Identity Politics Past and Present: Political Discourses from Post-War Austria to the Covid Crisis

1Discourses About Nationalism

Ruth Wodak

[A] national culture is a discourse—a way of constructing meanings which influences and organises both our actions and our conception of ourselves […]. National cultures construct identities by producing meanings about ‘the nation’ with which we can identify; these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it. (Stuart Hall 1996, 613)

1.1 Introduction

Nationalism, once declared an obsolete force, especially after the Second World War and the establishment of the European Union, has very clearly returned with renewed vigour. We encounter passionate nationalist movements everywhere, in Africa, South America, the Middle East, Southern Europe and in the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Frequently, new nationalisms emerge, tied to religious beliefs such as Islamic nationalism. Indeed, it seems that—in spite of an ever more connected and globalized world—more borders and walls are being constructed to define nation-states and protect them from dangers, both alleged and real.

In the following, I will first discuss salient concepts such as nationalism and, inasmuch as they relate to it, also transnationalism, post-nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This necessarily brief summary leads to an integrated critical framework for (national) identity politics embedded in a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), currently imagined as ‘body politics’ in many national publics (Musolff 2010; Norocel 2013; Wodak 2015). Thus, we are confronted with, on the one hand, globalized tendencies to transcend the nation-state frequently promoted as post-nationalism; and, on the other hand, with strong and virulent tendencies proposing a return to the nation-state, defined via cultural and ethnic (as well as racist and racialized) criteria. Finally, some texts representing re-nationalizing identity politics and politics of the past drawn from Hungarian and Austrian right-wing populist parties’ campaigns serve to illustrate ever new border and body politics.

1.2 Defining the terms

Modern nationalism originated in Europe in the period following the French Revolution, as a result of the emergence of industrial society and the establishment of the nation-state as the primary principle of social organization. Nationalism and nationhood are thus regarded as projects of modernity, related to the centralizing tendency towards the homogenization of populations, and hence defining modern statehood. In the contemporary post-industrial world, however, global trends of cultural fragmentation (connected to growing economic interdependence, consumerism, mass migration, and the diffusion of communication networks) increasingly override national boundaries (see Wodak et al. 2009, 7ff.; Krzyżanowski 2010, 29ff.; Delanty and Kumar 2006, 2–3; Sicurella 2015 for detailed overviews of theories on nationalism as well as discourses about nationalism).

Gellner defines nationalism as ‘primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner 1983, 1). He maintains that nationalism should be regarded as the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had dominated the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the population. This implies the general diffusion of school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. Importantly, Gellner stresses the relevance of ‘social entropy’: a monitoring of the polity, extensive bureaucracy, linguistic standardization (linguistic nationalism), national identification (an abstract community), a focus on cultural similarity as a basis for political legitimacy, and generally single-stranded social relationships (between one-dimensional social identities).

Anderson (1995, 49) in a similar vein defines nation-states as ‘imagined communities’ or ‘imagined political communities’, ‘imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. They are imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (ibid.). In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined in this sense and ‘are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson 1995, 49). He argues that the nation is imagined as limited ‘because even the largest […], encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind’ (Anderson 1995, 50). Consequently, nationalism always has an inclusionary as well as an exclusionary logic.

Busch and Krzyżanowski (2007) and Wodak (2007) have provided ample critique of Anderson’s conception of national identities and the nation-state, indicating that Anderson’s concept presupposes homogenous imagined communities, an imaginary which does not fit current multicultural nation-states constituted through citizenship and heterogeneity. Thus, identity, in the complex struggle over belonging to a nation-state, is never static and defined once and for all; all (national, collective and individual) identities are dynamic, fluid and fragmented; they can always be renegotiated, according to socio-political and situative contexts as well as to more global social change and ideologically informed categories. This is why the German sociologist Theodor W. Adorno famously claimed, ‘[i]dentity is the prototype of ideology’ (1966, 151). Along this line of argument, Delanty and Kumar (2006, 3) emphasize that ‘nationalism is present in almost every aspect of political community and social arrangements. It pervades the global and local dimensions and can even take cosmopolitan forms.’

At this point, it is important to mention the debate about the alleged contradiction between collective and individual (national, regional, local) identities. Triandafyllidou and Wodak (2003, 210) view identity ‘as a process, as a condition of being or becoming, that is constantly renewed, confirmed or transformed, at the individual or collective level, regardless of whether it is more or less stable, more or less institutionalized’ and reject any artificial boundaries which have long dominated many academic debates. It is important, the authors argue, to discuss how and through what these identities come into being and believe that the respective social action in context should be seen as the basic locus of identity formation and renegotiation. Accordingly, whether those identities are collective or individual identities that are constructed therein proves obsolete. Hence, ‘a rigid distinction between individual and collective identities risks reifying, taking identities as an essential quality that people have or as something concrete to which they belong’ (Triandafyllidou and Wodak 2003, 211; see also Krzyżanowski 2010, 30–32). Thus, collective identity cannot exist over and above individuals, just like individuality, with its physical and cognitive-psychological referents—the body and the soul/mind—cannot exist over and above society. Collective identities are constantly in a process of negotiation, affirmation or change in specific interactions in context through the individuals who identify with a given group or social category and act in their name. The two levels are intertwined and mutually constituted (Triandafyllidou and Wodak 2003, 211).

Transnationalism refers to the establishment of social, cultural, economic and political ties that operate beyond the nation-state (Schiller et al. 1992, ix; Vertovec 1999). Significantly, they need to be understood as existing only in relation to existing definitions and practices that can be called national. Transnational activities can be defined as

[t]hose that take place on a recurrent basis across national borders and that require a regular and significant commitment of time by participants. Such activities may be conducted by relatively powerful actors, such as representatives of national governments and multinational corporations, or may be initiated by more modest individuals, such as immigrants and their home country kin and relations. These activities are not limited to economic enterprises, but include political, cultural and religious initiatives as well. (Portes 1999, 464)

The notion of a transnational community puts the emphasis on human agency: such groups are the result of cross-border activities which link individuals, families and local groups. In combination with globalizing tendencies, the sharp increase of transnational communities is seen as undermining the means of controlling difference founded on territoriality. Castells (2007) views transnational communities as a powerful challenge to the traditional ideas of nation-state belonging: the idea of a person who belongs to just one nation-state or at most migrates from one state to just one other (whether temporarily or permanently) is undermined by increasing mobility; by temporary, cyclical and recurring migrations; by cheap and easy travel and so on. In the context of globalization, transnationalism can thus transcend previous face-to-face communities based on kinship, neighbourhoods or workplaces and extend these into remote virtual communities, which communicate at a distance, in network societies (Castells 2007; Capstick 2015). Castells argues:

Power is the most fundamental process in society, since society is defined around values and institutions, and what is valued and institutionalized is defined by power relationships. Power is the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favour the empowered actor’s will, interests and values. (2007, 10)

The examination of how migrants establish ties—whether familial, religious or economic—between multiple localities has been a major focus of migration research since the 1990s. Schiller et al. (1992, 11–13), for example, pointed out that an immigrant in New York may be called to talk to the Mayor of New York about the development of ‘our city’ and on the next day return to his hometown to talk about the development of ‘our nation’. Through internet and satellite channels, social ties are maintained, establishing ‘continuity in time and in terms of people’s emotional and cultural attachment to an imagined community that spread beyond national boundaries’ (Georgiou 2006, 143–49). Clearly, migrants have always lived in more than one setting, maintaining links with a real or imagined community in the state of origin. What is new today is the context of globalization and economic uncertainty that facilitates the construction of social relations transcending national borders. The increase in mobility and the development of communication have contributed to such relations, creating a transnational space of economic, cultural, religious and political participation. El Naggar (2015) highlights the salient notion of ‘umma’ for Muslims across the globe: intrinsic to Islam is the imagination of an umma—a global Muslim community—that encompasses many cultures and ethnicities. For instance, Mandaville (2001, 172) points out that Muslims ‘come face to face with […] shapes and colors of global Islam, forcing their religion to hold a mirror up to its own diversity. These encounters often play an important role in processes of identity formation prompting Muslims to revitalize and compare their understandings of Islam.’

The search for a European transnational identity is also the object of much critical social science and discourse-analytic research (Boukala 2013; Carta and Morin 2014; Krzyżanowski 2010; Weiss 2002; Wodak and Weiss 2004; 2007; Wodak and Boukala 2014, 2015).⁶ In contrast to migrants’ transnational identities, European hegemonic identity is frequently perceived as established top-down, by the elites. Kumar, for instance, emphasizes the common cultural characteristics of Europeans and claims that European identity is synonymous with European culture (2004, 35–36). Supporters of the transnational approach to European identity assume that a European identity based on common cultural characteristics, such as religion, would be able to unify the people of Europe and simultaneously distinguish them from the ‘others’. However, the concept of transnational identity does not comprise political and state mechanisms that are obviously also relevant to the establishment of a common identity.

In his famous essay ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, Jürgen Habermas states that the European Union created a new political form. It is neither a ‘federal state’ nor a ‘federation’; rather, it is ‘an association of sovereign states which pool their sovereignty only in very restricted areas to varying degrees, an association which does not seek to have the coercive power to act directly on individuals in the fashion of nation states’ (Habermas 2001, 5). Thus, the European Union does not exercise political power in respect to its members. For this reason, a more encompassing political framework would be necessary for institutional and political reinforcement of the Union: a European Constitution could lead to a re-regulation of the financial, social and foreign policies of the European Union, and could also strengthen the Union. However, Habermas views European identity as exclusively political. He underscores the role of the public sphere for the cultivation of solidarity ‘between strangers’ and the establishment of a collective European identity—this conception has been severely criticized ever since (see Wodak and Boukala 2014; Triandafyllidou et al. 2009). Nevertheless, the emphasis on the necessity of democratization of the European Union remains salient.

These debates have led some scholars to envisage the end of the ‘age of nationalism’, suggesting that humanity is about to enter a post-national era in which nations and nationhood will gradually but inevitably lose their significance for large segments of the world’s population. Political power is partially transferred from national authorities to super-national entities (the United Nations, the European Union, NAFTA and NATO). In addition, media and entertainment industries are becoming increasingly global and facilitate the formation of trends and opinions on a supranational scale. Migration of individuals or groups between countries contributes to the formation of post-national identities and beliefs, even though attachment to citizenship and national identities often remains important (Koopmans and Statham 1999).

This attitude is encapsulated in the following, much-quoted paragraph by Hobsbawm:

It is not impossible that nationalism will decline with the decline of the nation-state […]. It would be absurd to claim that this day is already near. However, I hope it can at least be envisaged. After all, the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism. (Hobsbawm 1990, 192)

The assumption that nationalism and nation-states are becoming obsolete as a result of increasing cultural fragmentation is one of the central tenets of postmodernism. Appadurai (1996) maintains that transnational trends, especially connected with global financial capitalism, have ‘de-territorialized’ the nation-state, making it necessary for people to rethink themselves and their identities outside and beyond the national frame. Whereas the loss of political sovereignty of nation-states in the face of global processes is rarely disputed, the postmodernist argument that national identities are becoming increasingly hybridized and therefore less salient as a consequence of mass migration and the influx of culturally diverse economic migrants into more affluent Western societies (Bhabha 1990) has been met with strong objections (Wodak 2015). The opponents of the ‘post-national’ paradigm point out that processes linked to globalization have in fact recently led to the resurgence of nationalism in various parts of the world (Boukala 2013; Wodak and Boukala 2014, 2015). Indeed, Sicurella (2015) provides ample proof for such re/nationalizing tendencies and the role of public intellectuals therein in the post-Yugoslavian nation-states.

Beck (2011), however, argues against ‘equating modern society with society organized in territorially limited nation-states’ and assumes that the mediation of risks that operate on a global scale, such as financial crisis, climate change and nuclear threats, have created imagined cosmopolitan communities of global risks:

Cosmopolitanism means all nations, all religions, all ethnic groups; all classes are and see themselves compelled given the potential of civilization and its potential for self-destruction to constitute a community with a common destiny in the interests of survival. (1353)

Cosmopolitanism thus contends that all human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality, relationship, view or structure extending beyond national boundaries or limits. Definitions of cosmopolitanism usually begin with the Greek etymology of ‘citizen of the world’. However, as Appiah points out, ‘world’ in the original sense meant ‘cosmos’ or ‘universe’, not earth or globe as current use assumes (Appiah 2006, xiv). Nation-building is never only a historical stage or period now concluded; nor can nations be constructed and established once and for all. On the contrary, they are continuously reproduced, narrated and ‘inhabited’ (Billig 1995) in order to subsist, especially in an increasingly globalized world. As Balibar maintains, the fundamental challenge is ‘to make the people produce itself continually as a national community. Or again, it is to produce the effect of unity by which the people will appear, in anyone’s eyes, as a people, that is, as the basis and origin of political power’ (Balibar 1991, 93–94, original emphasis; Sicurella 2015).

1.3 The discursive construction of national identities

Billig’s study (1995) of banal nationalism refers to everyday representations of the nation which build an imagined sense or ‘imaginary’ of national solidarity and belonging. Examples of banal nationalism include the use of flags in everyday contexts, sporting events, national songs/anthems and symbols on money, popular expressions and turns of phrase, patriotic clubs and the use of implied togetherness in the national press:

The term ‘banal nationalism’ is introduced to cover ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. It is argued that these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in establishing nations, is the endemic condition. (Billig 1995, 6)

Many of these symbols are most effective because of their constant repetition and indirect, vague nature and references. They are perceived as harmless and naturalized, i.e., regarded as given. Billig claims that, in the established nation-states, nationhood operates as an implicit background for a variety of social practices, political discourses and cultural products, which only needs to be hinted at—that is, ‘flagged’—in order to be effectively activated. Pronouns such as ‘we’ and ‘our’, rather than grand memorable narratives, that ‘offer constant, but barely conscious, reminders of the homeland, making our national identity unforgettable’ (Billig 1995, 93) become relevant (see below).

The study of the discursive construction of national identities in particular has emerged as a research programme within the DHA, following the research conducted by Wodak et al. (2009) on the construction of Austrian national identity/identities in public, semi-public and quasi-private discursive contexts. The key assumptions are:

•that nations are primarily mental constructs, in the sense that they exist as discrete political communities in the imagination of their members;

•that national identity includes a set of dispositions, attitudes and conventions that are largely internalized through socialization and create a ‘national habitus’, drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field (1990);

•and, lastly, that nationhood as a form of social identity is produced, transformed, maintained and dismantled through discourse (Wodak et al. 2009, 3–4).

Wodak et al. (2009) developed a differentiated discourse-analytical methodology and toolkit for the analysis of the construction of identity and difference. This conceptual and methodological step was accomplished through an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of multiple data related to Austrian identity (political speeches, newspapers, interviews, focus group discussions). Further research was conducted on political speeches between 1945 and 1996 (Reisigl 2007), on national rhetoric in commemorative speeches (de Cillia and Wodak 2009; Wodak and de Cillia 2007) and the development of attitudes and debates on Austrian neutrality in comparison to Hungary (Kovács and Wodak 2003). In due course, the theoretical framework first published in German (1998) was developed further.

The systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of the discursive construction of national identities comprised three dimensions: content, strategies and realizations (linguistic and otherwise). Five content-related areas were investigated:

•the construction of the Homo austriacus ,

•the narration and construction of a shared political past,

•the discursive construction of a shared culture,

•the discursive construction of a shared political present and future,

•the discursive construction of a ‘national body’ ( Wodak et al. 2009 , 30).

In this way, constructive discursive strategies encompass those linguistic acts which serve to ‘build’ and establish a particular national identity.⁷ These are primarily linguistic utterances that constitute a national ‘we-group’ through specific acts of reference, for example by using the pronoun we in connection with the toponymical labelling ‘Austrians’—for instance, ‘we Austrians’, which, directly or indirectly, appeals to solidarity and union. Expressions such as ‘to take on something together’ or ‘to cooperate and stick together’ frequently occur in these contexts. Strategies of perpetuation and justification maintain, support and reproduce a national identity perceived to be under threat. Justification and legitimization frequently refer to events of the past, which may influence the narratives of national history by employing the topos of history (see below). Of course, political decisions concerning the present and future have to be justified and legitimized, for instance through individual or collective, public or private national narratives.⁸

Strategies of transformation transform a relatively well-established national identity or parts of it into another. Since 1955 and the then internationally signed Austrian State Treaty, the meanings of Austrian neutrality were frequently redefined (see Kovács and Wodak 2003 for an extensive analysis and discussion). Finally, destructive strategies demolish existing national identities or elements of them. For instance, after 1989 and the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, the former Eastern communist countries all had to redefine and reimagine their national identities (Galasińska and Krzyżanowski 2009; Triandafyllidou et al. 2009). The same is true for the aftermath of the Yugoslavian war (1992–1996). The former multi-ethnic and multilingual state was destroyed and five new nation-states emerged, after a bloody war between former neighbours (Sicurella 2015).

Hence, from a discourse-historical point of view, national identities are constructed in and by discourse and the abovementioned discursive strategies which encompass manifold sub-strategies (Wodak et al. 2009, 35–37) all of which serve realizing different stages and degrees of uniqueness, sameness, distinctions and difference. National identities are continuously negotiated, co-constructed and discursively reproduced. On the one hand, as imagined communities, they are stable enough to allow identification and cohesion of social groups. On the other, they are flexible and dynamic enough to be articulated by various actors in various contexts and for various audiences. Diachronically, they are subject to change (political, social, economic and so on). Institutional and material social structures influence the construction of national identity; however, institutional practices may also conflict with identity imaginaries. The discourse of sameness, for example, stresses national uniqueness and inward sameness, ignoring differences within. The discourse of difference, by contrast, underscores the strongest differences to other nations.

Numerous publications replicated this approach and developed it further, in respect to multilingualism, European and other national identities, as well as to Austrian German.⁹ Today, international research on discursive constructions of national identities has diversified, but still draws on the aforementioned studies. Recent studies on the discursive construction of national identities were conducted on the secular and religious movements in Palestine (Amer 2012), the tensions between national and European identity in Poland (Krzemiński 2001) and Central-Eastern Europe (Brusis 2000), on regional identity (Paasi 2013), sports and national identity in Finland (Laine 2006), the significance of legislation in Denmark (Kjaer and Palsbro 2008), historical imagination in teaching in Cyprus (Christou 2007), large sports events (Smith and Porter 2004; Hack 2013) and practices of remembrance in Uruguay (Achugar 2009) as well as the trajectory of Hong Kong’s complex and multilayered development (Flowerdew 2012). In addition to such studies focusing on a particular state or region, others have taken a comparative view (for instance, comparing the role of shared values in the multinational states of the UK and Canada, Henderson and McEwen 2005, and of the role of religion, self-image and external image in twenty-three nations, Rusciano 2003).

Some of the abovementioned studies have elaborated the approach, such as by integrating other genres or data and respective methods. Others have placed new emphases or pointed out new dimensions of national identity:

(1) The topics of competence in state language, citizenship and naturalization, commonly subsumed under citizenship, have received growing interest in recent years (no longer only by legal professions, see http://eudo-citizenship.eu; Davy et al. 2013, but also by discourse analysts). This is notable on a national and European level (Gray and Griffin 2013). This new focus necessitates the analysis of both public and legal discourses on naturalization and citizenship as well as the testing methods and materials used in the naturalization process.

(2) Among the elements of the Kulturnation that have gained significance within the discursive construction of national identity are religious symbols, apart from language. The Islamic headscarf as metonymic symbol for otherness is a cultural element that has moved to the centre of debates relevant to national identity and integration in many European countries (Rosenberger and Sauer 2013; Wodak 2015).

(3) Numerous studies over recent years have pointed to the significance of the relationship, tension or overlap between regional, subnational and national identities on the one hand (Bußjäger et al. 2010) and between national and supranational identities on the other (Painter 2008; Mühler and Opp 2006). Relevant studies in similar fields have described the phenomena of inclusive and exclusive nationalism (Citrin and Sides 2004; Bruter 2005). Research has also documented an increasingly frequent strategic distancing from the EU or individual member states in public or quasi-public discourses, for instance in political discourse (Fuchs 2013; Lodge and Wegrich 2011) and media discourses or visual metaphors (Bounegru and Forceville 2011).

(4) Recent research on political discourse has emphasized the importance of Web 2.0 and social media (El Naggar 2015). A linguistically informed discourse-analytical perspective on national identities requires that online communication be included, since such easily accessible, quasi-private and at the same time quasi-public communication platforms as Facebook and Twitter allow participation in political discourse and deliberation (Morley and Robins 2002; Dorostkar and Preisinger 2012).

1.4 Nationalism, body and border politics

‘Border politics’ are part of national identity politics and are now increasingly defined by the national language (‘the mother tongue’), by ethnicity and culture, transcending the political borders of the nation-state. Such language policies imply a return to national language policies which essentialize the nation-state, projecting a homogenous culture, language and territory. Instead of cosmopolitanism or post-nationalism, a European citizenship and the common European language policies which promote multilingualism (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2011, 2014), we are witnessing a re/inventing of traditional, parochial, closed nation-states. Griffin (1999, 316) accordingly concludes that the radical right ‘takes on highly culture-specific forms, largely because it draws on nationalist myth whose contents are by definition unique to each cultural tradition’. Obviously, the concept of ‘mother tongue’ relates to nativist ‘body politics’ of viewing and conceptualizing the nation as a body with the mother tongue symbolizing the national language (Musolff 2010; Wodak 2015). Indeed, Musolff (2010, 137–38, original emphasis) contends that

the body-state metaphor and its illness and parasite scenarios have been ‘declared dead’, ‘moribund’ or at least deserving to be extinct in several schools of conceptual history. Its anti-Semitic associations have made it suspect on account of the memory of its use by the Nazis. Its semantic coherence has been seen as weakened in the modern era due to the demise of the humoral source of knowledge system and its replacement by new mechanically orientated scientific paradigms. […] In its use by the Nazis, the metaphor helped to advance a genocidal ideology in its most brutal form, which is still remembered. […] But the ‘German case’ is not unique.

A close look at election posters by the Hungarian Jobbik in 2010 reveals that body politics combined with the well-known, traditional racist discourse about parasites is experiencing a revival (see Figure 1.1). This poster represents a mosquito embedded in a stop sign. The colours of the Hungarian flag (red, white, green) evoke nationalism and imply that Hungary, represented by the right-wing populist Jobbik, should not be bothered or damaged by such pests, which come in swarms and also cause pain or even severe illness in case they should transmit contagious disease. Hungary, in short, should get rid of mosquitoes. However, the abstract noun employed, ‘parasitism’, implies that this is a notable phenomenon, not just trivial everyday mosquitoes. This is a serious condition that has befallen Hungary and one that Jobbik will stop. If this is a condition, then one necessarily poses the question: Who causes or has caused this condition? Who are the parasites/mosquitoes? In the context of the 2010 Jobbik campaign, the answer is not difficult to find: Roma and Jews living in Hungary. Accordingly, the report by the Human Rights First group (2014, 30) states that

Figure 1.1: Jobbik election poster 2010, translated: ‘Put an end to parasitism. You can also vote Jobbik!’¹⁰

[t]hese two parties [i.e., Golden Dawn and Jobbik] are arguably among the most extreme in the E.P. [European Parliament] in their rhetoric, which is designed to fan hatred and legitimize its expression, and in the violence they have fomented. Their stance goes far beyond the Euroscepticism that was seen the primary driver of the victory of many other European far-right parties in the E.P. elections. In fact they are so antisemitic and extreme that even Marine Le Pen, whose Front National won the French election with a record 24.86 percent of the vote, and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands declined to form a coalition with them in the European Parliament—thereby forfeiting the extra money, speaking time and influence they could have received by forming a parliamentary