Nationalism on the Internet

Critical Theory and Ideology in the Age of Social Media and Fake News

Christian Fuchs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367357665
• eBook ISBN: 9781000692662
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this timely book, critical theorist Christian Fuchs asks: What is nationalism and what is the role of social media in the communication of nationalist ideology?

Advancing an applied Marxist theory of nationalism, Fuchs explores nationalist discourse in the world of contemporary digital capitalism that is shaped by social media, big data, fake news, targeted advertising, bots, algorithmic politics, and a high-speed online attention economy. Through two case studies of the German and Austrian 2017 federal elections, the book goes on to develop a critical theory of nationalism that is grounded in the works of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eric J. Hobsbawm.

Advanced students and scholars of Marxism, nationalism, media, and politics won't want to miss Fuchs' latest in-depth study of social media and politics that uncovers the causes, structures, and consequences of nationalism in the age of social media and fake news.

Chapter One

Introduction: Nationalism Today

1.1 Nationalism Today

1.2 Studying Nationalism

1.3 This Book’s Structure

1.1 Nationalism Today

Right-wing politicians and parties have in recent years had success in a significant number of countries. Examples include:

• the Alliance of Patriots of Georgia;
• the Alternative for Germany;
• the Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi in India;
• Boris Kollár’s We Are Family, Marian Kotleba’s People’s Party Our Slovakia, and Andrej Danko’s Slovak National Party in Slovakia;
• Brexit, UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Nigel Farage in the UK;
• the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia in Estonia;
• the Croatian Party of Rights in Croatia;
• the Danish People’s Party in Denmark;
• the Democratic Centre in Colombia;
• Donald J. Trump in the USA;
• the Finns Party in Finland;
• the Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, Norbert Hofer, and Sebastian Kurz in Austria;
• Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands;
• the Golden Dawn in Greece;
• the Great Indonesia Movement Party in Indonesia;
• Jair Bolsonaro and the Social Liberal Party in Brazil;
• Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party in Poland;
• Jobbik and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary;
• the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan;
• Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France;
• Matteo Salvini’s Northern League, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy;
• the National Alliance in Latvia;
• the National Popular Front in Cyprus;
• One Nation in Australia;
• Prayut Chan-o-cha’s military junta governing Thailand;
• the Progress Party in Norway;
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule of Turkey;
• Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines;
• Santiago Abascal’s Vox in Spain;
• the Serbian Radical Party in Serbia;
• the Slovenian National Party in Slovenia;
• Svoboda in the Ukraine;
• the Sweden Democrats in Sweden;
• the Swiss People’s Party in Switzerland;
• Tomio Okumura’s Freedom and Direct Democracy party and Andrej Babiš’ Action of Dissatisfied Citizens in the Czech Republic;
• the United Patriots, Attack, Bulgarian National Movement, and Volya in Bulgaria;
• the United Romania Party in Romania;
• United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front, and the Liberal Democratic Party in Russia; and
• Vlaams Belang in Belgium.

This list is not complete, but shows that right-wing politics plays a role in many countries and parts of the world. Many of these parties are characterised by top-down leadership, nationalism, the use of the friend/enemy scheme for scapegoating minorities and political opponents, and law and order politics. These four elements interact and together constitute right-wing politics (Fuchs 2018a). Figure 1.1 visualises a model of right-wing politics. In right-wing politics that operates based on and accepts the democratic state, the elements of patriarchy and militarism take on the form of law and order politics (the belief that crime and social problems can be solved by policing, surveillance, and tough prison sentences) as well as material investments and an ideological stress on the importance of repressive state apparatuses (the police, the army, the judicial system, the prison system). Such politics can also be termed conservative politics. In contrast, fascist forms of right-wing politics oppose and want to abolish the democratic state. They want to organise society as a dictatorship that is built on and uses means of terror. Terror is used against political opponents and other identified enemies and scapegoats in order to try to annihilate them. Far-right politics operates based on the democratic state, but its boundaries to fascism are more fluid than in the case of conventional right-wing politics. In far-right politics, violent political rhetoric and communication that can imply and lead to physical violence against opponents is fairly common. In right-wing extremist politics, the boundary to fascism is even more crossed than in far-right politics. This means that in right-wing extremist political groups, parties, ideology, and practices, there are individuals who advocate the use of physical violence against opponents.

FIGURE 1.1 A model of right-wing politics

All right-wing politics has in common that it sees inequality between humans as a natural feature of society and therefore considers an egalitarian society as utopian and unrealistic (Bobbio 1996). In contrast, the political left sees inequality as a result of social contradictions and therefore argues that equality between humans can and should be established politically. Right-wing practices always contain various degrees of the four dimensions of right-wing politics. These elements define a group identity (nationalism), a method for organising the relationship between leaders and followers in the political group itself and society (leadership principle), an antagonistic relationship between citizens of the nation and enemies that is built on hatred (friend/enemy scheme), and methods of dealing with enemies (law and order politics, militarism). All right-wing politics denies the class conflict and advances the ruling class’ interests. It reifies and fetishises private property of the means of production and the existence of class society and class relations, which means that the economy is based on the leadership principle so that a small minority owns, controls, and governs the economy, whereas others are compelled to produce goods they do not own. Right-wing politics favours undemocratic models of the economy, where one class exploits the labour of another class.

Let us have a look at some political quotes:

• Donald Trump on Twitter: “The only way to stop drugs, gangs, human trafficking, criminal elements and much else from coming into our Country is with a Wall or Barrier.”¹
• Jair Bolsonaro: “The scum of the earth is showing up in Brazil, as if we didn’t have enough problems of our own to sort out.”²
• Heinz Christian Strache in a newspaper interview: “That’s why we consequently continue our path for our home country of Austria, the fight against population exchange, just like the people expect it from us. […] We do not want to become a minority in our own homeland.”³
• Marine Le Pen on Twitter: “By attacking the idea of the Nation and the control of immigration you let communitarianism, Islamism and terrorism grow.”⁴
• Recep Erdoğan on Twitter: “One nation. One flag. One fatherland. One state.”⁵
• Viktor Orbán on Facebook: “Nowadays, Hungary and the Hungarian people represent order in an increasingly disorderly Europe. Many of the leaders of Europe do not undertake the fight against modern mass migration and the incoming flood of illegal and law violating migrants.”⁶
• Nigel Farage on Twitter: “NHS should be a National, not International Health Service. £181,000 bill for one illegal migrant is madness.”⁷
• Matteo Salvini on Facebook: “While the Pope calls for welcoming all the migrants, 700 illegal immigrants have landed in Calabria and another 3,000 will arrive in Italy in the next few hours. Immigration? No, INVASION organized and financed by the new slavers.”⁸

Nationalism is a common element of all of these examples. Protecting a unitary nation is presented as important. Nationalism ideologically constructs a collective cultural and political identity by referring to “our Country”, “our home country”, “our homeland”, “the idea of the Nation”, “one nation”, “one flag”, “one fatherland”, “one state”, “Hungary and the Hungarian people”, or the National Health Service. Right-wing ideology understands the nation as a cultural and/or biological community that it presents as a people. Nationalism not just wants to establish a nation-state, where the imagined members of the nation live, but also strives for purity of the nation. In reality, societies are never homogeneous because there are different ways of life and nation-states are the outcome of conflicts, wars, imperialism, and colonialism.

All nationalism presents the nation as being threatened by aliens and as needing to be protected in order to secure purity that needs to be protected from aliens. In the examples, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, drug dealers, and organised criminals are presented as enemies of the nation. The cultural and biological nation is an ideological construct that serves to distract attention from actual exploitation and domination. In the age of digital capitalism, nationalist ideology is frequently communicated over social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

1.2 Studying Nationalism

This book asks: What is nationalism? What is the role of social media in the communication of nationalist ideology?

This work advances an applied Marxist theory of nationalism that revives classical critical theories of nationalism by using them as tools for studying nationalism in contemporary digital capitalism that is shaped by social media, big data, fake news, targeted advertising, bots, algorithmic politics, and a high-speed online attention economy. The book develops a critical theory of nationalism that is grounded in the works of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eric J. Hobsbawm. Their theories are applied to two case studies that analyse how nationalism was in the year 2017 communicated on social media in the context of the German and Austrian federal elections.

Critical studies that compare nationalism in different countries, analyse how nationalism is communicated, and apply Marxist theory for understanding nationalism are needed. The reason why I have chosen Austria and Germany as two case studies is that I know these two countries well and speak German, which allows me to understand social media content posted in these nation-states. Austria and Germany are interesting cases because both countries together gave under Hitler rise to Nazi-fascism and are today again haunted by the rise of the far-right – the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far-right ÖVP/FPÖ coalition government led by Sebastian Kurz and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria.

We certainly need more international comparative studies of nationalism and how it is communicated. Given the diversity of the world’s languages and the lack of diversity of funding sources, conducting comparative social research based on projects that provide funding to scholars in different countries located not just in Europe or North America is a difficult but nonetheless important task. National funding agendas are mostly nationalist in character, which means that they want to advance scientific progress, which is often seen as a foundation of economic growth and innovation, in just one country or region (such as the European Union). There is a lack of true internationalisation of research and international funding.

Marxist Theories of Nationalism

Many thought that the increasing levels of economic, political, and cultural globalisation since the 1970s would bring an end to nationalism. Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm (1992b), who was a political optimist, argued, for example, that the “owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism” (192). Writing in 1996, Jürgen Habermas (1998) was confident that “the catastrophes of two world wars have taught Europeans that they must abandon the mind-sets on which nationalistic, exclusionary mechanisms feed. Why should a sense of belonging together culturally and politically not grow out of these experiences” (152). Such assessments have unfortunately proven historically false. More than 100 years after the First World War, nationalism has returned.

Writing about the owl of Minerva, Hegel (1820/2008) stresses that philosophy can only interpret history ex post:

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.

(16)

In Roman mythology, Minerva was the goddess of wisdom, who was equated with the Greek goddess Athena. Athena was often either imagined and pictured as an owl or portrayed together with an owl. The owl of Minerva is therefore a symbol of wisdom.

Hegel (1820/2008) stresses that philosophy cannot give

instructions as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give to it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state.

(16)⁹

On the one hand, Hegel is right in stressing that thought alone is not a political force. At the same time, we of course have to see, especially today, in an age we can describe as digital and communicative capitalism, that intellectual strategies are key aspects of politics and the realm of intellectual production has become a key site of class struggle. But also in the digital age, it holds true that thinking the world is not sufficient for changing it. Marx (1845) said that the “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it” (5). Politics also needs to be put into action through...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Chapter One. Introduction: Nationalism Today
• Part I: Foundations of a Marxist Theory of Nationalism
• Chapter Two. Bourgeois Theories of Nationalism
• Chapter Three. Marx’s Concept of Nationalism
• Chapter Four. Otto Bauer’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s Opposing Theories of the Nation and Nationalism
• Chapter Five. Contemporary Marxist Theories of Nationalism
• Part II: Nationalism on Social Media
• Chapter Six. German Nationalism on Social Media in the 2017 Elections to the Bundestag
• Chapter Seven. Online Nationalism and Social Media Authoritarianism in the Context of the ÖVP/FPÖ Government in Austria
• Chapter Eight. Conclusion: Towards a Society of the Commons beyond Authoritarianism and Nationalism
• References
• Index