Ontological Nuisance in Elite Discourse: Foreign Policy and the Populist Radical Right in Germany

This article calls for a research agenda which looks at narrative challenge and disruption from within, that is, within political elites. Merging ontological security studies (OSS) with insights from narrative studies, we introduce the idea of political elites as being split between disruptors and defenders of identity narratives. This is different from conventional accounts of OSS which usually and often implicitly attribute the role of ontological repairers to political elites. We argue that members of the elite sometimes intervene in political debates through disruptive language which challenges established identity narratives and pushes the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy discourse. We conceptualize this type of disruption as ontological nuisance: a predictably recurring disturbance to biographical narratives from within the narrating elite. The article illustrates ontological nuisance empirically by systematically analyzing how populist radical right parties (PRRPs) engage with elite narratives about foreign policy and identity. By foregrounding contestation in the discourse among political elites, we show how interventions by PRRPs can call into question the relative elite consensus across the political spectrum. Specifically, we show how articulations by the German radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) tap into fundamental pillars of the ongoing foreign policy discourse about the national “Self” (internal dimension), relations with “significant Others” (intersubjective dimension), and the nature of the international order (systemic dimension). In this way, opposition parties can shape the nature of the debate about biographical narratives without ever being in government.