Abstract
This chapter explores the foreign policies of populist governments in several countries of Southern Europe, notably France, Greece, Italy, and Spain. These Mediterranean countries show similar characteristics in terms of not only geography, culture, and political system but also a dense presence of populist leaderships with governmental power (or close to having it, in the French case), both from the right and from the left. A comparative analysis of Populist Foreign Policy (PFP) in this sub-region allows us to unravel some of the distinctive ways in which populists shape foreign policy, especially in relation to the EU, and how this is influenced by structural positions in the regional distribution of power and the relative strength of domestic parties and institutions.
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Notes
- 1.
There may be some ambiguity on whether France is part of Southern or Northern Europe. For the purposes of this chapter, we sustain it can be usefully placed in the category of Southern given its shared religious, social, and political history with non-protestant countries, as well as several macroeconomic indicators such as levels of debt and deficit, regulation, state intervention.
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Chryssogelos, A., Giurlando, P., Wajner, D.F. (2023). Populist Foreign Policy in Southern Europe. In: Giurlando, P., Wajner, D.F. (eds) Populist Foreign Policy. Global Foreign Policy Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22773-8_3
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