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ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe form a distinctive cluster within the wider north Atlantic and pan-European populist conjuncture. They are distinctive in construing the opposition between self and other not in narrowly national but in broader civilizational terms. This partial shift from nationalism to “civilizationism” has been driven by the notion of a civilizational threat from Islam. This has given rise to an identitarian “Christianism”, a secularist posture, a philosemitic stance, and an ostensibly liberal defence of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom of speech. The paper highlights the distinctiveness of this configuration by briefly comparing the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe to the Trump campaign and to the national populisms of East Central Europe. It concludes by specifying two ways in which the joining of identitarian Christianism with secularist and liberal rhetoric challenges prevailing understandings of European national populism.
Acknowledgements
The original impulse for this paper came from an invitation to participate in a panel on “Religion and the Politics of National Identity” at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, 22 August 2016. Later versions of what had become a very different paper were presented as the Edward Westermarck Lecture in Helsinki, 24 November 2016, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 29 November 2016. I thank the organizers of these events for the opportunity to present work in progress and the participants for their comments and questions; and I thank the Wissenschaftskolleg for the residential fellowship that allowed me to work on this paper in ideal circumstances. Thanks also to three ERS reviewers, and to Matías Fernández, Michael Lambek, Victoria Koroteyeva, Susan Ossman, and Claus Offe for their comments on earlier versions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The populist moment, of course, is not confined to Europe and the United States: during this same period, Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India, and Rodrigo Duterte President of the Philippines. On the other hand, populism is not globally synchronized: the wave of Latin American left populisms of the preceding decade has been receding.
2 On horizontal and vertical dimensions, see also Biorcio Citation2003, 72–73; Jansen Citation2011, 84. Among more recent theoretical discussions of populism, see also, from a large literature, Mudde (Citation2004); Canovan (Citation2004); Laclau (Citation2005); Priester (Citation2012); Urbinati (Citation2013, Citation2015); Kaltwasser (Citation2014); Müller (Citation2016). For a broad survey of European radical right populism, see Mudde (Citation2007); a briefer and more recent historical survey of populism in the United States and Europe is provided by Judis (Citation2016).
3 On the performative dimension of populism, see Moffitt and Tormey (Citation2014).
4 Other important aspects of these populisms – notably their Euroskepticism and their shift from neoliberal to protectionist and pro-welfare state stances – fall outside the scope of this discussion. On Euroskepticism, see the overview in Vasilopoulou (Citation2013). For the shift from neoliberalism to welfarism, see Edgar (Citation2016).
5 For Björn Höcke’s January 2017 speech calling for a “180-degree turn in the politics of commemoration”, see http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/hoecke-rede-im-wortlaut-weizsaeckers-rede-zum-8-mai-1945-war-gegen-das-eigene-volk/19273518-3.html. On the anti-feminism of the AfD, see http://www.taz.de/!5033115/.
6 In a 2004 poll – the culmination of a television series devoted to establishing the greatest figure in Dutch history – Pim Fortuyn was declared the winner, beating out, among the ten finalists, William of Orange, Erasmus, Anne Frank, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Grootste_Nederlander.
7 Since the programme was devoted to exploring the issue of anti-gay violence, Khalil El-Moumni’s remarks were seen as particularly inflammatory, especially since the editors did not include the imam’s remarks opposing anti-gay violence (Hekma Citation2002). Subsequent press reports revealed that El-Moumni had previously characterized Europeans as “lower than dogs and pigs” for permitting gay marriage (which had just been legalized in the Netherlands, the first country to do so). See http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/5009/Archief/article/detail/2500894/2001/06/15/Van-Boxtel-Imam-heeft-gelogen.dhtml. The imam was summoned to meet the Minister of Urban Affairs, and the Prime Minister instructed Dutch Muslims at length about respecting Dutch tolerance of homosexuality (Hekma Citation2002, 241–242). El-Moumni was prosecuted under hate speech and anti-discrimination laws but acquitted on the ground of religious freedom (Kugle Citation2013, 119–121).
8 Muslim immigrants and their descendants do indeed have more conservative attitudes in matters of sexual morality than the population at large in the Netherlands and other European countries of immigration (Röder Citation2015). And they are overrepresented in Dutch police records of anti-gay violence (Buijs, Hekma, and Duyvendak Citation2011, 634). But there is no evidence that El-Moumni’s specific views – representing the very conservative sexual morality of orthodox religious milieux – were representative of those of Dutch Muslims at large (Mepschen Citation2009). And there is ample evidence that “native” Dutch continue to harbour a great deal of ambivalence about homosexuality (Bujis Hekma, and Duyvendak Citation2011), even as they express the highest levels of support in Europe for non-discrimination and equal rights (Gerhards Citation2010).
9 This, as Van der Veer (Citation2006) has argued, is the context for the centrality of “enjoyment” in the Dutch politics of culture vis-à-vis Islam. Van der Veer uses the notion of “enjoyment” in a much more straightforward sense than Žižek (Citation1993, 201–205), for whom “enjoyment” and the “theft of enjoyment” were central to nationalism.
11 After 9/11, the 1997 book was republished with a slightly different title, a new piece reflecting on 9/11, a critical response by a Dutch imam, Abdullah Haselhoef, and a cover photo of Fortuyn facing Haselfhoef, their “western” and “eastern” clothes indexing the “clash of civilizations” described in the book. To add to the piquancy of the face-off between the two men, Haselhoef, who had a reputation as a liberal imam, gained notoriety in the fall of 2001 by arguing that anal sex should be punishable by death if witnessed by four reliable men (Eyerman Citation2008, 103; Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens Citation2010, 968). In this context, the book received more attention.
14 Letter to De Volkskrant newspaper, August 8, 2007. http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/-genoeg-is-genoeg-verbied-de-koran~a870859/.
15 http://www.nltimes.nl/2016/07/25/wilders-renews-call-de-islamize-attacks-germany/. These and other proposals can also be found on Wilders’ twitter feed, which has 700,000 followers.
17 http://www.geertwilders.nl/index.php/94-english/1996-muslims-free-yourselves-and-leave-islam. Wilders’ call for the wholesale abandonment of Islam by world’s billion and a half Muslims is striking even on the populist right.
19 One of the first to identify this repositioning was Zúquete (Citation2008). Others who have commented on it include Göle (Citation2011) and Roy (Citation2016b).
20 On the paganism of the “nouvelle droite” in the last two decades of the twentieth century, see François (Citation2005); on anti-Christianism as a structuring element of new right paganism, see François (Citation2005, 184ff). On paganist currents in national populist parties, see Roy (Citation2016a) (on the French National Front) and McDonnell (Citation2016) on the Italian Lega Nord. On the earlier anticlerical tradition of the Austrian Freedom Party, see Hadj-Abdou (Citation2016).
23 http://www.profil.at/home/die-fpoe-retterin-abendlandes-bricht-parteitraditionen-242690; http://derstandard.at/1240550598731/Kirchenrat-und-Islamische-Glaubensgemeinschaft-Kritik-an-FPOe-Slogan-Abendland-in-Christenhand. The current party programme endorses a “European world view” based on “Cultural Christendom”: https://www.fpoe.at/fileadmin/user_upload/www.fpoe.at/dokumente/2015/2011_graz_parteiprogramm_web.pdf.
25 The term “Christianism” was introduced by Andrew Sullivan (Citation2003, Citation2006) to designate the ideology and agenda of the Christian right in the United States. As a specifically religious political programme of “Godly governance”, Christianism in this sense takes secularism (or “secular humanism”) as its chief enemy. But the Christianism espoused by Northern and Western European national populists – like the Christianism of the Trump campaign (Gorski Citation2016) – is not substantively religious but identitarian. I follow Gorski in using “Christianism” in this identitarian sense.
26 The theme of “belonging without believing” (Riis Citation1996, 119ff), like its counterpart “believing without belonging” (Davie Citation1994), has been central to the sociology of religion in contemporary Europe. Its connection to populist invocations of Christian identity is highlighted by the contributions to Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy (Citation2016); see especially Roy (Citation2016b), 193ff.
27 Nor does it imply an alignment between national populist parties and Christian churches. On the ambivalent and often antagonistic relations between populist parties and churches, see the essays in Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy (Citation2016).
28 On the culturalization of religion, see also Baer (Citation2010); Joppke (Citation2015), 180–181.
29 In mainstream political discourse, to be sure, one finds fewer explicit references to Christianity as a central aspect of cultural or civilizational identity. As Weiler (Citation2004) has argued, Christianity-talk continues to be widely seen, at least in liberal circles, as politically embarrassing or at least inopportune and as out of place in official public representations of European identity. In certain contexts, however, Christianity has emerged from the background and become the focus of broader public discussion. These include the high-profile Lautsi case at the European Court of Human Rights, concerning the display of the crucifix in Italian classrooms (Ozzano and Giorgi Citation2013; Joppke Citation2013), debates about a possible reference to Christianity in the Preamble to the European Constitution (Weiler Citation2004), and, above all, discussions of Turkey’s possible accession to the European Union (Hurd Citation2006; Minkenberg Citation2012; Minkenberg et al. Citation2012).
30 They are concerned with practices of worship only insofar as they come to be seen as symbols of belonging, as in the case of Marine Le Pen’s opposition to Muslim prayers in the street, which I discuss in the next section.
31 The issue wound up at the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled initially against the display of the crucifix in schools. This provoked so strong a wave of public protest – not only on the part of national populists – that the court’s Grand Chamber reversed the initial ruling on appeal (Joppke Citation2013).
32 On the Swiss referendum banning minarets, see Mazzoleni (Citation2016, 52–56); on campaigns against Mosques, see Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy (Citation2016); on opposition to special menus and restrictions on pious dress, see the next section.
33 See also Massad’s sweeping analysis of how liberalism has “constitute[d] Islam in constituting itself” (Citation2015, 12).
34 On the temporal mapping invoked in civilizational representations of Islam in the realm of gender and sexual politics, see Butler (Citation2008).
35 With the signs reversed, of course, equally sweeping civilizational contrasts mapped onto a series of normatively charged oppositions are deployed in “occidentalist” critiques of the West by Muslim intellectuals. See the discussion of “religious occidentalism” in Buruma and Margalit (Citation2005), 101–136.
36 In this comparative civilizational frame, Christianity is thus constructed as the unique civilizational fount of secularism and secular democratic politics. As Elizabeth Hurd (Citation2006, 409) notes, following Olivier Roy (Citation1999, 10), this claim to a (Judeo-) Christian monopoly of the civilizational sources of secularism has been one source of opposition to Turkey’s accession to the EU. In some contexts, to be sure, it is not (Western) Christianity per se but specific forms of Christianity that are seen as the matrix of secularism and liberalism; on claims made about Lutheranism in Denmark, see Mouritsen (Citation2006, 78–81).
37 For a serious scholarly argument, in a very different register, characterizing Christianity as a “religion to exit from religion”, see Gauchet (Citation1997). On the Christian origins of the category “secular” and the longue-durée developments within Christianity that have shaped the emergence and consolidation of understandings and practices we now think of as secular, including, crucially, the practice of distinguishing between “religious” and “secular” matters and the understanding of “religion” as a phenomenon of interior faith or belief that can and should be confined to the private realm, along with the correlative understanding of a “secular” public sphere, see illustratively Asad (Citation2003); Taylor (Citation2007); Calhoun (Citation2010).
38 Secular visions of national identity continue to be articulated against the institutional power of majoritarian and historically dominant forms of religion in countries (such as Poland) in which the dominant religion still has considerable institutional power, political influence, and cultural authority. (On the conflict between ethno-religious and civic-secular visions of nationhood in Poland, see Zubrzycki Citation2006.) In the US, too, what Gorski (Citation2017) has called “radical secularism” is directed against the continued robust presence of Christianity in American public life. But in highly secularized Northern and Western Europe, secular visions of national (or civilizational) identity are articulated in very different way, against minoritarian but putatively threatening forms of religiosity.
39 This is one aspect of a broader process of “ideological inversion” (Friedman Citation2016, 216; see also Buruma Citation2006, 30).
40 On post-secularism, see Habermas (Citation2008). For Habermas, “post-secular” does not refer to an increase in religious belief or practice. It refers to a “change in consciousness” that “undermines the secularistic belief in the foreseeable disappearance of religion and robs the secular understanding of the world of any triumphal zest”. Habermas accepts the consensual characterization of Europe as a uniquely secularized region. A post-secular understanding, on his view, relativizes Europeans’ self-understanding by seeing the European case in global perspective as the exception rather than the norm. A post-secular self-understanding is also open to appreciating the relevance of religious traditions – even in largely secular Europe – as “communities of interpretation” capable of providing valuable insights and arguments on political issues defined by conflicts of values; Habermas mentions as examples euthanasia, abortion, reproductive medicine, animal rights, and climate change.
41 The official Front National statement on laicité is at http://www.frontnational.com/le-projet-de-marine-le-pen/refondation-republicaine/laicite/. On the embrace of laicité by the Front National and the mainstream French right, see Baubérot (Citation2014). On the complexity of the French tradition of laicité and the problems involved in treating it as an unambiguous “model”, see Bowen (Citation2007).
42 The Islam-driven rightward shift of secularism is also strikingly illustrated by Riposte Laique (Secular Response), an openly anti-Islamic initiative that, since 2007, has produced an online journal, published numerous books, and organized demonstrations and meetings against “Islamization”, including a public “apéro saucisson pinard” to protest Friday prayers in the streets of the Goutte d’Or district of Paris by drinking wine and eating sausage. The prefecture of police, citing concerns about public order, denied permission for the event in the Goutte d’Or, so it was held on the Champs Elysees instead. This served as the model for other proposed public sausage and wine events. See, for example, http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2011/07/11/aperitif-saucisson-vin-rouge-la-droite-populaire-se-divise_1547547_823448.html. On the discourse of Riposte Laique, see Nilsson (Citation2015).
43 On the furore over Le Pen’s “occupation” comment, see http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2010/12/11/marine-le-pen-compare-les-prieres-de-rue-des-musulmans-a-une-occupation_1452359_823448.html. Less than a year later, street prayers were officially banned in France: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/world/europe/paris-begins-enforcing-ban-on-street-prayer.html; http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2011/09/14/01016-20110914ARTFIG00722-gueant-les-prieres-dans-la-rue-doivent-cesser.php. On the controversy over halal slaughter, http://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2012/article/2012/02/18/selon-le-pen-toute-la-viande-distribuee-en-ile-de-france-est-halal_1645353_1471069.html.
44 http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2012/09/21/marine-le-pen-je-mets-a-la-porte-tous-les-integristes-etrangers_1763542_823448.html; http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/citations/2016/08/26/25002-20160826ARTFIG00144-laicite-en-plus-du-voile-le-fn-veut-interdire-les-croix-et-les-kippas-en-public.php.
46 The defence of a secular public sphere is also as a way of excluding or delegitimizing substantively Christian arguments for openness towards or solidarity with migrants and refugees; see Mazzoleni (Citation2016, 52, 58) on the Swiss case.
47 Principled opposition to halal (and kosher) slaughter without prior stunning and to infant circumcision does not single out Muslims, and it is driven by concerns to protect animal rights or (in the case of circumcision) the right to bodily integrity. However, anti-Islamic populists have often opportunistically joined opponents of these practices.
48 On Polish populism, see Stanley (Citation2016); on Hungary, see the next section.
49 On the structural shift from nationalist anti-semitism to civilizational Islamophobia, see Bunzl (Citation2005). On the figuring of Jews as exemplary victims of the threat from Islam, see Zúquete (Citation2008, 328). Significantly, even Guillaume Faye, an influential intellectual of the extreme right who complains about the “soft genocide” being carried out against the “autochthonous” populations of Europe by “their own ethnomasochist and xenophilic elites” (Faye Citation2016), has denounced anti-semitism (Faye Citation2007) and highlighted the threats European Jews face from Islam (Faye Citation2015).
50 Akkerman and Hagelund (Citation2007); Betz and Meret (Citation2009, 322–323); Andreassen Citation2012. Akkerman (Citation2015) cautions that the liberal rhetoric coexists (except in the case of the Dutch Party for Freedom) with relatively conservative family policies. As Akkerman notes, however, the qualification “relatively” is important: as conservatives in prevailingly liberal contexts, these parties formulate their conservativism in liberal terms and avoid campaigning against liberal policies or public opinion (Citation2015, 56–57).
51 Baer (Citation2010, 61–62); Mancini (Citation2012); Lum and Renaudière (Citation2014).
52 See, for example, the charter statement of the transnational populist initiative “Women against Islamization”, founded by the Belgian Vlaams Belang, which characterizes women as the “first and foremost victims of Islamization”. http://www.vrouwentegenislamisering.be/21-2/?lang=en. Vlaams Belgan head Filip Dewinter seized the occasion of the Cologne aggressions of New Year’s Eve 2015 to speak in the Belgian parliament about the alleged dangers posed to women by Muslim men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xChMxoKGXs. Marine Le Pen, similarly, used the Cologne aggressions and incidents elsewhere to castigate the silence of the French left “faced with these fundamental attacks on the rights of women” http://www.lopinion.fr/edition/politique/marine-pen-referendum-sortir-crise-migratoire-94568.
53 On the Front National’s cultivation of support from gays, see Lestrade (Citation2012, chapter 2). Roy (Citation2016a, 89) notes that while it does not endorse gay marriage, the Front National pointedly declined to join the Catholic Church’s major mobilization against gay marriage. Even the Flemish Vlaams Belang, known for its conservative views on family and sexuality, and the only party to oppose gay marriage when it was legalized in Belgium in 2003, has gestured towards support for gay rights (Coffé and Dewulf Citation2014, 161).
54 As Massad (Citation2015) shows, the discursive construction of Islam as the antithesis of Western liberalism has a long history. Massad does not focus on populist discourse in contemporary Europe as such but traces the broader discursive processes through which “despotism, intolerance, misogyny, and homophobia” were “projected onto Islam”, as a result of which Europe could emerge as “democratic, tolerant, philogynist and homophilic” (12).
55 On the mainstreaming efforts of populist parties, see Akkerman, de Lange, and Rooduijn (Citation2016).
56 In principle, EU member states are required to adopt such measures by the 2008 EU “Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia”, but compliance has been uneven. Needless to say, the broad prohibitions on hate speech found in the EU could not exist in the United States, where an expansive First Amendment jurisprudence protects offensive speech.
57 This insistence on freedom of expression vis-à-vis sacred symbols has served (like the embrace of philosemitism, gender equality, and gay rights) to highlight “their” backwardness in relation to “our” modernity. As Mahmood (Citation2009, 843–845) has argued, it presents “them” as immaturely objecting to mere words or images and failing to recognize them as arbitrary signs. This view, she argues, drawing on the work of Keane (Citation2007), reflects a distinctive Western “semiotic ideology” that makes it impossible to understand why many Muslims felt so deeply offended by the Danish cartoons.
58 Le Pen had been charged with “inciting hatred” for her 2010 remarks, mentioned above, comparing Friday prayers by Muslims in the streets of certain parts of Paris to the German occupation; she was acquitted in 2015. Wilders had been acquitted in 2011 for remarks characterizing Islam as a “fascist religion,” but he was convicted in 2016 (without any punishment being imposed) of “inciting discrimination” for remarks made to his political supporters in 2014, asking if they wanted to have fewer or more Moroccans in the country, and responding, after the crowd chanted “fewer”, “we’ll take care of that”. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/09/geert-wilders-found-guilty-in-hate-speech-trial-but-no-sentence-imposed. As the trial got underway, Wilders characterized it as a “travesty”: “If speaking about this is punishable, then the Netherlands is no longer a free country but a dictatorship.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/28/dutch-far-right-mp-geert-wilders-says-race-hate-trial-is-travesty.
59 On the tension within the Front National, see Roy (Citation2016a, 84–85 and 92–93); on the tension within the Austrian Freedom Party, see Hadj-Abdou (Citation2016, 43).
60 Although the so-called “nones” – people with no religious affiliation – now constitute nearly a quarter of the population, atheists remain a small minority, only about 7 per cent. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/.
61 This was a potential problem for Trump, who was obliged to declare the Bible his favourite book.
62 H.R.2802 – First Amendment Defense Act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2802.
63 Some NWE populists, of course, have likewise deliberately offended liberal sensibilities, competing to be the most politically incorrect. But they have done so in the name of liberal values, including freedom of speech, said to be endangered by Islam.
64 The notion of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, to be sure, is central to the discourse of Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist. But Bannon is a fierce critic of secularism and liberalism, not a defender of secularism and liberalism vis-á-vis a putatively intrinsically illiberal Islam.
65 On the populism of the Fidesz regime, see Bozóki (Citation2015) and Enyedi (Citation2016). The populism of incumbents obviously differs from that of challengers. On the one hand, incumbents are evidently limited in their ability to attack the government for failing to represent the interests or protect the identity of “the people”, but that does not prevent incumbents from appealing to the people against “the elite”. This may be a cultural or economic elite or even a political or legal elite ensconced in institutions (such as constitutional courts or parliaments) that are held to be unrepresentative of “the people”. On the other hand, incumbents control a wide range of resources – symbolic and material – that allow them to represent themselves as promoting the interests of “the people” (understood in the vertical dimension as “ordinary people”) vis-à-vis “the elite” and as protecting the identity of “the people” (understood in the horizontal dimension as “the nation”) vis-à-vis forces within or without that are said to threaten it.
66 Hungary (unlike Poland) is as secular as the countries of NWE, with only 12 per cent claiming to attend religious services at least once a week (2004 Eurobarometer data, reported at http://www.gallup.com/poll/13117/religion-europe-trust-filling-pews.aspx).
67 For Orbán’s critique of liberalism, see Orbán (Citation2014, Citation2015b).
68 As Orbán put it already in 2011, “We did not tolerate being dictated to from Vienna in 1848 nor from Moscow in 1956 and 1990. Now we’re not going to allow ourselves to be dictated to by anyone from Brussels or anywhere else.” http://www.irishtimes.com/news/brussels-will-not-dictate-to-hungary-says-pm-1.574344.
69 For a detailed analysis of the sudden development of anti-Muslimism in Hungary, see Pall and Sayfo (Citation2016).
73 For analyses of the refugee crisis in terms of “moral panic”, see Cottee, “Europe's moral panic about the migrant Muslim ‘other'”, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-cottee-fear-of-refugees-20151013-story.html; and Bauman, “The Migration Panic And Its (Mis)Uses”, https://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/12/migration-panic-misuses/.
74 For Orbán’s reference to “suicidal liberalism”, see http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/orban-hungarys-sovereignty-depends-on-receiving-eu-funds/27582. For his most sustained critique of liberalism and his sketch of a non-liberal social and political order, see Orbán (Citation2014). For his reference to “keeping Europe Christian”, see Orbán (Citation2015a).
75 Significantly, Orbán has repeatedly used the term népvándorlás to designate this mass migration. Népvándorlás is the Hungarian equivalent of the German Völkerwanderung or “migration of peoples”, the tem used to describe the mass migrations (or from the point of view of Rome, the barbarian invasions – of late antiquity. On Orbán’s redefinition of the refugee crisis, see Balogh (Citation2015a).
77 Ibid.
78 On illiberal liberalism, see Joppke (Citation2008, 541–542); Adamson, Triadafilopoulos, and Zolberg (Citation2011); Triadafilopoulos (Citation2011).
79 On populism as a “thin-centered ideology” – one that does not provide answers to many major social and political questions addressed by more comprehensive political ideologies – see Mudde (Citation2004), drawing on Freeden’s (Citation1998) characterization of the ideological structure of nationalism.
80 For debates about terminology, see Mudde (Citation2007).
81 Earlier forms of populism, too, were often ideological hybrids, combining characteristically “left” and “right” elements; see Taguieff (Citation1995, 14).
82 The increasing salience of religio-civilizational categories in political discourse is part of a broader shift in which religion has replaced language as the cutting edge of the politics of difference (Brubaker Citation2013).
83 For an overview of the complex relation between Christianity and national identity in twentieth-century Europe, see Wood (Citation2016); on religion and national identity in the context of European integration, see Spohn Koenig, and Knöbl (Citation2015).
84 On the plasticity and adaptability of nationalism, see Anderson (Citation1983); Freeden (Citation1998); Malešević (Citation2006); and Brubaker (Citation2004, Citation2015).
85 I thank Siniša Malešević for this formulation.
86 As Zúquete (Citation2008, 329–332) observes, the “post-national” concern of the European extreme right to defend Western values against Islam both complements and competes with nationalist discourse.