Europe: Continent of Conspiracies

Conspiracy Theories in and about Europe

Andreas Önnerfors,André Krouwel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

This edited volume investigates for the first time the impact of conspiracy theories upon the understanding of Europe as a geopolitical entity as well as an imagined political and cultural space.

Focusing on recent developments, the individual chapters explore a range of conspiratorial positions related to Europe. In the current climate of fear and threat, new and old imaginaries of conspiracies such as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have been mobilised. A dystopian or even apocalyptic image of Europe in terminal decline is evoked in Eastern European and particularly by Russian pro-Kremlin media, while the EU emerges as a screen upon which several narratives of conspiracy are projected trans-nationally, ranging from the Greek debt crisis to migration, Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodological perspectives applied in this volume range from qualitative discourse and media analysis to quantitative social-psychological approaches, and there are a number of national and transnational case studies.This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of extremism, conspiracy theories and European politics.

1

Between internal enemies and external threats

How conspiracy theories have shaped Europe – an introduction

Andreas Önnerfors and André Krouwel

Europe: a continent shaped by conspiracy theories?

From the French revolution to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories have helped shape our understanding of Europe as a geopolitical entity as much as a socio-cultural space. Conspiracy theories are powerful narratives influencing people’s perception of the world as structured by secret plots and malign manipulation. These beliefs are frequently mobilised in times of crisis when large and complex world events beg for simplified black-and-white explanations and the easy identification of culprits. While we were finishing editorial work on this book, the planet became gripped by a universal pandemic, the novel coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19), that within weeks brought international travel to a standstill, halted the world economy, and placed billions of people under lockdown and quarantine with unpredictable social and economic consequences for the future. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories were constructed about the origin and intentional or unintentional dissemination of the virus, political countermeasures, epidemiological indicators (e.g., incidence, prevalence and mortality), potential treatment (i.e., medication) and prevention (i.e., vaccines), contributing to panic, disinformation, and political conflict. One of the earliest theories was that the virus was created artificially in Asia (China) and imported to Europe as a sort of bioweapon to facilitate economic domination. It was also claimed that Turkey had orchestrated a new wave of Syrian refugees on its border with Greece to contaminate the rest of Europe with the novel coronavirus via the ominous ‘Balkan route’ or that the virus was spread more intensively in countries with a high proportion of migrants (Önnerfors, 2020, and Langer in this volume). In addition, 5G mobile masts were attacked across the continent, as some people believed that this new standard of mobile information technology either spreads COVID-19 or degrades the human immune system (van Prooijen, 2020). For some, the virus was released from a lab on purpose to secure the Chinese takeover of the world economy, for others it was the USA that had intentionally brought it to China. As usual, George Soros and ‘globalist elites’ were blamed as well. Perhaps the most bizarre, but widely disseminated, idea is that the pandemic would serve as an excuse for forced vaccination with a mind-control chip, turning the world population into passive ‘sheeple’ in the hands of sinister puppet masters, headed by Bill Gates (EUvsDisinformation, 2020). Some of these conspiracies have been amplified by world leaders (Trump, Bolsonaro and Maduro, most notably), but also in Europe by extreme-right politicians such as Orbán (Hungary), Fico (Slovakia), Fedriga (the Italian Lega Nord party) and the former Greek minister of defence Kammenos (the Independent Greek party). Peddling conspiracy theories can have serious consequences for people’s health and safety, eroding trust in science and political institutions (Plenta, 2020: 1–19; van Prooijen and Douglas, 2018: 897–908; van Prooijen, Krouwel and Etienne, forthcoming).

What can conspiracy theories tell us about the fabric of political space? This volume investigates the impact of conspiracy theories on the understanding of Europe both as a coherent geopolitical entity and as an imagined political and cultural space exposed to evil machinations from within and outside. Exploring contested topics such as discourses on migration, EU enlargement and accession talks, demography and polarisation in politics and media narratives, we aim to demonstrate how conspiracy theories have developed explanatory power related to the essence of Europe in general and the European Union in particular.

The volume’s chapters treat various notions of conspiracy, their themes and typical representations, broadly categorised as threats from the outside and threats from within Europe, such as the fear of ‘Islamisation’, the threat of ‘invasion’ and of the ‘replacement’ of European citizens, the virulent construction of enemy images and internal and external scapegoating, such as the resurgence of anti-Semitism and, more generally, nostalgic narratives of the decline, decadence and apocalyptic and suicidal self-destruction of Europe. The empirical centrepieces of these chapters are the qualitative case studies from different European countries and regions, which explore how these themes are framed in the ‘traditional’ and social media and in politics, and how they are reinforced in a dynamic interaction between online and offline activism, even leading to terrorism such as in Hanau and Halle in Germany in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Chapters with a more quantitative approach highlight recent empirical findings concerning the correlation between Euroscepticism and conspiracy beliefs.

Our overarching aim is to contribute substantially to a reconceptualised political and cultural psychology of European and global affairs in which conspiracy narratives play an increasing role in combination with phenomena such as the global rise of populism, ‘fake news’ and online disinformation campaigns. Conspiracy theories reflect complex cognitive meaning-making processes of conceptualising and identifying with Europe. To date, no other publication operating at the same conceptual level has explored how a continent in its entirety has become the object of conspiracy theorising. Moreover, as we argue in this volume, one can claim that ‘Europe’ has been constructed through a wide range of meaning-making mythologies in which narratives of conspiracy play a foundational role, not least as reactive responses to sentiments of nostalgia and loss or other existential fears. In this volume, these responses will be mapped and analysed comparatively by a team of contributors from across Europe, uniting a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.

Imagining conspiracies is intrinsically linked to imagining Europe as a continent, and to European culture as such. In the absence of clear definitions of what constitutes Europe’s territorial borders as much as its limits of cultural identity, throughout history it has been easier to define what Europe is not than what it is, with self-images frequently being derived from the outside (Fornäs, 2012: 16). Moreover, ‘Europe has no fixed essence or existence. It is always in a process of becoming: a Europe-in-process, always contested and always in a crisis’ (Fornäs, 2017a: 5). In such a political–psychological sorting operation, attention has been directed towards internal as much as external enemies, and threats channelled through apocalyptic fear. Who is the ‘other’ against which Europe needs to define and defend itself? Who is threatening its presumed unity and coherence? Who has the prerogative to interpret its meaning? The answers to these questions are by no means self-evident and have been contested over time.

Over the last decade, these questions have become increasingly topical since they have informed the political mobilisation of populist parties (Mudde, 2017b), a third wave of neo-nationalism (Bergmann, 2020), European radical right movements (CARR, 2020) and global white supremacist ideologies both on the streets and on the Internet. These questions have fuelled societal polarisation in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’, weakened trust in the EU as a legitimate supranational actor, become key elements of Kremlin disinformation (and Manichaean disintegration) campaigns and inspired lethal terrorism such as in Norway in 2011 or Germany in 2019 and 2020.¹ Furthermore, the terrorist attacks in Christchurch and Halle in 2019 and in Hanau in 2020 (together with their manifestos) vividly demonstrate that imaginings of Europe have a global reach when coupled with larger narratives of the West as in terminal decline. Furthermore, these imaginings are fuelled by stronger sentiments of nostalgia and by the perceived loss of status and significance (Bauman, 2017). Arguably, Islamist terrorism in Europe is also driven by the perception of Western decadence and directed against its corrupted lifestyle.

United yet divided: the ongoing search for Europe

Over the centuries, Europe has lacked a proper geographic and, moreover, a consistent cultural definition. As Fornäs (2012: 1) has pointed out, ‘Europe is not alone in being a sociocultural construction with strong imaginary elements, and more of a project than an existing empirical fact’. The continent is exposed to considerable tensions between cultural, political and economic space as well as tensions related to political organisation across space (for models, see Johansson, Rönnquist and Tägil, 2001: 15; Jönsson, Tägil and Törnqvist, 2000: 20). The foundational myths and the symbolic, yet dualist, representation of Europe as a geopolitical entity are saturated with powerful imaginings (Passerini, 2003). Even the name of the continent places an unsolved mystery at the centre of its origins, pointing in two directions and towards two trajectories of interpretation. Greek mythology has it that the Phoenician princess Εὐρώπη (Europa) was abducted to Crete by Zeus in the guise of a white bull (Fornäs, 2012: 8–10, 14, 18; 2014: 74–87). Europa’s brother Cadmus was sent to search for her and bring her home, but his quest was unsuccessful. Instead, Cadmus established some of the accomplishments of the great eastern prehistoric civilisations in Greece, such as the alphabet, agriculture and urbanisation (Savin, 2005: 13–25). Searching for what is lost seems to be a powerful figure of thought inscribed in the search for the soul of the continent and part of its political psyche. As Sigmund Freud noted in his 1920 essay ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’ (‘Beyond the pleasure principle’), the children’s game of throwing something away (‘fort’) and its subsequent recovery or return (‘da’) provides a tool for handling the loss of a desired object or person.

To our minds, some of the primary components of contemporary conspiracy theories in and about Europe are fuelled by such political sentiments of loss, nostalgia and melancholia and the desire to re-establish and restore a golden age of presumed unity and harmony (Gilroy, 2004; Bauman, 2017). The Europa myth revolves around the four themes of ‘dislocation, desire, elevation and hybridity’ and ‘no clear direction to the European project’ (Fornäs, 2012: 37–42). Moreover, as Fornäs has argued, the narrative on Europe is organised around three main and polysemic tropes which together form a dominant formula for European identity. This narrative follows three distinct phases: that of the past golden age, a recent or current experience of internal division or suffering, and a golden future of reconciliation and unity (Fornäs, forthcoming). In our conclusions, we will suggest which position conspiracy theories occupy in this narrative scheme. This semantic openness leaves significant leeway for projections and interpretations that also echo in conspiracy theories about the continent.

Moreover, Europe’s political history offers powerful narratives placing the continent in a constant tension between globalising and regionalising forces, integration and fragmentation (Jönsson, Tägil and Törnqvist, 2000: 29–79; Johansson, Rönnquist and Tägil, 2001: 11–42). A presumably defining moment for the creation of Western civilisation, frequently exploited in contemporary narratives of conspiracy, are the wars between Greece and the Persian Empire, notably the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC (and its film adaptations of 1962, 2006 and 2014). Whereas these conflicts represent an iconic demarcation against the foreign and barbarian ‘other’, the rise of the Roman Empire is seen as exemplifying internal civilising integration, creating homogenising unity across space. Finally, Europe became divided and fragmented after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE (a historical event frequently cited as analogous to contemporary decline) in a dual process of succumbing to external pressure and forces of internal dissolution. During the ‘Dark Ages’ of the Migration Period from the third to sixth centuries, Roman civilisation as previously known disappeared almost entirely. In the year 800, Charlemagne (742–814) attempted to revive past unity in the form of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a loose federation of territorial states organised across central Europe and in existence until 1806 (Johansson, 2001: 43–54; Fornäs, 2012: 11). Whereas its establishment did not prevent other independent entities from being formed (e.g., the kingdoms of England, Scotland and France), the existence of a European emperor (of the House of Habsburg) contributed to a division of power with the papacy in Rome, a contested twin relationship determining major courses of events and intellectual developments until the seventeenth century, if not longer.

Other defining moments of common European cultural self-identification arguably developed in fierce opposition to Islam (a perceived external enemy) and Jewry (a perceived internal enemy). The ages of the Crusades to the Holy Land (1095–1291) and of the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula (711–1492) were ideologically legitimised by nothing less than what we would today call hate speech against the ‘Muslim infidels’, as evident in the writings of, among others, Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090–1153). Moreover, anti-Islam sentiments were accompanied by pogroms against the Jews living in Europe, who were said to frustrate the combat against Islam, the enemy of Christianity – propelled by a pandemic of universal proportions, the bubonic plague (Carr, 2017). In today’s conspiracy theories we also can trace a combined trope of ‘conspirational racialisation’ of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and we need to realise that this trope has a long history in the European political psyche (Zia-Ebrahimi, 2018; see Langer in this volume). What we can witness is a discursive convergence of two assumed conspiracies, that of alleged Jewish world domination and that of a grand Muslim takeover into a re-fashioned theory of white genocide in which Jewish and Muslim agency are interchangeable or portrayed as two plots aiming at the ultimate destruction of the West.

Imagery and imaginings of the Crusades and other historical events are recurrently evoked in contemporary conspiracy theories, for example, in the terrorist manifestos of the Oslo (2011) and Christchurch (2019) attackers and their medialisations. Whereas the Crusades eventually failed, they were also the first colonial endeavour to establish European rule outside Europe’s geographical core.

Other instances of an existential ‘clash of civilisations’ frequently referred to are the battle of Poitiers in 732, the defeat of Constantinople in 1453 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The subsequent relationship with the O...