Abstract
The last few years have not been kind to Europe. Its reputation as the prime example of successful supranational integration is unraveling. The continent is beset by persistent economic stagnation, mass protest movements on the left and right, and a resurgence of nationalist sentiment; 2016’s Brexit was the first ever move by a European Union (EU) member state to voluntarily leave the union. Little more than a year ago, Italian elections empowered the populist Five Star Movement and nationalist Lega parties on a platform blasting the EU for its autocratic tendencies, its economic mismanagement, and its pro-immigration initiatives. Meanwhile, in many countries, traditional leading parties have posted their greatest electoral losses in decades, with center-left parties in particular being rejected in record numbers. By June of 2018, even the European Commission Vice President, Frans Timmermans, spoke of a possible EU break-up, admitting that “the unthinkable has become possible.”
Most of this upheaval revolves around a pair of long-simmering issues: austerity and mass immigration. In 2008, the global financial crisis crashed into Europe like a tidal wave, and its slow retreat exposed deep social changes that many found troubling. European governments chose austerity policies as a pyrrhic solution to the crisis, revealing the extent to which political elites had become wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy of slashing public spending and suppressing wage growth. The same period saw an acceleration of global migration, with flows from the Middle East and North Africa set to turn many Western countries into multiethnic and multicultural societies. As a result of these changes, today’s Europeans are on edge. April 2018’s YouGov poll found that immigration and terrorism are the top two issues of concern for citizens in nearly all European countries, with unemployment completing this trio of worries for those in the economically ravaged Mediterranean bloc.
As with the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, these shifts caught established elites, not to mention many social scientists, off guard. We are in dire need of serious historical and comparative work that can help us understand how these issues and the movements they summoned have come to be. Movement Parties Against Austerity and Far-Right Politics in Europe are a timely pair of books, together serving as a roadmap to Europe’s current troubles and shedding light on the rise of both social justice and far-right movements more generally.
In Movement Parties Against Austerity, Donatella della Porta and her coauthors take a case-comparative approach to Southern European leftist parties empowered by the anti-austerity protests of 2010–2013. Those protests and public square occupations emphasized participatory democracy, both as a way to structure movement organizations and as an antidote to the stultifying dominance of center left and right parties. As might be expected, these movements are directly at odds with the modern liberal state and its long tradition of curbing popular input via entrenched parties and carefully screened representatives. Many questioned whether these outsider movements could have any impact on the existing political system. Movement Parties aims to explain how some organizations forged connections with the anti-austerity movements, producing “movement parties” that went on to achieve electoral gains: SYRIZA in Greece, the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, and Podemos in Spain.
The book is structured by a clear comparative logic, with each chapter tackling a different aspect of the Greek, Italian, and Spanish cases. Readers are led through chapters on the economic and political conditions that birthed the movement parties, the organizational and tactical repertoires that made each party movement-like, and the populist framing strategies that aligned the parties with movements and public sentiment. Each of these core chapters makes use of detailed between-case comparisons to unpack salient differences and similarities between the three parties.
The chapter on the birth of the movement parties offers a valuable account of how fringe challengers managed to strike surprisingly powerful blows against the political establishment. Of prime importance is the way that neoliberalism spread to saturation in the minds of policymakers, making the resulting centrist party bloc less responsive to the needs of non-elite national constituencies, more beholden to notions of “fiscal responsibility” and the need for anti-labor “structural reforms,” and less flexible in the face of any crisis that might test their leadership abilities. These parties were thus already suffering gradual delegitimation when the global financial crisis struck. In a horrific display of continent-wide self-harm, they responded with austerity measures that induced a double-dip recession and vast unemployment. The crisis thus “acted as a coagulant for discontent with the party system” and provided an opening for both the protest movements and the parties that could channel their energy (p. 31). Here, the authors weave a multi-leveled account of the origin of the left-wing movement parties that, as will be seen in the following section, is equally applicable to far-right populism.
Those interested in the real-world prospects of radically democratic movements can get much from Chapters 3 and 4, focused on the organizational features and anti-establishment frames that made movement–party fusion possible. All were fueled by an unstable amalgamation of populism and personalism, combining grassroots input with charismatic leaders such as Beppe Grillo of the M5S or Pablo Iglesias of Podemos. In line with the movements they draw on, all three evince some degree of open membership structure, with Podemos and M5S venturing into highly digital, loosely bound forms and using participatory ways of aggregating member interests such as online plebiscites. SYRIZA seems the least innovative in this regard, dropping some of their limited mechanisms of grassroots control as they moved closer to power. This typifies one of the fundamental issues that della Porta and coauthors confront throughout the book: the “paradox” of outsider parties attempting to be both a movement-connected force for radical change and a committed player of the electoral game.
They also include a chapter on negative cases such as other Mediterranean leftist parties without deep movement linkages, as well as countries like Ireland and Portugal where movement party formation never materialized. Here, the authors successfully capitalize on the natural experiment afforded by the EU’s shared economic disaster. They form strong arguments for why even hard-hit countries like Ireland (where a difference in protest timing and clientelism closed the door to movement parties) or Portugal (where the extensive welfare state provided a buffer) saw no movement party action. They also include some instructive comparisons with Latin America’s anti-austerity movement parties.
Overall, the authors hew to strong global and comparative research practices by enfolding their organization-level explanatory factors, such as between-party differences and changes within each party over time, inside of a larger cast of causal conditions. This multi-level model incorporates the global economic context, country-specific political and institutional history, and the particular qualities of each party. They convincingly argue that movement connections, both through organizational innovations and framing, strongly contributed to each party’s moments of success. Given the narrative way the case studies are constructed, they emphasize the organic and constantly shifting nature of the movement–party link; these are analyzed as “processes and works-in-progress embedded in both power relations and grassroots concerns” (p. 197).
Still, a more rigorous accounting of the weights of the various causal factors would have been useful. To take one example, SYRIZA’s movement connections were grafted onto an existing coalition and then tactically de-emphasized—and yet this most party-like of the three movement parties experienced the greatest electoral success, buoyed by the particularly desperate situation of the Greek economy. Meanwhile, movement parties could not find a foothold even in protest-rich countries such as Ireland when other factors mitigated the recession’s impact. These are threshold effects, in which adopting some minimum of movement qualities can energize outsider parties conditional on a specific level of structural danger. The question of where these thresholds might actually lie, as well as relative levels of causal factor intensity, could have been pinned down more tightly with a formalized comparative technique such as Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. While tables are used to hash out descriptive differences between the parties (e.g. pp. 94, 97), even a simple presence-absence-outcome table comparing the positive and negative cases at different time points would have helped distill the lessons of the well-written narrative sections.
Befitting its longer temporal scope, Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg’s Far-Right Politics in Europe avoids explicit comparisons altogether and instead gives us a densely-packed historical review. Their target, the far-right, encompasses organizations, ideas, and personalities that combine nationalism, ethnocentrism, strands of anti-capitalism, and (in the present wave) hostility toward supranational governance institutions such as the EU.
The authors focus on France as a baseline case, but as the chapters proceed in roughly chronological order they treat similar movements throughout Western and Eastern Europe. They begin with late 19th- and early 20th-century forerunners such as the followers of General Boulanger and proto-fascist strands of revolutionary syndicalism, proceed through the welter of interwar fascist regimes and related movements, and then steer the reader through the sectarian and secretive far-right of the postwar decades. In the second half, the authors connect that genealogy to today’s far-right, with detailed chapters on music-based subculture movements and youth-oriented “identitarianism,” various forms of Christian fundamentalism, the far-right in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the populist nationalism on the rise across Western Europe.
Three distinctions crop up prominently, all of which those trying to understand the far-right should bear in mind. First is the difference between far-right nationalism and the kind of “third-position” internationalism that led post-fascist thinkers such as Oswald Mosley and Francis Parker Yockey to advocate for a unified Europe (pp. 64–70). This positional latitude is easily forgotten because today’s resurgent nationalisms are almost always hoping to shore up the nation-state against “globalist” forces.
Second, Camus and Lebourg are careful to distinguish between far-right movements and more institutionalized far-right regimes or parties. The often troubled relationship between the two is an underlying current in many chapters. Far-Right Politics shows the right grappling with the same paradox noted in Movement Parties: how can movements that are self-consciously against the liberal state take part in electoral politics, let alone wield power, without compromising or undercutting their legitimacy? At least until recently, it seems that “when a party tips the balance toward institutional integration at the expense of its subversive charge” the far-right “loses its magnetic attraction” (p. 253).
Their third distinction is perhaps most interesting today. This is the split between free-market social Darwinists and the populist defenders of the welfare state arguing for some variant of nationalist socialism. The long-term view afforded by Camus and Lebourg shows that the latter strain predominated, with a far-right tradition of critiquing capitalism based on a corporatist and ethnocentric vision of society. This tendency is in full view today as parties such as the Sweden Democrats and France’s National Front (FN) have made shocking gains by presenting voters with an ultimatum pithily described by political scientist Matthew Goodwin: “Choose welfare, or choose immigration.”
Today’s far-right is also apt to justify preserving White majorities in European countries as a means of protecting worldwide ethnic and cultural diversity, portraying Europeans as singled out for minoritization in their own homelands, whereas Asians or Africans are not subject to such demographic reversal. As Camus and Lebourg show, this draws on a long line of anti-imperialist or “ethnopluralist” argumentation from radical right movements that charges globalized capitalism with “destroy[ing] the diversity of peoples” through immigration (p. 132).
This clarity about the nature of today’s far-right means Far-Right Politics is especially recommended for American scholars hoping to understand nationalism in Europe, where “the right” does not always carry the free-market, small government connotations it has come to have in the United States. Understanding this is even more important now that the “alt-right” edge of American nationalism is becoming the vehicle for European-style populism; this tendency is often critical of free trade and the U.S. penchant for foreign intervention and portrays mass immigration as both a leftist conspiracy and a result of unfettered capitalism. This is a formula that can, and has, drawn disaffected left-wing voters. We need only think of Trump winning the blue-collar Democrat strongholds of Wisconsin and Michigan, echoing the 2017–2018 collapse of the center-left in France, Germany, and the Netherlands in the face of nationalist gains.
Although the book was published before the most recent nationalist electoral victories, Camus and Lebourg’s chapters on the populist nationalists are essential reading. Special attention should be given to their analysis of the FN’s complicated process of “de-demonization” that purged the party of unpalatable fascistic elements. The impression is that this process was key to mainstreaming nationalist ideas in the core countries of France and the Netherlands (and, though outside the time span of the book, more recently in Germany). This was combined with recruiting anti-immigration voters based on both support for the welfare state and, perhaps unexpectedly, “the defense of women, gays, and Jews” from Islam (p. 202).
The wealth of detail covered by Camus and Lebourg can be dizzying; an appendix or, at the least, a list of the many acronyms and personalities encountered would have made for easier reading. More importantly, their account of the various waves of far-right activity, and especially the national populist resurgence, feels incomplete. We get much more of the ideological than material side of the story. While often noting in passing the major social questions that occupied the far-right, they also seem to take on the definition of the far-right as an emotional or aesthetic response that is “primarily a matter of style” (pp. 20–21, 149, 179). They too quickly slide over the effects of the macrosocial changes that today’s nationalists are attempting to “solve.” Real changes in the level or pace of neoliberal policy, in the intensity of terrorist attacks, or in migration flows and community fragmentation are rarely incorporated as causal factors. This recalls the debate between idea-centric historian of fascism Zeev Sternhell and scholar of Italian fascism David D. Roberts. Roberts suggested that analyzing fascism and related movements as “aestheticized” collections of ideas, rather than calculated responses to the material impact of real social problems, is not only empirically untenable but a scholarly cul-de-sac limiting our ability to dissect far-right views and understand their appeal.
It should already be apparent that these two works are complementary. Given each book’s purview, it is understandable that they fail to make parallels between these left and right outsiders. This might give readers the impression of two disconnected causal worlds. Yet, it is the commonalities that any scholar, or indeed anyone interested in grasping the accelerating political extremism of our age, must face.
Read together, Movement Parties and Far-Right Politics suggest it was the “Americanization” of European parties toward a neoliberal center that opened the door to the political outsiders. The left and right mainstream converged on a set of policy positions that prioritized globalized market relations over any other social concerns. These positions, generally unpopular outside of elite circles, left the center delegitimated and fragile: cleaving to EU institutions that seemed to exacerbate every crisis, encouraging financial speculation rather than wage-led growth, dismantling the “unsustainable” welfare state, and encouraging mass immigration and rapid cultural change. Movement Parties shows that the complacency engendered by the settled consensus meant that, once challengers appeared, the ensuing “panicked reactions” of “mistrusted elites” would further empower the newcomers (p. 66). Again, the 2016 US election shows that this process is not limited to Europe. With the anointed Democratic and Republican frontrunners (Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush) being in broad agreement on free trade, foreign intervention, and immigration, the opening was provided for a fringe challenger. The novelty of even a deeply flawed candidate breaking from neoliberal orthodoxy proved decisive.
These parallels extend to the current and future prospects of populist politics. Left and right outsiders are reacting to similar macrosocial pressures, and with elites in the EU and mainstream parties persisting in their neoliberal orientation, there is little reason to think outsider challenges will die down. Still, the events covered in both Movement Parties and Far-Right Politics illustrate the liberal state’s strange ability, evinced time and again over the past two centuries, to incorporate and thus render toothless most radical challengers. This is why the “paradox” of outsider success runs through both books; despite their positions at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the prospects of left and right outsiders depend on whether they avoid being converted into avatars of the system’s basic Whiggish tendencies.
The “personalism” noted in Movement Parties as a major ingredient of the new movement parties is also present among the populist nationalists. This may prove to be an increasingly common element of any outsider party that maintains some of its radicalism. The combination of populism, even grassroots democracy, and an unusual leader able to avoid total cooptation may embolden these parties toward ever more anti-systemic initiatives. In SYRIZA’s case, it does seem that it lost any chance it had to reshape Europe’s unequal economic playing field as it reverted to a conventional party model and deemphasized the personalized power of figures such as Yanis Varoufakis or Alexis Tsipras. It remains to be seen how the M5S will fare as Beppe Grillo takes a backseat role or what will become of American nationalism after Trump. Here, Camus and Lebourg are perhaps too sanguine about the populist nationalists, believing they will never find a solution to the paradox of power and that, once elected, they will be incorporated into conventional “Euroliberalism” (pp. 208–209). However, the movement party dynamics mapped out by della Porta and her coauthors suggest that making such assumptions might be whistling past the graveyard.
In all, these two books should be widely read and read together. Sociology is prone to biases about the “arc of history,” often overoptimistic about the prospects and rationality of left-wing radical movements and conversely too quick to assume that nationalist responses are atavisms relying mainly on emotional appeal. Juxtaposing Movement Parties Against Austerity and Far-Right Politics in Europe could help inoculate scholars against feel-good delusions.