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EUROPE FOR THE EUROPEANS

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Europe for the Europeans The Foreign and Security Policy of the Populist Radical Right

Edited by CHRISTINA SCHORI LIANG Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Switzerland

© Christina Schori Liang 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Christina Schori Liang has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiﬁed as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Europe for the Europeans: the foreign and security policy of neo-populist parties 1. Populism – Europe – Congresses 2. Political parties – Europe – Platforms – Congresses 3. National security – Europe – Congresses 4. Europe – Foreign relations – Congresses I. Liang, Christina Schori 324.2'403 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Europe for the Europeans: the foreign and security policy of the populist radical right / [edited] by Christina Schori Liang/ p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4851-2 1. Conservatism--Europe. 2. Radicalism--Europe. 3. Europe--Politics and goernment--1989– I. Liang, Christina Schori. JC573.2.E85E87 2007 327.4--dc22 2007013163 ISBN 978 0 7546 4851 2

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Tables Notes on Contributors Foreword – François Heisbourg Acknowledgements

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Europe for the Europeans: the Foreign and Security Policy of the Populist Radical Right Christina Schori Liang

vii ix xiii xv

1

Against the ‘Green Totalitarianism’: Anti-Islamic Nativism in Contemporary Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe Hans-Georg Betz

33

The Aims and Objections of the Austrian Far Right in the Fields of Foreign and Military Politics Fabian Virchow

55

Our Own People First in a Europe of Peoples: The International Policy of the Vlaams Blok Marc Swyngedouw, Koen Abts and Maarten Van Craen

81

Nationalism. New Right, and New Cleavages in Danish Politics: Foreign and Security Policy of the Danish People’s Party Jørgen Goul Andersen

103

‘La politique du dehors avec les raisons du dedans’: Foreign and Defence Policy of the French Front National Jocelyn A.J. Evans

125

‘Nationalism Ensures Peace’: the Foreign and Security Policy of the German Populist Radical Right After (Re)uniﬁcation Christina Schori Liang

139

The Communist Legacy? – Populist but Not Popular – The Foreign Policies of the Hungarian Radical Right

177

Europe for the Europeans

vi

Eric Beckett Weaver 9

Recalcitrant Allies: The Conﬂicting Foreign Policy Agenda of the Alleanza Nazionale and the Lega Nord Marco Tarchi

187

10

A Fortuynist Foreign Policy Cas Mudde

11

The Swiss People’s Party and the Foreign and Security Policy since the 1990s Oscar Mazzoleni

223

Non Angeli, sed Angli: The Neo-populist Foreign Policy of the ‘New’ BNP Roger Grifﬁn

239

Between Tradition and Transition: The Central European Radical Right and the New European Order Michael Minkenberg

261

A Speciﬁc Variant of Neo-Populism: Foreign and Security Policies of Extreme Right Parties in the European Parliament Elections in 2004 Volker Ahlemeyer

283

12

13

14

Appendix A: Populist Radical Right Parties Index

209

295 299

List of Tables 4.1

5.1 5.2 5.3

The number of seats of radical right parties in the European Parliament.

96

Perceived effects of globalization, 2005, by party choice. Strive to reduce the role of the nation-state, 2005, by party choice. Attitudes towards participation in international conﬂicts, 2001 and 2005, by party choice. Attitudes towards sending Danish soldiers to war, 2005, by party choice. Attitudes towards Danish participation in the war against Iraq, 2005, by party choice. Attitudes towards the United States as a peacekeeper, 2005, by party choice. Attitudes towards defence expenditures, 2001 and 2005, by party choice. Percentages voting yes in Danish referenda, 1972–2000, by party choice. Muslim countries a threat to Denmark, 1998–2005, by party choice. International solidarity, 2005, by party choice. Correlation between perception of Muslim/Arab countries as a threat to Danish security and perception of immigration as a threat to ‘our national identity’, 1990–2005. Gamma coefﬁcients.

121

7.1 7.2

Development of the German Radical Right from 2000 to 2005. The Internet Network of the European National Front.

144 170

13.1 13.2

Dominant actors in the Central European right-wing family: Poland. Electoral performance of the Central European Radical Right: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary. The radical right-wing mobilization potential in East and West, 1991 (nos. 1 – 6) and 2000 (nos. 7 and 8). Dissatisfaction with the democratic system in four Central European countries (in per cent). Analytic framework for right-wing radical mobilization potential in post-socialist Europe. Opportunity structures and right-wing radical electoral potential in post-socialist Europe.

265

5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6

113 114 115 116 116 117 117 118 119 120

269 272 273 275 277

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Notes on Contributors Abts, Dr. Koen. Sociologist and researcher at the Institute of Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO), Belgium. Pursuing PhD regarding progression of right extremism in Antwerp, Belgium. Key research topics also include populism, political trust and modernity. Andersen, Dr. Jørgen Goul. Professor of Political Sociology, director of the Danish Election Studies and the Centre for Comparative Welfare Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. Main research ﬁelds include the welfare state, parties and political behaviour, and political participation. Publications include Voting and Political Attitudes (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997). Betz, Dr. Hans-Georg. Professor of Political Science in the United States and Canada. Main research includes religion, culture and political polarization in the United States, including a text to be published in 2008 in Paris. Publications include Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); La droite populiste en Europe (Paris: CEVIPOF/Autrement, 2005). Evans, Dr. Jocelyn. Senior Lecturer in politics at the University of Salford, England. Authored articles on French Euroscepticism, the extreme right, and party system theory. Main research includes Northern Ireland party memberships, and the European extreme right; also co-founding the Extreme Right Electorates and Party Success (EREPS) in the European research network. Publications include: Voters and Voting: An Introduction (London: Sage, 2004); editor of The French Party System (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003). Grifﬁn, Dr. Roger. Professor of Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, England. Main research includes the primary or secondary sources relating to fascism and their relationship to established religion, modernity, and aspiration to bring about a secular cultural and temporal revolution. Publications include: The Nature of Fascism (London, New York, 1991); Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Liang, Dr. Christina Schori. PhD from the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Research Ofﬁcer at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. Lecturer for the Diplomatic Studies Programme at the Graduate Institute for International Studies (HEID), Switzerland. Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Advisory board member of Columbia International Affairs Online.

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Mazzoleni, Dr. Oscar. Director of the Observatory for Political Research in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland, and lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). Fellow researcher at the University of Turin, Italy and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Main research ﬁelds are citizens’ behaviour, party politics, and electoral behaviour in Switzerland. Publications include: Nationalisme et Populisme en Suisse: La Radicalisation de la ‘Nouvelle’ UDC (Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2003). Minkenberg, Dr. Michael. PhD from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Professor of Political Science at Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. Main research includes comparative politics, the radical right, religion, and politics. Publications include: Die neue radikale Rechte im Vergleich USA, Frankreich, Deutschland (Opladen and Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag 1998); co-editor of Politik und Religion, with U. Willems (PVS Special Issue 33/2002). Mudde, Dr. Cas. PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. Currently a Senior Lecturer and former Chair of the Department of Political Science of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Main research includes political extremism, civil society, parties and party families, and democratization. Publications include: Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Antwerp: Cambridge University Press, 2007); editor, the Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe (London, New York: Routledge, 2005). Swyngedouw, Dr. Marc. Professor and PhD in social sciences from K.U. Leuven, Belgium. Director of the Institute of Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO), Belgium. Formed the foundation for national elections studies in Belgium conducted by ISPO. Founder of analytical exit polls organised by public broadcaster BRTN/VRT for federal and local elections in Flanders. Guest professor at several universities and research centres worldwide. Research includes political sociology, electoral research, extreme right voting behaviour, comparative research, value orientations and ethnic minorities. Tarchi, Dr. Marco. PhD and Professor of Political Science, Political Theory and Political Communication at the University of Florence, Italy. Main research includes comparative politics, concentrating on populism, political parties, fascism, and the radical right. Publications include: Dal Msi ad An (Bologna : Il Mulino, 1997) ; Fascismo. Teorie, interpretazioni e modelli (Bari: Laterza, 2003) ; L’Italia populista (Bologna : Il Mulino, 2003). Van Craen, Dr. Maarten. Political scientist, researcher at the Institute of Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO) at K.U. Leuven, Belgium. Works as a researcher at the University of Limburg (LUC), Belgium. Member of the research group ‘Government and Society’. Main research includes extreme right-wing parties, social and political opinion research, and voting rights for immigrants.

Notes on Contributors

xi

Virchow, Dr. Fabian. PhD in Political Science and Professor at the Centre for Conﬂict Studies at Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. Main research includes social/political movements, militarism, political communication and political culture research. Publications include: Gegen den Zivilismus: Internationale Beziehungen und Militär in den politischen Konzeptionen der extremen Rechten (Berlin: VS Verlag Für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006); co-editor of Banal Militarism (Berlin: VS Verlag, 2005). Weaver, Dr. Eric Beckett. Junior member of St Antony’s College and a DPhil candidate in history at the University of Oxford, England. Serves on the board or managing committee of a number of academic societies focusing on central or southeastern Europe. Curator of two highly-acclaimed exhibitions, PhD Nationalism (Belgrade, 1998), and Kosovo/a: The Media War (Budapest, 2000). Co-editor of the book Challenges to New Democracies in the Balkans (London: The South Slav Research and Study Centre, 2004).

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Foreword François Heisbourg

The editor and the authors of Europe for the Europeans have produced a timely and important book. By providing a broad-spectrum analysis of right-wing populist external policies in Europe, it not only ﬁlls a signiﬁcant gap in the academic literature; it also does so at a critical juncture of the European project: after a full half-century of deepening and broadening, the European Union ﬁnds itself, after the rejection in 2005 of the constitutional treaty by two of the six founding countries, in a deep institutional crisis, which is itself a reﬂection of an existential crise de conﬁance. Radical right-wing populism is in part both a product and a cause of this situation. The pan-European picture painted by the contributors of this book must be set in its longer-term historical context. The radical forces that occupy the European scene today greatly resemble the earlier episode of the emergence of right-wing populism on a European level; that of the closing decades of the nineteenth century that marked, indeed, the invention of the world ‘populism’ itself, drawn from the Russian narodniki movement. Then, as now, the driving forces of populism were the wrenching changes brought about by what was then called internationalization, and what we now know as globalization. Karl Marx, in the opening pages of his ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ gives a description of internationalization, which bears a close resemblance to current characterizations of globalization: ‘In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufﬁciency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations, become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature to cite just one example among others.’1 While this ‘development of productive forces’ (to use another Marxian formula) was welcomed by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike as a necessary stage of humanity’s historical progress, because of its cosmopolitan nature, collides with more recent and increasingly powerful narratives of national identity. Then as now, the trauma resulting from internationalization was born of success, not of failure. The unprecedented growth typical of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, like today’s equally unprecedented growth at the global level, put into jeopardy established economic and social patterns. The greater the success, the 1 Marx, K. and Engels F. (1969), Manifesto of the Communist Party, (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

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worse the disruption for those who were thus challenged. The sharp cyclical crises of the 19th and early 20th-century economic growth – such as the German ﬁnancial crash of 1873 subsequent to the overheating produced by the inﬂux of French payments after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 – were crises of adaptation, which disproportionately hit the working poor, thus providing ready fuel for those in search of scapegoats. Then as now, attacks against ‘rootless plutocracy’ or ‘locustlike investment funds’ found ready-made audiences in Europe, as they did in the United States : William Jennings Bryan’s ‘Cross of Gold’ speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1896 bears witness of the appeal of populism beyond Europe’s shores.2 Then as now and somewhat more surprisingly, right-wing populism also found roots in popular perceptions of Europe’s decline. After all, Europe reached its apex of global power during the second half of the 19th century. With a majority share of both the world’s domestic product as well as of the territory, European powers with their colonial possessions were in a position of unprecedented strength. Yet, it was also during the 1870s that the United States overtook the British Isles as the number one economic power, and the 1890s also witnessed the birth of the ‘Yellow peril’, a slogan coined by Wilhelm II to marshal the Europeans against the Asiatic hordes. Although Oswald Spengler had not yet conceived his ‘Untergang des Abendlandes’,3 there was a Spenglerian feel to late 19th-century European attitudes. The fear of decay added fuel to populism. The differences are of course as notable as the similarities. Today, globalization is not simply a copy of 19th-century internationalization. Most of Europe has become a post-Kantian paradise (to use Robert Kagan’s expression4 instead of a collection of warring imperial rivals ; and the misery index of the losers of globalization in Europe today mercifully bears little resemblance to the proletariat and the Lumpenproletariat of Marx’s day. Yet the parallels between yesterday’s populism and today’s are compelling. They should at least force one to reﬂect on the future consequences of today’s right-wing populism, in comparison to the late 19th century precedent. In the 19th century, the forces of radical right-wing populism did not take power in any of the European states. But nearly everywhere, they strongly inﬂuenced the terms of the political debate and the shape of the new consensus. In particular, they gave a valid character and a broad political base to the forces of nationalism, which were to make the ‘wars of peoples’ so much bloodier than the ‘wars of kings’, to use the prescient words of Winston Churchill during the Boer

2 Bryan, W. J. (1896), The Cross of Gold: Speech Delivered before the National Democratic Convention at Chicago, July 9, 1896 (Chicago: University of Nebraska Press). 3 Spengler, O. (1977), Der Untergang des Abendlandes, (Germany: DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch). 4 Kagan, R. (2003), Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, (New York: Random House).

Foreword

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5

War. The white-hot nationalistic atmosphere of the initial stages of World War I was heavily inﬂuenced by the populist climate of the previous decades. The anti-semitism of pre-1914 right-wing populism – with Edouard Dumont in France, Karl Lüger in Austria and the anti-Semitic league in Wilhelminian Germany – along with the xenophobic denunciation of ‘la haute ﬁnance apatride’ – were to be the ideological spawn from which emerged the forces of Nazism and fascism in post-World War I Europe. Obviously, the historical background of the times, characterized by the breakdown of pre-1914 internationalization and its post-war replacement by the quest for economic autarchy, bears no resemblance to today’s era of triumphant globalization. However, systemic crises can, and do, occur in history and should make us cautious vis-à-vis forecasts of the linear pursuit of existing global economic trends. Furthermore, the speciﬁc characteristics of new radical right-wing populism in post Soviet, central and eastern Europe create the condition whereby rabid anti-Semitism and open racism can move from the discredited outer fringes of the new-fascist twilight zone towards the realm of widely accepted discourse of European-wide radical right-wing populism. In the communist states of the USSR’s empire, the absence of any serious coming to terms with the history of the years of persecution and killing of the Jews helps explain the lack of inhibition in the expression of such views today. There was no Vergangenheitsbewältigung – nor was there a Historikerstreit – in the German Democratic Republic or in any of the other ‘People’s Democracies’. The existence today in these countries of a powerful, and justiﬁed, narrative of rejection of oppression imposed by the Soviet Union and its communist allies in the ‘People’s Democracies’ has also been a major factor behind the difﬁculty of fostering a mainstream European narrative that is built on the need to deal with the legacy of World War II, seen ﬁrst and foremost as the crucible of the Holocaust. The ‘victims of Yalta’ have a view of post-1945 history that is obviously deeply different from that of those states – including the western portion of Germany – for whom the fall of Nazism was an unadulterated liberation from the worst catastrophe of European history. That difference of historical experience provides a foundation for a rightwing populism more openly and avowedly radical than most of its West European counterparts. It also gives greater respectability to the unacceptable and by osmosis, makes similar discourses acceptable in Europe as a whole. All of this is serious and potentially even dangerous. The potential danger ﬂows from the consequences of an as-yet non-existent systemic crisis, which would derail global economic progress, under circumstances similar to the crash of 1929. In this crisis, noisy populism could readily morph into militant fascism. The current seriousness of the situation is the consequence of populism regarding the European Union’s ability to be a winner rather than a relative loser of globalization. For example, the successful reforms of economically and politically liberal post5 Churchill, W. (1901). The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from the Churchill Centre website: http://www.winstonchurchill. org.

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dictatorship Spain, undertaken over a period of more than 25 years show what can be achieved positively, notwithstanding severe challenges including terrorism and separatism. Conversely, the recent populist and revanchiste lurch of Poland – a country of roughly the same size and population as Spain – demonstrates what can go wrong. An EU in which right-wing radicalism would set the terms of the debate in a signiﬁcant number of member states would increase the risk of entering into a selffulﬁlling prophecy of decline, while making it more difﬁcult to cope with eventual economic shocks. Dr Christina Schori Liang and an impressive cast of authors have thus rendered us a great service in providing this European-wide overview of one of the most troubling political developments of the post-Cold War era.

Acknowledgements This publication arose out of a workshop on the foreign policy of European rightwing populists which was initiated under the auspices of the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva in July 2004. The workshop was hosted by Philippe Burrin, the current director of the Graduate Institute for International Studies and Development and the editor of this volume. Philippe Burrin generously supported this conference with funds from his 1997 Max-Planck Forschungspreis for his monumental work in German historical scholarship. I am deeply indebted to Philippe Burrin, my former thesis advisor and mentor, for inspiring me to continue my work in this ﬁeld. I would also like to express my gratitude towards André Liebich and Jussi Hanhimäki, who did a wonderful job in chairing the workshop. As well as Melanie Sully and Piero Ignazi for their contributions to the workshop. Numerous colleagues and friends at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy were generous in their time and support for this project. I would especially like to thank Pál Dunay, Graeme Herd, and Fred Tanner who took the time to read individual chapters. Special thanks are also due to Sigrid Chatton, Shahram Chubin, François Heisbourg and Karl-Heinz Rambke. I would like to extend my warmest appreciation to: Kai Michael Kenkel, Sebastian Keil, Genevie Gold, Pablo Padrutt, Jason Powers, Rebeca Puentes, Julie Schindall, and Wolf Schweitzer for their very valuable work. As well as Nikki Dines at Ashgate Publishing for her support and keen guidance in bringing the book to its completion. This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Hans-Georg Betz who offered his extremely valuable expertise throughout this project. I would also like to thank the many other chapter contributors to this volume for their collegiality and their exciting scholarship in this ﬁeld which is increasingly relevant in Europe today. Finally, I am indebted to my parents for their kind support and most especially, my husband Oliver, for his thoughtful encouragement and patience throughout. Christina Schori Liang Geneva, November 2007

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Chapter 1

Europe for the Europeans: The Foreign and Security Policy of the Populist Radical Right Christina Schori Liang

Introduction There is a new populist moment in Europe. Populist politicians are enjoying unprecedented success at the polls and throughout Europe there is a crisis of conﬁdence in how contemporary politics are being shaped. As Krastev has noted, ‘[t]he result is a new type of politics where the main structural conﬂict is not between the Left and the Right or between reformers and conservatives. The real clash is between elites that are becoming more suspicious of democracy and the angry publics that are becoming more hostile to liberalism.’1 Added to this political dilemma are rising fears of insecurity which have shifted from classical fears of Soviet state aggression to less tangible threats from non-state actors, such as terrorism, organized crime, and uncontrolled immigration, as well as economic fears about the costs of globalization and European integration. Europeans have become increasingly worried. In a recent survey of 51 countries, western Europeans were the most pessimistic, with 64 per cent being negative about the future. Most of them feel ‘unsafe, powerless, and gloomy’.2 Europeans fear radical Islamists or ending up as demographic losers in a new ‘Eurabia’, and are anxious about being left behind in the globalization process or, even worse, being governed by an outside power such as the United States or the ‘elite driven’ and ‘undemocratic’ European Commission.3 Seventy-ﬁve per cent of West Europeans believe there will be further deterioration in global security in the future.4 According to another recent survey, Central European citizens are the most sceptical about the merits of democracy of all the regions of the world.5 According to a recent Gallup International Poll, 79 1 Krastev, I. (2007), ‘The populist moment’, Eurozine.com, http://www.eurozine. com/articles/2007-09-18-krastev-en.html>. 2 Gallup Poll (2007), ‘Future Threats’ prepared for the 2007 World Economic Forum Conference, Davos, Switzerland. 3 Moїsi, D. (2007), ‘The Clash of Emotions: Fear, Humiliation, Hope and the New World Order’, Foreign Affairs 86:1, 1. 4 Gallup International Association (2006), ‘Voice of the People 2006: What the World Thinks on Today’s Global Issues’, Gallup International Association. 5 Krastev, I. (2007), ‘Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus’, Journal of Democracy 18; 4, 57.

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percent of the world believes that democracy is the best form of government available but only one third agrees that the voice of the people is heard by the governments of their countries.6 In view of these fears, it is not surprising that after decades at the margins of political life, European populist radical right parties are making a political comeback across the continent. As many books on the topic have already argued, one of the most signiﬁcant developments of the past two decades has been the transformation of these parties from the margins to the mainstream’.7 In western Europe, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland have strong right-wing populist parties that have inﬂuenced their national governments and are shaping their countries’ foreign and security policies. In eastern Europe, populist and nationalist parties have developed in Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Even though the new European order has brought many positive changes, reform fatigue is causing proEurope and pro-market parties to lose ground to nationalist and populists groups.8 This book argues that the populist radical right’s foreign political platforms play an important role in their growing appeal in Europe. Until now, the vast majority of research on these parties has focused on their historical origins, political platforms, voter patterns and domestic politics. Only limited attention has been given to their international agenda. This is especially surprising since several of these parties were founded to speciﬁcally deal with foreign political issues. The meteoric rise of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) can be attributed to putting foreign policy issues at the centre of its agenda, namely preventing Switzerland from ‘unnecessarily’ getting involved in international affairs, and by mobilizing public opinion against Swiss membership in the European Economic Area and the United Nations, furthering ties with the European Union (EU), and defending Switzerland’s role in the Second World War.9 The German Republikaner also gained political notoriety when they argued for a new direction in German foreign policy based not on American political interests but rather focusing on its own national interests, namely German reuniﬁcation. As the subsequent chapters in this book show, the foreign–political platforms of numerous populist right-wing parties have allowed them to formulate coherent messages that have met with success at the polls. Although other works have covered some speciﬁc aspects of foreign policy issues10, this is the ﬁrst book which attempts to describe the European populist radical right’s 6 Krastev, I. (2007), ‘The populist moment’, Eurozine, . 7 Hainsworth, P. (2000), The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream (London: Pinter). 8 Larrabee, S.F. (2006), ‘Danger and Opportunity in Eastern Europe’, Foreign Affairs 85:6, 1. 9 Betz, H.-G. (2004), La droite populiste en Europe : Extrême et démocarate? (Paris: Autrement), p. 96. See also chapter 11 by Mazzoleni. 10 Mudde, C. (2007), Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), discusses globalization and International Organizations. Greven, T. and Grumke T. (eds.) Globalisierter Rechts-extremismus? Die extremistische Recht in der Ära der Globalisierung, (Wiesbaden : VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften), discusses globalization issues. Betz, H.-G. (2004), La droite populiste en Europe : Extrême et démocarate? (Paris: Autrement), discusses Islamophobia and migration.

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3

foreign and security policy objectives. It is a result of a workshop that was organized by Professor Philippe Burrin11 and the editor of this volume at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in July 2004, which brought together experts in the ﬁeld of right-wing populism to examine the right-wing foreign policy agenda, the importance of these views in attracting voters, as well as their ability to cooperate at the international level. The expanded contributions to this study seek to examine the wider foreign-policy platform of Europe’s populist radical right parties, to highlight the particular issues that exist at the national level, and to raise further questions for future scholarship. Deﬁning the Populist Radical Right Before addressing the foreign policy landscape of the populist radical right it is important to formulate a common deﬁnition of the parties explored in the book. It is extremely difﬁcult to ﬁnd a common deﬁnition in the plethora of terms that exist: ‘fascist’, ‘neoNazi’, ‘extreme right’, ‘radical right’, ‘far right’, ‘old right’ and ‘new right’ are but some of the most common concepts used in the past. According to Mudde, there are no less than 26 deﬁnitions of extreme right used in the literature and they list no less than 58 different features.12 Added to this complexity is the fact that some deﬁnitions carry historical signiﬁcance no longer relevant to the new generation of right-wing populists that emerged after the Cold War.13 Eastern European parties, which emerged from the double historical legacy of fascism and communism, are a particular challenge. Added to this dilemma is the ongoing political reform process of opportunistic parties constantly reinventing themselves. The book covers parties14 representing the Old Right (Front national, Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and regional separatists (Vlaams Blok, Lega Nord) as well as right populist parties (Schweizer Volkspartei, Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs/Bündnis Zukunft Österreich, Dansk Folkeparti), and ultra-catholic party (Liga Polskich Rodzin), and post-fascist turned conservative (Alleanza Nazionale) or post-modern (Lijst Pim Fortuyn). A common term to describe this wide range of parties is difﬁcult to ﬁnd. Mudde, in his most recent book,Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, develops the term ‘populist radical right’ which simpliﬁes these complexities into a simple and usable, minimum and maximum deﬁnition, in which elements of the ‘maximum’ are also contained in the ‘minimum’ group. 15 According to this deﬁnition, all parties which ﬁt into this category espouse, at a minimum, a speciﬁc form of nationalism. He has argued effectively that nationalism is one core concept of these parties. Outliving many of the other -isms in our century, nationalism espoused by these political parties 11 Professor Philippe Burrin is currently the Director of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, Switzerland. 12 Mudde, C. (1996), ‘The War of Words Deﬁning the Extreme Right Party Family’, West Europe Politics, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 225–48. 13 Grifﬁn, R. (2000), ‘Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the ‘Post-fascist’ Era’, Journal of Political Ideologies 5:2, 163–78. 14 The myriad of party names – often long and mutable – necessitates the use of many acronyms. A list of abbreviations can be found at the end of the chapter. 15 Mudde, C. (2007), Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 15.

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declares the maintenance and strengthening of one’s own nation to be the highest principle of human thought and action, and denigrates other nations.16 Nationalism alone, however, cannot describe the parties in this book, since the minimum deﬁnition ‘nationalist’ here does not make a distinction between ‘moderate’ nationalists – so-called ‘liberal’ nationalists – and radical nationalists. Thus the term nativist helps further reﬁne this distinction. The term nativism is deﬁned by Mudde ‘as an ideology which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state.’17 Mudde maintains that nativism can also accommodate the xenophobic and nationalist reactions to (socalled) indigenous minorities within the country (for example, Russians in the Baltic States, Roma and Sinti groups in Central and Eastern Europe).18 Nativism thus can encompass groups that are speciﬁcally racist or simply protectionist in relation to their own culture. In addition to nationalism and nativism, the parties examined in this volume support authoritarianism. Stöss deﬁnes authoritarianism as the willingness to voluntarily submit oneself to those who are stronger, or rather to a power that has not been legitimated, as well as the tendency to dominate those who are weaker. 19 Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, Robert Altemeyer further deﬁnes three facets of this authoritarian personality: conventionalism, authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission. In order to measure this cluster of beliefs, Altemeyer developed the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, asking subjects to rate their agreement (or disagreement) with statements such as ‘Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers/Do what the authorities tell us to do/Get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.’ This example contains all three facets of RWA scale: ‘honor the ways of our forefathers’ – conventional/traditional values; ‘do what the authorities tell us to do’ – authoritarian submission; ‘get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything – authoritarian aggression.20 All the parties described in this book share these traits, which seem to feed off a growing taste for authoritarianism in Europe. In a recent study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, for example, 9 per cent of Germans polled believed that under some circumstances a dictatorship could be a better system to run a state than a democracy. 21 An iron-ﬁsted leader who would ‘govern Germany for the beneﬁt of all’ would be supported by 15 16 Ibid., p. 16-17. See also Prizell, I. (1998), National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 13. 17 Mudde (2007), op. cit. p. 19. Hans-Georg Betz further elaborates the term in the subsequent chapter. See also Betz (2002), ‘Conditions Favouring the Success and Failure of radical Rightwing Populist Parties in Contemporary Democracies’, in Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke: Palgrave); Friedman, N. (1967), ‘Nativism’, Phylon 28:4, 408–15. 18 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 19. 19 Liang, Christina (2002), German Far Right Ideology in the Decade of German Uniﬁcation, thèse no. 641, IUHEI, Geneva, p. 10. 20 Altemeyer, R. (1981), Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press). 21 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 9 December 2006.

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per cent of the respondents. One in four – 26 per cent – said they favoured a single party in Germany ‘that would embody the national community as a whole …’.22 It is the authoritarian element of the nativism espoused by these parties that places them into the spectrum of radical parties, which, by democratic means, seek to change the conception of democratic values at the same time. The term radical in this sense does not necessarily mean marginal or extremist (although it can). Populist radical right parties can range from the Swiss SVP, which has a radical wing in what is otherwise a mainstream populist right party, to the French Front national, which is an ethnocentric party attempting to achieve a more mainstream populist image, to parties like the German National Democratic Party (NPD) and the British National Party (BNP), which are direct heirs of European Nazism and fascism. Finally, Mudde also suggests that the element of populism delineates speciﬁc parties from each other. Populism can be considered to be an ideology that separates society into two homogenous and antagonistic groups – ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’ – and that holds that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. For Krastev populists maintain that politics is the expression of the general will of the people and social change will only be possible with radical change of the elite.23 According to populist notions of democracy, nothing is more important than the general will of the people, not even human rights or constitutional guarantees. Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictum that ‘the politics of the future will be the art of stirring the masses’, populist radical right parties seek to foster populist leaders ‘who think with the head of the citizens.’24 They encourage ‘plain speaking’ and they believe they represent the common man from the street whom the traditional leadership elite has forsaken. Their task, according to the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs’ (FPÖ) Jörg Haider, is to protect ‘the citizens against a political and intellectual dispossession and incapacitation.’25 Neo-populist parties are able to address common feelings shared by large numbers of people that are largely ignored by politicians. Kriesi has suggested that the emergence of populist movements is intricately linked to major experiences of social and cultural turmoil and dislocation.26 Taggart also supports this argument by stating that populism is not the politics of the stable, ordered polity, but instead comes along due to change, crisis and challenge.27 Linked to the notion of populism is the characteristic of resentment politics. For Krastev, populism indicates that liberal solutions in the ﬁelds of politics, economics and culture are no longer considered attractive to voters who are drawn instead to politics of exclusion.28 Many of the parties examined pose themselves as political outsiders who dare to break political taboos and thus express the resentment felt by the populace against the political elite. For example, many of the parties in question express racist viewpoints, all the while abiding by democratic rules and staying within the legal 22 Ibid. 23 Krastev, I. (2007), Eurozine, p. 2–3. 24 Crick, B. (2005), ‘Populism, Politics and Democracy’, Democratization 12:5, 627. Betz (2004), op. cit., p. 45. 25 Ibid. 26 Kriesi in Betz (2004), op. cit., p. 52. 27 Taggart, P. (2004), ‘Populism and Representative Politics in Contemporary Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9:3, 275. 28 Krastev, op. cit., p. 1–6.

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parameters of racism laws. As Betz has argued, this strategy of breaking political taboos allows the radical right to present itself as a fresh political force outside the established parties and not corrupted by power. If punished for breaching racism laws, this tactic allows the radical right to present itself as a victim of the established parties and to advance a range of extreme demands without having to assume responsibility for the consequences.29 Resentment politics have received a further boost through changes in the democratic political process brought about by information technology. In the past, people traditionally identiﬁed with a particular party that espoused the same political traditions of the voter, based usually on political and religious traditions. Voters are now choosing their candidates based on real-time information in a rapidly expanding media world. The Internet has allowed the populist radical right an equal speaking platform with established mainstream parties. In almost all Western European countries there are declining levels of trust in political leaders. Legitimizing democratic governance has become a leading challenge in European democracies, especially in Eastern Europe, where 40 years of communist control have undermined the legitimacy of party-related activities and were the political class is viewed as corrupt. In Eastern Europe, the populists’ obsession with corruption has become more important than the actual policy options. Voters are mostly interested in revenging themselves against the politicians who are viewed as corrupted elites. Clearly this is not helped by the fact that politicians such as the current Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyuresàny admitted to lying “in the morning, in the evening, and at night.” According to the Eurobarometer surveys, parliaments, governments and parties are facing increasing scepticism in almost all European democracies.30 In 2005, 32 per cent of all EU citizens trusted their parliament, 28 per cent trusted their government, and just 14 per cent trusted their political parties.31 The populist radical right has helped foster this political disenchantment, arguing that mainstream political parties no longer meet the demands of their citizens. A further populist strategy employed by a number of parties is what Swyngedouw describes as the “jumping of scales technique” whereby global complexity is rescaled to local simplicity.32 Using this technique, radical right-wing parties describe global issues such as the processes of European integration, economic globalization as local, comprehensible matters which are a direct threat to established prosperity, rights and power.33 International migration, organized crime and international terrorism that are global issues can be redeﬁned as national or local problems. Jean-Marie Le Pen has used this simple formula when describing immigration, which, according to him, if prevented, would resolve all of France’s domestic problems. The SVP, DPP, and LPF have also used this formula. The Vlaams Blok (VB) suggests that criminality, domestic security and family politics can all be prevented by ending the preferential treatment of foreigners.34 29 Betz (2004), pp. 49–50. 30 European Commision (2006), ‘Attitudes towards European Union Enlargement’, European Commission: Special Eurobarometer, . 31 Ibid. 32 Swyngedouw (1997), Urry (2003) as described in chapter 4 by Swyngedouw et al. 33 See chapter 4 for an explanation of this formulas as it pertains to the Vlaams Blok. 34 Scharenberg (2006), op. cit., p. 97.

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Ethno-pluralism A ﬁnal concept linked to much of the populist radical right is ethno-pluralism. In the past these parties focused largely on anti-party rhetoric and issues such as immigration, asylum and refugees and, according to Betz, made little effort to develop a coherent ideology as a basis of legitimization for their demands.35 However, as Betz, Grifﬁn and others have pointed out, after the Cold War these parties developed a core doctrine based on ethno-cultural pluralism whose main characteristic is a highly restrictive notion of society, citizenship and democracy, all which are seen as intricately tied to a culturally and ethnically homogenous community.36 In some cases, ethno-cultural pluralism is also an attempt to preserve the idea of race and ethnicity in political discourse without evoking Nazi ideas of racial exclusion and persecution. Ethno-pluralism uses their own notion of ‘difference’ and ‘multiculturalism’ – mirroring anti-racist terms used in left-wing discourse – so as to seemingly reject all notions of biological racism and racial superiority and to promote the coexistence of races. Nonetheless, the concept of ethno-pluralism denounces the mixing of the races either through marriage or through immigration.37 Ethno-pluralist thinkers argue that multiculturalism will lead to ‘ethno-suicide’ due to the fact that lifestyle and traditions of the different peoples are inherently not compatible. Ethno-pluralists further maintain that if each ethnic identity were to develop its own separate political space, cooperation and harmony among different ethnicities would be assured. They want to ensure that ethnic-pluralism is ﬁrst and foremost to be preserved at home and in Europe. As one German Republikaner afﬁrmed: We are Europeans and would like to remain Germans within this Europe. We want a Europe that lives on cultural diversity, does not look down upon traditions, and in which diligence and civic-mindedness, order and security for everyone, the love of one’s own people and respect of others are not discounted as relics of a bygone era.38

The parties examined in this book thus comprise what can be called populist radical right parties. They have at a minimum a speciﬁc form of nationalism and a core identity of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. These characteristics separate these parties from the mainstream Right, and from the radical and populist Left. Finally, as will be shown, they are all gravitating towards an ethno-pluralist foreign political outlook, which is the closest the groups have yet come to deﬁning a common platform in Europe. Towards a European Populist Radical Right Foreign Policy The post-Cold War development of the populist radical right’s foreign policy was marked by three events: the perception of the economic and social effects of globalization 35 See chapter 6 by Evans. 36 Betz (2004), op. cit., p. 145. 37 Minkenberg, M. (1997), ‘The New Right in France and Germany: Nouvelle Droite, Neue Rechte, and the New Right Radical Parties’, in Merkl, P. (ed.), The Revival of RightWing Extremism in the Nineties, p. 72. 38 ‘Warum nicht Volkswahl?’, Der Republikaner 5, 1989, p. 1.

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in the mid-1990s; the increased rate of European integration in the late 1990s; and, the launch of the US-led ‘war on terror’ after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Each of these themes merits closer examination. Globalization The fear of the globalized economy runs as a sub-current through many of the positions of the populist radical right parties, who see globalization as a threat to be countered with strong national preference, welfare systems that favour indigenous populations, strong immigration laws and strong criminal legislation. Globalization is largely seen as being driven by the United States – economically from Wall Street, politically from Washington, and culturally from Hollywood. Indeed, the populist radical right have mapped out much of their foreign political programme on the feared impact of globalization on the economy, political sovereignty and national culture. The economic threat of globalization has been one of the most important catalysts of bringing the populist radical right to power in Europe. Due to the globalization of production, capital, labour and information, the world economy is perceived by the populist radical right to have become ‘a contest of regions’. Millions of cheap labourers are prepared to produce highly valued products for low wages. The German Republikaner consequently fear that [t]he world is at the brink of a world economic revolution, which will make the Europeans the biggest losers. In the end it will lead to a complete dispersal of political and economic power from western Europe to Asia, which might lead to a destabilization of social cultural structures and result in a recrudescence of ‘Marxist values’.39

The Republikaner further maintain that globalization undermines the welfare state and emasculates democracy. Economic globalization has also raised fears in Europe of the death of social welfare – a shock to deeply embedded mentalities for those who are accustomed to a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state. Competition puts pressures on governments not only to deregulate and liberalize goods and labour markets, but also to substantially alter the welfare state. These changes especially affect small pensioners and the elderly. To respond to this fear, the populist radical right promote a welfare chauvinism to protect the nation state for their ‘own people’.40 An example of this is an initiative promoted by Le Pen, who enjoys particular support among the French elderly, which called for a ‘national preference’ welfare system favouring indigenous French over immigrants.41 In Poland, the Kaczynski brothers have used extreme social conservatism to attract voters. Both the capitalists (liberals) and the neo-communists were blamed for the plummeting standards of living in the East, mostly due to the fact that during the transition period there was a certain continuity between the ruling “communists” and the parties’ pro-market reformist wing. Currently both are out of favour and are being replaced with populist leaders who argue that the social welfare 39 Ritter, M. (1996), ‘Droht eine Weltwirtschafts-Revolution?’, Der Republikaner 11, p. 7. 40 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 186-87. 41 Poggioli, S. (2006), ‘Europe’s Right Turn Anti-Immigrant Policy Boosts France’s Le Pen Again’, radio broadcast, National Public Radio, 12 January .

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institutions are the backbone of identity and the only remaining principle of cohesion in traditionless capitalist society. This new revolt is based not only on fears of losing the nation but more importantly fears of becoming déclassé in a new materialistic society. According to the populist radical right, the biggest winner of economic globalization is the United States, which through its powerful business giants and its control of international economic institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), has managed to dominate the global economy. One of the only exceptions to this is the Swiss SVP, which has maintained a more positive attitude towards the global economy and international ﬁnancial institutions, partially due to its close ties with the business community through party chief Christoph Blocher, himself a leading industrialist.42 Another exception are the Kaczynski brothers in Poland who have managed to combine anti-Russian and anti-German sentiment with pro-Bush military zeal. The populist right’s depiction of economic globalization draws on well-documented anxieties among European workers in the face of foreign competition. Indeed, studies have pointed to a systematic link between the decline in manufacturing employment and support for the populist radical right parties, even in the context of a developed welfare state.43 The impact of globalization on European economies and rising unemployment are producing a growing sense of insecurity that is provoking a populist backlash. This backlash is not only due to economic concerns. For the populist radical right, the United States is not only the economic power in the world, it is also the omnipotent driver of world politics – a hyperpuissance.44 Anti-Americanism has become one of the dominant foreign policy themes of the populist radical right since the end of the Cold War, and the United States is widely perceived as the main state adversary of Europe. Moreover, the populist radical right believes that globalization has led to a devolvement of traditional economic and political powers of states to international institutions, international companies, and other non-state actors. The United States is viewed by many populist radical right parties (notably by the Front national, the DVU, and the NPD) as having hegemony over international institutions, in particular the United Nations (UN), the WTO and international business. The United States is also represented as a warmonger, forcing countries to join in unwanted conﬂicts and instigating and forcing political, economic, and cultural integration. The Front national, FPÖ, the DVU and the NPD, among others, portray the United States as the biggest threat to world peace. They maintain that while the United States attempts to cloak itself in a mantel of good ofﬁces and propaganda, bestowing upon itself the role of the world’s policeman and protecting countries from foreign aggressors, it is in fact using any means necessary to further its imperialist ambitions—sometimes even by breaking international law – in order to control the globe for its enormous economic needs. In Eastern Europe, there is the popular perception that the ultimate winners of the painful convergence process for European integration were not Eastern Europeans

42 See chapter 11 by Mazzoleni. 43 Betz (2004), op. cit., p. 160. 44 A political concept ﬁrst described in 1999 by then French Minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Védrine to describe the United States at the end of the 20th century.

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but mainly, multinational corporations, the American-led military alliance and the EU bureaucracy.45 While political and economic globalization has led to important foreign policy positions – notably a shift towards anti-Americanism and the rejection of global institutions – the cultural aspects of globalization have brought the populist radical right together in a perceived common clash of cultures, giving new impetus for populist parties to pose as guarantors of the authentic national culture. Numerous antiforeign culture slogans abound, including ‘Britain for the British’ (National Front), ‘Bulgaria for the Bulgarians’ (Ataka), ‘Denmark for the Danes’ (Danish People’s Party) and ‘Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus!’ (Germany for the Germans, foreigners out!) by the Republikaner. They also stress the predominance of their own nationals – Les français d’abord’ (‘the French ﬁrst’ by the FN); Eigen volk eerst! (‘own people ﬁrst’ by the Flemish VB). These notions are not only anti-immigration, but reﬂect a cultural anxiety about the dilution of national cultures. Consequently, the current populist radical right rejects multiculturalism, with its ideas of a melting pot and cultural plurality. The DVU, for example, presents the United States as a cultural enemy. ‘The United States knows no national boundaries and embodies the concept of immigration, the entire humankind being on its territory. As a result, internationalism becomes national identity, based on the fundamental concept of the melting pot of races and peoples.’ 46 The United States is also represented as engaged in ‘cultural suicide’, which has led to high criminality, drugs and HIV/AIDS. This representation serves the dual purpose of holding the United States as an example of the failures of multicultural society and at the same time depicting the United States as an enemy composed of cultural degenerates. The DVU maintains ‘that it is impossible to counter the basic instincts of peoples to identify themselves with their ethnic group and their region and the strong desire not to become part of the amorphous mash of peoples that the European population is threatening to become.’47 By externalizing multi-culturalism as the ideology of the enemy, much like the creation of a Jewish conspiracy hosted abroad, the populist radical right justify the destruction of foreigners at home, or as Herf has pointed out, ‘that the destruction of foreigners in Europe would eliminate the spirit of multiculturalism from Europe.’48 European Expansion and Integration A speciﬁc issue for the populist radical right in its fear of a global culture clash is European expansion. The recent ‘big bang’ enlargement added eight Eastern European states, and in 2006, Bulgaria and Romania also joined, making a grand total of 27 EU countries. So far the purpose of enlargement has been to consolidate EU power and 45 Tamás, G.M., ‘Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution, Eastern Europe Today,’ Eurozine.com . 46 Rassen, S. der and Völker (1990)‚ ‘Die USA als Richter der Welt? Serie zur Geschichte und Gegenwart des US-Imperialismus, 2 Teil’, DNZ, 21 September, p. 4. 47 ‘Die Stunde des Nationalismus Europagedanke zum Scheitern verurteilt,’ DNZ, 24 January 1992, p. 6. 48 Herf, J. (1984), Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 231.

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to enhance political and economic reform in Eastern Europe. The EU is also meant to act as a political and economic counterweight to the United States. Most populist radical right parties have supported the integration of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states but have opposed the ‘big bang’ of EU membership. These sentiments were shared with 42 per cent of the EU population who opposed enlargement. Some voters were especially unfavourable to greater enlargement, such as the Germans (66 per cent), the French (62 per cent), the Austrians (61 per cent) and the Finnish (60 per cent).49 The rhetoric of the populist radical right has found resonance precisely because support for the EU has declined sharply in the last decade – from 72 per cent in 1990 to 54 per cent in 2005.50 The failure of the European Constitutional Treaty to win popular approval in the Dutch and French referenda in 2005 was a symbolic reminder of declining support for the EU, especially since it was rejected by two of its original founding countries. For most populist radical right parties, the EU represents a political problem. Since 1996, the populist radical right has formed the largest group of so-called ‘Eurosceptics’ in the EU.51 One of the key grievances is that the EU lacks democratic accountability. Pointing out that the EU’s power rests within the unelected Council of Ministers rather than with the elected European Parliament, the populist radical right claims that the EU is undemocratic. It also does not support the idea of a European ‘superstate’ and it does not want to relinquish political power to Brussels. Brussels is represented as corrupt and being run by a political and technocratic elite. Already in 1997, Pim Fortuyn in his book ‘Soulless Europe’ described Europe as a heartless, distant, bureaucratic monster.52 For the populist radical right, the creation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 represented a step too far in the direction of supra-national control and signiﬁed an unacceptable loss of national sovereignty, and an egregious violation of constitutional principles such as the principle of democracy and the separation of powers. They proclaimed that the treaty was a coup d’état from above.53 The often-invoked principle of subsidiarity did not redress the fact that the European Union would not be able to solve the conﬂict between centralization and decentralization nor alleviate the democratic deﬁcit of the European institutions.54 Others attacked the Maastricht Treaty even more sharply. The DVU maintained that ‘[a]pparently one wants to quietly withdraw our Bundeswehr from German sovereignty and internationalize it under the sign of the Maastricht über-Versailles [treaty].’55 In a somewhat unusual deployment of their symbolic heritage, they compared the establishment of the EU with the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933: ‘[w]ith the intended Machtergreifung of the Brussels bureaucracy and the renunciation of our

49 European Commission (2006), op. cit., p. 255. 50 Clark D. et al. (2005), A New Deal for Social Europe (London: Foreign Policy Centre), p. 2. 51 Taggart, P. (1998), ‘A Touchstone of Dissent: Euroskeptism in Contemporary Western European Party Systems’, European Journal of Political Research 33:3. 52 See chapter 10 by Mudde. 53 See chapter three of the 1987 Republikaner Party Platform. 54 Ibid. 55 ‘Das Verbrechen an Somalia. Bonn als Mittäter,’ DNZ, 13 August 1993, p. 1.

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national identity, German history would have come to its end.’56 Le Pen compared Maastricht to the ‘infamous Treaty of Troy’.57 Conspiracy theories abound within the populist radical right as regards to who is really in charge of the EU – the Americans, the Germans, the French. The German Republikaner believe that the EU is a strategy of the United States to keep Germany controlled in Europe. In Central and Eastern European countries, the populist radical right argues that the EU is but an extension of the old Soviet Union or its economic organization (COMECON).58 Weaver points out that the Hungarian Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MÍE ́ P) calls the European Constitution a ‘new Soviet system of centralization that was prepared in the West.’59 Similarly, the Lega Nord (LN) refers to the ‘Soviet Union of Europe as a nest of freemasons and Communist bankers.’60 Some Eastern Europeans such as the Czech National Party (NS) and Association for the Republic–Republican Party of Czechoslovakia (SPR-RSČ) maintain that joining the EU would make the country fully dependent on Germany, which will end up dominating it.61 The Polish radical right harbours similar views.62 According to most populist radical right groups, the creation of the European Union was a ‘no’ to Maastricht and a ‘yes’ to the idea of a ‘Europe of Nation States’, or a Europe of peoples based on ethnicity. Drawing on their ethno-pluralist values, the populist radical right promotes the idea of a ‘Europe of the Europeans’, based on the core values of a ‘European civilization’ – a Europe whose sovereignty does not lie with Europe or with the existing states but with their cultural communities.63 This concept of Europe is best expressed in the words of Pim Fortuyn: ‘I love Europe, I love its multitude of peoples, cultures, landscapes, weather conditions, language and human beings. I sometimes hate the Euro-elite in its arrogant negligence. In short, I want a Europe of the people, of the human scale, a Europe of you and me.’64 After German uniﬁcation, the Republikaner called for the reafﬁrmation of lost European strength, and thus an integrated Europe detached from the West. They were interested in a model of a ‘Europe of the Fatherlands’ as envisioned by Charles de Gaulle. In their view, the ‘nations that are joining together here are not losing their proper personalities. And the path they are going down will be the organized co-operation of states, until one day they might form a powerful confederation of states’.65 For many the idea of a Europe of the Fatherlands reconciles both national and European interests. A majority of the populist radical right parties strongly oppose the idea of a federal ‘United States

56 Deutsche National-Zeitung 11, 1992, p. 4, as quoted in the Bundesministerium des Innern (1993), Verfassungsschutzbericht 1992 ( Bonn: Bundesministerium des Innern), p. 112. 57 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 160. 58 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 161. Chapter 8 by Weaver. 59 See chapter 8 by Weaver. 60 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 161. 61 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 163. 62 Ibid. 63 See chapter 4 by Swyngedouw et al. 64 See chapter 10 by Mudde. 65 Der Republikaner, No.6, 1989.

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of Europe’, believing it will erode national identity and will eventually lead to a multicultural Europe that will be ‘open to antidemocratic and violent’ movements.66 This does not mean that the populist radical right is entirely against the European project. Most populist radical right parties presented in this book believe in the basic tenets of European integration but are sceptical about the direction the EU has taken. These groups can be identiﬁed as Eurosceptics, among which Mudde includes the FN, LN, and Republikaner.67 He has argued that most populist radical right parties in the accession countries also fall into this category, since they are inconsistent about their membership.68 So-called ‘Eurorejects,’ on the other hand, are more nativist and believe that the EU represents a threat to national independence with a serious ‘democratic deﬁcit’. Among the Eurorejects are the BNP, Democracia Nacional, Democratic Unionist Party, Veritas, and the SVP.69 Larrabee has shown that parties in Poland, especially the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS) and the Catholic League of Polish Families, have also been critical of Poland’s membership in the EU.70 While the above categories are useful typologies, the parties examined in this book appear difﬁcult to classify as Euroenthusiasts, Eurosceptics and Eurorejects since they are constantly reinventing themselves. Good examples of this are the Repulikaner, the FN and the LN who started out as Euroenthusiats but have become Eurosceptics. The Republikaner, FN and the LN, have vacillated between supporting and rejecting the EU. As populists, the parties opportunistically use their animosity against the European Union as a political tool, depending on what best suits their political needs. In this regard some parties supported the European Union when a large enough majority of the country was in agreement, but then dropped political support when it became a political liability. The Populist Radical Right and the European Union In 2005, greater international cooperation was set in motion by the Austrian think tank, Freiheitliche Akademie, which organized an international meeting of high level populist radical right party members from seven countries including the FPÖ, Vlaams Belang, Ataka, FN, Italian Azione Sociale and Movimento Sociale-Fiamma Tricolore (MS-FT), as well as the Romanian PRM and the Spanish Alternativa Española.71 The parties agreed to conduct annual meetings and to create a “Contact Forum for European Patriotic and National Parties and Movements with a permanent ofﬁce in Vienna.”72 At the meeting they adopted the Vienna Declaration of Patriotic and National Movements and Parties in Europe, whose main points clearly articulate a new globalized nationalist agenda:

66 Liang. 67 68 69 70 71 meeting. 72

BZÖ is one of the exceptions. See chapter 5 by Anderson and chapter 7 by Schori Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 164. Mudde (2007), op. cit. p. 164. Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 163. Larrabee, S.F. (2006), ‘Danger and Opportunity in Eastern Europe’, Foreign Affairs 85:6. The DFP, Lega Nord, the Polish PiS sent ofﬁcial greetings but did not attend the Ibid.

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1. The establishment of a Europe of free and independent nationals within the framework of a confederation of sovereign nation states; 2. The renunciation of all attempts to create a constitution for a centralist European super-state; 3. The clear rejection of a boundless enlargement of European integration to geographical, cultural, religious and ethnic non-European areas of Asia and Africa such as Turkey; 4. The effective protection of Europe against dangers of terrorism, aggressive Islamism, superpower imperialism, and economic aggression by low-wage countries; 5. An immediate immigration stop in all states of the European Union, also in the area of so-called family reunion; 6. A pro-natalist family policy, which aims at the promotion of large numbers of children of the European ethnic communities (Völker) within the traditional family; 7. The solidarist struggle of European ethnic communities against the social and economic effects of globalization; 8. The restoration of the social systems of the member state of the European Union and social justice for the European ethnic communities.73 The recent accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU provided another opportunity for the populist radical right and its more extremist fringes to build common consensus and to further their political agendas at a transnational level. Ironically, while many of these groups were opposed to further enlargement, two of the new EU members, Bulgaria and Romania, helped the ‘Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty Group (ITS)’ to achieve its critical mass to form a party within the European Parliament.74 Along with greater funding75 they will have the ability to chair debates and help set the agenda for plenary sessions, allowing for more time to outline their policies. Many of the 23 ITS members reiterated some of the points they had already outlined in 2005 Vienna declaration. These included: • • • • • •

Recognition of national interests, sovereignties, identities and differences. Commitment to Christian values, heritage, culture and the traditions of European civilization. Commitment to the traditional family as the natural unity within society. Commitment to the freedoms and rights inherited by all. Commitment to the rule of law. Opposition to a unitary, bureaucratic, European superstate

73 “Wiener Erklärung der europäischen patriotischen und nationalen Parteien und Bewegungen”, November 2005, available at the FPÖ website (http://www.ots.at/ presseaussendung.php?schluessel=OTS_20051114_OTS0051&ch=politik). 74 EU rules require groups to raise 20 members from seven different EU states in order to form a party. 75 ITS party is entitled to approximately one million Euros for staff and administrative costs.

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•

15

Commitment to direct accountability of governments to the people and the transparent management of public funds.76

The group itself is made up of a mixed bag of Holocaust deniers, ultra-nationalists, neoFascists and anti-Islamists making it difﬁcult for them to reach common consensus on some of the more speciﬁc issues. Bruno Gollnisch of the FN is currently leading the group. He was convicted in January, 2007 by a French court for Holocaust denial. Other members include FN leader Jean Marie Le Pen and his daughter, Marine, as well as, Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, who was voted into the Italian Parliament on the motto “better Fascist than gay”, and Dmitar Stoyanov of the Bulgarian Ataka party who during the ITS’s foundation launched an attack on the “powerful Jews, with a lot of money who are paying the media to form the social awareness of people.” He has also accused Roma parents of selling their young daughters.77 Other members include, Philip Claeys of Vlaams Belang, who is a well known supporter of the late Léon Degrelle, a notorious Beligian Nazi, who later became a prominent Holocaust denier. Corneliu Vadim Tudor of the Greater Romania Party, a former propagandist of Nicolae Ceauşescu78 and anti-Semite, and who regularly attacks the Roma and Hungarian minorities living in Romania. While in the past, populist radical right groups mainly focused on purely national policies and showed little interest in cooperation, they have found common ground on issues such as immigration, the treatment of minorities, and keeping Turkey out of the European Union. The Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN)79 is another national conservative group within the European Parliament. They include the Danish People’s Party, the Northern League and the League of Polish Families among others. It is a generally Euroskeptic party which does not necessarily want to leave the European Union. Both the ITS and the UEN include many members from states within East and Central Europe, whose historical experience as Communist satellite states largely dictated by the Soviet Union make them largely unwilling to concede to a new supra national structure such as the Brussels bureaucracy. The voting power of the ITS will be mostly negligible since they are opposed by virtually all of the other political groups. Nonetheless, their notoriety at the European level attracts media attention and the fact that ITS organized a faction might provide them a certain amount of legitimacy internationally, which could translate into more popularity at home if the mainstream parties are not able to articulate their ideas into concrete and effective new policies within the European Union. 76 http:www.its-pe.eu/pages/page.php?LANG=EN&TYPE=2, download 12 October 2007. 77 In response to a Roma MEP receiving parliamentarian of the year. Stoyanov wrote to the organizers: “Well, Gentlemen, I must disagree with you. In my country there are tens of thousands of gypsy girls way more beautiful than this honourable one. In fact if you’re in the right place at the right time you even can buy one (around 12–14 years old) to be your loving wife. The best of them are very expensive – up to 5,000 euros a piece, wow!” as quoted in Kroeger, Alix, ‘EU’s surprise far right coalition,’ BBC News, Brussels. 78 The Former Communist President of Romania who was in ofﬁce from 1965–1989. 79 Members include, Danish People’s Party, Irish Fianna Fáil, Italian - National Alliance, Northern League, Sicilian Alliance,Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom, Lithuanian – Peasant Popular Union and Order and Justice; Polish – Law and Justice, League of Polish Families, Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland and Polish Peasant Party.

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The new group of Parliamentarians which have strong representation within the Eurosceptic parties could also play a role in the future policies of the European Union. While joining the European Union has brought with it many positive changes, building democratic institutions and producing economic growth, their have been heavy social costs, including social alienation, high unemployment and growing income discrepancies. The fact that the transition led to rapid social stratiﬁcation that hurt many and only privileged a few caused a lot of antagonism towards those in power. Especially since the politics of transition included cooperation between the communist elite (old nomenklatura) and the anticommunist counter-elite, allowing current populists to vilify not only the old communists but the new liberal elite.80 The paradox of this situation lies in the fact that it was not the failures but the successes of postcommunist liberalism which has given rise to the nationalist and populist groups.81 In an effort to bring economic prosperity (EU) and security and democracy (NATO), policies were presented not as “good” but as “necessary.” Liberal elites did not give their constituents the ability to protest or express dissatisfaction, opening the door for the populists. Krastev argues that in Central Europe there is a new political polarization, a rejection of consensual politics and the rise of populism.82 Parties that espouse strong nationalist language in Central and Eastern Europe such as in Romania and Slovakia and the anti-Communist parties in Poland and Hungary are enjoying electoral success in the face of economic insecurity. Rupnik argues that these populist movements’ could lead to further apprehension towards European integration and could make current EU member states even more resistant to further enlargement and could erode the political bonds within the EU.83 European Security and NATO In their position regarding Europe, populist radical right parties have also developed speciﬁc ideas about European defence policy. During the Cold War, the populist radical right greatly supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in the absence of a European defence force that could realistically counterbalance the Soviet threat. After the Cold War, some parties broke with NATO, which was at that point seen as an instrument of US imperialism. The most extreme populist radical right parties such as the FN, LN and FPÖ believe NATO to be redundant and call for the creation of a European defence force.84 The FPÖ’s Haider heaped scorn on the Maastricht Treaty as it ‘only contains a small segment on Common Foreign and Security Policy which makes it impossible to function’.85 However, some groups still uphold a more realist foreign policy view of NATO as an interim insurance to protect them while they establish their own European security and defence policy. Other groups, inﬂuenced by Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory – which argued that post-Cold War conﬂict 80 Krastev, p. 60. 81 Krastev, op. cit., p. 58. 82 Krastev, op. cit., p. 57. 83 Rupnik, J. (2007), Anatomy of a crisis : The referendum and the dilemmas of the enlarged EU, Eurozine, < http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-09-10-rupnik-en.html>. 84 See chapter 6 by Evans. 85 See chapter 3 by Virchow.

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would occur most frequently and violently along cultural instead of ideological lines, as under the Cold War – look upon the United States as the only true protector against the ongoing war on terror and ‘Islamiﬁcation’ of Europe (Danish People’s Party, Alleanza Nazionale, the VB, Lijst Pim Fortuyn). Interestingly, as the contributions to this volume indicate, many populist radical right parties view future aggressions coming from their proximate neighbours: Central and Eastern Europeans view Russia and Germany as potential adversaries; the Italians fear their Balkan, African and Asian neighbours; the Austrians fear their Balkan neighbours and look upon Germany as a protector. Hungary and Poland still fear Russian and German aggression.86 Populists generally call for a well-deﬁned European security policy and believe that European integration will make them less reliant on the United States for security. Haider, for example, believes the EU can act as a counterweight to the United States, allowing Europe to delimit itself ‘from Slavic orthodoxy on the one hand and the Anglo-American sphere on the other.’87 Europe can only protect itself from further aggression with a strong European military force. Both the populist radical right in Germany and Austria speak of Berlin and Vienna being back in the centre of the new Europe whose frontiers will be reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire.88 For the Italian Alleanza Nazionale (AN), Italy will play an important role in the formation of European interests because of its proximity to the Mediterranean, which they believe has become the gravitational centre of world geo-politics. The Austrian FPÖ hopes to enlarge its inﬂuence to encompass both Eastern and South Eastern Europe.89 Security concerns weigh heavily in the populist radical right’s discussion of further European enlargement. Almost all parties agree that the European border should be drawn at the Urals and that the EU should eventually include all the Christian or occidental nations of Eastern Europe. They maintain that the EU represents a civilization based on Greek, Roman and Christian civilizations. Mudde argues that most parties would probably agree with the Republikaner’s statement that ‘[g]eographically Europe ends at the Mediterranean, at the Bosporus, and at the Urals’.90 The VB dreams of a united Indo-European Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, united in a loose Confederation of Peoples.91 Most populist radical right parties adamantly reject Turkish membership in the European Union, claiming it would lead to a clash of civilizations.92 In this position the populist radical right have captured a common sentiment shared by a number of European governments, even though Turkey’s eligibility as a European country to join has already been unanimously approved by the European Council on several occasions. According to the 2005 EU barometer, across the EU 25, 41 per cent of the respondents agreed with the statement that ‘Turkey’s accession to the EU would favour the mutual comprehension of European and Muslim values’. However, 54 per cent of the respondents agreed with the statement that ‘the cultural differences between Turkey and the EU Member States are too signiﬁcant to allow for this accession’. 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

See chapters on Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, Austria and Hungary. See chapter on Austria. See chapter 7 by Liang and chapter 3 by Virchow. See chapter 3 by Virchow. Republikaner Platform 2003. Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 171. See chapter 4 by Swyngedouw et al. See chapter 3 by Virchow.

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European hesitations and populist radical right rhetoric is supported by the politicians of the big three of Europe – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – all of whom have expressed reservations on a number of occasions about Turkey joining the European Union.93 Immigration Already before the fall of the Berlin Wall, populist radical right parties harboured ethno-pluralist fears about immigration. Yet they hoped that the eventual fall of the Soviet Union would lead to the creation of independent, neutral states with robust foreign policies, precluding the need for immigration and multiculturalism. This utopian vision did not materialize after the collapse of the Soviet Union; instead, the wave of migration from Eastern Europe and the conﬂict zones in the former Yugoslavia accelerated the capacity for the populist radical right parties to gain support based on anti-immigrant positions.94 Immigration and related fears of cultural conﬂict ﬁgure heavily in the populist radical right agenda. One of the major political problems within the EU is that it opened its borders with the Schengen agreement while at the same time extending its borders with big bang enlargement without creating a common immigration policy beforehand. For the populist radical right, the effects of international migration have not only meant a loss of traditional group ties, traditional values and culture, but are increasingly being perceived as a security threat. The Vlaams Blok revealed these kinds of fears when it argued there is no reason whatsoever, religious, political, historic, economic or cultural to accept Turkey as a member of the EU. … The person who opens the door to Turkey, moves Europe’s borders to Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Caucasus, and ﬂings open the gates to a new and massive tidal wave of immigration.95

The populist radical right’s reaction to the immigration issue plays on the increasingly negative perception of immigration in Europe. Media reports ﬁlled with accounts of illegal migration and human trafﬁcking especially have caused public distrust and lack of conﬁdence in politicians being able to address the problems effectively, despite the fact that European states are increasingly limiting immigration and some countries are attempting to block immigration all together. In a European Social Survey study 93 Dominique de Villepin argued that Turkey must recognize the present Republic of Cyprus before membership talks can resume. Jacques Chirac, during the campaign for the French referendum on the EU Constitutional treaty in 2005, backed calls for France to hold a referendum on whether Turkey should enter the European Union. Angela Merkel pledged to oppose Turkey’s membership of the EU, and Austria’s Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser stated that he will strive to ensure that membership is not a realistic option for Turkey. Austin, G. and Parker, K. (2005) ‘The Mono-Cultural Delusion: Turkey and Migration Politics’, in Austin, G. et al. (2005), Turks in Europe: Why Are We Afraid? (London: Foreign Policy Centre), pp. 19–21. 94 Although some parties rise to power were due to country speciﬁc issues: taxes in Denmark; uniﬁcation and the ‘criminalization of history’ in Germany. See Betz (2004), op. cit. 95 See chapter 4 by Swyngedouw et al.

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96

in 2003, half of the respondents expressed a resistance to immigrants belonging to a different race or ethnic group rather than the majority population. These feelings are shared by a large majority of Europeans who believe that their country has reached the limits of cultural ethnic diversity. In 2003, in the EU 15, 60 per cent of people surveyed believed that ‘there is a limit to how many people of other races, religions or cultures a society can accept’ and ‘if there were to be more people belonging to these minority groups, we would have problems’.97 According to the European Monitor Centre report98 on European public attitudes towards migrants and minorities, 58 per cent of people surveyed held the dominant perception of minorities in Western and Eastern Europe as ‘a collective ethnic threat’.99 In a recent Eurobarometer survey, respondents from across the EU ranked the importance of immigration higher than terrorism, pensions, taxation, education, housing, the environment, public transport, defence and foreign affairs.100 In Britain, a public survey found that immigration was considered a more important problem than the economy, education, drugs or Europe.101 Luedtke argues that EU citizens have been resistant to the idea of Brussels’ control over immigration not because of instrumental calculations regarding perceived strategic gains or losses from immigration cooperation and not because of their opinions of immigrants themselves, but because the proposed supranationalism of immigration control clashes with historically rooted national identities.102

Precisely because of the cultural issues at heart of the immigration debates, several researchers have argued that populist radical right parties have achieved their greatest success with this issue, forcing moderate parties to adopt the positions of the right.103 Over the years, the populist radical right claimed that all social problems of the state, be they job loss or insecurity, increased competition or criminal activity, are directly linked to immigration. Their argument that immigration is a direct threat to welfare and increased criminal activity has particularly managed to mobilize public opinion enough to force governments to change their immigration laws. Schain suggests that in France, fear of Le Pen managed to persuade the Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the Union for French Democracy (UDF) to adopt populist anti-immigrant rhetoric as 96 European Social Survey 2003, round I. 97 Chebel-d’Appolonia, A. (2006), ‘How Wonderful It Is to “Hate”: The Use of Anti-Migrant Sentiments by ERPs’, paper presented at the CEVIPOF Conference on ‘The Radical Right and its Impact on Migration Politics and Policies’, Paris, France, the New York University in Paris, Center for Political Research at Sciences Po, 17–18 November. 98 European Monitor Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. 99 Canoy, M. et al. (2006), ‘Migration and Public Perception’, Bureau of European Policy Advisors, European Commission, . 100 Eurobarometer 60, 2004 101 British Business Survey 2001. 102 Luedtke, A. (2005), ‘European Integration, Public Opinion and Immigration Policy Testing the Impact of National Identity’, European Union Politics 6:1, 83–112. 103 Norris, P. (2005), Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Scharenberg (2006), op. cit.; Schain, M. (2002), Shadows Over Europe: The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

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early as 1986 in an attempt to prevent further support for the FN. Pettigrew has argued that Austria also followed suit with more restrictive immigration policies when the FPÖ entered the coalition government with the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP).104 Scharenberg has shown that the Dansk Folkeparti (DF) managed to tighten Danish immigration laws after its success in 2001.105 The Dutch government also copied this trend when it acted to remove tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers, a move heavily inﬂuenced by Lijst Pim Fortuyn’s success at the polls. The Swiss SVP also managed to have strong immigration and asylum legislation passed in 2006 through a national referendum after many years of propaganda that criminalized immigrants and asylum seekers. The author of the SVP initiative, a member of the Swiss Federal Council, and current Swiss Justice Minister, Christoph Blocher, has in the meantime become a role model on this issue for the populist radical right across Europe. The United Kingdom also promulgated new regulations to limit low-skilled workers from Bulgaria and Romania ever since they joined the EU in 2006, marking a departure from the open-door policy adopted after eight other former Eastern European communist states joined the EU in May 2004. Islam The greatest single group of ‘foreigners’ singled out by populist radical right groups are Muslims. Before and immediately after the Cold War, immigration anxieties focused on migrants from the developing world who were perceived to exploit Europe’s welfare systems. This changed dramatically after the launch of the US-led war on terror in 2001, following the September terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Subsequent events, including the 2004 murder of the Dutch ﬁlmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch-born Moroccan, the Madrid train and London bus bombings of 2005, the 2005 cartoon controversy in Denmark, which sparked rioting in Muslim countries, and the attempted bombings of British Airway ﬂights as well as the weeks of unrest in France which following the death of two Muslim boys in 2006 all nurtured the idea of a growing culture clash between Islam and Europe.106 Drawing on these events, the populist radical right portrays Islam as one of the greatest threats to Europe in the twenty-ﬁrst century, replacing the old spectre of communism across Europe.107 Bossi, the leader of the Italian LN, used the wars in the Balkans to attack the United States and Muslims by maintaining that the ‘Christian Serbs’ were attacked by NATO because they represented the ‘ultimate obstacle to advance the global American and Muslim Empires’.108 According to the Danish People’s Party (DPP), Islam is anti-modern, anti-democratic, patriarchal, violent dogmatic religion belonging to a lower level of civilization.109 Islam is a political religion that is contemptuous of human beings and anti-democratic, the Republikaner 104 Norris (2005), op. cit., p. 366. 105 Scharenberg (2006), op. cit., p. 94. 106 Savage, T. (2004), ‘Europe and Islam: Crescent Waxing, Cultures Clashing’, The Washington Quarterly, 27:3, 25–50. 107 Savage (2004), op. cit., p. 46. 108 Betz (2003), p. 84–9; Mudde (2007), op. cit., p.85. 109 See chapter 5 by Goul Andersen.

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contend, and whoever admits it into classrooms favours the establishment of a parallel Islamic society, the ultimate aim of which is to set up an Islamic theocracy.110 Pim Fortuyn argued that Islam is a backwards culture that was diametrically opposed to all the norms and values of Dutch identity. He maintained that democracy, the separation of church and state, equality of the sexes, freedom of thought, and religious freedoms were not compatible with Islam.111 The LPF called for a stop to all Muslim immigration, pushed for stronger assimilation of immigrants and wanted to stop the Geneva Refugee Convention and prevent all economic migrants from entering the country.112 The VB favours the introduction of an immigration and asylum policy that would make use of a list of ‘unsafe countries’ and believes the EU should take steps to amend the Geneva Conventions to include a territoriality principle which would allow only Europeans refugee status.113 The fear of Europe losing its religious identity has led to a remarkable reafﬁrmation of Europe’s Christian identity. The AN argues that there should be an acknowledgement of Christian roots inserted into the European Constitution.114 The VB and the LN as well as the Polish Radio Marya stress the incompatibility of Islam with their Christian beliefs. The Bulgarian Ataka, the Party of Great Romania (PRM) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) all view their nation as essentially Orthodox Christian.115 Indeed, for the populist radical right, Islam will not only change the European way of life but will pose political, cultural, economic and security threats to the point where the Europeans can lose the right to their own home.116 A Republikaner article entitled ‘Mohammed ad [sic] portas’, claims that the conﬂict in France over the wearing of the hijab portends a potential Kulturkampf in Europe, which could have the same dimensions as the conﬂict between the government and religious forces in Algeria, a conﬂict that threatens to engulf all of Mediterranean Europe.117 This suggests that although the ‘Muslim question’ is intimately tied to the larger question of immigration, it transcends the latter. To be sure, immigration control and the ﬁght against insecurity are still at the centre of the populist radical right election campaigns. However, these issues no longer deﬁne the populist radical right. With the cultural turn of the 1990s, the populist radical right deﬁnes itself primarily as an identitarian movement, which derives its identity and political legitimacy from a new politics based on claims of recognition.118 In the process, the populist radical right has opened up a new line of conﬂict that no longer ﬁts into the traditional left–right schema. As a Lega Nord politician put it during the LN’s campaign to have cruciﬁxes displayed in all public ofﬁces, this new line of conﬂict runs between those who ‘are in favor of a battle in defense of the traditions and cultures of the peoples’ and those

110 Der neue Republikaner 9, 1999, p. 3; Verfassungsschutzbericht 1999, p. 41. 111 Scharenberg (2006), op. cit., p. 95. 112 Ibid. 113 See chapter 4 by Swyngedouw et al. 114 See chapter 9 by Tarchi. 115 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 85–6. 116 Verfassungschutzbericht 1994, p. 56. 117 ‘Mohammed ad portas. Fundamentalisten auf dem Vormarsch: Fällt Frankreich?’, Der Republikaner, September 1990, p. 6. 118 Betz (2004), op. cit., p. 134–5.

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who, ‘on the contrary, are opposed to it, promoting instead the building of a globalized society, in which all identitarian symbols are banished’.119 These views tap into a wider European anxiety about their Muslim citizens and residents. The Belgian politician Willy Claes, during his tenure as NATO SecretaryGeneral, already in the mid-1990s claimed that the new threat to the alliance was Islam.120 Besides the perception of a security threat, Europeans also regard Muslims as a direct challenge to the collective identity, traditional values and public politics of their societies, as has been demonstrated by heated controversies over the hijab as well as outrage on both sides regarding the Danish cartoons scandal.121 Demographic dynamics in Europe have also raised fears. The US National Council projects that with continued immigration and high Muslim fertility rates, Europe’s Muslim population will double by 2025.122 Other estimates predict that today’s Muslim population, which amounts to ﬁve per cent of the Europe’s population, could rise to 20 per cent by 2050.123 Muslim populations more than doubled in the last three decades. Moreover, Europeans have not been successful in integrating their Muslim communities. Experts have argued that even second and third generation Muslims growing up in Europe feel disenfranchised in a society that does not accept them. These Muslims are politically marginalized – they do not ﬁt national deﬁnitions of minorities, which are based primarily on ethnic and racial criteria – as well as economically marginalized due to unemployment rates for foreign-born nationals, that are twice as high as for native born citizens.124 This anger spilled over into the streets of Paris and nationwide in France during the riots in September 2005, which was widely perceived as a culture clash between nativists and their Muslim communities. This threat is considered the greatest in countries that have large Islamic communities such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Fear of a new domestic security threat has been exacerbated by instability in the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have contributed to the radicalization of Muslim youths, many of whom view the ‘war on terror’ as a ‘war on Islam’ and claim common cause with Muslims in the Israeli-occupied territories, Iraq, Chechnya, and elsewhere.125 Savage argues that, as it has done historically, ‘the world of Islam may do more to deﬁne and shape Europe in the twenty-ﬁrst century than the United States, Russia, or even the European Union’. He regards the challenge as twofold: Europe must ﬁnd a way to integrate its ghettoized and rapidly growing Muslim minority and externally must devise a viable approach to the primarily Muslim-populated volatile states, stretching from Casablanca to the Caucasus. The problem so far is that Europeans are

119 See chapter 2 by Betz and chapter 9 by Tarchi. 120 Betz (2004), op. cit., p. 150. 121 Savage (2004), op. cit., p. 43. 122 Gallis, P. et al. (2005), ‘Muslims in Europe: Integration Policies in Selected Countries’, Congressional Service Reports on Foreign Policy and Regional Affairs, , p. 3. 123 Savage (2004), op. cit., pp. 25–50. 124 According to the International Migration Report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2004 as cited in International Institute for Strategic Studies 2005. 125 Gallis (2005), op. cit., p. 4.

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pursuing a status quo approach at home and abroad, and are unwilling to adapt and engage and redeﬁne relationship in the way that the new situation requires.126 The spectre of a growing Muslim threat in Europe has given new life to populist radical right parties in Europe. Several countries (Austria, Denmark, Italy, Norway and Switzerland) must rely on the support of parties with anti-Muslim views within their coalitions to remain in European government.127 As with the immigration issue, the populist radical right appear to have had an impact on wider European attitudes towards its Muslim citizens. The inﬂuence of the rhetoric of the populist radical right on more moderate mainstream parties is evident in new legislation to restrict immigration.128 For some European countries the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’ are virtually synonymous. Not only have their been tougher immigration laws but there is also now increased emphasis on national interests in EU policy debates.129 The impact of Islamophobia is also visible in new religious practices. Thirteen of the 37 countries in Europe do not recognize Islam as a religion, even though it is at least the second-largest religion in 16 European countries.130 In Denmark, a recent book entitled ‘Islamists and the Naïve’ has become a bestseller.131 The book compares Islam to Nazism and communism with the argument that they all represent a totalitarian ideology, and argues that those who underestimate the threat Islamists pose to Danish values are naïve since they underestimate the radicals’ zeal in achieving the ‘Islamization’ of Europe.132 The authors of the book are former social democrats; one of them, Karen Jespersen, was the former Danish Interior Minister in charge of immigration issues. In Denmark, the DPP has been successful because a growing number of Danes are against immigration from countries that do not have the same European culture and way of life.133 Another example of populist radical right inﬂuence is so-called ‘Muslim tests’ which are designed to discourage Islamic immigrants from applying for citizenship. Since May 2006 would-be immigrants who want to settle in the Netherlands must take a language exam and watch a video that shows, among other images, two gay men kissing and a topless woman emerging from the sea. The message of this civic integration exam is obvious: those who cannot support the Dutch liberal lifestyle need not apply. Anti-Semitism No other issue recalls the populist radical right’s historical pedigree more than the continued importance it places on anti-Semitic rhetoric. Contemporary European populist radical right anti-Semitism is composed of four main themes: outright 126 Savage (2004), op. cit. See also Ash, T.G. (2002), ‘The Price of Parsley’, The Guardian, July 25, pp. 7–16; Davies, N. (1996), Europe: A History (Oxford University Press), pp. 251–8. 127 Savage (2004), op. cit. 128 Ibid, p. 41. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid. 131 Islamists and the Naïve (2006) by Karen Jespersen and Ralf Pittlekow. 132 Bilefsky, D. (2006) ‘Danish Wake-up Call on Islam’, International Herald Tribune, . 133 See chapter 5 by Goul Anderson.

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Holocaust denial, attacks on the taboo of anti-Semitism (such as anti-racism laws), conspiracy theories that portray Jews as in charge of government, business and media, and ﬁnally sentiments that cross the line between objective criticism of Israeli policies and anti-Semitism. After 1945, as a result of the Second World War and the Holocaust, domestic manifestations of anti-Semitism were less prevalent and were largely not considered salonfähig in most Western European states. As a result, some populist radical right parties have remained wary of embracing anti-Semitism too openly. In Central and Eastern Europe, the presence of anti-Semitism varies: in some countries, such as the Czech Republic and Slovenia, it barely exists, while in others, such as Hungary, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland and Russia, anti-Semitism has become widespread. Mudde has noted that in Hungary and Lithuania, almost a quarter of the population can be classiﬁed as anti-Semitic, and in Poland almost half the population has negative views towards Jews and Israelis.134 In Hungary and Russia, nationalism is also strongly xenophobic, based on strong anti-Semitic sentiments. Holocaust denial has become one of the most common modern forms of antiSemitism, despite the fact that it is punishable by law – in ten European states, denial of the Holocaust can lead to ﬁnes or prison time.135 During its EU presidency in 2007, Germany has sought the adoption of a European law on racism and xenophobia, including Holocaust denial. However, the laws have not forced Holocaust denial to disappear; instead, and perhaps as a result of these laws, Holocaust denial has gained in currency as a primary manifestation of anti-Semitism and as a means of demonstrating a willingness to break taboos. This was most recently revealed in a recent 2007 Holocaust denial conference in Tehran hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which was attended by 67 delegates from 30 countries.136 Many attendees attempted to argue that mass murder was simply a myth.137 Holocaust denial in this case is linked with the Israeli–Palestinian crisis: by denying the Holocaust as a myth, conferees attempted to discredit Jews in general and Israel in particular.138 Among the populist radical right, there are a number of Holocaust sceptics and reductionists, including the DVU’s Gerhard Frey, the NPD’s Horst Mahler, the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Gollnisch, and the LDPR’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Linked to Holocaust denial is so-called ‘secondary anti-Semitism’, broadly deﬁned as any form of attack on the taboo of expressing anti-Semitism. Broder described this type of anti-Semitism as embodying the sentiment that ‘Germans will never forgive 134 Mudde (2007), op. cit., p. 81. 135 Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland. 136 Conference participants included American David Duke, a former KKK leader and white supremacist, Australian Fredrick Toeben, jailed in Germany for incitement and insulting the memory of the dead, Frenchman Robert Faurisson, convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws, and Frenchman Georges Thiel, convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws. 137 Schorr, D. (2006), ‘Iran’s Holocaust-denial Conference: a Community of Hate’, The Christian Science Monitor, . 138 For Muslim extremists, Holocaust denial is also an attempt to force the West acknowledge the need to limit free speech, which they feel should apply to ‘blasphemous’ comments regarding Islam.

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the Jews the existence of Auschwitz’. Secondary anti-Semitism is a mechanism to cope with Holocaust guilt. The FPÖ, Republikaner, the DVU, and the NPD use this strategy to turn the tables of German war guilt by maintaining that there is a Jewish conspiracy that attempts to weaken Germany by keeping Germans shackled to their past and in a permanent state of apology. The populist radical right interpretation of German history rests on relativizing German responsibility and actions during the Second World War and blaming other nations for provoking the war and committing atrocities. In their quest for a useable past, they cast Germans as victims of both the Nazis and Allied power designs, and blame the Jews for starting, supporting and being victimized by the war.139 Vladimir Zhironovsky, who is currently senior parliamentary ofﬁcial and leader of the ultranationalist LDPR, also blames the Jews for starting the Second World War, provoking the Holocaust, sparking the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia – and destroying the country ever since. He has maintained that ‘[y]ou will always ﬁnd Jews where war is raging because they realize that money ﬂows where blood is spilled.’140 Finally, he blames Jews for the rise of Nazism in Germany on the eve of the Second World War because ‘there were too many Jews’.141 The populist radical right also peddles more traditional anti-Semitic canards. One is the claim that Jews control government, business and media, which they are using for their own designs, and that they are therefore responsible for society’s woes.142 In some countries, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, the populist radical right laments that Jews have too much inﬂuence over the government. However, in a newer, more globalized context, Jews are now mostly viliﬁed abroad, where they are represented as agents of foreign interests and powers.143 Most anti-Semitic rhetoric is directed against the Jews who reside in the United States and Israel. One of the most common conspiracy theories perpetuated by the populist radical right is the belief that Jews have control over US government policy, and, by extension, global politics. Finally, the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict has also become an important issue around which anti-Semitic ideas have developed. Ever since the Jews formed their own state, they have been considered even more powerful by the populist radical right. Goldhagen argues that the image of the sly, stealthy and corrupting Jew – Shylock – has been largely replaced by the image of the ‘Rambo’ Jew, who through military and political power has become a subjugating, brutalizing killer. He either does the work himself, as in Israel, or employs others to do it for him, including the White House or the American ‘East Coast’ establishment.144 The notion of militarized Jews controlling world institutions has led the populist radical right to maintain that the second Iraq 139 Liang, Christina (2002), German Far Right Ideology in the Decade of German Uniﬁcation, thèse no. 641, IUHEI, Geneva. 140 Krichevsky, L. (1998), ‘Russian Right-winger Gives Long Anti-Semitic Tirade’, Jewish News Weekly, . 141 Ibid. 142 Department of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on International Relations (2004), Report on Global Anti-Semitism, US Department of State, . 143 Scharenberg (2006), op. cit., p. 101. 144 Goldhagen, D. (2004), ‘The Globalization of Anti-Semitism’, Christian Action for Israel, .

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war was orchestrated by Jews in a plot to take control over global ﬁnance, supported by the media under the inﬂuence of Jewish plutocrats.145 For example, German radical populists maintain that ‘there is no war of the US against terrorism. We are witnesses of a global reign of terror which comes from the US under Jewish inﬂuence.’146 István Czurka, leader of the MÍEP, suggests that there is a global conspiracy driven by American and Jewish capital that oppresses global interests via the IMF and the World Bank.147 Czurka even celebrates the perpetrators of the 11 September 2001 attacks as ‘those who represent the oppressed people who have brought down the bastion of globalization to soot and ashes’.148 Another example is Horst Mahler, the infamous left-wing militant of the BaaderMeinhof gang and who is now a celebrated member of the German NPD. Mahler is an aggressive anti-Semite and has openly declared that one of his main political and ideological goals is to destroy Judaism. For him the symbolic meaning of 11 September 2001 was that it represents a ‘war of extermination of the globalists by those who are attempting to protect the cultures of the peoples … and which produced for the ﬁrst time a military defeat on the American soil’. He also maintains that 11 September 2001 marks the beginning of a long Islamic war against the West to unseat the Jews from power.149 This rhetoric no longer has anything to do with criticisms of Israeli foreign policy: as in the past, the Jews serve as a useful scapegoat upon whom to blame conﬂict in the Middle East, US imperialism, and the economic woes of globalization.150 It should be noted that anti-Semitism is not a universal manifestation among all the populist radical right. Some parties have realized that this issue is toxic and could alienate them from less extremist voters. Others have reconsidered their perception of the militarized Jew as a potential ally in their ﬁght against Islam in Europe. As Betz points out in a following chapter, Vlaams Belang’s DeWinter has become a staunch philo-Semite. A clash between Arabs and residents in the Jewish quarter of Antwerp on 3 April 2002 led DeWinter to take on the role as the protector of the Jewish community by insisting that there be more police protection in the area.151 DeWinter’s anti-Islamic remarks and support for Israeli foreign policy sit well with part of his new electorate, a large community of Hassidic Jews who have been supporting his candidacy in the latest elections. DeWinter’s apparent philo-Semitism of course is rooted in an ethno-pluralist worldview. Israeli defence policy is lauded as a resolute defence against Islamic extremism, not because of respect for Jewish life and culture. Similarly, while 145 ‘What we have commonly accepted as democracy is Jewish authority, arranged through the authority to dispose over the global ﬁnancial- and currency system and through the media power of the Jewish plutocrats.’ Ibid., p. 101. 146 Weitzman, M. (2006), ‘Antisemitismus und Holocaust-Leugnung: Permanente Elemente des globalen Rechtsextremismus’, in Greven, T. and Grumke T. (eds.) (2006) Globalisierter Rechts-extremismus? Die extremistische Recht in der Ära der Globalisierung, (Wiesbaden : VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften), op. cit., p. 60. 147 Scharenberg (2006), op. cit., p. 101–2. 148 Ibid., p. 102. 149 Ibid., p. 59. 150 Department of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on International Relations (2004), op. cit. 151 Scharenberg (2006), op. cit., footnote 17, p. 97.

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Muslims are mostly perceived as a threat to the European way of life at home, they are praised for their ethnic struggle against Americans and Jews abroad. The Islamic fundamentalists’ code of exclusion and conservatism sits well with many aspects of the populist radical right’s vision of the world. Some populist radical right parties, while condemning the killing of civilians, embraced the 11 September 2001 attacks as a brave action against the ideology of America and the West and as a sign that US globalization and ideological hegemony will come to an end.152 Le Pen, who has made numerous anti-Semitic statements, recently shifted to become more philo-Islamic in order to gain votes from the disgruntled inhabitants of the French banlieue, which the FN believes might be a source of protest votes against the French political system.153 Conclusion: Towards a Common Foreign Policy of Globalized Nationalism Will the many strands of populist radical right foreign policy – anti-immigration, nativism, anti-globalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and antiIslamism – lead to a common foreign political outlook? Will their inherent nationalistic interests allow for transnational cooperation? Nationalism and internationalism are not mutually exclusive categories for today’s populist radical right, as Grumke has rightly pointed out.154 As was indicated earlier, they can be deﬁned as globalization’s greatest critics. However, in their struggle against globalization, they have managed to ﬁnd universal themes that bind them with other radical right groups in Europe and across the globe. Grumke argues that they have created a transnational network which is supported by a collective identity and international compatible ideologies. Their collective identity is perpetuated by a racial and a cultural community based on Greek, Roman and Christian civilizations. Their compatible ideologies include pan-Arian racism and anti-Semitism.155 They also share a core doctrine based on ethno-cultural pluralism whose main characteristic is a highly restrictive notion of nation, society, citizenship and democracy, which are seen as intricately tied to a culturally and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, the enemies of the nation, once seen as primarily internal, are now increasingly seen as part of global networks themselves, be it radical Islamic terrorist groups, US-Israeli conspiracies, or elitist Eurocrats. This ethnopluralist thinking has united the populist radical right and inspired global cooperation and in the setting of increased economic, political and cultural globalization, has led to a common foreign policy outlook which can be described as globalized nationalism.156 152 ‘Republikaner bekunden Mitgefühl mit den Opfern.’ December 2001@ www. republikaner.de. 153 Gurﬁnkiel, M. (2006), ‘Le Pen France‘s Le Pen To Strike a Deal With Muslims’, New York Sun, . 154 Greven,T. and Grumke,T. “Enleitung: Die globalisierteAnti-Globalisierungsbewegung der extremistischen Rechten?“ chapter in Greven, T. and Grumke T. (eds.) Globalisierter Rechts-extremismus? Die extremistische Recht in der Ära der Globalisierung, (Wiesbaden : VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften), op. cit. p. 9. 155 Grumke, Thomas. ‘Die transnationale Infrastruktur der extremistischen Rechten’, in Greven, T. and Grumke T. (eds.) (2006), op. cit., p. 130. 156 Greven, T. (2006), ‘Rechtsextreme Globalisierungskritik: Anti-globaler Gegenentwurf zu Neoliberalismus und Global Governance’, in Greven and Grumke (eds.)

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After the Second World War, the Nazis and other European fascists already cooperated in helping war criminals escape to Latin America and the Middle East – they even held small international gatherings. Oswald Mosley, the veteran British fascist leader, unsuccessfully attempted to organize a Europe-wide fascist party. Many more attempts at creating international far-right organizations ensued with little or no success.157 Today, globalized nationalism has gained momentum in the instantaneous media world of the Internet and television, which can transmit far-right populist ideology via satellite across the globe. Some of the stories that originate in Europe are sent to the Middle East where they are further embellished and are sent back to Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. The populist radical right have been inﬂuenced by Antonio Gramsci’s theory that the Left could only achieve its political aims by creating a ‘cultural hegemony’ of political and social discourse in order to shape a particular social and political reality. The nouvelle droite of the 1960s seized this idea and developed the strategy of ‘metapolitics’, which sought to inﬂuence people by spreading right-wing ideology through mass media; today, the populist radical right has successfully implemented this idea via the Internet, including through websites, music downloads as well as 24-hour blogging. As a result, globalization’s greatest critics have become globalization’s biggest political beneﬁciaries. Leaders of populist radical right groups meet together to discuss international cooperation, and organize international marches, rallies, Volksfests, rock concerts and conferences. As previously mentioned, the European Parliament’s Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Party has managed to launch itself on the European stage. The populist radical right is increasingly taking advantage of the interdependent world in which global issues have an ever-stronger domestic dimension and domestic politics have an ever-stronger global dimension. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, other extremist groups, including the neo-Nazi NPD, have come together to create a European National Front, which promotes networking and mutual support among far right groups in almost all European countries. This shared vision of a struggle between globalized nationalism versus internationalist multiculturalism point to the fault lines in the larger ideological battle looming in the globlalized economy. In his celebrated article ‘End of History,’ Francis Fukuyama argued that society had reached its endpoint in its ideological evolution with the end of communism and the emergence of Western liberal democracy as the ﬁnal form of human government. Several years later, in his equally celebrated article on the ‘Clash of Civilizations,’ Samuel Huntington criticized Fukuyama’s vision and argued that the fundamental source of conﬂict in the twenty-ﬁrst century would not be ideological or economic but in fact cultural. Joseph Nye has pointed out that both scholars oversimpliﬁed their positions, arguing that ethnic and cultural conﬂict tends to rise when national identities are under threat. Nye argues that we are actually marking a ‘return to history’, as the end of the Cold War replaced communism with ethnic, religious and national communalism as the chief ideological rivals to liberal capitalism.158 As Filip DeWinter of (2006), op. cit., p. 16. 157 For a good historical overview see chapter 14 by Ahlemeyer. 158 Nye, J.S. (2000), Understanding International Conﬂicts: An Introduction to Theory and History, 3rd edition. (New York: Longman Publishing Group) p. 266. See also Smith, A.D. (1995), Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity); Kaldor, M. (2004), ‘Nationalism and Globalisation’, Nations and Nationalism 10:1–2, 166–77; (1999),

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the Vlaams Belang has argued, the exhaustion of the left–right conﬂict between Marxism and Liberalism that dominated the post-war period has lead to a new cleavage between ‘identity versus multiculturalism’.159 As in the past, this identity is strongly expressed in the populist radical rights’ foreign-political conceptualizations of their nation, Europe, and Europe’s place in the world – a vision that conceives a confederation of European peoples battling both the developed superpowers and much of the developing world in a bid to retain nativist notions of cultural identity and the welfare state. It has also become a defensive reaction to neoconservative or neoliberal globalization and neo-imperialism. There are also growing fears of new security threats, including the threats posed by Islamic migrants, fears of homegrown terrorists, organized crime and future global insecurities brought on by the on-going wars in the Middle East. As subsequent chapters will explore, the formulation of this foreign political vision varies greatly at the local level and in response to national political developments. Nonetheless, at the collective level, globalized nationalism has allowed these parties to cooperate at the international level. The populist radical right in Europe have developed for the ﬁrst time a coherent foreign-political message – ‘Europe for the Europeans’ – and it remains to be seen how the European electorate will react. Acronyms AN AE AS AS BNP DF DPP DVU COMECON EU FF FN FPÖ IMF ITS LDPR LN LPF LPR MÍE ́ P MS-FT NATO

Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) Alternativa Ẽspagnola (Spanish Alternative) Azione Sociale (Social Action) Alternativa Sociale (Social Alternative) British National Party Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) Danish People’s Party Deutsche Volksunion (German People’s Union) Council for Mutual Economic Assistance European Union Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) Front national (French National Front) Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party) International Monetary Fund Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Group Liberal Democratic Party of Russia Lega Nord (Northern League) Lijst Pim Fortuyn (Pim Fortuyn List) Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families) Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (Hungarian Justice and Life Party) Movimento Sociale-Fiamma Tricolore (Social Movement-Tricolor Flame) North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

‘The Nation: Real or Imagined’, Mortimer, E. and Fine, R. (eds.), The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism (London: I.B. Tauris & Co.), pp. 41–2. 159 Betz (2004), op. cit., chp. 2.

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NPD NS ÖVP PiS PRM REP RPR RWA SPR-RSČ SVP UDF UEN UN VB VB WTO

Europe for the Europeans

Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany) National Party (Czech Republic) Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian Peoples’ Party) Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) Partidul România Mare (Party of Great Romania) Republikaner (The Republicans) Rassemblement pour la République (Rally for the Republic) Right Wing Authoritarianism Sdruženi pro republiku-Republikánská strana Československa (Association for the Republic-Republican Party of Czechoslovakia) Schweizer Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party) Union for French Democracy Union for Europe of the Nations United Nations Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block) Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) World Trade Organization

References Altemeyer, R. (1981), Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press). Ash, T.G. (2002), ‘The Price of Parsley’, The Guardian, July 25, pp. 7–16. Austin, G. et al. (2005), Turks in Europe: Why Are We Afraid? (London: Foreign Policy Centre). Austin, G. and Parker, K. (2005) ‘The Mono-Cultural Delusion: Turkey and Migration Politics’, in Austin, et al. Betz, H.-G. (2004), La droite populiste en Europe : Extrême et démocarate? (Paris: Autrement). — (2002), ‘Conditions Favouring the Success and Failure of Radical Right-wing Populist Parties in Contemporary Democracies’, in Mény and Surel (eds.). Bilefsky, D. (2006), ‘Danish Wake-up Call on Islam’, International Herald Tribune, . Bundesministerium des Innern (eds.) (1993), Verfassungsschutzbericht 1992 (Bonn: Bundesministerium des Innern). Canoy, M. et al. (2006), ‘Migration and Public Perception’, Bureau of European Policy Advisors, European Commission, . Chebel-d’Appolonia, A. (2006), ‘How Wonderful It Is to “Hate”: The Use of AntiMigrant Sentiments by ERPs’, paper presented at the CEVIPOF Conference on ‘The Radical Right and its Impact on Migration Politics and Policies’, Paris, France, the New York University in Paris, Center for Political Research at Sciences Po, 17–18 November. Clark D. et al. (2005), A New Deal for Social Europe (London: Foreign Policy Centre). Crick, B. (2005), ‘Populism, Politics and Democracy’, Democratization 12:5, 625–32. Department of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on

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International Relations (2004), ‘Report on Global Anti-Semitism’, US Department of State, . Davies, N. (1996), Europe: A History (Oxford University Press). European Commission (2006), ‘Attitudes towards European Union Enlargement’, European Commission: Special Eurobarometer, . Friedman, N. (1967), ‘Nativism’, Phylon 28:4, 408–15. Gallis, P. et al. (2005), ‘Muslims in Europe: Integration Policies in Selected Countries’, Congressional Service Reports on Foreign Policy and Regional Affairs, . Gallup International Association, (2006), Voice of the People 2006: What the World Thinks on Today’s Global Issues, (Gallup International Association). Goldhagen, D. (2004), ‘The Globalization of Anti-Semitism’, Christian Action for Israel, . Greven, T. (2006), ‘Rechtsextreme Globalisierungskritik:Anti-globaler Gegenentwurf zu Neoliberalismus und Global Governance’, in Greven and Grumke (eds.). Greven, T. and Grumke, T. (eds.) (2006), Globalisierter Rechtsextremismus? Die extremistische Rechte in der Ära der Globalisierung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften). Grumke, T. (2002), ‘Freiheitsrechte der Völker zurückfordern’, Deutsche Stimme 3. — (2006), ’Die transnationale Infrastruktur der extremistischen Rechten’, in Greven and Grumke (eds.). Gurﬁnkiel, M. (2006), ‘Le Pen France’s Le Pen To Strike a Deal With Muslims’, New York Sun, . Grifﬁn, R. (2000), ‘Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the ‘Post-facist’ Era’, Journal of Political Ideologies 5:2, 163–78. Hainsworth, P. (2000), The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream (London: Pinter). Herf, J. (1984), Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). International Institute for Strategic Studies (2005), ‘Muslims in Europe: The Challenge of Integration’, Strategic Comments 12:2. Kaldor, M. (2004), ‘Nationalism and Globalisation’, Nations and Nationalism 10:1–2, 161–77. Kiss, Y. (2007), ‘Xenophones, not Workers are Uniting Across Europe’, The Guardian, 29 January. Krastev, I. (2007), ‘The populist moment’, Eurozine.com, . Krastev, I. (2007), ‘Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus’, Journal of Democracy,18; 4, 57. Krichevsky, L. (1998), ‘Russian Right-winger Gives Long Anti-Semitic Tirade’, Jewish News Weekly, . Larrabee, S.F. (2006), ‘Danger and Opportunity in Eastern Europe’, Foreign Affairs 85:6. Liang, Christina (2002), German Far Right Ideology in the Decade of German Uniﬁcation, thèse no. 641, IUHEI, Geneva. Luedtke, A. (2005), ‘European Integration, Public Opinion and Immigration Policy Testing the Impact of National Identity’, European Union Politics 6:1, 83–112.

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Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.) (2002), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke: Palgave). Merkl, P. (ed.) (1997), The Revival of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties. Minkenberg, M. (1997), ‘The New Right in France and Germany: Nouvelle Droite, Neue Rechte, and the New Right Radical Parties’, in Merkl (ed.). Moїsi, D. (2007), ‘The Clash of Emotions: Fear, Humiliation, Hope and the New World Order’, Foreign Affairs 86:1. Mortimer, E. and Fine, R. (eds.) (1999), The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism (London: I.B. Tauris & Co.). Mudde, C. (2007), Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Norris, P. (2005), Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nye, Jr., J., (2000) Understanding International Conﬂicts: An Introduction to Theory and History, 3rd edition. (New York: Longman Publishing Group). Poggioli, S. (2006), ‘Europe’s Right Turn Anti-Immigrant Policy Boosts France’s Le Pen Again’, radio broadcast, National Public Radio, 12 January. Prizell, I. (1998), National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rassen, S. der and Völker (1990)‚ ‘Die USA als Richter der Welt? Serie zur Geschichte und Gegenwart des US-Imperialismus, 2 Teil’, DNZ, 21 September. Republikaner bekunden Mitgefühl mit den Opfern (2001) Der Republikaner . Ritter, M. (1996), ‘Droht eine Weltwirtschafts-Revolution?’, Der Republikaner 11. Savage, T. (2004), ‘Europe and Islam: Crescent Waxing, Cultures Clashing’, The Washington Quarterly, 27:3, 25–50. Schain, M. (2002), Shadows Over Europe: The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Scharenberg, A. (2006), ‘Brücke zum Mainstream – Mainstream als Brücke: Europäische Rechtsparteien und ihre Politik gegen Einwanderung’, in Greven and Grumke (eds.). Schorr, D. (2006), ‘Iran’s Holocaust-denial Conference: a Community of Hate’, The Christian Science Monitor, . Smith, A.D. (1995), Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity). — (1999), ‘The Nation: Real or Imagined’, in Mortimer and Fine (eds.). Taggart, P. (2004), ‘Populism and Representative Politics in Contemporary Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9:3, 269–88. — (1998), ‘A Touchstone of Dissent: Euroskeptism in Contemporary Western European Party Systems’, European Journal of Political Research 33:3, 363–88. Tamás, G.M., ‘Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution, Eastern Europe Today,’ Eurozine.com, < http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-09-18-tamas-en.html>. Weitzman, M. (2006), ‘Antisemitismus und Holocaust-Leugnung: Permanente Elemente des globalen Rechtsextremismus’, in Greven and Grumke (eds.).

Chapter 2

Against the ‘Green Totalitarianism’: Anti-Islamic Nativism in Contemporary Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe Hans-Georg Betz

Introduction A few days before the Belgian parliamentary election in 2003, a relatively unknown candidate for the Senate, Marc Joris, started a letter campaign among Antwerp’s Jewish community soliciting their support for the upcoming election. The incident would probably have gone unnoticed, had Marc Joris not come from the ranks of the then Vlaams Blok (today Vlaams Belang), at the time one of Western Europe’s most extremist right-wing populist parties, which in the past had been associated with both anti-Semitism and Holocaust negationism. The letter was part of a larger campaign by the party designed to modify its image. The most remarkable example was an interview with Filip Dewinter, the party’s most prominent politician, with the orthodox Jewish newspaper Hamishpacha a few months before the election.1 In this interview, Dewinter not only made explicit reference to the suffering the Jews had experienced throughout history, including the Holocaust, but also presented himself as an admirer of Jewish culture and traditions, which had marked ‘our identity’ and therefore was ‘a part of European culture’. In short, Dewinter implied, the Vlaams Blok had no problems with the Jewish community in Belgium. The problem was with the Muslim community. As Dewinter put it, ‘Our culture cannot adapt itself to the Muslim way of life. We will never be able to live in harmony with each other. The way we think is completely different.’ Therefore, the Jewish community should look at the Vlaams Blok as allies, particularly with respect to the State of Israel, which Dewinter characterized as ‘a piece of Europe in the Middle East, the only democracy in the Middle East.’ Israel and the Vlaams Blok had the same enemy: Israel’s war against Palestinian terrorism was the same battle as that which the Vlaams Blok and other right-wing populist parties were ﬁghting ‘against Islam in Europe.’ Dewinter’s intervention was clearly designed to gain political respectability for the Vlaams Blok and thus undermine the strategy of marginalization (referred to as cordon sanitaire), which the major political parties had pursued with respect to 1

‘Antwerpse Joden achter Vlaams Blok’, Hamishpacha, (12 March 2003).

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Belgium’s radical populist right since its rise to prominence in the early 1990s. At the same time, it was an attempt to capitalize on growing public concern about Muslim fundamentalism (which Dewinter at one point assailed as ‘Green totalitarianism’) in the wake of 11 September 2001 in order to justify the party’s positions on immigration. As the party put it in one of its pamphlets, its programme had nothing to do with racism or ‘hatred toward others’ but was merely an expression of the desire to assert and defend ‘the distinctiveness [eigenheid] of our culture’ and way of life.2 For Filip Dewinter, his party’s main political priority was to safeguard the ‘right to identity’ and assure that Flemings would remain ‘boss in [their] own country.’3 This required above all a radical reversal of the prevailing immigration policies, which had allowed foreigners to enter the country, whose culture and values were fundamentally alien, if not hostile, to those of the West. The only way for Flanders (and, by extension, Europe) to preserve its identity and prevent cultural suicide was to introduce and observe a politics of selective exclusion, particularly with respect to migrants from Muslim countries. The Vlaams Blok has hardly been the ﬁrst and only party on the radical populist right to adopt identitarian themes in support of a politics of selective exclusion. In fact, the appeal to questions of culture and identity represents a central ideological instrument of radical right-wing populist strategy, which has allowed the radical populist right to promote itself not only as a staunch defender of cultural distinctiveness but also as a champion of western values and liberal democratic principles.4 The radical populist right’s justiﬁcation for its politics of selective exclusion derives its logic from arguments about the right to difference and recognition, designed to counter charges of xenophobia and racism. Ideologically, the focus is no longer on questions of inequality but, as Pierre-André Taguieff put it some time ago, on ‘the inability to communicate, of being incommensurable or incompatible’. As a result, ‘exclusion is given a place of honor in the general demand of the right to difference’.5 The emergence of exclusionary populist ideology in recent years is not, as is sometimes maintained, a revival of fascism or neo-fascism in postmodern guise; rather, it is a revival of an older strand of virulent nationalism – nativism. Historically, nativism has been associated primarily with settler societies, such as Australia, Canada and the US, where nativist movements played a major role in shaping political culture, particularly in the early years of the republic.6 For this reason, there might be hesitation to adopt this concept to analyse the development of contemporary radical right-wing populism in Western Europe. However, as I will try to show in what follows, there are striking parallels between American nineteenthcentury nativism and contemporary radical right-wing populist ideology in Western

2 Vlaams Blok (2003), Aanpassen of terugkeren (Brussels: Vlaams Blok), p. 8. 3 Dewinter, F. (2000), Baas in Eigen Land (Brussels: Uitgeverij Egmont), p. 11. 4 See Betz and H.-G. (2004), La droite populiste en Europe: extreme et démocrate? (Paris: Autrement). 5 Taguieff and P.-A. (1994), ‘From Race to Culture: The New Right’s View of European Identity’, Telos 98–99, pp. 122, 124. 6 On Canadian Nativism see See, S. (2000), ‘“An Unprecedented Inﬂux”: Nativism and Irish Famine Immigration to Canada’, American Review of Canadian Studies 30(4), pp. 429–53.

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Europe, which suggest that there is considerable heuristic value in using this concept to further our understanding of important developments on the contemporary radical populist right. Nativism Nativism emerged in the early nineteenth century in the US, at a time when the new country was faced with a ﬁrst mass wave of immigrants from Europe, many of them Roman Catholic peasants from Ireland and Germany.7 It was a defensive response on the part of the original settler community to newcomers, who were seen as threatening the culture, basic values and institutions of that community.8 The white, native-born Protestants responded to the immigrants with resentment and open hostility, reﬂecting wide-spread fears that mass immigration was part of ‘a Papal plot to subvert American liberty and seize control of the United States politically through the use of slavish Catholic immigrant minions’. At the height of the anti-immigrant backlash in the 1840s and 1850s, nativist groups formed the Know Nothing party (also known as the American Party), a political association designed to ﬁght the ‘despotic faith’ (Catholicism) that in their view was seeking to ‘uproot the tree of Liberty’.9 The party attracted: working class and middle class voters angered by the job competition from immigrants, the increase in crime, public drunkenness, and pauperism that accompanied immigration, the supposed pollution of the body politic by ignorant immigrant voters, and an assertiveness by Catholic clergymen that supposedly threatened the nation’s Protestant values and institutions.

Among other things, the party demanded that the residence requirement for new immigrants be extended from ﬁve to 21 years, that immigrants be disenfranchised until they had met the new residence requirement, and, generally, that ‘native-born’ Americans receive preferential treatment.10 Although the political movement proved rather short-lived – with nativism soon losing out to the question of slavery as the dominant issue of the day – it left a signiﬁcant imprint on American life. For one, the movement’s strident antiimmigrant campaign, which occasionally led to violence, was instrumental in putting an end to the mass migration of the mid-century.11 More importantly, its nativist ideas continued to play a signiﬁcant role for the rest of the century and

7 Billington, R. (1964), The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books). 8 On the distinction between settlers and immigrants see Huntington, S. (2000), ‘Reconsidering Immigration: Is Mexico a Special Case?’ (Washington: Center for Immigration Studies.) 9 McPherson, J. (1992), ‘Patterns of Prejudice’, The New Republic, 19 October, p. 45. 10 Holt, M., ‘Nativism’. . 11 Cohn, R. (2000), ‘Nativism and the End of the Mass Migration of the 1840s and 1850s’, Journal of Economic History, 60(2), pp. 361–383.

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well into the twentieth century, spawning new arguments for exclusion.12 Thus, at the end of the century, at a time of increased immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, various authors advanced the notion that American institutions were derived from the ‘Teutonic’ parts of Europe and might therefore ‘be compatible only with immigrants of Teutonic (Anglo-Saxon or German) immigrants’.13 Finally, in the late twentieth century, when the country was faced with a growing inﬂux of immigrants from developing countries, the focus increasingly shifted to the allegedly ‘huge burden’ the new arrivals imposed on the American taxpayer. Nativists argued that because new immigrants generally had lower skill levels, they were more dependent on public services than earlier immigrant groups.14 American nativism was originally the expression of an ethnocultural upsurge, fed by deep-seated fears of the effects of mass immigration on American society and the polity. These fears were fed by suspicions that newly arriving immigrants held values that were fundamentally incompatible with American democratic traditions and institutions. Thus, Catholic traditions were seen as ‘dangerously un-American because they did not harmonize easily with the concept of individual freedom embedded in the national culture’.15 These fears and suspicions turned American nativism increasingly into a profoundly political movement seeking to preserve the ‘ethno-national dominance’ of the Protestant majority either through exclusion or by forcing newcomers to assimilate to the dominant – that is, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – value system.16 In the nativists’ eyes, immigration represented a Trojan horse designed by the European monarchies – and later by European anarchists, communists and other radical movements – to subvert American liberty and democracy. Typical examples of this view were the titles of two inﬂuential books by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and one of the founding fathers of American nativism. The ﬁrst, published in 1834, bore the title The Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States; the second, published one year later, was published under the title, The Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Immigration. Morse’s writings were highly inﬂuential in perpetuating the notion that the Catholic Church was ‘an anti-democratic, dangerous, and even evil institution’ and immigration the instrument ‘of the Catholic Church’s supposed quest for world domination’.17 As late as 1960, when John F. Kennedy ran for president, evangelical 12 Higham, J. (2002), Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, rev. edn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press); Crawford, J. (2001), Cycles of Nativism in U.S. History (Washington: The National Immigration Forum). 13 Vedder, R., Gallaway, L. and Moore, S. (2000), ‘The Immigration Problem Then and Now’, The Independent Review, 4(3), p. 350. 14 Ibid., p. 354. 15 Higham, J. (1972), Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum Press), p. 6; cited in Berlet, C (2001), ‘Nativism’, The Public Eye 15(3), p. 10. 16 Vedder, R., Gallaway, L. and Moore, S. (2000), ‘The Immigration Problem Then and Now’, The Independent Review, 4(3), pp. 418, 420. 17 Gall, R. (2003), ‘The Past Should not Shackle the Present: The Revival of a Legacy of Religious Bigotry by Opponents of School Choice’, New York University Annual Survey of American Law, 59, pp. 415–416.

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Protestant leaders raised their voice warning that electing Kennedy ‘would be like handing the Oval Ofﬁce to the Antichrist’. And the Reverend Billy Graham, one of the most prominent leaders of America’s Protestant Fundamentalist movement, wrote at the time that the Vatican ‘does all in its power to control the governments of nations’.18 Chip Berlet, one of the leading experts on American right-wing extremism, has deﬁned nativism as a defensive form of nationalism that ‘doubts the suitability for citizenship (or even residency) of those suspected of being unable or unwilling to function as loyal and patriotic citizens’.19 However, nativism should not be confounded with opposition to immigration per se nor is it necessarily the same as xenophobia and racism. As Carol M. Swain and Russ Nieli have noted, the focus of American nativists has generally been to ‘stress the central importance of AngloSaxon ethnic and cultural hegemony as factors contributing to the success of the United States as a stable and progressive society’.20 Samuel P. Huntington, in a recent article warning of the threat to American identity posed by mass immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries, has reiterated this point. Huntington argues that contemporary American identity is largely deﬁned ‘in terms of culture and creed’, which: was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill’.

In Huntington’s view, mass immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries poses a fundamental challenge to the foundations of American identity, both in terms of the survival of English as ‘a single national culture’ and the survival of its ‘core Anglo-Protestant culture’.21 It would be unfair to characterize the author of The Clash of Civilizations as a right-wing extremist or to put him in the same league as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Filip Dewinter or even the standard bearer of contemporary American populist nativism cum protectionism, Patrick Buchanan.22 However, as I will show in what follows, the arguments he advances are virtually identical with those advanced by the contemporary Western European populist right to bolster their campaign against migrants, particularly those from Muslim countries. No wonder the European radical 18 Goodstein, L. (2004), ‘How the Evangelicals and Catholics Joined Forces’, The New York Times, 30 May. 19 Berlet (2001), op. cit., p. 9. 20 Swain, C. and Nieli, R. (2003), Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 17. 21 Huntington, S. (2004), ‘The Hispanic Challenge’, Foreign Policy, April. 22 For a critical approach to Huntington’s recent writings see Golway, T (2004), ‘The Return of the Know-Nothings’, America, 29 March, p. 6. As the title indicates, Golway sees Huntington in the tradition of American nativism.

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populist right has enthusiastically adopted Huntington’s central argument – namely that ‘the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conﬂicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically deﬁned groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities’ – to lend intellectual legitimacy to their campaign against immigration and multiculturalism.23 In the process, the arguments advanced by nineteenth-century American nativists have made a reappearance to bolster the populist right’s rhetorical assault on Muslim migrants and fan the ﬂames of Islamophobia, largely replacing the virulent antiSemitism characteristic of the traditional extreme right. Its ideological justiﬁcation is found in the appeal to the ‘right to difference’ based on the notion that all cultures are equal, but largely incompatible, which makes the idea of cultural merging and mutual enrichment advanced by the advocates of multiculturalism not only a foolish, but also a highly dangerous proposition. The nativist challenge posed by the radical populist right reﬂects the growing importance of sociocultural conﬂicts at the expense of traditional conﬂicts over material distribution. Or, as Filip Dewinter has put it, in the twenty-ﬁrst century the main political cleavage will be between identity and multiculturalism.24 Nativism, Islamophobia and the Radical Populist Right Radical right-wing populist parties have generally been characterized primarily as anti-immigrant parties. This is not wrong, but rather too simplistic. It ignores important developments in the evolution of these parties’ ideology, which has led to signiﬁcant differentiations and modiﬁcations with respect to their position on immigration and questions of citizenship. Particularly after Western European governments progressively tightened immigration rules during the past decade in order to stave off the electoral gains of the radical right, radical right-wing populist parties started to shift their focus to questions of integration and particularly multiculturalism. No longer was the main emphasis of the parties’ political mobilization on preventing immigrants from entering Western Europe, but on how to deal with the existent resident alien population. While a number of parties increasingly recognized and acknowledged that the vast majority of aliens had come to stay, they strongly objected to liberal trends that accepted ethnic and cultural diversity as legitimate and integral to full and equal participation in society. At the same time, the radical populist right vehemently opposed any attempt to help migrants reclaim, preserve, and foster their identity as well as any policies designed to promote cultural awareness and understanding. The new emphasis was on ‘integration before immigration’, bolstered by the argument that further immigration ‘impedes integration’. According to this argument, new immigrant groups were even less prepared than ‘ﬁrst generation migrants’ to integrate themselves into their host society since they could always rely for support on the already existing immigrant communities, which ‘often constitute their own 23 Huntington, S. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 21. 24 Dewinter (2000), op. cit., p. 14.

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25

separate worlds’. To counter these developments, the radical populist right called for an end to the failed ‘multicultural experiment’, which was to be replaced by policies that give foreign residents a clear choice – either to integrate themselves or to go home. As the Vlaams Blok put it in its party program, peaceful coexistence between migrants and Flemings presupposes that migrants ‘unequivocally choose assimilation. They must become Flemings among the Flemings. Those who don’t want to or who can’t do it have to return to their country of origin.’26 This line of reasoning substantially changes the nature of the radical populist right’s discourse on immigration and integration. No longer is the focus on the desirability of integration per se, but on the conditions that make integration possible and likely and those that do not. As the passage from the Vlaams Blok programme cited earlier makes clear, for the radical populist right, successful integration depends both on the willingness and the ability of foreigners to adopt their host country’s culture, values, and way of life. Willingness and ability, in turn, crucially depend on the commensurability and compatibility of the cultural disposition of each individual immigration group. For those who share the prevailing values, integration poses no problem at all; for those whose cultural disposition is incompatible with the prevailing values, integration is impossible. They should be returned to their country of origin. Jean-Yves Le Gallou and Philippe Olivier, two prominent former members of the Front National, were among the ﬁrst on the radical populist right to promote this argument and spell out the consequences. In a Front National pamphlet on immigration written in the early 1990s, the two authors advanced the following thesis: The experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth century shows that France has had no problem receiving and assimilating foreigners of European origin and generally Catholic (Italians, Poles, Belgians, then Portuguese and Spanish). By contrast, the experience of the past twenty years shows that the same has not been true with immigrants from the Maghreb, Turkey, India and Pakistan or Black Africa. The establishment of ethnic quarters and ghettoes, the crisis of the suburbs (banlieues) show that with the population from the Third World, integration does not work… The history of Europe and of the world shows that there has never been an example of an enduring, peaceful coexistence between peoples of different ethnic and religious origin sharing the same territory… An additional matter of concern is the growing role of Islam within the foreign communities. More than two-thirds of all immigrants currently entering France come from Muslim countries [ … ], and that at a time when Islam is in full expansion… Yet throughout history there has never been enduring peaceful coexistence between the Europeans and Christians on the one hand and the Orientals and Muslims on the other.

From this the authors concluded that continued immigration from developing countries represented a fundamental threat to France’s national identity, its European

25 De Smedt, D. (2003), ‘Volgmigratie – Blijvende instroom’ Vlaams Blok Magazine, 5 May, . 26 Vlaams Blok (2002), Een toekomst voor Vlaanderen: Programma en standpunten van het Vlaams Blok (Brussels: Vlaams Blok), p. 19.

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and Christian heritage, and its national sovereignty.27 Under the circumstances, France was faced with a choice: either to continue to subject itself to the unimpeded inﬂow of Developing World immigrants; or to reverse the inﬂux and effect the ‘progressive departure’ of those immigrants who turn out to be ‘inassimilable’.28 The Front National and the Vlaams Blok were the ﬁrst radical right-wing populist parties to propose concrete measures to confront the growth of Islam in France. In its 50-point anti-immigration programme, ‘Immigration – 50 mesures concrètes’ from 1991, the Front National called for, among other things, a stop to the construction of mosques in France and for strict regulations concerning the opening of Koranic schools and Islamic centers in the country. Following the Front National’s lead, the Vlaams Blok, in the party’s ‘70-point programme for solving the immigration problem,’ put together by Filip Dewinter in 1992, went even further stating that Islam was an ‘anti-Western and intolerant religion’. In Dewinter’s view, it had become increasingly obvious during the past several years that there was a ‘fundamental and irreconcilable antagonism between Islam and Western values’. Therefore, it was of paramount importance to do everything possible to stop and reverse the expansion of Islam in Belgium, particularly by drastically reducing the number of mosques in the country. Given the fact that mosques served not only as houses of worship but also as community centres, they contributed to the formation of separate ethnic and cultural communities and thus to the ‘Maghrebinization’ (magrebijnisering) of whole districts in Belgian cities. Putting a stop to the construction of new mosques, to be followed by a ‘drastic reduction’ in the number of already existing mosques, was therefore the best way to respond effectively to the formation of ghettoes in the country’s cities.29 At the same time, Dewinter warned of the growing danger stemming from Islamic fundamentalism. As early as 1993, the party maintained that fundamentalism was intrinsic to Islam, for a doctrine that ‘preaches holy war, assassination, forced conversions, oppression of women, slavery and extermination of “inﬁdels”, will automatically lead to what we now call fundamentalism.’30 In response, the radical populist right increasingly stressed the notion of identity as the most important weapon in the struggle against Islam. The point was most famously made by Pim Fortuyn in The Netherlands, who in 1997 published a polemic against multiculturalism and the Dutch policy of integration entitled, Against the Islamization of Our Culture – Dutch Identity as a Foundation. The book’s core argument was that Islamic culture, values and norms were diametrically opposed to those predominant in modern Western societies: the separation of church and state, democracy, and gender equality, religious tolerance and freedom of opinion, individual responsibility and respect for minorities.

27 Le Gallou, J.-Y. and Olivier, P (1992), Immigration: Le Front national fait le point (Paris: Éditions Nationales.), pp. 19–23. 28 Ibid., p. 35. 29 Dewinter, F. (1992), ‘Immigratie: De oplossingen. 70 voorstellen ter oplossing van het vreemdlingenprobleem’. . 30 Vlaams Blok (1993), no. 6, cited in Mudde, C. (2000), The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press), p. 103.

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Unlike other right-wing populist leaders, Fortuyn could claim to have personal experience with Islamic intolerance. As has been pointed out, the key to Fortuyn’s political views was his open homosexuality. Fortuyn’s diatribes against multiculturalism were a direct consequence of his aversion to, and loathing for, Islam, a religion, which in his view was deeply offensive toward women and members of minorities such as himself – as reﬂected in an infamous statement by a fundamentalist Moroccan imam who had found refuge in The Netherlands and who on Dutch television characterized homosexuality as a disease and in his sermons charged that Europeans were lower than pigs because they tolerated homosexuals in their midst.31 As René Cuperus has pointed out, Fortuyn’s invectives against Islam were meant ‘to sound the alarm’ while at the same time lent legitimacy to what he considered to be his personal mission as a writer and politician, namely ‘to defend hard fought-for Western liberal and democratic freedoms’ against a deeply suspect religion, which in his view was the expression of a fundamentally ‘backward culture’.32 Unlike modern societies, which place central importance to individual responsibility, Fortuyn noted that Islam accorded prime importance to collective responsibility, subject to religious law, and the family, while at the same time considering women inferior to men. From this it followed that Muslim immigrants could only be integrated into Dutch society if they abandoned their traditional worldview and adopted Western values and ‘secular, democratic procedures for resolving disputes’.33 Fortuyn’s arguments and propositions were similar to those advanced by established radical right-wing populist parties elsewhere in Western Europe. A prominent example is the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), which after splitting off the Danish Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet) in the 1990s became a major factor in Danish politics. One reason for the party’s success has been its uncompromising position on Islam. Mogens Camre, the party’s representative in the European parliament, set the tone when he charged as early as 2000 that Islam was ‘not only a religion but a fascist political ideology mixed with a religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages, an insult to human rights’. While noting that there was nothing one could do to prevent Muslims from ruining their own societies, ‘we ought to protect our own society. People who seek to wage a holy war should not be in Denmark.’34 A year later, the party made Islamophobia central to its campaign for the parliamentary election of that year. A few months before the election the party issued a book-length pamphlet entitled, Danmarks fremdtid: dit land – dit valg… (Denmark’s Future: this country, this election…). The cover of the pamphlet already provided a glimpse of its content: It displayed two young Muslim militants, one 31 Neurink, J. (2001), ‘Double Dutch’ in Al-Ahram Weekly, 5–11 July, . 32 Cuperus, R. (2005), ‘Roots of European Populism: The Case of Pim Fortuyn’s Populist Revolt in The Netherlands’ in Political Survival on the Extreme Right, Casals (ed.), (Barcelona: ICPS). 33 Hooper, J. (2002), ‘The Twisty Politics of a Far Right Politician’, The Guardian, 7 May. 34 Camre, M. (2000), ‘Islam kan ikke integreres’, .

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brandishing a pistol, the other what appears to be the Palestinian ﬂag, surrounded by a large group of young Muslim demonstrators. The picture was taken years earlier at an anti-Israel demonstration in Copenhagen. The intent of the pamphlet was to warn Danish voters of the attempts of militant Muslims to subvert Danish society and turn it into a country dominated by foreigners. (In order to drive home the point, the pamphlet featured a lengthy discussion – complete with a wealth of photographs, many of them depicting Muslim women wearing a head-scarf or even a chador – of life in Kreuzberg, a district in Berlin with a large Turkish population.) Like Fortuyn, the authors of the pamphlet charged, among other things, that Islam was a ‘political programme’ that promoted ‘medieval practices’ and that therefore was incompatible with democracy (as the party put it: ‘Islam and democracy – the impossible combination’). At the same time, it made a second point, which was to become increasingly important in radical right-wing populist campaigns against Islam, namely that Islam was not only fundamentally incompatible with democracy, but was also incompatible with Christianity.35 In the wake of 11 September 2001, virtually all parties and formations on the radical right made the confrontation with Islam a central political issue. Characterizing Islam as a fundamental threat to the West and its way of life allowed even extremist parties such as the Vlaams Blok to launch a frontal attack on both Islam and Western Europe’s rapidly growing Muslim immigrant population without automatically being charged with propagating racism. On the contrary, by adopting Fortuyn’s line of argumentation, the radical populist right managed to promote themselves as genuine defenders of secularism, democracy, and Western values in general. Among the ﬁrst to lay out the new strategy was, once again, Jean-Yves Le Gallou (this time, however, as a leading representative of Bruno Mégret’s renegade Mouvement National Républicain). In a speech delivered some three months after 11 September, Le Gallou argued that the attack against the US marked the end of the illusion that with the collapse of the Soviet Union history had come to an end.36 Instead, it heralded the beginning of a new global conﬂict – a clash of civilizations, as analysed by Huntington, which was likely to dominate most of the ﬁrst half of the twenty-ﬁrst century. This clash of civilizations had two primary causes. On the one hand, what Le Gallou called ‘the return of archaisms’; on the other hand, ‘the expansion of Islam’ as a ‘war religion’ (religion guerrière). The two processes were interrelated: in the Arab and Muslim world, the return to archaisms meant a return to Islam; in the West, the expansion of Islam as a war religion meant nothing less than the beginning of a ‘reverse colonization.’ As Le Gallou put it, when ‘they try to impose the chador on our streets and schools, mosques in our neighborhoods, the Ramadan in our cities and hallal meat in our canteens, it’s a culture war, a religious war which they wage on us. It’s a total war!’ Under these circumstances, the ﬁrst step toward confronting the threat was to deﬁne the main enemy – what Le Gallou called l’Islam conquérant. Islam threatened France both from the outside and the inside. Against the outside enemy, Le Gallou argued, France would only prevail if 35 Dansk Folkeparti (2001), Danmarks fremdit – dit land, dit valg… (Copenhagen: Dansk Folkeparti). 36 Le Gallou and J.-Y. (2001), ‘Le retour de l’Histoire’, Paris, 8 December.

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it opted for a politics of political and military strength. Against the threat from the inside, what France needed was a moral revival, which would lay the foundation for what Le Gallou called a patriotisme de civilization. For, as he put it, what ‘we have to defend today is more than France, it’s our civilization, meaning European civilization in its French expression.’ In the years since 11 September 2001, the claims and charges advanced by Fortuyn, Le Gallou, Camre and other leading advocates of a hardline position on Islam have come to dominate and deﬁne the radical populist right’s nativist discourse on immigration. At the same time, both established radical right-wing populist parties as well as relative newcomers have increasingly appealed to anti-Islamic sentiments to garner support for their cause. The Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, for instance, who gained notoriety abroad as The Netherlands’ most vocal opponent to the European Union Constitution, owes his political prominence to a large extent to his vocal campaign against radical Islam. Wilders, who many consider the heir to Pim Fortuyn, has maintained that Islam and democracy are incompatible because Islam preaches a ‘fascist body of thought, which threatens to destroy our democracy’. Muslims, if they seek to live in The Netherlands on a permanent basis, must therefore put the Dutch constitution above the Koran.37 Similar statements have been made by Robert Spieler, a former Front national deputy and founder of Alsace d’Abord, a regionalist radical right-wing populist party, which in the regional elections in 2004 received almost 10 per cent of the vote in Alsace. Like other parties on the radical right, Alsace d’Abord promotes itself as a staunch defender of cultural identity particularly against the Islamic threat. In fact, Spieler has maintained that Islam represents a ‘totalitarian religion’ that will never be a ‘European religion’. At the same time, he has warned that those who believe in the existence of a ‘moderate Islam’ not only delude themselves with regard to Islam’s true nature, but do not understand the real threat of Islam’s eventual ‘reconquest of Europe’ (reconquête de l’Europe par l’islam).38 The point was most forcefully made by Filip Dewinter in a programmatic speech delivered in late 2002 in his stronghold, Antwerp, and entitled, Het groene totalitarisme: De kolonisatie van Europa! (The green totalitarianism: the colonization of Europe.)39 Dewinter started his speech with a quote from a radical Islamist reported in the Italian daily La Republica predicting that it was only a matter of time until the ‘Green banner of Islam would wave over Rome, then Italy, and ﬁnally Europe.’ Citing other Islamists who had made similar claims with respect to France and Belgium, Dewinter came right to the central point of his discourse: Islam 37 See ‘Islam verderfelijk gedachtegoed’, De Volkskrant, 31 October (2004); Wilders, G. (2005), ‘Onafhangkelijkheidsverklaring’. , p. 12; Schreiber, M (2005), ‘Terror’s Unforeseen Consequences,’ PBS, 25 January, ; Gartner, T. (2004), ‘Tolerance Tested in Holland’, The Washington Times, 20 December. 38 Spieler, R (2004), ‘De l’islam en Alsace, de l’immigration’, 12 October, . 39 Dewinter, F. (2002), ‘Het groene totalitarisme: De kolonisatie van Europa!’, speech given at the Colloquium ‘Karel Martelstichting’, Antwerp, 20 November.

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was a ‘religion of conquest’ (Veroveringsgodsdienst), which disdained and rejected Western values and the Western way of life. In fact, European culture was nothing less than the ‘archenemy’ of the ‘Green totalitarianism – Islamism’. The attacks against the US represented the beginning of a new campaign of ‘blind terror’ whose ﬁnal end was the ‘complete Islamization of humanity’. If Europe so far had failed to recognize the threat stemming from ‘Europe’s colonization by Islam’ by means of a ‘cultural jihad’, it was largely due to naïvité and misplaced tolerance, fostered by ‘subsidized anti-racism’ and political correctness. Therefore, only if Europe started to assert its cultural identity, values and norms, proud and without shame, would it be able ‘to drive Islam back to where it belongs – the other side of the Mediterranean Sea’.40 Driving Islam back across the Mediterranean Sea also seems to have been the objective of a mass organized by the Liga Veneta in October 2002, commemorating the 431st anniversary of the ‘Christian victory’ against the Turks at Lepanto (7 October 1571), which saved Europe from ‘the horrors of a Muslim invasion’.41 The mass was celebrated by Don Gianni Baget Bozzo, a priest who a few months earlier had exhorted Umberto Bossi to make the defence of ‘our identity against the Islamic invasion’ a central issue in the Lega Nord’s political struggle.42 Baget Bozzo was not disappointed. During the past several years, the Lega Nord increasingly adopted a militant anti-Islam position, while at the same time promoting itself as a staunch defender of traditional ‘Christian values’. Thus, in September 2002, the Lega Nord came out strongly in favour of a law which would have made it obligatory to display a cruciﬁx in all public ofﬁces, including schools and universities. Given the symbolic character of the cruciﬁx as a symbol of Western civilization and Christian values, the law was designed not only to strengthen Italian cultural identity but also to counter the ‘arrogance and intolerance’ of Muslim organizations in Italy, which had attacked and denigrated the cruciﬁx.43 In the years that followed, the Lega’s tone with regard to Islam became even more strident. For instance, in 2004 on Holy Thursday, the Lega Nord held a public reading of Oriana Fallaci’s book La forza della ragione in front of the cathedral in Milan (where at the same time, Milan’s cardinal was performing the traditional foot-washing ritual on, among other people, a number of immigrants). The reading took place in order to remind the people of Milan of ‘the danger confronting the city and society’ stemming from ‘the violent and arrogant part of the Muslim world’.44 A year later, Roberto Calderoli, one of the Lega Nord’s leading politicians and minister for reforms, characterized the relationship between Islam and the West as a conﬂict between ‘a civilization and a non-civilization’. Calderoli was also quoted as saying that if Muslims ‘thought theirs was a great

40 See also Walt, V. (2005), ‘Life on the Front Lines,’ Time (Europe), 28 February. 41 ‘Messa Latina antica per il 431° della victoria di Lepanto,’ Una Voce Venetia, . 42 See Savoini, G. (2002), ‘Lega baluardo contro l’invasione islamica’, La Padania, 26 June. 43 See ‘Crociﬁssi contro l’Islam: la Lega li vuole dovunque’, La Repubblica, 18 September 2002; ‘Il Crociﬁsso torni nelle aule e negli ufﬁci’, Qui Lega (20 September 2002), p. 2. 44 ‘Lega Nord: Lettura Publica in Piazza Duomo Libro Fallaci’ ANSA (8 April 2004).

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civilization, let them show it. Otherwise, the door is always open. Let them return to the desert and talk with the camels, or to the jungle and talk with the apes.’45 The Lega’s pronounced and strident Islamophobia was an almost logical result of the party’s self-understanding as a primarily identitarian movement, which sought recognition of cultural diversity, identity, and difference, as Umberto Bossi afﬁrmed in his speech at the Lega Nord’s annual meeting in Pontida in June 2000.46 Confronted with what the party considered an increasingly militant and aggressive Islamic movement, the Lega Nord maintained that only by returning to the Christian roots of its civilization would Europe be able to hold its own. For, as the secretary of the renegade Lega Padana Lombardia-Lombardia Nazione and regional councillor, Roberto Bernardelli, put it, Christianity and Christian values are not only the foundations of European culture, but also the ‘fundamental bulwark against expanding Islamism, which is trying to invade our society, with the complicity and support of the centre-left.’47 Similar charges have also been advanced by the populist radical right in Switzerland, which in recent years has become a major political force in the country. This is largely due to the electoral gains of the Schweizer Volkspartei, which within a decade has managed to more than double its support at the polls. Against that, the traditional radical right – the Schweizer Demokraten – and the populist right in the canton Ticino – the Lega dei ticinesi – has experienced a considerable decline in popular support. Like its counterparts in other Western European countries, the Swiss populist radical right promotes itself as defender of national and cultural identity, particularly against the country’s growing Muslim immigrant population. The Schweizer Demokraten adopted as early as 2000 the notion, advanced by the French nouvelle droite writer Guillaume Faye, that Europe was severely threatened of being colonized by Islam, a conquering religion, which had embarked on a deliberate campaign of massive settlement designed to subjugate Europe.48 As a letter to the party’s ofﬁcial monthly paper put it with great pathos: ‘One day, our bells won’t come back from their Easter voyage, and the muezzin will replace the calls to prayer with a shrill cry from the bell towers and minarets, ﬁve times a day, with bows toward Mecca.’49 If the party could claim, in the wake of 11 September 2001, to have been justiﬁed in warning of the grave dangers posed by Islam, it was unable to exploit Islamophobia politically, particularly with regard to the Schweizer Volkspartei.50 45 Fontana, E. (2005), ‘In Arabia paragonano I leghisti ai terroristi’, Il Giornale, 22 September. 46 ‘Intervento del segretario federale, OnUmberto Bossi’, Pontida, (4 June 2000), . 47 Bernardelli, R. (2004), ‘Lombardia nazione difende I valori cristiani!’, Lega Padana Lombardia-Lombardia Nazione, 3 March, . 48 See de Seinmers, M. (2000), ‘La Colonisation de l’Europe’, Schweizer Demokrat, March–April, p. 13. 49 Ibid. 50 See Schmidhauser, W. (2004), ‘Gefahr durch den Islam’, Schweizer Demokrat, January, pp. 1–2.

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The Schweizer Volkspartei has shown itself particularly unscrupulous in constructing the image of an Islamic threat in order to attain concrete political goals. A case in point was the party’s campaign in 2004 against a proposed law put before the Swiss electorate in a referendum, which would have made it easier for long-term foreign residents to become Swiss citizens. The campaign was led by Ulrich Schlüer, a national councillor situated on the far right of the Zürich wing of the Schweizer Volkspartei, who organized a ‘Nonpartisan Committee against Mass Naturalization’ to defeat the proposal in the referendum. The committee managed to place several ads in a number of major daily papers, which strongly suggested that the adoption of the law would invariably lead to the ‘Muslimization’ of the country.51 One of the committee’s ads suggested that if the number of Muslims in the country continued to grow at the same rate as it did between 1990 and 2000 (going from 150,000 to more than 310,0000), Muslims would represent, by 2040, 72 per cent of the resident population in Switzerland. As a result, Christians would soon be a minority in the country, while Muslims would shape political issues, such as the rights of women. Given the fact that Muslims put religion over secular laws, this would create major problems.52 The party’s anti-Muslim campaign proved highly successful: in the referendum in November 2004, a majority of those participating in the vote rejected the initiative. For the party’s leadership, the outcome of the referendum was a conﬁrmation that a majority of the Swiss population shared their concern about the threat posed by Islam to democracy and liberalism. As Christoph Mörgeli, a national councillor and one of the party’s main ideologues, put it (quoting the German specialist on Islam, Hans-Peter Raddatz), a ‘religious Muslim is always also a political Muslim. This means that those who follow the religious laws must invariably come into conﬂict with the democratic legal system’, because those who base their claim to power on religious foundations cannot ‘accept the Western rule of law, which places itself above the commandments of the Koran’.53 This could mean only one thing: the silent ‘Muslimization’ of the country caused by the failed immigration policy of the past posed a deadly threat to the very foundations of the Swiss political system and Switzerland’s national identity. Islamophobia and the Quest for Political Recognition In his classic study of the nativist movement in the US, the American historian John Higham characterizes nativism as ‘an intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., “un-American”) connections’. Nativists believed 51 Schlüer, U. (2004), ‘Die Konsequenzen von Masseneinbürgerungen: Muslimisierung’, Schweizerzeit, 3 September; See also Impuls, no. 4, (2004), the ofﬁcial publication of the Schweizer Volkspartei St. Gallen, which features, among other things, a cartoon with the title ‘Federal Council 2044’ (the Federal Council is the country’s government, composed of 7 members elected from the four major political parties). The cartoon suggests that by 2044 all of the national councillors will be from the Balkans and the Middle East. 52 See Schär, M. (2004), ‘Das Kreuz mit dem Islam’, Die Weltwoche, 38. 53 Mörgeli, C. (2004), ‘Auswüchse einer fälschen Einbürgerungspolitik’, SVPja 12, p. 7.

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that ‘some inﬂuence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within… Seeing or suspecting a failure of assimilation,’ nativists charged the newcomers with disloyalty to the country. In response, they embarked on a campaign intent on destroying ‘the enemies of a distinctly American way of life’.54 If in the US nineteenth-century nativists agitated predominantly against the burgeoning Catholic community, it was because they regarded Catholicism fundamentally different from other denominations and a lethal threat to the norms and values of American AngloProtestant culture. Nobody expressed this more poignantly than Samuel Morse when he exhorted his fellow American Protestants to see ‘the truth that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.’55 For the nativists, the practical political consequences that followed from this evaluation were obvious. As the Know-Nothing Party put it in 1855: ‘The politico-religious foe is fully discovered – he must be squarely met, and put down. We want in this free land none of his political dictation.’56 Some might argue that nativism is a distinctively American phenomenon, which has to be seen in the context of its history as a settler nation. The evidence presented above, however, suggests that the term can be usefully employed to further our understanding of the nature of contemporary radical right-wing populism in Western Europe. Like the nineteenth-century nativists did with respect to Catholicism, contemporary radical right wing populist parties and movements ground their campaign against Islam on at least two, mutually reinforcing arguments: Islam is an alien religion, fundamentally incompatible with Western Europe’s secular values and way of life; and, given its ‘totalitarian’ claims and aspirations, it represents a fundamental threat to individual freedom and liberal democracy. Underlying these claims are two mutually reinforcing notions: on the one hand that ‘civilizations are made up of one type of people who are inherently different to the members of another civilization’ and on the other, that there is something ‘within Islam and in the nature of Muslim people’ that makes them inherently more prone to pursue their objectives with violent means.57 As the analysis provided above clearly demonstrates, after 11 September 2001 virtually all radical right-wing populist parties and movements have made Islam a central target of their political mobilization. There are a number of good reasons from this development. For one, with regard to the question of Islam, the radical populist right has a large percentage of public opinion on its side. For example, a 2003 French survey on immigration found that more than 60 per cent of the French population agreed with the statement that Islamic values were incompatible with

54 Higham (2002), op. cit., p. 4. 55 Cited in Golway (2004), op. cit. 56 Cited in Sinopoli, R. and Gabrielson, T (1999), ‘Mirroring Modernity: America’s Conﬂicting Identities’, Polity, 32. 57 See Lentin, A. (2005), ‘‘Racism Ten Years On’, speech delivered at the Tenth Anniversary of the Council of Europe ‘All Different – All Equal’ Campaign against Racism, Strasbourg, 26 October, .

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the values of the French Republic.58 One year later in Germany, some 70 per cent of the population agreed with the statement that Islam was incompatible with the ‘Western world’. When asked what they associated with the word ‘Islam’, over 80 per cent said ‘fanatical’ and ‘radical’ and two-thirds, ‘backward’. Only 6 per cent associated Islam with openness and tolerance. At the same time, more than 60 per cent of the respondents agreed with the suggestion that what was happening was a ‘clash of cultures’ between Islam and the Christian world. And almost the same number said they could not imagine living in a neighbourhood where there were many Muslims.59 In addition to unfavourable public opinion, there are also a growing number of public ﬁgures who have made negative and even derogatory remarks about Islam. A case in point is Oriana Fallaci, whose book La rabbia e l’orgoglio became a bestseller in a number of Western European countries (in Italy it sold one million copies within seven months), not least because of its provocative, uncompromising indictment of Islam and its ‘silent invasion’ of Italy and the rest of Western Europe. One might also mention Michel Houellebecq, one of France’s leading – and most widely translated – writers, who in 2001, after calling Islam ‘la religion la plus con’ caused a storm of indignation among the country’s Muslim community. Houellebecq went even further in his book Plateforme, in which an émigré Egyptian biochemical engineer lament the precipitous decline of his country of origin and its total intellectual void, which he attributes to the fact that Egypt adopted Islam, a religion brought to Egypt by what he calls [l]es minables du Sahara.60 Although Houellebecq was charged with inciting racial hatred for his remarks, he was acquitted and never suffered any of the sanctions usually imposed on those who transgress Western Europe’s norms on hate speech. On the contrary, in 2005 Michel Houellebecq received the Prix Interallié for his most recent book, La possibilité d’une île.61 Given the extent of anti-Islamic sentiments prevalent in Western Europe, the adoption of Islamophobia by the radical populist right might be interpreted as an attempt to gain political legitimacy and acceptance beyond the relatively circumscribed circle of sympathizers without having to abandon the identitarian and exclusionary positions at the core of their ideology. Filip Dewinter is perhaps the most prominent and emblematic case in point. In the introduction to this chapter, I already mentioned the Vlaams Blok’s attempts to ﬁnd favour with Antwerp’s Jewish community in 2003. After Belgium’s highest court in late 2004 charged the Vlaams Blok with racism, Dewinter responded quickly. He not only refounded the 58 ‘Sondage Ipsos-LCI-Le Point: Islam l’inquiétude des FrançAis’, Le Point (16 May 2003), p. 39. 59 Heitmeyer, W. (2004), ‘Die gespaltene Gesellschaft’, Die Zeit, 2 December; Noelle, E. (2004), ‘Der Kampf der Kulturen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 September. 60 Houellebecq, M. (2001), Plateforme (Paris: Flammarion), p. 261. 61 Another famous example is the French ﬁlm legend and ardent admirer of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Brigitte Bardot, whose denunciation of ‘the Islamization of France’ and its inﬁltration by Islamism in her most recent book, Un cri dans le silence, which appeared in 2003, provoked outrage among anti-racist organizations. See Schoﬁeld, H. (2003), ‘Brigitte Bardot s’attaque aux musulmans et à la France moderne’, Agence France Press, 12 May.

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party, changing its name to Vlaams Belang, he also intensiﬁed his efforts to gain respectability, particularly in view of the upcoming municipal election in 2006, in which Dewinter hoped to be elected mayor. As part of this strategy, Dewinter once again made great efforts to appeal to Antwerp’s Jewish community. Thus, in October 2004, Dewinter granted an interview to the American paper, Jewish Weekly, which he made available on his personal website. In the interview, Dewinter readily acknowledged, among other things, that Vlaams Belang was an Islamophobic party: ‘Yes, we’re afraid of Islam. The Islamization of Europe is a frightening thing. Even distinguished Jewish scholars, such as Bat Ye’or and Bernard Lewis warned for this. If this historical process continues, the Jews will be the ﬁrst victims. Europe will become as dangerous for them as Egypt or Algeria.’ Under the circumstances, Belgium’s Jews had but only one choice: if they were intent on defending Western democracy and Western civilization, ‘with its Judeo-Christian roots’, they should ‘vote for a party that wants to stop the spread of Islam in Europe’.62 It would be easy to dismiss Dewinter as a political opportunist with limited impact beyond Antwerp’s municipal boundaries. However, an editorial which appeared in the Jewish liberal paper Forward in May 2002 suggests otherwise. The author deals explicitly with the challenges that the Western European radical rights’ anti-Islamic positions posed to the Jewish community. While reafﬁrming the notion that fascism ‘remains profoundly wrong’, the editorialist put particular emphasis on the fact that ‘the main target of the far-right’s animus, Europe’s restless Muslim immigrant population, happens to be pretty high up on the list of Jewish worries as well’. The author continues that the Jewish community appreciated ‘help and support wherever we ﬁnd it, including the new right’, particularly from those like ‘Filip Dewinter’s Flemish Bloc’, which appeared to have made ‘genuine efforts at bridge-building’ and who had ‘taken a lead role in defending Israel and opposing anti-Jewish violence’.63 Under these circumstances, Dewinter’s public profession of Islamophobia – which led two anti-racist organizations to lodge a formal complaint with the Antwerp public prosecutor requesting that Dewinter be charged with inciting radical hatred – represents a perfectly rational political calculation. The radical populist right’s appeal to Islamophobia can also count on the benevolent support from a second, important sector of American opinion – conservatives and the Christian Right, who more often than not share a common view of Islam with the West European radical populist right. Take, for example, Don Feder, a columnist for a number of right-wing and Christian Right publications, who has characterized Islam ‘an atavistic cult (more ideology than religion) whose tenets glorify holy war, teach contempt for other peoples, foster toxic resentment and inspire megalomania among its followers’.64 There is also the prominent television evangelist and head of a multi-million Christian broadcasting empire Pat Robertson, who in a speech 62 ‘Interview with Filip Dewinter’, Jewish Weekly, 28 October 2005, ; See also Schwartz, A. (2005), ‘Between Haider and a Hard Place’, Haaretz, 29 August. 63 ‘Fire on the Right’, Forward, (3 May 2002). 64 Feder, D. (2005), ‘Condi Ups Ante on Crescent-Kissing – Says Islam’s a Religion of Peace,’ GrasstopsUSA.com, 31 October,

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delivered in 2003 in Jerusalem referred to Islam as ‘a fanatical religion intent on returning to the feudalism of eight-century Arabia’ and to the Middle East conﬂict as a historical struggle over the question of whether Hubal, the Moon God of Mecca, known as Allah, is supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah, God of the Bible, is supreme.65 Given these views, the results of a 2002 poll of American fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant religious leaders are hardly surprising. It found that 77 per cent had an unfavourable view of Islam, 72 per cent believed that Islam was opposed to religious pluralism and to democracy, and 70 per cent held that Islam was a religion of violence.66 Add to this the widespread concern expressed by a number of right-wing American columnists and pundits that Western Europe is slowly committing ‘cultural suicide’ only to be overtaken by militant Islam and turning into ‘Eurabia’, and it is hardly surprising that radical right-wing populist Islamophobia has received relatively few negative reviews in the American conservative press.67 Undoubtedly, radical right-wing populist parties and movements have derived signiﬁcant political beneﬁts from promoting themselves as defenders of democracy and Western values against allegedly intolerant Islam. Not least, by couching xenophobia in predominantly cultural terms, the radical populist right has to a large extent succeeded in taking the wind out of their detractors’ sails. It is hardly an easy feat – particularly given 11 September 2001 and the events that followed – to persuade a court to charge a party with inciting racial hatred for purportedly standing up for the rights of women or defending Israel’s right to survival as a state. Strategic considerations, however, only partly explain why virtually every radical right-wing populist party has adopted Islamophobia to some degree as a core programmatic issue. The main reason for this development is that Islamophobia ﬁts perfectly into the larger identitarian political agenda, which these parties pursue. As I have argued elsewhere before, one of the radical populist right’s main political objectives is to put an end to ‘multicultural experiments’ as a ﬁrst step toward the restoration of ethno-national dominance.68 Ethno-national dominance means, among other things, that integration, if it is envisioned at all, is strictly determined and controlled by the majority culture. Minority cultures are denied recognition; instead, they are expected to absorb the majority norms and values, as a non-negotiable 65 Robertson, P, 2003, ‘Why Evangelical Christians Support Israel’, address to the Herzliya Conference, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, Jerusalem, 17 December, . 66 The poll data are from a 2002 survey of fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant leaders commissioned by The Ethics and Public Policy Center and Beliefnet and reported in ‘American Public Opinion about the Religion of ISLAM’, Religious Tolerance.org, . 67 See Germano, M. (2003), ‘Islamic Europe?, The Rise of Eurabia’, Biblical Archeology Perspectives, July–September, ; Caldwell, C. (2004), ‘Islamic Europe?’, The Weekly Standard, 4 October; Weigel, G. (2004), ‘Is Europe Dying?’, European Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, 17 March. 68 Betz, H.-G. and Johnson, C (2004), ‘Against the Current – Stemming the Tide: The Nostalgic Ideology of the Contemporary Radical Populist Right’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3), pp. 320–23.

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precondition for inclusion and participation. As Geert Wilders put it in early 2004 in respect to Muslim immigrants in The Netherlands, ‘Why aren’t we allowed to say that Muslims should conform to us given the fact that our norms and values are on a higher, better, and more humane level. No integration. Assimilation!’69 The radical right’s insistence on assimilation, however, is hardly something new. According to Eric Kaufmann, the determination to preserve ethno-national dominance was also one of the main motivating factors fuelling the American nativists’ anti-Catholic mobilization in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century.70 In fact, similar attitudes can still be found today in the US. In a recent article, a leading right-wing commentator warns of the dangers resulting from the views of ‘certain elites’ that ‘there is something better about other countries. In this view, immigrants should keep their allegiance and cultural heritage and not assimilate.’ This view, in the author’s opinion, ‘is a strategy for the death of any culture. While a nation cannot exist “half slave and half free”, in President Lincoln’s words, neither can it exist in a state that is culturally subdivided.’71 Given the real and imagined challenges posed by Western Europe’s growing Muslim population, the fervour and determination displayed by radical right-wing populist parties to constantly reassert Western Europe’s dominant secular culture is hardly surprising. It is likely to prevail as long as the established political parties fail to advance a convincing alternative model. In the meantime, the radical populist right is likely to continue to exert a considerable inﬂuence on the public debate about the role of Islam in Western Europe. Given the profound lack of understanding of and wide-spread lack of interest in, Islam among the Western European public – in a survey conducted in late 2004, more than 80 per cent of the Dutch and 85 per cent of the Italians admitted knowing very little or nothing at all about Islam – this is hardly reassuring.72 References ––– (2002), ‘Crociﬁssi contro l’Islam: la Lega li vuole dovunque’, La Repubblica, 18 September. ––– Impuls, 4, 2004. ––– (2004), ‘Islam verderfelijk gedachtegoed’, De Volkskrant, 31 October. ––– (June 2000), ‘Intervento del segretario federale, On. Umberto Bossi’, Pontida, 4. .

69 Wilders, cited in ‘VVD'er Wilders haalt uit naar collega-Kamerleden’, De Telegraaf, 4 February 2004. 70 Kaufmann, E. ‘American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the “Universal” Nation, 1776–1850’ . 71 Thomas, C. (2005), ‘Cockeyed Immigration Proposals’, Sacramento Bee, 1 December. 72 Allam, M. (2004), ‘I musulmani?, Amici solo per uno su dieci’, Corriere Della Sera, 24 January.

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––– (March 2003), ‘Antwerpse joden achter Vlaams Blok’, Hamishpacha, p. 12. ––– (May 2002), ‘Fire on the Right’, Forward, p. 3. ––– (May 2003), ‘Sondage Ipsos-LCI-Le Point: Islam l’inquiétude des FrançAis’, Le Point, p. 16. ––– (28 October 2005), ‘Interview with Filip Dewinter’, Jewish Weekly. . ––– (September 2002), ‘Il Crociﬁsso torni nelle aule e negli ufﬁci’, Qui Lega, p. 20. ––– ‘’VVDer Wilders haalt uit naar collega-Kamerleden’, De Telegraaf’ (04 February 2004). ––– ‘American Public Opinion about the Religion of ISLAM,’ religious. Tolerance. org; . http://www.religioustolerance.org/reac_ter18a.htm. ––– ‘Lega Nord: Lettura publica in Piazza Duomo libro Fallaci’, ‘Ansa’ (08 April 2004). ––– ‘Messa latina antica per il 431° della victoria di Lepanto,’ Una Voce Venetia . Allam, M. (2004), ‘I musulmani? Amici solo per uno su dieci’, Corriere Della Sera, 24 January. Berlet, C. (2001), ‘Nativism’, Public Eye, 15, p. 3. Bernardelli, R. (2004), ‘Lombardia nazione difende I valori cristiani!’, Lega Padana Lombardia-Lombardia Nazione, 3 March . Betz, H.-G. (2004), La droite populiste en Europe: Extreme et démocrate? (Paris: Autrement). Betz, H.-G. and Johnson, C. (2004), ‘Against the Current – Stemming the Tide: The Nostalgic Ideology of the Contemporary Radical Populist Right’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9, p. 3. [DOI: 10.1080/1356931042000263546] Billington, R. (1964), The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books). ––– (2003), Aanpassen of terugkeren (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). Caldwell, C. (2004), ‘Islamic Europe?’, Weekly Standard, 4 October. Camre, M. (2000), ‘Islam kan ikke integreres’ . Casals, X. (ed.) (2005), Political Survival on the Extreme Right (Barcelona: ICPS). Cohn, R. (2000), ‘Nativism and the End of the Mass Migration of the 1840s and 1850s’, Journal of Economic History, 60(2), pp. 361–383. Crawford, J. (2001), ‘Cycles of Nativism in U.S. History’ (Washington: The National Immigration Forum). Cuperus, R. (2005), ‘Roots of European Populism: The Case of Pim Fortuyn’s Populist Revolt in The Netherlands’ in Casals (eds.). Dansk Folkeparti (2001), Danmarks fremdit – dit land, dit valg… (Copenhague: Dansk Folkeparti). de Seinmers, M. (2000), ‘La Colonisation de l’Europe’, Schweizer Demokrat, March–April. de Smedt, D. (2003), ‘Volgmigratie – Blijvende instroom’ Vlaams Blok Magazine, 5 May .

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Dewinter, F. (1992), ‘Immigratie: De oplossingen. 70 voorstellen ter oplossing van het vreemdlingenprobleem . ––– (2000), Baas in Eigen Land (Brussels: Uitgeverij Egmont). ––– (2002), ‘Het groene totalitarisme: De kolonisatie van Europa!’, speech given at the Colloquium ‘Karel Martelstichting’, Antwerp, 20 November. Feder, D. (2005), ‘Condi Ups Ante on Crescent-Kissing – Says Islam’s a Religion of Peace’. GrasstopsUSA.com; 31 October . Gall, R. (2003), ‘The Past Should Not Shackle the Present: The Revival of a Legacy of Religious Bigotry by Opponents of School Choice’, New York University Annual Survey of American Law, 59, pp. 415–416. Gartner, T. (2004), ‘Tolerance Tested in Holland’, Washington Times, 20 December. Germano, M. (2003), ‘Islamic Europe?, The Rise of Eurabia’, Biblical Archeology Perspectives, July–September . Golway, T. (2004), ‘The Return of the Know-Nothings’, America, 29 March. Goodstein, L. (2004), ‘How the Evangelicals and Catholics Joined Forces’, The New York Times, 30 May. [PubMed: 15616553,15459382,15372022,15257355,15057 824,15164834] Heitmeyer, W. (2004), ‘Die gespaltene Gesellschaft’, Die Zeit, 2 December. [PubMed: 15325638,15261284,15139749] Higham, J. (2002), Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925, rev. edn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press). Holt, M., ‘Nativism’ . Hooper, J. (2002), ‘The Twisty Politics of a Far Right Politician’, The Guardian, 7 May. Houellebecq, M. (2001), Plateforme (Paris: Flammarion). Huntington, S. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster). ––– (2000), Reconsidering Immigration: Is Mexico a Special Case? (Washington: Center for Immigration Studies). ––– (2004), ‘The Hispanic Challenge’, Foreign Policy, March/April. Kaufmann, E., ‘American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the “Universal” Nation, 1776–1850’ . Le Gallou, J.-Y. (2001) ‘Le retour de l’Histoire’, Paris, 8 December. [PubMed: 115 52810,11505222,11450395,11429857] Le Gallou, J.-Y. and Olivier, P. (1992), Immigration: Le Front national fait le point (Paris: Éditions Nationales). Lentin, A. (2005), ‘Racism Ten Years On’, Speech Delivered at the Tenth Anniversary of the Council of Europe ‘All Different – All Equal’ Campaign against Racism, Strasbourg, 26 October . McPherson, J. (1992), ‘Patterns of Prejudice’, The New Republic, 19 October. Mörgeli, C. (2004), ‘Auswüchse einer fälschen Einbürgerungspolitik’, SVPja 12. Mudde, C. (2000), The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press).

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Neurink, J. (2001), ‘Double Dutch’ Al-Ahram Weekly, 5–11 July . Noelle, E. (2004), ‘Der Kampf der Kulturen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 September. [PubMed: 15618467,15355128,15007094,14707116,15032580] Robertson, P. (2003), ‘Why Evangelical Christians Support Israel’, address to the Herzliya Conference, Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, Jerusalem, 17 December . Savoini, G. (2002), ‘Lega baluardo contro l’invasione islamica’, La Padania, 26 June. Schär, M. (2004), ‘Das Kreuz mit dem Islam’, Die Weltwoche 38. Schlüer, U. (2004), ‘Die Konsequenzen von Masseneinbürgerungen: Muslimisierung’, Schweizerzeit, 3 September. [PubMed: 12915945] Schmidhauser, W. (2004), ‘Gefahr durch den Islam’, Schweizer Demokrat, January. Schoﬁeld, H. (2003), ‘Brigitte Bardot s’attaque aux musulmans et à la France moderne’, Agence France Press, 12 May. Schreiber, M. (2005), ‘Terror’s Unforeseen Consequences’ PBS, 25 January . Schwartz, A. (2005), ‘Between Haider and a Hard Place’, Haaretz, 29 August. See, S. (2000), ‘“An Unprecedented Inﬂux”: Nativism and Irish Famine Immigration to Canada’, American Review of Canadian Studies, 30(4), pp. 429–453. Sinopoli, R. and Gabrielson, T. (1999), ‘Mirroring Modernity: America’s Conﬂicting Identities’, Polity, 32. [DOI: 10.2307/3235334] Spieler, R. (2004), ‘De l’islam en Alsace, de l’immigration’, 12 October . Swain, C. and Nieli, R. (2003), Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Taguieff, P.-A. (1994), ‘From Race to Culture: The New Right’s View of European Identity’, Telos, 98–99. Thomas, C. (2005), ‘Cockeyed Immigration Proposals’, Sacramento Bee, 1 December. Vedder, R., Gallaway, L. and Moore, S. (2000), ‘The Immigration Problem Then and Now’, The Independent Review, 4(3). Vlaams Blok (2002), Een toekomst voor Vlaanderen: Programma en standpunten van het Vlaams Blok (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). Walt, V. (2005), ‘Life on the Front Lines’, Time (Europe), 28 February. [PubMed: 15766049] Weigel, G. (2004), ‘Is Europe Dying?’, European Outlook (American Enterprise Institute), 17 March. Wilders, G. (2005), ‘Onafhangkelijkheidsverklaring’ .

Chapter 3

The Aims and Objections of the Austrian Far Right in Foreign and Military Policies Fabian Virchow

Introduction In 2005 Austria celebrated the 50th anniversary of the signing of the State Treaty (Staatsvertrag) which had been negotiated by the occupying powers of the United States of America, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain, as well as the government of Austria. At the core of the agreement, which came into force on 27 July 1955, had been the restoration of a sovereign and democratic state called the Federal Republic of Austria. Besides this general recognition of the Austrian state, the main points of the covenant dealt with minority rights for Croats and Slovenes (article 7), with the Austrian obligation not to enter into any kind of political or economic uniﬁcation with Germany (article 4), and with the dissolution of Nazi organisations and protections against any attempt to revive them (article 9). In addition, the signing of the State Treaty would be followed by the declaration, of Austria’s own volition, of an eternal neutrality. Occupying powers left Austrian territory by 25 October 1955, and the next day was marked as a national holiday.1 Today, the neutral status of Austria remains highly valued among the Austrian population2 and is a crucial part of the way the ‘Austrian nation’ sees itself. Nevertheless, there has always been discussion about the meaning and the consequences of neutrality, regarding, for example, membership of Austria in supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN) or the amount of ﬁnancial resources to be allocated for military purposes. This article aims to outline the politics that the Austrian far right has supported in regard to foreign affairs and military issues.

1 See Rotter, M. (1984), Bewaffnete Neutralität. Das Beispiel Österreich (Frankfurt/ Main: Haag + Herchen); Gehler, M. (2005), ‘From Non-Alignment to Neutrality. Austria’s Transformation during the First East-West Détente, 1953–1958’, Journal of Cold War Studies 7:4, 104–36. 2 See IMAS International (2004), Die österreichischen Denkmuster (Sonderbericht Mai 2004) (Linz), p. 4; IMAS International (2005), Die Signale des öffentlichen Bewusstseins (IMAS-Report 14/2005) (Linz).

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Considering the diverse and varied spectrum of the Austrian far right,3 this chapter does not claim to give a complete overview, but focuses instead on some of the movement’s most relevant actors. Looking at the past 20 years, it is important to take into account the political party the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ),4 the weekly publication the Neue Zeit, and the monthly magazine Aula5. It is important to note that several high-ranking ofﬁcers of the Austrian Armed Forces have contributed articles to these publications. In this analysis, the term far right is solely used in an academic sense corresponding to the deﬁnition of Holzer.6 As far as organisations and publications are concerned, the term ‘far right’ refers to the political proﬁle that is discernible from public statements or programmatic material; however, this does not mean that every member of an organisation or every author featured in a publication under investigation here should be labelled as far right. To a certain extent, even, conservative authors who appear in these publications actually contradict the far right on some occasions.7 There is also a further peculiarity regarding the over-proportional number of authors from Germany (as compared to other non-Austrian countries) in these papers, which can be explained by the proximity of language as well as by the idea of being part of the ‘German nation,’ an idea that is fairly widespread among followers of the Austrian far right. However, the analysis here focuses on Austrian actors. This article starts with a look at the question of neutrality and membership in international organisations such as the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), as these has been and remain a main issue of political controversy in Austria. It then widens the analytical horizon by looking at visions and ideas that actors from the far right have put forward in relation to the future Austrian role in international politics. The article further investigates standpoints on issues such as Turkish membership in the EU and the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict. Finally, the situation and perspective of the Austrian Armed Forces (Bundesheer) as it is portrayed by authors in the far right media are looked at; this includes ﬁnancial matters as well as armament issues, the deployment of Austrian soldiers abroad, and the decision about having a conscripted or professional army – a topic that is widely debated. Following the methodological approach of Franz L. Neumann which mandates that the study of National Socialist ideology should be based on the review of its

3 See DÖW – Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (ed.) (1993), Handbuch des österreichischen Rechtsextremismus (Wien: Deuticke). 4 See Bailer, B. and Neugebauer, W. (1993), ‘Die FPÖ: Vom Liberalismus zum Rechtsextremismus’, in DÖW, pp. 327–428; Morrow, D. (2000), ‘Jörg Haider and the new FPÖ: beyond the democratic pale?’, in Hainsworth, pp. 33–63; Scharsach, H.-H. (2002), Rückwärts nach rechts: Europas Populisten (Wien: Ueberreuter), pp. 9-39, 188-208; Luther, K.R. (2003), ‘The FPÖ: From Populist Protest to Incumbency’, in Merkl and Weinberg, pp. 191–219. 5 See Gärtner, R. (1993), ‘Die Aula’, in DÖW, pp. 253–70; Gärtner, R. (1996), Die ordentlichen Rechten. Die Aula, die Freiheitlichen und der Rechtsextremismus (Wien: Picus). 6 Holzer, W.I. (1993), ‘Rechtsextremismus. Konturen, Deﬁnitionsmerkmale und Erklärungsansätze’, in DÖW, pp. 11–96. 7 See for example Merkel, H. (1994), ‘Westbindung statt Einkreisung’, Aula, 7–8/1994, p. 13.

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follower’s own statements in order to understand their goals , the exposition of this chapter rests on a critical analysis of the ideology of publications of the Austrian far right. The data and sources used for the analysis have mainly been written material published over the past 15 years. Due to the limited amount of space, the focus of this chapter is on the critical reconstruction of political concepts of the far right in Austria. Redeﬁning or Abolishing Neutrality? The issue of neutrality is an important subject in publications of the far right, although no uniform position exists. At ﬁrst glance there seems to be support for neutrality, for example in the political platforms of the FPÖ9 or in statements by FPÖ Member of European Parliament (MEP) Andreas Mölzer, who has spoken out in favour of neutrality.10 But a more detailed look gives a much more complex and confusing picture. One can ﬁnd a dominant perspective and valuation as far as the emergence and character of neutrality until the late 1980s, but the period thereafter has seen a very varied range of standpoints on this question. According to many authors in far right papers, neutrality has not been the result of a truly voluntary decision, but rather was imposed on Austrian decisionmakers in exchange for the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1955.11 Otto Scrinzi, one of the éminences grises of the Austrian far right, has reminded readers of Aula magazine that the predecessor of the FPÖ, the Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU), had supported the State Treaty on the basis that it reestablished at least the status of, in Scrinzi’s view, partial sovereignty.12 Scrinzi argues that denying the necessary ﬁnancial and military means to this sovereignty in subsequent years comes close to treason.13 In sum, he suggested that one should speak of a neutralised, instead of a neutral, country.14 Erich Reiter, who labels himself a liberal15 but has stayed with the FPÖ despite its strong turn to the right, is of the opinion that the end of the period of occupation was, in fact, weighted with the ‘burden of neutrality’.16 A general and often repeated complaint of the far right is that the central status of neutrality in the political culture of the country has led to a severe neglect of what they call serious security politics: 8 See Neumann, F.L. (1942/1977), Behemoth. Struktur und Funktion des Nationalsozialismus 1933–1944 (Köln and Frankfurt), pp. 65–7. 9 Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (1985), Parteiprogramm (Wien), p. 42; Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (2005), Parteiprogramm (Salzburg), p. 10. 10 Mölzer, A. (2004a), ‘Wer reitet den Stier?’, Zur Zeit, 15–16/2004, p. 16. 11 Mölzer, A. and Hatzenbichler, J. (1997), ‘Die Neutralität – früher nutzlos, heute nur mehr Nonsens’, Zur Zeit, 1/1997, p. 6; Scrinzi, O. (2005), ‘Die Lebenslüge von der Freiwilligkeit’, Zur Zeit, 21/2005, p. 4. 12 Ibid. 13 Scrinzi, O. (1991a), ‘Von den kurzen Beinen der drei Neutralitätslügen’, Aula, 5/1991, p. 7. 14 Ibid. 15 Reiter, E. (1998), ‘Der aufrechte Gang fehlt noch’, Zur Zeit, 51–52/1998; Hatzenbichler 1992 16 Reiter, E. (1997), ‘Von der Neutralität zur Realpolitik’, Zur Zeit, 1/1997, p. 7.

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Europe for the Europeans While the political class of Austria started to internalize neutrality, thereby contributing to the ﬁction that this is an integral part of the national identity of the Austrians in general, from a perspective of political realism the country was not in a position to build up a credible military component of neutrality, as in the case of Switzerland.17

Erich Reiter, who had been an active representative of the FPÖ for a long time and who is a well respected expert in the international security community, laments a ‘peculiar philosophy to oust security politics’.18 Arguing that Austrian defence policy has not been developed on the basis of an analysis of real and potential threats but rather vice versa, assuming a low level of threat by nature of low military resources, Reiter aligns himself with two well-known far rightists, Mölzer and Hatzenbichler, who state that from the military and security point of view the ever-lasting neutrality of the country has been nothing but a ‘façade’.19 Reiter himself has argued that neutrality served Soviet interests20 and that Austria’s only voluntary act in relation to neutrality had been to make a myth out of it.21 Given the portrayal of neutrality as a policy that had importance in history but is not relevant today, one must ask what consequences will result from this portrayal. This has led to a situation in which far right actors criticize politicians of other Austrian parties for misusing the idea and the concept of neutrality to avoid necessary changes in foreign and military affairs, while also themselves speaking up for neutrality at one turn and at the next proclaiming that neutrality has lost its relevance for political reasons and must be replaced. Therefore, if neutrality is no longer the appropriate approach, what alternative(s) do actors of the far right propose? Some recommend NATO, few prefer joining the EU, and others speak out for a European confederation22 with a kind of federated armed forces. Jörg Haider, who has dominated and shaped the development of the FPÖ for two decades23 and founded the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ) as a splinter group from the FPÖ in 2005, opted for the integration of Austria into NATO quite early on.24 He argued that the Cold War had created a situation in which Austria had been under the ‘sword of Damocles of a nuclear Holocaust’;25 an that now, with a new political map after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, with many former Soviet bloc countries looking toward the West,26 Austria should become a bridge to the West for these 17 Ibid. 18 Reiter (1997), op. cit., p. 7. 19 Mölzer and Hatzenbichler (1997), op. cit., p. 6. 20 Reiter, E. (1992), ‘Neutralität als Mythos’, Jahrbuch für politische Erneuerung des Freiheitlichen Bildungswerkes (Wien), pp. 357–8. 21 Ibid., p. 353. 22 Dillersberger, S. (1994), ‘FPÖ und Europa’, in Freiheitliches Bildungswerk, pp. 469– 475; Mölzer, A. (2005c), ‘EU muß völlig neuen Weg beschreiten’, Aula, 7–8/2005, pp. 30–31. 23 See Bailer-Galanda, B. (1997), Haider und die Freiheitlichen in Österreich (Berlin: ElefantenPress); Ottomeyer, K. (2000), Die Haider-Show: Zur Psychopolitik der FPÖ (Klagenfurt: Drava). 24 Haider, J. (1996), Friede durch Sicherheit. Eine österreichische Philosophie für Europa (Wien: FBW), p. 7. 25 Ibid., p. 9. 26 Ibid., p. 19.

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countries and could do so best by becoming a member of NATO. In addition, keeping Austria neutral would even be ‘a hindrance for the further stabilization of our east and middle European sphere. Whomever wants to live securely cannot assign himself the role of a marginal position at the eastern border of a European Security System’.28 Erich Reiter is also a staunch supporter of Austria joining NATO.29 He points to the importance of NATO for preventing struggles for hegemony among European countries30 and emphasises the relevance of the location of Austria, with its borders with Hungary and Slovenia, for the integration of these countries into Europe and also for military operations.31 In the case Ukraine allied itself with Russia, Austria becoming a NATO member ‘would change the status of Austria from a NATOinﬂuenced area to a fully integrated member with its own sphere of inﬂuence’.32 When the Austrian Ofﬁcers’ Association published a statement in favour of Austrian membership in NATO in 1998, far rightist Juergen Hatzebichler criticized the statement, pointing out that some erroneous had been put forward (for example, that only becoming a NATO member would secure access to sophisticated technology). Notably, however, he nonetheless stated that recent developments had proven the suitability of the Austrian Bundesheer for NATO.33 Indeed, since entering the Partnership for Peace programme initiated by NATO in the early 1990s,34 Austria has increased its military cooperation with NATO forces signiﬁcantly. Again, this development is put forward as proof by voices of the far right that Austrian neutrality is already historically out-dated. Others argue that Austria may become a NATO member, but only on certain conditions.35 Some actors in the Austrian far right emphasise that already the decision to become a member of the UN (in 1955) had brought the neutral status of Austria, in a formal sense, to an end.36 While the participation of Austrian soldiers in UN military operations is valued highly by several contributors to Aula and Zur Zeit, especially those who are themselves ofﬁcers in the Bundesheer, others have slandered the UN as a ‘red world parliament’ with an ‘anti-democratic Security Council’37, a view held commonly by far rightists in Germany.38 27 Ibid., p. 130. 28 Ibid., p. 155. 29 Reiter, E. (1994), ‘Österreich als NATO-Staat?’, in Mock, Pirzio-Biroli and Kießling, pp. 38–43; Reiter, E. (1999), ‘Parteipolitik statt Sicherheitspolitik’, Zur Zeit, 33/1999, pp. 6–7. 30 Reiter, E. (1995), Nato-Beitritt Österreichs? (Wien: Schriftenreihe der Landesverteidigungsakademie), p. 77. 31 Ibid., p. 93. 32 Ibid., p. 95. 33 Hatzenbichler, J. (1998b), ‘NATO neu – die Sehnsucht nach dem Osten’, Zur Zeit, 11/1998, pp. 6–7. 34 See . 35 Walter, E. (1998a), ‘Österreich und die NATO: Fragen und Konsequenzen’, Aula, 2/1998, p. 26; Gudenus, J. (1999), ‘NATO mit wenn und aber’, Zur Zeit, 16/1999, p. 2. 36 Romig, F. (1992), ‘Warum “Nein” zu EWR, EG und EU’, Aula, 11/1992, p. 25. 37 Scrinzi (1991a), op. cit., p. 8. 38 Virchow, F. (2006), Gegen den Zivilismus. Internationale Beziehungen und Militär in den politischen Konzeptionen der extremen Rechten (Wiesbaden: VS), pp. 142–8.

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Whereas NATO gets a fairly positive judgement from a pragmatic perspective by several actors,39 others see no need to join the alliance,40 and even expect trouble in doing so41, and stress that being a non-member gives Austria more ﬂexibility regarding decisions in military and foreign affairs.42 The Austrian far right’s position towards the EU is much more critical than views towards the UN. While Colonel Helge Endres advocates participating in the integration process of the EU,43 Mölzer once argued that a strict interpretation of the status of neutrality would isolate Austria in relation to its European neighbours,44 and later referred negatively to the bureaucratic and ‘materialistic orientation’ of the EU45 and, together with Hatzenbichler, stated that EU membership would have a destructive impact on the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of Austria.46 Haider has said that he regrets that the Maastricht Treaty, which contains only a small segment on the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and, in addition, includes a very cumbersome ﬁxed modus of agreement.47 This, he concludes, leads to a situation in which a true CFSP is ‘practically impossible’.48 Nevertheless, Haider did approve of Austrian membership in the Assembly of the Western European Union (WEU), as ‘Atlantic and European interests may, in the long run, drift apart’.49 Relating NATO and the EU, Haider argues that European integration should not start with a common currency, but with the CFSP50 – with ‘NATO enlargement before EU enlargement’.51 Contrary to Haider, Friedrich Romig opposes in principle any formal afﬁliation with the European Economic Area or the EU and claims that the WEU does not operate properly.52 Gudenus as well as Hofer have had doubts that membership in the EU is compatible with Austria’s neutrality law53, and Mölzer is against a ﬁnal

39 Niemann, N. (1998), ‘Weiterwursteln muß ein Ende haben’, Zur Zeit, 11/1998, p. 6; Romig (1992), op. cit., p. 25; Haider (1996), op. cit., p. 30; Mölzer, A. (1998b), ‘Solidarität mit der NATO’, Zur Zeit, 43–44/1998, p. 6; Spath, G. (2000), ‘Zum Begriff “Sicherheit” in Österreich’, Aula, 5/2000, pp. 21–4. 40 Jung, W. (2002a), ‘Die neue Sicherheitsdoktrin’, Aula, 1/2002, p. 7. 41 Jung, W. (2003), ‘Neutral, in die NATO oder europäisches Bündnis?’, Aula, 3/2003, pp. 21. 42 Gudenus, J. (2005a), ‘Die Neutralität liegt am Seziertisch’, National-Zeitung, 46/2005, p. 4. 43 Endres, H.W. (1995), ‘Neue sicherheitspolitische Perspektiven für Österreich’, Aula, 7–8/1995, p. 15. 44 Mölzer, A. (1989c), ‘Neutralität oder Isolation’, Aula, 9/1989, p. 15. 45 Mölzer, A. (1998a), ‘In der Tradition des alten Reiches’, Zur Zeit, 27/1998, p. 7. 46 Mölzer, A. (1997a), ‘Das Abendland – sonst nichts’, Zur Zeit, 9–10/1997, p. 7. 47 Haider (1996), op. cit., pp. 81–2. 48 Ibid., p. 94. 49 Ibid., p. 175. 50 Ibid., p. 153. 51 Ibid., p. 154. 52 Romig (1992), op. cit., pp. 23–5. 53 Gudenus (2005a), op. cit., p. 4; Hofer, W. (2002), ‘Hochwasser, Abfangjäger…’, Zur Zeit, 36/2002, p. 5.

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rejection of neutrality as long as Europe has no security system of its own. Walter argues that joining the EU does not make sense regarding aspects of security or economy, but has advantages in view of Austria’s national interests, especially efforts to counter ‘Italian inﬂuence in southern Tyrol’.55 The Austrian right has long seen itself as a supporter of Tyrolean autonomy.56 Contrary to the basic idea of the EU as viewed by Mölzer, as simplifying complex processes of interaction and as being controlled by ‘some lobbies, secret societies, and wire-pullers’57 to create a supranational body that takes charge of decisions hitherto made by national governments, the Austrian far right favours a European confederation of sovereign nation-states. This would exclude a European Minister of Defence,58 keep the command of the Bundesheer in Austria and, according to Bundesheer ofﬁcer Wolfgang Jung, ‘[guarantee] that our soldiers will not be sent into action by an overzealous commissioner in Brussels’.59 However, criticism towards the EU should not be confused with a principled rejection of the option of a ‘uniﬁed Europe’. Instead, this latter vision is very much supported by a large majority of the far right. This leads to attempts to deﬁne what ‘Europe’ is. Looking at the post-Second World War landscape, Haider mourns that the division of Europe was accompanied by the vanishing of Europe as a historical actor.60 Its recreation as a political factor reaching ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals would be desirable but is not possible at the moment’.61 Mölzer points to the necessity to deﬁne ‘how far Europe stretches from a geopolitical and a cultural perspective, and which states and peoples belong to it, in order to make this Europe complete’.62 Ignoring the Holocaust as an important, if not the most important, historical occurrence of not only German, but of European history, Mölzer speaks of the values and strengths of a Western humanism and a European individualism that make it easy to ﬁnd separation from the Islamic world, black Africa and Asian Confucianism. Much more difﬁcult, in his view, is it to delimit ‘Europe’ from the Slavic orthodoxy on the one hand and the Anglo-American sphere on the other. While he does not answer this question directly, Mölzer nevertheless gives an idea about the shape and positioning of the ‘Europe’ he advocates. According to his vision, the Old World is still the hub of the universe and the philosophy of history of the translatio imperii suggests that ‘this worlds needs states (Staatlichkeit) that 54 Tomaschitz, B. (2005a), ‘Mölzer für Beibehaltung der Neutralität’, Zur Zeit, 10/2005. 55 Walter, E. (1994), ‘Realisierung Mitteleuropas durch den EU-Beitritt’, Aula, 6/1994, p. 9. 56 See Grund, J. (1996), ‘Mit der Dornenkrone nach Brüssel’, Aula, 6/1996, pp. 22–5; Scrinzi, O. (2002), ‘Südtirol – 10 Jahre Streitbelegung, 50 Jahre Tolomei-Schwindel’, Aula, 7–8/2002, pp. 8–9; Zacharasiewicz, A. (2002), ‘Kooperation – trotz allem!’, Zur Zeit, 46/2002, p. 16. 57 Mölzer (2004a), op. cit., p. 16. 58 Scrinzi (2005), op. cit., p. 5. 59 Jung (2002a), op. cit., p. 8. 60 Haider (1996), op. cit., p. 10 61 Ibid., p. 151. 62 Mölzer (1998a), op. cit., p. 7.

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have a sacred legitimation – which is the Reich’.63 The history, idea and future of a renewed Reich have played a very important role in recent debates of the German far right,64 not least inﬂuenced by the Austrian doyen of geopolitical thought, Heinrich Jordis von Lohausen.65 While Mölzer blames the National Socialist Empire of having been a ‘hypertrophic imperialist nation-state of violence’66 he suggests that a future ‘Europe’ expand geopolitically and cultural–spiritually out to where the spiritual and, with it, the political frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had once existed. In accordance with this view, he values eastward enlargement positively, to include the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovenia, plus, in the long run, Croatia. From Mölzer’s point of view, eastward enlargement is not about ﬁnancial advantages, but rather is relevant by ‘the simple fact that Silesia and Transylvania are indisputable parts of European history and European territory’.67 Apart from the territorial expanse, Spath demands a ‘European idea for the world of tomorrow’ that should include surmounting Europe’s homage to ‘paciﬁst de-bellicism’68 as the wished-for ideal that ‘cannot be protected by abstract twaddle about peace’ but by a strong European military force only.69 Mölzer also demonstrates a clear expectation that the relationship between ‘Europe’ and the Anglo-American sphere, with its ‘extreme materialism and its hypocritical and irrational puritanism’,70 has tended to become (and in a certain sense must become) more competitive and even hostile. While Jung declares that there is no opposition in relation to the United States, he advocates that, ‘Europe has to recognize its autonomy more than previously and it has to detach itself from American coat-tails’71, given that the two spheres’ interests may become contrary in the future. Haider underlines that he regards the uniﬁcation of Europe as a necessary means of self-assertion: ‘Opposite to the American and the Asian bloc, our continent will only withstand politically and economically and will be able to secure its interests if it is united and acts unitedly in foreign policy’.72 Spath argues that the ‘American plutocracy is about the subjugation to global ﬁnancial and economic interests and the control of limited natural resources’.73 To counter the ‘US claim to world domination and the “One World” concept to be behind it’74 and to end a situation in which the West is busy ‘collecting crumbs and adopting every lack

63 Ibid. 64 Virchow (2006), op. cit., pp. 115–27. 65 Lohausen, H.J. von (1994), ‘Das Reich – eine Raum- und Erlebnisgemeinschaft’, Aula, 1/1994, pp. 18–24. 66 Mölzer (1998a), op. cit., p. 8. 67 Ibid., p. 8. 68 Mölzer, A. (2003a), ‘36 wären besser’, Zur Zeit, 21/2003, p. 14. 69 Ibid., p. 15. 70 Mölzer (1998a), op. cit., p. 7. 71 Jung (2002a), op. cit., p. 7. 72 Haider (1996), op. cit., p. 29. 73 Spath, G. (2003a), ‘Weltmacht USA – und wo bleibt Europa?’, Aula, 5/2003, p. 13. 74 Ibid.

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of culture from the other side of the Atlantic’ , Spath strongly demands a military arming of Europe. Otherwise, he declares, European states will be ‘vassals of the US’,76 a country that has become the ‘biggest threat to survival on Earth’.77 For Mölzer, the failure of the referenda on the EU constitution in France and The Netherlands in 2005 offered a chance to redirect the EU in a way that competes with and confronts the United States: Support of non-European interests, for example those of the USA, by members of the EU has to be unthinkable in the future and has to be ostracized by all means. The British, for example, who support US wars and mock European interests, have to make a decision from now on. Do they want to be European and take part in the future Europe or not?78

Mixed with anti-Semitic phrasings is Romig’s (rhetorical) question of who ‘really’ governs us; little surprise that he has detected ‘the Jews’ dominating US affairs79, as this is a wide-spread theory of conspiracy long-held by far right thinkers.80 To understand the role that Austria should strive for in the scenario of a revived ‘Europe’, according to the right-wingers, one should refer to military expert and historian Magenheimer, who has positioned himself with rightist revisionist approaches, German nationalism and anti-Semitic arguing, according to researchers from the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW).81 He argues that security policy is also a policy of ordering.82 In this sense, leaving behind the Austrian government’s role as a ‘servile executing body of US politics’83 would allow a return of the country to its historical position as a dominant power (Ordnungsmacht). Integrating eastern and southeastern European countries into ‘Europe’ would bring ‘Berlin and Vienna back into the centre of the new Europe’ as Mölzer argues84, thereby reclaiming their traditional role as a hegemonic power in this sphere. With this issue, the question of the German–Austrian relationship is also addressed. While a uniﬁed Germany may provoke fears of German domination and a ‘German Europe’, there is, from the far right’s viewpoint at least, no reason for Austria to share in worries as ‘it is part of it’.85 Even if long-term FPÖ leader Jörg 75 Ibid., p. 16. 76 Spath (2003a), op. cit., p. 14. 77 Ibid., p. 16. 78 Mölzer (2005c), op. cit., pp. 30–31. 79 Romig, F. (2002), ‘Wer regiert uns wirklich?’, Aula, 4/2002, pp. 7–9. 80 See Pfahl-Traughber, A. (1993), Der antisemitisch-antifreimaurerische Verschwörungsmythos in der Weimarer Republik und im NS-Staat (Wien: Braumüller); Meyer zu Uptrup, W. (2003), Kampf gegen die ‚jüdische Weltverschwörung’: Propaganda und Antisemitismus der Nationalsozialisten 1919–1945 (Berlin: Metropol). 81 See Bailer, B. et al. (1996), ‘Revisionistische’ Tendenzen im österreichischen Bundesheer? Stellungnahme zu Aussagen von Dr. Heinz Magenheimer (Wien: DÖW). 82 Magenheimer, H. (2003), Sicherheitspolitik in Theorie und Praxis (Wien: Schriftenreihe der Landesverteidigungsakademie), p. 3. 83 Romig (2002), op. cit., p. 9. 84 Mölzer (1998a), op. cit., p. 8 85 Hatzenbichler, J. (1994), ‘Rückkehr zur Geopolitik’, Aula, 10/1994, p. 8.

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Haider has been oscillating between declarations of ‘Austrian patriotism’ on the one hand (in 1995) and a devaluation of the ‘Austrian nation as a failure’ on the other (in 1988),86 there is a strong commitment to ‘Germanness’ inside the FPÖ and the far right.87 Mölzer has even spoken of the ‘sham existence of an ethnic and culturally independent “Austrian nation”’88 and could hardly hide his enthusiasm about the emotional participation of many Austrians in the German uniﬁcation.89 These perspectives derive from an understanding of national belonging not in a republican sense, but instead by merging republican ideals with a völkisch approach that deﬁnes a nation as a ‘natural community of common destiny united by origin, language, common territory, culture, religion, and history’.90 Beloning to a people is therefore ‘something given, natural, and, if one likes, something fateful and therefore something that is hardly of one’s choice’.91 In linking Austrian and German affairs so fundamentally, it comes as no surprise that rightist statements have emphasized the ‘common interests’ of the two countries. When Germany gained full sovereignty through signiﬁcant changes that have occurred after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, codiﬁed in the four-plus-two treaty, Haider remarked that ‘Austria can exercise its sovereignty fully for the ﬁrst time since the Second World War and therefore can shape its security policy according to its own needs’.92 Hoping for a situation in which Austria can exert inﬂuence on countries in central Europe, actors in the far right regularly declare that the dissolution of Soviet states created a setting in which Austria has far more small state neighbours than before: ‘Since 1993 Austria has more neighbouring countries with low population ﬁgures than with high ones,’ Haider said.93 Additionally, it is noted that the military abilities of these countries have shrunk as well. In sum, it is expected that Austria should play the role of what is euphemistically called the ‘protector’, not only of Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia,94 but also of the South Tyroleans.95 Adolph-Auffenberg has even declared that southeastern Europe had its best time when under the pinion of the imperial and royal monarchy.96

86 See Obszerninks, B. (1999), ‘Nachbarn am rechten Rand. Republikaner und Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs im Vergleich (Münster: Agenda), pp. 127–9. 87 Hatzenbichler, J. (1992), ‘Der “Umvolker” und das Parteiprogramm’, Aula, 6/1992, p. 14; Jenewein, H.J. (2002), ‘Wie deutsch ist Österreich’, Aula, 6/2002, pp. 28–30. 88 Mölzer, A. (1990a), ‘Neutralitäts-Heucheleien’, Aula, 10/1990, p. 7. 89 Mölzer, A. (1990b), ‘Österreich – im Windschatten der deutschen Einigung’, Aula, 4/1990, pp. 7–9. 90 Schiszler, S. (2002), ‘Vom Unsinn der österreichischen Nation’, Aula, 6/2002, p. 31. 91 Ibid. 92 Haider (1996), op. cit., p. 173. 93 Haider (1996), op. cit., p. 124. 94 Haider (1996), op. cit., p. 172. 95 Nachtmann, H. (2002), ‘Das Ende freiheitlicher Südtirolpolitik?’, Aula, 9/2002, p. 11. 96 Adolph-Auffenberg, H. (1994), ‘Südosteuropa und das alte Vaterland’, Aula, 7–8/1994, p. 21.

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Shaping Foreign Affairs In terms of foreign affairs, the far right addresses several questions. Among the most prominent are the issue of Turkish accession to the EU, the situation in the Balkans, and conﬂicts in the Middle East. Concerning further enlargement of the EU as promised to Turkey for decades, there is broad concurrence against it, especially after Jörg Haiders’ about-turn on the issue. He had previously argued in favour of Turkish EU membership due to security reasons,97 but recently changed his mind. His BZÖ party fellow Hubert Gorbach is also against Turkish membership.98 Many well-known FPÖ-members – Daniela Raschhofer (MEP), Johann Gudenus, Herbert Fritz and Heinz-Christian Strache99 – spoke out against Turkish membership in the EU, arguing that there would be a huge ﬁnancial drain for Europe and that a great number of Turkish people would migrate to Europe. This position is turned into negative stereotyping by Melisch, who asserts that a large portion of the Turkish population wants to take advantage of social security systems of middle European countries.100 Also, there is the demagogic picture of millions of Turks invading Europe and living in ghettoes – as if the behaviour of migrants and their readiness to become a lively part of society is not also dependent on how the society welcomes its new members. But for far rightists, Turkey as an EU member state would ‘directly lead to the decline of the EU’.101 Mölzer agrees with Samuel Huntington’s idea of the ‘clash of civilisations,102 as the theory ﬁts with the völkisch thought of peoples living in distinct territories each with a certain language and a set of cultural forms. Huntington’s book received a good response from far right actors, despite receiving harsh criticisms from other groups.103 Turkey, Mölzer argues, does not ‘belong to Europe by its religious, cultural and the whole of its social structure’.104 From his point of view, there is a line deﬁning ‘Europe’ that should not be crossed: Historically and culturally there is a pretty clear boundary in the East and in the Southeast, where in its widest sense the cultural and political inﬂuences of the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation have ended. All those areas that had been, sometime during the Middle Ages, exposed to the political control of the Roman-German emperor.105

97 Golowitsch, H. (2004), ‘Europa oder Eurasien?’, Aula, 1/2004, p. 32. 98 Tomaschitz (2005b), op. cit. 99 See Aula 4/2004, pp. 9–10. 100 Melisch, R. (2004a), ‘Der Nahostkonﬂikt und die EU-Osterweiterung’, Aula, 1/2004, p. 27. 101 Grund, J.C. (2005), ‘Türkei – Tanzbär der EU’, Zur Zeit, 1/2005, p. 9 102 Huntington, S.P. (1997), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster). 103 See Menzel, U. (1998), The West against the Rest. Samuel Huntingtons Rekonstruktion des Westens (Braunschweig: IfS); Müller, Ha. (1998), Das Zusammenleben der Kulturen – ein Gegenentwurf zu Huntington (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer). 104 Mölzer (1997a), op. cit. 105 Ibid.

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In a paranoid view, Müller believes that Turkey entering the EU is mainly of interest for Israel,106 and another writer near to the German NPD offers the idea that Israel was a major actor behind the kidnapping of Abdullah Öcalan.107 Instead of paying too much attention to Turkey, Mölzer argues that the Balkans are a special interest area for Austria.108 The conﬂict in the former Yugoslavia that led to the disintegration of the federation is seen as proof that multi-ethnic societies cannot exist. Following the paradigm of völkisch purity, Kerschhofer argues apartheidstyle: ‘A solution can only consist of the breaking up of the quarrelling peoples and in border changes’.109 Mölzer sees the Austrian soldiers deployed as peacekeepers to Kosovo as successors of the German Wehrmacht who tried to ‘prevent killing between the Balkan peoples’.110 To portray occupying Nazi forces in this way denies the massacres and cruelties that German and Austrian soldiers perpetrated in the ﬁrst half of the 1940s, in a morally shameful way. In a changing international environment, Austria’s far right hopes that Austria will be able to enlarge its inﬂuence in eastern and southeastern Europe. Mölzer has more than once demanded that Austria should become the ‘advocate of the small East and Southeast European nations’.111 As the far right wants to make nationalist ideas and the völkisch principle universal paradigms, it is no wonder that the Austrian far right is especially interested in the political welfare of like-minded residents of these neighbouring countries. Therefore, political parties like the anti-Semitic Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) led by István Csurka,112 the Bulgarian ATAKA,113 and the Greater Romania Party114 are featured in Austrian far right agendas.115 As one of the most tragic and continuous conﬂicts of the last decades, the Israeli– Palestinian conﬂict has drawn special attention from the far right. The dominant perspective that rightist media takes is a one-sided position against Israel. In Aula magazine, Johann F. Balvany has been a frequent reporter on the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict. He speaks up for consensual conﬂict resolution116, but his statements are regularly biased when it comes to the question of who is the main obstacle for achieving peace and who has been prolonging the conﬂict. While he ﬁlls page after page accusing Israel and its politicians of exercising a ‘reign of terror’,117 of running

106 Müller, H. (2004), ‘Im Hintergrund Israel’, Zur Zeit, 40/2004, p. 3. 107 Schwab, J. (1999), ‘Wer steckt hinter der Entführung Öcalans?’, Aula, 3/1999, p. 20. 108 Mölzer, A. (2004c), ‘Pulverfaß Balkan’, Zur Zeit, 47/2004, p. 10. 109 Kerschhofer, R.G. (1998), ‘Der nächste Domino-Stein?’, Zur Zeit, 33/1998. 110 Mölzer, A. (2004d), ‘Streitschlichter am Balkan’, Zur Zeit, 14/2004, p. 12. 111 Mölzer (1997a), op. cit., p. 1. 112 See Aula 12/2001, p. 19; Aula 1/2006, p. 18 113 See Aula 1/2005, p. 19. 114 See Aula 1/2006, pp. 20–21. 115 See Mudde, C. (ed.) (2005), Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe (London and New York: Routledge). 116 Balvany, J.F. (2002b), ‘Israel taumelt in eine Katastrophe’, Aula, 3/2002, pp. 22–3; Balvany, J.F. (2003a), ‘US-Irrwege im Nahen und Mittleren Osten’, Aula, 12/2003, pp. 14–15. 117 Balvany, J.F. (2002c), ‘Der Palästina-Teufelskreis’, Aula, 9/2002, p. 26.

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‘concentration camps’, of acting like Nazis, of having a growing number of ‘settler-warriors with a particular brutality’120, and of being responsible even for the intensifying warfare in Iraq,121 there are few comparable attributes given to the second conﬂict party, the Palestinians. Instead, Balvany regularly mentions his good contacts with ‘high-ranking Arabic interlocutors’122, although not giving any details as to who they may be. While it cannot be ignored that ofﬁcial Israeli politics include ignoring UN resolutions and violating human rights, the statements of the far right are so biased that one has to speak of severe anti-Semitism. There is some phrasing about ‘Islamist terror’123 in these articles, but in the sum of all the articles there is much more coverage of Israeli brutality and injustice124, and hardly anything about the terrorist character of suicide attacks in Israeli cities, which cause deaths and injuries to the population and cause wide-spread fear and anger. Regular articles in rightist media contain statements that US politics are under the control of Israel/the Jews125 and that these two countries are the ‘real rogue states’.126 The results of European opinion polls in which nearly 60 per cent of people agreed to the statement that Israel is endangering world peace are not seen as the result of uneven perceptions or of anti-Semitic attitudes, but rather as the result of violations of human rights by Israel against Palestinians127. This view by the far right of polling numbers thereby gives credit to their biased interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conﬂict. On some occasions, the US and Israeli are made responsible even for the terrorist threats they now face. In regard to the nuclear arms race, author Sitte ﬁnds the ultimate responsibility with the Jews: ‘Mankind knows without doubt that these atomic bombs invented by the highly intelligent Jewish scientists Oppenheimer & Co should never have been there’.128 He not only reenforces the stereotype of the ‘intelligent Jews’129, but also overlooks the many non-Jewish scientists who contributed to the development of atomic bombs. A similar one-sidedness can be found in another article from Sitte in which he points to early Jewish terrorist groups like Haganah or Irgun but ignores relations between the National Socialists and some

118 alvany, J.F. (1998), ‘Alptraum Nahost’, Zur Zeit, 14/1998. 119 Balvany, J.F. (2002e), ‘Wie lange noch Scharon?’, Aula, 4/2002, p. 25. 120 Bavany, J.F. (2002d), ‘Nahost erlebt den fünften Krieg’, Aula, 6/2002, p. 22. 121 Balvany, J.F. (2004b), ‘Der asymmetrische Krieg’, Aula, 4/2004, p. 20. 122 Balvany (2002b), op. cit., p. 23. 123 Balvany, J.F. (2002a), ‘Palästina 2002’, Aula, 1/2002, p. 20. 124 Balvany (2002b), op. cit., p. 22. 125 For example, Romig, F. (2004), ‘Der Krieg gegen den Terror und Israel’, Zur Zeit, 44– 45/2004, p. 9; Balvany, J.F. (2004a), ‘Der Bruch: Europa – USA’, Aula, 1/2004, p. 23; Romig, F. (2005), ‘Ein Schlag ins Gesicht’, Zur Zeit, 15/2005, p. 10; Balvany, J.F. (2005), ‘Amerika und die Israel-Lobby’, Aula, 9/2005, p. 24. 126 Prantner, R. (2004), ‘Israel ein Schurkenstaat?’, Zur Zeit, 38–39/2004, p. 16. 127 Balvany (2004a), op. cit., p. 23. 128 Sitte, F. (2004a), ‘Die Schurken und ihre A-Bomben’, Zur Zeit, 41–42/2004, p. 26. 129 Gilman, S. (1996), Smart Jews. The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press).

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Arab leaders. While he stated in 2003 that anti-Semitism is inexplicable for him and a ‘bad thing’,131 he openly confessed to being ‘anti-Semitic’ two years later.132 On several occasions the weekly Zur Zeit reported on the activities of Moishe Ayre Friedman and his orthodox Jewish community in Vienna, which of course included rightist demands to get rid of the present state of Israel133 and placing blame on Zionism, at least partly, for the occurrence of the Holocaust.134 While it is true that US foreign policy supported Islamist forces in Afghanistan to ﬁght the Soviet occupation, it is a dramatic simpliﬁcation to explain the terrorist and anti-democratic activities of the Al Qaeda network as the result of the one-sided policy of the US in the Middle East, as Sitte does.135 As in the case of the Israeli– Palestinian conﬂict, the dominant interpretation of the armed conﬂict between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the US is one that portrays the Arab side simply as the victim.136 When FPÖ leader Jörg Haider visited Iraq and Saddam Hussein in 2002, one author admitted in his report that Saddam is a dictator, but the author was ultimately more interested in the performance of Haider.137 His visits to Iraq and the commentary in the media of the far right are more or less typical of the view the majority of the far right holds in regards to the situation in Iraq. Presented by Haider as a contribution to peace138 the long-time FPÖ leader’s book on the meeting with then head of state Saddam Hussein only rarely mentions crimes committed by the Baath regime. What the book offers instead is a kind of fascination Haider seems to have for powerful men, even when they are unscrupulous and dedicated to an anti-Semitic worldview. Solely blaming UN sanctions for the miserable situation of Iraqi children and horrible conditions in Iraqi hospitals, but not mentioning the large share of ﬁnancial assets spent by the Baath regime for military purposes, Haider deﬁnitely creates an erroneous picture of the causes of the situation in Iraq. While Haider argues that the engagement of the United States in the Middle East is mainly dictated by strategic and economic interests, he himself proudly speaks of the advantages Austrian enterprises (may) have due to his visits to Iraq and his good relations with the Arab world. Mölzer backs him up, arguing that Haider’s visit continues a tradition of taboo breaking by Austrian politicians, including Austrian Chancellor Kreisky’s meetings with Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddaﬁ at a time when both were widely seen as terrorists.139

130 Sitte, F. (2003a), ‘Gordischer Knoten: Der Nahe Osten’, Zur Zeit, 28/2003, p. 13. 131 Ibid., p. 14. 132 Sitte, F. (2005b), ‘Sie machten mich zum Anti’, Zur Zeit, 7/2005, p. 15. 133 See Zur Zeit 11/2004, p. 13. 134 See Zur Zeit 48/2003, pp. 22–3. 135 Sitte, F. (2005a), ‘Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika auf allen Kontinenten’, Zur Zeit, 24/2005, p. 12. 136 For example Melisch, R. (1998), ‘Irak, der Störenfried’, Aula, 1/1998, pp. 18–19; Prantner, R. (2003), ‘Größenwahn und Wirklichkeit’, Zur Zeit, 49/2003, p. 11. 137 Domberg, G. (2003), ‘Zu Gast bei Saddam’, Zur Zeit, 13/03, p. 15. 138 Haider, J. (2003b), ‘Aus den US-Giftküchen’, Zur Zeit, 7–8/2003, p. 12. 139 Mölzer, A. (2002a), ‘Schurken unter sich?’, Zur Zeit, 8/2002, p. 6.

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Arming the Armed Forces With the remarkable exception of Franz Kernic’s study140, up until today there has been very little research done on the military politics of the far right in Austria. The Austrian far right portrays itself as the champion of the Bundesheer. Rightist media presents Austrian armed forces as not receiving the necessary appreciation from mainstream political parties, the political and military leadership of the armed forces,141 and from a relevant part of the population.142 Rightists say that the troops are running out of money, are paid poorly,143 are trained insufﬁciently,144 and that their weaponry is outdated.145 Following these statements, the far right’s demands seem logical: a stronger military is necessary to meet the security demands of today and tomorrow, as well having military standards maintained at such a level so as to enable them to face the United States at ‘eye level’.146 Like several other national armed forces, the Austrian Bundesheer is undergoing a process of restructuring accelerated by the fundamental change in world politics after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While prominent members of the FPÖ, like Brigadier Wolfgang Jung, declare that previous approaches to adapt the Bundesheer to the new security environment have been worthless, he claims that the FPÖ has been successful at pushing through a new security agenda when it was part of the national governing coalition from 2000 to 2002. According to Jung, the FPÖ’s agenda seeks to integrate aspects of foreign and domestic policy into military restructuring.147 Indeed, the far right is fully supportive of the so-called Austrian assistance operations (Assistenzeinsätze) that became signiﬁcant in the early 1990s. Bundesheer Colonel Helge Endres, who in 2002 supported a militia in Graz closely connected to the local FPÖ and who once joined the Kameradschaft IV, an association of former members of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, praised the effectiveness of soldiers in preventing refugees from passing through the Austrian border and entering Austrian territory.148 Vinzenz Eschlauer (alias Andreas Mölzer) also argued in favour of a militarization of asylum politics when he wrote, ‘who else but the Bundesheer had been competent to bring the stream of refugees under control and to channel it?’149 If Austrian forces do not control the border, Mölzer claims, painting a catastrophic 140 Kernic, F. (1988), Zwischen Worten und Taten: Die Wehrpolitik der Freiheitlichen 1949–1986 (Wien: Österreichischer Bundesverlag). 141 Kamehl, G. (1998), ‘Bundesheer – in der Krise?’, Zur Zeit, 48/1998, pp. 4–5. 142 Endres, H.W. (1990), ‘Umstritten – das Bundesheer’, Aula, 7–8/1990, p. 9. 143 Pfeiffer, M. (2003), ‘Bundesrat Gudenus für Heeresreform ohne Tabus!’, Zur Zeit, 39/2003. 144 Groß, W. (2005), ‘Die Drachensaat’, Aula, 1/2005, p. 9; Kamehl, G. (2005), ‘Eine Armee von Folterknechten?’, Zur Zeit, 2/2005, p. 6; Moser, R. (2005a), ‘Vom Großen zum Kleinen’, Zur Zeit, 35–36/2005, p. 18. 145 Howanietz, M. (2005), ‘Abrüsten ohne Zukunft’, Zur Zeit, 41/2005, p. 18, calling the Bundesheer ‘mere administrative machinery’. 146 Bachmann, G. (2004), ‘Papiertiger Europa?’, Zur Zeit, 22/2004, p. 16. 147 Jung (2002a), op. cit., p. 7. 148 Endres, H.W. (1991), ‘Landesverteidigung – Assistenzeinsatz’, Aula, 2/1991, p. 9. 149 Eschlauer, V. (1991a), ‘Nötiger denn je!’, Aula, 3/1991, p. 9.

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picture, that there will be a growth of Slovenians settling in Carinthia and they will fulﬁll ‘the daring dreams of chauvinist Slovenian nationalists’.150 Another author in the weekly Zur Zeit made the suggestion to equip Austrian armed forces with pilotless remote-controlled helicopters of the type that are already in use on the US– Mexico border.151 Bundesheer Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Bösch, who was one of the FPÖ spokespersons in military affairs until April 2006, demanded an extensive use of the assistance operations in order to confront ‘international terrorism and illegal immigration’.152 Given that the FPÖ speaks up for the idea of a people as an organic and homogeneous entity, the use of military forces is part of its policy to keep the number of immigrants in Austria as low as possible. Another change in Austrian security structures the FPÖ ascribes to its successes in the national government is the creation of a National Security Council, which has replaced several administrative bodies and has become the central counsel committee of the government in foreign, security and defence affairs.153 Referring to the advantages of this permanent committee, FPÖ politician Jung argued that it will produce common ground between all parties in terms of security policy and that it will allow ‘real progress among government and opposition groups as far as the fostering of conﬁdence is concerned’.154 Nevertheless, the far right’s expectation that security and military affairs would be exclusively dealt with by parliamentarians and high-ranking military personnel did not materialise. In 2004, militia ofﬁcer Günter Kamehl complained that 10 per cent of the members of the then commission working on reform of the Bundesheer were clueless in military issues, while military experts had been allowed observer status only.155 FPÖ activist Howanietz called the commission a ‘Bundesheer smashing committee’.156 One controversial topic debated within the FPÖ and on the pages of Zur Zeit and Aula is the question of whether the Bundesheer should be transformed from an army of conscription to an army of professional soldiers. Some rightists have praised the performance of Austrian soldiers on UN missions157, or have argued that present purposes could not be managed sufﬁciently by a professional army due to a shortage of ﬁnancial and personnel resources.158 Also, there is the complaint that turning to a professional army would support a trend ‘to enlarge the rights of the individuals but 150 Eschlauer, V. (1991b), ‘Bürgerkrieg vor der Tür’, Aula, 6/1991, p. 13. 151 Pfeiffer, M. (2002a), ‘Grenzüberwachung der nächsten Generation’, Zur Zeit, 6/2002, p. 13. 152 Bösch, R. (2004a), ‘Heimatschutz’, Zur Zeit, 6–7/2004, p. 6; Bösch, R. (2004b), ‘Für ein starkes Heer’, Zur Zeit, 27/2004, p. 3. 153 See Bundesgesetz über die Errichtung eines Nationalen Sicherheitsrates, Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich vom 16.11.2001, Teil I. 154 Jung, W. (2001a), ‘Sicherheitspolitik nicht militärisch ﬁxiert’, Zur Zeit, 42/2001, p. 3. 155 Kamehl, G. (2004), ‘Schon wieder Bundesheerreform!’, Aula, 3/2004, pp. 20–21. 156 Howanietz (2005), op. cit. 157 Endres, H.W. (1989), ‘Die beste Investition – Frieden’, Aula, 3/1989, p. 14; Endres, H.W. (1994), ‘Bundesheer – international’, Aula, 7–8/1994, p. 12. 158 Jung (2002a), op. cit., p. 8; Spath, G. (2004), ‘Bundesheer 2010 – klein, aber fein oder…?’, Aula, 3/2004, pp. 17–19; Kamehl (2004), op. cit.

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159

to reduce his/her duties concerning the community’. Others speak up for a periodic review of the proposal for a professional army,160 or suggest for the continuation of the conscription system to be accompanied by general compulsory service for young adults.161 Author Endres once made the suggestion to have a system in which compulsory military service is suspended rather than abolished.162 Finally, a minority represented by Gudenus favours an army made up of professional soldiers.163 No matter the internal debate, there is general unhappiness in the far right with the present state of the Bundesheer, which is portrayed as too civilian,164 too small in number165, and hostile towards right-wing political positions.166 Reducing the period of military service from eight months to six months by January 2006 met opposition from the FPÖ.167 Admiration of elite soldiers like the French Foreign Legion168 and the German Commando Special Forces169 is found side by side with praise for the ‘bravery’ and ‘fulﬁlment of duty’ of Wehrmacht soldiers170 – as if they had not been part of a criminal war of aggression and as if the Wehrmacht had not been involved in war crimes. There is also constant complaining about allegedly lacking ﬁnancial resources. Reiter, as one of the most prominent security experts of the FPÖ, has demanded several times for the doubling of the military budget.171 Lieutenant Colonel Kamehl once stated that Austrian soldiers are ‘despised as “fare dodgers” in security politics’, followed by a dramatic appeal to the Austrian chancellor: ‘We cannot allow ourselves to be smiled at and not taken seriously any longer. Mister Chancellor: Lead Austria back to the way of honour and dignity!’172 When former FPÖ spokesperson for military affairs Herbert Scheibner became Minister of Defence in the conservative– far right coalition, he actually lamented that he had taken over a ‘pile of smashed crockery with decades of investment deﬁcit’.173 Yet, contrary to demands from fellow party members, he did not carry through with an increase in military expenditure during his period of ofﬁce. 159 Kamehl, G. (1999), ‘Soll unser Bundesheer einem Berufsheer weichen?’, Zur Zeit, 28–29/1999, p. 7. 160 Bösch (2004b), op. cit. 161 Magenheimer, H. (1999), Zur Frage der Allgemeinen Wehrpﬂicht. Standortbestimmung – Alternativen – Konsequenzen (Wien: Schriftenreihe der Landesverteidigungsakademie. Institut für strategische Forschung). 162 Endres, H.W. (1999), ‘Ohne Geld keine Militärmusik’, Aula, 12/1999, p. 10. 163 Gudenus, J. (2002a), ‘Streit um Abfangjäger’, Aula, 4/2002, p. 11. 164 Wiesinger, K. (1998), ‘Die eingesparte Sicherheit’, Zur Zeit, 26/1998. 165 Gudenus (2005a), op. cit. 166 Niemann, N. (1997), ‘Das kann bei uns nicht passieren’, Zur Zeit, 9–10/1997. 167 Mölzer, A. (2003c), ‘Widersprüche um das Heer’, Zur Zeit, 11/2003, p. 5; Bösch (2004a), op. cit. 168 Müller, H. (2001), ‘Fremdenlegionäre voran’, Zur Zeit, 42/2001, p. 7. 169 Pfeiffer, M. (2001), ‘Schnelle Eingreifstruppe’, Zur Zeit, 42/2001, p. 6. 170 Jung, W. (2002b), ‘Rede zum 8. Mai’, Aula, 6/2002, pp. 9–10. 171 Spitzauer, F. (1989), ‘De-facto Aufgabe der Neutralität’, Aula, 3/1989, p. 15. 172 Kamehl, G. (2001b), ‘Einseitige Loyalitäten’, Zur Zeit, 31/2001, p. 7. 173 Kamehl, G. (2001a), ‘Oben ohne, Frau Vizekanzler?’, Zur Zeit, 26/001, p. 5.

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The question of what kind and what amount of weaponry and armament the Austrian armed forces should have is a regular subject in the media of the far right. Authors tend to discuss armament issues in terms of a wide range of pieces of equipment, from boots and trucks to nuclear weapons. However, attention has longer been focused on the issue of getting new interceptor ﬁghters for the Austrian Air Force. For two decades, Swedish Draken ﬁghter planes were the backbone of the Austrian Air Force. In response to the announcement by the planes’ manufacturer that it would not continue maintenance of the jets, the far right came out with several different positions. While Kamehl complained that the decision to buy the successor of the Draken had taken too long,174 and former Bundesheer Colonel John Gudenus, who had been convicted in 2006 for violating the law banning attempts of National Socialist revival, favoured a temporary solution to be put in place quickly.175 FPÖ Member of European Parliament Andreas Mölzer made critical remarks about the hurry in which the acquisition of the interceptor ﬁghters had ﬁnally been carried out, and he said that he suspected dishonest motives in the process of decisionmaking.176 Bachmann, however, supported the decision to buy the Euroﬁghter as a ‘decision for Europe’ by which dependence on the United States in the armament sector would be reduced.177 Mölzer was disappointed by FPÖ parliamentarians who had previously voiced opposition but then voted in favour of the Euroﬁghter.178 This case exempliﬁes important differences inside the FPÖ on the issue of obtaining military resources179 leading some observers to suspect improper decisionmaking processes.180 The issue of the interceptor ﬁghters is connected to the question of whether or not a small country like Austria is capable of running an air force can independently carry out a full spectrum of missions. With the majority of the far right favouring the integration of Austria into either a transnational European security structure or NATO, the argument goes that strategic air defence will be covered by forces of these military coalitions. Given this supposition, Pfeiffer points out that money allocated for the aircraft might be spent more usefully elsewhere.181 Gudenus, too, argued that the interceptor ﬁghters should not be seen as the most important and necessary innovation of military technology and equipment for the Austrian armed forces. For the purpose of an air police, technically sophisticated machines would not be necessary,182 especially as there is a future with UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles).183 Also, Brigadier Wolfgang Jung, one of the representatives of the FPÖ in the national parliament (Nationalrat) and a regular author in publications like Aula

174 Ibid. 175 Gudenus, J. (2003b), ‘Wer trägt die Verantwortung?’, Aula, 10/2003, pp. 7–8. 176 Mölzer (2003a), op. cit., p. 6. 177 Bachmann, G. (2002), ‘Zwiespältige Sicherheitspolitik’, Zur Zeit, 40/2002, p. 6. 178 Mölzer, A. (2003b), ‘Ein Sturzkampfbomber?’, Zur Zeit, 20/2003. 179 Mölzer, A. (2002b), ‘Wer den Schaden hat...’, Zur Zeit, 32–33/2002, p. 5; Ebenberger Stix, C. (2002), ‘Nur ﬂiegen ist schöner…’, Zur Zeit, 26–27/2002, p. 5. 180 Golowitsch, H. (2003), ‘Drittes Lager, wohin?’, Aula, 6/2003, pp. 25–31. 181 Pfeiffer, M. (2002b), ‘Bundesheer bald NATO-kompatibel?’, Zur Zeit, 7/2002, p. 7. 182 Gudenus, J. (2003a), ‘Teuerste Kampfmaschine für Luftpolizei’, Aula, 5/2003, p. 5. 183 Ibid., p. 6.

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and Zur Zeit, has pointed out that modern equipment had been bought for the armed forces, but that buying new military trucks has been deferred several times.184 In June 2006, Reiter provoked a scandal when he demanded that the EU should become a global power with access to nuclear weapons.185 This issue had already been raised by Brigadier Gunther Spath three years before. Writing as the then Chief of Staff of the Military Commando in the Austrian state of Carinthia, Reiter stated that, in order to compete with the United States, Europe needs a strong nuclear component: It is obvious that the French and the British will not Europeanize their national nuclear forces in the short term. Europe has to make a decision: do we want to be involved, or do we want to be a vassal and an appendage? Equality with the US in power politics is a sheer illusion without having strategic capacities at one’s disposal.186

Summary The political strategies of the Austrian far right regarding foreign and military affairs rest on a nationalist and völkisch understanding of the idea of peoples that is then integrated into a wider European perspective. Organic understandings of state and nation187 and a connection between ethnic purity and cultural development188 are relevant pillars of this far right world view. Austria’s future role is seen as being part of a European confederation that gets migrants off Austria’s back, keeps Turkey out, aggressively ﬁghts moral degeneration as part of the ‘clash of civilizations’189, and rises to become a ‘strong and independent factor in world politics’190, rivalling the United States. As far as the military factor is concerned, according to authors in far right media, better ﬁnanced, better equipped and better trained Austrian armed forces are needed. As part of a European military alliance that should have nuclear bombs at its disposal, Austrian soldiers are expected to remain under national command. The question of changing to an army of professional soldiers is not answered as uniformly as is the issue of neutrality. The idea and the concept of neutrality, while occasionally referred to positively, is not an indispensable pillar in political concepts of the Austrian far right, as the many proponents of the EU, NATO or a European confederation demonstrate. Concerning the Austrian relationship with Germany, there is a deep feeling of belonging to the same nation and some expectation that, speaking geopolitically, Germany’s move to the centre of Europe will also strengthen the position of Austria, which will then become a dominating power over several smaller countries in eastern 184 Wiesinger (1998), op. cit. 185 Reiter, E. (2006), ‘Will die EU eine globale Macht werden?’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17/18 June 2006, p. 6. 186 Spath (2003a), op. cit., pp. 15–16. 187 Scrinzi, O. (1991b), ‘Nation Europa – ohne Nationen?’, Aula, 7–8/1991, pp. 30–31. 188 Mölzer (2004a), op. cit., p. 16. 189 Romig, F. (2001), ‘Krieg gegen den Gottesstaat’, Zur Zeit, 51–52/2001, p. 12. 190 Mölzer (2004a), op. cit., p. 16.

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and southeastern Europe. The latest FPÖ programme even opts for the entry of South Tyrol into Austria.191 As Stirnemann already noted several years ago, the Austrian Rights’ hopes for Europe may mirror a changed perspective regarding the Austria’s relationship with Germany: ‘What has been the idea of the Anschluss in these circles during the monarchy and the First Republic seems now to have become the idea of Europe with its possibility to merge with at least a part of the sphere where German is the language.’192 Some may even dream of a revival of the imperial and royal Habsburg Empire. Acronyms BZÖ CFSP DÖW EU FPÖ MEP MIÉP NATO UN VdU

Bündnis Zukunft Österreich Common Foreign and Security Policy Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes European Union Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs Member of European Parliament Hungarian Justice and Life Party North Atlantic Treaty Organisation United Nations Verband der Unabhängigen

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— (1995), Nato-Beitritt Österreichs? (Wien: Schriftenreihe der Landesverteidigungsakademie). — (1997), ‘Von der Neutralität zur Realpolitik’, Zur Zeit, 1/1997. — (1998), ‘Der aufrechte Gang fehlt noch’, Zur Zeit, 51–52/1998. — (1999), ‘Parteipolitik statt Sicherheitspolitik’, Zur Zeit, 33/1999. — (2006), ‘Will die EU eine globale Macht werden?’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17/18 June 2006. Romig, F. (1992), ‘Warum “Nein” zu EWR, EG und EU’, Aula, 11/1992. — (2001), ‘Krieg gegen den Gottesstaat’, Zur Zeit, 51–52/2001. — (2002), ‘Wer regiert uns wirklich?’, Aula, 4/2002. — (2003), ‘Israelischer Bush-Krieg’, Zur Zeit, 12/2003. — (2004), ‘Der Krieg gegen den Terror und Israel’, Zur Zeit, 44–45/2004. — (2005), ‘Ein Schlag ins Gesicht’, Zur Zeit, 15/2005. Rotter, M. (1984), Bewaffnete Neutralität. Das Beispiel Österreich (Frankfurt/Main: Haag + Herchen). Scharsach, H.-H. (ed.) (2002), Haider: Österreich und die rechte Versuchung (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt). — (2002), Rückwärts nach rechts: Europas Populisten (Wien: Ueberreuter). Schiszler, S. (2002), ‘Vom Unsinn der österreichischen Nation’, Aula, 6/2002. Schönhuber, F. (2004), ‘Die Gründe des Wahlsieges der Serbischen Radikalen’, Aula, 2/2004. Schöfbänker, G. (1997), Neutralität – Quo Vadis? Struktur eines außenpolitischen Prioritätskonﬂikts (Stadtschlaining: ÖSFK). Schwab, J. (1999), ‘Wer steckt hinter der Entführung Öcalans?’, Aula, 3/1999. Scrinzi, O. (1991a), ‘Von den kurzen Beinen der drei Neutralitätslügen’, Aula, 5/1991. — (1991b), ‘Nation Europa – ohne Nationen?’, Aula, 7–8/1991. — (2002), ‘Südtirol – 10 Jahre Streitbelegung, 50 Jahre Tolomei-Schwindel’, Aula, 7–8/2002. — (2005), ‘Die Lebenslüge von der Freiwilligkeit’, Zur Zeit, 21/2005. Schönfeld-Pfennigbauer, B. (2005), ‘Frieden für Palästina?’, Zur Zeit, 03/2005. Sichelschmidt, G. (1998), ‘Was die Welt Amerika verdankt?’, Aula, 10/1998. Sitte, F. (2003a), ‘Gordischer Knoten: Der Nahe Osten’, Zur Zeit, 28/2003. — (2004a), ‘Die Schurken und ihre A-Bomben’, Zur Zeit, 41–42/2004. — (2004b), ‘Doppelbödige Moral’, Zur Zeit, 30–31/2004. — (2005a), ‘Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika auf allen Kontinenten’, Zur Zeit, 24/2005. — (2005b), ‘Sie machten mich zum Anti’, Zur Zeit, 7/2005. Spath, G. (2000), ‘Zum Begriff “Sicherheit” in Österreich’, Aula, 5/2000. — (2003a), ‘Weltmacht USA – und wo bleibt Europa?’, Aula, 5/2003. — (2004), ‘Bundesheer 2010 – klein, aber fein oder…?’, Aula, 3/2004. Spitzauer, F. (1989), ‘De-facto Aufgabe der Neutralität’, Aula, 3/1989. Steindl, A. (2005), ‘Wegtreten’, Zur Zeit, 7/2005. Stirnemann, A. (1986), ‘Das neue Parteiprogramm der FPÖ – eine kritische Analyse’, in Khol, Ofner and Stirnemann (eds.). Tomaschitz, B. (2005a), ‘Mölzer für Beibehaltung der Neutralität’, Zur Zeit, 10/2005.

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— (2005b), ‘Kehrtwende in EU-Politik’, Zur Zeit, 31/2005. Verband Österreichischer Gewerkschaftlicher Bildung and Österreichisches Studienzentrum für Frieden und Konﬂiktlösung (eds.) (2001), Von der sozialen zur militärischen Sicherheit? Die Rolle der Neutralität im 21. Jahrhundert (Wien: Verlag des ÖGB). Vetter, M. (2005), ‘Sieht Europa bald ganz anders aus?. in: Aula, 11/2005. Virchow, F. (2006), Gegen den Zivilismus. Internationale Beziehungen und Militär in den politischen Konzeptionen der extremen Rechten (Wiesbaden: VS). Waldner, C. (1993), ‘Europäische Region Tirol’, in Bossi, Pučnik, and Haider (eds.). — (1994), ‘Südtirol zwischen Autonomie und Selbstbestimmung’, Freiheit und Verantwortung 1994. — (1995), ‘Berlusconis Triumph. Südtirol und das italienische Rechtsbündnis’, Freiheit und Verantwortung 1995. Walter, E. (1994), ‘Realisierung Mitteleuropas durch den EU-Beitritt’, Aula, 6/1994. — (1998a), ‘Österreich und die NATO: Fragen und Konsequenzen’, Aula, 2/1998. — (1998b), ‘Die überforderte Weltmacht Amerika’, Aula, 10/1998. Werz, N. (ed.) (2003), Populismus. Populisten in Übersee und Europa (Opladen: Leske+Budrich). Wiesinger, K. (1998), ‘Die eingesparte Sicherheit’, Zur Zeit, 26/1998. Zacharasiewicz, A. (2002), ‘Kooperation – trotz allem!’, Zur Zeit, 46/2002.

Chapter 4

Our Own People First in a Europe of Peoples: The International Policy of the Vlaams Blok Marc Swyngedouw, Koen Abts and Maarten Van Craen

Introduction Over the past 25 years, the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block) has progressively established a prominent position in the party system of Flanders. If initially there was some doubt about the viability of an extreme-right party, the Vlaams Blok now has a greater impact on Flemish politics than ever before. With more than 24 per cent of the votes, in 2004 the anti-system party became the largest political party in the Flemish parliament. Its electoral success has been largely due to its anti-foreigner position, its anti-political arguments and its continual harping on criminality.1 In the 1990s the anti-immigrant party had succeeded in combining its radical agenda of exclusion with a populist ideology, mobilization strategy and style.2 Depending on the research tradition to which they belong, political scientists call this interweaving of populism and cultural (and ethnic) exclusion, ‘national populism’,3 ‘right-wing populism’,4 ‘exclusionary populism’5 or ‘xenophobic populism’.6 On the one hand, the Vlaams Blok can be 1 Swyngedouw, M. and Beerten, R. (1996), ‘Cognitieve en affectieve motieven van partijkeuze, De nationale verkiezingen van 21 Mei 1995’, Res Publica, 38(3–4), pp. 555–574; Swyngedouw, M. (2001), ‘The Subjective Cognitive and Affective Map of Extreme Right Voters: Using Open-End Questions in Exit-Polls’, Electoral Studies, 20(1), pp. 217–241; Van Craen, M. and Swyngedouw, M. (2002), Het Vlaams Blok doorgelicht: 25 jaar extreem-rechts in Vlaanderen (Leuven: ISPO-Bulletin). 2 Swyngedouw, M. and Ivaldi, G. (2001), ‘The Extreme Right Utopia in Belgium and France, The Ideology of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French Front National’, Western European Politics, 24(3), pp. 1–22. 3 Taguieff and P.-A. (1995), ‘Political science confronts populism’, Telos 103(1), pp. 9–43. 4 Betz, H.-G. and Immerfall, S. (eds.) (1998), The New Politics of the Right (New York: Macmillan Press); Betz, H.-G. (2002a), ‘Conditions Favoring the Success and Failure of Radical Right-wing Populist Parties in Contemporary Democracies’, in Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave). 5 Betz, H.-G., 2002b, Exclusionary Populism in Austria, Italy and Switzerland, paper presented at Renner Institut. 6 DeAngelis, R. (2003), ‘A Rising Tide for Jean-Marie, Jörg, and Pauline? Xenophobic Populism in Comparative Perspective’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 49(1), pp. 75–92.

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deﬁned as a ‘populist’ party that rejects the established powers and that claims to derive its legitimacy from a direct and privileged link with the people. The Vlaams Blok presents itself as the only true defender of the indivisible Flemish community and of real democracy.7 On the other hand, Vlaams Blok supports a particular type of populism, namely an ‘ethno-nationalistic’ populism, since the party is convinced that the Flemish national identity should be pursued and that the ethnic identity should actively be defended against internal enemies of the Flemish community and against external inﬂuences. ‘Ethnic populism’ limits citizenship explicitly to the ethnic community: the community is deﬁned on an ethnic basis. The community, for the Vlaams Blok, is ethnos, not demos, since the party is convinced that the cultural community should precede the political community. However, because the party preaches at the same time that the boundaries of the state should coincide with those of the nation, its ideology can also be deﬁned as ‘nationalistic populism’. From the beginning, the ideal pursued has been an independent Flanders. Several studies have already dealt with the exclusionary politics of ethnic populism.8 Strikingly, however, research has focused only on the domestic programme of neo-populist parties and movements. That only limited attention is paid to the international agenda of modern populist movements is remarkable, since their rise is often linked to the consequences of political, cultural and economic internationalization and globalization.9 Although international questions have hardly any impact on the public discourse and electoral success of the Vlaams Blok, the party has still developed its own view on international matters. Ethno-nationalistic populism, as described above, also ﬁnds expression in the international programme of the Vlaams Blok. As scientiﬁc and popular analysis has paid scarcely any attention to either the international and European programme of the Vlaams Blok, or the position of the party in the European political system, this article aims to go some way to ﬁlling this gap. 7 Canovan, M. (1999), ‘Trust the People!, Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy’, Political Studies, 47(1), pp. 2–16; Taggart, P. (2000), Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press); Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.) (2002), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave); Abts, K. (2004), ‘Het populistisch appel: voorbij de populaire communicatiestijl en ordinaire democratiekritiek’, Tijdschrift voor Sociologie, 25(4), pp. 451–476. 8 Merkl, P. and Weinberg, L. (eds.) (1997), ‘The Revival of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties’ (London: Frank Cass); Betz and Immerfall, op. cit.; Hainsworth, P. (ed.) (2000), The Politics of the Extreme Right. From the Margins to the Mainstream (London: Pinter); Mudde C. (2000), The Ideology of Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Swyngedouw and Ivaldi (2001), op. cit. 9 Kitschelt, H. (1995), The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press); Immerfall, S. (1998), ‘The Neo-Populist Agenda’ in Betz and Immerfall; Kriesi, H. (1999), ‘Movements of the Left, Movements of the Right: Putting the Mobilization of Two New Types of Social Movements into Political Context’ in Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, Kitschelt, H., Lange, P., Marks, G. and Stephens, J. (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Betz (2002a), op. cit.; Swank, D. and Betz, H.-G. (2003), ‘Globalization, the Welfare State, and Right Wing Populism in Western Europe’, Socio-economic Review 1, pp. 215–45.

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The Indirect Importance of International Politics International and European policy questions can hardly be described as central to the political campaign of the Vlaams Blok. Originally, the party preferred to completely ignore Europe. Only in 1989, more than 10 years after the party had gained its ﬁrst representative in Belgium’s parliament, did the Vlaams Blok win a seat in the European Parliament. In the very early period – in 1979 – other priorities and ﬁnancial difﬁculties discouraged the Vlaams Blok from taking part in that year’s European elections. Five years later the Vlaams Blok did in fact take part, but its ﬁrst European campaign, with the slogans ‘We say what you think’ and ‘Sooner a rocket in the garden, than a Russian in the kitchen’, attracted only a few votes. This was the ﬁrst and last time that the party would take part in an election, yet fail to win any seats at all. The 1989 campaign on the other hand was a success. Its ‘Europe for Europeans’ campaign enabled it to send its ﬁrst Member of the European Parliament (MEP) to the European parliament, namely the party’s founder and then chairman Karel Dillen. The anti-politics ‘Spring Clean’ slogan of the 1994 campaign, which played on the need to rid Belgium and Europe of foreigners, political banditry and fraud, helped the Vlaams Blok do even better and allowed the current party chairman, Frank Vanhecke, to join Karel Dillen in the European parliament. In 1999, both MEPs were re-elected with ease, but relinquished their seats in favour of others in June 2003. Karel Dillen, then 77, retired from politics and was succeeded by his son Koen Dillen. Frank Vanhecke, on the other hand, won a seat in the Belgian Senate (upper house) and was succeeded in the European Parliament by Philip Claeys, a former employee of the parliamentary party in the Flemish parliament. The change was accompanied by a marked rise in the parliamentary activities of Vlaams Blok in the European parliament. Finally, in 2004 the party gained its electoral triumph. In the European elections, the Vlaams Blok’s share of the vote increased considerably from 15.1 per cent in 1999 to 23.2 per cent in 2004. As a result, three former MEPs were elected: Frank Vanhecke, Philip Claeys and Koen Dillen. Although interest in foreign policy and Europe has signiﬁcantly increased over time, international questions are still given only low priority in the public discourse of the Vlaams Blok and in its electoral appeals. The party has relatively little interest in Europe, and the average Vlaams Blok voter is unlikely to lose much sleep over international political issues.10 Nonetheless, the party succeeds all too well in exploiting for its own ends a range of local consequences of the complex social changes of late modernity, namely internationalization, globalization, and individualization. Always coated with outspoken populist and anti-establishment rhetoric in relation to the European Union (EU), all kinds of local/national problems associated with ﬂoods of immigrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees are linked back to the erosion of national borders. All this is presented as part of a discourse of Flemish national particularism. Here we see how the Vlaams Blok cleverly applies the ‘jumping of 10 Ackaert, J., de Winter, L. and Swyngedouw, M. (1996), ‘Belgium: an Electorate on the Eve of Disintegration’ in Choosing Europe: the European Electorate and the National Parties in the Face of the Union, van der Eijk, C. and Franklin, M. (eds.) (Ann Arbor: University Press); Van Craen and Swyngedouw, op. cit.

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scales’ technique, whereby global complexity is rescaled to local simplicity.11 Social and political problems that are manifested globally, such as international migration, organized crime and international terrorism, are redeﬁned as national or local problems. Global complexity, which refers to the processes of cultural and economic globalization as well as the enlargement of the EU, is translated into comprehensible and tangible issues, whereby such changes are condensed and expressed as a direct and immediate threat to established prosperity, rights and power. In this way, the complexity of international issues can be simpliﬁed to the all-embracing populist opposition between insiders and outsiders. Crucial to this translation process are the instrumental ﬁgures of the political establishment and the immigrants, who threaten the unity of the Flemish people from inside or outside.12 Thus, the international problems are chieﬂy linked back to and expressed in terms of the national core issues of the Vlaams Blok, namely immigration, crime, and the theme of anti-politics. Indirectly, the Vlaams Blok makes a connection, whenever possible, with European policies, and the party exploits the growing resentment of current asylum policies and European enlargement. For example, 49 per cent of Belgians reject the most recent enlargement of the EU by the addition of ten new member states, whereas barely 38 per cent of Belgians favour the accession of these states.13 Furthermore, the Vlaams Blok successfully exploits the widespread distrust of asylum-seekers. Roughly 55 per cent of Flemings think that Flanders has too many asylum-seekers relative to its number of inhabitants, while 46 per cent want the borders shut to new asylum-seekers. Moreover, two in three Flemings think that too many asylum-seekers come to Flanders to proﬁt from the social security system.14 In sum, the data show an enormous reservoir of resentment. To capitalize on these forms of resentment, the Vlaams Blok succeeds in redeﬁning the foreigner or asylum-seeker as a threatening public enemy in the shape of a competitor for social and economic beneﬁts in the labour market, the grave-digger of the welfare state, and the beneﬁciary of communal provision. It portrays the foreigner as disturbing everyday life and as a criminal immigrant and cultural intruder who threatens and contaminates the Flemish heartland.15 Although freedom of religion is not a point of conﬂict in Belgian politics, the Vlaams Blok constructs the image of the threatening immigrant by invoking the alleged threat of Islam. One of the arguments in its 2004 campaign literature against Turkish membership of the EU was that Islamic Turkey is not part of European civilization.16 11 See Swyngedouw, E. (1997), ‘Homing in and Spacing Out: Re-Conﬁguring Scale’, School of Geography, University of Oxford, WPG97-10; Urry, J. (2003), Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press). 12 Swyngedouw and Ivaldi, op. cit.; Cuperus, R (2003), ‘The Populist Deﬁciency of European Social Democracy’, Internationale Politiek und Gesellschaft, 3, 83–109; Abts, op. cit. 13 European Commission (2004), Eurobarometer 61 (Brussel: EC). 14 Billiet, J. and Meireman, K. (2004), ‘Immigratie en Asiel: de opvattingen en houdingen van Belgen in het Europees Sociaal Survey’, Leuven: Onderzoeksverslag DA/2004-36. 15 Swyngedouw, M. (1995), ‘The “Threatening Immigrant” in Flanders 1930–1980, Redrawing the Social Space’, New Community (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies), 21(3), pp. 325–40. 16 Vlaams Blok (2004b), Vlaamse Staat, Europese Natie. Europees verkiezingsprogramma 2004 (Brussel: Vlaams Blok).

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The Ambiguity of the International Discourse In general, the ofﬁcial approach to international politics is characterized by internal contradictions and the adoption of vague positions. Central to this is a somewhat contradictory argument for a strong Europe of European peoples. On the one hand, the Vlaams Blok wants a strong and powerful Europe to act on the international stage, capable of speaking and acting as one. Characteristic of this thinking is the call for a fully developed European defence system, as well as uniform and stringent policies towards immigration and asylum-seekers. On the other hand, however, the party loudly objects to the asphyxiating centralism of Europe, where the European structure is viewed as a breach of the inalienable right of a people to determine their own fate. As a result, the attitude towards the European Union is in general highly ambivalent: greater integration of the free market economy, foreign policy, defence, immigration, crime ﬁghting, and environmental policies, combined with a powerful plea for less or even no intervention in national matters such as the arts, education, law and order and social security. Similarly, there is no clearly articulated attitude towards the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) or the US, although, in general, the party’s positions on transatlantic policy, the hegemony of the US and international bodies such as NATO and the United Nations (UN) are largely negative. As the core ideas of the far-right party regarding international policy are most clearly expressed through its positions on European integration, we look ﬁrst at the attitude of the Vlaams Blok to the process of European integration. In Grondbeginselen [Basic Principles], the electoral programme Baas in eigen land [Boss in our own country], the congress texts Staatsgedachte [Idea of State] and Europa [Europe], the study document Europa: vloek of zegen [Europe: Curse or Blessing?] and, above all, the programme for the European elections Vlaamse staat, Europese natie [Flemish State, European Nation], the Vlaams Blok appears to position itself as constructive but critical with respect to the European Union. In reality, however, its attitude towards Europe is ambiguous due to intrinsic tensions between the party’s national and international objectives, wherein the development of a Flemish national community should be linked to the objectives of the project of European integration. A Confederal Europe of Peoples The Vlaams Blok is against the political uniﬁcation of Europe. However, as a matter of principle the party is in favour of and a defender of cooperation among the peoples of Europe. The core of this ‘Europe of peoples’ idea is that sovereignty does not lie with Europe or with the existing states, but with the various cultural communities.17 An essential aspect of the extreme-right view is the right of self-determination of a people. As a result, it is not the existing states that are the building blocks of a future Europe. Rather, future European integration can only be built on the basis

17 See Verreyken, W. (1994), Europa barst! (Antwerp: Tyr).

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of cooperation among such peoples.18 On the one hand, therefore, the party argues for a confederal Europe or a ‘confederation of peoples’ that allows for the selfdetermination of all European peoples, as deﬁned in cultural terms. Thus, it totally rejects the concept of a federal Europe as characterized by a European constitution and European citizenship. On the other hand, the plea for a Europe of peoples allows the Vlaams Blok to link its struggle for a separate Flemish state to a European agenda. As a result, the Vlaams Blok demands a rightful place in the European Union for the future state of Flanders. The concept of a ‘Europe of the fatherlands’ reconciles the national and European interest. The current process of political uniﬁcation in the direction of a federation of states, similar to the United States of America, is thus regarded by the Vlaams Blok as unnecessary, and is moreover both dangerous and harmful. In this view, Europe is a serious threat to the sovereignty of the member states, and in the longer term would be a danger to the cultural diversity of the European peoples. Additionally, the European superstate is likely to become a bureaucracy. The Vlaams Blok decries the notion of European tutelage and expressly opts for the restoration of the primacy of the nation state. First of all, in the eyes of the extreme right, the EU cannot lay claim to any constitutional authority: ‘the EU is not a state and for us it can never be that. Constitutions can only be drafted by and for states.’19 Furthermore, the party argues for a consistent and radical application of the principle of subsidiarity in the European Union. Some inalienable policy areas continue to be a proper part of the national decision making process. In part, the Vlaams Blok argues that powers and decisions of relevance to the peoples of Europe, such as culture, education, law and order, social policy, and social security, must remain ﬁrmly in the hands of the national states and can be better exercised at state level, which is closer to the people.20 For the Block, such matters are inherently associated with the national identity of every language and cultural community. The ﬁrst and main argument against the transfer of these inalienable powers to the European level is the conviction that there never can and never will be a ‘European demos’ or ‘European people’. For the Vlaams Blok, Europe is a patchwork of peoples, each with its own cultural identity and interests. Because a minimal consensus on fundamental principles is missing in so many respects, the party thinks there is absolutely no point in working towards a European federal superstate.21 Using similar arguments, the Vlaams Blok continues to reject on principle the concept of European citizenship, according to which any person – wherever he or she may live – who has the nationality of one of the European member states is allowed to vote in European and local elections. To bring about the suppression of local voting rights for EU citizens, the party demands a fundamental review and curtailing of 18 Dillen, K. (1990), Manifest van het rechtse Vlaams-nationalisme. Grondbeginselen (Brussel: Vlaams Blok); Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 19 Vlaams Blok (2004a), Dossier ‘Europa: vloek of zegen?’ (Brussel: Vlaams Blok); Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 20 Vlaams Blok (2001b), Congrestekst Europa. (Brussel: Vlaams Blok); Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 21 Vlaams Blok (2001b), op. cit.

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the Maastricht Treaty. After all, according to the Vlaams Blok, political rights must continue to be directly linked to citizenship or nationality. ‘Everybody has the right to assert more political rights on their “own ground” than what guests can lay claim to.’22 Although the Vlaams Blok’s actions are primarily aimed at electoral rights for non-European foreigners introduced in 2004, the party continues, by reason of its strict linkage of voting rights and nationality, to aim at EU citizens. The second argument by the Vlaams Blok against a far-reaching transfer of powers is based not so much on the denial of national interest, but rather on the enormous democratic deﬁcit that the party thinks would accompany a federal Europe. European institutions lack democratic legitimacy. Here the Vlaams Blok has taken advantage of the numerous anti-establishment sentiments associated with the democratic paradox inherent in every representative liberal democracy.23 First, the constitutional democracy and the European system of checks and balances is contested.24 The institutions lack transparency and are too complex, while the European bureaucracy is characterized by interference and a mania for organization. Second, the party capitalizes on the discrepancy between the ideal of good governance and the practice of European politics.25 ‘Mismanagement is the rule rather than the exception.’26 Europe’s institutions are wasteful, badly run, beneﬁt only the few, and are corrupt and nepotistic. According to the Vlaams Blok, the solution lies in a drastic tightening of anti-corruption measures, but above all in a far-reaching reform of the EU’s political institutions and a signiﬁcant reduction in the number of civil servants employed by the EU. Third, the Vlaams Blok takes advantage of the unbridgeable gap between citizens and political system.27 Time and again, important decisions are made without public debate. The Vlaams Blok therefore argues in favour of a plebiscitary democracy and the introduction of binding referenda as a direct expression of the popular will. Nonetheless, the Vlaams Blok is not simply an anti-European party. Contrary to some other West European populist movements, the attitude of anti-Europeanism in itself forms no part of the populist appeal of the Vlaams Blok.28 Its populist critique 22 Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 23 Oakeshott, M. (1996), The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press); Canovan (1999), op. cit.; Mouffe, C. (2000), The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso); Papadopoulos, Y. (2002), ‘Populism, the Democratic Question, and Contemporary Governance’, in Mény and Surel (eds.), op. cit.; Taggart, P. (2002), ‘Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics’, in Mény and Surel (eds.), op. cit.; Abts, op. cit.; Abts, K. and Rummens, S. (2007). Populism versus Democracy, Political Studies (forthcoming). 24 Leca, J. (1996), ‘La démocratie à l’épreuve des pluralismes’, Revue françaize de Science Politique, 46(2), pp. 225–279; Mair, P. (2002), ‘Populist Democracy versus Party Democracy’ in Mény and Surel (eds.). 25 Bobbio, N. (1987), The Future of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press). 26 Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit., p. 24. 27 Canovan, M, 2002, ‘Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy’, in Mény and Surel (eds.), op. cit.; Papadopoulos, op. cit. 28 Taggart, P. (1995), ‘New Populist Parties in Western Europe’, Western European Politics, 18(1), pp. 34–51; Taggart (2000), op. cit.

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is principally directed at the European establishment in general. Although in the Vlaams Blok’s view, Europe can never be a political unit or federal superstate, it does subscribe to the idea of a confederal Europe with an extensive and strengthened common policy with respect to certain areas where Europe can offer beneﬁts. In the party’s view an institutionally united Europe is only an ‘intergovernmental cooperative association’ with respect to a number of clearly deﬁned matters, all of which are associated with transnational problems. First of all, these are matters such as the internal market, environment, transport infrastructure, and consumer protection. For the Vlaams Blok, efﬁcient economic, environmental and infrastructure policies can only succeed in the European context. The approval of the procedures for such policies requires, in the Vlaams Blok’s view, a qualiﬁed European majority. Apart from this, the party is also forcefully in favour of common European foreign affairs, defence, and immigration and asylum policies. In view of their enormous impact on national interests, decisions made at the European level on such matters must in the party’s view be adopted unanimously.29 Foreign Policy, Defence Policy, Immigration and Asylum Policy The Vlaams Blok regards the best response to the geopolitical challenges of the twenty-ﬁrst century as comprising a common foreign policy, an effective European defence force and a strict common immigration and asylum policy, with these policies serving as the main concerns of the European Union. With respect to foreign policy, the party notes that ‘Europe must speak with a single voice.’30 At present, EU foreign policy offers insufﬁcient counterbalance to the global hegemony of the US and suffers excessively from internal division, as well as a lack of credibility and effectiveness, as demonstrated most strikingly by the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, the Vlaams Blok fails to formulate any forceful and relevant, let alone clear, positions with regard to European diplomacy. When asked for an opinion about the second Gulf War, the Vlaams Blok replies, with a mixture of sarcasm and nonchalance, that it is not ‘our war’. In general, the attitude towards transatlantic politics is marked by internal division. On the one hand the Vlaams Blok points to the danger of blindly following the US, and questions the de facto position of the US as world leader. After all, the Vlaams Blok ideal is of the organic community and a European Community of peoples that rejects both American individualism and socialist collectivism.31 On the other hand, the party nonetheless views the US as a natural ally in this era of clashing civilizations. The ambivalent attitude of the party towards the US is clearly visible in the party’s view of the NATO alliance. Although the party is well aware that the US offered protection from the Soviet threat during the Cold War, the Vlaams Blok considers that Europe should take initiatives as quickly as possible to protect itself. In the 1980s this was formulated as follows:

29 Vlaams Blok (2001b), op. cit. 30 Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 31 Dillen (1990), op. cit.

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The Vlaams Blok takes the view that future European policy should aim to achieve and maintain the independence of Europe… By way of transition, and as long as Europe is not a single entity and does not itself have the power to pursue its own policies, it is perfectly clear that the lesser evil is the inevitable continuation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The Vlaams Blok therefore takes the position that a uniﬁed Europe must also be a strong, armed and effective Europe capable of protecting its freedom and itself.32

During the Cold War the ofﬁcial line was unanimous – as long as there was no European defence force, Europe had to remain in NATO. However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been a clear call to withdraw from NATO. In 1993, Karim Van Overmeire, currently a Vlaams Blok member in Belgium’s lower house, put it as follows: Nowadays no more excuses can be invented for following the United States or even recognizing US leadership in the world. There is no longer any such thing as the West. Although North America and Europe may often have similar interests, which they should jointly pursue, they have just as often conﬂicting interests.33

The party’s programme for the European elections34 reafﬁrms its plea for the development of an independent European defence force separate from NATO and the US. The underlying idea is that in the absence of any such political and military union, the US will continue to set the international agenda not only in Europe, but elsewhere in the world as well. More speciﬁcally, the party proposes a European defence community based on an intergovernmental treaty that provides that EU member states must harmonize their defence initiatives and render one another assistance, should a member state be attacked. To this end the Vlaams Blok would certainly be prepared to double the defence budget to the same relative level as the US, namely to 3.2 per cent of GDP instead of the current 1.5 per cent. After all, says the Vlaams Blok, ‘the world is not a peaceful village. It is a jungle where only the right of might counts. Without properly motivated and equipped armed forces no country in the world can retain its freedom, its prosperity or its independence.’35 Despite its plea for an independent European defence force, the Vlaams Blok is apparently not unambiguously anti-American. The EU and the US have, according to the party, similar interests in the ﬁght against terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapon technologies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the common threat of communism has been steadily replaced by Islam, especially after 11 September 2001.36 For this reason, the Vlaams Blok, in this arena at least, is in favour of far-reaching cooperation between the EU and the US as equal partners in a treaty of association. In short, the US is viewed

32 Dillen, K. (1980), Vlaams Blok Grondbeginselen (Deurne: Vlaams Blok). 33 See Spruyt, M. (1995), Grove borstels. Stel dat het Vlaams Blok Morgen zijn Programma realizeert, Hoe Zou Vlaanderen er dan uitzien? (Leuven: Van Halewyck). 34 Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 35 Vlaams Blok (2004a), op. cit. 36 Vlaams Blok (2004a), op. cit.; Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit.

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as a natural ally, while the supremacy of this great power and the subordination of Europe in NATO are decried. The Vlaams Blok also favours the abolition of the United Nations, although it uses rather different arguments. First of all, the party does not recognize the legitimacy and authority of the UN. ‘The illogical composition of the Security Council. The unwieldy bureaucracy. The democratic deﬁcit. All those factors make the UN an unproductive, unreliable and incredible organization.’37 However, the criticism is more fundamental. In the party’s eyes the entire logic behind the UN is bad. The Vlaams Blok attaches no faith at all in the existence of a world community or an international legal system, let alone the possibility of enforcing any such legal system. In any case, there is no international consensus about fundamental concepts like democracy, justice, freedom or human rights. Consequently, the party argues that the UN is totally unsuitable for such a task, as the majority of the organization’s members are non-Western and undemocratic countries. ‘The UN is weighed down with an accumulation of insoluble contradictions… If the West is to survive in a hostile and barbaric world, it will have to rely on its own strength. We must not subordinate our right to self-defence to the decisions of the UN.’38 The Vlaams Blok is therefore in favour of an international police force controlled solely by Western countries to secure the continued existence of Europe. On the other hand, the Vlaams Blok adopts a far less European, and even less international, approach to the ﬁght against international terrorism. Although the party supports the European arrest warrant, it is ﬁrmly opposed to the way the draft European Constitution promotes mutual cooperation among Europe’s police forces and courts. According to the party there is no longer any mention of intergovernmental cooperation, but simply a threatened equivalence of police forces and the administration of justice throughout Europe, as a result of which the operation of the police could escape the sovereignty of national states. The Vlaams Blok is therefore in favour of less Europe with respect to law and order and justice. Despite the complexities of ﬁghting international terrorism, the party sticks to the view that law and order and the administration of justice belong among the inalienable responsibilities of the national authority.39 Nevertheless Europe may not evolve into ‘an open-door zone for the third world’.40 Accordingly, the Vlaams Blok favours the introduction of a strict European immigration and asylum policy that makes use of a list of ‘unsafe countries’. The party wants new member states to provide greater guarantees that they will make sufﬁcient effort to protect their external borders against the entry of illegal immigrants and criminals from non-member states in Eastern Europe. With respect to asylum policy, the Vlaams Blok believes that member states must also take steps to amend the Geneva Conventions so as to include the territoriality principle. Once this is done, refugee status could only be granted to European citizens. In the meantime, a list of ‘politically unsafe countries’ must be drawn up. Applications for political 37 38 39 40

Vlaams Blok (May 1994), Magazine, p. 7. Vlaams Blok (May 1994), Magazine, p. 7. Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. Vlaams Blok (June 1994), Magazine, p. 8.

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asylum from these countries would be automatically disqualiﬁed from consideration. As for economic refugees, the Vlaams Blok favours fast and ﬁrm repatriation, while prospective refugees are best held in their countries of origin. Finally, such a strict immigration and asylum policy must be underpinned by a common European foreign policy, where development and aid initiatives would be linked to the repatriation of illegal immigrants.41 Here it also appears that the Vlaams Blok views development aid mainly in terms of its immigrant policy, and speciﬁcally in terms of the prevention of international migration and a proactive return policy. For example, the party would like to invest virtually the entire development aid budget in the countries of origin of those non-European foreigners in Belgium, such as Morocco, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Such a radical reorientation of policy would lead to the suspension of all government support to the projects of non-governmental aid organizations.42 European Enlargement The party’s attitude towards the expansion of the European Union is likewise highly ambiguous. Here the Vlaams Blok ﬁnds itself squeezed between ideology and practice. The party still dreams, for example, of a united Indo-European Europe, stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. The fact that the EU has opened its arms to Eastern Europe is a good thing in abstract terms, particularly as this reduces the danger of these countries falling back into the clutches of the Russian sphere of inﬂuence. Yet, although the Vlaams Blok is not opposed to this enlargement as such, it seriously objects to the practical feasibility and the conditions of accession for the ten new member states. The Vlaams Blok thinks that the EU enlargement has taken place too fast and that too many new members have been accepted at once. The rush has meant that that the EU has tried to accept too many countries at once, even though most countries were not ready and are still faced with all kinds of unresolved problems. The Vlaams Blok fears that this will lead to a new and massive wave of immigrants, a rise in crime, brutal economic competition, a steep rise in the democratic deﬁcit and a permanent breakdown of national communities. The Vlaams Blok sees a new wave of immigration and crime as the most catastrophic consequence of the new round of European enlargement. According to the party, numerous East European gangs and terrorist networks have been given free rein now that these criminals live within EU territory. For this reason, the Vlaams Blok opposes the free movement of persons within the EU and favours strict border controls at the internal borders of the EU, particularly along the borders with the new member states. This measure would serve to restrict the free movement of people for a speciﬁc period of time; namely, for as long as the standards of the economies of the new states do not approach those of the existing states. This restriction on the free movement of persons would, according to the Vlaams Blok, also prevent existing member states from being ﬂooded by a new wave of guest workers. Nonetheless, 41 Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 42 Dewinter, F. (2000), ‘Baas in Eigen Land’, Over identiteit, culturele eigenheid En nationaliteit (Brussel: Egmont).

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the party fears that there will be an immense rise in unemployment, a distortion in industrial relations, and catastrophic consequences for the social welfare system as a result of internal competition within Europe, ‘The Flemings will probably have to pay the bill for the unbridled accession policy adopted by the European Commission; not just once but twice. First as net contributors to the EU budget and second as victims of an enormous increase in competition.’43 The Vlaams Blok also opposes any fast expansion on democratic grounds; on one hand because the EU threatens to become a bureaucratic government incapable of adopting decisions that are good for all member states, and on the other hand because the democratic process does not work as it should in the new member states and many of their political systems are riddled with corruption. Finally, the sharp differences in prosperity and social and cultural distinctions will, in the party’s view, probably result in even greater conﬂicts and contradictions within the EU, while at the same time natural ethnic communities will be disrupted. However, the party fails to make itself at all clear about what might be a desirable size for the European Union, particularly as there are apparently divergent opinions on this within the leadership. What does emerge though is that Vlaams Blok clearly and openly opposes any further unlimited and rapid expansion. Moreover, the party is ﬁrmly convinced that any expansion of the EU should be limited to those peoples who belong to the European cultural community. This is because the Vlaams Blok sees Europe primarily as a community of civilizations: ‘To achieve meaningful cooperation, all partners must share a number of fundamental values.’44 Thus, for the Vlaams Blok the acceptance of Turkey as a prospective member of the EU is totally unacceptable. Apart from the fact that Turkey is not a democracy, and is economically irreconcilable with the EU, which would result in a massive drain on ﬁnancial resources, the main objection is that Islamic Turkey could never be part of the European cultural community. ‘There is no reason whatsoever, religious, political, historic, economic or cultural to accept Turkey as a member state of the EU… The person who opens the door to Turkey, moves Europe’s borders to Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Caucasus, and ﬂings open the gates to a new and massive tidal wave of immigration.’45 This doomsday scenario is the reason why the Vlaams Blok is so radically opposed to any Turkish accession: it is not just undesirable, it would also be a dangerous precedent. ‘In the blink of an eye, both Tunisia and Morocco will be knocking on Europe’s door, application forms in hand.’46 The Vlaams Blok therefore demands that the entire Turkish question should be settled by a binding referendum in each of the member states, whereby Europeans would cast their votes not only on the admission of Turkey, but also on the European Constitution and further enlargement of the EU. This move allows the Vlaams Blok to make a populist appeal to anti-establishment as well as anti-Islamic feelings while openly lamenting the disinclination of the political class to give expression to the people’s will on the integration of Europe. Although anti-Islamism is an important 43 44 45 46

Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. Vlaams Blok (2001a), op. cit. Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit.

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plank of the Vlaams Blok’s international vision, the rejection of Turkey as an EU member does not mean that the party thinks that far-reaching cooperation and good neighbourliness with Turkey is impossible, that is if Turkey respects human rights and makes every effort to deal fairly and strictly with Islamic fundamentalism.47 Once again this is indicative of the ethnopluralism of the Vlaams Blok. Such essentialist distinctiveness is the point of departure of the party’s model of cultural segregation. In its view every cultural community must be allowed to be itself and has a right to its own room for living. Between the People’s Community, the Indo-European Cultural Community, the Dream of a Great European Empire and a Western Alliance From the above it will be clear that the position of the Vlaams Blok on international questions is far from unambiguous. To put it brieﬂy, the party ﬂoats between the idea of a Flemish people’s community, a Europe of peoples, a strong Europe, and a Western alliance. The call for a strong Europe alternates with complaints about too much Europe, whereas a powerful anti-American note in some areas seems to be interchangeable with calls for more transatlantic unity. The ambivalence of the international face of the Vlaams Blok is, however, most clearly expressed in the party’s attitude to the process of European integration and enlargement. In general, the extreme-right vision of Europe attempts to link the Flemish community to the European cultural community, in which ‘our own people ﬁrst’ is combined with ‘Europe for Europeans’. Consequently, the party sees the European uniﬁcation project both as a threat to the Flemish identity and an opportunity to realize the dream of a true Europe that would be the rightful successor to the Indo-European heritage. To counter the far-reaching inclusiveness of the European project, the Vlaams Blok invokes le droit à la difference,48 or the right of the Flemish people to their own cultural identity, whereby a people’s nationalism forms the ideological framework for demanding a separate and independent place as of a right in Europe. A striking aspect of this nationalist party, which above all wants to bring about an independent Flanders, is that it does not reject the European project as such. This can be easily understood by looking at the link between the nouvelle droite trend in the Flemish extreme right and the Indo-European heritage.49 Apart from undermining the speciﬁc nature of the Flemish people, European uniﬁcation offers, in the Vlaams Blok’s view, a way of reviving European culture, in particular the original and essential Indo-European or Indo-Germanic cultural community. This overarching culture or mentality would, according to the party, stress the common origins of the European peoples and should therefore be actively defended. The meaning of the

47 Ibid. 48 De Benoist, A. (1978), Vu de droite: anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Copernic). 49 Taguieff and P.-A. (1994), Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes); Delporte, S. (2002), Nieuw Rechts in Vlaanderen (Universiteit Gent: Licentiate dissertation).

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‘European heartland’ is illustrated by following quote: ‘In our view Europe would be better constructed from the glory of the past, free of all guilt complexes, and the consciousness of the common culture and heritage [ … ] We don’t want to lose the European grandeur of the past at this juncture when joint action at the world level is vitally important.’51 So, the party’s attitude towards Europeanism is based on two references. On the one hand there is an ideological foundation, notably the common European civilization and core values. On the other hand, a united Europe is simply realpolitik to keep external threats at bay. Nonetheless, the attitude towards the European project is extremely ambivalent. Each radical-nationalist party is faced with the difﬁculty of connecting the national community to Europe. At the same time the Vlaams Blok supports two types of heartland: the community of the Flemish people and the Indo-European cultural community. However, the Vlaams Blok is perfectly clear about the relationship between the Flemish community and the European one, namely that the interests of the Flemish community must always take precedence over those of the IndoEuropean people. This is why the Vlaams Blok argues in favour of ‘including the sovereign principle of “one’s own people ﬁrst” in all European conventions, followed in importance by the “European preference”, which means that Europeans should be given political preference over residents who are not citizens of an EU member state’.52 The cultural singularity of the different European peoples is thus inviolable. As a consequence, not only the idea of a federal Europe, but also the theoretical construct of a shared Indo-Europe itself is undermined. In spite of this, European identity remains crucial to the international policy of the Vlaams Blok. The signiﬁcance of the European heritage is especially apparent from the party’s attitude towards the enlargement of the EU. Although the party is critical of the implementation of the recent enlargement, it seems that the Vlaams Blok has nothing against the idea of enlargement as such. After all, the new member states share the same European culture. ‘Of course Poles and Greeks are culturally different from Flemings or Italians, but these cultures are related to one another. They rest on shared foundations: a mixture of elements of pre-Christian, Germanic, Christian, classic Graeco-Roman and humanist civilization.’53 The celebration and importance of the Indo-European identity in the party’s approach to Europe is mainly identiﬁable from the rejection of any possible consideration of Turkey’s membership. According to the Vlaams Blok, Islamic culture is simply irreconcilable with, and a direct threat to, the Indo-European heritage. In other words, apart from advocating the Flemish identity, the Vlaams Blok makes it clear that it is also an uncompromising defender of an essential and original European identity. The opposition to a united or federal Europe demonstrates, however, the limits of the Vlaams Blok’s Europeanism. Even in Europe, ‘our own people ﬁrst’ seems to be the political creed. Defence is an exception to the rule. With respect to defence and 50 Taggart (2000), op. cit. 51 Vlaams Blok (June 1989), Magazine, p. 5. 52 Vlaams Blok (2004b), op. cit. 53 Vlaams Blok (1999), Baas in eigen land. Verkiezingsprogramma van het Vlaams Blok. (Brussel: Vlaams Blok).

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foreign policy, the Vlaams Blok mainly laments the weakness and powerlessness of Europe compared with the US and Russia. The solution is a ‘block-free’ Europe with a powerful defence. This call for a powerful European defence force refers to the ‘Great European Empire’ ideal and the dream of a large and powerful Europe, independent of the US and Russia. The core of this dream is a uniﬁed central Europe, which would, once again, occupy a powerful position in world politics and whose territory would stretch from the Atlantic shore to the Urals. Finally, despite the anti-American discourse, the Vlaams Blok continues to see the US as Europe’s natural ally in the struggle against the menace of Islam and communism. In the shared struggle of the West against the rest, the party argues in turn for more transatlantic unity, and the development of a powerful and effective Western global police force. In short, the Vlaams Blok hovers between the Flemish people, a Europe of peoples, Indo-Europe, a strong European Empire and a Western alliance as the elements of its international policies. The International Extreme Right: A Party Family? From early in the 1980s, the Vlaams Blok was interested in the political developments of extreme-right movements in other countries. Whenever a radical-right party met with success anywhere in Europe, the Vlaams Blok was prepared to seal an alliance. In this respect the close relationship with the French Front National (FN) is particularly striking.54 The Vlaams Blok maintains close contacts with the FN and leaders from both parties regularly attend each other’s activities. The FN is sometimes described as the model and big brother of the Vlaams Blok. Indeed, ever since 1984 the Vlaams Blok has kept a close eye on the electoral strategy and political line of the FN and has successfully applied the French party’s strategy in Flanders. Furthermore, the Flemish party regards the administrative mandates that the FN has won in Marignane, Orange, Toulon and Vitrolles as interesting test cases, and as a source of priceless information for the development of its own political strategy, particularly in Antwerp. Apart from the French connection, other contacts are heavily biased towards Eastern Europe. Over the years the Vlaams Blok has had contacts with all kinds of nationalist movements and parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. These contacts form part of a deliberate strategy aimed at preventing the political vacuum in Eastern Europe from being ﬁlled by the traditional parties by default.55 The contacts and exchanges with Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) and Italy’s Lega Nord (LN) are more recent. Despite numerous attempts by the Vlaams Blok to establish links with Jörg Haider’s party, the FPÖ leadership for a long time shied away from any approach by the Vlaams Blok. As for the Lega Nord, it was the Vlaams Blok itself that distrusted the Italian party. But the three parties made overtures to each 54 Gijsels, H. and Vander Velpen, J. (1989), Het Vlaams Blok 1938–1988: Het verdriet van Vlaanderen (Berchem: EPO/Halt). 55 Spruyt, M. (2000), Wat het Vlaams Blok verzwijgt (Leuven: Van Halewyck).

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other in the summer of 2002, after which the Vlaams Blok has maintained contact with both the FPÖ and the Lega Nord. At a meeting in Austria these parties even proposed that talks be started with the Danish People’s Party to establish cooperation around a number of speciﬁc themes. It was also hoped that the four could form a parliamentary party in the European Parliament following the 2004 elections.56 But previous experiences show that formal cooperation in the European Parliament is not realized in an instant.

Table 4.1

The number of seats of radical right parties in the European Parliament

Vlaams Blok (Belgium) Front National (France) Die Republikaner (Germany) MSI - Alleanza Nazionale (Italy) Lega Nord (Italy) Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austria) Dansk Folkeparti (Denmark) Ethniki Politiki Enosis (Greece)

1979

1984

1989

1994

1999

2004

– – – 4 – – – –

0 10 – 5 – – – 1

1 10 6 12 4 – – –

2 11 0 11 6 – – –

2 5 – 9 4 5 1 –

3 7 – 9 4 1 1 –

After the 1984 elections, MEPs from FN, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the Ethniki Politiki Enosis (EPEN) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) formed the Group of the European Right. Five years later the 10 FN MEPs, the six MEPs from Die Republikaner and the one Vlaams Blok MEP established the EuroRight parliamentary party – known ofﬁcially as the Technical Group of the European Right. However, the formation of this group was not done without difﬁculty. The case of South Tyrol made it impossible for the Republikaner to conclude an alliance with the MSI. Secondly, the ideological differences between the FN and the Vlaams Blok meant that the agreement resulted in only a technical alliance, not a deal to present a common party line. In spite of repeated discord within the parliamentary group, the Vlaams Blok wanted to form a strengthened European parliamentary party after the elections of 1994. But the voters decided otherwise. Only the Vlaams Blok and the FN were reelected to the European Parliament, which made it impossible to carry out the plan. To be recognized as an ofﬁcial parliamentary party, a group must consist of at least 16 MEPs from at least three different countries. As a result, Vlaams Blok MEPs sat with the unregistered delegates. However, together with the MEPs of the FN they established an alliance called The Coordination of the European Right.57 Neither did the dream of a strong European party come true in 1999 and 2004. Bad election results and differences of opinion hampered ﬁrm cooperation. 56 Vlaams Blok (2002), Magazine, September. 57 Spruyt (1995), op. cit.; Spruyt (2000), op. cit.

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As far as European unity is concerned, there is a big gap between the dreams of some radical politicians and their concrete realizations. The so-called party family of the extreme right has so far succeeded only twice in forming a European parliamentary party. Since 1994 the radical parties are divided among themselves. ‘The problems of establishing the parliamentary group were an early indicator of the limits to cross-national co-operation between parties whose assertive nationalism was to the fore in their ideological platforms. Historical enmities were clearly a major hurdle to any shared patriotism towards Europe.’58 So, one can wonder what is meant by ‘party family’. Scientiﬁc discussions focus primarily on the question of whether there is a group of radical-right parties that have a common ideological basis.59 Less attention is paid to the formal and informal cooperation among these parties in Europe. In any case, the inability to cooperate is a characteristic of this so-called party family. As a result of fundamental ideological disagreements, the parties failed to form a European parliamentary party. Thus, we doubt there exists a radical-right party family. Conclusion The international programme of the Vlaams Blok deals only brieﬂy with many foreign policy aspects. Often the programme is also ambiguous or vague. There are two reasons for this. First, foreign policy is not the core business of the party. International politics only matters for the Vlaams Blok if it can be linked to national and local politics. The Treaty of Maastricht is reduced to voting rights for EU citizens, 11 September 2001 to the threat of Islam, and the EU membership of Turkey to the downfall of the centuries-old European heritage. Second, there is a lack of agreement on some aspects. But the fact that there are internal disagreements concerning international topics is not a problem for the party. The Vlaams Blok allows the subject of the EU and the relations with the US to be debated openly in its magazine, because these are purely internal discussions and as such have virtually no impact on electoral appeal. Although some party members have a clear view on some issues, the world-view of the party is described in a rather utopian and nonsystematic way. The internal relations between the Flemish community, a Europe of peoples, Indo-Europe, the great European empire and the Western alliance are not always clear and sometimes even conﬂicting. This does not mean, however, that there is no logic to the Vlaams Blok’s international ideology. On the contrary, its view on international topics is built on the ethno-nationalistic populism that the party defends in national politics. Its ‘own 58 Fieschi, C., Shields, J. and Woods, R. (1996), ‘Extreme Right-wing Parties and the European Union: France, Germany and Italy’ in Political Parties and the European Union, Gaffney, J. (ed.) (London: Routledge), p. 236. 59 Ignazi, P. (1992), ‘The Silent Counter-Revolution, Hypotheses on the Emergence of Extreme Right-wing Parties in Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, 1–2(22), pp. 3–34.; Betz, H.-G. (1994), Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press); Kitschelt, op. cit.; Mair, P. and Mudde, C. (1998), ‘The Party Family and its Study’, Annual Review of Political Science, 1, pp. 211–29; Mudde, op. cit.

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community’ also has priority in the international policy agenda of the party. National and international matters are included in an ethno-pluralistic worldview. Therefore, the slogan ‘our own people ﬁrst, always and everywhere’, should be interpreted very literally. This thesis is also the basis of the party’s international agenda, as evidenced by the conceptualization of the ‘European confederation of peoples’. So, the relation to the ‘outside’ is a speciﬁcation of the ethno-pluralistic attitude towards the cultural or ethnic ‘other’. The Vlaams Blok takes the view that people are inextricably bound up with a speciﬁc ethnic community, that people and ethnic communities are not identical but equivalent, and that every community has a right to its own place to live. For the Vlaams Blok, rights to cultural identity imply that every community has a right to its own territory. How the international party line will evolve in the future is unclear. In November 2004 the party transformed itself into Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), because Belgium’s Supreme Court (Court of Cassation) upheld the conviction by the Court of Appeal of racism and discrimination. The party’s audacious pronouncements directed primarily at non-European foreigners can in the view of the Court not be tolerated. This judgement strikes at the heart of the Vlaams Blok, for it is precisely its antiforeigner position that has yielded electoral gain. So far the anti-foreigner position has been the be-all and end-all of the Vlaams Blok’s ‘our own people ﬁrst’ ideology. To safeguard its political heavyweights against prosecution and to guarantee future revenue, in November 2004 the party changed its Basic Principles and Regulations. Although several extremist clauses have been deleted, the transformation of the Vlaams Blok into Vlaams Belang seems to have no other goal than to polish its façade. At the ﬁrst congress of the ‘new’ party, President Frank Vanhecke underlined that the content of the party line will hardly change: ‘We change our name, but not our tricks. We change our name, but not our programme… We stay the party that never said “only our own people”, but that always, even if we may not say it any more, will keep thinking “our own people ﬁrst”.’ At this point it is simply too early to assess the consequences of this transformation, but time will tell whether the Vlaams Belang wants or needs to develop a new ideological basis and new public frames.

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Acronyms EU FN FPÖ LN MEP MSI NATO UN

European Union Front National Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs Lega Nord Member of the European Parliament Movimento Sociale Italiano North Atlantic Treaty Organisation United Nations

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Dewinter, F. (2000), Baas in eigen land. Over identiteit, culturele eigenheid en nationaliteit (Brussels: Egmont). Dillen, K. (1980), Vlaams Blok Grondbeginselen (Deurne: Vlaams Blok). ––– (1990), Manifest van het rechtse Vlaams-nationalisme. Grondbeginselen (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). European Commission (2004), Eurobarometer 61 (Brussels: EC). Fieschi, C., Shields, J. and Woods, R. (1996), ‘Extreme Right-wing Parties and the European Union: France, Germany and Italy’ in Gaffney, J. (ed.). Gaffney, J. (ed.), Political Parties and the European Union (London: Routledge). Gijsels, H. and Vander Velpen, J. (1989), Het Vlaams Blok 1938-1988: Het verdriet van Vlaanderen (Berchem: EPO/Halt). Hainsworth, P. (ed.) (2000), The Politics of the Extreme Right. From the Margins to the Mainstream (London: Pinter). Ignazi, P. (1992), ‘The Silent Counter-Revolution, Hypotheses on the Emergence of Extreme Right-wing Parties in Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, 1–2(22). Immerfall, S. (1998), ‘The Neo-Populist Agenda’ in Betz, H.-G. and Immerfall, S. (eds.). Kitschelt, H. (1995), The Radical Right in Western Europe: a Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Kitschelt, H., Lange, P., Marks, G. and Stephens, J. (eds.) (1999), Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kriesi, H. (1999), ‘Movements of the Left, Movements of the Right: Putting the Mobilization of Two New Types of Social Movements into Political Context’ in Kitschelt, H., Lange, P., Marks, G. and Stephens, J. (eds.). Leca, J. (1996), ‘La démocratie à l’épreuve des pluralismes’, Revue françaize de Science Politique, 46(2). Mair, P. (2002), ‘Populist Democracy Versus Party Democracy’ in Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.). Mair, P. and Mudde, C. (1998), ‘The Party Family and its Study’, Annual Review of Political Science, 1. [DOI: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.211] Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.) (2002), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave). Merkl, P. and Weinberg, L. (eds.) (1997), The Revival of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties (London: Frank Cass Publishers). Mouffe, C. (2000), The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso). Mudde, C. (2000), The Ideology of Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Oakeshott, M. (1996), The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press). Papadopoulos, Y. (2002), ‘Populism, the Democratic Question, and Contemporary Governance’ in Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.). Spruyt, M. (1995), Grove borstels. Stel dat het Vlaams Blok morgen zijn programma realizeert, hoe zou Vlaanderen er dan uitzien? (Leuven: Van Halewyck). ––– (2000), Wat het Vlaams Blok verzwijgt (Leuven: Van Halewyck). Swank, D. and Betz, H.-G. (2003), ‘Globalization, the Welfare State, and Right Wing Populism in Western Europe’, Socio-Economic Review, 1. [DOI: 10.1093/ soceco%2F1.2.215]

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Swyngedouw, E. (1997), ‘Homing in and Spacing Out: Re-Conﬁguring Scale’, School of Geography, University of Oxford, WPG97-10. ––– (1995), ‘The “Threatening Immigrant” in Flanders 1930–1980, Redrawing the Social Space’, New Community (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies) 21(3). ––– (2001), ‘The Subjective Cognitive and Affective Map of Extreme Right Voters: Using Open-End Questions in Exit-Polls’, Electoral Studies, 20(1) [DOI: 10.1016/ S0261-3794%2800%2900010-X] Swyngedouw, M. and Beerten, R. (1996), ‘Cognitieve en affectieve motieven van partijkeuze. De nationale verkiezingen van 21 mei 1995’, Res Publica, 38(3–4). Swyngedouw, M. and Ivaldi, G. (2001), ‘The Extreme Right Utopia in Belgium and France. The Ideology of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French Front National’, Western European Politics, 24(3). Taggart, P. (1995), ‘New Populist Parties in Western Europe’, Western European Politics, 18(1). Taguieff, P.-A. (1994), Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes). ––– (1995), ‘Political Science Confronts Populism’, Telos, 103(1). ––– (2000), Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press). ––– (2002), ‘Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics’ in Mény, Y. and Surel, Y. (eds.). Urry, J. (2003), Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Van Craen, M. and Swyngedouw, M. (2002), Het Vlaams Blok doorgelicht: 25 jaar extreem-rechts in Vlaanderen (Leuven: ISPO-Bulletin). Van der Eijk, C. and Franklin, M. (eds.) (1996), Choosing Europe: the European Electorate and the National Parties in the Face of the Union (Ann Arbor: University Press). Van Dijck, W. (2001), ‘Vlaanderen in Europa’, Vlaams Blok-Magazine, 25(7–8). Van Overmeire, K. (2000), ‘Uitbreiding Europese Unie is moeilijke oefening’, Vlaams Blok-Magazine, 24(2). Verreyken, W. (1994), Europa barst! (Antwerp: Tyr). Vlaams Blok (1999), Baas in Eigen Land. Verkiezingsprogramma van het Vlaams Blok (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). ––– (2001a), Congrestekst staatsgedachte (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). ––– (2001b), Congrestekst Europa (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). ––– (2004a), Dossier ‘Europa: vloek of zegen?’ (Brussels: Vlaams Blok). ––– (2004b), Vlaamse Staat, Europese Natie. Europees verkiezingsprogramma 2004 (Brussels: Vlaams Blok).

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Chapter 5

Nationalism, New Right, and New Cleavages in Danish Politics: Foreign and Security Policy of the Danish People’s Party Jørgen Goul Andersen

Introduction Foreign policy is not a priority area of the Danish People’s Party, which since 2001 has been the only ‘new right’ party of any signiﬁcance in Denmark. Rather, the party’s foreign policy positions are mainly a consequence of its ardent resistance against immigration and multiculturalism. This issue has triggered a basic change in the Danish political cleavage structure and has become equally as important for party choice as the traditional class-based left–right conﬂict. As the resistance against multiculturalism has it appeals mainly to the less-educated segments of the population, the Danish People’s Party has adjusted its position leftwards on the traditional left–right scale, on distributional and welfare issues, in order to consolidate its support. This chapter presents the policy positions of the party and the attitudes of its voters within a framework that emphasizes changes in political cleavages1 and relatively ‘rational’ political behaviour more than the party’s populist platform and voters’ panic reactions to globalization and related fears of marginalization of which we ﬁnd few signs in the Danish case. As a result of the changing cleavages, the relative strength of the political parties and the majority combinations in Parliament have changed quite profoundly. When the Danish People’s Party (DF) gained 12 per cent of the votes in the Danish 2001 election, it was lifted from the margins to the mainstream of Danish politics. For the ﬁrst time since the 1920s, parties to the right were able to form a majority in Parliament without the support of centre parties. Since then, the party has functioned as a stable, loyal and inﬂuential coalition partner for the liberal-conservative government led by the liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh 1 Lipset, S. and Rokkan, S. (1967), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press), pp. 1–64; Andersen, J.G. and Bjørklund, T. (1990), ‘Structural Changes and New Cleavages: The Progress Parties in Denmark and Norway’, Acta Sociologica 33, 195–217; Kitschelt, H. (1995), The Radical Right in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press).

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Rasmussen. This cooperation has included, inter alia, annual budget negotiations, a big reform package in 2002 that lead to an unprecedented tightening of the conditions for immigration (and of social rights of new immigrants), support for Danish participation in the war against Iraq in 2003, and a major reform of the municipal and regional structure and division of labour between administrative levels in 2004, all of which were decided by the narrow minority of the three parties. Further, the Danish People’s Party has participated in nearly all broader compromises over labour market reforms, welfare reforms, and so on. The only major exception is European politics where the Danish People’s Party has consistently resisted any move towards further integration. This position as a ‘respectable’ coalition partner represents a fulﬁlment of the party’s dreams, especially of the undisputed party leader, Pia Kjærsgaard. Because of the ‘mainstreaming’ of the party (some might prefer to speak of the ‘populism’ of other parties), and because of the ambiguity of the term, we have abstained from using the word ‘populism’ in the headline, in favour of the term ‘new right’. Unlike what has often happened to ‘new right’ parties, political responsibility has not been detrimental to the electoral support of the party. On the contrary, the party obtained 13.3 per cent in the 2005 election, and throughout the period 2001–2006, support for the party in opinion polls has stabilized around 12–15 per cent, in spite of the declining saliency of the issue of immigration, and in spite of widespread satisfaction in the population with the new, tighter rules on immigration. On the other hand, and unlike what was previously the case, dramatic media events that trigger negative feelings towards immigrants have only caused moderate increases in support for the party. Even after the 11 September 2001 attacks, or during the Mohammed cartoon crisis in 2006, support for the DF only went up by some 2–3 per cent. One more peculiarity should be mentioned: although the Danish 2001 election was a landslide election, it was by no means a ‘protest election’. With the exception of the issue of immigration, voters had rather positive evaluations of the former Social Democratic coalition government, and the level of political trust in parliament, politicians, parties, government, and so on was not only among the very highest in Europe, but also the highest that had been recorded in Danish elections since 1971.2 In this respect, the 2001 election was diametrically opposite to the 1973 election, which witnessed the birth of the Danish Progress Party. The situation around the 2005 election was roughly the same as in 2001. Furthermore, the increasing support for the Danish People’s Party and the importance of immigration in Danish politics has come in a situation where there is nearly full employment (after 20 years of mass unemployment from 1975–1995), and where even the most cautious economists ﬁnd it difﬁcult to point at anything to be pessimistic about. This is similar to Norway where the DF’s sister party the Progress Party obtained 22 per cent in the 2005 election, but different from the experience in many other regions of Europe. Finally, the 2001 election did not unambiguously represent a resurgence of nationalism. On the contrary, even though the Danish population had largely maintained its scepticism against sacriﬁcing national sovereignty in favour of the 2

Andersen, J.G. (2004), Et ganske levende demokrati (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press).

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European Union (EU), the feeling of a European identity had been increasing. In 1990, only 17 per cent of the population felt ‘as much European as I feel Danish’; in 2001, the ﬁgure was 32 per cent. By 2003, even a small majority felt as much European, perhaps reﬂecting the successful extension of the EU to 25 members under Danish chairmanship of the EU3; in 2005, the ﬁgure was back to 32 per cent. However, at the time of the election in February 2005, 50 per cent declared themselves inclined to vote in favour of the new EU constitution (with only 30 per cent against it). This is about the highest proportion of favourable vote intentions recorded since the ﬁrst Danish referendum on EU membership in 1972. This paper focuses on the party’s foreign policy positions in the broad sense, including nationalism, attitudes to security policy, Europeanization and globalization. Further, it brieﬂy relates the party’s positions to voters’ attitudes and to the new cleavages in Danish politics which can be discerned even in the ﬁeld of foreign policy. The initial section elucidates the foreign policy positions of the Danish People’s Party and its actual behaviour in Parliament on foreign policy issues, including its position during the conﬂict with Muslim countries over the cartoons of Mohammed that had been printed in a Danish newspaper. Then, the article will analyse foreign policy opinions of Danish new right voters and discuss to what extent there is congruence between the party and its supporters on foreign policy issues, and to what extent new divisions are crystallizing among voters over foreign policy issues. Nationalism and Foreign Policy Positions of the Danish People’s Party The Danish People’s Party is the successor of the Progress Party, which was launched as an anarcho-liberal, populist tax protest party in 1973. From the beginning, the party was almost anti-nationalist. For instance, its founder Mogens Glistrup proposed to abolish the Danish defence in favour of an automatic telephone replier answering in Russian ‘we surrender!’, and to sell off Greenland and the Faroe Islands to the highest bidder. However, the party soon adopted a conventional bourgeois foreign policy with support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the EU. In 1984, Mogens Glistrup was imprisoned for tax fraud and replaced by Pia Kjærsgaard, who soon managed to grasp control of the party. From the mid-1980s, immigration became the core issue of the party while the issue of tax protest gradually disappeared except in the party programme. Since then, the cleavage structure of Danish politics has changed profoundly. It has increasingly been structured along two different dimensions: the traditional (distributional) left–right dimension, and a new liberal-authoritarian value dimension triggered by the issue of immigration, which is the core of this dimension alongside issues like law and order and aid to developing countries.4

3 Andersen, J.G. (2003a), ’EU og modstanden i Danmark’, in Danmark 30 år i EU. Et festskrift (København: Gyldendal), pp. 82−104. 4 Borre (1995), ‘Old and New Politics in Denmark’, Scandinavian Political Studies 18(3), pp. 187–205; Andersen, J.G. (2006), ‘The Parliamentary Election in Denmark, February 2005’, Electoral Studies 25(3), pp. 393–98.

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After a rebellion in the parliamentary group against Pia Kjærsgaard’s ‘dictatorial’ leadership, she broke out in 1995 and launched a new party, The Danish People’s Party. At the same time, most of the neoliberal heritage was thrown overboard, and as the party increasingly attracted workers – since 1994, the Progress Party/Danish People’s Party has recruited a larger proportion of its voters among workers than any other party – it further adjusted its welfare policies to consolidate its working class support. Increasingly, it has presented itself as a Social Democratic party as far as welfare is concerned, and in 2006, it even stated that it would by no means support any tax relief before the next election. As workers are leftist on distributional issues but rightist on liberal-authoritarian issues (determined by education), the centrist or even centre-left position of the Danish People’s Party on distributional issues has brought it closer to the political preferences of many workers. Instead of tax protest and critique of the welfare state, nationalism has been the core point and organizing principle of the party’s ideology. Nationalism and threats to the nation The nationalism of the Danish People’s Party is eclectic and by no means an intellectual doctrine. It is a small-state, ethnic nationalism, stressing the national cultural community, and the need to protect it against perceived threats. There are no attempts to deﬁne positively what constitutes ‘Danishness’ or its historical origins, and the programmes do not draw any distinctions between Danish and other Western cultures. But there is strong emphasis on the superiority of modern, secular, democratic Western culture, as compared with non-Western cultures. In her introduction to the extremely short party programme (Programme of Principles, of October 2002) which contains only 983 words, Pia Kjærsgaard states that ‘the essence of the party programme is a warm and strong love of our country’. Whereas there may be similarities with other Danish parties in concrete policy proposals, even on a few issues concerning immigration, the emphasis on the nation and the national Gemeinschaft is certainly a distinguishing feature of the party. Culture is loosely deﬁned as ‘the sum of the Danish people’s history, experience, beliefs, language and customs’.5 The party wants to ‘protect and develop’ this culture – and to support Danish minorities abroad. The party’s working programme says in a section about citizenship: Belonging to a nation presumes that you are a part of the community that binds the nation’s citizens together: Common language, a common set of values, common basic views, customs developed through history, and a behaviour the nation’s citizens feel conﬁdent about. People who do not share the common values – or actively oppose them – cannot be admitted to the community.6

According to the party programme, the task is to: 5 Translation by the author; actually, in 2004 the party programme was for a while available at the party’s home page in ten languages, including Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew! 6 It should be added, though, that the operational criteria of citizenship are about knowledge of language, society and democracy.

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• ‘strengthen the country’s internal and external security’; • ‘support those Danes who are in need’; • ‘oppose any attempt to curtail democracy and citizens’ rights of freedom’. The ﬁrst headline refers to law and order and defence and security policy, the second headline to welfare policy. The threats against democracy and freedom are spelled out in the party’s working programme which is undated, but was written around 2000. The decisive threats are immigration and loss of national sovereignty, but actually, the programme also includes a few other issues as threats, in particular a populist one and a neoliberal one: •

•

• •

•

•

‘Increasing distance between political decision makers and the people.’ Decisions are criticized for being made behind closed doors, and more referenda are demanded. This anti-establishment stance is strongly weakened in public statements since 2001, however, except in relation to the EU. ‘The tremendous growth of the public sector’ which creates disincentives to work and an ‘institutionalized dependency culture’. Since 2001, however, criticism of taxes and welfare has disappeared from the rhetoric of the party, and when the party’s Member of the European Parliament (MEP) (Camre) and a Member of Parliament (Messerschmidt) sought to revive it in 2005, they were immediately silenced by the party leader.7 ‘Normlessness and lack of respect’, due to ‘inefﬁcient and ideologically biased methods of socialization and teaching’ in schools. ‘Immigration from countries that are far away from Danish and European culture and way of life’ – groups that are ‘impossible to integrate in Danish society’. Due to high birth rates, marriages and family reunions, this ‘can transform Danes into a minority in Denmark within the 21st century’. Ghettoization, crime, illiteracy and suppression of women among nonWestern immigrants whose ‘religions and customs… have made their own countries poor, unfree and unbearable’. The working programme underlines the inferiority of non-Western cultures without explicitly mentioning Islam. The reference to Islam is highly explicit in other writings, however (see below). European Unionization as it will suppress national self-determination. To erode national identity will lead to a multicultural Europe which is ‘open to antidemocratic and violent movements’.

Against multiculturalism The nationalism of the party is related to – and originates from – the party’s ﬁerce opposition to immigration and multiculturalism. In a headline in the programme of principles, it is stated that ‘Denmark is not a country of immigration’ and that the party ‘will not accept a transformation to a multi-ethnic society’. In the working 7

Politiken, 12 July 2005.

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programme it is more explicitly stated that the party ‘will resist any attempt to build a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic society in Denmark, that is, a society where substantial groups of the population adhere to a different culture than ours. Making Denmark multiethnic implies that reactionary cultures hostile to development will erode our hitherto stable, homogeneous society’ Foreigners should be ‘admitted’ (the party’s own English translation uses the expression ‘it ought to be possible to absorb foreigners’) but ‘only provided that this does not put security and democratic government at risk’. Still, ‘to a limited extent… foreign nationals should be able to obtain Danish citizenship’. Islamophobia As mentioned, Islam is not explicitly referred to in the party programme or the working programme. But the documents are ﬁlled with allusions, and other writings are more explicit. The picture of Islam as a dogmatic, anti-modern, antidemocratic, patriarchal, violent religion has become the core of the party’s criticism of multiculturalism. Although the party leader Pia Kjaersgaard does sometimes distinguish between Islam and Islamists (see below), it is doubtful whether her audience grasps that – or whether they are intended to. When leaders from the Islamic religious community in Denmark travelled to the Middle East in January 2006 to mobilize protest against 12 cartoons of Mohammed that had been printed in a Danish newspaper, the Islamic religious community was described by Pia Kjaersgaard as a ‘ﬁfth column’. She added that ‘imams who injure Denmark’s interests should be thrown out of the country’ and that: The Islamic religious community in Denmark is populated by miserable, mendacious men with a troubling inﬂamed view on democracy and women. These are the enemy from within. The Trojan horse in Denmark. A kind of Islamic Maﬁa giving us an offer we can’t refuse: Apologize, or ...

She went on stating that: The Islamic religious community thinks that Denmark and the Danes should follow the instructions from the Koran. Our children are not allowed to eat pork, but only halalmeat in kindergartens, and [the newspaper] Jyllands-Posten is not allowed to draw their hypocritical [sic] Prophet, if these people were to decide.8

This is about as far as the rhetoric goes. The party leadership has been keen to ensure that it should not go too much further. Members have been excluded, MPs have been corrected, and homepages have been erased if they appeared more racist or hateful. Signiﬁcantly, on 29 January 2006, amid the growing cartoon crisis, MPs were instructed by mail that ‘Critique of Islam as such and Muslims in general is

8 Actually, the headline of the article is the title of a well-known song from the resistance against the Nazi occupation (‘weed seeds’). Pia Kjærsgaards weekly, 6 February 2006, .

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9

not the political mission of the Danish People’s Party’. The instruction was hardly written in order to avoid an escalation of conﬂict, but rather to maximize the gains in voter support by appearing sufﬁciently moderate. On the other hand, however, Pia Kjaersgaard has not hesitated to describe ‘tens and tens of thousands’ of immigrants as belonging to a ‘lower level of civilization’.10 Finally, as a curious side effect, the identiﬁcation of Muslims with the Middle Ages has reinforced the party’s insistence on secular modernity and tolerance on a number of issues not usually associated with right-wing extremism. This includes not only gender equality, but also the rights of homosexuals, for instance when a Gay Pride Parade was attacked by young Muslims (in fact, one of the party’s wellknown MPs takes pride in presenting herself as lesbian). In a contradictory way, one might say that such ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ values are among the few elements encountered in the party discourse that contribute to a positive deﬁnition of what Danish culture is at all about.11 Globalization The basic tenets above serve as the foundation for the Danish People’s Party’s foreign and security policies. In terms of globalization, the party has not developed any comprehensive notion of globalization, but in the working programme, it has borrowed from various sources to portray globalization as a threat. Characteristically, the introduction to the working programme states that ‘The solidarity and the community in Denmark and other small countries are currently threatened in several respects: from within by closed and intolerant minorities, and from outside by globalization and the power of international capital’. The latter is the only trace of anti-capitalism that is found in the party programme. Although the working programme recognizes that countries have become increasingly interdependent, the authors of the programme warn against seeing globalization as a natural law or as an inevitable process. It depends on political

9 Politiken, 29 January 2006. 10 The statement is worth quoting at full length: ‘[nobody had imagined] that large parts of Copenhagen and other big cities in 2005 would be populated by people on a lower level of civilization, carrying with them primitive and cruel habits like killings of honour, forced marriages, halal slaughtering − and blood feuds. This is precisely what has happened. That tens and tens of thousands of people who, culturally, mentally and in terms of civilization seem to live in 1005 rather than 2005, have come to a country that departed from the medieval age centuries ago’ (Pia Kjaersgaard’s Weekly, 13 June 2005). Addressed to immigrants, Pia Kjaersgaard writes elsewhere: ‘If you want that your life – and the lives of your fellow citizens – should be dictated by Islamic dogmatism, then go to those places in the world where these dogma are prevailing − rather than trying to inﬂict these religious rules upon us’ (Pia Kjaersgaard’s Weekly, 17 October 2005). 11 In June 2006, however, the party collectively voted against a law that placed lesbian couples on an equal footing with heterosexual couples as regards right to insemination in public hospitals. The law was carried through by united opposition and some defectors from the governing Liberal party.

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decisions. The working programme calls for national and international cooperation to avoid the evils of globalization: Speculative capital movements, wage competition and job losses, increasing international inequality, and exploitation of people and natural resources in poor countries. The most heavy criticism, however, is launched against those discourses that see globalization as a force that will inevitably lead to happy amalgamation of all societies and cultures.

The quotes above are quite remarkable as some of the statements resemble criticism from the left. But this is united with the party’s emphasis on national sovereignty and fear of immigration. Certainly, these latter parts are by far the most important concern, but the party’s critical stance as far as the economic aspects are concerned is nevertheless remarkable. In day-to-day statements of the party, however, there are few references to this issue, or to ‘globalization’ altogether, probably on the grounds that it has been less and less discussed as a threat in Danish politics, as the Danish economy rather seems to prosper from globalization. Foreign and defence policy As for foreign policy, the party expresses support for international cooperation but the key value is to maintain national sovereignty. Therefore, the party is against the European Union (in particular development towards a federation) but is in favour of the NATO alliance and a strong national defence as well as the maintenance of compulsory conscription and even of the Danish Home Guard. The party also supports (in principle, at least) the United Nations, especially for providing humanitarian aid and for its contribution to peaceful coexistence among member countries. The party has also supported Danish participation in the war against Iraq, which was decided by the narrowest possible vote by the government and the Danish People’s Party against the vote of all other parties. The party has also supported Danish participation in military operations in Afghanistan. However, in 1999, the Danish People’s Party had joined the Socialist left in its opposition against NATO’s war against Serbia. Commenting on the bombings, Pia Kjaersgaard stated that ‘It is terrible and unreal. A tragedy. We shouldn’t have done it. It is to turn things upside down when a defence alliance like NATO now attacks.’12 However, the party kept a low proﬁle on the issue, especially as it turned out that a large majority of the population supported not only the bombings but even an intervention by troops on the ground13, persuaded by a long series of media reports about what was described almost as genocide against the Albanian people in Kosovo. Aid to developing countries In accordance with their perception of a ranking of cultures, the Danish People’s Party sees culture as a major determinant of poverty:

12 Politiken, 26 March 1999. 13 Sonar and Jyllands-Posten, 26 March 1999.

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Poverty must to a large extent be seen as a culturally determined problem, because the development of society basically is determined by the consciousness of the people… . It is because of cultural differences that some countries with infertile soil and lack of resources have developed order and wealth whereas some very fertile countries that are endowed with large natural resources are characterized by over-population, poverty, and dictatorship.

However, it is necessary to change this under-development in order to avoid ‘that poverty and over-population leads to hostile clashes between the different cultures’. In particular, the task is to prevent mass immigration. Aid to developing countries should be lowered to the same level as in most other countries – and be directed to peaceful nations and to social, institutional and democratic reforms, the working programme states. Thus, the party position on this issue is strictly determined by the goal of protecting the Danish society against immigration and multi-culturalization. Against European integration If the Danish People’s Party has become much more in favour of a strong defence and military intervention than its predecessor the Progress Party ever was, it has at the same time become much more anti-European, a process which started already when Pia Kjaersgaard was the leader of the Progress Party. Characteristically, the Norwegian Progress Party, which has not experienced a similar break with the past, has maintained a somewhat more sympathetic attitude towards the EU.14 However, the negative attitude of the Danish party is quite logical as the European Union is a crystallization point for almost everything the party is against, as spelled out in the working programme: • • •

threats against national sovereignty and national identity ‘growing distance between politicians and the people’: Centralization and the political culture of EU dangers of bureaucratization, or in the party’s words: ‘irresponsible administration’, ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’

To this comes: • • • •

free movement of workers and dangers of immigration ‘the wrong perception’ that immigration is the solution to Europe’s lack of labour power in the future the initiatives of the EU against racism, notably the actions against Austria when Jörg Haider’s party entered the government the intention to enlarge the EU to include Muslim countries like Turkey

Rather than intensiﬁed European integration, the party demands a preservation of the ‘veto right’, a strengthening of the European Council vis-à-vis the European Commission, and Danish withdrawal from the Schengen Agreement. 14 Bjørklund, T. and Andersen, J.G. (2006), ‘The Far Right Parties in Scandinavia’, manuscript.

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Foreign and defence policy, the cartoons of Mohammed, and political cooperation The foreign and defence policy positions of the Danish People’s Party, including the issues on which the party deviates from other bourgeois parties, are ﬁrst and foremost a reﬂection of the party’s opposition to immigration and multiculturalism. One could imagine that this would complicate cooperation with the bourgeois government. Indeed, the opposition against the European Union is a potential barrier for cooperation and certainly one of the reasons why the party is unlikely ever to be offered a government position. But in practice, the obstacles have been few as the differences in policy positions are not that big. The bourgeois government has tightened the rules on immigration more than the Danish People’s Party could have dreamed of in the mid-1990s. The parties have roughly coincidental views on defence and security policy, and like the Danish People’s Party, the liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen chose a close alliance with the United States rather than with the majority of Western European countries in the Iraq conﬂict. The government has also made large cutbacks on aid to developing countries, partly in accordance with the preferences of the Danish People’s Party.15 And in 2006, the vice-chairman of the Liberal Party declared that his party and the Danish People’s Party to a large extent had shared values: ‘We are all concerned about the cohesion of Danish society. We are concerned about being Danish and to look at core values as freedom of speech and democracy… in that way we share a wide array of values.’16 Perhaps the most signiﬁcant instance of the cooperation between the government and the Danish People’s Party was during the crisis launched by the cartoons of Mohammed that were published in a Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in the autumn of 2005. The Prime Minister took what might be described as a rather ‘fundamentalist’ stance in his defence for freedom of speech which made him reject the complaints and the request for a meeting from a number of Muslim ambassadors, and which made it extremely difﬁcult for him to come up with something that could look like an excuse. This was in accordance with the position of the Danish People’s Party, and throughout the crisis, from its very beginning, the party backed the prime minister and abstained from criticism, even before the most intensive stages of the conﬂict when Danish embassies and ﬂags were burned. Only in one instance, when the prime minister appeared on Arab television channels and said something that could be interpreted as a regret more than an excuse, was he criticized by the DF for being a bit too vague. But the party abstained from further criticism, and shortly thereafter, all parties agreed that this was not the time to criticize the government too much in public – a decision which was followed loyally by the Danish People’s Party. But to what extent is the Danish People’s Party followed by its voters? And is it at all about representation of policy views, or should the support for the party rather be seen as an effect of fear of marginalization in relation to globalization? 15 This explains the apparent change in spending attitudes towards foreign aid from 2001 to 2005 in Table 5.2. 16 Politiken, 23 September 2006.

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Foreign Policy Attitudes of Danish People’s Party Voters Fear of globalization It is relatively common to see support for the new right as an effect of marginalization related to the transition to post-industrialism and globalization.17 However, in the case of the supporters of the Danish People’s Party, there is nothing about their social characteristics that can justify a description of these voters as marginalized or as threatened by marginalization.18 But what about their political views? Even though they are not personally threatened, people may nevertheless feel worried about the general impact of globalization on society. As mentioned, the Danish public is generally optimistic about globalization. But as revealed by Table 5.1, this optimism is less apparent among those who vote for the Danish People’s Party. Even though only 27 per cent expect that globalization will have a negative impact, this ﬁgure is substantially higher than among adherents of other parties – and much more than can be explained by educational and age composition which is almost similar to the Social Democrats except for a somewhat lower proportion of highly educated people.

Table 5.1

Perceived effects of globalization, 2005, by party choice. Percentages and PDI (Percentage Difference Index): Positive minus negative.

Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population Average

Positive

Neutral/ don’t know

Negative

PDI

39% 41% 48% 56% 26% 44%

46% 46% 43% 38% 47% 44%

15% 13% 9% 6% 27% 12%

+24 +28 +39 +50 -1 +32

Wording: It is often discussed whether so-called ‘globalization’ will have an overwhelmingly positive impact on Denmark or an overwhelmingly negative impact. On this scale from 1 to 5 where 1 means very positive and 5 means very negative, which impact do you think globalization will have? Source: Election survey 2005.

17 Betz, H.-G. (1994), Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press). 18 Bjørklund, T. and Andersen, J.G. (2002), ‘Anti-Immigration Parties in Denmark and Norway: The Progress Parties and the Danish People’s Party’, in Schain, M, Zolberg, A. and Hossay, P. (eds.), Shadows over Europe: The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 107–36.

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Apart from mainly economic fears, there could also be fears of terrorism and the like. As this does not occupy very much space in the public debate, it was not included in the 2005 election survey, but the 2001 survey, conducted shortly after 11 September 2001, contained two questions on the issue. However, the deviation was very small indeed. When asked whether they felt that the world was under more threat, 69 per cent of Danish People’s Party voters answered afﬁrmatively, as compared with a population average of 64 per cent. And when asked if they feared a terrorist attack, 22 per cent of the party’s voters conﬁrmed this, compared to a population average of 15 per cent. On both issues, Social Democrats came very close to the supporters of the Danish People’s Party.19 On the other hand, those who vote for the Danish People’s Party are fully in line with the party’s emphasis on maintaining the sovereignty of the nation-state. Whereas a majority of the population in the 2005 election survey agreed that ‘we should strive for a society with more international orientations and less weight on borders between countries and their populations’, only 27 per cent of Danish People’s Party voters agreed (Table 5.2). This is in very sharp contrast with adherents of other parties, including the Social Democrats.

Table 5.2

Strive to reduce the role of the nation-state, 2005, by party choice.

We should strive for a society with more international orientations and less weight on borders between countries and their populations Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population Average

Agree

Neutral/ don’t know

Disagree

PDI

59% 53% 69% 57% 27% 54%

23% 30% 22% 29% 28% 28%

18% 16% 9% 14% 45% 18%

+41 +37 +60 +43 -18 +36

To summarize, there is little to indicate that supporters of the new right in Denmark are personally worried about globalization, but they clearly distinguish the issue in their political opinions. Not so much in terms of fear of terrorism and so forth, but ﬁrst and foremost in purely political terms – they are more isolationist and more keen to protect the sovereignty of the nation-state. This could perhaps be viewed as nostalgia for the past, but it seems more fair simply to describe it as a ‘political preference’ (which may or may not be realistic, but in the ﬁnal analysis, that holds for all sorts of political preferences).

19 Andersen, J.G. (2004), ‘The Danish People’s Party and New Cleavages in Danish Politics’, working paper. Also as ‘Fremskridtspartiet och Dansk Folkeparti’, in Rydgren, J. and Widfeldt, A. (eds.), Från Le Pen till Pim Fortuyn – populism och parlamentarisk högerextremism i dagens Europa (Stockholm: Liber), pp. 147–70.

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Defence and security policy With these isolationist attitudes, one could expect the supporters of the Danish People’s Party to be somewhat at odds with their party when it comes to military intervention in other countries. And this actually seems to be the case. As seen in Table 5.3, supporters of the Danish People’s Party are considerably less inclined to intervene in international conﬂict in order to protect human rights – a difference that has been consistent since 1990.

Table 5.3

Attitudes towards participation in international conﬂicts, 2001 and 2005, by party choice. 2005

Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals + Cons. Danish People’s Party Population average

Stay out of conﬂict

Don’t know

Intervene

PDI 1990

PDI 2001

PDI 2005

15% 27% 12% 15% 32% 20%

6% 4% 5% 5% 7% 6%

79% 69% 83% 80% 61% 74%

+66 +37 +52 +42 +29 +41

+76 +64 +77 +65 +24 +58

+64 +41 +71 +65 +29 +54

Source: Election surveys 1990, 2001 and 2005.

This also holds true when it comes to the issue of sending Danish soldiers to war. Here, the Danish People’s Party is much more in line with Social Democrats and left wing voters (Table 5.4). Unlike during the Cold War, when the Danes stuck very much to the ideology of non-interference, military intervention in international conﬂicts in order to protect human rights gained legitimacy in Denmark in the late 1980s and the 1990s, even to the point of sending Danish troops into conﬂict. Among Danish People’s Party voters, there was a balance between adherents and opponents of sending troops, but in the other parties, in particular among centre and right parties, ‘interventionists’ constituted a majority in 2005. It might be said that the items above concerns situations where human rights are threatened and that human rights may not be the most important concern to the supporters of the Danish People’s Party. However, the difference between the supporters of the Danish People’s Party and other bourgeois parties is also evident when it comes to the issue of Danish participation in the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Table 5.5). Among Danish People’s Party voters in 2005, more than 40 per cent considered it as mistake to participate in the war in Iraq – fewer than among the supporters of the opposition parties, but substantially higher than among liberal and conservative voters.20 20 Admittedly, the relatively high support originally enjoyed by the intervention probably derived from the fact that the intervention was legitimized to the population by the cruelty of Saddam Hussein, more than by perceived threats of chemical weapons, let alone suspicion of

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Table 5.4

Attitudes towards sending Danish soldiers to war, 2005, by party choice.

We should be willing to send Danish soldiers to war, if it is necessary to protect human rights in other countries. Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population Average

Agree

Neutral/ don’t know

Disagree

PDI

44% 42% 59% 63% 40% 51%

20% 20% 20% 19% 20% 10%

36% 38% 21% 18% 40% 29%

+8 +4 +38 +45 0 +32

Source: Election survey 2005.

Table 5.5

Attitudes towards Danish participation in the war against Iraq, 2005, by party choice.

It was a mistake for Denmark to join the war against Iraq Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population Average

Agree

Neutral/ don’t know

Disagree

PDI

79% 66% 58% 23% 42% 47%

9% 13% 15% 18% 14% 17%

12% 20% 27% 59% 43% 36%

+65 +46 +31 -36 -1 +11

Source: Election survey 2005.

When it comes to attitudes towards the ‘Atlantic alliance’ with the United States, on the other hand, Progress Party voters are in line with the supporters of the two big bourgeois parties. However, it should be added that even among the supporters of the bourgeois parties, there is a very sceptical attitude towards the peace-keeping role of the United States. There is almost as large a proportion disagreeing as agreeing on the item ‘The United States does a very positive effort for peace in the world’ (Table 5.6), even among the adherents of the governing parties which have so strongly allied themselves with George Bush.

cooperation with al-Qaeda. What has de-legitimized Danish participation is presumably not the disproof of the latter accusations, but more the failure of the operation in achieving its democratic goals.

Nationalism, New Right, and New Cleavages in Danish Politics

Table 5.6

117

Attitudes towards the United States as a peacekeeper, 2005, by party choice.

The United States does a very positive effort for peace in the world Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population Average

Agree

Neutral/ don’t know

Disagree

PDI

4% 16% 10% 38% 36% 25%

9% 22% 17% 32% 28% 24%

87% 62% 73% 30% 36% 51%

-83 -46 -63 +8 0 -26

Source: Election survey 2005.

As far as defence expenditures are concerned, the voters of the Danish People’s Party are also somewhat at odds with the party line. Even though the proportion of Danes favouring cuts in defence budgets has, surprisingly, declined since the end of the Cold War, there is somewhat less support for defence expenditures among Danish People’s Party voters than among liberal and conservative voters (Table 5.7).

Table 5.7

Attitudes towards defence expenditures, 2001 and 2005, by party choice. The public spends [in 2005]:

Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population Average

Too much money

Appropriate

Too little money

55% 39% 37% 20% 34% 33%

41% 55% 60% 73% 55% 60%

4% 6% 3% 7% 11% 7%

PDI 2001

PDI 2005

-54 -26 -22 -7 -13 -19

-51 -33 -34 -13 -23 -26

Source: Andersen, J.G. (2003), ‘EU og modstanden i Danmark’, in Danmark 30 år i EU. Et festskrift (København: Gyldendal), pp. 82–104; Election surveys 2001 and 2005.

Europe for the Europeans

118

European Attitudes When it comes to European Unionization, Danish parties have generally found it difﬁcult to control the votes of their supporters. But supporters of the Danish People’s Party are an exception. At least the supporters of the Progress Party were positive or mixed until the party split in 1995, but supporters of the Danish People’s Party have since 1998 been the most negative group of voters, next to the supporters of the left wing Unity List party (which got its breakthrough in the 1994 election mainly based on its criticism of the Socialist People’s Party’s acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty with the so-called Edinburgh reservations in 1993). This is also the case with the aborted referendum in 2005 which actually pointed towards a signiﬁcant ‘yes’ in Denmark at the time of interviewing. Apart from the Unity List (not shown in the table), the Danish People’s Party voters were the only ones with a majority for a ‘no’ (Table 5.8).

Table 5.8

Percentages voting yes in Danish referenda, 1972–2000, by party choice. 1972 1986 1992 1993 1998 2000

Election result (per cent of valid votes) Socialist People’s Party Social Democrats Radical Liberals Conservatives Liberals Progress Party Danish People’s Party Non-socialist parties, total

Change Voting 1972–2000 intention for 2005

63% 56% 49% 57% 55% 47%

-16

62%

17% 59% 73% 89% 97% – – 87%

+8 -17 -10 -16 -34 – – -29

57% 57% 79% 83% 79% – 29% 70%

15% 24% 75% 95% 99% (63) – 91%

11% 33% 64% 79% 89% 33% – 73%

16% 49% 58% 85% 88% 45% – 77%

22% 52% 70% 78% 79% 27% 20% 66%

25% 42% 63% 73% 63% – 16% 58%

Source: Andersen, J.G. (2003), ‘EU og modstanden i Danmark’, in Danmark 30 år i EU. Et festskrift (København: Gyldendal), pp. 82–104; and Election survey 2005 (voting intentions 2005).

It would be tempting to see hostility against foreigners and negative attitudes to the EU as constituting one single dimension. However, in Danish politics, this is not the case. In the 1990s a weak association seemed to be emerging,21 but by 2005, the association between general attitude towards the EU and the main indicator of attitudes towards immigration (‘immigration constitutes a serious threat to our national identity’) was as low as r = −0.05. This partly reﬂects the fact that opposition against the EU has two main roots: in the anti-capitalist left and in the xenophobic

21 Andersen, J.G. (2003a), op. cit.

Nationalism, New Right, and New Cleavages in Danish Politics

119

22

right, to put it bluntly. On the right there is a moderate association, and one could imagine that with a waning of resistance against the Union on the left, there would in the long run emerge such a dimensionality. But this is speculation. So far, there has been little or no movement in this direction, and in the 2000 referendum on the Euro, resistance was actually strengthened, absolutely and relatively, among the anti-capitalist left, probably because the referendum came to be framed in terms of the welfare state versus market. New Dividing Line in International Conﬂicts There is much debate about a clash between civilizations. Such a conﬂict is wanted among Islamists whereas moderate Muslims and the West seek to deny and avoid it. The strong support of Danish People’s Party – and to quite some extent the attitudes of Danes in general – can perhaps be seen as an indication that the Islamists may get what they want. At any rate, there is a surprisingly widespread perception among Danish voters in general that ‘Muslim countries constitute a serious threat to Danish security’, (Table 5.9) as 44 per cent agree and only 37 per cent disagree. It could be argued that the 2005 ﬁgures reﬂect the war in Iraq, and that the 2001 ﬁgures reﬂect the 11 September events of the same year. But even in 1998, there was a relative majority who agreed that Muslim countries constitute a threat in the long run. By 2005, 79 per cent of the Danish People’s Party’s voters agreed whereas only 6 per cent disagreed.

Table 5.9

Muslim countries a threat to Denmark, 1998–2005, by party choice. 2005

In the long run, Muslim countries constitute a serious Agree threat to Danish security Left Wing Social Democrats Centre Parties Liberals and Conservatives Danish People’s Party Population at large

18% 41% 19% 50% 79% 44%

Neutral/ don’t know 16% 17% 20% 22% 15% 19%

Disagree

PDI 1998

PDI 2001

PDI 2005

66% 42% 61% 28% 6% 37%

-50