Between Breivik and PEGIDA: the absence of ideologues and leaders on the contemporary European far right

In the aftermath of the Norwegian terror attacks of 22 July 2011, the question of agency with regard to the convicted perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, has frequently been discussed. Did he really act on his own? Were his actions self-directed? Was he, as a typical ‘lone wolf’, inspired by the prevalent far-right concept of ‘leaderless resistance’ or, simply, a blind tool, a string puppet pushed and pulled by dark forces, as some commentators have claimed? His cut-and-paste manifesto points to inspiration from ideas circulating in the European Counter Jihad Movement (ECJM), in itself a contradictory mix of ideological positions. A number of these ideas were given new life when the so-called ‘populist right-wing movement of indignation’, the Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (PEGIDA) took to the streets of Dresden in the autumn of 2014. The driving force behind PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, with a past as petty criminal and doorman, is an unlikely front man for one of the most successful political initiatives in post-unification Germany. Comparing Breivik and PEGIDA, Önnerfors argues that the ECJM is part of the ‘third generation’ of right-wing discourse that is without a consistent world view, dominant leaders and prolific ideologues. Instead, in a new atmosphere of ‘politics of passion’ and ‘post-politics’, fuzzy ECJM ideology turns into a screen upon which diffuse uneasiness with current political affairs can be projected and channelled. Outside the scope of Önnerfors's article but worth noting is the considerable impact these developments have had on electoral support for right-wing populist parties such as the Front National in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden.     

The paradox of nationalism: The common denominator of radical right and radical left euroscepticism

What can explain the strong euroscepticism of radical parties of both the right and the left? This article argues that the answer lies in the paradoxical role of nationalism as a central element in both party families, motivating opposition towards European integration. Conventionally, the link between nationalism and euroscepticism is understood solely as a prerogative of radical right‐wing parties, whereas radical left‐wing euroscepticism is associated with opposition to the neoliberal character of the European Union. This article contests this view. It argues that nationalism cuts across party lines and constitutes the common denominator of both radical right‐wing and radical left‐wing euroscepticism. It adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining intensive case study analysis with quantitative analysis of party manifestos. First, it traces the link between nationalism and euroscepticism in Greece and France in order to demonstrate the internal validity of the argument. It then undertakes a cross‐country statistical estimation to assess the external validity of the argument and its generalisability across Europe.     

From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular right

Conventional academic research into the legacy of inter-war fascism has generally neglected the myriad minuscule and often ephemeral formations of the extreme right that have sprung up since 1945, and has concentrated instead on abortive attempts to emulate the success of the Nazi and Fascist party-based mass movements, and more recently on non-revolutionary ‘neo-populist parties’. However, when examined closely, many of these formations can be observed to behave as fully developed, highly specialized and largely autonomous grouplets that simultaneously form the constituents of an amorphous, leaderless and centreless cellular network of political ideology, organization and activism that is termed here ‘the groupuscular right’. As such, these ‘groupuscules’ are to be seen as the product of a sophisticated process of evolutionary adaptation to post-1945 realities that allows extreme variants of revolutionary nationalism to survive in the ‘post-fascist’ age in a form that is largely resistant to attempts to suppress them, and may represent a number of permanent, if mostly inconspicuous, threats to liberal democracy.     

The Swedish dystopia: violent imaginaries of the radical right

ABSTRACT

Thorleifsson examines the ways in which violent imaginaries of Sweden have been discursively constructed and used by populist radical-right (PRR) parties and actors in contemporary Europe. Based on multisited fieldwork among politicians and supporters of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Hungarian Jobbik party, this article demonstrates how individual acts of violence are ‘transvaluated’ into violent imaginaries of migrants from Muslim-majority lands. What Thorleifsson terms ‘the Swedish dystopia’ not only entails a message of alarm and warning. PRR actors also use the trope of the Swedish dystopia in their call for action against Muslim migrants and minorities who, they claim, pose an ethnoreligious threat to national identity, security and even (Judaeo)-Christian civilization as a whole.     

The many faces of counterterrorism: an introduction

This article sets the stage for the special issue by describing the many faces of counterterrorism policy. The article highlights some key concepts??e.g., domestic and transnational terrorism, and alternative types of counterterrorism policies??that are applied throughout the special issue. The two data sets exploited in this issue??s empirical contributions are also described. Next, each of the 12 articles is introduced and briefly summarized. The main conclusions and insights of the articles are distilled and placed in perspective.     

Repression and reaction: militant democracy and the radical right in Germany and France

The June 2004 elections offered the British National Party unique opportunities for growth. There were three different elections being held at once: for seats on local councils, for the London mayor and the London Assembly, and for members of the European parliament (MEPs). Following boundary changes, the local council election was being conducted on a three-candidates-per-seat basis. The London and European elections were being run according to the rules of proportional representation. Both systems favour minor parties. The BNP went into the elections buoyed up by almost four years of considerable success. However, the party failed to achieve the gains anticipated. After several years that witnessed increasing votes, this was the first instance of the BNP vote stagnating. Renton explains the BNP's failure in terms of a series of factors: poor leadership, tactical errors, the hardening of Conservative anti-BNP voters, the press publicity garnered by the UK Independence Party, and the successful intervention of anti-BNP campaigners.     

The 2006 Earnings Public-Use Microdata File: an introduction

This article introduces the 2006 Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF) and provides important background information on the file's data fields. The EPUF contains selected demographic and earnings information for 4.3 million individuals drawn from a 1-percent sample of all Social Security numbers issued before January 2007. The data file provides aggregate earnings for 1937 to 1950 and annual earnings data for 1951 to 2006. The article focuses on four key items: (1) the Social Security Administration's experiences collecting earnings data over the years and their effect on the data fields included in EPUF; (2) the steps taken to "clean" the underlying administrative data and to minimize the risk of personal data disclosure; (3) the potential limitations of using EPUF data to estimate Social Security benefits for some individuals; and (4) frequency distributions and statistical tabulations of the data in the file, to provide a point of reference for EPUF users.     

Gender and the radical right in Western Europe: a comparative analysis of policy agendas

ABSTRACT

Systematic research comparing the views of populist radical-right parties with respect to gender issues is still scarce. Akkerman’s article aims to fill this gap by comparing the positions of the six most successful populist radical-right parties in Western Europe. Her focus is on gender issues in the policy domain of family relations, on the one hand, and in that of immigration and integration, on the other. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of external and internal party documents has been used to assess the positions of the main populist radical-right parties with regard to these two policy domains. Akkerman's analysis shows that, in the domain of family relations, the parties are traditionally conservative or adopt a more flexible modern conservative position. Compared to mainstream right-wing parties, which are consistently more liberal than their radical-right counterparts, conservatism on issues relating to the family sets the radical parties clearly apart. Yet, as this particular profile tends to become less salient over time, it is doubtful that gender issues in this traditional policy domain will continue to be a defining characteristic of these parties. Gender issues have gained importance for populist radical-right parties in the domain of immigration and integration policies but, in this context, the parties do not display a conservative profile. They tend to emphasize the principles of gender equality and sometimes also gay rights, although these commitments are mainly rhetorical and instrumental to anti-immigration and anti-Islam agendas. Conservative views of gender remain the defining, albeit less salient, characteristic of these parties.     

Empirical social choice: an introduction

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue.     

Cause and consequence in legislation: an introduction

Abstract. Legislation has traditionally been studied from different but usually limited perspectives. To analyse the process of law-making as an extended process including the causes as well as the consequences of legislation, the initiation as well as the implemention of legislative decisions, may contribute to a better understanding of the effects and limits of contemporary politics, to the meaning of different policy styles, and to the role of interest groups both before and after formal decision making has taken place. It may also sharpen our awareness of the basic assumptions from which participants in the political process proceed and direct our attention to changes in the prevailing patterns in political decision making and their possible consequences.     

Debating globalization: cosmopolitanism and communitarianism as political ideologies

Economic, cultural and political systems formerly bounded by the borders of nation states are increasingly globalized. Politicians, civil society and other societal actors engage in publically debating issues related to globalization. Whether conflicts consolidate to form a stable cleavage depends among other factors on the extent to which they become ideologically underpinned. As the basis for such an underpinning, we identify philosophical debates about justice between globalists and statists and between universalists and contextualists as raw material that political entrepreneurs active in the public sphere can draw upon. On this basis, we identify four major bones of contention that could provide the core of such ideological underpinning: the permeability of borders; the allocation of authority between levels; the normative dignity of communities; and the patterns of justification. One ideal typical combination of those four components can be labelled cosmopolitanism—combining arguments from globalists and universalists; another communitarianism, combining statist and contextualist arguments. The more these two ideal types feature as political ideologies in public debate, the more do debates about globalization solidify into a new cleavage. We develop a conceptual framework which can subsequently be used in support of empirical research analysing the ideological foundations of globalization conflicts.