A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe

Abstract

Contestation over European integration has been widely studied in the rhetoric of parties, leaders, and movements on the far right in a variety of media. Focusing on Twitter use by far right actors in Western Europe, we apply corpus-aided discourse analysis to explore how imaginative geographies are used to politicize Europe among their digital publics. We find that the idea of a crisis of cultural identity pervades imaginaries of Europe amongst far right digital publics. While Europe is presented as facing a crisis of cultural identity, we find that the far right articulates an aspirational imaginary of Europe, the 'Europe des Nations' that rejects liberal-democratic pluralism in the EU and the 'establishment'. We find that the contestation of Europe in far right digital publics relies on a crisis of cultural identity, representing a translation of Nouvelle Droite imaginaries of Europe into the social media space.

Introduction: the politicisation of permanent crisis in Europe

“…With respect to Schengen, it became impossible for politicians to depoliticise this crisis through supranational delegation; and with respect to Brexit, for the Brexiteers at least, leaving the EU was the triumph of 'us', the sovereign domestic people, over 'them', the faceless bureaucrats of Brussels. This idea of the conflict of 'us' vs. 'them' is also central to Ganesh and Froio's (2020) contribution. It shows how farright actors use Twitter to promote the narrative of a cultural crisis of Europe based on a nativist reading of current events (notably the migration and economic 'crises').…”

“…As suggested by Boin, Bengt, and Stern (2005), crises occur when there is the perception that the core values of a community are under threat, there is a strong sense of urgency and time pressure which is combined with a growing sense of uncertainty. Ganesh and Froio (2020), for example, show how the far-right's narrative revolves around the perception of a cultural crisis, which challenges the core identity of Europe. Another form of identity crisis is also discussed by Voltolini (2020), who suggests that the challenges to the core traits of EU external identity created a situation of urgency and the need to react by ensuring that the EU's raison d'être and its foreign policies were aligned.…”

“…It thus offers the possibility of cross-policy and cross-methods comparison across different policy domains. We seek to provide a balanced view of the different types of crises that the EU has been facing over the past decade, including articles on the migration crisis (Castelli and Zamponi 2020;Hadj-Abdou 2020), the Eurozone crisis (Kutter 2020;Moreira Ramalho 2020), identity and/or culture crises (Coutto 2020;Ganesh and Froio 2020;Voltolini 2020), and external crises (Natorski 2020;Voltolini 2020;Ikani 2020). This broad empirical and methodological reach, we hope, adds to the existing literature which to date has focused predominantly on the Eurozone and the refugee crises.…”

Euroscepticism between Populism and Technocracy: The Case of Italian Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle

“…It is especially since Lega came into office in 2018, and in the context of a series of European financial and migration 'crises', that Salvini's discourses consolidated right-wing, ethnocentric and Eurosceptic positions around the promotion of 'Italians/Italy first' 2 and the safeguard of Italy's borders, mobilising much public frustration and resentment against Brussels, advocating, for example, welfare policies that would protect 'national culture' and reject foreigners per se (Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone 2018) in a battle over cultural identity (Ganesh and Froio 2020). Lega's emphatic defense of Italian identity escalated into the policy of 'porti chiusi' when, in his office as Minister of the Interior in 2019, Salvini prevented NGO ships rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean from docking into Italian ports.…”

Politicizing Europe on the far right: Anti-EU mobilization across the party and non-party sector in France

“…Yet, they tend to replicate some of the limits of research on political parties -in this case suffering of a 'grassroots bias'. Based on the idea that the relationship between the electoral and protest arenas is reinforcing for the Left, whereas it is substitutive for the Right (Hutter, 2014), very few studies have looked at right-wing contestation of the EU in the protest arena (Ganesh & Froio, 2020;Pavan & Caiani, 2017). This led to overlooking grassroots far-right movements and equating far-right 'protest' with the 'protest vote' for radical right political parties.…”