Imagining Far-right Terrorism

Violence, Immigration, and the Nation State in Contemporary Western Europe

Josefin Graef

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000534993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Imagining Far-right Terrorism explores far-right terrorism as an object of the narrative imagination in contemporary Western Europe.

Western European societies are generally reluctant to think of far-right and racist violence as terrorism, but the reasons for this remain little understood. This book focuses on the extraordinarily complex case of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany, and high-profile instances of racist violence in Sweden and Norway. The author analyses the narratives surrounding far-right and racist violence, drawing on a broad range of empirical sources. Her account attributes the limits of imagining violence as far-right terrorism to elite practices of narrative control that maintain positive images of the liberal-democratic order in counterpoint to its two constitutive "others" – the far-right and racialised minorities. Situated broadly within the scholarly tradition of critical terrorism studies, the book breaks new ground in research on far-right terrorism by following its narrative traces across time, public spaces of contestation, and national borders. It also draws on material and findings originally written in German, Swedish, and Norwegian, which were previously not available in English.

This much-needed volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers of terrorism and political violence, right-wing extremism, European politics, and communication studies.

1 Imagining Far-Right Terrorism

DOI: 10.4324/9780367816124-1

On Friday, 22 July 2011 at 3.25 pm local time, a car bomb exploded in Oslo’s government quarter, killing eight and injuring many more in its vicinity. Less than two hours later, 69 individuals, mostly teenagers, were killed and dozens injured in a mass shooting at the annual youth camp of the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet, Ap) held on the nearby island Utøya.

Three days after the attacks, a chilly Monday with overcast skies, more than a million people came together in Oslo and other places across Norway to commemorate the victims. In his speech on the City Hall Square, Rådshusplassen, where more than 200,000 had gathered, Prime Minister (PM) and Ap leader Jens Stoltenberg assigned the events a special place in Norwegian history:

Tonight the Norwegian people are writing history. With the strongest of the world’s weapons, the free word and democracy, we set the course for Norway after 22 July 2011. There will be a Norway before and one after 22 July. But we ourselves decide, which Norway it is. Norway will be recognizable.

Stoltenberg 2011¹

Stoltenberg did not speak of terrorism. Instead, the extraordinary event he marked on that July day was Norway becoming even more like itself: more open, more tolerant, more democratic, staying on a path it had chosen long before gaining independence from Sweden in 1905 (Lödén 2020: 474–475).

Other Nordic leaders echoed Stoltenberg’s words. Writing in the major daily Svenska Dagbladet one week after the attacks, Swedish PM Fredrik Reinfeldt of the liberal-conservative Moderate Party spoke of an “act of terror” (terrordåd) that expressed “blind hate”, a “crime directed against all of us” in “this part of the world” that demanded “more freedom and democracy” in response. Only in December 2010, Reinfeldt recalled, Sweden’s capital Stockholm had been exposed to an “attempted terrorist attack” (Reinfeldt 2011) – by a Swedish citizen residing in the UK and believed to have acted as part of an Islamist network. Reinfeldt did not mention that, at the time, the Swedish police were also investigating a series of (attempted) racist murders of residents in Malmö after they had arrested the putative perpetrator, Peter Mangs, on 6 November 2010.

Nine years after the twin attacks in Oslo and on Utøya and 1,200 kilometres further south, a night-time shooting spree in a kiosk and two bars in Hanau, in the West German state of Hesse, killed nine locals and injured six more. In her press statement the next morning, 20 February 2020, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), like Norwegian PM Stoltenberg, did not speak of terrorism. The “horrible deed” and “harrowing murders”, Merkel said, pointed to the existence of the “poison” of racist hatred “against people with a different descent, a different faith, or a different appearance” – ostensibly because most of the victims had Bulgarian, Romanian, Kurdish, Turkish, Afghan, or Bosnian family ties. That poison, Merkel reminded the German public, had caused many more deaths since the turn of the millennium – beginning with the “misdeeds” (Untaten) of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in the 2000s (Die Bundeskanzlerin 2020, my emphasis).

Stoltenberg, Reinfeldt, and Merkel’s responses to the attacks in Norway in July 2011 and in Germany in February 2020 are illustrative of two kinds of trouble with far-right terrorism in contemporary Western Europe. The first one is a reluctance to speak of violence as “far-right terrorism” at all. The second one is that doing so carries a sense of disrupting positive self-images of the liberal-democratic nation state. This book investigates the reasons behind and the implications of these troubles through the lens of narrative imagination. I build on C. Wright Mills’ understanding of the sociological imagination as a “quality of mind” that allows us to understand “what is going on in the world” by connecting history, society, and the individual in time and space (Mills 2000 [1959]: 5). Starting from the premise that narrative is the primary mode in which we make these connections and thereby create knowledge of the social world, I ask: how is far-right terrorism imagined in contemporary Western Europe? What does the struggle to imagine violence as far-right terrorism tell us about these societies? Put the other way around, why do we struggle to imagine violence in these terms? To find answers to these questions, I bring the (critical) literatures on narrative, terrorism, the far-right, and immigration to bear on violent events in Germany, Sweden, and Norway in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

A long history

This book examines far-right terrorism as an object of the narrative imagination. Still, the ways in which we currently speak of the phenomenon as a type of violent behaviour and distinct threat offer an obvious starting point for my discussion. Throughout the 2010s and in particular since 2015, assassinations, mass shootings, and bombings targeting Blacks and People of Colour, Muslims, Jews, Romani, and (White) “pro-immigration” politicians² in North America, Europe, and Oceania – still commonly defined as the geopolitical and cultural “West” – have injured and killed hundreds. They have left a lasting mark on places of shelter, socialisation, and worship: churches, mosques, synagogues, asylum homes, stores, and bars – places that epitomise the banality of the everyday and the vulnerability of human life.

Indeed, and although its share of terrorism events worldwide remains small overall (5.2% on average between 1970 and 2019), the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) reports of the past couple of years, produced annually by the Sydney-based think tank Institute for Economics & Peace since 2012, identify (non-state) far-right terrorism as an emerging security threat in the West. Not only has the number of incidents grown by 250% since 2014, attacks are also becoming more deadly on average. According to the GTI, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of deaths from far-right terrorism between 2014 (11) and 2019 (89) (Institute for Economics & Peace 2019: 44–51; 2020: 40, 62). As regards Western Europe specifically, the data collected at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo (C-Rex), established in 2015 as a direct response to the 2011 attacks in Norway, reveal that nearly 900 deliberate acts of far-right violence, including pre-mediated acts of terrorism, have killed 330 individuals between 1990 and 2019 (Ravndal et al. 2020: 2).³ Doering and Davies (2021: 1076–1077), using a different methodology, have calculated a comparable figure of 771 far-right terrorist attacks in Western Europe for the period 1990–2016. Security authorities consider further attacks highly likely (CTED 2020; Europol 2020; Mekhennet 2020), potentially heralding the start of a fifth “terrorism wave” (Auger 2020; Hart 2021).

As these figures suggest, while major armed conflicts are generally absent, at least compared to all other world regions where terrorism occurs (Institute for Economics & Peace 2020: 61), far-right violence and terrorism have had a long history in the post-(Cold) War West. Only recently, however, has this insight pushed the topic to the top of political, security, media, and research agendas. The far-right, in particular its extreme facets, as the sixth Munich Security Report observed in early 2020, challenges the very notion of the “West”, embodied in states’ “commitment to liberal democracy and human rights, to a market-based economy, and to international cooperation in international institutions” (Munich Security Conference 2020: 6). After two decades of terrorism talk dominated by the events of 11 September 2001 and the specific conflict diagnoses they carry, far-right terrorism is putting the West’s relationship with itself under scrutiny. This is where I begin my examination of far-right terrorism as an object of the narrative imagination: what does (not) speaking of it tell us about the (European) “West”?

Far-right terrorism in Germany, Sweden, and Norway

The three Western European countries at the centre of my study – Germany, Sweden, and Norway – are both similar and different across a range of indicators, including their population size, political system, and economic strength (see Table 1.1), as well as their immigration histories and experiences with violence “from the right”. As regards the latter, my discussion concentrates on a selection of high-profile cases. This includes the series of murders and bombings in Germany 1999–2007 attributed to the NSU; the (attempted) serial killings by John Ausonius (1991–1992) and Peter Mangs (2003–2010) in Sweden; and the attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik on 22 July 2011 in Norway.

TABLE 1.1 Overview: Germany, Sweden, and Norway

	Federal Republic of Germany	Kingdom of Sweden	Kingdom of Norway
Form of government	Federal parliamentary republic	Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy	Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Parliament (lower house)	Bundestag (bicameral)	Riksdag (unicameral)	Storting (unicameral)
Foundation	1871	1809	1905
Constitution	Grundgesetz (Basic Law) 1949	Grundlagarna (Basic Laws) 1974	Grunnlov (Basic Law) 1814
Area (land)	357,588 km^2	407,000 km^2	364,266 km^2
Population	83.2 million	10.4 million	5.4 million
Density	232/km^2	25/km^2	14/km^2
GDP (per capita, PPP)	$54,316	$54,914	$63,293
EU membership	founding member	since 1995	Member of the European Economic Area
Currency	Euro (EUR)	Swedish Krona (SEK)	Norwegian Krone (NOK)
Religious membership (approx.)	27% Catholic 25% Protestant 6.5% Muslim	55% Church of Sweden 19% (other) Christian 5.0% Muslim	68% Church of Norway 7% (other) Christian 3.4% Muslim
Source: Based on 2021 data from OECD and National Offices of Statistics...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Imagining Far-Right Terrorism
• 2 Narrative Dialectics
• 3 After Evil
• 4 Filling the Void
• 5 Counter-Imaginations
• 6 The Making of a Terrorism Trial
• 7 Proving Far-Right Terrorism in Court
• 8 The Limits of Imagining Far-Right Terrorism
• Index