The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia

Abstract

(2017). The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia. Fennia 195: 1, pp. 85-101. ISSN 1798-5617. In this article we carry out a geopolitical analysis of the turbulent breeze driving the EU into uncharted extremes. To do this we zoom in on three cases that we deem both a response to political extremism and a source of political extremism in themselves: France's state of emergency, Brexit and the pyrrhic victory over the far-right in the Dutch elections of 2017 . Our analysis suggests that even though the political forces behind these events have praised their policies or electoral victories as bulwarks to keep extremism in check, the sort of extremism that they try to keep at bay is not as worrying as the counter-productive realpolitik of the traditional establishment they represent. By surreptitiously adopting precisely the kind of extremist political preferences that they claim to set themselves against, these politics show how the establishment in the EU is normalising the extreme geopolitics of exclusion that are structurally undermining the very principles of rule of law, liberal democracy and overall openness on which the EU is based. The result: what used to be easily dismissed as irrational or evil has become the everyday normal. The extremism we so much fear has become the new normality.

The Autoimmunity of the EU’s Deadly B/ordering Regime; Overcoming its Paradoxical Paper, Iron and Camp Borders

“…So, in contrast to the employment of the metaphor of "autoimmunity" by far-right politicians like Thierry Baudet to denounce "massive immigration" as the cause of the West's "weakening body", we resort to Derrida's notion of autoimmunity to argue exactly the opposite: the EU's autoimmunity is not rooted in its openness to the world but in the counterproductive effects of its current closed, discriminatory border regime. We argue that that the EU over time has developed a regime that consciously discriminates, endangers and criminalises the mobility of specific migrants on nativist grounds, alienates the EU from its self-professed values of rule of law and human rights, and thereby legitimises and normalises nativist authoritarian populists like Baudet and others (Boedeltje and Van Houtum 2008;van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017). Thus, the autoimmunity that we recognise has its roots inside EUrope and not beyond its borders.…”

“…The segregation and maltreatment of people who share a bodily resemblance or cultural affinity with already-discriminated ethnic minorities in EUropean societies send a toxic message to the EU's own citizens: it tells them that the fundamental rights to which the EU adheres do not fully apply to undocumented migrants (Virdee and McGeever 2018). By legitimising such discrimination, the immunisation tactic of the border camp fails to ensure the protection of law and order that it was designed to safeguard and, instead, emboldens populist leaders and political movements in the EU who would like to rely on the same discriminating discourse and excluding practices not only against increasingly vilified migrants but also against migrant-looking citizens and antagonistic political minorities (Bueno Lacy and Van Houtum 2013;van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017;Vasilopoulou 2009).…”

“…Not only has the EU been unable to find support for a comprehensive and responsible migration and asylum system across its supranational community but the EU is increasingly taking the self-destructive road towards dirty deals, multiplying its human rights violations and pushing back legitimate asylum seekers to countries where they might die or suffer severe harm. The politicisation of migration and the coinciding adoption of extreme policies by establishment parties under the pretence of "normality" as a strategy to stop the rise of extreme far-right anti-immigrant parties has by nowone would thinkproven to be severely counterproductive (Mudde 2019a(Mudde , 2019bvan Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2017). What is more, since the structural causes that keep pushing people away from their countriese.g., inequality and poverty, armed conflict and widespread violence, droughts and agricultural collapse, overfishing and the depletion of ancestral fisheries, and overall livelihood-destroying global ecocideare unlikely to be addressed anytime soon and the worsening effects of climate change are surely going to keep magnifying them (Franzen 2019;Nordås and Gleditsch 2007), the question the EU should be asking is not whether the next crisis of solidarity and its liberal democratic spirit will come, but rather when.…”

The Scandinavian far-right and the new politicisation of heritage

“…When it comes to restricting the meaning of heritage, working from the outside – where parties have more room to be confrontational (Thesen, 2015) – may therefore be more tactical for the far-right than being in government. As argued by Houtum and Lacy (2017: 87), far-right parties’ ‘consistent underdog status has rendered credibility to the conspiratorial nature of their rhetoric’, and rather than protesting their radical politics, many centre–right parties in Europe have responded by ‘mimicking their rhetoric and by implementing their preferred policies’. An example from the last election in Norway serves to illustrate this point: Actively entering one PP’s areas of issue ownership, prominent party members of the Conservative Party and the Centre Party kicked off the 2017 election debates with the contentious topic of ‘Norwegian values under threat’.…”

“…Leading a politics of division fuelled by fear and nostalgia, this diverse political family has managed to instil into public discourse, an image of the nation as a battleground where 'natives' fight for survival against forces of globalization and non-western immigration (Wodak, 2015). Their entrance into national parliaments has effectively destabilised classic intraparty alliances and provoked establishment parties to bend the political conversation around their specific issue-areas (Houtum and Lacy, 2017). One such area is cultural heritage.…”