Abstract
The steady rise of the far right in Europe and the United States in recent years constitutes an alarming socio-political issue that is also gaining increasing attention from social and political science scholars. The role of digital media in the current development of the far right into a political force with considerable influence, in an era marked by different crises with global dimensions, is an important aspect of the phenomenon that deserves to be studied in its own right. This volume offers a significant contribution to that end, by comprising a variety of approaches and case studies from different European countries and the United States on the ways that far-right ideas and movements develop.
The book brings together various scholars from the fields of political science, philosophy, sociology, literature, anthropology and journalism, working both within and outside academia. Therefore, the book offers a rich and multidisciplinary approach to the topic, displaying not only different nationally oriented studies but also different theoretical approaches and methodologies. All contributions form a rich corpus that enhances our understanding of the complexities, the local particularities and the roots of the far right’s enduring force in the Western realm.
The contributions to this book are divided in three main sections. In the first one, ‘extremisms and the internet’, Berlet and Mason present the history of online far-right propaganda in the United States, as it developed through the work of a neo-nazi agitator working with a variety of media in a long-term effort to construct a white supremacist movement; Strømmen and Stormark trace the story of the Norwegian far-right terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, and the position of the Internet in his radicalization, as well as in establishing a network of like-minded people and potential associates; Christensen, Spahiu, Wilson and Duval offer a quantitative research approach on the networking processes of political extremism in the United States; Michailovic analyses in a comparative perspective the academic and journalistic work of two intellectuals – a US (Kevin MacDonald) and a Russian (Alexandr Dugin) one – who have been influential in far-right circles across the globe. The second section is titled ‘far right politics and internet identities’. In this section, Duerr provides us with a case study of a far-right European Union (EU) parliamentary group called ‘Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty’, showing the difficulty of sustaining such coalitions across national borders and across time; Druxes investigates the strategies of contemporary German far right initiatives to reach broader publics; Sik analyses the rise of the far right in Hungary in relation to the opportunities provided by the Internet to create ‘anti-public’ spheres to facilitate far-right discussions; Mazurski looks at the ‘Swedish Democrats’ party, focusing on one of their anti-immigration ads that was censored from national television and the ways in which the controversy caused by this censorship helped the party to obtain electoral gains; Virchow examines the so-called ‘Identity movement’ that developed in different EU countries, by analysing the ideological construction of its German version. The book’s third section is titled ‘homophobia, race and radicalism’. Koronaiou, Lagos and Sakellariou analyse the Greek ‘white power’ music scene as part of the propaganda tactics of the ‘Golden Dawn’ neo-nazi party to attract the youth; Michailovic investigates the ‘archaistic’ features of the Russian ‘Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers’ group performances and their further online dissemination; Simpson discusses the political aesthetics and performances of the white supremacist band ‘Prussian Blue’ and, more broadly, the ideology and tactics of white supremacists in the United States; Garcia looks at the racist discussions of white supremacists online concerning a successful Mexican boxer and measuring his ‘whiteness’; Klier, finally, discusses the roots of East German xenophobia, through a variety of relevant experiences and examples, while highlighting the autocratic state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a formative force in this phenomenon.
To put in brief, the volume unfolds and explains the far-right phenomenon in its diversity across the geopolitical space of the ‘West’, both in its core and its periphery, and also probes us to understand the enduring roots of the far right politics and practices, as well as its limitations along with the general inconsistencies of the far right.
The variety of all these fascinating contributions may also leave some ambivalence with regards to how we can understand the root causes of the general rise of the far right. The authors’ ideas on the matter seem to vary. In some contributions, populism seems to be constitutive to the growing of the far right; the far right also appears as an extreme political expression, presented as equivalent – through quantifiable ways of measurement – to movements on the left; cultural/national exceptionalism from the liberal-democratic tradition of Western polity appears to be the case for the rise of Eastern European far-right movements in particular; finally, some authors introduce neoliberal politics and ideology in their discussion, pointing towards the economic crisis as a key variable of this phenomenon.
In this respect, some further theorization of the terms used by the authors would be useful. For instance, no explanation is provided on what populism means. Ernesto Laclau (2005) argues that politics are essentially populist in all their variations as they presuppose specific constructions of ‘the people’; others stress the democratic qualities of populism, while maintaining the distinction between populist and non-populist politics (Stavrakakis and Katsampekis, 2014). If we maintain the idea of populism as a symptom of the decline of democracy and citizenship today, what would the normative, non-populist standpoint of democratic politics be? Would the general ‘free-market’ pragmatics of neoliberal reason (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 191), with politics managed by experts, suffice to that end? Critics, like Colin Crouch (2004), note the rise of managerial technocracy – along with the individualist neoliberal civic ethos – as central features of the decline, not just of democracy, but of liberalism itself.
Then, how should we understand ‘extremism’? Are we as readers to conclude that everything standing beyond the liberal version of democracy is to be condemned as extremist? And if a pro-liberal-democratic stance is our normative point of departure, how can we respond to critics like Tariq Ali (2015) and his thesis on the ‘extreme center’, while discussing the hegemony of the right in the post–Cold War world (Davidson, 2016: 17), the shrinking of the democratic dialogue in the West today, as well as the dogmatic insistence on the neoliberal ‘no-alternative’ dogma despite its failures in dealing with the economic crisis and a series of other crises (such as the so-called refugee crisis) in a democratic way?
In addition, culture is noted as an adequate explanation for the rise of particular, nationally oriented, far-right movements, as in Hungary (Sik) or in East Germany (Klier). The authors note the ‘socialist’ legacies of these countries/regions and their lack of a civic culture that is similar to the liberal-democratic one. There is, however, a contradiction here as the book also discusses the simultaneous rise of similar far-right movements in liberal democracies with strong civic traditions, like that of Sweden. How are we to assess these parallel developments? What can we say about the emergence of phenomena described as ‘liberal intolerance’ (Lindekilde, 2014) that appear even in peaceful and (relatively) egalitarian societies, like the Scandinavian ones? Does cultural and even historical exceptionalism still provide us with adequate tools to explain the rise of the far right as symptomatic of ‘weak’ democratic states?
As was the case in the past, when Fascism and Nazism emerged in the context of an economic crisis as phenomena related to modernity itself and its possible trajectories (Bauman, 1998), today’s rise of the far right is a symptom of broader systemic and structural crises, related to the decline of democratic institutions and civic identities, and to the injustices produced by a late capitalism in crisis (Askanius and Mylonas, 2015; Kompatsiaris and Mylonas, 2015). Taken together, these systemic problems (a politico-democratic and an economic one) offer a comprehensive approach to understand the penetration of the far right, its appeal to the (White) working classes and its systemic value for exceptionalist governing strategies.
However, despite these criticisms, this volume makes an important contribution to the study of a growing phenomenon that requires the attention of scholars with diverse backgrounds working in this field.