European View

Over the last two years Germany has experienced a significant growth of nationalist, anti-Islamic and xenophobic forces. While the movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA) has been mobilising protest on the ground in the Saxon capital, the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) has continually increased its number of seats in state parliaments, with a fundamental rejection of the refugee policy of the federal government. Since the election of a new leadership of the AfD in the summer of 2015, one can observe signs of rapprochement between these two organisations. In this paper I argue that the AfD and PEGIDA are two sides of the same coin. Further approximation and collaboration will depend on the outcome of lasting internal power struggles inside the AfD.

This article analyses the causes of the loss of support suffered by Podemos in the elections held on 26 June 2016. In these elections, the party, led by Pablo Iglesias, ran for office in coalition with the United Left. The article describes the way the election developed for Podemos, analyses the shaping of its populist rhetoric in line with a radical left-wing view, discusses the social and political conditions that favoured its rise, and finally, notes that the disappearance of these conditions jeopardises its chances of success in the future.

In Germany and Austria, an unprecedented political communication campaign orchestrated by a small group of well-connected politicians, green and left-wing political parties, and associated civil society organisations has evoked strong aversion among the population to the negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP) between the EU and the US. Germany's anti-TTIP groups want nothing less than to take their protests to other European countries. The network's campaigns are largely driven by myths and fears evoked by emotive narratives and powerful metaphors. Their reasoning has strong persuasive power though. This article sheds light on who the campaign movement's major protagonists are, the messages they spread, their objectives, and how their deceptive argumentation threatens social interaction, pluralist societies and individual economic freedom.

Since its birth in 2009, the Five Star Movement has achieved incredible growth, accompanied by important electoral successes. This has resulted in concrete responsibilities and influential positions in the system. Grillo's movement was born as an anti-system and populist force with interesting peculiarities, and the main challenge it is now facing is to prove itself able to govern and to transform problems into solutions. So far the promised revolution has not taken place: a mixture of inexperience, internal divisions, scandals and contradictions has already damaged the image of the movement, which is facing many challenges and a difficult transition. The evolution of the Five Star Movement shows all the weaknesses of populist movements facing reality. The best strategy to confront them is to ensure that all their contradictions emerge and, at the same time, to regain the citizens’ trust by providing credible solutions to their problems.

The EU is facing its biggest threat yet—a crisis of European identity. As member states fall into the hands of Eurosceptic and nationalist regimes, for many the future of the Union seems hopeless. People are disillusioned, failing to see the added value in the community of nations they once voted to join. Institutions are struggling, unable to regain their citizens’ trust, or even to reach them at all. This new crisis requires a new way of thinking—instead of supporting the institutional machine, the EU must support the people. It needs to place trust in the awakening civil society, endorsing and funding grass-roots movements such as the Committee for the Defence of Democracy, which in a matter of days managed to ignite the biggest mass protests in Poland since the fall of Communism.

This article sheds light on one of Europe's successful right-wing populist parties, the Norwegian Progress Party. Since 2013 the party has been in a coalition with the Conservative Party. The history, ideology and position of the party in the Norwegian political system are factors that explain how a centre–right party and a populist one have been able to form a viable coalition. Over time the Progress Party has become increasingly well integrated into the political system. The fact that no cordon sanitaire or total boycott policy was implemented against it may explain why the party developed a more moderate and pragmatic approach than most other right-wing populist parties. In turn, this made it possible for the Conservative Party to offer to form a coalition with the Progress Party and placed the centre–right in the strategic position of cooperating with parties both in the centre and to the right.

Whatever the result of the 2016 US presidential election, it will signal a new era of political communication. Candidate Donald Trump defeated 16 contenders in the Republican primaries, most of them Republican Party insiders. There are several reasons for this unexpected turn of events. One of them is the different kind of communication that Trump employs. Trump's communication method, like that of the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle) in Italy, uses a high number of icons (signs that represent objects by their similarity, such as images) instead of the indexes (signs that indicate their object by contiguity, such as tags, labels and proper names) that have characterised the last 20 years of political communication. This change encourages politicians to focus on communication as a ‘complete gesture’, and as a meaningful action that creates an ambience rather than stressing the role of the leader. This paper deals with the semiotic characteristics of this new kind of communication and explains the consequent key features of successful political communication in the coming years.

This article argues that political economy can explain how and why information distribution and opinion formation are changing. Even more importantly, political economy offers us ways to fight the negative effects of misinformation. It is argued that asymmetry of information can explain recent developments and why poor-quality information is capable of competing with good-quality information. Subsequently, the article explains how poor-quality information influences peoples’ decisions through internal decision-making processes.

This article looks at how the Greek, German and British press have addressed the issue of the refugee crisis in Europe. Using a mixed research approach that combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this article examines 1340 articles that were published online between 20 March and 31 May 2016 in Greece (Kathimerini, To vima), Germany (Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung) and the UK (The Guardian, The Telegraph). The results presented by this article suggest that the press in all three countries mostly presented the refugee crisis in numbers. Geographical qualifiers were also deployed in the effort to broach this thorny issue, while the managerial aspect of the refugee crisis, the critical issue of child refugees and the EU–Turkey agreement were all among the most frequent topics covered by the press.

The past year has witnessed a major shift in the relationships between the four Central European countries that make up the Visegrád Group. In matters related to migration, the members of the alliance have worked together in Brussels as a cohesive bloc throughout 2016. But in the wake of Brexit, simmering internal divisions have arisen within this regional alliance over the EU's future. The Visegrád Group acts as an amplifier, an ad hoc coalition, reinforcing regional positions where they exist. Its diplomatic infrastructure and other structural factors are here to stay, but the key drivers of its stances are now domestic politics and the role of the countries’ leaders. In the absence of a shared vision for the future of Europe and the role of EU institutions, the honeymoon period seems to be over. A ‘conservative revolution’ in Poland has created an illiberal axis with Hungary, where a sovereigntist narrative holds sway, while the Czech and Slovak governments have maintained a more pragmatic line on the EU. The new risk is that reinventing the EU will come at the expense of (divided) Central Europeans.

This article looks at the causes and impact of a range of current events related to migration, examining them from the perspective of present-day demographic trends in Africa and the Middle East. The quest for decent prospects in life acts as the incitement and rationale behind the push–pull factors which underlie the movements of people from these parts of the world. The article sheds light on the extraordinary nature of modern migration, which is creating pressure on policymakers to ensure appropriate policy and economic resolutions are formulated, as well as providing answers to how the formation of trenches between nations and nationalities occurs, which stems from collective identity discourses. By applying a structural and socio-economic feature-focused approach to explaining the migration process, the article highlights the impact of socio-psychological mechanisms on shared decision-making processes, and aims to build an improved and broader conceptual understanding of the ongoing demographic shifts.

As Tunisia continues to move forward on the path of democratisation and pluralism, the problems it may still face remain significant. A comparative analysis of the (failed) Algerian attempt to democratise and the current process underway in Tunisia could shed light on what Tunisia needs to do to avoid a setback in its democratisation process.

The economic and financial crises evident since 2007 have refocused the debate as to the future structure of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This article looks at the issue from the perspective of economic history and identifies that current proposals for fiscal union are based on an over-reliance on Optimum Currency Area theory and are not realistic in the current political environment. In addition, European fiscal rules have become over-complicated, inefficient and open to widespread manipulation. In the medium term, rather than risk the lessening of political commitment to the EMU through divisive fiscal union proposals, the EU should focus on developing unique governance mechanisms that better reflect the current characteristics of the EMU. In this context, this article proposes four actions to complement existing initiatives such as the Banking Union: (1) simplified EU budgetary rules, (2) the creation of an independent European Fiscal Board to assess and enforce national compliance, (3) a commitment to retaining core national fiscal autonomy with a strict ‘no bailout’ rule, and (4) increased levels of investment through an expanded European Fund for Strategic Investments. Only following the successful completion of these measures should fiscal deepening be discussed at a political level.

Regional and local authorities already promote their own policies and actions in the international arena for humanitarian, political, commercial, cultural and institutional reasons. From cross-border to decentralised cooperation, under the concept of City diplomacy, local authorities often move independently and actively, both in the international arena and in the EU's decision-making processes. They act during conflicts, providing peace-building and dialogue opportunities, and take action in post-conflict regions or regions in need. This form of diplomacy complements traditional diplomacy and is mostly activated when the latter is frozen or required to remain low profile for contingent, political reasons. These new actors, with strong devolved powers at home and strong political leadership, deserve more attention from international players such as the European Commission and some of the United Nations’ agencies. The current scheme of international cooperation is overly rigid. There is a need for more flexibility so that support—including financial support—can be better targeted to meet specific needs. This could lead to regional and local actors becoming direct recipients of international financial support for planning and running decentralised or bottom-up forms of cooperation, partnership and political dialogue.

The existence of natural panaceas or silver bullets in diplomatic agreements is currently under examination. Diplomacy has evolved from the classical theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which stressed the importance of objective factors, to modern ideas that highlight the human element as well. This explains why finding generalised models in diplomatic arrangements was easier in the old forms of diplomacy than in its more modern counterparts. Diplomatic agreements have become increasingly complex, covering many fields beyond conflict in the traditional sense. The Dayton Accords and Minsk Agreements are good examples of this. This complexity hampers our ability to find a universal formula which can work for all diplomatic situations and agreements. For some scholars a settlement must produce a set of arrangements that lasts for generations, demonstrating robustness and permanence, while for others, the measurement of success is based on the ability of the agreement to meet initial expectations.