Abstract
Nation is a community constructed from above by means of the claims of history as an authoritative discipline, which takes possession of the past (Lowenthal, 2015). National heritage provides the members of a nation with a powerful set of meanings that can be used in constructing, reconstructing and ‘inventing’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) their ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983). Historically speaking, populism often involved agrarian populations facing hostile socio-structural conditions in the context of a changing socioeconomic environment where industrialization imposes a power shift away from traditional rural communities.
Similarly, the recent global financial crisis, the ‘refugee crisis’ and the COVID-19 pandemic have caused many changes in the everyday lives of individuals. They exacerbate tendencies that existed before, such as the feelings of people in geographically and politically remote places that they are not only exposed to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice but also to spatial and nostalgic deprivation (Gest et al., 2017; Rodrigues-Pose, 2018), which leads to a loss of status and personal dignity felt by the impoverished middle class in the face of globalization processes that delegitimize social positions built up over time. Social, spatial and cultural frustrations make some local residents sensitive to political offers of populism which come from outside, mainly far-right populists as in the cases of rural and post-industrial regions of contemporary Europe. The catalyst which intensifies these processes is immigration, especially in regions without experience in hosting foreign populations.
Bonacchi’s book is a great contribution in the sense that she enables the reader to assess the right-wing forms of populism through the theories of nationalism. She eloquently summarizes the theories of nationalism ranging from primordialism to modernist ones. However, her reliance on the ethno-symbolism of Anthony Smith seems to have overshadowed the masterpieces of Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Roger Brubaker (pp. 30–34). Reintroducing the theories of nationalism, which were the leading scientific lens of the 1990s, is a very good reminder for the reader to reassess what populism today denotes.
The depiction of an ‘imagined community’ is often based on the strength of the myths and heroisms of the past. As Bonacchi demonstrates very well in the analysis of big data collected from the posts of supporters of right-wing populist parties in Facebook and Twitter over the last few years in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, there is often a longing for the past, the national heritage and myths, when the interviewees try to find comfort from the hardships of the present. Evidently, what the Facebook and Twitter users affiliated with right-wing populist rhetoric in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States commemorate in the name of heritage is mostly the rise, the decline and the fall of the Roman Empire, which is portrayed differently in different contexts.
Italy’s populist political party, the League, since its establishment in the 1990s had appropriated images linked to the Roman, pre- and post-Roman world. Initially, the League celebrated the legendary figure Alberto da Giussano, who ‘was said to have won the battle of Legnano against Federico Barbarossa in 1176, defending the independence of the Lega Lombarda (Lombard League), and had featured prominently in Italian collective memory’ (p. 59). However, after the League became a nation-wide political party under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, its supporters mostly commemorated the age of Enlightenment, which has been epitomized with the image of Florence as a ‘cradle of art and civilization’. Salvini argued that this kind of civilization is now under threat and at risk of being ‘erased’ by Muslim immigrants. He therefore pleaded to ‘stop invasions and stop Islam’, a religion that he repeatedly portrayed as violent (p. 61). Bonacchi also gives a detailed account of the ways in which the supporters of Five Star Movement and CasaPound Italia use the deep past for their own political consumption.
As for the Brexiteers, Bonacchi scrutinizes the social media posts of the supporters of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in relation to the uses of the Iron Age, Roman and early medieval past by the political parties and leading politicians active when the referendum was held (p. 78). The common trope that often pops up in the social media posts is the reference to the mythical figure of Boudica and the Hadrian Wall. Boudica is perceived to be a long-standing symbol of libertas and opposition to Roman imperialism which has been leveraged extensively throughout Britain’s history (p. 104).
Bonacchi also successfully demonstrates how Donald Trump has used the rhetoric of building a wall on the US–Mexican border, and kept the rhetoric alive during his entire term although the wall has never been erected. She explains how the performative role of Trump’s wall is widely accepted by his followers who tended to racialize this borderwork that was intended ‘to protect white privilege by supposedly “keeping out” illegal Mexican migrants and terrorists’ (p. 136). In making his argument to build the wall, Trump constantly drew on the Great Wall of China as an example of the successful construction of a very long border wall with a defensive function. Although his discourse on both Facebook and Twitter was devoid of references to the Roman, pre- and post-Roman past in arguing the issue of wall-building and border control, his followers often posted messages in social media referring to the Roman history, especially to Hadrian’s Wall (pp. 113–117).
McCrone et al. (1995) assert that heritage is a thoroughly modern concept, belonging to the final quarter of the twentieth century, contending that the rise of heritage discourse belongs to the post-Fordist economic climate characterizing the post-modern era beginning in the 1970s. In a similar vein, following the modernist theories of nationalism (e.g. those of Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Nora, 1989), Ashworth and Tunbridge (1996) suggest that the present selects an inheritance from an imagined past for current use and decides what should be passed on to an imagined future. In other words, the only referent that matters in the materialization of heritage, or what one may call heritageisation, is the present (Harrison, 2015). The proliferation of ‘heritage industry’ and the rise of ‘heritageisation’ in the late twentieth century seems to be linked with the neo-liberal logic of culturalization and commodification of the past and history – a popular exercise that is deployed to shape, or to assemble, the future in the present (Harrison, 2015; Harvey, 2001).
Heritage is a present-centred cultural practice and an instrument of cultural power (Harvey, 2001). Similar to a nation, it is not primordial. In Lowenthal’s (1998) words, ‘[It] is in large measure our own marvellously malleable creation’ (p. 226). In today’s world, heritage may serve to legitimize the acts of populist politicians. To put it differently, heritage may serve as the self-defence of individual agents to rearticulate and recover a sense of the past and to affirm or renegotiate a sense of what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus against different modes of modernization and globalization, which erode customs and traditions (Brett, 1996: 9).
Rodney Harrison (2015) highlights that heritage functions towards assembling futures, which means that ‘heritage involves working with the tangible and intangible traces of the past to both materially and discursively remake both ourselves and the world in the present, in anticipation of an outcome that will help constitute a specific resource in and for the future’ (Harrison, 2015: 35). Harrison’s assertion that heritage is not about the past, but rather about the future, renders it political. Referring to the notion of ‘new heritage’ coined by Cornelius Holtorf (Holtorf and Fairclough, 2013), Harrison argues that heritage is neither fixed nor inherent, but rather emerges in dialogue among individuals, communities, practices, places and things. Hence, one could even say that the ‘new heritage’ has nothing to do with the past, but is instead a form of ‘futurology’ (Harrison, 2015: 35).
Heritage is also a form of governmentality, which needs to be critically assessed. In focussing on the use of the past by right-wing populist party leaders and their adherents, Bonacchi tries to understand how the processes of heritagization are being articulated in social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and how the realities of everyday life are translated by individuals into a cultural, religious and civilizational rhetoric through what Dominique Reynié (2016) calls ‘heritage populism’.
Bonacchi’s book could be interpreted as a scientific intervention that perceives populism as a political style rather than an ideology. Her book reveals how populist politicians are well-matched in different contexts (Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States) as far as anti-elitism, anti-political correctness, anti-globalism, nativism, an inclination to post-truth, use of the past and use of myths, religion, nativism and nationalism are concerned. It was Peter Worsley (1969) who first defined populism as a political style. Pierre-Andre Taguieff (1995: 10, 41) followed his traces and argued that populism does not embody a particular type of political regime nor does it define a particular ideological content. Rather, it is a political style suitable for various ideological and political contexts. This is why a democracy or a dictatorship may have a populist dimension or orientation; they can have a populist style.
Chiara Bonacchi’s book deserves a great welcome to heritage studies, nationalism studies and populism studies. This is a book which bridges these fields. The book deconstructs contemporary populist nationalism by examining the ways in which the deep past has been mobilized by right-wing populist leaders and consumed by their followers. Based on the analysis of the big data collected from Facebook and Twitter posts about the Italian League, the Brexit debate and Donald Trump’s wall rhetoric, the book has shed new light on the anatomy of myths inspired by the Iron Age, Roman and early medieval past of Europe. The book has also exposed the circulation of these myths during the last decade, in association with exclusionary social media discourse linked to the Italian political debate, Brexit and US border policies. Furthermore, the book has investigated historical sense generation, the rise of post-truth, growing scepticism about cognition, societal and political polarization and increasing popularity of emotions in shaping how myths are reconfigured, transmitted, articulated and legitimized for the political needs of the present and the future. The book also offers a practical tool to the reader to assess the use of the past by other nationalist-populist parties and its consumption by the followers of such parties: for example, the use of the myth of Jeanne D’Arc by Marine Le Pen, and the use of the Ottoman past by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Kaya, 2020).