Europe at the Crossroads: Confronting Populist, Nationalist, and Global Challenges

By Nordic Academic Press

The far right is on the rise. And there are signs that part of the political mainstream in Europe, the US, and beyond is considering accommodating far-right populist parties and their divisive, ethno-nationalist programs.

Europe at the Crossroads is an urgent scholarly response to the sociopolitical challenges that far-right programs pose to the idea of a more egalitarian world. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis and critique of the dynamics of the far right in Europe from Poland to the UK, from Sweden to Greece. The authors present pertinent alternatives when tackling the exclusionary rhetoric and the politics of resentment.

Each contributor investigates the current advance of far right populism and the threat to liberal democracy. Their texts address the historical roots and activities of the ideologies behind Orbanism or Brexit for example. The slogan 'Fortress Europe' once a pejorative term now appeals to large numbers of voters. The authors analyze the power balance in the European Parliament, particularly in connection with the elections in the spring 2019.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9789188909190

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

On radical right mainstreaming in Europe and the US

Matthew Feldman

This chapter focuses on three longer-term trends across Europe (and to a lesser extent, the US) that have converged in recent years.¹ The first is a European far right that has substantially gained in vote share this century and, for the first time since 1945, is in several coalition governments. In practice, this success was born of an ideological trade-off, whereby far right movements reframed their political message for the mainstream, from ethno-centrism and biological racism to one of nativism and cultural identity. Another trend is the emergence of what will be called here the ‘near right’, straddling traditional conservatives and the more familiar far right. This ‘illiberal democracy’, or ‘right-wing populism’, has gained enormous force across the continent of late, bridging the gap between the centre ground and far right in a way that demands new approaches—and critically interrogating older ones. Importantly, drawing parallels to the interwar period in Europe is full of pitfalls that can mislead as much as instruct. Yet like then, just when it is needed most, liberal self-confidence is faltering, raising a third, distinct theme: a faltering of norms, institutions, and ideological self-confidence. This has had the two-pronged effect, in turn, of making reliable sources hard to distinguish from ‘fake news’, on the one hand; while on the other, further entrenching communication silos—online echo chambers that promote political discord, insults and worse. Together, these system stressors have put the traditional cordon sanitaire—an invisible boundary traditionally separating the far right from mainstream politics via civic, if not always civil, engagement—under greater pressure than at any time since 1945.

The far right’s challenge to liberal democracy

Liberal democracies are facing an increasingly clear challenge today: the development and effects of a congealing ‘far right’ in Europe. At the time of writing, what have been called ‘post-fascist’ parties have entered coalition government in Austria (the Austrian Freedom Party) and Italy (La Lega Nord, now shorthanded as ‘Lega’), on the one hand; while on the other, once centre-right and now increasingly ‘illiberal democracies’ in Poland, Hungary and the US erode fundamental democratic norms by embracing far-right positions on nativism and authoritarianism. This pincer movement towards what can be called a near-right politics is, in turn, the long-term result of the mainstreaming of previously radical right policies—above all ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘Fortress US’ for non-white migration—which are posing acute challenges to the post-war Euro-American settlement. In taking the long view of some of these converging developments, this chapter returns to a pressing interwar question, so long dormant, that is emerging once again: ‘Could it happen here?’

Recognizing and then defining the ‘it’ of far-right politics, and its connection to historical fascism, remains a vexatious issue (for example, Camus & Lebourg 2017: 53 ff.). Protestors and left-wing activists see fascism in the politics of Trump, Orbán, and Salvini, to name but three political elites. Conservatives tend to be less sure, even if they see a clear divide between themselves and nativist, often explicitly racist, campaigns by insurgent parties such as Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) or the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD)—parties that entered national parliaments in 2017 with 13 per cent, and 17 per cent of the vote in 2018, respectively. To this challenge, historians and political scientists bring forth small libraries of commentary and analysis, with often sharp disagreement over terminology (on the debate over the definition of the radical right, see, for example, Eatwell 2000; and Mudde 1996, 2017). To avoid getting too bogged down in an article concerned with different issues, it nevertheless remains the case that what is variously called the (neo-)fascist, radical right, far right, or, most opaquely, national populist usually boils down to a handful of commonly identified features. These Wittgensteinian family resemblances, or ‘faces’ of the far right, have been usefully summarized in a book whose title identifies one of the principle challenges to liberal democracies at present, Trouble on the Far Right:

far-right activism should be understood as tactically oriented in the short run; at the same time, it may also target gradual changes in mindset, discourse, values, loyalties and legitimacy in the long run. One aspect of the long-term strategy is the professionalised political appearance of many right-wing organizations, which has contributed to the gradual disappearance of a cordon sanitaire: a figurative firewall that the political mainstream would previously use to block far-right influences. (Actors base their ideology and action on the notion of inequality among human beings, combining the supremacy of a particular nation, ‘race’ or ‘civilization’ with ambitions for an authoritarian transformation of values and styles of government.) (Fielitz & Laloire 2016: 16)

Rather than perpetuating ‘the academic war of words on far-right definitions’ or ‘simplistic schemes of plug and play designs’ (Fielitz & Laloire 2016: 18), the editors helpfully

use far right as an umbrella term to subsume actors, attitudes and behaviours, spanning from those which articulate dissent within the framework of representative democracy but are not geared toward the entire system (radical right) to those which deny the values, rules and arenas of democracy, impelling a revolutionary overthrow (‘extremist right). [As a distinct ideological world view] actors base their ideology and action on the notion of inequality among human beings, combining the supremacy of a particular nation, ‘race’ or ‘civilization’ with ambitions for an authoritarian transformation of values and styles of government (actors base their ideology and action on the notion of inequality among human beings, combining the supremacy of a particular nation, ‘race’ or ‘civilization’ with ambitions for an authoritarian transformation of values and styles of government. (Fielitz & Laloire 2016: 17–18)

Seen in this way, the far right is a praxis of revanchist ethnonationalism, hostile to the many of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy.

Fully twenty-five years ago, a pioneer in this area of study, Hans-Georg Betz (1993: 413), defined ‘radical, right-wing populist parties’ in definitive terms, setting out their key platforms and ideas:

Radical right-wing populist parties are radical in their rejection of the established sociocultural and sociopolitical system and their advocacy of individual achievement, a free marketplace, and a drastic reduction of the role of the state. They are right-wing in their rejection of individual and social equality, in their opposition to the social integration of marginalized groups, and in their appeal to xenophobia, if not overt racism. They are populist in their instrumentalization of sentiments of anxiety and disenchantment and their appeal to the common man and his allegedly superior common sense.

A generation on, it is remarkable how far this scholarly convergence on the ideological tenets of populist radical right parties has advanced. To take just two recent examples, Elise Saint-Martin (2013: 4) offered a sophisticated template for European radical right parties in the twenty-first century:

radical right parties rely on appeals to national sentiments defined in ethnic terms; reject cosmopolitan conceptions of society; react to rising non-European immigration; oppose globalization and reject European integration which they see as undermining national sovereignty and identity; and brand themselves as anti-parties, criticizing domestic political elites as corrupt and removed from the ‘common people’ … I have chosen to categorize the radical right according to three (3) defining features: nativism, socio-authoritarianism, and populism.

And as Ov Cristian Norocel rightly argued in a recent doctoral thesis, these and similar features (most recently antisemitism and anti-Muslim prejudice) form the core of radical right ideology, which extends from parties to less formal movements and groups:

The ineliminable components of radical right populist ideology are the identification of a Manichean opposition between a ‘corrupt elite’ and a ‘pure people’. The said people of radical right populist ideology is not only pure, but also constitutes an indivisible whole, whose sovereign will finds its most appropriate manifestation in the figure of a respected leader. What is worth underlining here is that the aforementioned purity of people, and the intrinsically interrelated fear of pollution, rests on exclusivist definitions of the ‘rightful’ inhabitants of a certain nation–state, in a decidedly nativist nationalist manner This has a key economic aspect—namely, welfare chauvinism—which delineates the ‘pure’ people and their birthright to the nation–state’s welfare infrastructure from those underserving Others: a dynamic category that may include allegedly parasitical social groups, resented ethnic/’racial’, religious, and/or sexual minorities, along a logic of nationalist solidarity. (Norocel 2013: 18)

From Betz and Mudde to early career researchers today, the radical right has become a well-understood phenomenon amongst scholars of political science, history, sociology, gender studies, and psephology. As this suggests, the varying organizational faces of the far right—street marches, populist politicians, even political violence and terrorism— have been the subject of commentary that dwarfs the coverage of other ideological groupings.

Put another way, everyone seems to be talking about the far right. So what is all the buzz about? Is the far right ‘back’, and if so, how can liberal democracy best respond?

Historical parallels as a double-edged sword

While historical parallels have their place, the far right poses different challenges than the interwar fascism before it did. Indeed, perspectives from the interwar history of fascism can cloud as much as illuminate views of the far right today. History does not repeat itself—can never simply replicate itself—but it does sometimes echo, point, or even nudge. For the far right, the historical experience of transnational fascism (Bauerkämper 2010) after the Great War often boils down to the wartime Axis, the stigma of which the far right, in its various guises since 1945, has consistently tried to negate, excuse, or otherwise overcome (Feldman 2015: 9). For several decades after the Second World War, the results of what should be properly called neo-fascist distancing tactics were mixed at best (Bastow 2002). Indeed, the early twentieth-century context is so different to that of 1930s Europe that political, mobilizational, and even intellectual responses are just as likely to provide counterproductive historical examples for our current milieu.

Figure 1.1. Scholarly articles about the far right (adapted from Mudde 2017: 2).

It bears repeating that historical analogies are a double-edged sword, which, at least when it comes to the far right today, can be used as much for defence—such as drawing lessons from the interwar rise and consolidation of fascism in Europe—as it can be used for attack, whether in terms of Antifa street confrontations, or in rhetorically tarring far-right groups as Nazis and fascists (as can be seen in countless placards at any counterdemonstration against the far right today) (see Wodak & Forchtner 2014, which includes an example from Vienna). Equally, history provides more nuanced explanations than slogans such as ‘No pasaran!’ allow (from the Spanish Civil War)—a blunderbuss that risks making the issue of far-right legitimization worse rather than better. Care should be taken in drawing the historical parallels between fascism and the contemporary far right.

It scarcely needs be said, however, that most journalism and non-specialist literature compound these problems. In terms of historical fiction, for example, consider the October 1935 publication of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s novel republished in 2017—which sold like hot cakes following Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Offering a standard Marxist view of fascism long ago discarded by most scholars (Griffin 2008), Lewis imagines big business as the reactionary hand behind a semi-legal dictatorial regime—a mix of Nazi racism and Fascist economic corporatism, sprinkled with heavy doses of paramilitary violence:

Pushing in among this mob of camp followers who identified political virtue with money for their rent came a flying squad who suffered not from hunger but from congested idealism: Intellectuals and Reformers and even Rugged Individualists, who saw in Windrip, for his clownish swindlerism, a free vigor which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled and senile capitalistic system. (Lewis 2017: 79)

By this account, American liberalism had become ‘cramped by a certain respect for facts which never enfeebled the press-agents for Corporism’ (Lewis 2017: 283) which oversees concentration camps and summary executions, arrests much of Congress and later invades Mexico ‘as a protection against the notorious treachery of Mexico and the Jewish plots there hatched’. The regime ultimately brings about another American civil war. Opposing the aggressive tyrants, Buzz Windrip and his henchmen, who whip up extremes of nationalist hysteria, is the journalist-cum-protagonist, Doremus Jessup, a sort of prototype ‘Liberal American Humanitarian’ (58). Revealingly, he is hampered by ‘a certain respect for facts’ (283); troubled by bad educational standards, he is only too aware that all utopias ‘end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion’ (114). Watching with horror as a ‘program for revitalizing the national American pride’ turns swiftly into a bloody dictatorship, Jessup concludes, ‘It can happen here’ (243).

At the point in which Lewis’s warning was written, of course, fascist movements were very much on the march in Depression-era Europe. It was concern at the rise of fascism in Europe that led Lewis to write the novel in the summer of 1935—even though events were to swiftly overtake his fiction. Ahead of a 1-million-strong rally in September 1935, the Third Reich hurried to introduce the so-called Nuremberg Laws, that quintessence of administrative inequality, making Jews legal aliens in Germany (Knox 2000: 145). Less than three weeks later, Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia, with a trail of chemical weapons in their expansionist wake. These events markedly changed the picture of interwar Europe, generating the classic, indeed rightly indelible, picture of fascist aggression and legalized persecution. It Can’t Happen Here’s seductive warning of imminent fascist dictatorship fit the roiling times of crumpling democracies and militaristic nationalism in Europe, but less so the US in the 1930s, with its puny Silver Shirt movement (Steigmann-Gall 2017: 108), and far less so in our day—save for those crying wolf by denouncing Trump as some kind of fascist dictator.

‘If Trump as fascist dictator’ does not warrant analytical scrutiny in terms of historical parallels (Matthews 2016), surely more helpful is the view that many fascist tropes were dangerously mainstreamed in interwar Europe. Extreme ideas, as the historian Aristotle Kallis (2013: 55–6) rightly reminds us, ‘begin their life-cycle as politically and socially marginal and radical counter-propositions to established, mainstream cognition. By transgressing widely accepted boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable premises or prescriptions, they are essentially attempting to remap these established cognitions and subvert the mainstream frames that support them.’ In the context of the 1930s, what Kallis elsewhere calls the ‘fascist effect’ became a kind of ‘brand’ that even non-fascists wished to emulate. To take just one historical instance, consider the impact of the Nazi race laws:

When one looks at the diffusion of the ‘racial’ anti-Jewish paradigm in 1930s Europe, it becomes obvious that the model pioneered by the Nazi regime with the 1935 ‘Nuremberg Laws’ broke taboos and, in so doing, activated and/or empowered pre-existing, yet latent or partly suppressed anti-Jewish demand in other countries. This contributed critically to its reproduction—in a ‘domino effect’ style—across other European countries in 1936–39. It also served as both a legitimizing (and viewed as ‘successful’) precedent and a ‘successful’ bold model for shaping similar ‘solutions’ to the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ outside Nazi Germany. (Kallis 2013: 56)

From this perspective, in several European states between the wars, the danger was in fascism becoming normalized or domesticated, or rather of the mainstream becoming fascistized. A paradigmatic instance was the conservative elite, like the Junkers and civil servants in early 1930s Germany who were disdainful of democracy and willing to co-opt Nazism as a bulwark to smash what they broadly understood to be ‘the left’—or so they thought. As it turned out, fascism’s political opportunism and mobilizational appeal, first in Italy and then in Germany, soon overwhelmed the reactionary elites once it had its hands on the machinery of state power (Knox 2000). It should be remembered that Nazism rested on widespread popular appeal—including 40 per cent of the working-class vote—and most of the Gestapo’s later arrests came from ordinary informants (Gellately 2001: 136 ff.). These were as much ‘consensus dictatorships’ as autocratic tyrannies. Right across Europe, new democracies established after the Great War fell one after another to right-wing authoritarianism, like shakily placed dominoes, until fewer than a dozen democracies remained in the west and north on the eve of the Second World War. In much of the former Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, democracy failed to put down solid roots or galvanize widespread popular support, such that the UK, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland were the only remaining democracies in Europe by the outbreak of the Second World War (Linz 2003: 226).

From the margins to the mainstream revisited

Perhaps the last time the mainstream felt such a sense of acute alarm was in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Speaking for many, exactly sixty years after Sinclair Lewis’s warning, the celebrated novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco penned ‘Ur-Fascism’ (1995) for the New York Review of Books, widely disseminated then, and since taken as a popular guide for gauging whether a particular country is ‘going fascist’. His concern had been triggered by what Martin Lee and others have called an ‘ideological facelift’ by the far right (2000: 388)—one starting to pay dividends following the demise of the once great enemy, the Soviet