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.

The question of European identity today seems to be all the more pressing, as the current financial crisis is not only quickly developing into one of internal political cohesion for the Union, but has also certainly aggravated the long-standing problem of a lack of identification with the European political project among European populations. This article seeks to discuss this disenchantment with Europe through a concept of political myth. It argues that political myths entail both narrations of communal origins and utopian horizons of the communal future. Drawing on insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it connects the utopian dimension of myth to the level of affective investment in political communities, and suggests that the disenchantment with the European project might be partly due to the fact that its original utopian horizonthat of peace in Europetoday seems to have been achieved.

No abstract

The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ by leading politicians in the European Union and, against the aforementioned historical background, analyse their representations of Europe’s past, present and future. By utilising the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, narrative theory and elements of Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), we illustrate how, first, a ‘new Europe’, based on admitting failure, is narrated. However, second, we also show that such a self-critical narration of a ‘bitter past’ is, paradoxically, transformed into a self-righteous attitude towards Europe’s ‘others’.

No abstract