Right-wing hegemony and immigration: How the populist far-right achieved hegemony through the immigration debate in Europe

Introduction

All across Europe, right-wing populist parties are enjoying significant popular support. . . . they are exploiting fear of Muslim immigration and frustration with the political establishment – and are forcing mainstream parties to shift to the right. (Der Spiegel, 28 September 2010)

Der Spiegel’s caption sums it up: Europe has been turning to the right for more than two decades. I argue in this article that this turn is not merely a question of right-wing popular parties gaining ground and pushing the mainstream political establishment to the right. What we are witnessing is a tectonic movement that has shaken the entire political landscape and realigned social and political movements along a new fault line. This new fault line is interpellated by a discourse of culture, i.e. culture has become central to the questions of belonging and alterity, that is, the ontology of the social has become culturalized. ¹ Political discourse centered on the culturalized ontology of the social has left traditionally class-based leftist parties paralyzed with few possibilities to offer alternative visions. In other words, the far-right’s success has been of hegemonic dimensions.

Hegemony is a not so much a question of a particular discourse – culturalist, assimilationist, or multiculturalist – becoming dominant ² but that of the redrawing of the political/social horizon in terms of culturally based political/social identities. A hegemonic political project operates as a social imaginary that establishes one single horizon of intelligibility. As Smith (1994: 36–37) explains, ‘a hegemonic project does not . . . require [the political subjects’] . . . unequivocal support for its specific demands. It pursues, instead, a far more subtle goal, namely the naturalization of its specific vision of the social order as the social order itself’ and renders alternative representations unintelligible.

The populist far-right intervened in public discourse in the mid-1980s, tapping into popular discontent with the political establishment and linking the fears, anxieties and the ‘lost’ identities of the ‘people’ to their own specific xenophobic, often anti-Islamic policy themes. In right-wing populist parlance, the ‘people’ became synonymous with the ‘nation’, which excludes the cosmopolitan elites that destroyed the nation through the careless immigration policies toward Muslim immigrants. Social cleavages, such as class, gender, sexual orientation and so forth, are omitted from the construction of the ‘people’ (i.e. nation) in these right-wing populist accounts (Wodak, 2011: para. 8).

A hegemonic project is never a question of articulating policies, themes and categories already given in the facts of the situation; the ideas and categories themselves are constructed in the same process (Leys, 1990). While the notion of the people were rearticulated to be ‘the nation’, its antagonistic Other, too, had to be reconstructed: immigrant workers thus were turned into Muslims. ³ The new ontological order today projects back into the past as if it has always constituted the social/political horizon.

Once the new antagonistic identity categories become the common sense of the social structure, even those who argue against right-wing positions draw upon the same epistemology of the social. In this sense, an epistemic collusion occurs between right and left. It is this shared epistemology of the social that is the basis for the new hegemony.

However, a hegemonic project is never complete and is subject to continuous struggle. The sustained polemic about Muslims and Islam in political discourse reproduces the new hegemony. The sustained focus draws attention to cultural differences as the defining moments of social division and ontologizes the Muslim immigrant vis-a-vis the nation. In short, immigrants have come to signify new types of social antagonism within society.

Increased awareness, scattered across fields

There is an increasing awareness in scholarly work that the immigration debate has turned into a debate on Muslim immigrants and Islam. However, the xenophobic tone of the debate leads many scholars to describe this focus as a new form of racism in cultural clothes, that is, either as Islamophobia or cultural racism, or both (Modood, 2005; Wren, 2001). This phenomenon is not merely a question about racism in new, cultural clothes. The very category of immigrant has been transformed in this process: the immigrant worker turned into the Muslim immigrant. Not only has the category of immigrant been culturalized; the culturalized immigration debate has taken a central place in political discourse. Soysal (2009: 5–7), for example, argues that culture has ‘become the predominant mode of addressing citizenship, security, and even economy, which were conventionally considered to be distinct from culture’. Culture, in other words, has become the common sense in ordering, organizing and managing the world, not only the European world, but also the world at large, with Muslims replacing immigrants in general terms.

The centrality of culture and religion in the making of a new Europe is also evident in the large body of literature about the place of Islam in a (future) Europe. A very popular part of the literature is the so-called ‘Eurabia’ literature, which is blatantly Islamophobic. The common characteristic of this literature is that it depicts ‘Europe as a doomed continent, on the brink of cultural extinction in the face of a relentless and co-ordinated campaign of Islamicisation’ (Carr, 2006: 2).

The more ‘serious’ work on Muslim immigrants and Islam in Europe is critical of Eurabian fantasies, but most literature in this area takes for granted the culturalized categories of the social at the outset, even when if they are trying to challenge the monolithic conceptions of culture and religion. The notion that the immigration debate is a response to demographic shifts is another problematic assumption that often characterizes this scholarly work. Laurence and Vaisse (2006), for example, feel compelled to make the obvious argument that the importance of religion in the lives of Muslims in France should be considered alongside the other aspects of their lives, while contending that the emergence of a Muslim minority is a historic demographic shift. The same sentiment is also evident in both Bowen (2010), who argues that Islam can become accepted in France because of immigrants’ existence, and Klausen (2005), who frames the conflict with Europe’s Muslims because that they are here to stay. That is, most studies implicitly have the problematic assumption that the tensions around Islam and Muslim immigrants are a ‘natural’ outcome of the increasing numbers of immigrants from Muslim countries.

On the other side, academics also realize that the conflict is not necessarily about the demographic shift but instead the shift in the characterization of these immigrants. Roy (2007: 5) notes, for example, that young immigrants in the 1980s made no reference to Islam. Roy also notes the blurring of traditional divisions (such as between left and right, between secularists and religious sectors) in the face of the intense focus on Islam which renders Muslim immigrants as an incompatible category with Frenchness.

Researchers are increasingly becoming aware of the role that the populist far-right has played in this shift and about the alignment of progressive politics with right-wing politics (Klausen, 2009; Pitcher, 2009). Ironically, the most interesting work about the central role of the immigration debate in European political discourse comes from political theory, a field that does not focus on immigration or immigration-related issues, but rather examines the development and success of the far-right parties. ⁴ Explanations in this literature for the populist far-right mobilization include reference to: (1) the crisis in the political representation system along with the de-alignment of voters from their political parties and the polarization of the political spectrum (Ignazi, 2003); (2) the political vacuum created by the erasure of left–right distinctions (Mouffe, 1995, 2005); (3) anxieties created by the structural changes in the postwar era; (4) popular resentment with the political system; and (5) the politicization of immigration issues (Betz, 1994; Betz and Immerfall, 1998). The literature evidences the centrality of immigration in the populist right’s appeal to voters and in turning social and economic anxieties against the system. Moreover there is a general tendency to attribute the rise of the populist right as a ‘backlash’ to the increasing numbers of immigrants – a premise that is explicitly challenged by Schain et al. (2002). They argue that the popular consternation over immigrants often follows an electoral emergence and has little to do with the presence of immigrants. Indeed, support for the populist right is often strong in areas with virtually no immigrants. On the contrary, they observe, these parties play a central role in turning immigrants into an alien threat. Karapin (2002), for example, demonstrates in a study of the German case that the far-right’s success depended on the salience of immigration and immigration-related issues rather than on the numbers or presence of immigrants. Berggren (2007) points to the problematic notion that characterizes most literature in which the populist far-right addresses the resentment already in the popular conscience rather than generating the resentment from scratch. ⁵

As my short review illustrates, these insights are scattered through various fields and disciplines whose different foci and methodologies often prevent their authors from learning from insights in other fields and disciplines. Research in this sense responds to the discursive climate and produces knowledge that, in a circular manner, contributes to the sedimentation of the new ontological distinctions as a common-sense vision of society.

Sharing a common vision

When the populist far-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) published the book Denmark’s Future, Your Country, Your Choice . . . (Dahl et al., 2001) a few months before DPP’s electoral victory in 2001, all hell broke out. The controversy around the book provides an insight into how the sides are positioned in the heated debate on immigration. Two sections organize the book. The first and more substantial part of the book paints a picture of a Denmark ridden with problems because of Muslim immigrants and their culture (one of the chapters, called ‘The impossible combination of Islam and democracy’, is full of pictures of bearded Muslim men and women wearing headscarves). The second part, devoted to the future of Denmark, shows idyllic pictures of pristine lakes, verdant woods, colorful cottages, white swans and peaceful-looking Danes with smiling children – all of whom are blond. The section creates an image of a pure, conflict-free Denmark that will be restored to its ‘original’ state when the DPP comes to power.

One wonders what all the fray was about considering that this Manichean dichotomy has been the primary framework in the mainstream media for the discussion of immigrant-related issues since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Based on their survey of Danes’ attitudes on immigrants and the media’s coverage of immigration during the 1980s, Gaasholt and Togeby (1995: 163) concluded that the xenophobic right had already won the struggle for not only media attention, but also in setting the frame for covering immigration and related issues.

The controversy surrounding the book was fierce but a closer look shows that critics’ reactions were limited to the verifiability of the facts, the book’s specific policy proposals and its harsh tone. Almost no critics questioned the basic antagonism that characterized the book. For this is the vision of society that characterizes not only the far-right, but also the entire political spectrum, including political parties and social movements on the left. Denmark is not, as the electoral success of the populist far-right parties all over Europe would testify, unique in this sense.

Both Social Democrats and the more ‘immigrant-friendly’ parties to the left of them share the far-right’s concerns about the cultural threat that Muslim immigrants pose to ‘our common’ values. This is so even if their specific policy suggestions may seem to be the opposite of the right and may appear more inclusive towards cultural difference. Chairman for the Socialist People’s Party in Denmark Villy Søvndal sums up what seems to be the common concern for left and progressive movements: ‘It is clear that the left has struggled a long time for gender equality. But it is also clear that immigrants, for example from Somalia, have not experienced the struggle for equality and all the hardships it [the struggle] caused. And this creates cultural problems which are not unwinnable, but which we need to take seriously as a fight with immigrants’ (Politiken, 7 March 2008). That is, we may not want to exclude the immigrants, but their ‘culture’ is simply not compatible with ‘our’ achievements.

It also means that the left and right not only use the same ontological categories to understand social struggles, but also use the same antagonistic characteristics within these categories. In these categories, gender equality or sexual freedom signify ‘our’ side of the equation, while ‘they’ are clearly waiting to evolve. In the face of the impending cultural threat that endangers ‘our achievements’, the discourse gives an impression of sameness across the political spectrum such that other types of divisions emerge vis-a-vis the Muslim immigrants.

On the surface, the quote above from the socialist leader may not sound as unreasonable as I have indicated if we ignore the monolithic conception of cultural difference that underlies the statement. There is nothing curious about jealously defending the achievements ‘we’ had to fight for and the hardships ‘we’ had to endure, especially when ‘the cultural practices of Muslim immigrants’ seem to oppose everything ‘we’ have achieved so far. Yet the focus on immigrants when it comes to emancipatory projects has dire political consequences. First, the salience of the debate on Muslim immigrants and their culture ontologizes cultural differences, as the unreflexive use of ‘we’ indicates. This causes a hegemonic displacement in social representational systems. Second, social and political cleavages are now understood in new terms that reconfigure traditional hegemonic struggles in Europe. What used to be the traditional divide between capital and labor that once formed the contours of left and right in Europe is now a cultural divide between national citizens on the one side and cosmopolitan cultural elite and Muslim immigrants on the other. The culturalized political discourse brings the left closer to the right, with whom they used to fight over gender equality and a wide range of social achievements.

How does culturalization re-ontologize society? The following passage, which features Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party, contains some clues:

Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values. . . . A lot of people, progressive ones – we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right – are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the 60’s and 70’s,’ . . . So there is this fear,’ he said, ‘that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.’ (Bilefsky and Fisher, 2006)

The most interesting feature of the quote from Lagendik is the seamlessly shifting uses of ‘we’ within the same extract. In the context of a discussion about Muslim immigrants, the pronoun ‘we’ is used to mean first ‘we’ the progressives, and then a slide occurs towards ‘we’ the nation (or in a broader sense, European civilization) at the end of the quote. The shifting uses of ‘we’ indicate new ways of articulating ‘we’-ness – a slippage through which traditionally progressive notions are rearticulated as the core of national culture(s). This has enormous implications for how ‘we’ understand ‘us’.

The passage not only contains Lagendik’s vision for progressive politics, one that has to be rearticulated in opposition to Muslim immigrants who pose an immediate threat to ‘our’ freedoms. It also points to the fact that ideas once considered to be at the extreme right end of the political spectrum (i.e. Islam is incompatible with European values) have moved into the center and have been adopted by both the mainstream right and progressive or leftist groups. The shift is not a simple question of the populist right’s influence on the mainstream political debate on immigration. Rather, what we are witnessing is a new hegemonic displacement.

Hegemony

Hegemony points to the struggle of a particular class or classes in certain historical periods to gain or maintain power through bloc-making, or alliance-creating, strategies. For Gramsci (1971), class identities are rooted in objective economic and social relations. Laclau and Mouffe (1985), on the other hand, understand class identities as the result of an articulatory process that also shapes the meaning of economic and social relations. In other words, those relations are not given in any objective, readily available, non-discursive reality; they are the result of interventions by an articulating, i.e. a hegemonic, force. This point is important because the hegemonic displacement that I have been describing is precisely a displacement of social identities from the economic to the cultural realm. It means the social identities can be understood as interpellated by culture. The cultural paradigm essentializes social distinctions and explains social problems by attributing the responsibility to the incommensurable nature of different cultures.

According to Marxist and social democratic traditions, it was capitalists in a class-based society that prevented the working class and other oppressed and marginalized groups from achieving their ideals. It was only by removing capitalism that a final reconciliation was possible. What happened during the last two decades is the disarticulation of the ideals of various oppressed and marginalized groups (e.g. feminists in the struggle for gender equality or gays in the struggle for sexual freedom) from the class struggle and from the anti-racist struggle.

The hegemonic shift means that the traditionally progressive anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic arguments are detached from their historical relations to left-wing politics and reappropriated by the populist right to mark national identity, particularly in European nations. This rearticulation happens through the debate on Muslim immigrants and Islam in Europe, as well as through the ideologically manufactured link between Islam and terrorism on a global scale. In both cases, ‘western civilization’ is presented as the very condition of possibility for the realization of emancipatory projects.

Antagonism

Emancipatory projects, such as gender equality and sexual freedom, signify a larger European or western cultural totality only when they are opposed to Islam as another totality. Islam, in these kind of narratives, is represented as a system characterized by dogmatic, religious authoritarianism and unquestioning collectivity, which are things that the West abandoned long ago. The implication is, by abandoning dogmatic religious authoritarianism, Europeans also leave behind gender discrimination or discrimination against homosexuals. Very few leftists, feminists, or progressive gays would agree with these ideas if uttered in another context. However, in talking about a purported ‘we’ as opposed to a purported Muslim culture, it becomes possible to embrace this logic.

What this means is that the meaning of European/western culture is fixed in an antagonistic relationship with its opposite pole: Islam. The category excludes whatever the other category is assumed to include. In this sense, they are not simple oppositions; they do not belong to the same ontological order (Laclau, 2005).

An important qualification is necessary here. The hegemonic displacement I am describing is not an ideological project that has a coherent worldview. Rather, what keeps together this vast array of oft-contradictory categorical signifiers of European and Muslim is the naming of the ontological categories itself. Once the ontological structure of the social is taken for granted, articulating alternative politics that could be realized within that structure becomes extremely difficult (Yılmaz, 2006).

Another qualification to this discussion of antagonism is the nature of hegemony. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue, a hegemonic project can never be completed because of the heterogeneous nature of the social. The project thus demands a constant struggle to keep the ontological order in place. In this case, what keeps the ontological order in place is the salience of the immigration and immigration-related issues. Crises and moral panics around particular issues, such as criminality, gang rapes, honor killings and female circumcision, sustain nationalist-racist hegemony through a constant focus on immigrants. Through these moral panics and crises, the focus on immigrants produces them as a category whose cultural values explain these phenomena. This is a circular process, but it is initiated in the first instance by nationalist-racist right interventions in the discourse .

Such an antagonistic relationship implies a broken space, a gap that emerges in the harmonious continuity of the social. Clearly, the gap has to be produced through a narrative as if there had been social peace and harmony before the arrival of Muslim immigrants. In this context, it becomes vital that there is a narrative of Europe, or rather narratives of each country with the antagonism as culturally homogeneous prior to the arrival of Muslims.

Relationship between demography and culture is discursive

There are two distinct problems with this narrative of the past. First, if there is a relationship between demography and culture, it is a hermeneutic relationship, not something an outer reality dictates. The new immigrants did not have to be defined in a culturalized and ethnicized language. In fact, when the first immigrants came in the 1960s and subsequently, Europeans mainly discussed them in terms of their contribution to, or burden on the economy. Even when culture and religion entered into the debate, these were articulated mostly within the general framework of class struggle as the main point of contention.

It is only after mid-1980s that culture has come into focus as the defining feature of immigrants’ presence. The culturalization of discourse at that moment resulted from the far-right’s intervention in the discourse, successfully changing the parameters of the debate (Yılmaz, 2006). Rod Benson (2000: 224) describes a similar situation in France:

The rise of a negative cultural framing of immigration in France is difficult to ‘see’ in the sense that it has become so widely accepted today as the essence of a distinctive French model of immigration and integration. Many journalists, activists and even academics have come to accept a distinctive approach to cultural difference as not only the French reality but the French ‘way’. They thus deny or can no longer even remember that a cultural framing of immigration was only one among many ways that immigration was understood in France during the 1960s and 1970s and that its taken-for-granted status of the 1980s had in fact to be won in the political and media arenas.

In short, culture talk assumes a natural process of ‘two cultures’ meeting, in which the increased immigration of Muslims into Europe over the past couple of decades explains the natural emergence of tensions. In this narrative, history or culture become the agents, not the political forces that move them in a particular direction.

To explain it another way, the far-right’s intervention in the discourse brought culture to the center in an environment already ripe for such intervention in the mid-1980s. The left–right distinction was being erased in the face of an emerging neoliberal ideology (Mouffe, 1995), and social democrats were promoting free markets while turning a blind eye to inequalities. At the same time, a number of new social movements that did not have allegiances to working-class movements were slowly culturalizing political discourse. These were times of profound representational crisis, when the working-class interests were poorly represented within the political system. This is the typical definition of a hegemonic crisis. The social and political environment was ripe for a new kind of populist articulation of the antagonism between the ‘people’ versus the ‘establishment’. As Laclau (2005: 33–49) argues, populist movements should not be analyzed with respect to their ideological content, but with a focus on their political practice. Populism thus did not connect to the left, as it traditionally had, but came from the far-right, which managed to articulate a basic antagonism between the ‘people’ in the national sense and the ‘cosmopolitan, traitorous elite’ that let Muslim immigrants (a culturally alien force) take over the ‘country’. This is the process that most European countries experienced regardless of their country-specific differences.

The new hegemonic structure is the result of the far-right’s intervention in discourse through sustained crises and moral panics around Muslim immigrants and their ‘cultural practices’. Their political parties have succeeded in making immigration, culture and religion central issues for all mainstream parties, including those on the left side of the traditional political spectrum. The slide to the right happened over the debate about Muslims and Islam’s incompatibility with European culture. Culture, meaning cultural struggle, has been thus the key concept in the turn to the right of the entire political spectrum. The populist far-right capitalized on the increasing attention paid to immigration, turned it into a cultural question, and then managed to push the culturalized immigration debate into the center of political discourse. The mainstream right then cynically adopted the cultural focus on immigration in part to recapture the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim animosity that brought the populist far-right electoral gains. ⁶ These moves so far have disarmed the left such that it has offered little resistance to the xenophobic campaign, and, in many cases, adopted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim language and policies. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory came after an explicitly anti-immigrant campaign where he promised to restore the pride of being French. He has since been campaigning ‘to purify and protect national identity, purging so-called foreign elements . . . from membership in the nation’ (Scott, 2010: para. 3).

The second problem with the culturalized narrative of history is the temporal space from which it speaks. Although it presents itself as universal wisdom, the culturalized narrative of history speaks of the past through a contemporary perspective. It reflects the focus on culture as the main signifier of social antagonisms in contemporary Europe rather than being a descriptive statement about how the country was in the past. It is not that immigration and debate on immigration is new; Europe has received immigrants throughout history. Those times, however, presumed that ethnic minority groups were assimilated ‘successfully’, without great problems.

Historical accounts do not merely describe historical facts. They (re)write history through significant elements of the contemporary discourse. If culture is one of the defining elements of contemporary discourse, then contemporary accounts will look at history through the lens of culture. This seems to be a generic strategy for all narratives that attempt to articulate a vision for the future. If society is explained by class struggles, then the history of hitherto existing society becomes the history of class struggles (e.g. Marx and Engels, 1978). Conversely, if society is explained by religious narratives, then the history of hitherto society becomes a phantasmatic tale of divine creation. The history of hitherto society could easily be understood as the history of women’s oppression, or of homophobia, or of culture wars. Any of these interpretations would indicate a past constructed from the particular perspective of a contemporary struggle on a given discursive terrain. Thus, the narrative that Europe is becoming multiethnic and multicultural implicates a particular understanding of the past, meaning what existed before the change. My point is that it is the narrative about the transformation that constructs – in a reverse direction of causality – the very past assumed to be transformed. This narrative suggests that changes in attitudes towards foreigners are the result of the demographic changes caused by immigrants from essentially different cultures and religions. In other words, it is the presence of culturally alien immigrants that creates the reactions from the ‘people’.

The point is not that Europe was less culturally diverse in the past, but that culture was not a primary concern in imagining social divisions. More importantly, there was no peaceful, harmonious past in Europe. The past there, as everywhere, was also characterized by conflicts, upheavals and struggles over class and identity. According to Lucassen (2005), the integration of immigrants has always been a long and painful process. The Irish immigrants in Britain, the Poles in Germany and the Italians in France were considered different and problematic – if not more so – than the contemporary ‘Muslim’ immigrants.

In this particular instance, national culture(s) – understood as the opposite of Islam – has come to signify the ontological order, which is a departure from the order in class-based narratives. In those narratives, the ontological order equated national culture(s) with the working class and peasants as their constitutive members in the form of the ‘people’. In other words, the fundamental division of society has shifted from one based on the traditional divide between labor and capital (where other social cleavages were articulated with this divide as their reference), to a framework based on a cultural divide, and every other social identity now takes this ontology as its reference point. It means that solutions to pressing problems are conceived within the parameters of this ontological structure.

The populist right managed to frame media debates, via ongoing moral panics around immigrants’ ‘cultural’ behaviors, in such a way that political parties of all persuasions are forced to respond continually to ever fresh scandals and intentional provocations. They thus tacitly accept the premises for these so-called debates (Yılmaz, 2011). Whatever the differences between political platforms, the basic antagonism produces its own culturally defined social divisions, making it impossible to articulate alternative visions under given conditions. This is what paralyzes social democrats. Rather than articulating their own vision for the future of the nation (or Europe), they have quietly accepted the basic premise of the Islamophobic/xenophobic perspective in order to keep their constituency from being attracted to the extreme right. Both the political establishment and those who claim to challenge the extreme right’s vision of the nation nevertheless draw on this ontology. This is how racist hegemonic articulations have found their way to the center. Unless a radical rearticulation of the political imaginary takes place, other parties’ movements to gain momentum will be ‘limited by the straightjacket of the hegemonic formations whose parameters remain substantially unchanged’ (Laclau, 2005: 238).

Rather than taking for granted the culturalized narrative of the social as the reflection of the real world beyond our reach, we need to identify it as a particular politico-rhetorical move that narrates its own vision of the social as if it were the reflection of some kind of indisputable reality. To borrow from Zizek (1999), there is a real basic divide without which ‘society’ cannot be conceptualized. However, how that divide is inscribed symbolically, or how that divide is overdetermined is not bound in a natural law or in a deeper reality that dictates the symbolic, but largely depends on hegemonic articulations.