Locating the Ideal State: The Practice of Place by Far Right and Islamist Parties

ABSTRACT

This article explores the co-constitutive practice and conceptualisation of place in political parties at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Illustrated with examples from the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir in Denmark (DK) and the Netherlands (NL) and the far right Party for Freedom (NL) and the Danish People’s Party (DK), we seek to better understand the role of place and space in the translation of ideology to practice. With the concept of lived space central to our argument, we propose that ‘ideal places’ – be they Caliphates or ethnically and religiously homogeneous nation-states – are precisely co-constitutive in that one party’s utopia is the other’s dystopia. However, pointing to the essence of co-constitutive opposing ideals does not suffice when addressing members, recruits, voters, or wider audiences; ideals must be realised, enacted or performed in order to move, drive and inspire people. Thus, we ask, how do political parties turn ideals into something tangible and practicable? Our argument is that a better understanding of the role of place through the concept of lived space helps explain the apparent success of ideologically driven non-conformist parties in Western Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Lived space
• Hizb ut-Tahrir
• Danish People’s Party
• Party for Freedom
• utopia
• dystopia

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 And thereby investigating how the party performs the caliphate as the Caliphate (as an historically fixed ideal). We capitalise ‘caliphate’ to distinguish between the historically heterogeneous forms and practices of the caliphate and the discursive attempt of our case subjects to undermine such historicity and multiplicity.

2 Even though HT rejects parliamentary participation, they refer to themselves as a party (hizb) and as our focus in the current article is on their state ideal and not on parliamentary attitudes and relations, we have settled for the common term “party” for all three objects of interest here.

3 We would like to thank one of the two reviewers of this paper for pointing us in the direction of the use of ‘essentialism’ in the work by Karl Popper (1902–1994). Popper argues that Plato’s thinking was based on a methodological essentialism in that Plato progressed from an understanding of something’s ideal form towards an understanding of what happens to this ideal over time or in the meeting with objects or individuals. Popper was critical of this orientation towards understanding something’s essence and argues from a point of view of realism and nominalism in his thinking (Popper 2013, 1946). In our analyses, the notion of locating something’s true form is relevant of course – whether this is one’s own ideology or the inferiority of that of the opponents.

4 According to HT’s ideological writings (see for example, The Ummah’s Charter 1989, The Islamic State 1998, and Structuring of a Party 2001), the initial two phases of implementing the Caliphate are directed at Muslim majority countries alone, whereas phase three involves world domination.

5 The term ummah has various meanings in the Qur’an (see, for example, Denny 1975) and early Islamic documents, such as the Constitution of Medina (see, for example, Denny 1977). Historically, it is, however, most commonly applied to refer to ‘community’ (in early Islamic periods) and ‘Muslim community’ more recently (e.g. Mandaville 2013), and hence ascribed a political status.

6 We emphasise the prefix “the” here to refer to the practice of essentialising (and thus, politicising) the concept of the ummah.

7 Here we are considering Stuart Hall’s understanding of culture in terms of ‘roots’ or ‘routes’ (1989, 1995), but also Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and the ‘school’ of discourse theory, who propose thinking of identities as a “never complete, always in process” representation (Hall 1989: 221).

Additional information

Funding

This collaboration was supported by the Doctoral Exchange Partnership Program of Griffith University and the University of Southern Denmark.

Notes on contributors

Susan de Groot Heupner

Susan de Groot Heupner completed her PhD in Political Sociology at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia. With her doctoral research, she investigated the mutual displacement of the Muslim subject in prevalent forms of far right and islamist discourses. In her research, Susan directs focus to the mutual relations between opposing political identities to sustain binary identifications. She has published in the fields of international relations, critical theory, and cultural and political sociology. She is a current Research Fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research where she is working on multiple research projects, including a monograph entitled “Manufacturing Division” that is under contract with Leiden University Press.

Kirstine Sinclair

Kirstine Sinclair is Associate Professor and Head of Studies at the Centre for Modern Middle East and Muslim Studies, University of Southern Denmark, since 2015. She holds an MA in History and Comparative Literature from the Universities of Aarhus and Edinburgh (2003) and a PhD from the University of Southern Denmark (2010). Her field of research is Muslim minorities in the West with special reference to religious institutions, organisations and religious-political activism, modernity and mobility. Her most recent publication in English: Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity: Islamic Traditions and the Construction of Modern Muslim Identities, co-edited with Dietrich Jung, Brill (2020).