1 Rural authenticity between commodification and populism
Eirik Magnus Fuglestad, Elisabete Figueiredo and Pavel Pospěch
DOI: 10.4324/9781003091714-1
The idea for this book came about during the XXVIII European Society for Rural Sociology Congress “Rural Futures in a Complex World”, held in Trondheim, Norway, 25–28 June 2019. The editors organised a working group at the congress titled “Politics and policies of rural authenticity and the return of nationalism and populism” in which a range of interesting themes and topics were presented and discussed. The topics discussed in the working group were then, and still are, at the forefront of political and socio-economic developments in Europe and the United States, where national populism and issues related to rural–urban divides and centre–periphery relations converge and shape our societies more powerfully than before. For this reason, the editors felt it was timely to collect those discussions and findings in a volume. However, for a number of reasons, not all the presentations from the working group at the European Rural Sociology Congress are included in this book, and the book includes some chapters that were not originally presented at the conference.
The chapters included in this book focus on how the notions of rurality and rural authenticity are used and produced in various discursive framings, including prominently the current wave of nationalist-populist politics, which seeks to build its legitimacy on the long-lasting rural–urban dichotomy. The populist-induced split between “common people” and “elites” attaches itself to the rural–urban divide, and its supporters promote various images of rurality. Often, the rural is portrayed as morally pure, unalienated, upholding national heritage and soul, and opposed to the cultural and economic globalisation. There are many different producers of “rural authenticity”: the concept is employed and filled with meanings by groups from regional food producers, through film-makers, to policymakers and lobbyists. What is the rurality that these groups refer to? How is it produced, and what purposes does it serve? In this volume, we provide answers from the areas of both the politics and the policy of the “authentic rural”.
Discussions on whether rural areas are somehow distinct and meaningfully different from their urban counterparts have been the subject of a long controversy in rural and urban sociology alike (Sorokin and Zimmerman 1929; Wirth 1938; Simmel 1950; Bell 1992). Generally speaking, the concept of rural distinctiveness has come to be seen as increasingly less plausible: this questioning was spearheaded by the empirical critiques of the notion of rural–urban continuum and by rural sociologists working in the political economy tradition (Pahl 1966; Buttel and Newby 1980; Friedland 1982). Yet in recent years we have witnessed a notable return of rural distinctiveness. Firstly, by a re-emergence of the rural–urban dichotomy through the growing hegemonic social and political representations of the rural as a mainly “authentic” and “idyllic” place (Halfacree 1993; Bell 2006; Soares da Silva et al. 2016), even if these representations do not match the reality of many rural territories (Cloke 2006; Halfacree 2007; Figueiredo 2013). We argue that this resurgence of the rural as a distinct place has also found its way into policy and in politics. “Authentic rurality” became a buzz-term around which public policies, market strategies and cultural productions gravitate. The growth of rural tourism and heritage industries, together with amenity migration and counter-urbanisation, the branding and marketing of local crafts and products and the marketisation of rural identities, as well as cultural products (films, TV shows and websites), produce and reproduce images of “authentic rurality” and turn rural territories into “consuming idylls” (Halfacree 2006: 57). All these phenomena co-produce a matrix of meanings which emphasise the distinctiveness and the value of authentic rurality. In this introduction, we will give a short overview of the major political and economic trends that frame this development. We also provide a brief overview and discussion of the chapters presented in this book.
Rural authenticity in a context of rising nationalist and populist sentiments
Rural authenticity has taken new political forms in a trend that can be observed in recent years. While a politics of the rural, from agrarian parties to rural protest, has been a stable feature of the western political environment, there is now a new sense of urgency to these issues. In the Anglo-American world especially, the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016 represented dramatic political shifts where the rural–urban dichotomy played a significant role. The relative success of Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election the following year and the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France in 2018 further reinforced the impression that the rural was back with new force.
A few key books were quickly established as a sort of canon for an initial understanding of these changes to western European politics. In 2016 Christophe Guilluy published his book with the telling title: Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery and the Future of France (English translation published 2019). One of the central points of this book was that new tensions between the large cities – what Guilluy termed “the new citadels” – and the peripheries were rising in France in a context wherein peripheries and rural areas were increasingly marginalised.1 In the aftermath of Brexit the following year, the English writer David Goodhart (2017) published The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, in which he made the distinction between “somewheres” and “anywheres”. This became a tool for understanding the Brexit vote, where the more cosmopolitan, mobile and highly educated upper-middle-class “anywheres” represented the remainers, and the more rooted (often rural or from the peripheries) and less educated “somewheres” represented the leavers. In America, even before the election of Donald Trump as president, Kathrine Cramer published The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016). Cramer showed, among other things, how many rural people attributed rural deprivation to decisions made by urban elites, thus reinforcing the urban–rural dichotomy and creating a seedbed for populist politics.
The trends observed in the aforementioned books are not unique to these three cases: they can be observed throughout Europe, to varying degrees, and they are part of a larger canvas that displays a transformation of politics across Europe and the Americas. This transformation can be interpreted in different ways, but two prisms have been dominant: this is seen either as a return to nationalism, or as a revival of populist politics – or sometimes both. Academics have asked questions such as “why has nationalism not run its course?” (Harris 2016), or “why has nationalism been revived in Europe?” (Hosking 2016). In 2019, a group of intellectuals and academics published a manifesto in major European newspapers pointing to what they saw as the populist nature of this nationalism: “let’s reconnect […] with our ‘national soul’! Let’s rediscover our ‘lost identity’! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent” (The Guardian 2019). There is an ongoing discussion as to whether nationalism and populism can be conflated in the present political climate, or if nationalism and populism should be kept as distinct concepts in this analysis. In the wake of this discussion, Rogers Brubaker has suggested that populism and nationalism should be seen as “analytically distinct but not analytically independent: as intersecting and mutually implicated though not fully overlapping fields of phenomena” (Brubaker 2020: 45). Brubaker further suggest that what is now happening is that “Nationalist discourse claims to restore ‘ownership’ of the polity to the nation, just as populist discourse claims to restore power to the people” (Brubaker 2020: 51). These two impulses have strengthened and to some degree converged over much of Europe and America during the last decade. The politics of rural authenticity has been part of this, as the chapters of this book will demonstrate. Each chapter in this volume provides insights into different cases related to this development, and the individual chapters use their own analytical frames. In the following, we will provide a broad analytical context within which we may understand the new politics of rural authenticity and the way in which such politics have become entangled with nationalism and populism.
Rising inequalities: the transformation of nations and centre–periphery relations
The trend we are witnessing in European and American politics today, whereby rural authenticity is being revitalised in the context of nationalism and populism, can be seen as a new stage in the development of the liberal nation-state. To frame this, we first invoke two classics in the literature on the emergence of the nation-state. The first one is Ernest Gellner’s influential theory of nationalism put forth in its earliest form in Thought and Change (1964) and cemented with the publication of Nations and Nationalism (1983). For Gellner, the key term when it comes to the creation of nation-states is “homogenisation”. Nation-states, according to Gellner, create cultural homogeneity that fosters social mobility and economic growth, and they come into being due to the conditions required by industrial society (Gellner 2006). This symbiosis of nationalism and industrialism created societies that for the first time in history sustained perpetual economic growth and mass social mobility. Gellner thus implied, in the words of John Hall, that a “modern social contract existed in which legitimacy would be and should be given to social orders that provided wealth and in which rule was exercised by those co-cultural with the majority of the population” (Hall 2019: 46). This modern social contract entailed an expectation that the economic growth created should benefit all members of the nation – not necessarily equally, but to at least some extent.
Gellner did not pay much attention to the processes by which such a distribution came into being as nation-states formed. For this we go to the other classic author on the field: the political sociologist Stein Rokkan. Different from Gellner’s almost ahistorical models for nation building, Rokkan paid a great deal of attention to the specific historical developments of nation-states, most notably in his essays “Nation building, cleavage formation and the structuring of mass politics” (1970) and “Dimensions of state formation and nation building: a possible paradigm for research on variations within Europe” (1975). Rokkan was in line with Gellner on the homogenising effects of the nation-state, but he emphasised much more strongly the conflict dimensions that this process both created and sustained within nation-states, particularly between the nation’s cultural and geographic centre and its peripheries. Nations seek homogeneity, but they are not homogenous: they contain within themselves a variety of subcultures and interest in the peripheries which come to expression through the way party politics is organised. For national homogenisation to be successful, the peripheries not only had to be included in a national culture, they also had to partake in the economic growth and the social mobility that the nation-state made possible (Rokkan 1987). The key point for us here is that Rokkan pointed out how crossing conflict lines that included both class and centre–periphery relations had played out historically to form liberal democracies and redistributive mechanisms within the western nation-states. And, most importantly, while Gellner’s modern social contract on perpetual growth and social mobility kept such conflicts more or less contained until recently, we are now seeing a crack in this contract. Centre–periphery relations are being reactivated, and the politics of rural authenticity plays a key role in this.
What has happened, in the words of John Hall, is that “it is no longer the case that one's piece of the pie, however small, will increase year by year” (Hall 2019: 52). The two recent large volumes by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty first Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020), have provided rich empirical data on the increase in inequality all over the world. While Europe and America saw unprecedented economic growth and a high degree of economic equality and social mobility in the years following the Second World War, we have witnessed a massive rise in inequality since the 1980s, as Piketty clearly demonstrates. Piketty attributes this to what he calls “hypercapitalism” or “neo proprietarianism”. It is important to note that this current hypercapitalism is a global phenomenon, and that it works in an increasingly connected global economy. Piketty points to a change in the political landscape that has occurred alongside the economic and ideological shift towards globalised hypercapitalism: the traditional left and the traditional right political parties have changed in structure and ideology into what he calls the “Brahmin left” (mostly constituted by the higher-educated elites) and the “merchant right” (for the elite rich). Thus, the large groups of working- and middle-class voters are left without political parties that represent them; instead, the Brahmin left and the merchant right display many converging interests in terms of the new globalised political and economic changes (Piketty 2020). This has activated centre–periphery relations (Rokkan’s old conflict lines). In this context of a globalised capitalist economy, many rural areas or peripheral areas have become what Andrés Rodríguez-Pose calls “places that don’t matte...
