The End of ‘Central Europe’? The Rise of the Radical Right and the Contestation of Identities in Slovakia and the Visegrad Four

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the effects of the migration crisis and the parallel rise of right wing parties on national and regional identities in Slovakia and the broader subregion of the Visegrad Four. It argues that the recent right wing political discourse around migration has been reshaping the meaning of ‘Central Europe’ as a normative project and an identity shared by the V4 countries. The post-Cold War narrative of Central Europe was a story of ‘returning to the West’, which in practice meant that normative conformity with the West was a precondition of membership in key Western institution. The situation has changed visibly after the migrant crisis, as the V4 political elites have now been constructing new identities, in partial juxtaposition with Western European liberalism. These new identities favour a culturalist, conservative interpretation of the nation and reject humanitarian universalism, epitomized by the European Union’s decision to welcome the refugees. This arguably devaluates the previous notion of ‘Central Europe’ as a region that seeks to identify itself firmly with the West. Slovakia is chosen as a case study because of the recent success of the radical right in the 2016 parliamentary elections. The article concludes that although the situation of being structurally locked into the EU does not allow the V4 countries to openly challenge its main principles, the V4 political elites pursue a counter-hegemonic strategy, subverting and resignifying some of its key political notions. One should, therefore, speak not of an end of ‘Central Europe’ but rather of its evolution into a new, hybrid stage, where normative conformity and identification with the West will only be partial. The article makes use of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and related concepts as well as insights from constructivist geopolitics literature to track articulatory practices of the regional establishments. The study relies on evidence from recent political campaigning in Slovakia as well as official Visegrad Group documents from 2015 to 2016.

Notes

1. Analysts in the region make similar observations on Viktor’s Orbán intent ‘to transform the EU’ hoping that its current leadership will be ‘swept away’ by the refugee crisis. Then ‘the new Europe can be formed on the ruins of the old one – against the federalist vision, and based on the trinity of the family, the nation state and Christianity’. Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital think-tank in Budapest, as quoted by Financial Times (see ‘The Visegrad Four: Brussels’ eastern critics’ 2016).

2. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in June 2016, Poles and Hungarians remained among the EU’s ‘strongest backers’ with 72% and 61% viewing it favourably. See http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2016/06/Pew-Research-Center-Brexit-Report-FINAL-June-7-2016.pdf According to Parlemeter, on the other hand, in 2016 when asked about the benefits of EU membership 61% of Poles, 54% of Slovaks, 47% of Hungarians, but only 32% of Czechs found their country’s membership in the EU to be ‘generally a good thing’. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdf/eurobarometre/2016/parlemetre/eb86_1_sociodemo_en.pdf.

3. Preserving the Schengen regime as one of the ‘foundations’ of the EU, its ‘key practical and symbolic achievement’ remained a recurrent theme in V4 joint statements, as well as in the rhetoric of individual V4 governments.

4. While criticizing the EU in its current state, Visegrad leaders generously embellished their rhetoric with calls for a ‘stronger Europe’ and praises to ideas such as that of an ‘EU army’, which in itself is rather counterintuitive, given their aversion to federalism.

5. Otilia Dhand in an interview to Financial Times (See ‘The Visegrad Four: Brussels’ eastern critics’ 2016).

6. Theorists like Mouffe see the recent rise of right wing anti-immigrant populism in Europe as stemming from the phenomenon of ‘post-politics’ or ‘post-democracy’. According to Mouffe, the political frontiers between right and left have been blurred, thus rubbing democratic politics of its essence of antagonism (Mouffe 2016). The blurring of frontiers comes as a result of the neoliberal or ‘post-political’ consensus of the elites who have given up on any alternative to neoliberal globalization. Consequently, Mouffe argues, ‘the success of right wing populist parties comes from the fact that they provide people with some form of hope, with the belief that things could be different’ (Mouffe 2005, 56). The temptation of political alternative comes together with a temptation of identity politics, which has been missing from the ‘post-political’ constellation. By turning on migrants the populist right provides the ‘them’, or the ‘constitutive outside’ without which group identity (the ‘us’) cannot be articulated in principle (Mouffe 2005, 57). For Eastern European EU members Mouffe’s analysis should be least partially valid, insofar as these countries have been integrated into the Western neoliberal order through European integration. Here, the sense of a missing alternative that spurs populism may have yet an additional source. On the one hand, it is true that through EU membership which limits their sovereignty, Eastern European governments are locked into a particular neoliberal order in terms of their key policy choices. The losers of this order are then prone to see all mainstream parties that do not question EU membership as pseudo-alternatives to each other, which naturally leads to a sense of the ‘post-political’. Right or left, some key things must be done in the way in which Brussels requires it. Yet another problem that concerns Eastern Europe, and Slovakia in particular, is corruption of the mainstream parties. In recent years, there has been no lack of corruption scandals across the Slovak political spectrum. The psychological sense of ‘no alternative’, and the ensuing alienation of voters from mainstream parties, is thus reinforced by the perception of all parties – whether left or right – as being equally corrupt. And here, it is notable that the extreme right wing People’s Party Our Slovakia, which poses as the alternative to all mainstream parties, combines anti-EU and anti-migration narratives with anti-corruption and anti-establishment rhetoric. Thus, if we follow Mouffe’s explanation of populism, there is no reason to be surprised that political discourse in the Visegrad Four has been becoming even more intensively right wing than in Western Europe.

7. Thus, the ‘ethnicized and populist language’, regional analysts observe, ‘disappeared from SMER rhetoric’ following the elections (Dubéci 2016).

8. The party received 11 out of 150 seats in the Slovak parliament following the 2016 elections.

9. KPOPS leader Kotleba in his parliament speeches came up with a similar conspiracy theory, to the effect that the ‘directed migration wave is EU’s instrument of wiping out nation states and their identities’ (‘Marian Kotleba vystúpil v rozprave k programovému vyhláseniu vlády’).

10. This assessment belongs to the Slovak prime minister as quoted by Slovak media (‘Fico: Utečencom pomôžeme, rozlišujme však medzi ekonomickými a ostatnými’ 2015).

11. Recent sociological studies also seem to confirm the point on hybridity. Thus, according to recent polls conducted in Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, 48%, 48% and 52% of the respondents, respectively, when asked where their countries belonged geopolitically chose neither ‘East’ nor ‘West’ but ‘somewhere between’ as their answer. (See ‘GLOBSEC Trends. Central Europe under the fire of propaganda: Public opinion poll analysis in Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia’ 2016.)

12. The Slovak group was followed by units of Czech and Polish policemen.

13. The enmity between Slovak and Hungarian ethnonationalism goes back to the nineteenth century. In the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, the Slovak ethnic was subject to policies of cultural assimilation, and Slovak nation building was suppressed by Budapest. The Treaty of Trianon (1920), adjusting the borders of Hungary in the wake of World War I, left a large Hungarian minority in the territory of Slovakia. In the post-Communist period, the issue of Hungarians in Slovakia was exploited by politicians on both sides, leading to periods of tension between the two countries. While Slovak right wingers have repeatedly accused Hungary of irredentism, the Hungarian grievance narrative points out the utter unfairness of the Trianon partition.

14. In their 2005 article, Bialasiewicz and Minсa analyse how the 2003 Gulf War stimulated the American geopolitical imagination to invent ‘banal cartographies’ that divided EU members into the ‘Old’ and the ‘New Europe’ – according to their stance on the US invasion of Iraq. Different foreign policy preferences led to tensions between new and old member states, suggesting that a shared European identity can face challenges even absent a significant crisis. In 2015, differences between groups of member states emerged from a serious domestic crisis that the EU itself was facing, suggesting that, this time, the effect on shared notions of Europe may be much deeper. See Bialasiewicz and Minca (2005).

15. Also, it would perhaps be useful to remember in this context that it is no other than Angela Merkel that at some point announced the failure of German multiculturalism.