This paper examines and classifies “uncivil society” in Europe, that is, a set of associational activities characterized by discursively exclusionist, undemocratic or violent features. With particular reference to organizations connected to the political right, it examines the relation between political systems and civil society, identifying the factors that have made civil society relevant for political actors and pointing to a relation of mutual dependence between the associational world and political movements and parties. It is argued that membership in uncivil society organizations is an alternative type of political participation which articulates growing anti-political sentiments, and that the emergence of uncivil society activities is rooted in newly relevant conceptions of social and political life which are anti-modern and based on ascriptive criteria of membership. Uncivil society organizations are classified as racist, nationalist and populist, and characterized as biologically essentialist, or territorially or culturally exclusionist.

This paper focuses on the role played by civil-society organisations in three policy sectors -environmentalism, regionalism and anti-racism -at different territorial levels. The paper describes routes of Europeanisation, and highlights the crucial role of mediators between national and European levels of governance in building alliances and transnational networks.

This paper documents and analyses how populist discourse was used in very different ways by political entrepreneurs of the Italian right, leading to three specific manifestations. The empirical range of populist ideologies is identified through a frame analysis of party materials and connected to the varying political and cultural opportunities of different kinds of parties. However, it is argued that at the same time a common reliance on some common populist tenets constituted an innovative strategy of the Italian right, and that as an ideology one of it's distinctive functions has been to act as a conceptual glue in a coalition which would otherwise be deeply internally divided.

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