Transatlantic Turmoil: Populist Parties and NATO Membership in the European Union

For the past few years, scholars, politicians, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have been ringing alarm bells about the rise of anti-institutional populism in Europe bringing about the fall of the bulwark institutions of the liberal international order. Although there is a lot of literature on the antagonistic relationship between populist parties and the European Union (EU), there is little on how these parties view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), another bastion of the internationalist post-war order. Seeking to close this gap, thesis asks the following question: what are the attitudes of populist parties in the EU towards NATO membership and why?

Interestingly, a majority of EU populist parties support NATO membership. This work uses party platforms and secondary sources to examine this counterintuitive variation in populist party stances on NATO membership. It assesses domestic and international explanations of this variation and concludes that the latter have more explanatory power than the former. Specifically, this thesis posits that domestic party competition does not parallel party stances on NATO membership, while numerous international positions do. Foreign policy positions related to support for NATO membership include not being Euroskeptic and holding a positive view of the United States, while those that are correlated with opposition to NATO membership are a negative view of the United States and opposition to EU membership. A party’s view of Russia, its support of EU membership, and Euroskepticism are inconsequential. Furthermore, this thesis argues that there is no such thing as a “populist foreign policy,” at least in the realm of NATO- related affairs, since populist parties have a diverse range of stances on these matters. As such, it stresses that EU populist parties should not be treated as a homogenous group and notes that while we can take some comfort in knowing that NATO is not threatened by populism to the same extent that the EU is, we should not rest easy: the unpredictability and influence of these parties means that if they make severing ties with NATO their core issue, they may get their way.