Europe for the Europeans

The Foreign and Security Policy of the Populist Radical Right

Christina Schori Liang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317139867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For the last two decades the number of political organizations on the far right, neo-populist right and neo-conservative right has been growing. Along with the mounting electoral success for many of the parties there has also been a growing disenchantment with the political class which has led to a revolt against the current political 'establishment'. The events of September 11, 2001 and the 'War on Terror' have further aggravated tensions within the populations between those who feel they are the 'legitimate' citizens of the state and those who are considered 'outsiders'. The recent expansion of the EU's borders has also brought on fears of a surge of both legal and illegal immigration. All these factors have led to a growing number of cases of harassment and outbursts of violence aimed at asylum seekers and ethnic minorities in Europe. This book measures the effects of neo-populist groups on the current political establishment and illustrates how much political appeal neo-populist views have on making current political policy.

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 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 pro-Europe 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 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’, ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘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 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 (so-called) 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 auth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword – François Heisbourg
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Europe for the Europeans: the Foreign and Security Policy of the Populist Radical Right
• 2 Against the ‘Green Totalitarianism’: Anti-Islamic Nativism in Contemporary Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe
• 3 The Aims and Objections of the Austrian Far Right in the Fields of Foreign and Military Politics
• 4 Our Own People First in a Europe of Peoples: The International Policy of the Vlaams Blok
• 5 Nationalism. New Right, and New Cleavages in Danish Politics: Foreign and Security Policy of the Danish People’s Party
• 6 ‘La politique du dehors avec les raisons du dedans’: Foreign and Defence Policy of the French Front National
• 7 ‘Nationalism Ensures Peace’: the Foreign and Security Policy of the German Populist Radical Right After (Re)unification
• 8 The Communist Legacy? – Populist but Not Popular – The Foreign Policies of the Hungarian Radical Right
• 9 Recalcitrant Allies: The Conflicting Foreign Policy Agenda of the Alleanza Nazionale and the Lega Nord
• 10 A Fortuynist Foreign Policy
• 11 The Swiss People’s Party and the Foreign and Security Policy since the 1990s
• 12 Non Angeli, sed Angli: The Neo-populist Foreign Policy of the ‘New’ BNP
• 13 Between Tradition and Transition: The Central European Radical Right and the New European Order
• 14 A Specific Variant of Neo-Populism: Foreign and Security Policies of Extreme Right Parties in the European Parliament Elections in 2004
• Appendix A: Populist Radical Right Parties
• Index