Ontological Insecurities and Postcolonial Imaginaries

Abstract

In this article, I address the particular narratives and discourses that respond to increased feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear, so-called ontological insecurities, and their connections to the postcolonial imaginaries of populist politics. Recent focus on post-truth politics and alternative facts point to some underlying questions concerning the emotional appeal of particular social imaginaries, such as the appeal and resonance of certain discourses and narratives, as well as the ways in which specific discourses and narratives grip and take an emotional hold of a subject. Of particular importance in terms of populist politics is why specific imaginaries ultimately come together in the imagined object of the other—in this case, the immigrant and/or the refugee other. To understand how power works through emotional discourses and narratives, I discuss how they come to naturalize colonial fears and postcolonial melancholia, played out in myths about “the nation,” “the people,” “the establishment,” and “the immigrant others,” but also how such myths justify the imagined ills of Western society and how they constitute both remedies to and origins of ontological insecurities.

Keywords

ontological security insecurity postcolonial imaginaries emotion populism

Personal Reflexive Statement

Catarina Kinnvall’s interest in the subject of ontological (in)security goes back to her initial work on the effects of globalization in China after the economic reforms in 1982 and similar developments in India from 1991 and onward. The anxieties and fears in relation to rapid political change and economic developments made her look into the consequences of such anxieties in psychological, postcolonial, gendered, and structural terms and she has since then extended her interests to cover a number of other empirical cases, not least the effects of migration and crises in a European setting. As a result, she has, over the last decade, developed the research field on ontological security studies in international relations theory together with Jennifer Mitzen to account for a growing interest in the field among a large number of international scholars. Her focus on populist politics and emotions in relation to ontological (in)security and postcolonial imaginaries has also been the topic of a number of articles and chapters during the last few years and has come to further her interest in political psychology and international relations as emerging interrelated fields. Catarina is also the current editor in chief of the journal Political Psychology.

This country was ready-built thirty to forty years ago. The only thing we had to do was to take care of and develop the opulence and welfare that earlier generations had created. The Sweden Democrats is the logical inheritor of the idea of the people’s home.

Jimmie Åkesson (leader of the Swedish Democrats, cited in Sydsvenskan, Sunday, June 24, 2018) In order to captivate an imaginary past, the Sweden Democrats (SD), together with multiple other populist parties and organizations in Europe and elsewhere, has not only fabricated stories to allow for a dystopic narrative of immigrant others to prevail but has also been intent on portraying past national sentiments as defined by security, harmony, and coherence. On November 16, 2016, the Oxford Dictionary announced “post-truth” as the word of the year, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Without going into the debate about what such “objective facts” would be, or whether we can ever talk about objective in any neutral kind of way, the term’s high currency owes its origins to two significant events with potentially long-lasting effects on a regional and global scale: the Brexit Referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as the U.S. President. However, these two events do not stand alone in their emphasis on simple answers to complex questions but form parts of a larger global current on the rise of (especially far right) populism and the threat of declining democratic standards. But they also point to a number of underlying tensions and emotional experiences related to the effects of neoliberal governance, austerity politics, and postcolonial pasts.

Living in most Western societies involves being confronted with headlines of increased crime, welfare tourism, terrorism threats, and migration crises. In many ways, it appears as if the Western world, and all it is believed to stand for, is under attack from global forces beyond our control. It seems to be a world in which anxiety and insecurity have become the staple food of “our” existence, a questioning of who “we” are, what “we” believe in, and “who” is to blame. For some, it can be read as an increasing dread of an unknown and unforeseeable future. But it can also be seen as a return to a nostalgic past, one dominated by a belief that our genealogy can be traced back to a specific place, time, and ancestor, thus creating an imagined ideological lineage from past to present. The emotional dimension of such imaginaries is visible in the SD leader Jimmie Åkesson’s appeal for a restoration of the Swedish “people’s home”—a concept launched by the Social Democrats in 1928 to refer to a series or welfare reforms—an appeal to “make Sweden great again” and instill the lost pride of a nation “overwhelmed” by immigrants.

In such imaginaries, it is easy to see how symbols, memories, myths, and heritage are reproduced and given new political significance according to current needs and goals. In the hands of populist leaders, it is about channeling and governing emotions in its broadest sense for containing anxiety, neutralizing anger, alleviating guilt, and satisfying (imagined) needs for pride, attachment, and pleasure (Richards 2007). Nostalgia, in these accounts, becomes a means to guide future action, while constructing an illusion of ontological security in the present. It is at such times of heightened tension and anxiety in the society that populist discourses and narratives seem to resonate with an audience beset by securing its everyday existence.

In this article, I address the particular narratives and discourses that respond to increased feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear, so-called ontological insecurities, and their connections to the postcolonial imaginaries of populist politics. Recent focus on post-truth politics and alternative facts points to some underlying questions concerning the emotional appeal of particular social imaginaries ( The Economist 2016). As Solomon (2015) has asked in relation to the conservative movement in the United States: Why and how do certain discourses and narratives appeal and resonate with an audience, and how can discourses and narratives grip and take an emotional hold of a subject? To this can be added the question of why their attractions and bearings ultimately come together in the imagined object of the other—in this case, the immigrant and/or the refugee? To understand how power works through emotional discourses and narratives, I discuss how they come to naturalize colonial fears and postcolonial melancholia, played out in myths about “the nation,” “the people,” “the establishment,” and “the immigrant others,” but also how such myths justify the imagined ills of Western society and how they constitute both remedies to and origins of ontological insecurities.

The article starts with a discussion of some of the background to populist politics in Europe and the West, outlining how we can understand populist leaders, movements, and politics and some of the reasons for why they find emotional resonance among a growing audience. It then moves on to a short overview of the ontological security literature to explore the particular ways in which the discourses and narratives that come to define such insecurities can be understood in present-day Europe. Here, I am especially concerned with the structural and emotional dimension of these narratives in terms of how they play into the fears, anxieties, and nostalgic longings for a past—often directed against imagined ills and fantasies of the other—and how such longings play into present and future politics. This includes a focus on the unconscious in subject formation, the fantasmatic (fictional) narratives that are used to keep ontological insecurities at bay in the (impossible) search for a complete identity. Finally, I discuss some conceivable solutions to the current ontological insecurity crisis in terms of ruptures to and dissolutions of the populist narratives that so much seem to define current society and discuss (briefly) what this would require in terms of structural and psychological change.

Populism, Nativism, and Racism: Insecurity and Anxiety in Europe and the West

To understand how particular emotions have been capitalized on by populist politicians and leaders, we need to understand how certain emotions, such as anxieties and fears, have evolved over time in relation to a changing political landscape. Looking at the European case, we can see how throughout the period of enlargement of the European Union (EU), the main concerns became the loss of jobs and farming to new member states, fears of increase in crime, and the prospect of economic crisis. This is clearly evident in the European Commission’s 35 years of Eurobarometer (2008), which examined the “hopes and fears created by the construction of Europe” by comparing responses to the question of “fears about the building of Europe.”

However, from 2014 onward, Europeans became increasingly worried about immigration and terrorism at the state level, particularly after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and subsequent assaults, and the 2015 Eurobarometer survey (EB 87) shows how Europeans’ apprehensions and fears were manifest at the EU level, with clear-cut anxieties over immigration and terrorism to be addressed in the EU from 2014 and onward. Recently released YouGov findings (reported in Nardelli 2016) on populist authoritarian attitudes—measured as anti-immigrant sentiments, strong foreign policy views, and opposition to human rights, EU institutions, and European immigration policies—also found that such attitudes were shared by 48 percent of British adults, despite less than 20 percent of the population identifying itself as right wing. In France, a clear majority held authoritarian populist views—63 percent of those surveyed, while in Italy the figure was 47 percent. The highest levels of authoritarian populist views were recorded in Romania and Poland, where 82 percent and 78 percent of adults held them, respectively, closely followed by Hungary.

A methodological focus on surveys and polling can tell us something about the increase and decrease in racist sentiments, and measures of hostile and reported criminal acts can say something about their consequences. However, surveys or reports alone do not adequately describe the underlying emotions behind such fluctuations. Hence, there is no straightforward connection between economic, political, and social conditions and how people subjectively experience and interpret such conditions. Actual economic and physical dangers may thus be less relevant than the discursive construction of fear, anxiety, and threat. Here, a number of more current developments related to globalization and postindustrialism may have instigated higher levels of insecurity among the European populace. Economic and political change, party realignment, the weakening of the welfare state, crises of legitimacy for ordinary parties, social marginalization, migration, unemployment, crime, and changed gender relations constitute some of these factors, but included are also more general feelings of shared cultural and/or national “loss.” Such feelings were clearly evident in the Brexit debate, with Brexiters proclaiming their wish to “take Britain back” or “make Britain great again” (Manners 2016:5). Both quantitative and experimental studies (e.g., Lucassen and Lubbers 2012) also show that cultural threats to identity are more likely to induce exclusionary reactions to immigrants and multiculturalism than threats to economic well-being.

Looking at recent developments in Europe and the West, we find a number of features of populist trends that seem to correspond with current far-right populism: nationalism and nativism, racism, xenophobia, new forms of democratic governance, and appeals for a strong state (Iganzi 2003). Here, the focus is often on the restoration of national values and on idealized images of a past order (Kenny 2017). In the literature on the far right, this longing for the nation has been referred to as nativism, meaning “an ideology which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (the ‘nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the nation-state” (Mudde 2007:22). Nativism involves a key economic aspect of welfare chauvinism, viewed as the result of social conditions giving rise to a populist “frame of mind,” such as insecure forms of employment and decreased economic security together with a shift toward more punitive welfare regimes and the deepening of existing forms of regionally based inequality (Kenny 2017). What marks welfare chauvinism, however, is its tendency to delineate the “pure people” and their birthright to the nation-state’s welfare structure from those undeserving others, such as ethnic/racial/religious minorities along a logic of nationalistic solidarity (Derks 2006). A number of feminist writers have further accentuated the gendered role of nativism in populism, detailing the role of gender in the biological and cultural reproduction of the nation and its “essence” (Butler 2004; Yuval-Davis 1997), and the role of gender in nationalist ideology (Cusac 2004; Norocel 2013), in which the nation’s women are marked off from the other’s women. Examples are plentiful: In the United Kingdom, Ukip ran its 2017 election campaign on banning the burqa and enforcing genital checks from groups (meaning Muslim groups) at risk of suffering female mutilation (Young 2018), while in Poland the right-wing Law and Justice Party has targeted human rights groups, feminists, and proimmigration activists through media censorships, new laws on the teaching of holocaust history, and frequent raids on the offices that criticize the government (Holloran 2018). Similarly, the SD and the Danish People’s party converge on their aversion against multiculturalism, but also in terms of their anti-feminist approach that emphasizes heteronormative values at the same time as Swedish and Danish gender equality has to be saved from “immigrant” (specifically Muslim) authoritarian practices. “Being Muslim” has thus been perceived by many far-right and populist party followers as being perpetrators or sympathizers of terrorist attacks (Lööw 2011; Siims and Skjele 2008). Hence, it is probably safe to assume an increase in both overt and covert racism in Europe, and the emotional performances related to such racism, regardless of whether this is labeled xenophobia, prejudice, or discrimination.

Both nativist and antiestablishment narratives tend to focus on the homeland of the betrayed people, that the established parties have “sold out” the homeland and/or the welfare state in favor of multiculturalism with leaders articulating the “authentic” voice, virtue, and experience of ordinary people (Inglehart 2016). The Internet is a crucial arena and resource for such initiation, mobilization, and coordination as it provides opportunities for inducing and maintaining collective identities and a sense of community, at the same time as it offers emotional guidance, bonding, and support (Caiani and Wagemann 2009). This support and the particular emotional messages used differ from context to context. What remains constant across the board of recent far-right populist appeal, however, is the “fear of strangers related to vehement nativist nationalism built on the myth of the quasi-homogenous nation-state,” increasingly expressed in terms of Islamophobia and nostalgia for an imagined past (Özkirimli 2017; Wodak 2015:31-32). As Agius and Dean (2017) have argued in the context of Brexit:

For those supporting “Brexit,” the referendum was an opportunity to shape emotions in order to “reclaim” national identity and “control” over economic and immigration policy and borders. The Leave campaign’s saturation of images and rhetoric imagined a restored national sovereignty that proved to be a powerful, if contentious and divisive, discourse. For many of those supporting the Remain campaign, the loss of the referendum was experienced as existential—or “Brexistential”—crisis, /…/ an undoing of a sense of security and identity attached not only to the nation-state /…/ but also to Europe. (p. 2)

Pointing to the emotional dynamics of the Brexit campaign and outcome is not to deny the significance of intraelite contestation and manipulation behind the rhetoric, not least the split within the conservative party and the power of anti-EU-agitators. However, as Browning (2018) has noted: “This split, however, is not just a matter of political differences, but has, from the beginning, exhibited deep emotional, psychological and even existential elements.” Similarly, Reicher and Haslam (2016, in Agius and Dean 2017:2) maintain that Trump’s success was attributable not only to his political rallies as carefully orchestrated performances but also to his ability to represent himself and his platform in ways that resonated with his would-be followers’ experience of their world. This focus on rhetoric and “sound” has become even more pronounced after the election of Trump as President, with other republicans trying to follow suit (and flatter the President) by being “more Trump than Trump himself” in order to appeal to a disgruntled electorate, using emotional (and visual) narratives like “drain the swamp,” “Build the wall,” “rigged systems,” “fake news,” and “America first” (Peters 2018:5). Similarly, we can see how post-truth politics have spilled over into xenophobic expressions of migrants on various social media sites and with an increase in reported hate crimes in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe (FRA 2016).

Ontological Insecurity, Postcolonial Imaginaries, and the Fantasmatic Other

Masses and elites that have nothing otherwise in common can find that the same ideology and the same organizing leadership unites them, relieves them of their rootlessness; the same apocalyptic and redemptive vision gives them a common future. They are relieved by it, enthused by it, feel swept into place by it, and they are glad to be alike, uniform, in a historical process that asks no thinking of them but gives them the comfort of an obedience that does not feel passive to them. (Young-Bruehl 1996:78-79)

As Young-Bruehl notes, at the heart of the populist rhetoric is the promise of relief and redemption from everyday frustrations, anxieties, and fears. These ontological insecurities can be countered and salvaged through visions of a common future, implying a need to understand the discourses and narratives involved in populist rhetoric and their emotional reception. Taking an ontological security perspective on populism, emotions, and security means investigating both the structural and the affective reasons why individuals and collectives experience ontological insecurity as well as the emotional responses to these feelings. To a certain extent, it requires a move away from Giddens’s original understanding of ontological security as a “security of being,” toward an understanding of ontological security that emphasizes a “security of becoming,” in which the ontological insecurities people experience often require a “leap of faith” (see Arfi 2010) in terms of an imagined secure future that can relieve the individual from their present predicament.

When initially employing the concept, Giddens (1991) took his point of departure in Laing’s conceptualization of ontological security at the individual level where he argued that an ontologically secure person is somebody able to phase all hazards of life from a centrally firm sense of her own and other people’s reality and identity, while an ontologically insecure person is one for whom identity and autonomy are always in question (Laing 1960:39, 49). While Laing was primarily concerned with ontological insecurity as a psychiatric condition, Giddens largely provided a sociological interpretation of Laing’s analysis. Relying on the object-relations theory developed by Winnicot, Giddens argued that subjectivity derives from intersubjectivity and that learning the qualities of others is connected to the earliest explorations of the object world and with the first stirring of what later become established feelings of self-identity. It is here that Giddens most explicitly states that trust in others is at the origin of the experience of a stable external world and a coherent sense of self-identity—a security of being. This security of being relies on a predictability found in everyday life, in social routines that structure everyday interactions as natural and normal. Such a focus on routines and predictability has also been at the center of much work on ontological security in international relations theory (see, e.g., Mitzen 2006a, 2006b, 2016; Lupovici 2012, 2016; Rumelili 2015; Zarakol 2010). As Giddens (1991:37) describes it: “The natural attitude brackets out questions about ourselves, others and the object-world which have to be taken for granted in order to keep up with everyday activity.” Others have put less emphasis on the intersubjective dimension of ontological security and instead emphasized its intrasubjective facets and autobiographical narratives (Steele 2005, 2008; see also Subotic 2016). Yet others have focused less on the state and rather emphasized how individuals and groups come to terms with living with insecurities and the ways in which ontological security seeking behavior has played out in relation to significant others (e.g., Croft 2012a, 2012b; Croft and Vaughan-Willliams 2017; Kinnvall 2004, 2006, 2017a,b; Krolikowski 2008).

Giddens’s notion of ontological security has been an important and invaluable source of reference for all these scholars. It should be noted, however, that Giddens’s account of ontological security as a “security of being” relies on a particular notion of subjectivity that rests on individual reflexivity and broad assumptions that social agents are in command of some implicit knowledge and self-understanding regardless of their social and political context (Barker 1999; Kinnvall 2017). Giddens has also been criticized for largely submerging self and identity (self-identity; Browning and Joeneimmi 2013), with the consequence that multiple subjective identifications as spelt out in much psychoanalysis in terms of unconscious fantasy and repressed desire and thought are largely ignored. The often-unquestioning tendency to rely on Giddens’s notion of subjectivity in much ontological security research thus raises some questions in terms of its relationship to autonomy and identity (Rossdale 2015) as well as the status of the subject as an ontological security seeker (Mälksoo 2015; see also Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017).

Rather than going into depth of this discussion (for an overview, see Berenskoetter 2014; Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017; Rossdale 2015), I suggest a move away from Giddens’s focus on ontological security as security of being—something individuals can possess or have—toward a focus on ontological security as a process that is constantly in progress, a temporal process of always wanting. Such a shift in focus implies that there is no core or autonomous self to return to in order to feel ontologically secure, rather what we are witnessing is an antifoundational notion of self, expressed through images, fantasies, and desires. As the child is encountering their surroundings, they are born into an existing symbolic order that is alien to them; a symbolic order unable to escape the symbolic filter of language. To develop their agency and subjectivity, they have to enter into this foreign world, which they can never fully grasp. Thus, to constitute ourselves as subjects, we identify with certain master signifiers, which define what it means to be a social being: a woman, a man, a Brit, an American, and so on, in order to get recognition by others and for providing a place within a certain social order (Eberle 2018; Epstein 2011). Lacan’s subject is thus never autonomous but is always dependent on images of others in the construction of self, implying that belief always precedes the subject’s self-understanding and always occurs through an other. This is also what makes a cohesive self-impossible—the subject is not only split but also characterized by a constant lack—a lack of stable identity, a lack of certainty, and a lack of a full sense of self. Relying on a Lacanian (1978, 1988) notion of subjectivity is thus to understand emotions as social, cultural, and political constructs that bind subjects to identities, collectives, and particular narratives (Solomon 2017).

Here, Lacan’s conception of the real (the unconscious direct experience) is in line with much work on ontological insecurity focused on uncertainty as it refers to a state in which we can never fully know either the past or the future. It is a state in which we need to interpret both processes in terms of an existing symbolic order that works at both a conscious (often symbolic and performative) and an unconscious level. To overcome uncertainty, or lack in Lacan’s terminology, the subject engages in fantasies and imaginations in order to feel whole and secure. Such imaginations are always the product of social relations and involve emotional codes which are culturally inscribed and subject to modification and contention (Loseke 2009). They work performatively on the subject, legitimizing certain forms of action at the same time as they shape future interactions (Fattah and Fierke 2009). This does not imply that people constantly walk around feeling anxious, as the ontological lack that Lacan talks about is temporarily covered by fantasies that protect us from being overwhelmed by anxiety (Lacan 1978, see also Glynos 2001). As Eberle (2018) has argued, to “filter away anxiety, we construct fantasies that promise a resolution, or at least an ‘occlusion’, of this ‘original deadlock’ /…/ of the absence of a stable, unique and complete identity.” In comparison to an ontological security of being, a Lacanian approach means to accept the fragile nature of a constant becoming—of learning to live with a constitutive lack. This is not an easy task, however, and is likely to become more difficult as the world around us is changing in unforeseen directions and when our emotional investments seem to be threatened. Here it is important to note how collective emotions, such as love for the nation; hate, fear, or disgust for the stranger, are central in the narrative constitution and consolidation of (collective) identities. They become, in Lacan’s terminology, the objects onto which fantasies of wholeness are projected to salvage the belief in core identities.

There is a need to recognize how language and emotions overlap in order to “more fully understand how some discourses become powerful symbolic sites of emotional investment on the part of the audiences” (Solomon 2017:497). Emotional investment is thus tied to the institutionalization of shared collective identities, or master signifiers, and stimulates members to experience shared emotions and united understandings of a situation or event (Wolf 2017). This is not to deny that emotional experience is also somatic; we feel anger, joy, fear, pride, love, and so on, at a bodily level, but how we feel it and in relation to what particular circumstances are always intertwined with social, cultural, and political contexts (Crawford 2014). Mercer (2014:515) uses the term “social emotion” to emphasize the intersubjective dimension of emotion and to describe how people come to care about significant political matters such as power, status, and justice. While some scholars separate emotions from affect and describe affect as a preconscious automatic response rooted in the neurological system while emotions are viewed as being captured and given meaning through language (Massumi 2002:35), others argue that more important is to show how affect, emotions, and discourse are produced together in multiple ways in actual practices (Solomon 2017). Much of this work is focused on how emotions seep into discourses, how they work performatively, how they are governed, and how they are memorialized (see Koshut 2017), but also how they become unconscious investments in preexisting cultural constructs such as the nation.

Emotions, as Fattah and Fierke (2009) have argued, have a history and are in Lacan’s terminology intimately connected to the symbolic order and the longing for stable subjectivity, which is consonant with a desire to heal a constant lack (Lacan 1988). Reading Lacan from an ontological security perspective thus puts becoming over being by recognizing the impossibility of any stable subjectivity even when this is the desired outcome. Here, ontological insecurity stems from a future possibility of something bad happening, while past events can make it more likely to occur (Fattah and Fierke 2009). It is, in other words, both forward and backward looking and acts as a precursor to anxiety and fear as well as to hate and love. Here, the privileging of the state narrative and its close relationship to an imagined sense of national identity involve a specific emotional process of imagination that defines the “spatio-temporal parameters from and towards which they [individuals] can act as a community” (Berenskoetter, 2014:270, quoted in Chernobrov 2016:585). Hence, any search for ontological security, although a powerful story that continues to play a crucial part in the narratives that people and groups construct to make sense of themselves, is a story that can never be fulfilled. In responding to increased feelings of ontological insecurity, people, groups, and state representatives thus temporarily close down identity to defend against emotional anxieties and traumatic experiences.

Viewing subjectivity as temporally open puts emphasis on how discursively and narratively constructed subject positions are taken up by concrete persons through fantasy identification/emotional investments, such as through symbols, myths, and memories that are narrated at a collective level. The role of crisis and trauma is crucial to any discussion of ontological insecurity, as these become authoritative representations “orienting collective political and moral conceptions” (Eyerman 2011:xiv). The emotional meaning of such narratives is thus important to the tone and impact they may have on the public sphere and all leaders, politicians, and movements, argues Richards (2013), are engaged in reading and responding to current feelings of the public and are, as a result, engaged in emotional governance. This is not a neutral process. Rather, it takes both racialized and gendered forms, as actors and institutions struggle to monopolize the power to define legitimately recognized threats. The most powerful narratives, or those deemed most believable by a vast heterogeneous audience, are those encompassing the “most widely and deeply held symbolic and emotional codes” (Kusenbach and Loseke 2013:25).

It is here that the emotional backlash of populist politics becomes most prominent. As the case of the SD shows, which is currently estimated to win 20 percent of the electorate in the upcoming elections, the past is constantly defining present and future imaginaries. “Sweden used to be fantastic” is a T-shirt slogan covering the cupboard of Jimmie Åkesson’s (the SD leader’s) office in parliament.

Everything was better before. Today it’s all so individualistic. I don’t like it. We are completely destroying the foundation of our model. It makes me very scared. Especially concerning values; our main problem today in terms of cohesiveness is that we are becoming culturally split. You can’t disregard the fact that we have large communities in Sweden that do not define right and wrong in the same way as the ordinary Swede does. (Interview Sydsvenskan, May 5, 2018, Lönnaeus 2018)

The fantasies of the past conjure up images of not only a country free from migration but also one untouched by global forces. It entails a fantasmatic narrative of past greatness that is transmitted to new generations in search of answers to their own anxieties, while it simultaneously points to those who have taken this “greatness” away (the establishment/immigrants). “Populism simplifies complex developments by looking for a culprit” says Pelinka, arguing that “right-wing populism sees multiculturalism as a recipe to denationalize one’s (own) nation, to deconstruct one’s own people” (Pelinka 2013:8). This is not to say that populism is only about finding culprits and constructing others onto which fear and anxiety can be projected. As discussed in the previous section, populists are united in more general antiestablishment sentiments combined with new forms of democratic practice and desires for strong leadership. However, it is difficult to conceptualize the emotional appeal of populist discourse without understanding what otherness does to the insecure subject in contemporary society. Using the discourse of “stranger-danger,” Ahmed (2014) highlights how the enforcement of boundaries takes shape between bodies that belong and bodies that are the “origin of danger” (p. 4). Using the metaphor of gated communities and neighborhood watch, she illustrates how spaces (neighborhoods, nations) are embodied and how “strangers” are “already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place” (2000:21). Hence, to comprehend how power works through anti-immigrant narratives, it is important to consider how they come to naturalize a postcolonial melancholia—a longing for the fulfillment of what is often believed to be an ethnic past in which the territory of the nation and the people were one. Such longing, as Kenny (2017) has argued, takes the shape of politically orchestrated forms of nostalgia. As such they have become “integral features of anti-establishment populism, and have helped project strong objections to liberal elites, and the policies of economic openness, tolerance and cultural diversity associated with them” (p. 258). The assumption behind this nostalgia is the belief that people inhabit only one nation and only one religion; that they are members of only one race, one gender, and one sexual orientation; that they, as Calhoun (1997:18) has phrased it, “live in only one world at a time.” These are the fantasies of fulfillment that Lacan explores and which seem to determine populist narratives of ontological security. Eberle (2018) argued, “Typically, in fantasies, there are only two possible versions of the future with no middle ground: either we capture the ‘object’ and we are safe (the beatific scenario of securing a complete identity), or we fail and we are doomed (the horrific scenario of losing it).”

“In Britain,” Gilroy (2005:15) maintains, these populist narratives “are tied to an obsessive repetition of key themes—invasion, war, contamination, loss of identity—and the resulting mixture suggests that an anxious, melancholic mood has become part of the cultural infrastructure of the place, an immovable ontological counterpart to the nation-defining ramparts of the white cliffs of Dover” (p. 15). This “postcolonial melancholia,” or desire for a lost past, is not only confined to former colonial powers, however; rather, they must be understood in relation to the entire foundation of an Empire and of Europe, in which anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and xenophobic sentiments have emerged in a historical context. The idea of empire and Europe did not leave the others untouched, but rather enforced and diffused the idea of the nation as a homogenous body in which sovereignty has come to depend on essentialist understandings of nationhood, people and being, exported and governed by, and through the colonizing masters (Fanon 1952; Kinnvall 2016). To this can be added how Eastern Europe has its own particular form of postcolonial pasts in which previous Soviet domination become interspersed with a nostalgia for a national identity subjugated by the Soviet Union and now threatened by steps toward European integration and migration. There are variations on the populist theme, argues Pehe, a Czech scholar who worked closely with the former President Vaclav Havel, but the populist leaders all “ride the wave of anxiety—about globalization, migration and new phenomena—and appeal to those looking for some protection” (cited in Erlanger 2017). Similarly, in the case of Sweden, a main proposition behind the Sweden Democrat’s call for the restoring of a “people’s home” is that Swedishness is coterminous with the territory of Sweden and that both inside and outside threats to the integrity of the Swedish nation is an offense against the Swedish body—a threat to Sweden’s imagined ontological security. A Sweden outside of the European Union—a Swexit—would restore past pride and counter such outside threats. Here, Jimmie Åkesson shares with many other populist leaders the ability to unite narratives of nativism—expressed in nationalist terms—with those of an antielitist and antiestablishment discourse. He shares with other populists the knowledge that sentiments, images, and symbols, rather than established and historically verified accounts can galvanize individuals by offering his followers a fantastical vision of making “Sweden great again” in the light of perceived internal and external threats.

The actual comparison between the other and us serves to reinforce the whole notion of primordial identity as an ontological security seeking fantasy. Debasement of the other thus captures the essential connection between xenophobic history writing and the desire to “remember.” Here, nostalgia and memory serve as “temporal orientation devices that make past meaningful by providing a sense of where ‘we’ have come from and what ‘we’ have been through” (Berenskoetter 2014:270). However, as noted by Kenny (2017), nostalgia cannot be seen as just a pathological by-product of a populist era but should be seen as a more general ontological security seeking performance as it offers an important route back to an imagined, and desired, past. In so doing, it taps into an established emotional repertoire, while also ordering arguments aimed at justifying new routes in the present. Here, it is important to note, however, that it is not past in a “real” sense but fantasies of an imagined past, an emotional appeal to something secure and homogenous that can be performed in the present. As Zizek (1993) has argued: “A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices” (p. 202). In terms of postcolonial melancholia, the empire cannot be brought back in these stories. Enjoyment (what Lacan [1988] refers to as jouissance) can never be fulfilled—it is “something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations” (Stavrakakis 1999:42). This unfulfillment of the colonial past “invokes desire by identifying something objective that prevents our being fulfilled” (and experiencing jouissance): “it constructs a scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us” (Zizek 2008:43). This is the immigrant other, the Muslim woman, the “postdiaspora” generation (to refer to second and subsequent generations of migrants; Kinnvall 2016; Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking 2011).

This populist narrative seems to resonate with a large number of people in European political space who experience the disruptive effects of economic, cultural, and political change, but the emotions displayed—insecurity, anxiety, and fear—are also intimately connected to particular masculine attachments to emotional narratives of love for the nation and lost masculinity and it is no coincidence that populist narratives are particularly (although not exclusively) appealing to a male electorate. Being male and white thus appear to correspond with cross-national findings of those who are most likely to buy into a discursive narrative of insecurity and risk—at least if we look at the European support base of far-right parties both in terms of electoral preferences (Hainsworth 2000; Norris 2005; Rydgren 2012) and in terms of party organization and members (Art 2011; cf. Meret and Siim 2012). Despite controlling for other factors, such as occupation, education, and age, we find that men are roughly 40 percent more likely to vote for the far right than female voters. This remains the case even among voters of the Norwegian Progress Party and the Danish People’s Party (which have both [had] female leaders), where about two thirds of the voters are male (Heidar and Pedersen, 2006). This has led some observers to speak about Männerparteien (male parties) with regard to the far right, thus emphasizing a clear gender gap in terms of voting behavior (Decker 2004; Geden 2005; Mudde 2007). Such a gap is well-documented in terms of voter support, while few studies actually analyze the narratives of nationalism and populism from a gendered perspective or constructions of masculinity more generally within far-right discourse (Art 2011; Meret and Siim 2012; Mudde 2007; see Kinnvall 2015, for a detailed discussion).

The fact is, however, that much far-right discourse is focused on the gendering of spaces, which is a process through which social systems maintain the organization of powerful hierarchies based on assumptions about masculinity, femininity, and privileges (Horton and Rydstrom 2011). As Kimmel (2018b:1) argues in his studies of radical movements: “[T]he fact is that virtually all of those mobilizing on all sides of this growing clash are young men—whether right-wing extremists, anti-immigrant zealots, anti-Muslim skinheads and neo-Nazis or young Muslims readying for jihad.” Young, men he says, join these movements in response to a number of socioeconomic displacements, such as downsizing, outsourcing, or a general inability to become active economic and political participants in the society, but they do so in particularly gendered ways. Often in terms of feeling emasculated, a sense that their masculinity has been taken away from them by unseen conspiratorial forces in which recruitment is seen as a way to reclaim their manhood and restore a sense of entitlement. “Their failure was not theirs as individuals; it was something done to them—by an indifferent state, by predatory corporations and rapacious bankers, by a host of “others” who had preyed upon global sympathies to get special bargains. They were not failures; they were victims” (Kimmel 2018a:20). Kimmel’s focus is specifically on those (young men) joining radical movements, but his emphasis on emasculation and humiliation seem to ring true for the particular masculine attachments to narratives of self and other in regard to exclusive nationhood as professed by populist leaders.

Hence, understanding the search for security in a global world means confronting the particular challenges of occidental racism and postcolonial legacies, often in gendered terms, but it also involves a thorough analysis of their reproduction in multicultural settings—among both majority and minority populations. Here, we can see how recent contexts of sociocultural tensions, such as those produced through the economic and so-called migration crisis in Europe and accelerated by the ubiquity of mass media and the Internet, have created opportunities for authoritarian and populist leaders to efficiently spread their emotional messages. In these contexts, the targeting of the other is not only particularly easy as it is broad and vague (e.g., refugees, Muslims, migrants) but also a key element in the success of far-right populist rhetoric. The political exploitation of notions and discursive elements of anxiety and fear—under the theoretical framework of ontological security as becoming—are fundamental for populist leaders to advance their agendas by appealing to voters’ and citizens’ feelings of threat and enthusiasm. This often takes root in communities highly divided by these circumstances. As emotional moments, they are ideal for political gain from populist leaders as they can raise levels of situational involvement and highlight risk factors. “Fear leads to enhanced attention, interest, and drives individuals away from long-standing beliefs. In such situations, individuals tend to yield to the force of arguments and persuasion because they seek ways to cope with a given threat” (Cranmer 2015:286-87). These feelings—in consonance with the in-group–out-group identification dynamic of racism—are exploited in tandem, as these leaders rely on the ability to exploit the “right” amount of fear and anxiety in their recipients (predominantly linked to the incarnation of a “common enemy”), while consequentially appealing for their enthusiasm to enable and support the measures and policies they propose (i.e., “ban Muslims from Europe,” “defend European values”; Cranmer 2015:286). From a Lacanian perspective, these narratives become successful through their ability to create a homogenous fantasy space in response to a situation of failed identity by invoking a desire to restore lost pride and, in the case of some men, lost masculinity—to deal with the disappointments, anger, frustration, and anxiety (ontological insecurities) experienced by a significant number of European majority populations.

Conclusion

It is important to understand how the rise of populism in Europe can never be viewed apart from its Eurocentric origins in which the desire for homogenous identities, especially as propagated through essentialist imaginaries of whiteness and the nation-state, play a defining role. The fear and anxiety that such identities are under attack by imaginary others are thus of vital importance for appreciating not only the conscious (or real) effects of social, economic, and political changes but also the unconscious (or imaginary) threats to an imagined ontological security that xenophobia and racism entail. This implies that anxiety and ontological insecurity are not simply psychological concepts with which to study emotions but also, as Rossi (2017:126) has argued, political and social practices “embodying and enabling a specific form of security.” This specific form of security is captured through an “ontological security as becoming,” which puts emphasis on the desires involved in any attempts to heal a fractured self through the imaginaries of a complete selfhood. Populist imaginaries of past, present, and future solutions to emotional anxieties and ontological insecurities thus provide powerful stories of who and what are to be blamed for these current predicaments at the same time as they supply convincing stories about a lost greatness.

Populist politics does not exist in a vacuum, however, rather it is connected to both postcolonial pasts and neoliberal futures in which also mainstream parties identify the same threat as the far right. “In this way, mainstream parties can claim to act as ‘responsible’ and ‘rational’ mediators between the need to tackle a threat and the authoritarian solutions proposed by the far-right parties” (Rossi 2017:131). To resort to exceptional measures by mainstream parties and governments, through practices such as bordering, deportations, and surveillance, is thus unlikely to either break the emotional bond between postcolonial pasts and populist presents or to provide alternative narratives from which change can be initiated. Rather, as Zizek claims, it provides the mainstream parties with a postpolitical and technocratic rationale as opposed to their “factionalist, ideological and ‘politically passionate’ extremist counterpart” (quoted in Stavrakakis 2007). Instead of falling into the demagogic trap of populist discourse, Wodak (2015) argues, we need to set alternative frames and agendas which endorse and disseminate alternative concepts, such as equality, diversity, and solidarity. Rather than highlighting fear and anxiety, these concepts contain positive imaginaries that could allow for a politics of hope as a cure for current anxieties. Proceeding from a focus on “ontological security as becoming” thus allows for other imaginations in terms of unconscious desires. It allows for a resistance against what Bakhtin (1986) has described as “monological closure” and the opening up for ontological security to be as much about creativity and the ability to dwell in ambivalence (Cash 2016; Solomon 2015), as about closure and permanence. It is about the power to live with uncertainty, to see the condition of ontological insecurity as a possibility for change and opportunity, rather than one of closure and fear. However, there is also a need to more specifically redress postcolonial legacies of xenophobia and racism in the cultural reproduction of unconscious desires. In other words, not only future narratives can be in focus but also the incessant reconstruction of imperial pasts and their effects on interpersonal, group, and societal relations.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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