und
kapitulierte im Januar 1917. Ein fahrbares 8,8 cm-Marinegeschütz,
das mit großer Mühe nach Likuju transportiert worden war, fiel außer
einer Anzahl guter Maschinengewehre dem Feinde in die Hände. In
Wirklichkeit scheint die Lage der Abteilung Grawert nicht so
verzweifelt gewesen zu sein; wenigstens kam eine starke Patrouille
unter Vizefeldwebel Winzer, der nicht mit kapitulieren wollte,
unbelästigt vom Feinde in südlicher Richtung davon und fand nach
einigen Tagen schmaler Kost reichlich Verpflegung in den Gebieten
westlich Tunduru. Mir zeigte das Verhalten dieser Patrouille, daß es
auch aus anscheinend verzweifelten Lagen fast immer noch einen
Ausweg gibt, wenn der Führer entschlossen ist, auch ein großes
Risiko auf sich zu nehmen.
Die Verpflegungsschwierigkeiten des Generals Wahle wuchsen
nun immer mehr. Ob sie durch rücksichtsloses Abschieben von
Nichtkombattanten in der Art, wie es am Rufiji geschehen war,
erheblich hätten vermindert werden können oder ob eine größere
Gewandtheit in der Beschaffung und Verteilung der Lebensmittel
imstande gewesen wäre, die materielle Lage der Westtruppen
wesentlich zu verbessern, war ich vom Utungisee nicht in der Lage
zu entscheiden. Die behelfsmäßige Drahtverbindung nach Mahenge
war wenig leistungsfähig und oft unterbrochen, und vom General
Wahle in Mahenge bis zu den Truppen war immer noch ein
mehrtägiger Botenverkehr erforderlich. So war es für mich schwer,
aus den unvollkommenen Nachrichten eine Anschauung zu
gewinnen. Genug: die Verpflegungsschwierigkeiten wurden in
Mahenge als so erheblich angesehen, daß die Versammlung so
starker Truppenmassen nicht länger für möglich gehalten wurde und
Teile abgeschoben werden mußten.
Abteilung Kraut und Abteilung Wintgens wurden nach Westen auf
Gumbiro in Marsch gesetzt, um von dort nach Süden dringend die
Straße Ssongea-Wiedhafen zu überschreiten, wo in den Bergen
südlich Ssongea genügend Verpflegung vermutet wurde. Die
Meldung über diese Bewegung traf bei mir so spät ein, daß ich nicht
mehr eingreifen konnte. Von Gumbiro wandte sich Hauptmann
Wintgens nach Norden und hat in der Gegend des Rukwasees
gegen eine ihn verfolgende feindliche Kolonne mit Erfolg gekämpft;
bei der Annäherung an Tabora wurde er selbst typhuskrank
gefangengenommen, und Hauptmann Naumann führte die Abteilung
weiter, bis er sich schließlich gegen Ende 1917 am Kilimandjaro der
feindlichen Verfolgungskolonne ergab, die mit reichlicher Reiterei
ausgestattet war. Es ist zu bedauern, daß diese von der Initiative
eingegebene und mit so großer Zähigkeit durchgeführte
Einzeloperation doch zu sehr aus dem Rahmen der gesamten
Kriegshandlung herausfiel, um für diese von Nutzen sein zu können.
Major Kraut hatte sich in Gumbiro von Hauptmann Wintgens
getrennt und war dem ihm vom General Wahle erteilten Befehl
entsprechend nach Süden marschiert. Das Überschreiten der
Etappenlinie Ssongea-Wiedhafen machte keine Schwierigkeiten,
führte aber, da der Feind seine Vorräte in den Etappenlagern gut
verschanzt und gesichert hatte, zu keiner Beute. Auch im Lande
wurde jetzt, im März 1917, also in der ärmsten Jahreszeit, einige
Monate vor der neuen Ernte, wenig Verpflegung vorgefunden. Nach
einigen Nachhutgefechten gegen englische Truppen glückte am
Rowuma ein Überfall auf das kleine portugiesische Lager bei
Mitomoni. Major Kraut zog dann den Rowuma abwärts nach Tunduru
und begab sich selbst zu persönlicher Berichterstattung zum
Kommando nach Mpotora. Zwei seiner Kompagnien blieben bei
Tunduru zur Sicherung des dortigen reichen Verpflegungsgebietes.
Die drei anderen rückten weiter nach Osten und wurden
vorübergehend dem Kapitän Looff unterstellt, der vor Lindi lag.

The Inter and Transnational Politics of Populism Foreign Policy Identity and Popular Sovereignty Thorsten Wojczewski Full Chapter

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The Inter and Transnational Politics of Populism Foreign Policy Identity and Popular Sovereignty Thorsten Wojczewski Full Chapter

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The Inter- and Transnational Politics of

Populism: Foreign Policy, Identity and

The Inter- and Transnational

Global Political Sociology

Cover illustration: © Dennis Cox/Alamy Stock Photo

1 Introduction: Populism and International Relations 1

8 Conclusion: Re-Conceptualizing and De-Centring

Introduction: Populism and International

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Özpek and Park 2019; Taş 2020). In addition to the predominant

“populist government formation (or participation) concretely influences

Rationale, Themes and Theoretical Approach

(1) To what extent have international relations created conditions of

In addressing these questions, the book identifies and analyses foreign

right-wing populist parties. The study’s expectation is that populism does

populist and non-populist logics under the label of populism, when he

Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017). Though sharing these schol-

Empirical Cases, Method and Sources

an unconsolidated, post-colonial developing country democracy with left-

interviews and tweets. In total, the dataset amounts to roughly 4300

avoid the re-production and reification of populist claims by denatural-

Chapter 6 turns to left-wing populism and examines to what extent the

of politics, the distinctive affective and emotive appeal of populism remains

De Cleen, Benjamin, Jason Glynos and Aurelien Mondon. 2018. Critical

Howarth, David. 2002. Discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London:

Solomon, Ty. 2015. The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy

The Populist Challenge to International

It has become almost a cliché to begin a discussion of populism by

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

relevance as empirical phenomenon and even to contemplate abandoning

Populism: Strategy, Ideology, Style, Discourse

into being by drawing an antagonistic frontier between ‘the people’ and

Populism and International Relations

Zaslove 2017; Plagemann and Destradi 2019; Destradi and Plagemann

While many scholars following this approach highlight “the diversity of

Resisting the Populist Hype?

or the “populist explosion” (Judis 2016). As Maiguashca (2019: 769)

U nser Abmarsch von Kibata ging am ersten Tage programmäßig

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