The revenge of the village? The geography of right-wing populist electoral success,anti-politics,and austerity in Germany

Abstract

This paper discusses the geography of the electoral successes of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national election to the German parliament in September 2017. Unlike other studies that reduce the electoral pattern to differences between “the city” and “the country,” we do not accept the empirical observation of an urban-rural divide as a sufficient explanation. By doing so, this paper proposes a theorization of the urban and the rural as social relationships that can be dialectically differentiated through the all-encompassing urbanization process and which materialize through space. This approach draws on Henri Lefebvre’s work on urbanization and his understanding of “the urban” and “the rural” and integrates it with Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of “the provincial” to better characterize “the rural” as a form of social relationship in which the culturally familiar, authenticity, and a lack of difference and reflection dominate. Recent theoretical discussions of anti-politics—understood as both a mode of making political claims and a political strategy that negates arguments, negotiations, and compromise, starting instead with absolute, non-negotiable positions— inform this paper as well. Based on this theoretical foundation, we argue that the rural is the breeding ground for anti-politics and AfD votes. A discussion of three places where the AfD was particularly successful supports our argument: the more peripheral, small-town administrative district of Western Pomerania-Greifswald and the two large-city districts of Mannheim-Schönau and Pforzheim-Haidach.

Keywords

New Right populism political geography urban-rural divide Germany

Introduction

In an interview with a national radio station entitled “The Revenge of the Villages,”¹ the German ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba argues that current trends in right-wing populism in Germany should be seen as a “veto” by the country (Kaschuba, 2016). In contrast to the past, when “city societies basically moved forward and determined the way into the future,” rural regions now “disagree with the path of city societies” (Kaschuba, 2016). According to Kaschuba, right-wing populist movements and the crisis of the political elites, therefore, show a particular geography that is significantly shaped by the contrasts between city and country. Kaschuba asks whether “any political party is still able to represent at the same time the interests of both country and the city?” (2016) In this paper, we discuss the geography of the success of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), a right-wing populist party open to right-wing extremist views, in the national election to the German federal parliament in September 2017 (cf. Figure 1). At first glance, Kaschuba's assertion seems to be accurate—in fact, the AfD did far better in smaller towns and villages than in big cities. This is confirmed by a simple correlation between the number of residents and the share of AfD votes at the municipal level (cf. Förtner et al., 2019).

Figure 1.

AfD election results for the 2017 national parliamentary elections to the Bundestag on the municipal level.

We take a serious look at this spatial pattern, but go beyond an interpretation that focusses on a static city-country divide. We do so, first, by proposing a differentiated theorization that is relevant to the seemingly bipolar treatment of the concepts of “city” and “country” in the tradition of Marx and Critical Theory. Following Lefebvre and Adorno, we start with “the urban” and “the rural” as social relationships that can be dialectically differentiated through the all-encompassing urbanization process and which materialize through space, instead of with the spatial categories of city and country. From Lefebvre, we adopt his concept of the urban, which is well known in geography and urban studies (Lefebvre, 2003). To deepen his take on the rural, we add Adorno’s rarely applied concept of the “provincial” (Adorno, 1973, 1998), which he characterizes as an unreflected mode of being. More so than Lefebvre, Adorno sees the “Other” in relation to the urban, in the process of urbanization, as clinging to what is perceived as supposedly culturally familiar and authentic. We argue that adding this understanding of the provincial, which can but does not necessarily need to be located in the country, to the Lefebvrian notion of the rural enables us to see the latter as the breeding ground for anti-politics and AfD votes. This theorization of the urban and the rural is discussed in more depth below.

Second, we add the notion of anti-politics to the analysis of right-wing populism. We understand the anti-political as a mode of making political claims and a political strategy that negates arguments, negotiations, and compromise and starts instead with absolute, non-negotiable positions. Furthermore, we argue that this mode of thinking and arguing fits subjectivities produced under neoliberalism and makes them compatible with right-wing positions, which selectively challenge the progressive aspects of neoliberalism. We discuss this connection in the second section. The third section provides context on the AfD and research on the geography of right-wing populism in Germany. The connections between the urban, the rural, and anti-politics are the focus of the fourth section. In the fifth section, we demonstrate why we consider this theorization of the urban and the rural in the urbanization process and anti-politics suitable for the geography of the electoral success of the AfD and its embeddedness within a situation of crisis in Germany by discussing three regional/local examples: the county of Western Pomerania-Greifswald and the urban neighborhoods of Pforzheim-Haidach and Mannheim-Schönau (see Figure 1).

Anti-politics, right-wing populism, and the rural

We argue in this paper that one of the main reasons for the success of the AfD is its anti-political mode of politics. It brings together ideas from a wide range of ideologies such as resentment-laden nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; market-radical economic, social, and education policy proposals; and climate change denial and anti-elitism directed at established political parties and media outlets. All this culminated with a political project that became successful after neoliberalism’s global economic crisis of 2007–08, in conjunction with the ensuing austerity policies. While the AfD describes itself as conservative, liberal circles perceive the party as a right-wing populist party (Müller, 2016). From a more radical perspective, the AfD can be seen as open to right-wing extremist positions and closely linked to right-wing extremist discourses and structures (Friedrich, 2017; Heitmeyer, 2018; Salzborn, 2017; Weiß, 2017). Building on these analyses, we add that AfD positions are closely connected to anti-politics that are on the rise in many liberal democracies and are a result of depoliticization due to neoliberalism and austerity (for a detailed reconstruction of how austerity was introduced into German fiscal politics as early as 1975 and how it was radicalized after 2007, cf. Petzold, 2018). Following the debate in Anglo-American political science and human geography (see contributions to this topic: Buller et al., 2019; Clarke et al., 2017, 2018; Fawcett et al., 2017), we view anti-politics as a strategy of consistently rejecting engagement in political discussions while making political statements. Clarke, who introduced the term anti-politics to human geography, defines it “as mutual withdrawal by politicians and citizens” (Clarke, 2015: 191) from established politics, its institutions and rationality. Some authors, therefore, see “an end of representative politics” (Tormey, 2015), coming at the “expense of discussion and struggle over questions of value and priority” (Clarke, 2012: 35). Clarke (2012) draws heavily on the work of Peter Mair (2006), who elaborates on why the “void” created by the “mutual withdrawal” (33; original emphasis) by citizens and party leaderships from “popular democracy” results in a situation in which “the political class has itself become an issue of contention” (Mair, 2006: 49). “[T]he resulting gap,” Mair argues, “has sometimes helped to fuel a populist mobilization usually, but not exclusively, on the right” (2006, 49).

Populism, understood by Müller (2016) as a structurally anti-pluralist, anti-elitist position that declares its positions as non-negotiable, while pretending to represent the only true voice of the people, is indeed the political form in which the anti-political becomes a political force. As Boris (2016) criticizes correctly, Müller equates right-wing with left-wing populism. We restrict Müller’s definition to right-wing populism, as left-wing populism (cf. Goes and Bock, 2017; Mouffe, 2018 and the conclusion below) is about opening spaces for discourse. Further, Müller does not explain the specific conjuncture that has given rise to the particular kind of right-wing populism we witness in many European countries and beyond. As Nachtwey (2018), Heitmeyer (2018), Butterwegge et al. (2018), and others argue, this conjuncture is marked by neoliberalization, depoliticization, and social polarization. In it, (male) lower-middle and working-class segments of the electorate, in particular, experience relative deprivation, fear of economic decline, and political alienation that often result in casting a vote for the AfD (cf. Falkner and Kahrs, 2018). Further, as Leggewie (2015) underlines in a situation that he calls a “displaced class struggle” (148), emotional and affectual aspects and resentments, in particular, need to be taken into account to understand how minorities and politically liberal “elites” are held “responsible for one’s own, always relative deprivation” (150). As Adorno observes in his recently published and surprisingly up-to-date talk on the “Aspects of New Right-Wing Radicalism” from 1967, blaming the latter turns anger away from the mechanisms that have caused loss and misery among those “who considered themselves, according to their own subjective class consciousness, middle-class” and redirects it toward “those who have been critical of the system in which they once had standing—at least according to traditional standards” (Adorno, 2019: 10). By combining these discussions about populism and anti-politics, we believe that the latter is best understood as an analytical term that describes a specific way in which political claims, demands, and complaints are expressed and political subjectivities and movements are constructed. These claims, demands, and complaints are expressed as non-negotiable and absolute. This political form coalesces best with ideas grounded in the ideologies of inequality of right-wing populism, the New Right, and fascism, as well as competition-based neoliberalism (Butterwegge et al., 2018: 12). Subjectivities and movements associated with anti-politics build on this type of argumentation. The anti-political, in this sense, is political through and through, as it enters the realm of the political to gain influence and bring about change. The success of the AfD, we argue, is built on this type of anti-politics.

The anti-political builds on the neoliberalization of the previous decades. Presenting itself as standing outside and above the realm of the established discourses, arguments, and negotiations of the political, anti-politics has emerged in the wake of the post-democratic and post-political TINA (“there is no alternative”) ideology of the neoliberal project. By not following the TAMARA (“there are many and realistic alternatives”) approach and attacking what Fraser (2017) has controversially termed “progressive neoliberalism” in the name of traditional values and privileges, anti-politics radicalizes the TINA ideology even more by insisting on the supposed righteousness of one’s position: “there is no alternative to my absolute and rational ideas and attitudes,” which one might abbreviate as TINA-MARIA. Subjectivities receptive to this kind of position were produced during and through processes of neoliberalization (Brown, 2015) and have been pushed to the extreme right by the socio-economic and political devastations brought about by these very processes (Nachtwey, 2018). TINA-MARIA is, as Jörke (2016: 205) argues, for populism, “the other side of post-democracy.” The decidedly xenophobic and nationalist right-wing populism taken up by the AfD is anti-political in that it is not interested in arguments, negotiations, and compromise—cornerstones of any liberal understanding of democracy and politics in general (Müller, 2016).

Unlike theories of radical democracy, which are also critical of compromise and consensus due to their depoliticizing character (cf. Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Mouffe, 2018; Rancière, 1998), anti-politics wants to do away with politics altogether, i.e. with struggle, arguments, and disagreement. When Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 176) propose “to deepen and extend [liberal-democratic ideology] in the direction of a radical and plural democracy” (original emphasis), they intend to institutionalize the “moment of tension, of openness” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 188) in order to make arguments, controversy, and conflict possible. More recently, Mouffe (2018: 10) has talked about the need “to break with the post-political consensus and to affirm the partisan nature of politics to create the condition of an ‘agonistic’ debate about possible alternatives.” Such a politics, for Rancière (1998: 30), “makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise.” Whereas theories of radical democracy denounce consensus in the name of openness for debate and struggle, anti-politics starts and ends with an absolute, non-negotiable position that is protected from being challenged from antagonistic positions and disagreement by silencing all discourse with noise, in the form of verbal and, more often than not, physical violence. We argue that this kind of political subjectivity is more likely to be found in social formations that we characterize as the rural, where the culturally familiar, authenticity, and a lack of difference and reflection dominate.

AfD, the new right, and their geography

Even though the entry of a right-wing populist, and at least partially right-wing extremist, party like the AfD into the national parliament is a new phenomenon, there were numerous movements and parties with similar right-wing agendas in post-war Germany. First, political parties of the extreme right were successful to some degree at different points in time and in different regions, indicating the wide-spread existence of xenophobic and related attitudes in the German population (Heitmeyer, 2018): most notably, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD, 4.3 percent in the 1969 national elections), the German People's Union (DVU, 12.9 percent in the 1998 parliamentary elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt), and The Republicans (REP, 10.1 percent and 9.1 percent in the parliamentary elections in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 1992 and 1996, respectively). Second, neo-Nazis were able to establish organizational structures in some regions, mainly in the East and in the country, and to emerge from a subculture to become part of the political mainstream (Botsch, 2012). This went hand in hand with violence against leftists and foreigners, as documented in the ethnographic study by Bürk (2012) on the dominance of the extreme right in two small towns in eastern Germany. This development was sometimes based on the strategy of establishing “National Liberated Zones” (Döring, 2008; Schulze and Weber, 2011). According to this strategy, the extreme right would not only dominate these zones, but be culturally hegemonic by combining violence with more consensus-oriented tactics such as providing social services in rural areas (Bundschuh, 2012). Third, the New Right, when viewed as a “bridging spectrum” between conservatism and right-wing extremism (Salzborn, 2016: 45) began focusing on the elites in West Germany in the 1960s (Salzborn, 2017; Weiß, 2017). Since then, the aim was the establishment “of a new right-wing party that formally dissociates itself from neo-Nazism” (Salzborn, 2016: 37), i.e. a party like the AfD. As many observers have emphasized, the success of the AfD is built on its capacity to bundle together these pre-existing attitudes and initiatives (Heitmeyer, 2018; Salzborn, 2017).

This bundling required a specific conjuncture within the German political landscape. After years of preparation, intellectuals, ideologies, and media outlets of the New Right were in place, when a particularly explosive situation was suddenly created in Germany, triggered directly and indirectly by the global economic crisis of 2007–08. First, the German government responded to the European debt crisis by guaranteeing Greece’s public debt and repeatedly portrayed this policy as one without an alternative. While this de facto meant that the German government was exporting its own austerity politics, it was criticized in fierce and, to a large extent, racist debates as a betrayal of German interests (cf. Belina, 2013). The AfD was founded in 2013 in this political context as a nationalist ordo-liberal party opposed to the Euro currency (Friedrich, 2017). Second, anti-Islamic xenophobia, which had been on the rise since 9/11 and intensified after terror attacks in Western Europe, was channeled into various movements such as the Pegida movement (“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident”). Schmidt (2017) characterizes this movement as a hybrid, combining autonomous nationalism and the essential New Right ideology of ethnopluralism. As Pegida started weekly rallies in the eastern German city of Dresden in October 2014, it attracted national and international attention from the media, as well as from academics (Dostal, 2015; Schmidt, 2017). Following the success of Pegida, the AfD—which endorses the more radical positions of Pegida more and more—increasingly turned toward anti-Islamism and xenophobia, especially after around one million refugees and other migrants came to Germany in 2015 (Friedrich, 2017). The electoral success of the AfD was, therefore, dependent on a combination of events; outcries about ongoing social insecurity due to neoliberalism and austerity and previously latent racism merged with the heated public reaction to the economic crisis of 2007–08 and large-scale immigration in 2015.

The electoral results of the AfD reflect two spatial patterns in particular (cf. Figure 1): first, an east-west divide with a significantly higher proportion of AfD votes in eastern Germany and, second, a country-city divide with a greater tendency for those in the country to vote for the AfD. Commentators and analysts have intensively discussed the east-west-pattern. The most important findings for explaining the higher AfD share of the votes in the east of Germany focus on the 1990s, with its policies of (often fraudulent) privatization, mass unemployment, and national and EU policies incapable of and/or unwilling to raise the economic standard of the east to that of western Germany (Falkner and Kahrs, 2018: 39; cf. Miggelbrink, 2020). This resulted in a specific East German identity based on social insecurity, feelings of being left behind, the consequences of a wide-ranging shift of social values and the experience of having suffered the devaluation of past accomplishments (Begrich, 2018: 41ff.). According to some historians, the identities of people in the eastern part of Germany have also been shaped by the experience of having lived almost completely segregated from foreigners prior to 1990 due to a particular form of practicing anti-fascism prescribed by the government, a particular localism performed during the era of “real existing socialism,” and the experience of having brought down the government through demonstrations in 1989 (Frei et al., 2019; Wolf, 2017). The second pattern, city vs. country, which we are interested in, received some attention after the 2017 elections. In one quantitative study, “ruralness” correlated positively with a higher number of votes for the AfD on the municipal scale only in the East, but not in the West (Deppisch et al., 2019). In contrast, a national survey found that “xenophobia” explains a higher percentage of AfD votes, while city-country differences or a self-perception as “losers of modernization” (“Modernisierungsverlierer”) do not (Schröder, 2018).

This conclusion was challenged by Hillje (2018) in a qualitative study in two localities with high percentage of AfD votes, which stated that instead of racism being the main explanation for the success of the AfD, insufficient public transportation and social infrastructures are the important reasons for feeling disadvantaged in comparison to refugees and for feeling neglected by politicians within small towns and villages. Additionally, another quantitative study found that in 79 regions, a high percentage of “modernization opponents” (“Modernisierungsgegner”) (Rösel and Samartzidis, 2018) was the strongest explanatory factor for the high number of AfD votes in eastern Germany, while a high AfD turnout in western Germany correlates with conservative values and local patriotism. Relevant explanatory factors identified in other quantitative studies include the high electoral success of the NSDAP Nazi party in 1933 on the municipal scale (Cantoni et al., 2019)—an issue also mentioned by Adorno (2019: 25). On the scale of (much larger) electoral districts, explanatory factors include voters of a high average age, having a high percentage of small businesses and manufacturing jobs, and low average household incomes (Franz et al., 2018); and according to Richter and Bösch (2017), voters of a high average age, a high percentage of nonvoters in 2017 and of voters for the neo-Nazi NPD party in 2013, a low settlement density, and a high percentage of people with migration background were factors. The last finding contradicts the conclusion of a study mentioned above that found that a low percentage of asylum seekers among the general population is, in fact, one of several factors explaining the electoral success of the AfD (Cantoni et al., 2019). As this brief overview shows, the mostly quantitative studies on the subject come to heterogenous results, depending on the variables used and probably also on the spatial scale of the analysis. We argue that this clearly demonstrates the need to more thoroughly theorize which types of social processes the spatial pattern city vs. country reflects.

From city vs. country to the urban and the rural—and back again?

There are two opposing perspectives in the debate about the explanation of city-country differences within the electoral success of the AfD. Some view AfD voters as “patriarchal-oriented, racist-minded middle-class people indulging in the ‘idiocy of rural life’” (Salzborn, 2017: 182, quoting Adorno, 2005: 28) and the “village [as] an expression of an anti-societal community” (Salzborn, 2017: 184). Given the racism of the AfD and its constituents, other authors think that to explain the latter by searching for spatial or social patterns is the wrong approach: “At its center are not rifts between, for example, rich vs. poor, east vs. west, city vs. country or ‘content’ vs. ‘insecure,’ but the fact that they themselves [the voters] have made issues of ethnic homogeneity and maintaining clear internal/external divisions the center of their beliefs” (Eversberg, 2018: 46). This article would like to provide a third position. We argue that the success of right-wing populist movements and parties does indeed reflect spatial patterns that are shaped by city-country differences; however, a traditional understanding of the contrast between city and country does not explain these results in a sufficient way. Instead, following Lefebvre’s understanding of the different degrees of production of urban and rural spaces in the process of urbanization, combined with Adorno’s take on “the provincial,” provides an opportunity to better understand urban and rural social formations, which enable us to identify possible conditions for the success or failure of anti-political right-wing populism.

Beyond the urban-rural contrast

The debate about what characterizes the city vs. the country has a long history that can be summarized as a movement from the “objects” of city and country toward the social relationships of urban and rural. Harvey (1978) and Lefebvre (2003) argue decisively for a definition of the urban following the tradition of an explicitly societal-theoretical approach in the tradition of Marx. We are convinced that incorporating Adorno’s take on the “provincial” adds to this project. It is useful to consider how Adorno saw the country because it also helps to overcome misunderstandings regarding his use of the pejorative wording of the “idiocy of rural life” from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels, 2010: 488) in the section of the Minima Moralia referenced by Salzborn in the quote above. A close look reveals that this language does not stem from a description of the reality of country life, but reflects an “anti-intellectualism and irrationalism” (Adorno, 2005: 28) displayed by intellectuals themselves, with their worldviews being rooted in “mechanisms of competition”. Thus, Adorno does not intend to provide a definition for a type of rural socialization. In fact, in the Minima Moralia he writes about a “blurring of the difference between town and country” (Adorno, 2005: 140). Adorno nevertheless states elsewhere that “[t]he persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions meanwhile are irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself” (1998: 31). As in the Manifesto, however, this characterization refers to the dominant mode of production in the country, the agrarian and agriculture. As Harvey (1978: 114) writes, however, “the urban-rural distinction has lost its real economic basis.” This is because the country is by no means characterized by agriculture alone—which is even more true in Germany today than it was 40 years ago. When turning to Adorno, as we do in the subsection after the next, we do not focus on his scattered comments on the country, but instead on what he refers to as the “provincial.”

In contrast to urban theory, which has an extensive tradition across various academic disciplines, there is no comparable theorization of the rural. Proponents such as Woods (2005, 2011) and Halfacree (2006) start from Williams’ The Country and the City (1973), which frames city and country as opposites with numerous associations, but which are nevertheless inextricably linked. Similarly, we develop our argument by building on Lefebvre’s theorization and critique of urbanization as an all-encompassing process that produces both “the urban” and “the rural.” We argue that both, understood as social relationships, are inherent to the contradictory process of urbanization.

Lefebvre on the urban

With his hypothesis that “[s]ociety has been completely urbanized,” Lefebvre (2003: 1) develops a theory of urbanization that defines itself through the formation of the urban as a societal and, at the same time, historical phenomenon. As terminology is crucial, translation can become a problem. In “La Révolution Urbaine,” Lefebvre (1970) proposes a specific terminology that is also used in the translated English-language edition (Lefebvre, 2003). He differentiates between the spatial object “city” (French: ville) and the social relationship “the urban” (French: l’urbaine). The latter is produced in the social process of urbanization (French: urbanisation), the result of which is “urban society” (French: société urbaine) or “complete urbanization” (French: urbanisation complète). The complementary terms are “country” or “countryside” (French: la campagne) or “village” (French: la village) for the spatial object and “the rural” (French: le rural) for the social relationship. This terminology is rather unambiguous and will be used and qualified throughout this paper. Problems arise with the related adjectives. First, Lefebvre uses campagnard and villageois as the adjectives for the spatial objects campagne and village respectively, and rural as the adjective for the social relationship le rural. A problem for the translation into English arises here because in English “rural” is the adjective for both the spatial object “country” or “countryside” and the social relationship “the rural” (and none exists for “village”). Second, another adjective-related translation problem is the fact that the French adjective for both the spatial object ville and the social relationship l’urbain is urbain. In the English-language edition, “urban” is also used as the adjective for both “city” and “the urban.” In the original French, Lefebvre reserves urbain as the adjective for the social relationship most of the time (but not always) and uses phrases that include the noun ville when referring to the spatial object. One example of this is when he qualifies “[l]a ville industrielle” as often being “à peine urbaine” (Lefebvre, 1970: 24). While the industrial city is clearly “urban” in the sense that it is a spatial object qualified as a “city,” it is “barely urban” (Lefebvre, 2003: 14), as it is not characterized by the social relationship of “the urban.” To resolve both problems, in this paper, we follow Lefebvre’s example and use the adjective “urban” when referring to the social relationship and the noun “city” when talking about the spatial object. Similarly, we use the adjective “rural” when referring to the social relationship “the rural” and the noun “country” when talking about the spatial object.

For our purpose, we focus on two aspects that follow from Lefebvre’s understanding of the urban as “associated with the logic of form and with the dialectic of content” (2003: 119). First, the urban can materialize in both cities and the country on various spatial scales, and second, the urban provides the form in which political conflicts are fought and is, thus, the potential site of the political.

First, according to Lefebvre, the societal relation “the urban” can emerge everywhere and on all spatial scales. By applying a historical lens, Lefebvre locates the human settlement process as the transition from “nature” to the urban-rural distinction and ultimately its dialectical abolition through complete urbanization. Looking at this process, the urban has a mediating function between the “global level” (Lefebvre, 2003: 78; emphasis in original), where capital and the state impose their laws, and the private, i.e. the level of dwelling and everyday life. Historically, the city becomes the center of societal exchange. With this, comes the centrality that is the distinguishing feature of the urban by enabling “the concentration of everything there is in the world” (39; emphasis in original), becoming productive through exchange and encounters. The city makes possible the coming together of diverse elements and, through this, creates the situation of the urban. The urban is, therefore, initially “pure form” and, because of its temporary lack of content, remains “abstraction, associated with practice” (118f.). Concrete differences are what give centrality its specific content. Referring to social practice, Lefebvre initially understands it as “an invitation to allow the ‘other’ to live differently” (Schmid, 2005: 276). Lefebvre argues that the acknowledgement of the variety of differences that encounter each other through centrality can lead to “ethnic, linguistic, local and regional particularities, but on another level, one where differences are perceived and conceived as such; that is, through their relations and no longer in isolation, as particularities” (Lefebvre, 2003: 96). Within the pure form of centrality, the differences and contradictions, or rather the field of relations between them, become decisive for the development of urban society through their confrontation and simultaneity in their spatio-temporal relationship. The content of the urban, made up of the encounter of differences, remains theoretically indeterminate and requires a “sensory” social practice of difference. In terms of its meaning, the urban can, therefore, always represent something different depending on the historical-societal situation, while being at the same time a foundational element and a mirror of societal developments. As a result, the urban “in the sense of centrality is at its core a social relationship that can only emerge through space but not only in cities” (Ronneberger and Vogelpohl, 2014: 258). The urban is consequently not bound to a concrete location within the city, but can occur in any location.

Furthermore, the urban can also appear on any spatial scale. Centrality, being neither static nor homogeneous, increasingly tends to be organized on smaller spatial scales. Lefebvre argues that spatial segregation prevents centrality and, therefore, the encounter of differences because it “attempts to resolve conflicts by separating the elements in space” (Lefebvre, 2003: 175). Thus, the “dual” or “quartered city” (Marcuse, 1989) and “divided cities” (Fainstein and Harloe, 1992), as well as the spaces produced through “peripheralization” (Fischer-Tahir and Naumann, 2013) of the country come with a centrality on a small spatial scale. Graham and Marvin in “Splintering Urbanism” (2001) use infrastructure networks to show how numerous and spatially close disparities of ever smaller spaces develop within cities. Similar processes of “splintering regionalism” (Huning et al., 2011) can also be observed in terms of water infrastructure in the country, for example, in eastern Germany. Processes of splintering are examples of the fact that urban and rural contexts increasingly differentiate themselves and that new, small-scale disparities are layered on top of previous spatial patterns—such as city-country differences. Therefore, both cities and spaces in the country can be characterized by a variety of centralities on different spatial scales, i.e. of spaces where differences come together and form the urban.

Second, Lefebvre sees “the urban as form and reality” (2003: 175) because it is in fact the form in which differences meet and potentially clash. It is the form that “also incorporates conflict, including class conflict” (175). The particular interests and positions of various social classes and groups, which emerge in the abstract due to the political-economic structures on the global level, become concrete in conflicts on the mixed level of the urban. Again, this is true for urban spaces in both the city and the country, as debates on a “Right to the Countryside” (Barraclough, 2013) and “Radical Ruralism” (Wilbur, 2013) illustrate. The urban “provides the characteristic unity of the social ‘real,’” (Lefebvre, 2003: 80), where “forms-functions-structures” (80) come together in a manner that can provide for some sort of cohesion. Lefebvre pins a lot of hope on the transformational character of the political conflicts emerging in and around the urban: “The conception of the urban also strives for the reappropriation by human beings of their conditions in time, in space, and in objects” (ibid.: 179; emphasis in original). Lefebvre’s take on the urban, however, can also be understood as a form of conflict mediation when he writes that “[w]e could therefore define the urban as a place where conflicts are expressed, reversing the separation of places where expression disappears, where silence reigns, where the signs of separation are established” (175f.; emphasis in original). As a result, two consequences are possible: a politicization that questions the power structures of the global level in a transformative manner or a depoliticization that helps to achieve social cohesion and, thus, continues injustices and differences by finding compromises that guarantee some sort of (at least passive) consensus. No matter what kind of conflicts the urban produces, however, it is not the site of anti-politics that negates the necessity of political conflicts altogether. Either way, the urban is the site of the political.

The production of the urban and the rural in the process of urbanization

In contrast to the urban, the rural—understood as a social relationship—can be seen as a breeding ground of anti-politics. To develop this argument, we reconstruct the meaning given to the rural by Lefebvre and add what Adorno understood under “the provincial” in order to propose how in the end the rural and the urban are both produced in the process of urbanization. By looking at the process of urbanization from the perspective of the quantitative conditions of production, Lefebvre first states that “each mode of production has ‘produced’ […] a type of city” (Lefebvre, 2003: 24). Through its central role as a mediator and, therefore, the center of the production process, the city itself becomes a productive force in late capitalism (30). This becomes apparent during the transition to post-Fordism in the formation of urban centers with “decision-making and power structures, those that involve massive concentrations, enormous densities, of wealth and power,” on the one hand (97). On the other hand, large parts of the population are displaced to the suburbs and previously important production sites of industrialization degenerate into shrinking areas.

Important for further analysis is the dialectical development in the urbanization process that establishes new centers, but also produces a new periphery:

“The dialectical abolition of the city-country contradiction can be found in the new and altered meaning of centrality. In the course of urbanization, this contradiction transforms itself into a new contradiction, namely between the center and the periphery. The essential contradiction of urban society therefore can be found within the phenomenon of urbanization: between the centrality of power and the other forms of centrality, between the center and the peripheries, between integration and segregation” (Schmid, 2005: 181f.).

“Lefebvre sees the potential of an urban revolution anchored in the subjective experiences of this segregation, alienation, and being excluded from the center—experiences produced by the everyday circumstances of people’s lives. The revolutionary subject (the displaced and excluded), thus, emerges from urban everyday life and finds its political expression through the demand for the right to the city” (Mullis, 2017: 357).

According to Lefebvre, there is also a shift on the qualitative level of urbanization: “The ‘urban-rural’² opposition is accentuated rather than dissipated, while the town and country opposition is lessened” (1996: 120). As a result, in the process of urbanization, neither the distinction between city and country can be used as an explanatory model of societal development, nor can the difference between the two be understood as a difference between two modes of production since both are now subject to (post-)industrial production. Spatial manifestations of the increasingly differentiating urban and rural social formations take place in a variety of places.

From the perspective of the country, a quantitative urbanization process can be observed leading to “depopulation and the ‘loss of the peasantry’ from the villages” (Lefebvre, 1996: 72) and turning a formerly rural lifestyle into folklore. According to Lefebvre, however, the societal implementation of this process is not free of conflict. This process does not take place “without the resistance of those affected, or without convulsions” (Lefebvre, 2016: 110). Although Lefebvre deals only marginally with these convulsions in the course of his critique of urbanism, at one point he declares: “Conventional attitudes and a more or less folkloric parochialism and regionalism protest the disappearance of the city. Protest based on particularities, generally of peasant origin, should not be confused with an opposition to repressive bodies or with an awareness and acknowledgement of difference” (2003: 95f.; emphasis in original).

This understanding of the rural as a moment of rigidity can be linked to the concept of the provincial in Adorno's sense. Again, a note on terminology and translation is relevant. In German, the adjective “provinziell” used by Adorno is both a descriptive term for places outside the center and a pejorative term referring to a “low intellectual and cultural standard,” as the authoritative German language dictionary, Duden, puts it (www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/provinziell; our translation). As a dialectical thinker, Adorno, well aware of this polyvalence, uses the term “provincial” in a way that keeps the tension between the two meanings without resolving it. His interest lies in explaining the nature of a provincial mindset which, for him, is not place-determined, but needs to be explained with reference to social relations. At the same time, he is resolutely clear that he disapproves of provinciality as a mind set for theoretical and political reasons. What is important to note though, is that Adorno never equates provincial places with provincial mindsets, bad-mouthing the country as such. Instead, a far more nuanced relationship between place and mindset is utilized. Provincial mindsets can be found in cities and the mindset of participants in progressive movements in the country are usually not provincial, in Adorno’s sense.

Adorno transfers the relationship between the urban and the provincial to the individual level. In Philosophy and Teachers, a short piece written in 1961, Adorno calls for a “duty to deprovincialize” (1998: 31), by which he means to learn to think reflectively through “self-reflection and critical exertion” (32). Here “the provincial” refers to that which is left behind when an “individual becomes mature” (31) “as part of the individual learning process” (Baumann, 2015: 138). Provinciality is “extraterritorial to culture” (Adorno, 1998: 30f.)—it is its “Other.” Learning is often associated with the distance one travels from one’s origin, as when students leave the country to study in the city. However, the provincial they have to overcome when learning to think reflectively is not necessarily located in the country. Thus, “both country and city origin prove to be provinces if the formative development of the individual remains determined by it” (Baumann, 2015: 138). Adorno, therefore, situates the provincial not only in the context of the city-country dichotomy, which he also refers to in the talk from 1967 mentioned above (Adorno, 2019: 15), but also in the holistic development of the individual, which is, however, “always permeated by historical developments in the societal division of labor” (15).

The provincial is also the breeding ground for the “jargon of authenticity” (Adorno, 1998: 27), a phrase Adorno devotes a whole book to, published in 1964. In it, “provinciality” (Adorno, 1973: 50) does not just refer to a kind of deficiency in the formation of an individual. It also refers to the outright rejection of individual reflection as advocated in existentialist philosophy and the jargon that emerged from it, which, according to Adorno, dominated West German post-war public debates and “provide[d] [fascism] with a refuge” (5). For Adorno, this way of thinking preaches unmediated authenticity—“reflected unreflectiveness” (55). As we live in a “universally mediated world” (99), however, the seemingly primal is in reality only “second-hand primalness” (76). In response to the claim by Heidegger, who to a large extent developed the jargon that there is a difference between a culturally mediated ontic and a true, fundamental ontological, Adorno states that both are merely “expressions for different forms of reflection” (118).

The Jargon of Authenticity (Adorno, 1973) is important for our purposes for three interrelated reasons. First, in analyzing how Heidegger “disarms the charge that he is provincial” when “he uses the term ‘provincialism’ in a positive sense” (53), Adorno shows how Heidegger ideologically refers to “a false eternity of agrarian conditions” (55). Country life never looked the way Heidegger portrays it, nor does the image of the country he constructs have any reference to the real country since it has been “radically subordinated to exchange” (107). While Adorno reveals how Heidegger’s portrait of the country is purely ideological, he argues however that the provincial, unreflectiveness, and its closeness to fascism are still connected to the country. He shows what he means in a drastic manner when he mentions that “the worst atrocities in the concentration camps were committed by the younger sons of farmers” and concludes, “The general situation in the country […] pushes disinherited sons into barbarousness” (26f.). Again, Adorno, at the same time, situates the provincial—now understood as both unwilling and willing unreflectiveness—in the country, but also goes beyond equating the country with “provinciality.”

Second, the closeness of provincial jargon to fascism has its roots in unwilling and willing unreflectiveness, which we argue, constitutes the rural breeding ground for anti-politics. When the jargon locates its “absolute starting point, free of doubt” and “outside of the texture of thought”, its reasoning becomes “terroristic” (45f). Adorno argues that “Heidegger secretly reinstates the creator quality of the absolute subject” (120) and shows how, despite all the philosophical effort, it all comes down to “subjectivism: authenticity, in the traditional language of philosophy, […] identical with subjectivity as such” (126). Thus, the alleged ontological “authenticity is determined by the arbitrariness of the subject”. From this, two things follow. On the one hand, this way of thinking makes individuals impose their own, purely subjective yardstick against which to measure what is true, good, and right—what we refer to as anti-politics. On the other hand, the jargon “favors demagogic ends” (9). In contrast to Heidegger’s self-portrayal as a fierce critic of modernity, he and his followers are in fact legitimizing the latter because the very form of their language “accommodates itself to the goal of subordination” (3). In doing so, they affirm existing capitalist social relationships by abstracting from them—precisely what the New Right and the AfD have been doing. This, Adorno concludes, “was according to the taste of fascism” (ibid.: 100).

Third, the proponents of the jargon were “anti-intellectual intellectuals” (Adorno, 1973: 4). In the name of their own intellect, unmediated as they presented it, they were “accusing other, mostly anticonservative, groups of sinful intellectuality” (45). In his talk in 1967, Adorno sees this connection confirmed by the way in which neo-Nazis at the time were using existentialist jargon to dismiss critical intellectuals (2019: 34)—one of the groups of “designated enemies” (30) their propaganda was directed at. These techniques of propaganda through which “the separation between so-called mind and so-called emotions is reified” (33) has prominently been used by the AfD and the New Right to dismiss intellectuals, experts, and even science.

As the German philosopher Claus Baumann (2015: 146) concludes in his discussion of Lefebvre and Adorno, the latter’s understanding of the provincial means, in regards to urbanization, that “the evolving and progressing moment of urban development is fundamentally connected with its opposite, the either stagnant or regressive provincial moment, with the dynamics of urbanization functioning as the overarching universal of this mediation.” By integrating Adorno’s understanding of the provincial into Lefebvre’s theory of urbanization, we understand the social formation of the rural as provincial in Adorno’s sense. We add Adorno’s concept to Lefebvre’s theory, and not the other way round, because the production of the urban and the rural, according to Lefebvre, belong to the broader concept of complete urbanization, which helps us to go beyond the city-country differences in the first place: “This complete urbanization has recreated the difference between city and country in a new and completely urbanized way” (Baumann, 2015: 145). Urbanization, therefore, not only contains the urban, but also a rural or provincial moment as a social relationship; both are mediated through social space in the process of urbanization, but are not bound to a certain morphological basis. For Baumann (2015), the two forms can rather be defined as an intertwined social relationship that is produced through social practice. The rural materializes in a concrete location and through social practice, in that a provincial justification of authenticity vis-à-vis differences fosters an absence of diversity. As a result, societal conflicts are not expressed in the rural or are consciously suppressed and, instead, quickly turn into hostility toward the “Other” (Schmid, 2005: 276). The rural, therefore, stands in opposition to the urban as an intertwined antagonism—the rural is the negation of the urban.

This is why the rural serves as a breeding ground for the anti-political, by fostering unreflected rigidity and “authenticity” that is not interested in arguments and negotiations, but aims to silence all opposition to its own position. The main level at which these conflicts take place is everyday life, in which urban-rural space is not only (re-)produced by social practice, but through which (anti-)political subjectivations and class formation processes are also experienced on a local scale (cf. Belina, 2017; Förtner, 2018). These experiences present themselves differently during the process of urbanization and its inherent, uneven spatial development.

The production of the rural in the process of urbanization: Three examples from Germany

The methodological approach used for the following empirical illustrations is based on Henri Lefebvre’s theoretical definition of the urban. The urban is, therefore, associated with the quantitative “logic of form” (Lefebvre, 2003: 119), as well as with the “dialectic of content” that is revealed through historically grown contradictions in a more qualitative manner. To illustrate the quantitative form, socio-structural indicators were selected from official statistics and municipal social space analyses, with a focus on population size, population density, population heterogeneity, distance to city center, and land use. The following section combines this data with a historical analysis of conflicts in the examined counties and districts regarding difference and “Otherness.” These analyses are taken from the relevant academic literature as well as from around 20 journalistic publications that have followed the socio-economic history of the three cases from the end of the 1980s until today. The focus of analysis is on the social practices of conflict and conflict mediation, with the aim of illustrating the ways in which difference vs. authenticity are inscribed into local social formations. All empirical analysis in the following section is based on a master’s thesis about the relationship between urbanization and the electoral success of the AfD (Förtner, 2018).

As part of a qualitative study of the electoral success of the AfD, three spaces of different size and with very different socio-economic conditions were examined. Western Pomerania-Greifswald in north-eastern Germany is a peripheral region that has had to contend with considerable demographic and economic structural difficulties since German reunification. Right-wing movements have been able to establish themselves here for several years. We discuss this as comprehensive peripheralization (5.1). On the other hand, in western German cities such as Pforzheim, the development of difference is lacking despite its supposedly high level of centrality. In the district of Pforzheim-Haidach, the habitual segregation of German repatriates from former Soviet regions for the last 30 years has resulted in a rather “reactionary” form of difference that articulates itself decisively via identity conflicts. We discuss the Haidach neighborhood, therefore, as a peripheral center (5.2). There are also districts with a high level of support for the AfD in the economic growth center of Mannheim. In Mannheim-Schönau, the lack of difference seems to have historical roots. Pogrom-like attacks on a refugee shelter had already taken place as early as 1992, with the causes, in part, deeply rooted in the development of the socio-spatial structure of the district. We discuss Mannheim-Schönau as a central periphery (5.3).

The three examples stand for different scales of consideration: Western Pomerania-Greifswald, as a larger single administrative district, is dominated by villages and small towns, while Mannheim-Schönau and Pforzheim-Haidach are districts of large cities. Our aim is not to compare the examples, but to illustrate the different rural and provincial contexts—situated in both the country and the city—in which the AfD has been successful.

Western Pomerania-Greifswald

In the Western Pomerania-Greifswald District, over 22.4 percent of the electorate voted for the AfD in the 2017 national parliamentary elections (Bundeswahlleiter, 2017). The electoral success of the AfD is strongly linked to the socio-economic and political-cultural developments in the everyday life of the region, and can be interpreted as a reaction to the ongoing urbanization process that is deeply linked to the neoliberalization of the agrarian sector. The historical development of Western Pomerania-Greifswald is strongly influenced by the contradictory dynamics of urbanization and is, therefore, affected by a comprehensive peripheralization.

By transforming the agrarian-industrial society into a service society at the push of a button, as it were, implemented in the wake of German reunification and linked to the neoliberal restructuring of agricultural production, rural society in Western Pomerania-Greifswald experienced multiple crises. The transformation of agricultural cooperatives into capitalistic business forms led to massive job losses of up to 80 percent in the agricultural sector (cf. Maschke and Köncke, 2020: 286). The effects can still be felt today and are reflected in high unemployment rates (Agentur für Arbeit, 2018). This socio-economic modification was strongly linked to a transformation of socio-spatial structures in everyday life. Aiming to address the country-city divide in living conditions (cf. Maschke and Köncke, 2020), the agricultural cooperatives provided economic, political, and cultural centrality, organizing everyday life in the country. When these activities were discontinued after 1990, it resulted in a disorientation and an identity crisis for a whole generation of workers, in addition to the job losses and economic deprivation for most of the workforce. The implosion of the historical-social space resulted in what Lefebvre (1996: 72) would have referred to as the “depopulation and the ‘loss of the peasantry’ from the villages.” Since 1970, the population has declined by 25 percent and the employment rate in the primary sector has been reduced to 3 percent, despite having an agricultural and forestry area of 78.7 percent of the area still under cultivation (Statistisches Amt Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2017). In a region with very little differences, a diminishing centrality, and not much democratic experience and tradition, the crisis of rural society came about suddenly, prompting local residents to “question society as a whole” (Schmid, 2005: 128).

The loss of centrality and the loss of significance for the entire region is reflected in people’s everyday culture, which is characterized by right-wing strategies and concepts of spatial dominance. In this context, the territorial strategy of the “nationally liberated zone” has often been used by a variety of right-wing actors. They use techniques anchored in everyday life to exert power over certain social-spatial issues and adapt these to their ideology through various social practices that also include violent behavior. These practices range from the targeted appropriation of centrally located real estate, the infiltration of rural communities, and the re-interpretation of traditional services through cultural subversion, all the way to taking on the political role of the problem solver (cf. Förtner, 2018). In Western Pomerania-Greifswald, this process has currently advanced to the extent that the use of right-wing extremist symbols and the presence of right-wing extremism in everyday life has been normalized (cf. Borstel, 2011), thereby, revealing a shift in the public discourse. Political, cultural, and, above all, ethnic differences remain hidden in this situation due to the pressure of conformity creating an “undialectic […] immobility in the ‘interpretation of the world’ throughout local society” (Petzke et al., 2007: 69). This absence of difference interwoven into the structures of everyday life offers space for anti-political positions, represented mostly by the anti-migration discourse of the AfD. The controversy over the renaming of the university in the main city of the district, Greifswald (cf. Klüter, 2020), can be understood as an example of how the political right fought the pockets of urban society by mobilizing a rural or provincial mindset. Founded in the 15th century, the university was named after a nationalist 19^th century poet with strong anti-Semitic leanings by the Nazis. To impede the university from getting rid of that name (which eventually happened in 2017), conservatives, the AfD, and the far right joined forces in arguing against it in the name of regional identity. It took immense efforts on the part of what we refer to as the “urban” or “deprovincialized” part of the regional public to organize a majority to support the renaming the of university.

This is the context in which the electoral success of the AfD in Western Pomerania-Greifswald has to be seen. Here, the urbanization process creates a situation in which the “resistance of those affected” (Lefebvre, 2016: 110) expresses itself in the everyday structure of social space, and in which the rural is produced by right-wing groups through different social practices. With the high share of votes for the AfD, there is a risk that anti-political public discourse is stabilizing the comprehensive peripheralization and its forms of the rural production of space.

Pforzheim-Haidach

The Haidach neighborhood, located in the Buckenberg District of Pforzheim, was one of the areas with the strongest support for the AfD in Germany, with 43.2 percent of the votes cast for them as the preferred party in the 2017 federal elections. Already during the 2016 state elections, 35.6 percent of the district’s citizens voted for the AfD, with the proportion of AfD constituents in the Haidach neighborhood being even higher at 42.8 percent (Bundeswahlleiter, 2017).

The historic development of the Pforzheim-Haidach neighborhood can be seen as a classic functionalist product of the capitalist urbanization process. Built on a greenfield site, Haidach represents a functional addition to the core city and, as a high-density residential area, is a classic example of simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation, or splintering, of city space. The distinct feature of the social-structural configuration in Haidach has been the particularly contradictory form of segregation of more recent German repatriates, which provided the initial conditions for producing the rural. Despite the increasing economic peripheralization of Pforzheim (cf. Förtner, 2018), Haidach can be regarded as a center for migrants coming from Russia and other former Soviet regions since 1990. The Haidach neighborhood is, thus, a peripheral center.

Since its inception, the neighborhood has played a crucial role in dealing with difference and spatial subjectivation by becoming the center of political debate in everyday life, as a point of reference for identity conflicts between “long-time residents” and the “newcomers.” The attribution of meaning through place-making has become important because it produces a particular practice of spatial subjectivation and the associated politicization of space. The labelling of Haidach as “Russian Hill” or “Little Moscow” had an early delimiting effect as a physical-material place. The proportion of citizens in this neighborhood with a migration background is just under 80 percent among 18–65-year olds, while at the same time over 90 percent of residents possess German citizenship, which is also indicative of the high number of recent German repatriates that mostly migrated from Russia (Stadt Pforzheim, 2017). At the beginning of the 1990s, the effects of this spatial exclusion favored problematic social everyday practices such as disrespectful behavior by youth, turning parts of the neighborhood into a “no-go area for long-time residents” (cf. Förtner, 2018: 77). These exclusionary effects, however, also had a community-building effect on the recent repatriates who were then protected from the hostility of the native population. Already upon arrival in the host society, the new residents of the Haidach neighborhood experienced a dual process of simultaneous community formation and exclusion.

The development of centrality and difference under these circumstances is considerably more difficult. These problems in Haidach could only be decreased through economic advancement and internal problem solving. The segregation effect leads to a production of rural space based on internal community formation, simultaneous disassociation from the external majority society, and rejection by the latter. When viewed in connection with the lived traditional values of some recent repatriates from Russia regarding the notions of nation, family, and adherence to Christianity (cf. Förtner, 2018), their reaction to the “European migration crisis” or to refugees as “embodiments of the collapse of order” (Evans and Baumann, 2016) reflects a historical contingency. Political subjectivation and an anti-political mindset not only reveal themselves through the political rightward shift of some of the recent repatriates, but it is also enforced in its most pronounced form of social practice. By setting up a militia in reaction to an alleged rape fostered by the Russian media, some organized residents of Haidach displayed their rigidity and hostility toward refugees using territorializing practices. Supported by the AfD, the local Pegida offshoot, and right-wing Russian-German associations, they displayed the anti-political through social practice in space.

From a socio-spatial perspective, the ability to connect with the AfD as an anti-urban and also pro-Russian party is, therefore, a backlash against the global urbanization process in Pforzheim-Heidach. The rural moment emerges as an internal contradiction in the process of urbanization itself and is articulated through the absence of difference in the neighborhood. The anti-foreign sentiment and social practices of some of the repatriates from Russia in Haidach can, therefore, be traced back to collective experiences of exclusion and is, in fact, produced by an (anti-)political and spatial practice promoted by segregation.

Mannheim-Schönau

In Mannheim-Schönau, 30.1 percent of constituents voted for the AfD in the 2016 state elections, thus, providing an unexpected direct mandate for the AfD candidate in a former “stronghold of the Social Democrats.” In the 2017 national parliamentary elections, the proportion of AfD voters in the district dropped to 21.4 percent, which still represented the highest percentage for a single party within the city of Mannheim (Bundeswahlleiter, 2017).

The Mannheim-Schönau District was created as a result of the rapid growth of the city during industrialization, and can be regarded as an example of “growths of dubious value” (Lefebvre, 2003: 4). It started as a residential area for workers, the unemployed, and the marginalized in the middle of today’s metropolitan region and has remained a district with social problems to this day. The district can be viewed as a central periphery in the urbanization process. The Schönau District is an expression of a capitalist dynamic of urbanization that has led, in this case, to socio-spatial inequality through an urban housing policy of concentrating social housing on the outskirts of the city. This is a form of both a homogenization and fragmentation of urban space that has intensified due to neoliberal urban politics in recent years.

In Schönau, as a result of allocating social housing to deserving groups of the population, a new type of conflict emerged during the mid-1950s—one between “hardworking long-term residents” and “criminal newcomers.” The conflict arose because the long-term residents drew a distinction between themselves and the newcomers and, in addition to the structural disadvantages of the neighborhood, reinforced an additional neighborhood effect that revealed itself through negative representation, stigmatization, and a lack of prospects (cf. Förtner, 2018). This conflict can be viewed as an integral part of the social-spatial process. The everyday situation is aligned with the produced social space, which, in turn, is based on the centrality of the urban and the subsequent collision of different elements.

In Schönau, the confrontational, anti-political style of negotiating this conflict can be witnessed in a particular combination of the everyday and the global. In 1992, pogrom-like attacks on a refugee shelter in the district occurred during a local fair (Möller, 2007). This practice led, at the same time, to a contradictory situation that was created through the particular way in which difference was dealt with. On the one hand, it temporarily dissolved the social division between the two opposing parties in the district since both sides participated in the riot together. On the other hand, this created a new form of social division, which in practice expressed itself through violence and separation from a new “Other.” In the years after the pogrom-like attacks, a rather ineffective process of self-reflection was initiated that seemed to only include some segments of the local population. Also, further financial investments in social and cultural infrastructure failed to change the social circumstances, which are still dominated by a lack of prospects and anti-political skepticism about “Others,” as well as politics and institutions in general. By 2016, the continued socio-spatial feeling that “[n]othing is going to happen for us” (71), as an expression of frustration about a perceived ongoing crisis, had led to a continuous rightward shift in favor of the AfD.

On the one hand, the rural revealed itself in the Mannheim-Schönau context through the abolition of the contradiction of social division, which led to violence and hostility toward the “Other” and, as a result, rejected the urban as a place of expressing differences. On the other hand, however, the rural also exposed itself in the events that manifested themselves through a lack of reconsideration and reflection on the events, i.e. silence and the denial of individual guilt (cf. Möller, 2007). The current turn toward the AfD as a party of anti-refugee politics is an anti-political moment, in that it can be regarded as a lack of liberation from one's own history, i.e. a refusal to discuss it politically.

Conclusion: City, country, and anti-politics

The rise of the New Right in Germany—its mobilization, its electoral success, and its impact on public discourse—are illustrative examples of a rural anti-political project. Also, outside of Germany, the New Right was able to present itself as an alternative to the established political systems and its institutions, the media, and rationality. This anti-political moment and the ability of the AfD, as an anti-elitist, right-wing populist project, to ideologically connect the mainstream Right (formerly connected to the conservative CDU/CSU parties), the elitist New Right (national-conservative groups), and the far-right (organized Nazi groups) are, in our view, the major reasons for the increasing number of people voting for the AfD—reflecting a trend under way in many European countries.

Anti-politics can find its expression in the differences between city and country, as in the Western Pomerania-Greifswald example. However, as the examples of Pforzheim-Haidach and Mannheim-Schönau demonstrate, the anti-political rural can materialize in cities as well. As these two city districts illustrate, crucial elements of urbanization such as centrality and difference are unequally distributed even in cities. In this sense, a conventional notion of city and country, which sees both as homogeneous and static units standing in contrast to one another, is not sufficient for understanding the centrality of the rural in right-wing populist mobilizations.

The suggestion not to take city-country contrasts for granted, but to theorize them more strongly poses further challenges for future studies. First, there is a need for quantitative analyses of these relationships at the national, regional, local, and sub-local scales, combined with qualitative analyses of their concrete manifestations in space and time. Second, there is still a considerable need for research on the rural in both the country and the city, their transformation and political dynamics, particularly in conceptual terms, to establish a critical theory of the urban-rural divide. Third, critical research, necessarily “anti-provincial” in Adorno’s sense, faces the methodological challenge of being itself perceived as part of established institutions by anti-political movements.

The goal for progressive political practice today is to take note of the, in many respects justified, rejection of established political institutions and to transform the root causes of right-wing populism and anti-politics into a source of progressive politics. Recent contributions by Chantal Mouffe (2018) and the German Left (Goes and Bock, 2017) call for a “left-wing populism” that builds on “equality and social justice” (Mouffe, 2018: 47) and a radical democracy “in which differences are still active” but where people are united in their opposition against “forces or discourses that negate all of them” (38). These contributions are not only confronted with the need to avoid simplistic explanations for, and an empathetic understanding of, xenophobic prejudices. What also needs to be improved are the prospects for a better future—one that promises a better world for both city and country spaces; in this regard, leaving behind established notions of city and country could be a good start.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We like to thank the cartographer at the Department of Human Geography at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Elke Alban, for producing the maps in and for compiling the data.

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.

Notes

Maximilian Förtner is currently working as a neighbourhood manager of the Frankfurt district of Griesheim, focusing on the social development of the district by promoting community work and democratic culture. Prior to this, he received his master’s degree in Human Geography from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.

Bernd Belina is professor of Human Geography at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His fields of research, rooted in historical-geographical materialism, include urban and political geography.

Matthias Naumann is interim professor of Geographical Education at Technische Universität Dresden. His fields of research include urban and rural development, infrastructure and political geography.

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