In June 2016, when 52% of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union, it became clear that Benedict Andersonâs notion of nations as âimagined communitiesâ (1984) was as relevant as ever. The transnational promise of fluid borders and comingling cultures was being forced out of the geopolitical landscape by a rejuvenated nostalgia for a singular, native identity. Since the millennium, signs of such nostalgia have pierced the seamlessness of an economically open and socially mobile Western Europe. This is peculiar: have not Western European governments defined themselves in terms of fluid diversity for decades? As events from recent years have shown, ideals of openness have struggled to cope with mounting right-wing populism. The European electorateâs taste for organised far-right parties has intensified in recent years, exemplified by the rise of Lega Nord in Italy, Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands and the FPO in Austria. Terror attacks in Belgium and France have been opportunistically mobilised for political leverage by Vlaams Belang in Belgium and Front National in France. Such electoral shifts have been accompanied by a surge in hate crimes across Western Europe, frequently involving attacks against places of worship and aimed at cultural and ethnic minorities. While some of the effects of these new nationalisms are clear, the cultural response to these contemporary developments is in urgent need of address.
In these times of mounting tensions and increasing hostilities to difference, understanding the ways in which cultural artefacts and artistic texts respond will provide a vital perspective on the contemporary moment. This collection brings together analyses of case studies from across Western Europe to explore the way individual nations are being figured in and through films today. Broaching a breadth of questions regarding identity and indigeneity, borders and hybridity, dissent, heritage, nation-branding and patriotism, contributors to Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema are engaged in addressing the persistent cultural tendencies of the century pastâbut in ways that reflect the uneasy moment of the early twenty-first century. To begin, then: what has changed?
The Return of the National
The title of this book is dense by necessity. Each of the termsâcontemporary , Western European, even cinemaâare equally important to understanding what is at stake in the visual culture of todayâs nationalist formations.
By contemporary , we recognise that one cannot remain contented by the contemporariness of post-Enlightenment modernity, nor even postmodernity. Nor is the moment in which we find ourselves containable in the contemporary described by Peter Osborne: âfirst, structurally, as idea, problem, fiction and task; and second, historically, in its most recent guise as the time of the globally transnationalâ (Osborne 2013: 15). There have been some profound changes on the political scene in recent years thatâwhile perhaps not yet causing any radical change in the order of global capitalismâhave at least introduced novel challenges. These challenges cross the social, cultural and economic realms.
First, the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 and the global âwar on terrorâ that ensued. The state of perpetual war that followed initiated a new era of global securitisation. Borders, previously permeated for the free and inventive mobility of labour and capital, re-hardened. Ruth Wodack has demonstrated how such âborder politicsâ have been co-opted as effective strategies by right-wing populist parties (Wodack 2018: 412). Such border politics have of course been part of the mainstream for some time, now. Their contemporariness can be measured in relation to the new wave of xenophobia, especially in the form of Islamophobia. As Liz Fekete has demonstrated, nativist scapegoating of minoritiesâspecifically Muslimsâpreceded twenty-first century anti-terror legislation. Citing as exemplary the German and French governmentsâ institutionally racist treatment of Muslim communities, formerly populist rhetoric became mainstream in the 1990s (Fekete 2009: 10). However, it is impossible to understate quite how much the institutional racism of border politics intensified throughout the early twenty-first century. It is emblematised famously, for instance, by ever-increasing surveillance and information-sharing, Donald Trumpâs âtravel banâ and the lack of official opposition to such discriminatory policies.
The second challenge regards the market crash of 2008, which threw Western economies into disarray, destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people and, in some cases, collapsed the economies of many formerly comfortable nation states. In his study of the revival of nationalism across Europe, Geoffrey Hosking identifies the anachronism of national economies in the globalised free-market economy as the principle reason for the rise of populist ethno-nationalism. As such, Hosking defines these new nationalisms as âa challenge to us to find new ways of reconciling global markets, nation-states and democracyâ (Hosking 2016: 220). Wolfgang Streeck has offered some vital thoughts towards the way these three realms interact. The economic crisis produced a sharp decline in âthe political manageability of democratic capitalismâ (Streeck 2011: 24) with the resultant effect that âdemocracy is as much at risk as the economyâ (ibid.: 25). Widespread austerity policies and the continued accumulation of wealth by a tiny minority have cemented the fact that âeconomic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defencesâ (ibid.: 29). This politico-economic reality seems to provide a crucial determining factor in the populist backlash against the status quo. Elsewhere, Streeck has addressed the mechanisms of how said populism has taken its nationalist form:
[N]eoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promisedâŠInstead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nationsâŠâGlobal governanceâ didnât help, nor did the national democratic state that had become uncoupled from the capitalist economy for the sake of globalization. To make sure that this did not become a threat to the Brave New World of neoliberal capitalism, sophisticated methods were required to secure popular consent and disorganize would-be resisters. In fact, the techniques developed for this purpose initially proved impressively effective. (Streeck 2017: 7)
Streeck accounts both for the (temporary) re-stabilisation of precarious global neoliberal economies and the resurgence of populist nationalism through sophisticated methods: lies. The emergence of the so-called âpost-factualâ ageâemblematised by Donald Trump in the US and the Brexit campaign in the UK. An emergent distaste for experts paved the way for a new consensus led by anti-globalist personalities. Streeck is critical of the âmoral denunciationâ (ibid.: 12) directed at those supporting this position, ironically ventriloquising the retortive battle cries of ethno-nationalism. While Streeck is correct to problematise those that dismiss the contemporary opposition to globalism as ethno-nationalistic, the stunning breadth of his argument itself neglects the important ethnocentric dimension of todayâs populist nationalisms. The very post-truth strategies he associates with mainstream media and governmental rhetoric revolves above all around the non-native: the foreigner becomes the point of interest as muchâperhaps even more soâfor cultural and aesthetic reasons as she does for her socio-economic status.
The resurgent visibility of ethno-nationalism in the public sphere has also fed into the public response to the third challenge. As state and non-state forms of terror escalated across the Middle East, mass migrations of people seeking refuge tested the infrastructure of European states. One of the primary motivations for the slim majority that voted to âleaveâ the European Union in the UKâs EU referendum of 2016 regarded the rehoming of refugees. Angela Merkelâs subsequent demand for all EU member states to âdo their partâ involved the proposed introduction of quotas to ensure a fair spread of refugees across Europe. As Rainer Bauböck has explained though, most states are happy to ignore this plea âas long as moral blame is the only consequence of non-cooperationâ (Bauböck 2017: 6). The far-rightâs recent achievement of permeating the Central European political establishment has fed into much of the Westâs contemptuous official response to rehoming refugees. And since the official line has been largely apathetic and often hostile, those previously on the fringes of political discourse have penetrated the mainstream across Western Europe too. The margins have altered and hate campaigns led by the likes of Britain First, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and AfD in Germany have been given unprecedented mainstream exposure as a result.
Consequently, the inability of the centrist political establishment to forge an effective way of coping with these three pivotal threats has thrown into question what Osborne called âthe time of the globally transnationalâ (Osborne 2013: 15). The contemporary today involves the re-introduction of an earlier, mainstream political binary: between a pluralistic social democracy and conservative nationalism. It is the latter that has quickly made ground in recent years and provides the core concern for contributors here. It is our intention to unpack the localised representations ofâ and disputes withânationalism, at the level of cinema.
By Western European, we recognise the distinct geopolitical character of these changes. For nearly seventy years, this geographic area has been commonly viewed as the most socially stable and coherent democratic arena in the world. That moral codes established at the end of the Second World War could be deemed dispensable by the very culture that lived and breathed such horror, is surely no less than a shocking, tragic failure of humanity. It is a failure to learn the lessons of history. It is a failure to adapt to the inevitable comingling of vastly different social and cultural realities. It is a failure to understand cultural identity as, in Stuart Hallâs words, âa matter of âbecomingâ as well as of âbeingââ (Hall 1990: 225). And, insofar as social change involves cultural hybridity, it is a failure to care for and about our world and its people. As right-wing populism reaches sophisticated levels of organisation across Western Europe, purposeful resistance to well-documented historical experience begins to mimic other past tragedies, whereby a people consent to what is bad for them. One might be reminded of some words by Walter Benjamin:
Mankind, which in Homerâs time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. (Benjamin 1968: 242)
As Benjamin expressed so effectively, when this failure unfolds in the social arena, it also registers as an aesthetic phenomenon. It is this intersection between aesthetics and politics that preoccupies the contributors herein. While Benjaminâs essay, âThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionâ, explored the democratic potential of cinema against Fascism over seventy years ago, it is still no clearer to what extent cinema provides an effective tool of res...