Foreign Policy and the Public Sphere

In the fall issue of International Politics, DIIS-researcher Vibeke Schou Tjalve examines a central problem of democratic security politics: How to keep popular rule from degrading into mere and dangerous populism? Part of a special issue on Realism in Context, Tjalve’s article ‘Realism, Pragmatism and the Public Sphere’ examines why this question seemed particularly urgent to the generation of early and mid-twentieth century political theorists, who experienced first hand how democratic mass politics became a force of fascist or nazist unreason, hysteria and destruction. Connecting these historical concerns with the politics of the present, she argues that the era of Instagram, Wikileaks or Twitter – of global and highly medialized crowd phenomena such as the Arab Spring, the American Tea Party Movement, or the Russian Pussy Riots – is one equally beset by both the promise and the pittfalls of mass politics. As she concludes, there are valuable lessons to be drawn from the past: Contemporary debates over security, democracy and ‘crowd politics’ would gain from revisiting the concerns of the inter- and postwar period.