Hate 2.0

by Kaileigh La Belle

In doing this week’s readings, I was struck by Cento Bull’s reading on populism and popular memory. In particular, her argument is that the other is consistently used to construct a populist national image. I think that this argument can be applied to other readings from this week. Namely, Molnar’s article on the role of racial anxiety in reunified Germany. Throughout the article, Molnar highlights narratives from reunified Germany in which German citizens suggest that immigration would threaten their country. As such, through this construction of the other, they attempt to call back to a mythic, historic image of Germany, one that is predominately white and Christian. 

The Cento Bull reading also encouraged me to consider why narratives of the other are so successful in creating both an imagined past and an imagined community around which people can rally. Personally, looking at cases such as those discussed in Molnar’s article, I feel that the ‘other’ is often conceptually distanced, but also physically distanced. For example, in his introduction, Molnar highlights a racist letter against immigration written by a man called Lange. In this letter, Lange uses examples of other ethnically mixed countries, namely in Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, and suggests that this would be Germany’s fate. The physical distance between these countries would enable people to demonize the situation and present a myth as fact as there becomes greater space for disinformation.  

In conclusion, I felt that Cento Bull raised some interesting points about the role of the other in populist myth-making, which I feel carries over to other readings from this week. In considering this subject more critically, I found myself faced with continued questions as to how these processes occur and what makes them so successful in such varied situations.

By: Adam Paquin

The Bull article has an interesting take on populism and tells us that all over the world there are several different definitions for this term we call populism. With many different styles or ideologies and in most cases, it is set to a sort of moralism which turns the official into a person of good and their opponent into a person of evil. She also argues that often a populist leader uses ones memory against them creating fabricated visions of history while placing their enemy at the center and stating that they are the reason for the states downfall.

The Molnar article gives us and in depth look into racism, antisemitism and all-around fears of immigration that many of the German citizens had after the Second World War. He specifies the fact that during the cold war and up until the mid 90’s anti-immigration sentiment was on the rise and until then they only accepted very minimal amounts of immigrants under strict circumstances. But after the collapse of communism, they started to receive a massive spike of immigration. One part I found rather interesting was the fact that their welfare system was so good that many German citizens proposed the idea that many of the “asylum seekers” might not even be seeking asylum. But in fact, taking advantage of the German taxpayers and the welfare system. Which now began to spread large amounts of violence both from Germans and immigrants seeking asylum. Molnar proceeds to go in depth more on the violence and riots that erupt afterwards.

By Jim Dagg

In “1984”, George Orwell wrote “who controls the past controls the future”. We are seeing this over and over again in this course. Bull’s article in this week’s readings positions “counter memories” as a commonly used and powerful tool of populist parties. With her focus on Italy, she highlights Berlusconi’s work in the 1990s vilify the left, which he has simplified to “communist”, and to which he assigned false blame for the Bologna massacre (at least). This was part of his work to rehabilitate the AN (heirs to MSI, and hence Mussolini). The second part of the “1984” quote is “who controls the present controls the past”. That part applies to Berlusconi – the media tycoon – just as aptly.

Bull’s notion of an “empty signifier” – what a great term! – is new to me. The signifier really is empty to begin with. Using Berlusconi as the example again, he co-opts “freedom” and fills it with the specific meanings that will appeal to a sufficient coalition of the population. In the winter of 2022, we in Ottawa saw the same term “freedom” used in precisely the same way by the trucker convoy. 

The Kalb chapter was dense and powerful.  He described the devastating effects of neo-liberalism on workers in former Soviet satellites. Then he showed how the reaction produced today’s populist authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland especially. While notionally western parts of the individual Visegrad countries have become important manufacturing centers for Europe, the eastern parts of these countries have fallen behind. Easterners in Hungary were then hurt badly by the financial crisis of 2008 and turned to populists for the answer. Orban was elected in 2010 and transformed Hungary into an “illiberal national workfare state”. The idea spread to Poland next.

 Kalb believes that, in transition to open markets, there grew a rift between the self-perceived “deserving” and “undeserving” workers. He claims this undermined possible solidarity among workers and was a missed opportunity. His description of conflict and hierarchy-seeking makes sense, but would broad solidarity among workers in eastern “provinces” have made any difference to their prosperity – or their precaritization 😉?

While scholars may struggle to define what populism is, it’s a lot less difficult to identify what causes it. Populism is a direct reaction to neo-liberal capitalism. As the Marmonova, Franquesa, and Brooks article puts it, “socio-economic inequalities are the fundamental driving force in defining political cleavages and conflicts in rural Europe today” (1516). Despite the claims currently being made in many neo-liberal democracies, neo-liberal democracy is the cause of, not the solution to, the ascendance of populism. However, as the Molnar article articulates within the context of Germany, in order for this fact to be comprehensible, the hegemonic teleology of neo-liberal democracy must be dismantled. If this is done, then the post-Cold War period “appears less as a redemptive end point and more as a foreboding new beginning” (514). This is because even in a success story like Germany, the application of neo-liberal capitalism resulted in losers as well as winners. Just ask the small farmers of Saxony. Neo-liberal democracy isn’t a centrist and neutral position. Nor is it inevitable or inarguable or without alternative. The alternative is populism. As the Marmonova, Franquesa, and Brooks article illustrates in several countries, while neo-liberalism has been great for agricultural mega-corporations, it has been really bad for small farmers, so why wouldn’t those small farmers look for a political alternative? Similarly, due to the depopulation caused by neo-liberalism, representative democracy no longer works for rural areas, so why wouldn’t the people who live there look for a political alternative? However, that alternative doesn’t have to be neo-fascism. For example, the politics of rural Spain demonstrates that, if the Left can provide a compelling alternative, then they too can be successful. In the absence of a compelling leftist alternative, however, far-right populism wins by default. Unfortunately, far-right populism does nothing for the economically disadvantaged people who support it because, as Bull describes in the Italian context, populism reacts to economic problems not by encouraging class-consciousness, but by creating a consciousness of “the people”. This provides no alternative to neo-liberal capitalism, the root of the problem, but merely an “other” group (southern Italians, Roma, Turks) upon which the problem can irrationally be blamed. In the absence of a credible Left that would identify class as the most useful category of societal analysis, the losers in the rigged game of neo-liberal capitalism are left only with a far-right populism that expresses their legitimate rage using an illegitimate discourse of nationalism and race.

Jacob Braun

The topics of migration and democratisation stand out to me most succinctly in this week’s readings. In the years following German reunification and the dissolution of the USSR, these topics were on the minds of everyone in the Western Bloc; how to manage the influx of migrants from formerly Communist states, and how to properly integrate those states into the Capitalist free market world order. Combined with the increasing globally-interconnecting environment of the 1990s and early 2000s, issues that arose during this period continue to plague European politics to this day. Most notably, I would like to draw parallels between increased foreign migration to Germany after reunification and increased migration to Europe as a whole resulting from the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011.

As we’ve discussed together in class, racism and “othering” seems to be a constant in the ideology-bundle of right-wing populism. Throughout the Cold War, large numbers of Turkish immigrants migrated to West Germany to rectify their postwar need for labour. Many of them were unable to become German citizens, as West German citizenship law operated under jus sanguinis (meaning your parents must be German for you to be German). It would only be until 2000 when Germany would reform their citizenship law to jus soli (meaning if you are born on German soil, you are German). Yet, the presence of a large non-German population would spark a wave of neo-Nazi resurgence and attacks on foreigners from people desperately trying to keep Germany for the Germans. Come 2011 with the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War and subsequently the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War*, the German right-wing would capitalise on a large influx of non-white Muslim immigrants to popularise their platform. Similarly to the influx of Turks, discrimination and violence would befall these populations.

*This title may now go to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, which has produced almost 15 million refugees displaced worldwide compared to Syria’s 11 million.

Image from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/03/berlin-walls-fall-marked-the-end-of-the-cold-war-for-the-american-public/

Even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, vast swaths of people from East-Germany had attempted to flee into the west. Many would attempt to cross the wall in Berlin with some even being killed. Of course this issue would spill over once the Soviet Union fell, and many individuals that made it into the west were not all necessarily coming in with good intentions, and the Molnar article explains how German society found itself more multicultural then it ever had been, and that this had created a lot of tension among the far-right. This tension would spill over in the form of violence against non-Germans, and would highlight that racist sentiments were still very much prevalent in Germany even by the 90’s. What is even more shocking is that these sentiments were not just disorganized far-right groups, but the German government itself “Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his government developed a plan that sought to dramatically reduce the number of Turks in Germany by paying them and their families to leave Germany forever. The plan, overwhelmingly supported by the German people, was put into law in 1983.” (Molnar) The fact that this action was overwhelmingly supported by the German population hammers home that those racist sentiments were still there. What is even scarier is that it is still present pretty much to this day as highlighted by Mamonova when she talks about how the right-wing party “Alternative für Deutschland” is heavily backed by eastern villages in Saxony where racist anti-refugee sentiments are very strong. Why do they still feel this way though? Is it really just remnants of fascist ideology, or is there something else at play here?

Readings Used:

Christopher Molnar, “Greetings from the Apocalypse”: Race, Migration, and Fear after German Reunification” Central European History, (2021), 1-25.

Natalia Mamonova, Jaume Franquesa, and Sally Brooks, “‘Actually Existing’ Right-Wing Populism in Rural Europe: Insights from Eastern Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Ukraine,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 47, no. 7 (2020): 1497–1525