The Rise of the Politics of National Identity: New Evidence from Western Europe

Abstract

Numerous West European democracies are witnessing unprecedented levels of electoral support for the populist radical right parties. By focusing on four such parties in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, we demonstrate that the issue of immigration is at the core of their populist appeal. We argue that these countries’ electorates already came to be politically divided over immigration to the extent that one could talk about the emergence of a new cleavage—ethnic vs. civic citizenship. We further posit that immigration, intensified by the unrelenting process of globalization, will continue to affect political dynamics of the recipient states.

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Prof. Zsolt Enyedi from the Central European University and Prof. Peter Rollberg from the George Washington University, for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. Nigel Farage, one of the main advocates of Brexit, has earned much of his political reputation by criticising immigration. In 2014, he commented that mass immigration was making parts of the UK appear ‘unrecognizable’ and look like ‘a foreign land’ (Sparrow, 2014).

2. The fact that the town (Boston) that voted most keenly for Brexit (76%) is the one with the highest percentage of EU incomers among its population (13%) (“Brexitland versus Londonia”, 2016) should therefore not be regarded as a surprise.

3. In reference to this political phenomenon, Albertazzi and McDonnell noted that ‘we can see evidence of a broad populist Zeitgeist in Western Europe in which not only have dyed-in-the-wool populists been successful, but where many other mainstream political leaders […] have regularly dipped into populism's box of tricks’ (2008, p. 2).

4. Electoral studies have long ago shown that disaffected voters are a ‘natural reserve’ of the extreme right (Mudde, 1999). In that spirit, numerous analyses of the recent British referendum on the EU focus on economic factors and the ‘left behind’ thesis, arguing that globalisation brought about prosperity all over the world except to the working class in Western societies (Haidt, 2016).

5. Our assumption was supported by Thomas Oppermann, chairman of the German SPD parliamentary group, who told us in a recent interview that ‘the reasons behind the electoral success of the AfD are much deeper than the ongoing refugee crisis’ (Berlin, September 2016).

6. Analyzing manifestos of German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), Austrian Social-Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the People's Party (ÖVP), Denmark's Social-Democrats (Socialdemokraterne) and the Liberal Party (Venstre), and the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the Labour Party (PvdA) in the Netherlands, one can identify an important common position: without mentioning ethno-national background, they all identify the key values of their societies such as democracy and human rights as the most important criteria for social integration. See: CDU Party Program (2007), ÖVP Party Program (2015), PvdA Party Program (2016), Socialdemokraterne Party Program (2016), SPD Party Program (2007), SPÖ Party Program (1998), Venstre Party Program (2006) and VVD Party Program (2016).

7. In an interview (Berlin, January 2017), Ralf Bammerlin, the head of the planning team in the SPD parliamentary group told us that such a scenario was indeed possible to imagine in Germany. In that sense, he mentioned the surveys conducted by his party in the summer of 2016 which showed that 46% of German voters agreed with the following statement: ‘I am not in favor of AfD but I am glad that the party performed well in recent elections’.