‘The battlefield is in Brussels’: Islamophobia in the Visegrád Four in its global context

ABSTRACT

A common popular and scholarly opinion of Islamophobia in the so-called ‘Visegrád Four’ or ‘V4’ (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) sees it as caused by circumstances unique to Eastern Europe. Specifically to blame, it is alleged, is a distinctive local history of intolerance, especially antisemitism, and the fact that under socialism these countries were exempt from the post-war soul-searching that took place in Western Europe. Kalmar’s paper, instead, decentres Islamophobia in the V4 by considering it less as a limited regional phenomenon, and more in terms of how it is linked to Islamophobia in other European Union member states and the United States. As elsewhere, foremost among the conditions that encourage Islamophobia in the V4 is the alienation of certain publics on the periphery, which is an effect of global neoliberal policies. These have generated, along with Islamism and Islamophobia, a reinvented, essentializing discourse of difference between Eastern and Western Europe. In spite of that alleged difference, however, Islamophobic populism in the V4 is not just a regional threat to liberal democracy, but targets all of the European Union and the world.     

Shifting borders: Islamophobia as common ground for building pan-European right-wing unity

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Islamophobia has become a useful tool for right-wing parties to mobilize electors in many European nation-states. The general xenophobic campaigns of the 1980s have given way to Islamophobia as a specific expression of racism. It is not only the new incarnations of right-wing populist parties that are making use of Islamophobic populism, but also right-wing extremist parties, whose traditions hark back to fascist or Nazi parties. This development appears unsurprising, as Islamophobia has somehow become a kind of ‘accepted racism’, found not only on the margins of European societies but also at the centre. Another interesting concomitant shift is the attempt by such parties to gain wider acceptance in mainstream societies by distancing themselves from a former antisemitic profile. While the main focus on an exclusive identity politics in the frame of nation-states previously divided the far right and complicated transnational cooperation, a shared Islamophobia has the potential to be a common ground for strengthening the transnational links of right-wing parties. This shift from antisemitism to Islamophobia goes beyond European borders and enables Europe's far right to connect to Israeli parties and the far right in the United States. Hafez's article explores this thesis by analysing the European Alliance for Freedom, a pan-European alliance of far-right members of the European parliament that has brought various formerly antagonistic parties together through a common anti-Muslim programme, and is trying to become a formal European parliamentary fraction in the wake of its victory in the European elections in May 2014.     

Islamophobia and postcolonialism: continuity,Orientalism and Muslim consciousness

ABSTRACT

In this article, Meer tentatively delineates three ways in which he understands that the concept of Islamophobia is being informed by postcolonial scholarship. The first functions as continuity, in so far as it is claimed that historical colonial dynamics are reproduced in contemporary postcolonial environments, broadly conceived. The second involves translation. This is related to the first but different in that it focuses in particular on the utility of Orientalist critique for the concept of Islamophobia. The third concerns an account of Muslim consciousness, in so far as it is argued that ‘the making of Muslims’ is signalled by the emergence of the concept of Islamophobia, part, as one view has it, of a wider ‘decentring’ of the West. Meer argues that this third framing rests on terrain that is also populated by scholarship beyond the postcolonial tradition. This is because it expresses a story of how Muslims have contested and sought revisions to existing citizenship settlements, not least the ways in which approaches to anti-discrimination are configured. This is a story that is observable within imperfect liberal democratic frameworks that contain some institutional levers through which to challenge Islamophobia.     

Islamophobia and the Europeanness of the other Europe

ABSTRACT

In this article, Sayyid’s focus is on the relationship between the emergence of Islamophobia and the crisis of Europeanness. What is it about Europeanness right now that makes one of its most vocal expressions an insistence on the Muslim question? To answer, or perhaps address, the question of why the Muslim question and why now, Sayyid places the formation of European identity in a postcolonial context. That is, the horizon opened by the decentring of the West not only geopolitically or economically but also culturally and philosophically is explored. East Central Europe in its various permutations—historical and cultural—provides an excellent platform to study the impact of the postcolonial on Europeanness. The East Central European experience of the postcolonial is inflected through a history of imperial articulations and peripheralizations that demonstrate not only the contingency of the idea of Europeanness but also its imbrication with the Orient.     

The nation under threat: secularist,racial and populist nativism in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Right-wing discourses and issues of belonging and collective identity in Europe’s political and public spheres are often analysed in terms of Islamophobia, racism and populism. While acknowledging the value of these concepts, Ke?i? and Duyvendak argue that these discourses can be better understood through the logic of nativism. Their article opens with a conceptual clarification of nativism, which they define as an intense opposition to an internal minority that is seen as a threat to the nation due to its ‘foreignness’. This is followed by the analysis of nativism’s three subtypes: secularist nativism, problematizing particularly Islam and Muslims; racial nativism, problematizing black minorities; and populist nativism, problematizing ‘native’ elites. The authors show that the logic of nativism offers the advantages of both analytical precision and scope. The article focuses on the Dutch case as a specific illustration of a broader European trend.     

Nationalist discourse and the ultra-conservative press in contemporary Poland: a case study of Nasz Dziennik

After the democratic transition to post-Communist Poland, ultraconservative groups found themselves legitimately able to propagate a nationalist ideology. They focused on an idea of ‘national identity’ that clearly and restrictively defined the boundaries of the national community. In the late 1990s a far-right movement supported by a radical faction of the Roman Catholic Church gained wide public support and, eventually, political legitimization. The fears of those for whom the transition of the socio-economic system did not bring a change for the better have been exploited by activists and institutions that consistently point to various foreign ‘threats’ (external and internal) against Poland’s political and economic independence and against national integrity. Starnawski analyses forms of anti-pluralist backlash as strategies undertaken by the ultra-conservative media. Provided is a case study of Nasz Dziennik, one of the major Polish newspapers to disseminate a far-right discourse that combines a concept of ‘national identity’ with radical Catholicism. Such nationalistoriented media use rhetoric that claims to be representative of the dominant group, and attempt to provide the audience with a restrictive sense of identity that is based on the construction of elements that are considered foreign and threatening to a sense of nationhood, a mobilization of the audience against foreign ‘threats’, and the exclusion or marginalization of elements depicted as incongruous with collective identity, especially the cultures of national and ethnic minorities (both ‘native’ minorities and recent immigrants), minority religions and alternative cultures, as well as liberal advocates of diversity. Since Polish society is in large part culturally homogeneous, its members are more often exposed to stereotyped images of minority groups than they are to face-to-face contact with members of minorities. Therefore, Starnawski argues, exploring the contemporary nationalist discourse in ‘pluralizing’ societies such as Poland is no less essential for the diagnosis of anti-democratic obstacles than studying the actual conditions of minority groups themselves. The future of social and cultural pluralism in Poland heavily depends on the majority’s awareness of diversity and its ability to promote attitudes of openness to and understanding of cultural differences on the one hand, and a readiness to extend the notion of ‘Polishness’ to a wide range of cultural and social categories on the other.     

The limits of analogy: comparing Islamophobia and antisemitism

ABSTRACT

The predicament faced by Muslims today, either in the United Kingdom specifically or in the West more generally, is often compared with the predicament faced by Jews at some point in the past. Muslims, it is suggested, are the new Jews. Klug's article homes in on one element in this view, the claim that Islamophobia is the new antisemitism, and considers the analogy between them. An introductory section sketches the political context, after which Klug focuses on logical or conceptual issues. The two middle sections contain the core of the analysis: consideration of the two terms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ in relation to the concepts they denote, followed by an examination of the concepts as such. Certain conclusions are drawn about both their general logic and their specific logics. The final section returns to the political context and, via critique of a thesis put forward by Matti Bunzl, discusses the uses of the analogy. Klug argues that the question we need to ask is not ‘Are Islamophobia and antisemitism analogous?’ but ‘What is the analogy worth?’ The value of the analogy lies in the light it sheds on the social and political realities that confront us in the here and now. Does it illuminate more than it obscures? These things are a matter of judgement. Klug leans towards asserting an analogy between antisemitism in the past and Islamophobia in the present, within limits.     

The Limits of Liberal Peacebuilding? International Engagement in the Sri Lankan Peace Process

Abstract

This essay explores international engagement in the Sri Lankan peace process between 2002 and 2008. The internationalization of peacebuilding in Sri Lanka is analysed as part of a broader international shift towards a model of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, which involves the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty. The essay provides a detailed and disaggregated analysis of the various exporters, importers and resisters of liberal peacebuilding, with a particular focus on the contrasting ways in which the United National Front (UNF) and the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) regimes engaged with international actors. It is argued that an analysis of the Sri Lankan case provides a corrective to some of the core assumptions contained in much of the literature on liberal peacebuilding. Rather than viewing liberal peacebuilding as simply an hegemonic enterprise foisted upon countries emerging from conflict, the essay explores the ways in which peacebuilding is mediated through, and translated and instrumentalized by, multiple actors with competing interests – consequently liberal peacebuilding frequently looks different when it ‘hits the ground’ and may, as in the Sri Lanka case, lead to decidedly illiberal outcomes. The essay concludes by exploring the theoretical and policy implications of a more nuanced understanding of liberal peacebuilding. It is argued that rather than blaming the failure of the project on deficiencies in its execution and the recalcitrance of the people involved, there is a need to look at defects in the project itself and to explore alternatives to the current model of liberal peacebuilding.     

Revitalizing and de-territorializing fascism in the 1950s: the extreme right in France and Italy,and the pan-national (‘European’) imaginary

ABSTRACT

In this article Mammone explores a still relatively neglected story in the history of post-war neo-fascism, notably the attempts by some French and Italian right-wing extremists to revitalize fascist ideology after the war by means of two interconnected strategies, namely, radicalization (rejection of the democratic system) and ‘de-territorialization’ (in the sense of converting narrow fascist nationalism into pan-European nationalism). Mammone describes these project(s), as well as the influence of thinkers such as Julius Evola and Maurice Bardèche, and their location in the wider ideological context of the extreme right in the 1950s. The immediate outcome of this ‘de-territorialized fascism’ was the creation of an extreme-right international association, the Mouvement Social Européen, in which French and Italian activists played a central role. Mammone breaks new ground regarding the non-national dimension of extreme-right thought, a topic too often studied within the boundaries of a given geographical territory and nationalist ideological landscape. By utilizing a transnational framework, he also shows the continuous connections and interactions between the Italian and the French extreme rights.     

Liberal Nationalism,Imagined Immigration and the Progressive Dilemma

The article critically evaluates liberal nationalist perspectives on immigration by drawing on findings from a qualitative research project undertaken in 2014 among White British interviewees in England. From one perspective the study's participants' attitudes seem to support arguments made by David Goodhart and other liberal nationalists regarding immigration, social trust and integration. However, further analysis suggests that these attitudes are to a very significant extent drawn first from partially imagined ideas surrounding immigration and second from potentially unreliable sources. These findings thus provoke the question of whether social trust and notions of a national community are actually being disrupted by immigration, or whether they are being disrupted by prejudiced nationalist and xenophobic perceptions about immigration and immigrants. The article will conclude by arguing for more nuanced research into attitudes towards immigration and in favour of a sceptical approach to nationalist frameworks for interpreting society and politics in Britain today.     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

Rejecting refugees in illiberal Poland: The response from civil society

ABSTRACT

Since 2015, the European Union and its members have been responding to the increased arrivals of migrants and refugees at Europe’s southern shores. The states and societies of East and Central Europe are rarely discussed in this context. Even though their governments support the overall EU policy objectives in the area of freedom, security and justice, they vocally refused to participate in EU ‘burden sharing’. In this way these countries earned the label of uniquely xenophobic. This article seeks to complicate this perception by highlighting how civil society in Poland responded to the right-wing Polish government’s anti-refugee stance. Through the lens of Aronoff and Kubik’s concept of Legal Transparent Civil Society (LTCS) the author examine the evolving relationship between the ruling Law and Justice party and civil society organizations, proposing that activities for the benefit of refugees offer an insight into the transformation of civil society in the emerging illiberal political system.     

ASEAN and human rights: resisting Western pressure or emulating the West?

Abstract

Observers of Southeast Asian affairs commonly assume that the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are reluctant to pursue liberal agendas, and that their main concern is to resist pressure from Western powers to improve their human rights practice. This article, however, argues that such a conventional view is too simplistic. The Southeast Asian countries have voluntarily been pursuing liberal agendas, and their main concern here is to be identified as ‘Western’ countries – advanced countries with legitimate international status. They have ‘mimetically’ been adopting the norm of human rights which is championed by the advanced industrialized democracies, with the intention of securing ASEAN's identity as a legitimate institution in the community of modern states. Ultimately, they have been pursuing liberal agendas, for the same reason as cash-strapped developing countries have luxurious national airlines and newly-independent countries institute national flags. Yet it should be noted that the progress of ASEAN's liberal reform has been modest. A conventional strategy for facilitating this reform would be to put more pressure on the members of ASEAN; however, the usefulness of such a strategy is diminishing. The development of an East Asian community, the core component of which is the ASEAN–China concord, makes it difficult for the Western powers to exercise influence over the Southeast Asian countries. Hence, as an alternative strategy, this article proposes that ASEAN's external partners should ‘globalize’ the issue of its liberal reform, by openly assessing its human rights record in global settings, with the aim of boosting the concern of its members for ASEAN's international standing.     

Crooked Timber or Bent Twig? Isaiah Berlin's Nationalism

Isaiah Berlin is often regarded as one of the sources of contemporary liberal nationalism. Yet his own attitude to nationalism, and its relation to his liberalism, remains unexplored. He gave conflicting definitions of nationalism in different places, and although he frequently contrasts more benign with more malign forms of nationalism, the terms in which he draws the contrast also vary. In Berlin's most explicit account, nationalist doctrine is presented as political, unitary, morally unrestricted and particularist, but these four dimensions are separate, and on each of them alternative nationalist positions are available. Berlin's account of the sources of nationalism is also ambiguous: his analysis of the Jewish condition in European societies and his support for Zionism contrasts with his diagnosis of the origins of German nationalism. Comparing Berlin with later liberal nationalists, we see that his liberalism prevented him from presenting a normative political theory in which liberal and nationalist commitments were successfully combined. Such a theory can indeed be developed, but the challenge that emerges from Berlin's writing is to explain how real-world nationalism can be kept within liberal limits.     

Liberalism against the people: learning to live with coups d’état

ABSTRACT

This article argues that a perceived liberal ‘defection’ to a 2006 military coup in Thailand can help illuminate the authoritarian face of liberalism during an existential crisis; more provisionally, it is proposed that the Thai experience may provide lessons for understanding liberal decisionism. Detailing a single case has the advantage of embedding the discussion in cultural, historical and political detail without which the action is incomprehensible. The article applies decisionist and morphological theory and historical analysis as it explores the factors and motives leading to liberal coup complicity. The article’s chief objective is to make intelligible a form of liberal extra-constitutional decisionism in a non-western setting.     

Is epistemic accessibility enough? Same-sex marriage,tradition, and the Bible

ABSTRACT

In Liberalism’s Religion, Cécile Laborde argues that a liberal state has to be a justifiable state: state action can only be legitimate if it is publicly justified, that is, if it is based on accessible reasons. These accessible reasons, she argues, are reasons that can be understood by all citizens. She defends a purely epistemic conception of accessibility. On Laborde’s account, accessible reasons are identified by particular epistemic features, and not by their substantive content. In this paper, I argue that Laborde’s account of epistemic accessibility cannot deliver on its promise of public justification. To illustrate this argument, I examine the case of the prohibition of same-sex marriage and look at two potential reasons that could be used to justify this prohibition: the non-accessible reference to the Bible and the accessible appeal to the value of tradition.     

The evolution of regime imaginaries on the Chinese Internet

ABSTRACT

This study examines popular perceptions about the ruling state on the Chinese Internet before and along the state’s project of ‘online public opinion guidance.’ We chose two historical moments from 2011 and 2016, and systematically captured and analysed massive amounts of speech traces on Weibo that contain the term tizhi, a discursively flexible, yet distinctive, concept onto which sentiments related to the state are projected. Combining semantic network clustering and critical discourse analysis, our analyses have revealed, historically and macroscopically, the relative dominance of differing ways of evaluating regime legitimacy on the Chinese Internet. Among other things, the previously dominant legitimacy-challenging imaginary grounded in (Western) democratic references has imploded and become absorbed by a nationalist, ‘civilizational competition’ discourse that enhances regime legitimacy. Additionally, the legitimacy-criticizing imaginary within the party-state’s ‘reform framework’ has become depoliticized into administration-focused compartments. By exploring the ‘regime imaginaries’ held by ordinary people, this study complements the scholarship on Chinese state legitimacy that predominantly focuses on historico-structural analyses, policy initiatives, or the party elite’s normative justifications. It also makes methodological and conceptual advances for researching the complex cultural frames, political tropes, and repertoires of local references that comprise regime imaginaries.     

Defending broad neutrality

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates Cécile Laborde’s account of the proper role of religion in the liberal state. It begins by examining Laborde’s claims that prevailing liberals are not committed to broad neutrality about the good, but rather only restricted neutrality about the good—and that they are right to do so. It argues against Laborde on both exegetical and substantive grounds. It then turns to Laborde’s minimalist conception of secularism, according to which the state must be justifiable, inclusive, and limited, and it argues that it is not sufficiently demanding. Finally, it argues that the classical liberal presumption of skepticism toward religious establishment is warranted.     

Civil society and post-communist democratization: Facing a double challenge in post-Milošević Serbia

Abstract

Civil society literature attributes the weakness of post-communist civil society to the communist heritage. It is structurally weak, the argument goes, because post-communist citizens are averse to voluntary organizations and because of ethnic nationalism. This article goes beyond the heritage argument and contends that post-communist civil society is weakened by democratization itself. Post-communist democratizing states are fragmented structurally and ideologically, and lack a consensus on the liberal state as a provider of public goods and an inclusive citizenship. Simultaneously, the non-state sector in post-communism is expanding in both liberal and illiberal directions. While the liberal segments of the state respond to a liberal civil society, its illiberal segments reinforce an illiberal civil society. Consequently, ‘good’ civil society is forced to confront ideologically both the illiberal state and illiberal non-state groups, which limits its potential contribution to promoting good governance. The argument is illustrated by a study of civil society's transformation in post-Milo?evi? Serbia and the struggle by liberal civil society groups for acceptance of responsibility for Serbian war crimes committed in the wars of Yugoslavia's disintegration in the 1990s.     

Laborde’s religion

ABSTRACT

Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion proposes liberal principles to address political controversies over religion. One is the public reason requirement that reasons for state policies should be accessible. Another is the civic inclusiveness requirement according to which symbolic religious establishment is wrong when it communicates that religious identity is a component of civic identity. A third is the claim that liberal states have meta-jurisdictional authority to settle the boundary between what counts as religion and what counts as non-religion. The article considers whether Laborde has managed to articulate these three principles in a way that is operationalisable and can serve to provide solutions to practical controversies over religion. It is argued that Laborde’s formulations leave important issues open, and some ways of settling these issues are considered.