(http://www.thenation.com/article/162698/europes-turn-right#)
Europe's Turn to the Right
_Ian Buruma_ (http://www.thenation.com/authors/ian-buruma)
August 10, 2011 | from the Aug 29 / Sept 5 issue
Right-wing gunmen are a rarity in postwar Europe. There have, of course,
been instances of right-wing violence. In the 1990s, gangs composed mostly of
former East German youths, prey to neo-Nazi fantasies, set upon Turks and
other clearly identifiable immigrants, beating people up in the streets and
torching refugee shelters.
Soccer hooligans, too, from a number of countries—especially Germany,
Britain and Russia—like to scream racist or nationalist slogans while brawling
in stadiums or smashing city centers. There is even evidence of some
organizational links between political fringe groups, such as the English
Defence
League, and gangs of soccer hooligans.
Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered seventy-six people in the name of his
war against “Islamization” and “multiculturalism,” was never, so far as
we know, a soccer hooligan. But he did have relations with the English
Defence League. His rambling manifesto, titled “2083—A European Declaration of
Independence,” contains a lot of gobbledygook about medieval knights, but
also negative views on Muslims and liberals (“cultural Marxists”), which
echo to a disconcerting degree what certain populists closer to the European
mainstream are saying. He quotes Dutch politician Geert Wilders, among
others, as an inspiration, especially on the evils of multiculturalism. One or
two politicians on the far right have returned the compliment. Francesco
Speroni of Italy’s Northern League, which is part of Silvio Berlusconi’s
government, claimed that “Breivik’s ideas are in defense of Western
civilization.” A new anti-immigrant Romanian party has even accorded him the
singular honor of borrowing his name.
Even so, most right-wing populists who share many of Breivik’s opinions,
such as Wilders, have quickly distanced themselves from the killer and
dismissed him as a madman. Wilders tweeted: “That a psychopath has abused the
battle against Islamization is disgusting and a slap in the face of the
worldwide anti-Islam movement.” This is a smart way to avoid being tainted,
but
is it right? Is Breivik just a crazy loner, or is there a link between his
murderous acts and the ideas that inspired them?
Even if far-right violence in postwar Europe has been sporadic so far, and
without serious political significance, there have always been radical
right-wing parties, mostly operating on the margins of national politics. The
nature of these parties differs from country to country, depending on
national histories and traditions. The National Front in France, for instance,
was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a veteran of anticolonial wars, whose views
on World War II (the Nazi occupation was “not especially inhumane”) are
in line with an antiliberal, anti-Semitic tradition in France.
The Flemish nationalists in Belgium owe much of their animus against
foreigners to a long socioeconomic struggle with the French-speaking Walloons,
who dominated them for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During
the war, this made many of them sympathetic to Nazi ideas of Aryan
supremacy. Now it is immigrants, especially Muslims, who are seen as the enemy
by
the far-right Vlaams Belang party.
In Germany, especially, it has been impossible to escape from the past. The
right-wing Republikaner Party was founded in 1983 by the late Franz
Schönhuber, a former officer in the Waffen SS, who blamed foreigners for most
of
the problems in West Germany. In the ’90s he had hoped to merge his party
with the even more radical, but equally marginal, German People’s Union,
whose leader advocated racial purity and violence against immigrants.
Even though Austrians had an easy ride after the war, absolving themselves
from German war guilt, a certain nostalgia for Nazi times still lurks in
right-wing corners there too. The late Jörg Haider, former leader of the
Austrian Freedom Party, a far more mainstream party than the German
Republikaner, pandered to older members by praising the virtues of the wartime
generation, especially the Waffen SS.
At least two important radical right-wing parties emerged directly from the
sump of Mussolini’s Italy. The National Alliance, under Gianfranco Fini,
and the Tricolor Flame came from the Italian Social Movement, founded by
neo-Fascists in 1946. Before tacking more to the center in the ’90s, Fini was
given to such statements as “Fascism has a tradition of honesty,
correctness and good government.”
The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries are less tainted by the
past, even though they produced their share of National Socialists and Nazi
collaborators. Right-wing fringe parties in the postwar Netherlands were
antiliberal and sometimes nativist. One notorious figure, Hans Janmaat, spoke
out against immigrants. But neither he nor other right-wingers could be
described as fascists. In Denmark, Sweden and Norway, right-wing parties, until
recently, were more interested in lowering taxes than in the threat of
foreigners to the purity of the native folk.
One reason radical right-wing parties were marginalized for a long time in
Europe is that they were simply too disreputable. It was worse than uncouth
to agitate openly against minorities, let alone to flirt with ideologies
that had caused the death of millions. Even to suggest that large-scale
immigration could be a problem was considered racist until not so long ago. In
such countries as Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and France, mainstream
parties have tended to gang up against radical right-wing parties, blocking
them behind what the French call a cordon sanitaire. On the whole, voters
for the far right hovered between 10 percent and 15 percent—more than is
desirable, perhaps, but few people worried that they would ever get much
more.
The cordon first began to crack in Austria and Italy, during the ’90s.
This was not so much because Austrians were rediscovering their Nazi
sympathies. Indeed, by the late ’90s most politicians on the democratic far
right in
Europe had tried to distance themselves from Nazi or fascist antecedents.
The reason for the Freedom Party’s success was that the Social and
Christian Democrats had been in government too long. People voted against a
sclerotic establishment. Many Italians felt the same way about the Christian
Democrats, who had been propped up for decades, with the help of the United
States, to keep the left out. But once the Christian Democrats finally lost
power, it wasn’t the left that leapt into the vacuum but Berlusconi, backed by
neo-Fascist and anti-immigrant parties, such as Fini’s National Alliance
and Umberto Bossi’s Northern League.
Governments of the European Union were outraged in 2000, when the Austrian
Freedom Party garnered enough votes to form part of a coalition government.
Boycotts were threatened. Austrian officials were snubbed. This was a
mistake. It only helped to burnish the right’s anti-establishment credentials.
After all, the AFP was democratically elected, as were the right-wing
Italian parties in 1994.
Perhaps being part of a government had a civilizing effect. In 1995 Fini
disavowed his party’s Fascist heritage. But when it comes to immigration and,
especially, “the Muslim problem,” Fini and his right-wing allies in
Berlusconi’s coalition, as well as the Austrian AFP, are if anything even more
ferocious than before. In this, they are not alone.
* * *
Already by the late ’90s, anti-immigrant feelings were simmering in several
European countries, where relatively large numbers of “guest workers,”
former colonial subjects and refugees were beginning to make the native
majorities feel nervous. Neighborhoods were changing. Jobs were thought to be
in
peril. Welfare states were felt to be under strain.
And then 9/11 happened, and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van
Gogh, and the bombings in Madrid and London—all these atrocities perpetrated
by
terrorists acting in the name of a violent Islamist revolution. This
finally gave right-wing populists a cause with which to crash into the center
of
European politics.
European civilization, frightened citizens were being told, had to be
defended against “Islamization,” against fanatical aliens who breed so fast
that white Europeans will soon be outnumbered. And the promoters of this cause
were not nostalgic old SS men dreaming of the good old days, or
neo-Fascists pining for black shirts and military marches, or skinheads
itching for a
brawl. Quite the opposite: Europe’s new populists are smartly dressed
modern men and women who claim to be defending our freedoms. And they are
persuasive because people are afraid and resentful, blaming economic and
social
anxieties on “liberal elites.” But if the fears are vague and various, the
focal point is Islam.
The most successful politician of this new type is Geert Wilders, whose
Freedom Party was described by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian killer, as “the
only real conservative party in existance.” There are sane reasons to be
worried about mass immigration, Islamist extremism or the failures of
multiculturalism. But Wilders goes much further than that. He likes to speak
in
apocalyptic terms, of “lights going out over Europe,” of “the final stages of
the Islamization of Europe,” of the “threat to America and the sheer
survival of the West.” And all this not just because of a particular strain of
violent revolutionary Islam but because of Islam itself: “If you want to
compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or National Socialism—a
totalitarian ideology.”
Yet the Europe to be fought for, in Wilders’s rhetoric, bears no relation
to the dreams of Hitler or Mussolini. It is modern, and at the same time ill
defined. Sometimes it is “Judeo-Christian civilization” that must be
defended, sometimes “the Enlightenment” and sometimes liberal values mostly
achieved since the 1960s, such as gay rights and gender equality. These are
not the kinds of ideals typical right-wingers normally espouse, but since
conservative Muslims tend to oppose them, they can be held up as pillars of
Western civilization.
The perception of a Muslim threat allowed the populist right to turn the
tables on the old liberal elites. Now it was the new right who were defending
the West against the new fascists. And the liberals were the “collaborators
” of “Islamofascism.”
Wilders and others in the “anti-Islamization movement” have even replaced
anti-Semitism, associated with the old European far right, with what looks
like its opposite, a fervent form of Zionism. Indeed, they are great
friends of Israel—that is, of a certain kind of Israel, the one associated
with
figures such as right-wing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. Wilders makes
frequent trips there, dining with Lieberman and telling settlers on the
West Bank that “Judea and Samaria” are rightfully theirs. So does
Heinz-Christian Strache, of the Austrian Freedom Party. What they like about
the
Israeli government is its anti-Arab militancy. Israel, in Wilders’s phrase, is
on the “front line” of the war to save Western civilization.
Even the new leader of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen, daughter
of Jean-Marie, would not dream of defending French fascism or indulge in her
father’s barely veiled anti-Semitism. And yet, in an odd way, the legacy
of World War II still haunts us, which is why critics of the apocalyptic
view of Islam in Europe are routinely denounced as “appeasers.” Europe, in
the words of an American admirer of Wilders, has entered another “Weimar
moment.”
In short, we are facing another war. The new right-wing populists in Europe
see not only Muslims as their enemies but also “liberal elites,” “
multiculturalists” and “appeasers” who are fatally undermining the West and
selling Europe out to the Islamofascists.
So far, this is just a war of words. Wilders’s Freedom Party, as well as
the Danish People’s Party and the Austrian Freedom Party, are not advocating
violence. On the contrary, by playing by the rules of democracy, they have
successfully pushed more centrist parties to the right. Neither the Dutch
nor the Danish government could survive without the official support of the
populists. And Marine Le Pen’s National Front appears to be gaining
strength in France. In Norway, the right-wing Progress Party, of which Breivik
was
a member until 2006, is the second-biggest party in the country.
This move of right-wing populist parties to the mainstream could be a
reason for the kind of savagery displayed by the Norwegian terrorist. Violent
extremists might feel that parties they once admired are losing their purity
by tacking toward the center. But this explanation lets the populists off
the hook a little too easily. Even though they don’t promote violence, they
are exploiting fears in a dangerous manner. When the right claims that the
future of our civilization, our democracies, our countries, is at stake,
and that all the Muslims living in our midst are driven by “a totalitarian
ideology,” it is surely not surprising that some people might interpret this
as a call to arms.
Perhaps Anders Breivik is a madman, even though there is no evidence so far
of clinical insanity. Maybe the men who flew airplanes into the Twin
Towers, who stabbed Theo van Gogh to death, who laid bombs in the London
subway,
were crazy too. But different times produce different pathologies. If the
hateful words of radical Muslims bear any relation to extreme acts, carried
out in name of Islam, then surely the words of people who warn us that we
are at war with Islam and its liberal appeasers must be held accountable
too.
Ideology can be random. In other times, Breivik might have killed in the
name of fascism, anarchism or communism. Some murderous dreamers, Muslims as
well as Christians, might well use any ideological excuse to perpetrate
their crimes. In which case we cannot blame right-wing, anti-Muslim populists
directly for the murders in Oslo, just as anti-Western Muslim clerics can’t
be blamed for 9/11. But hate-filled words surely have an influence on
murderous minds, and on the targets they pick.
--
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