Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective

Liberal Illiberalism? The Reshaping of the Contemporary Populist Radical Right in Northern Europe

“…As noted, the appeal to 'Enlightenment values' and the cribbing of the discourse of liberalism is far more appealing to audiences in these contexts than outright xenophobia. This shift-from an ethnocratic nationalism which centres on a particular ethnic group to a civic nationalism which centres on with those with 'shared values' (Akkerman, 2005)-has been particularly evident in the Northern European PRR's embrace of philosemitism (Brubaker, 2017(Brubaker, , p. 1202. A sharp contrast to the antisemitism of their forbearers, these parties now see Jews as part of the 'enlightened Western' civilisation that must be defended against Islam: indeed, Wilders has gone so far as to portray Jerusalem as the 'frontier' for the West against Islam, arguing that 'if Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next ' (2010).…”

“…The related second point is that 'ideological purists' are rare and often relegated to the electoral sidelines, and as such, it is unsurprising that PRR parties are able to mix their ideology, policy positions and discourse in a way that confounds our neat theoretical categoriesin this regard, some populists are more liberal than others. Third, the evidence of how these parties reconfigure, adopt and utilise seemingly paradoxical ideological and discursive positions lends credence to the position that populism is less a world-view or ideology (even a thin one, as in the work of Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), and more a discourse (Stavrakakis, Katsambekis, Nikisianis, Kioupkiolis, & Siomos, 2017) or style (Moffitt, 2016): as Brubaker (2017Brubaker ( , p. 1210) notes, such 'contradictions are not surprising: bound by no stable substantive ideological or programmatic commitments, populism is distinctively and chronically eclectic, given to instrumentalizing whatever issues seem exploitable at the moment'. Today, those issues are most effectively exploited by wrapping them in a liberal package.…”

“…What is of interest, however, are the latter policies, which have been less explored. The liberal themes that these parties tend to use to couch their otherwise relatively consistent illiberalism coalesce around: 1) gender and sexuality; 2) individual freedom; 3) 'Christian secularism' (Brubaker, 2017); and 4) free speech. Given that liberalism is such a broad church, these specific areas have been selected to examine as they broadly reflect the concerns of the variant of 'romantic liberalism' put forward by Gustavsson (2014Gustavsson ( , 2015-a mode of 'hard' liberalism that sees self-expression as the primary value that justifies liberal rights rather than diversity, tolerance or autonomy-that is relatively common in the discursive and ideological platforms of many actors on the contemporary Western European (populist as well as nonpopulist) right.…”

The Noisy Counter-Revolution: Understanding the Cultural Conditions and Dynamics of Populist Politics in Europe in the Digital Age

“…Some actors, like Geert Wilders, claim that they in fact protect European liberal values and gender equality against an illiberal Islam (Zúquete, 2008). Rogers Brubaker calls this "civilizationism" (Brubaker, 2017). Yet such seemingly pro-liberal defenses of liberal-egalitarian norms are deceptive insofar as they are regularly intermingled with ethnicized myths of cultural superiority and inferiority, and accompanied by racialized stereotypes of Muslims as essentially "culturally incompatible" with European societies-labeling Muslims collectively as dangerous extremists or as rapists.…”

The populism of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): an extended Essex School perspective

“…This paper seeks to build on this line of work by proposing a formal distinction between populism and reductionism, whereby the latter tends to reduce "the people" onto a differential particularity that sets a priori limits on the equivalential chain, producing a tendential essentialist closure of the latter and undercutting the primacy of the logic of equivalence that is fundamental to Laclau's (2005aLaclau's ( , 2005bLaclau's ( , 2017Laclau's ( [2014) understanding of populism and subsequent empirical applications of it Howarth, 2007, 2008;Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014;Stavrakakis et al, 2016;Stavrakakis et al, 2017). It is argued that the tension between populism and reductionism is characteristic of Western European parties commonly labelled "right-wing populist," which may seek to resolve this tension through a populist logic of partial openings that cuts through the essentialist closure in the equivalential chain so as to enable a selective incorporation of sexual or ethno-linguistic minorities against a common (often "Islamic"; see also Brubaker, 2017) constitutive outside. This is demonstrated in a discourse analysis of the Alternative for Germany (AfD)-a party categorised almost universally as "right-wing populist" in the German political science literature (Franzmann, 2014;Arzheimer, 2015;Bebnowski, 2015;Häusler, 2016;Lewandowsky et al, 2016) -and its development from a "competition populism" (Bebnowski and Förster, 2014;Bebnowski, 2015) into an ethnoculturally reductionist conception of "the people" coexisting with a populist logic of partial openings in relation to LGBT persons and Russian-Germans in the Berlin context in particular.…”