Neo-Nationalism

The Rise of Nativist Populism

Eirikur Bergmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030417727
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030417734
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book maps three waves of nativist populism in the post-war era, emerging into contemporary Neo-Nationalism. The first wave rose in the wake of the Oil Crisis in 1972. The second was ignited by the Collapse of Communism in 1989, spiking with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The third began to emerge after the Financial Crisis of 2008, soaring with the Refugee Crisis of 2015. Whether the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020 will lead to the rise of a fourth wave remains to be seen. The book traces a move away from liberal democracy and towards renewed authoritative tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic. It follows the mainstreaming of formerly discredited and marginalized politics, gradually becoming a new normal. By identifying common qualities of Neo-Nationalism, the book frames a threefold claim of nativist populists in protecting the people: discursively creating an external threat, pointing to domestic traitors, and positioning themselves as the true defenders of the nation.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. BergmannNeo-Nationalismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41773-4_5

Begin Abstract

The Third Wave: The International Financial Crisis and Refugees

Eirikur Bergmann¹

(1)

Centre for European Studies, Bifröst University, Reykjavik, Iceland

Eirikur Bergmann

End Abstract

When the International Financial Crisis of 2008 was chewing into people’s livelihoods, distaste for the political establishment had already been building for decades. In its wake, nativist populism rose to new heights, now also spreading far into the mainstream. This was illustrated in wide calls for leadership renewal. In fact, political experience was generally being dismissed, with increased appetite instead for inexperienced newcomers.

This was the time of the political novice. In other words, it was the amateurization of political life in the West. Even in firmly rooted democracies, traditional politics were giving way to populists. The third wave of nativist populism also brought a transformation in their appearance. These were no longer rogue demagogues revelling in Nazi symbolism, as in previous eras. Instead, populist leaders now looked like normal politicians.

As I will illustrate in this chapter, the third wave saw the spread of populist nationalism further into the mainstream in European and American politics than ever before. The new wave brought Brexit to the UK, Donald Trump to power in America and Marine Le Pen qualifying to the second round in the presidential elections in France, where she bagged a third of the vote. Indeed, this was a brand-new world. It is telling for their reach that the four largest democracies in the world—Brazil, Indonesia and India in addition to the US—were all governed by politicians often labelled as being populist.

In Europe, populists came into government in Austria, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Poland and Switzerland. In Italy, two populist parties, the Five Star movement and the quasi-fascist Lega, united in government. Even in Germany, far-right populists were also surging.

The president of the Generation Identitaire, Arnaud Delrieux, described this change as the ‘age of identities, for it is the very essence of the European people that is threatened by the steamroller of globalism, the immigration invasion and multiculturalism’ (qtd in Zúquete 2018).

In the third wave, nativist populism had grown far beyond Cas Mudde’s (2004) coining of the phrase populist zeitgeist. Populist discourse was moved out from the fringe and into the mainstream—even fully adopted by government parties in some instances. Whichever way we dissect this trend, the third wave brought a fundamental shift in the evolution of nativist populism and came to constitute a clear trend of Neo-Nationalism spreading across Europe, America and elsewhere.

The third wave was fuelled by two main consecutive events hitting the Western world, first the International Financial Crisis culminating in 2008, followed by the Refugee Crisis heightening in 2015. Nationalist sentiments were again heightening with the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

The Credit Crunch

The International Financial Crisis brought the extraordinary economic boom of the early noughties to a stark halt. Indeed, this was the most serious economic calamity since the inter-war Great Depression. The troubles arose around sub-market housing mortgages in the US in 2007, turning into a full-blown Credit Crunch in the following year. The crisis shook the foundations of Western capitalism, bringing economic uncertainty, severe public austerity and increased hardship on the ordinary public, which largely felt victimized by both business and political elites.

The fall of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 was a watershed moment, turning troubles into a serious banking crisis. In October Iceland, the small island country in the northwest Atlantic, became the poster-child of the global Credit Crunch when all of its oversized international banks came tumbling down within a single week, amounting to one of the world’s greatest national financial crises (Bergmann 2014b). This was a financial tsunami without precedent in contemporary times. The crunch also illustrated a vulnerability in the internationalized economy of the West.

In 2009 the crisis was contesting the very fabric of the European economic system and was posing an existential threat to the Euro, the shared currency of many EU member states. Leaders on the continent responded to the crisis with imposing severe austerity measures onto vulnerable countries that were most seriously affected by the malaise. In effect, leaders in Berlin and Paris and other powerful players within the EU were able to coerce authorities in Athens, Rome, Lisbon, Madrid and in other economically weaker EU capitals to accept grave financial burdens in exchange for direly needed bailout, in order to save their countries from defaults—which in turn was threatening to turn into a domino-effect of bankruptcies around the continent.

The austerity measures spurred mass protests among the affected public. With it, the political establishment was largely losing credibility in the eyes of the burdened people, leading to nationalist and populist actors gaining ground in many European countries. On the left flank, populists were gaining ground in Greece and Spain. However, populists were surging more on the right, leading to a paradigm shift in increased support for rogue challengers to the mainstream liberal democratic order.

The Rise of the Third Wave

As I will document in this chapter, the third wave saw nativist populism firmly moving from the fringes to become normalized. Most of these parties had abandoned open xenophobia, rather dressing their messages within more acceptable rhetoric. In the UK for instance, the more toned down populist UK Independence Party was replacing the openly racist BNP, which I discussed in the previous chapter. Later, the Brexit Party took over the rollers for a while. In France, the National Rally (previously named the National Front) found renewed support under the leadership of the more composed-looking Marine Le Pen, who had replaced her more aggressive father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

One of the greatest successes of populist parties in the third wave came in the 2014 European Parliament elections. In Denmark, France and the UK populists surged to the very front. Five years later, populists entered the EP in even greater numbers. Prior to the 2019 elections, European far-right populists had attempted to forge a continental alliance under the leadership of Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Marine Le Pen in France. The US far-right strategist Steve Bannon was also trying to unite European populists in his Brussels-based group called The Movement. Bannon described Brussels as the beating heart of the globalist project, and said he wanted to ‘drive the stake through the vampire’ until the whole system started to disintegrate (qtd in Lewis 2018).

However, as I discussed in the Introduction to this book, it has proven difficult to unite nationalists across borders in a meaningful way, as each is primarily focused on domestic aspects. These parties have thus found difficulties in co-operating in the European Parliament and have, more or less, been split into at least three separate parliamentary groups. One of their dividing issues was that of Russia. While Salvini, Le Pen and Orbán aligned with Vladimir Putin, especially due to his opposition to both the US and the EU, others were more wary of Russia, for instance the Scandinavians and those in the Baltics, as well as also Kaczynski of Law and Justice in Poland.

Euroscepticism was also finding its way to Germany with the rise of Alternative for Germany, which secured significant support in the 2017 parliamentary elections. In the third wave, such sentiments were indeed spreading much further even in many of the more traditionally pro-EU countries than they had done in the two previous waves.

Populism was also on the rise in South America. The Chávismo regime in Venezuela had consolidated power, incarcerated leading opposition figures, and firmly forced much of media and civil society under their will. In 2017, Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, dissolved parliament and shifted authority over to the newly established Constituent Assembly, which adhered to the will of the Chávismo regime.

Over in Greece, different kinds of populists were competing for power. Landing more than a fourth of the vote in 2012, the left-wing populist Syriza was sw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: The Rise of Nativist Populism
• Understanding Nativist Populism
• The First Wave: The Oil Crisis and the New Nationalists
• The Second Wave: The Collapse of Communism and 9/11
• The Third Wave: The International Financial Crisis and Refugees
• Conclusions: The Neo-Nationalist Order
• Back Matter