Extreme Right Activists in Europe

Bert Klandermans, Nonna Mayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134245451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Since the 1980s, one of the main political changes in Western Europe has been the electoral upsurge of extreme right-wing parties. However, while the electoral support of these movements has been studied extensively, their membership has largely been ignored. This book examines who joins the extreme right and why?Drawing upon extensive research and featuring contributions from distinguished social psychologists and political scientists, this book provides the most detailed comparative study yet published of the psychology of right-wing extremist activists. Countries discussed include Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and France.

Part I

The environment

1	Right-wing extremism as a social movement
	Bert Klandermans and Nonna Mayer

Since the 1980s, one of the main political changes in western Europe has been the electoral upsurge of right-wing ‘extremist’ or ‘radical’ parties, such as the French Front National (FN), the Flemish Vlaams Blok (VB), the Austrian FPÖ, or the Italian Alleanza Nazionale (AN) (ex-Movimento Sociale Italiano – MSI). However, while the electoral support for these movements has been studied extensively, their membership, with a few exceptions such as Van Donselaar (1991) in Holland, Orfali (1990), Ivaldi (1994) or Bizeul (2003) in France, Maraffi in Italy (2001), has been ignored, although their capacity to attract and keep followers appears as one of the key conditions of their future development. Who joins the extreme right, and why? How similar, how different are extreme right activists from one country to another? These are the questions our book attempts to answer. Bringing together social psychologists and political scientists from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Germany,¹ it draws on a large-scale cross-national research based on some 150 in-depth interviews, conducted between 1995 and 1999 with extreme right activists from each country. Unlike many comparative approaches to the extreme right, this is not just a collection of national monographs. The theoretical and methodological frame, the interview guide and the coding scheme were elaborated collectively after extensive discussions at more than a dozen meetings over a period of six years. Summaries of the interviews were circulated, data analysis problems were debated in common, articles and papers written together. And besides the country chapters, thematic cross-national chapters outline what extreme right activists share in common and what makes them different, from one context to another.

Extreme right activists

By activist – from the Latin ‘activus’, Aktivist or Aktiver in German, activist in Dutch, attivista in Italian, but militant in French – we mean individuals who are not only members but active participants in a movement,² ‘who fight for a collective cause in an enduring way’ (Mouriaux 1983: 54). It implies a deeper commitment (Klandermans 1997) than just casting a ballot for a right-wing extremist (RWE) party and suggests that extreme right activists may not have exactly the same profile and motivations than voters or sympathizers.

Defining ‘extreme right’ activist was more problematic. The polemic nature of the term weighs on the debate. In the collective memory of Europeans, it automatically evokes the Second World War, Nazism and the extermination of 6 million Jews. Labelling a movement as ‘extreme right’ involves associating it indirectly with fascism and its crimes, discrediting it morally and excluding it from the democratic political game. Unsurprisingly, most movements studied in this book deny such an infamous label. The academic uses of the word are also confusing. In his survey of the literature, Cas Mudde (1996) counted no less than 28 competing definitions of the contemporary extreme right, along 58 different ideological dimensions. Jürgen Falter and Siegfried Schumann (1988), in the line of Adorno et al’s work (1950), define right-wing extremism by the combination of ten ideological features – hyper nationalism, ethnocentrism, anti-communism, antiparliamentarism, anti-pluralism, militarism, law and order thinking, a demand for a strong political leader, anti-Americanism and cultural pessimism (Falter and Schumann 1988; see also Karvonen 1997). Meindert Fennema (1997) selects only one characteristic, xenophobia. As for Piero Ignazi (1997), he combines a spatial definition – parties located at the right end of the left–right continuum – and an ideological criterion – fascism is the key reference (the old extreme right) and/or anti-system, anti-democratic values (the new extreme right).³ But again there is no agreement on the core features of a ‘minimum’ or ‘generic’ fascism or on the definition of anti-system features. Besides, most authors classify these parties a priori, on the base of ideological features attributed without any systematic examination of their platforms, and not taking into account the ‘double language’ – respectable for the outside public and tough for the party members – that they often use.

To this quasi-essentialist approach of RWE, taking for granted some immutable ideological features of the extreme right, we prefer a relativist definition such as that of Seymour M. Lipset and Earl Raab in their classic study of right-wing extremism in America. For them extremism is ‘a self serving term’ (1970). It may mean going to the limit, which can often be justified; or it may mean going beyond the limit, which by self-definition is never justified. But the ‘limits’, as defined by the basic institutions of society, have never been static. In terms of specific issues, extremism most simply means going to the poles of the ideological scale. In its more pejorative sense – in the sense in which it is linked to such terms as ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ – as an absolute political evil, extremism is not so much a matter of issues as one of procedures. In this sense, extremism means going beyond the limits of the normative procedures which define the democratic political process. Many of these procedural norms are themselves constantly being redefined (Lipset and Raab 1970: 3–4). Consequently, we decided to consider as extreme right the parties located furthest on the right in each country and to rely on the interviews to investigate the ideological stands of their members and their respect for democratic procedures. The Eurobarometer survey conducted just after the European elections of 1994 asked each national sample to classify the parties of their respective countries on a spatial left–right scale in ten positions, ranging between 1 at the extreme left and 10 at the extreme right (see Table 1.1).⁴ The parties located at the extreme right are the Republikaner (REP) in Germany, the FN in France, the MSI/AN in Italy, the VB in Flanders and the Centrumdemocraten (CD) in the Netherlands, with scores ranging between 8.3 and 9.2. These scores clearly rise high above the average scores of the voters on the same scale, which range between 4.9 and 5.4, and also higher than for the other right-wing parties. There is more than one-point difference between the scores of the VB and those of the Flemish nationalist party (VU) or the liberal party (VLD), as between the FN and the Gaullist party (RPR), between the CD and the other liberal or protestant right-wing parties, between the AN and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI). There is as much as two points between AN and the populist Lega Nord, or between the REP and the Christian Democrats. We shall therefore provisionally consider activists who join these parties as extreme right, whether or not they consider these movements as extreme right and whether or not they consider themselves as extreme right. For they have in common that they are perceived and stigmatized as such in their own country.

The bulk of the interviews were conducted with members of these five parties and/or their connected networks such as youth or students’ groups. For comparison, we also did some interviews with members of smaller or more radical organizations such as CP ’86, Volks Nationalisten Nederland (VNN), NVU, Nederlands Blok and Voorpost in the Netherlands, an action group, Voorpost and a nationalist student movement, NSV, in Flanders, Movimento Sociale-Fiamma Tricolore (MS-FT) and Fascismo e Libertà in Italy, editors of the weekly magazine Junge Freiheit ( JF) in Germany and Action Française (AF) in France. But we were mostly interested in members of RWE organized parties, that have made the choice of taking part in the electoral competition and abiding by the rules of representative democracy, leaving aside the violent terrorist groups or skinheads as well as the New Right circles who prefer cultural warfare to the political arena.

Table 1.1

Party and voters scores on ten-point left–right scale, 1994

Country	ERW party	ERW party score	Closest right-wing party score	Voters’score
Germany	Republikaner	9.20	7.03	5.32
			CDU/CSU
France	FN	9.05	7.97/7.04	4.92
			RPR, UDF
Italy	AN	8.65	7.53/6.56	5.38
			FI, Lega Nord
Flanders	VB	8.57	7.60/7.58/7.51	5.22
			VLD, VU, CVP
Netherlands	CD	8.28	7.00/ 7.01/7.02	5.36
			SGP, VVD, GPV

Source: European Elections Study, June 1994.

Notes

CDU-CSU: Christian Democrats.

RPR: Rassemblement Pour la République.

UDF: Union pour la Démocratie Française.

VLD: Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten.

VU: Volksunie.

CVP: Christelijke Volkspartij.

VVD: Liberal party.

SGP, GPV: Protestant Conservative parties.

Traditional approaches to right-wing extremism

Early studies of RWE largely took a psychoanalytic turn and insisted on the irrational dimension of extremism. Examples are Wilhelm Reich’s study on the mass psychology of fascism, the surveys conducted before the Second World War by the Institute for Social Sciences of Frankfurt on the authoritarianism of the working class, the work of Harold Lasswell or Erich Fromm on the psychology of Hitlerism. But the most famous of these studies until now is The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1954), which sees the origin of extremism in the individual’s personality. A syndrome of authoritarian attitudes, formed during childhood by dominating parents, is supposed to predispose people to political extremism.⁵

Reacting against this psychoanalytical approach, other authors defined RWE as a way of thinking, a rigid ‘cognitive style’. According to them, it reduces the complexity of real life to simple choices, it boils down politics to a Manichaean struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil and it sees plots everywhere (Billig 1979). The theory of conspiracy gives to the person ‘who knows’ a global key of explanation and a feeling of superiority towards the ‘naïve’ who let themselves be manipulated. According to this approach RWE should be particularly attractive for people with low income and little education. This is shown by the early work of Christie and Jahoda (1954) on the link between low education and authoritarianism, as well as by the classical study of Selznick and Sternberg (1969) on ‘simplism’ and its relation with prejudice. A third approach focuses on economic and social change and its destabilizing consequences. From Geiger to Lipset, Nazism has often been presented as a reaction of despair coming from the independent middle classes, crushed between big capital on the one side and the working-class movement on the other. Today, in the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, manual blue collars are the ‘losers of modernization’ and the first to respond to the calls of extremist parties (Minkenberg 2001). Lastly, Hannah Arendt’s work on the origins of totalitarism or William Kornhauser’s work on mass society, made scholars assume that the breakdown of elementary solidarity, the mechanisms of social exclusion and ‘disaffiliation’ that isolates individuals, would predispose them to be mobilized by extremist movements.

If one combines these different models, which indistinctly apply to extremist voting and extremist activism, four basic features – authoritarianism, lack of education, economic insecurity and social isolation – supposedly help turn someone into a RWE. We shall of course look into the psychological and socio-economic profile of our interviewees to check if this is so, but we propose a different approach. We consider RWE organizations as part of a social movement, obeying the same dynamics as any other social movement. And we assume that participation in RWE organizations is as equally rational as in any other movement or organization.

Right-wing extremism as a social movement

Although most of the activists studied here were actively involved in political parties, they were also in the wake of a larger mobilization which goes beyond the process of ordinary politics and takes the form of a social movement in the classical sense defined by Sidney Tarrow (1998: 3): ‘collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.’ Taking into consideration the purposive, collective and dynamic aspects of participation in social movements departs from the traditional approaches of RWE and has several consequences, the most obvious being that we look at RWE as movement activists, at organizations of the extreme right as movement organizations and at today’s right-wing extremism as a cycle in a longer trajectory.

Social movement literature abandoned personality psychology as an explanatory framework for movement activism a long time ago, and turned to conceptualizations of the interaction of people with their environment for a better understanding. This is what we will do as well. We will try to understand the motivation of someone who becomes an extreme right-wing activist and describe the environment in which such motivation emerges. By ‘environment’, we mean both movement organizations and the wider societal context. RWE organizations may be more or less attractive to a person and the wider social environment may be more or less hostile to the extreme right-wing movement and its participants.

Similarly, social movement literature has abandoned theories that pictured movement participation as irrational. Scholars began to emphasize the instrumental character of movement participation: no longer was it depicted as behaviour out of resentment by marginal and isolated individuals, or as aggressive reaction to frustration, but as politics by other means. It was especially the resource mobilization approach, as illustrated by the work of such pioneers as Oberschall (1973) and McCarthy and Zald (1976) and the ‘political process’ approaches (Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982) that took the assumed rationality of movement participants as their point of departure. Therefore, we assume that choosing to join an RWE movement, as any other movement, has a rationality of its own, that activists have reasons to do so. And we took it as our challenge to discover what these reasons are.

Motives to participate

The answers that have been given to the question of why a social movement appeals to an individual can be boiled down to three fundamental motives. People may want to change the world they live in, they may want to be part of a group, or they may want to giv...