In recent years two crises have populated the imagination of publics: environmental crises, ranging from, for example, water and air pollution to climate change, and the crisis of liberal democracy, illustrated by the rise of far‐right actors across Europe, the United States and beyond. While these environmental and political crises have been analyzed on their own, little research has been done on their nexus. Against this background, this focus article reviews existing academic literature on far‐right climate‐change communication by European party and nonparty actors, that is, climate‐change communication from a distinctively ethno‐nationalist and authoritarian perspective. The far right is not a homogenous entity but best viewed as a continuum, ranging from radical‐right, anti‐liberal democracy actors to extreme‐right, anti‐democracy ones. This contribution to WIREs Climate Change argues that many, though not all, far‐right party and nonparty actors are skeptical towards (anthropogenic) climate change and/or responses to it, at least in comparison to the European mainstream. The article does so by reviewing existing research before formulating areas for further research. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Social Movements

This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental issues are conditioned by deeper structures of nationalist ideology and the understandings of nature embedded therein. It illustrates a fundamental difference between the way nationalist actors engage in, on the one hand, the protection of nature as national countryside and landscape, epitomizing the nation's beauty, harmony and purity over which the people are sovereign. On the other hand, they deny or cast doubt on environmental risks located at a transnational level, such as those that relate to climate. The article argues that this apparent inconsistency is rooted in the ideological tenets of nationalism as the transnational undermines the nationalist ideal of sovereignty.

This article analyzes multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions. On the basis of our fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009, we explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practice and perform multilingualism in their everyday work. In our theoretical and methodological framework, we draw on existent sociolinguistic ethnographical research into organizations and interactions, and integrate a multilevel (macro) contextual and sequential (micro) analysis of manifold data (observations, field notes, recordings of official and semi-official meetings, interviews, etc.). In this way, a continuum of context-dependent multilingual practices becomes apparent, which are characterized by different patterns of language choice and which serve a range of both manifest and latent functions. By applying the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), the intricacies of the increasingly complex phenomenon of multilingualism in transnational-organizational spaces, which are frequently characterized by diverse power-related and other asymmetries of communication, can be adequately coped with. (Code-switching, multilingualism, power, institutional spaces, European Union, ethnography, discourse-historical approach, critical discourse studies)*

This article explores climate-change communication by the German far right-spanning a continuum which ranges from anti-liberal democracy radical-right populists, to the extreme right and to antidemocratic neo-Nazis-and asks: how do these actors articulate the phenomenon of climate change? In responding to this question, we conduct a discourse network analysis which identifies relations between actors, objects, phenomena and processes, and point out differences/similarities across a continuum of exemplary far-right sources. The investigated actors put forward a rather skeptical climate change narrative, even though differences exist as the significance attached to the Volk and its sovereignty, rooted in far-right ideology, sometimes overrides, and sometimes is in harmony with, their ideological-driven affinity with nature protection. We thus contribute to the growing body of knowledge on climate-change communication and, more specifically, on the link between ideology and climate-change skepticism.

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