Integrative essay #1

Nationalism, Nativism, and the Revolt Against Globalization. Manuela Achilles Kyrill Kunakhovich Nicole Shea

Council For European Studies - 2018

On the evening of August 11, 2017, a large group of white supremacists, alt-right activists, and neo-Nazis – mostly men, but also a few women – staged a torchlight parade through the grounds of the University of Virginia. Chanting, “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us,” they marched to a statue of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, where they attacked a small group of students, faculty, and staff. The next morning, a much larger crowd – as many as 500 people – gathered a mile away, in downtown Charlottesville, around a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Participants wielded shields, battle flags, and semi-automatic weapons; they harassed and assaulted local residents who had lined the streets in protest until the police broke up the rally. A small group then adjourned to a nearby park, where they listened to speeches by rally organizers. Meanwhile, a rally participant rammed his car into a downtown crosswalk, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring nineteen others.

To observers and participants alike, this American tragedy resonated with echoes of Europe. Most striking were the Nazi symbols, which seemed like relics from another age: swastikas, the Black Sun, cries of “blood and soil.” But there were also more contemporary links. One participant carried a shield with the slogan “nog är nog,” Swedish for “enough is enough,” which is used by Sweden’s anti-immigration activists. The chant “You will not replace us” originated with Identity Evropa, a US-based group that calls itself a “generation of awakened Europeans.”[1] It is an offshoot of the Identitarian movement that began in France and has close ties to Germany’s anti- Islamic front, PEGIDA. The rally’s main organizer, Richard Spencer, runs a so-called think tank “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of European people.”[2] Another speaker, Matthew Heimbach, models himself on the Romanian fascist Corneliu Codreanu and calls Russia the “leader of the free world.”[3] Such contacts suggest that the Charlottesville rally was part of a broader movement – and indeed Europe saw many similar rallies in 2017. Perhaps the biggest took place in Warsaw in November, when some 60,000 people marched to chants of “pure blood” and “white Europe.”[4] Anti-immigrant demonstrations are on the rise across the continent, and so, too, are anti-immigrant assaults. Over 3,500 (nearly 10 a day) were recorded in Germany in 2016 alone,[5] including 595 beatings and 116 arson attacks.[6] Such violence in the streets has only strengthened far-right parties at the ballot box. In the past year, the Alternative for Germany and the Austrian People’s Party placed third in their countries’ parliamentary elections, while the Dutch Party for Freedom finished second. By political scientist Matt Golder’s account, “far right parties have participated in coalition governments in Austria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, and Switzerland, and they have

supported minority governments in Bulgaria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.”[7] This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging. For Spencer, the dream is a racial “ethno-state” to be achieved through what he calls “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”[8] The notion that the political and the national unit should be congruent is broadly in line with Ernest Gellner’s famous definition of nationalism as “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”[9] However, the commitment to a perfect synthesis of state and nation can take many forms. It can mean banning Muslim headscarves, as French courts did in 2010, on the grounds that they run counter to republican national values such as laïcité, gender equality, and democracy. It can mean banning political opponents, whom leaders from Vladimir Putin to Jarosław Kaczyński routinely call “national traitors.” And it is also this commitment that drives Europe’s many separatist movements, which promise to align state with nation. The trouble, of course, is that those are two incommensurable units: one legal and the other “imagined,” “constructed,” or “voluntaristic.”[10] Making them congruent, as Gellner pointed out, is likely to generate intense passions. “Nativism,” the second term guiding our inquiry, originated in the 1840s in reference to US Know Nothing party – formally called the Native American Party. While it has not been widely applied to Europe, it highlights important parallels between far-right movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Most prominently, they share an intense hostility to immigrants, especially those of a different race or religion. Anti-immigrant sentiment, Elisabeth Ivarsflaten has found, is the thread that links the vast array of Europe’s right-wing populists; it is the only grievance that has been “consistently mobilized by all successful populist right parties.”[11] But what separates nativism from mere xenophobia is its eugenic obsession with blood, birth, and health. For Spencer, “‘immigration’ is a proxy for race”: it produces a “miscegenated” nation and destroys whites’ “biological and cultural continuity.”[12] Such language has long been a fixture of Europe’s far-right groups, which habitually describe immigrants as “parasites” and “cancers.” Drawing from a deep well of anti-Semitism, they also portray ethnic minorities as sexual predators – a view aptly summed up by the portmanteau “rapefugees,” often seen on PEGIDA banners. Here the body politic is clearly female, and its vital function – reproduction – threatened by migration of any kind. Accordingly, one of the far-right’s greatest bugaboos is the idea of globalization. The grievances are partly economic, fueled by fears of lost jobs and profiteering elites. The rhetoric of two worlds, a “France of winners” and a “France of losers,” was a fixture of the 2017 presidential elections. But the concerns with globalization run deeper. For Richard Spencer, it impinges on the natural order of things, mixing together what is properly kept apart. “Identitarianism acknowledges the incommensurable nature of

different peoples and cultures,” he writes, “and thus looks forward to a world of true diversity and multiculturalism.”[13] Europe’s far-right groups view globalization as an assault on national sovereignty and identity. Marine Le Pen, in her first campaign speech, equated globalization with “Islamic fundamentalism,” since “both are working to make our nation disappear.”[14] Such critiques engender a politics of outrage, fueled by a sense of being under siege. That is why Charlottesville’s rally centered on a statue of Lee, which the city council had recently voted to remove. Global forces like political correctness, organizers claimed, had conspired to threaten local culture – identified, in their minds, with the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.[15] The same logic drives widespread criticism of Brussels and the European Union, distant actors that are easily portrayed as meddling. It can also take overtly anti-Semitic forms: “the Goyim know,” read a placard in Charlottesville, evoking the old trope of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The revolt against globalization frames far-right groups as underdogs, bravely fighting more powerful forces. By making the strong feel defensive, it often serves as an incitement to violence. It is a well-known paradox that nationalism is transnational: all nations claim to be unique, but in strikingly similar ways. The same seems to be true of far-right groups, as the Charlottesville rally suggests. Such groups now share tactics, symbols, and beliefs, honed in the echo chambers of the internet, or, increasingly, through in-person meetings. In December, nine of Europe’s far-right parties met in Prague to discuss joint strategy in – and against – the European Parliament. Several larger congresses have convened in Russia, which bills itself as the leader of the World National Conservative Movement. But if the global far-right is growing interconnected, so, too, are its opponents. In the days after Heather Heyer’s death, “vigils for Charlottesville” took place in many European cities, from Galway to Paris to Athens. Heyer’s name has also been coopted for various local causes – such as a women’s protest against another far-right march in Warsaw.

References

[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/09/26/identity-evropa-and-arktos-media- %E2%80%94-likely-bedfellows [2] https://www.salon.com/2013/10/29/white_separatists_are_afraid_of_the_future/ [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-connections-to-the-alt-right-2016-11 [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/12/pray-for-an- islamic-holocaust-tens-of-thousands-from-europes-far-right-march-in- poland/?utm_term=.9d0a25738a1f [5] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39096833 http://www.dw.com/en/more-than-3500-attacks-on-refugees-in-germany-in-2016- report/a-37719365 [6] [6] https://www.proasyl.de/news/gewalt-gegen-fluechtlinge-2017-von-entwarnung- kann-keine-rede-sein/ [7] Matt Golder, “Far Right Parties in Europe.” The Annual Review of Political Science 19 (2016), 477-97, here 477.

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/world/americas/white-nationalism- explained.html [9] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 1. [10] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 7. [11] Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, “What Unites Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe? Re- Examining Grievance Mobilization Models in Seven Successful Cases.” Comparative Political Studies 41: 1 (January 2008), 3-23, here 17. [12] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand- spencer-0 [13] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/10/12/american-racists-work-spread- %E2%80%98identitarian%E2%80%99-ideology [14] https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-globalization-campaign-launch-french- politics-news-lyon-islam/ [15] See, e.g., Gary Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (eds.), The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).