https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8313-1353
At the end of June 2023, the International Sociological Association (ISA) stages its World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne, Australia. The rise of the global far right, in Europe and beyond, got traction post-2008 financial crisis. It seems the urgency to counter the global threat by far-right populism and regional forms of authoritarianism has finally reached mainstream sociology: the 2023 ISA Congress theme is ‘Resurgent Authoritarianism’.
With its main office in Madrid, not unlike the European Sociological Association (ESA) headquartered in Paris, the ISA struggles to work on more inclusive trajectories and is pushing hard to counteract its Eurocentrism. On its website the ISA acknowledges that the Congress takes place in the country, which is called Narrm, and is home to the Kulin Nation Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people. For a European the nationwide effort to reconcile with First Nation/ Indigenous People is fascinating and impressive and also provides a glimpse of hope that this settler society is rapidly transitioning, and aboriginal voices will lead the change in the years to come.
Viewed from Down Under the current international affairs in Europe remain dominated by the war in Ukraine. The fear is looming that superpower China might join the armed front with Russia against the Western Allies rather than coming up with a ground-breaking contribution to a bilateral and international peace agreement. Taiwan is geographically close to Australia, and all countries across Australasia/ Ataraira are closely watching what is happening next. In May, Australia welcomed the Indian Prime Minister Modi, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The UK newspaper The Guardian wrote about Modi’s visit: he received a ‘Rock-star reception in Sydney’.Footnote1 Modi’s domestic policy regarding citizenship excludes Muslim refugees: the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 provides only a pathway towards Indian citizenship to persecuted minorities who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and who entered India on or before 31 December 2014.
Whereas the pandemic triggered largely global efforts to tackle the deadly virus and ways to manage countries and populations through it, such as lockdown measures, financial subsidies for unemployed and local business, and later vaccination programmes, the post-pandemic and post-2022 situation looks worryingly drifting apart. Though it is contested to which degree Putin’s war of aggression and the Ukrainian military defence has become a proxy war between Russia and liberal democracies, the social-economic effects felt globally do not translate into any downsizing of militarism. Quite the opposite the language of hate and the industrial means of warfare are legitimised widely by media and politics as we witness a defining war in Eastern Europe, taking place at the border of the European Union. The logic upheld here is one of ongoing threats by Russia, ergo by Putin, the toxic male leader who was in power and tolerated by all of us for too long; we might agree on that one. Except that not all of us do: a position ambiguous towards or even supportive of Russia became attractive and effective for some far right wing populist parties and leaders, whose anti-system rhetoric lacked focus after the controversial pandemic restrictions have subsided.
Another topic of concern is the European Union’s more cohesive and synthesised approach to tackle its immigration crisis. The new Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR) replaces the Dublin regulation, dating back to 1990.Footnote2 Demanding that those EU countries unwilling to offer refuge to incoming asylum seekers must support financially those EU Member States (such as Greece) bearing the costs, is a step forward. However, the decision to leave it to single countries to decide what a ‘safe’ country is and an otherwise tightening of the common borders of the EU, is a drawback to any welcoming policy of accepting people fleeing war and persecution.Footnote3 The Mediterranean Sea has become a mass grave; the capsized and then sinking ship on 14 June 2023 with more than 750 people on board, is another horrific example of the loss of vulnerable lives.
With respect to the situation of people fleeing the war in Ukraine and reaching safety in European countries, and largely in the Member States of the European Union, we would have hoped that the generous welcoming of these refugees equally would apply to other victims of war, from Sudan, for example. This is not going to happen as it seems: Europe continues to define its boundaries again and again as white. Countries like Poland and Czech Republic, which were adamantly opposed to the reception of Muslim refugees from Syria, have welcomed this recent wave of forced migration and are now among those with the highest number of Ukrainian refugees per capita in the EU.Footnote4 But we also must acknowledge that 90% of the 4 million Ukrainian refugees, who arrived by September 2022, in the European Union were women and children.Footnote5 We made this point of an intersectional gendered (and racist) discourse of international movement of people fleeing wars, before.
Or is it prominently the ideological difference that the threat by an autocratic regime in the borderland of Europe makes? Similar to the way how political refugees from communist countries before 1989 were welcomed unlike refugees from other places and postcolonial countries? Shouldn’t this logic, then, also apply to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps, of Russians, among them many academics, who have left the country since February 2022? Or did we explicitly or implicitly adopt the (Ukrainian) position that Russians fleeing from authoritarianism should not be welcomed but fight their repressive government at home (the same reasoning could have been applied to the earlier refugees from communist countries).
One way or the other what we see is a lack of moral compassion for all victims of war atrocities, slaughter and systemic violence. It was the German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was praised for her moral compass, e. g. in her response to refugees from Syria in 2015. Though not a year later, she was pushing for an arguably immoral refugee deal with the increasingly authoritarian leader of Turkey, Recep Erdogan. What is lacking in the contemporary moment is a radical advocacy for our moral compass. The late Zygmunt Bauman (Citation1991, p. 80) reminds us: ‘(o)ne recognises morality by its gnawing sense of unfulfilledness, by its endemic dissatisfaction with itself. The moral self is a self always haunted by the suspicion that is not moral enough’. The request for moral action is going beyond superficial comforts of our own gains and should direct us to try harder. Morality is non-conformity in times that are dominated by anti-migration and populist racist discourses.
Speaking of the continuity of far-right populism in different shapes and different countries Ronan van Rossem and Henk Roose in their article, The Victims strike back: Globalisation and rightwing populist attitudes in the EU. Evidence from the 2008 European Values Study, analyse the 2008 EU European Values Study across 27 EU Member States. They were interested to explore to which degree globalisation creates new cleavages between so called winners and losers of globalisation – making the latter prone to vote for far-right populist parties (RWP) as well as identifying with anti-migrant and ethno-homogenising values. Unlike most studies focusing on Northwest and Southern EU countries (the one by Crulli, for example, in this issue) they also included East European Member States in the data analysis. What they found confirmed the assumption that ‘the development of RWP attitudes a reaction is to the uprooting caused by transformations such as globalisation’ (p. 18). That said the expectation that there would be a match between globalisation victims and the level of income inequality turned out as not valid. The study rather suggests that it is the fear of losing out (Abstiegs-ängste/fear of social decline) rather than the actual socio-economic position people find themselves in that trigger affinity to RWP attitudes. The weakness of the findings, also admitted by the authors, is that the data analysed does not reflect post-2008 socio-political shifts, such as the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2016 Brexit decision of the UK to leave the EU, and last not least, the impact of the global pandemic since 2020. Still the tendencies found back in 2008 illustrate a moving target: ‘A large group of victims holding strong RWP attitudes may potentially be dangerous for the democratic system’ (p. 20). Accordingly, as van Rossem and Roose argue, what must be tackled more in-depth is the ‘fear’ and ‘perceived threat’ by globalisation and the transition of late neo-liberal capitalist states in the EU and beyond.
Our second article in this issue focuses on the gain or loss of far-right parties during the pandemic. Mirko Crulli’s article, Unmet expectations? The impact of the Coronavirus crisis on radical right populism in North- Western and Southern Europe, approaches the question to which degree the pandemic between 2020 and 2022 helped to extend the appreciation of populist radical right (PRR) parties, or otherwise against this expectation the (successful) management of the global and national health crisis by mainstream parties and politics. The success of moderate parties in government might have undermined the standing of radical right parties. From the hypothesis that different layers of crisis would extend the influence of the populist far right, and due to its anti-elite segment, the role that academic science elites played in governance representation and decision making is remarkable. Crulli follows Mudde’s (Citation2007) ‘ideational approach’ (7 pp.) and turning to the PopuList, narrowing the focus of the study to an analysis of 15 countries and 20 PRR parties. Though the analysed period only offers a snapshot of two years into the pandemic and does not consider national government terms running four years, for example, Crulli argues that of
the 20 parties considered, the majority – 13 – experienced losses during the first wave. Among these, AFD (Germany), Lega (Italy), FvD (Netherlands) and SD (Sweden) recorded the greatest collapse (−4 in just three months). Three parties saw their situation unchanged, while four gained. The most remarkable rise was that of FdI (Italy), which grew by 3% (p. 9).
Though the shadow of the 2020–2022 global pandemic stays with us the next article moves on from the explicit concern with far-right movements and parties. Olga Ulybina, Laia Pi Ferrer and Pertti Alasuutari in their article, Managing the Crisis: International organisations’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as legitimation work, shift the focus from governmental skills in managing the global health crisis to a reflection on the contribution of IGOs and INGOs in the response to the pandemic. While analysing closely the websites of, in total, 504 IGOs and INGOs they studied what they call ‘legitimation practices’ while investigating how and why a scale of these organisations tackled foremost the pandemic crisis. Though the window of data analysis was rather short lived (September–December 2020), the findings give a glimpse of distinction and legitimation strategies. ‘The INGOs’ response rate was significantly higher than that of IGOs. In line with rational choice assumptions, general purpose IGOs were more likely to react to the pandemic than task-specific IGOs’ (p. 17). They found also ‘conformity’ to policy goals and the pressure on IOs, particularly, to ‘be seen as professional, authoritative and legitimate actors’ (p. 17).
Thomas Chevallier’s contribution – ‘Toward a depoliticising civic style. How public-led partnership life socialises the leaders of an association in a French deprived neighbourhood’ – concentrates on neighbourhood social policies in deprived parts of Lille, France. Chevallier focusses on interactions between authorities/local public institutions and civil society, the latter particularly in the form of civic associations. The local partnership is analysed in terms of interactions between associative leaders and institutions, and the emerging forms of civic action. Such interaction is approached through ethnographic study as well as archival work, and captured in civic grammars. Chevallier points at a complex dynamic of the emergence of a community dynamic of partnership when local authorities engage with specific societal partners. This dynamic involves a component of professionalisation of such partners and inevitably a form of co-optation, leading to a kind of ‘partnership order’, which however may lead to forms of depoliticisation as well as exclusion of other potential societal actors entering into closer relations with authorities.
Julia Kantek, Helena Onnudottir and Irena Veljanova’s article ‘I partied my way to (my) Hungary: the agency-driven engagements of Hungarian-Australians to shape feelings of place and belonging outside their diaspora tourism programme’, addresses the relation between diaspora communities and their homeland, in this case, the Hungarian diaspora living in Australia. The authors analyse a specific Hungarian programme for diaspora engagement which has intensified with the coming into power of the conservative government of Viktor Orbán, which has an outspokenly nationalist political project which prominently involves kin-state politics, but also focuses on other diaspora communities. As the authors show, the programme aims at enhancing national consciousness amongst diaspora communities, with a focus on language learning. While such programmes are typically top-down exercises, the contribution indicates that engagement from below is equally important, and have important impact on participants’ experiences.
The books reviewed in this issue deal all with themes touched upon in this editorial and the other articles. Shaun Best examines the bold claim of Carlo Bodoni’s monograph Post-Society (2022) that the Covid pandemic has brought about the end of modernity. While he finds some of the arguments in individual chapters ‘both interesting and well informed’, Best is less convinced by ‘the book’s central epochal argument’.
As the political attention has shifted from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine, Anton Oleinik’s book Building Ukraine from Within (2018) might be worth revisiting. According to Avdi Smajljaj, this ‘multidisciplinary scientific work’ utilising quantitative as well as qualitative methods offers not only a compelling case study grounded in empirical data, but also showcases an innovative approach that could be applied to democratisation as well as nation- and state-building processes in other countries. Furthermore, it sheds a light on the more specific ‘issues and challenges within Ukraine as a case study of nation and state building, which came also to the fore in recent developments’.
Paul Carl’s Multiculturalism and the Nation in Germany (2022) attempts to map the moral conflicts in a country divided by the sudden influx of refugees in 2015. Cathrin Mund credits the book for its ‘decent efforts to apply and develop Durkheim’s theory’ and for offering a ‘valuable overview of the development of moral discourses in post-war Germany’ as well as ‘insights into materials by left-wing activists and right-wing actors that otherwise would remain hidden’. However, she is highly critical of the author’s symmetrical treatment of left- and right-wing extremism, which often ‘adopts a far-right reasoning’ instead of reflecting on its ‘underlying agenda’ and ‘repeatedly gives the impression that the left threatens German democracy more than the right’. Thus, it provides only an ‘inadequate picture of Germany’s moral landscape’ which limits its scholarly use.
Finally, moving to multiculturalism and post-ethnic activism in Scandinavia, Maurine Ekun Nyok discusses Suvi Keskinen’s book Mobilising the Racialised ‘Others’ (2022) which challenges to the Nordic countries’ self-image ‘as champions of egalitarianism and equality’ and criticises their whitewashing ‘of colonialism and racism’. Utilising a variety of empirical sources, Keskinen elucidates post-ethnic activism as a local and transnational practice of online and offline communities. ‘By articulating the experiences and analyses of the oppressive structures that constitute communities of belonging’, Nyok concludes, ‘the author makes a significant contribution to studies of post-ethnic activism’ shedding a light on ‘Nordic national histories and their intersection with global history’.
Notes
Reference
- Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and ambivalence. Polity.
- Mudde, C. (2007). populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.