Keywords

In Europe and elsewhere, territorial disputes are acquiring new meanings as they are exacerbated by the increasing politicisation of sovereignty and national identity. Political movements and parties have developed nostalgic agendas and discourses aimed at restoring their sovereignty, which they claim has been stolen or violated. These arguments have imposed themselves in public opinion and electoral campaigns, as well as parliaments and governments, from the local to the supranational scales, such as in the European parliament. The label that may be the most widely used among scholars to designate these political formations, especially in the fields of political science and sociology, is populism, in particular right-wing populism. Countless studies have focused on the success of the so-called right-wing populist movements and parties in contemporary democracies. However, few studies have explicitly investigated the relationship between populism and territoriality. Therefore, this chapter seeks to highlight how a territorial approach can contribute to understanding some aspects of populism. In this chapter, we will first try to reflect on the polysemic notion of populism by defining an ideal type in relation to territory. Then we will highlight how populism can also be closely related to the concept of border in a multi-scaling environment.

A Controversial Concept

In all European countries, successful political movements and parties are speaking out against “discrimination” against the natives and the nation and asking for restrictive rights, including rights of access, for immigrants, as well as those they consider not to be legitimate members of the “true” people, such as the political establishment and supranational powers. Actors labelled as nationalist, sovereignist, far right-wing or nativist have asserted themselves in public opinion and achieved significant electoral success. Until the 1990s, the most consistent electoral support for those formations had been observed in a few Western European countries, like Italy, France and Austria. In the past decade, however, this support has spread and increased throughout Europe and other continents. These formations’ success is not just electoral but implies wide policy influence and core positions in numerous national governments. The most famous case is Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency of the United States, the world’s largest superpower, in 2016 and his subsequent controversial tenure. In Europe, many national and regional elections, as well as the vote in favour of Brexit, in the name of a strong Euroscepticism, confirm the trend. Victor Orbán’s consolidation of power during the Hungarian elections of 2014 and 2018 has received most of the attention, but there have been similar experiences in Poland, with the Law and Justice party and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczyński. It is important to note the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil in 2018, the most populous country in Latin America, and the rise of the Indian People’s Party (the Bharatiya Janata Party) to power in 2014 in India, the second-most populous country in the world, both of which have strong nationalist connotations. In many countries, such party formations, capable of winning elections and shaping policies and even constitutional order, have taken strong conservative and nationalist stances, shown hostility to immigrants and a multicultural society, denounced certain pillars of liberal democracy, such as the autonomy of the judiciary, and condemned the global and supranational powers, all of whom they consider enemies of the people. Of course, their electoral and political successes are not continuous or taken for granted. The recent change in the US presidency seems to counter these trends. However, Joe Biden’s victory does not mean that the polarisation that had underpinned the political climate during his predecessor’s term has disappeared. Moreover, it is uncertain whether similar political actors in other countries, for example in Central Europe or Latin America, will meet the same defeats.

Academic scholarship has been engaged in a persistent debate over the nature and the features of those political parties, particularly in the light of a recent political trend. The most successful and widespread notion among scholars, especially in political science and political sociology, is “populism”. An enormous amount of academic research has been conducted on this topic and has focused on the nature of populist claims (such as defining it as a discourse, ideology or frame), the reasons for the success of political parties, the impact of socio-economic crises and uncertainties arising from the processes of globalisation and Europeanisation, as well as how these changes fuel anxieties among citizens and voters (e.g. De la Torre, 2019; Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017).

Despite growing academic interest and debate on populism and party politics, including an increasing empirical interest in the regional and subnational dimensions related to support for populist parties, especially in Europe (e.g. Heinisch & Jansesberger, 2023; Heinisch et al., 2021; Van Hauwaert et al., 2019), relatively few research studies theoretically investigate populism as a concept from a territory-oriented perspective (Mazzoleni et al., 2023). It is surprising that, when approaching the varied literature on populism, the role of the concept of territory is often marginal, neglected or even explicitly excluded. From a theoretical perspective, some approaches even posit an ontological opposition between populism and territorial space. A clear example of this is discussed by geographer Doreen Massey (1992) in relation to a volume by Ernesto Laclau (1990), one of the most influential scholars of contemporary populism. According to Laclau, the notion of politics, which is the primary realm of populism and its manifestations, is in an antinomian relationship with space, assumed as an ipso facto depoliticised, static, a-temporal entity. In short, Laclau implicitly takes up a notion of space inspired by Newtonian physics, understood as an objective and passive entity that exists outside and beyond the subject. Space would be governed by structural laws that elude creativity and populist expression. By contrast, we argue that alternative conceptions of space—and, thus, of territorial space—can be adopted and taken as heuristically useful in understanding populist claims. In fact, one might argue that territory is inherent in populism.

Specifying Populism

For some scholars, the ongoing debate about the definition of political formations that express nationalist, sovereignist, anti-immigration and anti-establishment views is seen as unproductive or even harmful. They argue that designating a thing or phenomenon helps to construct it and suggests interpretative keys to explain its relevance, success or failure. The term “populism” is often used to highlight the opposition between a people, who are considered the repository of absolute sovereignty, and an elite, who are viewed as treacherous or unable to respond to the interests of the people. However, given the many meanings attributed to the notion of populism, the question arises as to what exactly is being discussed.

It is unclear whether populism refers to an ideology, a type of discourse or a communicative style (e.g. Heinisch et al., 2021). It is also debated whether it is a logic, a strategy, a form of mobilisation or even an organisational mode based on the central role of the leader. Moreover, it is uncertain whether populism applies to a specific family of parties and leaders that share common features, comparable to the ideological families of twentieth-century Europe. For some scholars, populism is a connotation of the right as such, and a left-wing one cannot exist. Others consider the question of whether a party is populist to be secondary; they start from the assumption that a party is or is not populist, with a kind of apriorism; for some, the problem is the lack of a general agreement among scholars, while others accept, more or less explicitly, the inevitable semantic polysemy. Meanwhile, more than the way the party acts and communicates, a large part of scholars seem to be interested in the dichotomic classification of the individual party or leader as populist or not rather than a question of degree of populism. The dichotomic (and static) approach represents the most widespread use of the notion of populism in political science. Of course, this has huge normative implications as it can lead to the political instrumentalisation of academic discourse. The political use of the notion of “populism” is often negatively connoted in public sphere—although recently some of these leaders and parties accept being qualified as populist.

However, parties designated (justifiably or not) as populist have varying ideological origins, from the extreme right to the radical left. They also have traits that vary over time and in relation to different ideological, political, cultural, institutional and territorial contexts. Many, but not all, oppose economic globalisation and advocate for a kind of national protectionism. Some aim to revive a discourse based on the working classes fighting against capitalist elites and a welfare state based on solidarity. Some are newcomers, others have a long history and have been radicalised for some time. Their organisational patterns and history also vary: Some recover the old tradition of mass parties, while others provide lighter organisations, even adopting solutions that do not require activists to formally join the party. Most are led by a strong and charismatic leader, although in some cases, success is only partly due to the founding leader because the latter has since disappeared. The diversity of populist parties is partly attributable to the constraints and opportunities of their respective institutional contexts, party traditions and ideological influences that vary at the macro-regional, national and micro-regional levels (e.g. when populism is combined with regionalist discourse). Thus, the dominant traditions of South American populism are rather left-leaning, while European populism tends more to the right, although in recent years these trends have become more complex.

The multiple and differentiated characters of parties labelled as populist and the variety of features that the concept of populism tends to embrace can be seen either as a problem to be neutralised or as an intrinsic trait to be examined. In other words, it can be seen as an opportunity to develop a differentiated approach to the phenomena that we can analyse through the concept of populism. To pursue the latter path, one might adopt an ideal-type approach to conceptualisation in order to understand how empirical reality corresponds to a concept that has already been defined. This approach is inspired by the work of Max Weber (2011). In this framework, populism is not a thing in itself but a notion that selectively and partially describes some aspects of a political formation or leader, regardless of whether they are nationalist, right-wing, left-wing, etc. For example, populism can be understood as a communicative style. A party or leader may be more or less populist at a given time depending on the communicative style that they use. However, this style may not always be considered populist in all contexts and at different scales. The same party may act differently on a national scale than it does on a regional scale. In other words, leaders and parties tend to adapt their style according to whether they directly or indirectly exercise governmental functions, whether they are in the majority or the minority in a coalition government or a parliamentary opposition-only role.

The advantage of an ideal-type approach is that it does not define universal validity and avoids the use of minimal definitions that attempt to encompass every form of populism and every political formation under one umbrella. This approach, which has been very influential in political science in recent years (e.g. Mudde, 2004), allows for comparative empirical analyses, at least to some extent, because of its ambition to impose a universal minimum definition, it also tends to overlook the diversity of manifestations of populism. A differentiated approach to populism, by contrast, accepts its plasticity and adaptability to concrete socio-political manifestations without oversimplifying. In other words, populism can simultaneously be an ideology, a discourse, a style, a logic, a strategy and a form of mobilisation, without one aspect excluding the other. This approach also entails the assumption that populism is an analytical category that does not exclude the adoption of complementary labels, such as nationalism (as “national populism”) or right-wing populism that highlights different aspects of the phenomenon. The key is to understand which aspect of the populist phenomenon one wishes to use the appropriate definition to interpret its complexity.

The Defence of the Territory

When considering populism as a discourse or rhetoric, one can focus on economic, cultural, emotional or constitutional dimensions. One can also highlight territorial components and define territorial populism as an ideal type. Unlike the generic meaning associated with the work of Margaret Canovan (2005), this type of populism is characterised by a defensive view of the people. In territorial populism as an ideal type, the people are defined with various terms (e.g. as the people, the nation, the homeland, etc.) that align with the concept of a circumscribed territorial space and the natural holder of sovereignty over it. By appealing to the people rather than to the individualities of citizens, populism emphasises belonging to a group, or a community and is rooted in an idea of territorial boundaries that unites and qualifies the people, which may not necessarily coincide with the institutional borders of the national state. In contemporary democratic politics, the reference to territory is multi-scalar since the people—as true members of the constituency—can be embedded in concentric and nested spaces, such as the locality, region, nation and even beyond. This can be seen when populist rhetoric combines an anti-Islamic agenda with a call for the defence of European-Christian traditions (Marzouki et al., 2016). Similarly, the nexus of people and territory can articulate within localist and regionalist mobilisations, as opposed to other scales of identity (e.g. Heinisch & Jansesberger, 2023). Populist rhetoric often centres around resentment as the people are presented as victims, legitimate sovereigns who have been defrauded of their rights and prerogatives (Betz, 2018). In our case, the victim is not only the people in the broad sense but also their territory and living space, which has been forgotten, abandoned, discriminated and is seen as a “place of resentment” (Munis, 2022).

Within populist rhetoric, territory is also component of the Manichean “friend-enemy” logic between the people who share a common identity, on the one hand, and heterogenous and foreign entities, on the other. In this logic, there is a vertical and a horizontal dimension. The first dimension focuses on populist denunciations of the elite or the establishment—specifically, those allegedly responsible for betraying the people: first and foremost, the (political, cultural, economic) elites, who are seen as being out of touch with the interests of the people and disconnected from the territory and its inhabitants. This antagonist target also includes global powers and supranational bodies, such as the European Union, which are accused of taking away the people’s sovereignty. The horizontal dimension targets groups who are not deemed worthy of being part of the people and come from external territorial spaces. This happens when the populist discourse identifies immigrants as a cultural threat, a danger to national integrity and a threat to the economic welfare or as interfering in the national labour market or illegitimately exploiting the welfare state, in line with welfare chauvinism claims.

Finally, there is another aspect of populism, which is the promise of redemption, a more or less radical breakthrough aimed at re-establishing the sovereignty and, consequently, the power of the people over their territory. It includes regaining control over their borders, reclaiming their lost roots, sovereignty and national identity. Populism can also refer to the reconquest of the nation-state’s political power as opposed to the power of supranational organisations and the regaining of economic sovereignty as a sovereignist appeal aimed at controlling the conditions of economic prosperity threatened by the enemies of the people. Populism also seeks to reclaim the authenticity of the native territorial space as the “Heimat”. In territorial populism, populist discourse identifies, classifies and categorises people through the lens of its territory. Populist discourse can be translated into a territorial claim against de-territorialisation processes (e.g. distant elites, globalisation and cultural hybridisation) for re-territorialisation as re-bordering strategies, in the name of the threatened territory of the people.

Border as a Logic and an Issue

The concept of border is essential in the nexus between populism and territory (Osuna, 2022). There is no territory without borders. Moreover, although rarely highlighted, the border plays an important role in defining territorial populism as an ideal type. Generally speaking, populism expresses a logic to establish or redraw boundaries between groups and entities. According to Margaret Canovan, populists “wish to challenge existing political boundaries and to redraw the line of battles in a new place” (1981, p. 282). Populism can be understood as a logic, a way of interpreting reality that creates and recreates lines of demarcation and separations between an in-group (here) and an out-group (there). In other words, the logic of borders and populism are similar: people vs. elites, people vs. enemies, us vs. them, people vs. foreigners, friends vs. enemies, good vs. bad. Borders and populism also overlap in terms of their shifting logic. Populists often produce borders, understood as the demarcation lines of the borders that are new or, more often, recover old borders affected by transnational and rescaling transformations.

However, populism is not just a defensive response to the uncertainty caused by permeable borders, such as advocating for border closures to protect people. Populism also thrives in uncertainty. Not only it dramatises the dangers of weak borders but also can even adapt and strategically utilise uncertainty. As Paul Taggart (2000) argues, populism has a chameleon-like ability to adapt to the environment, constructing changing discourses, myths and narratives. Populism appeals to latent concerns shared by a heterogeneous constituency (Canovan, 1981: 261–262; 2005) and provides a high degree of malleability, allowing for the mixing of contradictory ideas in a strategy of ambiguity, which stems from the fact that much more than the notions of class or nation, the concept of people lends itself even more to polysemy. Leaders use rhetoric to unite supporters behind them, thereby neutralising divisions and broadening their electoral base.

Contemporary populist discourse often focuses on territorial borders as an explicitly political issue, especially when combined with nationalist, anti-immigrant and law-and-order stances (Schain, 2019; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). Borders are seen as symbols of a stable society, protecting its people against forces that may threaten its cohesion. Collective identities, electoral mobilisations and the legitimacy of migration and security policies are all at stake when it comes to borders. Populism often proposes restrictive policies against migratory flows, criminals and external economic threats, as well as against supranational and multilateral powers, to protect national interests and defend sovereignty, thereby constructing an exclusionary interpretation of territorial borders. In this case, right-wing populist rhetoric seeks to carve out a central role for itself in redrawing borders on the basis of so-called national preference, in the name of defending the survival of its own endangered people. In short, maintaining and controlling borders is part of a political agenda and intimately linked to national identities and distinctiveness, while their permeability is frequently presented as a threat to national interests.

The subject of borders becomes a central part of radical right-wing populist parties’ or their leaders’ political agenda. In some cases, the border as a separation between nation-states or other forms of statehood or collectivity remains in the background; in other cases, it comes to the fore and shapes public discourse and policy. For example, during Donald Trump’s presidency, the fight against illegal immigration, asylum seekers and family reunification was symbolised by the proposed wall on the border between the United States and Mexico, which the administration said would protect the former from foreign interference. In Europe, there are other examples of similar campaigns and public policies. In Hungary, the construction of walls to prevent the influx of refugees from Serbia and Croatia was explicitly promoted in the name of defending Christian values, which were deemed to be threatened by the arrival of Muslim migrants. In the summer of 2015, as thousands of migrants were arriving in the country, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán advocated for the construction of 170 kilometres of a four-metre-high mesh fence along Hungary’s southern border with Serbia. In 2019, Orbán initiated the construction of a wall with Croatia, once again in an attempt to stem migration flows. In 2020, the issue of the border was also directly at stake in the question of sovereignty, when Brazilian President Bolsonaro stated in front of UN representatives that: “it is a mistake to say that the Amazon is a world heritage site… Dealing with such fallacies, one or the other country…fell for the lies of the press and behaved disrespectfully, in a colonialist spirit. They have questioned what is most sacred to us: our sovereignty!” In his populist discourse, both the defence of what he considered his own territory, the Amazon and the criticism of the elites (i.e. the press and the colonialists) in the name of endangered sovereignty are prominent. As we have seen with Brexit, the strategy of a country regaining control of its borders is about regaining past sovereignty (Vaughan-Williams, 2009). The border encompasses crucial issues such as immigration (the border as a barrier), law and order (borders as safeguards for an honest people), nativism as a way to protect the identity of the culturally pure people and protectionism to strengthen economic borders in international trade for preserving national interest.

Territorial Spaces of Mobilisation

Defining an ideal type of territorial populism and addressing the concept of borders as both as discursive logic and a political issue is not enough to fully understand the territory-related aspects at stake, especially when studying populist mobilisation (Jansen, 2011). Territory and its borders are not only symbolic representations but also draw a practical space of mobilisation, that is the constituency and the multi-scalar context in which party action and government policy-making take place. Each constituency presents different constraints and opportunities for political mobilisation, which has an impact on the agenda and issues framed by political actors, as well as on the spatial variation of party electoral success. The Rassemblement National (RN, formerly “Front national”), which does not have a presence in all constituencies of France, serves as an interesting example. Despite having a nationalist agenda and a very centralised organisational structure, the party adapts its message across the country. In Southern France, where its main competitors are traditional right-wing parties, RN is mainly focused on immigration and threatened cultural identity, while in the North, in regions affected by deindustrialisation and where left-wing parties are stronger, the RN’s message mainly stresses the welfare state and national preference (Ivaldi & Dutozia, 2018). Populist agendas should also adapt to multi-scaling competition—local, regional, national and supranational—by combining nationalist and Eurosceptic stances in “left-behind” regions. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) represents an example. It became the third-largest party in the German federal parliamentary elections in 2017, and in the European elections in 2019, the AfD was particularly successful in eastern regions. In the 2019 regional elections, the AfD won 27.5% of the vote in Saxony and 23.5% in Brandenburg, ranking second in both regional parliaments of the former East Germany. Although it is not a regionalist party, the AfD has a nationalist agenda against the EU while developing an influential advocacy discourse aimed at East German voters that can politicise resentments rooted in enduring tensions related to the country’s reunification (Betz & Habersack, 2019).

Cross-border regions are peculiar spaces of political mobilisation. Borders are not only territories of military conquest but also spaces where the electoral competition takes place, such as in constituencies near national borders, where they interweave issues related to the local, urban, regional and transnational scales. In contemporary democracies shaped by global processes, a complex form of politicisation of borders emerges, highlighting their multidimensionality (e.g. Laine & Casaglia, 2017; Schain, 2019). Borders are both physical and symbolic demarcation lines, as well as spaces for contact and interaction, between cooperation and conflict (Houtum & Van Naerssen, 2002; Raffestin, 1992; Scott, 2012). Populists may have peculiar views within and across integrated cross-border regions (Lamour, 2022). In borderland constituencies, where socio-economic interdependence is high, the national border may be an issue for populist mobilisation but also a context in which barriers are not fully claimed. Integrated borderlands with multicultural and multinational constituencies may develop common cross-border interests, which could favour an adapted right-wing populist message (Biancalana & Mazzoleni, 2020).

Reconceptualising Populism

In this chapter, we sketched how a territorial approach can enrich studies on populism. Scholars are divided on how to understand populism and how to define successful parties—both in contemporary democracies in Europe and elsewhere—that adopt populist discourse, styles, ideologies and strategies. These persistent theoretical disagreements have often been seen as an obstacle to empirical analysis. However, to some extent, these conceptual and taxonomic polysemes are a result of the inescapable intertwining of scientific and political-ideological definitions, as well as analytical and normative connotations. In addition, conceptual disputes are a by-product of the complexity of reality and the importance of contextual features that scholars have to understand. Instead of pursuing the illusion of a common and universal understanding, it would be better to develop approaches that can grasp specific aspects of that complexity.

A territorial approach to conceptualising populism could be heuristically useful by taking advantage of the open and polysemic nature of the concept. Populism is not just a means of categorising individual parties with all-encompassing labels but a conceptual tool capable of providing insight into aspects of populist discourse, rhetoric, logic and mobilisation from a territorial perspective. As we showed, some definitions of populism, especially understood in terms of its discourse, rhetoric or ideology, can connect the concepts of territory and allow us to investigate antagonistic strategies for constructing territorial spaces. Inspired by the perspective formulated by Max Weber, it is useful to define an ideal type of populism that we call “territorial populism”, making explicit what is often only implicit in contemporary populist discourse. This type of populism emphasises the overlap between people and territory and the demarcation between the defended territory and external threats. In territorial populism, the territory corresponds to the space of belonging for the people claimed by populist discourse, which designates its antagonists as the elites and other entities that are detached or distant from the territory that is deemed as threatened.

As borders are an integral part of territories, they are a component of territorial populism. Borders are a logical demarcation of what constitutes people and what does not, which is an intrinsic aspect of populism. However, populist discourse is often ambiguous and cannot be reduced to a simple and clear separation, as it encompasses a heterogeneous universe of individuals and groups. When issues of immigration and national sovereignty are at stake, borders become an important part of the contemporary populist political agenda. Territorial spaces are also spaces of mobilisation where actors spread populist discourse and compete for power. Populist mobilisation occurs in heterogenous and multi-scalar territorial spaces, including “left-behind” regions, borderlands and constituencies shaped by different party systems, where nationalist and right-wing discourse adapts and takes on peculiar meanings. Defining territorial populism enables the development of a research agenda integrating the multidimensional role of territorial spaces in democratic politics. For example, it addresses the questions of how populist discourse constructs the people rooted in territorial spaces and strategically reshapes territorial rescaling against global and supranational powers, how citizen attitudes towards territorial spaces drive populist support and to what extent living in a borderland contributes to enhancing or reducing right-wing sovereignist orientations.