21.04.2016
Populism, nationalism and racism
Fred Leplat (ed), 'The far right in Europe', Resistance Books and International Institute for Research and Education, London 2015, pp334, £12
The rise of the far right in Europe - amply demonstrated by the high votes obtained by assorted reactionary parties in the European parliament elections of May 2014 - is clearly an important and dangerous phenomenon, which needs to be analysed, discussed and, if possible, reversed. Whilst much of the British left has focused on the relative success of the radical left, often in new forms, in Greece, Spain, Portugal and, to a lesser extent, the Irish Republic, the predominant trend on the continent since the financial crisis of 2007-08 has been the rise of the far right.
These forces, already renowned for their xenophobia against all immigrants and refugees, as well as for their particular focus on scapegoating Muslims in the period since the attack on the Twin Towers, will undoubtedly have been given a considerable further boost by the recent indiscriminate jihadi massacres in Paris and Brussels, all or most of whose bombers and gunmen seem to have been born and brought up in France or Belgium, in very marked contrast to the Middle Eastern assassins of 9/11. Therefore, the publication of this collection of essays dealing with the far right in seven European countries by a group of Marxists, most, although not all, of whom are members or supporters of groups linked to the Fourth International - or, as some would describe it, the Mandelite version of that International - should be welcomed by anybody on the left with a genuine interest in the struggle against both neo-fascism and other ultra-nationalistic racist currents in European politics; currents which are increasingly influential on this side of the Channel and will become far more so in the event of a Brexit.
Ukraine
It is not my intention to use this review to comment extensively on the successes or failures, the correct decisions or tactical errors, of various national sections of the FI in relation to fascism and the rest of the far right over the last few decades but to concentrate on the contents of the book itself. However, in the light of some very disturbing statements made about Ukraine, after the coup by far-right paramilitaries linked to the Maidan in February 2014, by some prominent members of Socialist Resistance and what appeared to be a majority position of the FI as a whole favouring the current Kiev regime, one cannot help noticing that the Ukraine is not one of the countries discussed here.1
Nonetheless, it is reassuring that the longstanding and highly regarded FI theoretician, Michael Löwy, in his ‘Ten theses on the far right in Europe’ (pp28-33), when making the important point that “A significant part of today’s European far right has a directly fascist and/or neo-Nazi framework”, includes “the Ukrainian parties, Svoboda and Right Sector” (p29), alongside the Hungarian Jobbik and the Greek Golden Dawn. This is in marked contrast to SR’s self-proclaimed experts - at least one of whom has explicitly denied Svoboda’s fascist nature, despite its previous name containing the words ‘Social Nationalist’.
Anders Svensson in the chapter on Sweden also remarks:
The Nazi groups are very violent, and becoming even more so, as they are fuelled by the situation in Ukraine. SVP members have joined the ranks of Svoboda and the Right Sector in Kiev, while members of the SMR fight on the pro-Russian side in eastern Ukraine (p327).
Which is probably a fair point, even if most armed European fascist volunteers are, of course, fighting for Kiev. Manuel Kellner comments in the introduction that “the necessity of self-defence and mutual support against far-right aggressions should be patiently argued for. In Greece, in Hungary and in the Ukraine this is evidently an actual necessity today” (p26). This has a potential ambiguity in relation to Ukraine, especially given his earlier assessment that “An atmosphere of violence and civil war in the Ukraine has led to the emergence of rightwing, semi-fascist and fascist forces on both sides” (p14). However, one would hope that Kellner’s statement about self-defence is supportive of those fighting back against Svoboda, Right Sector and the Azov Battalion by all means necessary, rather than endorsement of any Russophobe bloc with the neo-Banderites, who have carried out such actions as the Odessa massacre of May 2014 and driven the leftists of Borotba underground in western Ukraine.
To return to the countries which do receive dedicated chapters, the point has to be made that they do not receive equal attention. As a result, the chapter entitled ‘France: Pétain’s children’, written by the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste’s anti-fascist commission, is far longer than any other section of the volume. There are similar substantial discrepancies in literary style. Some contributions are written in an academic format - occasionally excessively so in Adam Fabry’s case - while others have a more activist stamp, sometimes one more appropriate to a journalistic piece written for the deadline of an agitational or propagandist weekly paper rather than a bound volume that will be on sale for some years, as with Checchino Antonini.
The absence of any chapter on Germany seems a major gap - the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was already making an impact on German politics when this project was conceived,2 even if its electoral advance has accelerated since the book’s publication. Whilst there must have been some consensus amongst the editor (Leplat) and the more theoretical contributors (Kellner and Löwy) that a chapter on Hungary was urgently needed,3 but no such attempt was made to find a suitable contributor on the Polish case, where the activities of the governing Law and Justice party have aroused concern far beyond the ranks of the radical left. Some might feel that, given Latvia’s regular and shameless celebrations of its citizens’ role in the SS in 1941-45 and systematic persecution of its Russian minority since 1991, it too deserved a chapter, but I would see the major omissions in terms of population numbers and geographical size amongst the EU countries as being Germany and Poland.
‘Populism’
Obviously not all of the far-right parties and movements discussed in this book can be described as fascist - certainly the Danish People’s Party is not defined in such terms in the Danish chapter by Tobias Alm, nor does Phil Hearse claim that the UK Independence Party is fascist in the chapter on the UK. As the NPA commission points out, “it is unacceptable to use the term ‘fascism’ lightly, simply as an insult. The term so used would lose all its political meaning, and its use could even become dangerous” (p165) - I do not think any of the contributors to this volume fall into that trap. However, the question arises as to how one describes xenophobic anti-immigrant and racist parties that are clearly further to the right than the mainstream conservative parties. Anybody familiar with either academic political science writing or journalistic writing about such parties will have frequently seen the word ‘populist’, but there does not appear to be any consensus about the legitimacy of this term amongst the authors of the book.
The sixth of Löwy’s ‘Ten theses’ is devoted to this concept. He condemns it in no uncertain terms, opening the section as follows:
The concept of ‘populism’ employed by certain political scientists, the media and even part of the left is wholly inadequate to explaining the phenomenon, seeking only to sow confusion. If in the Latin America of the 1930s to 60s the term ‘populism’ corresponded to something quite specific - Vargasism, Peronism, etc - its European usage from the 1990s onwards is ever more vague and imprecise (pp30-31).
He also emphasises that “‘Populism’ is also used in a deliberately mystifying fashion by neoliberal ideologues in order to make an amalgam between the far right and the radical left, characterised as ‘rightwing populism’ and ‘leftwing populism’, since they are both opposed to neoliberal policies, ‘Europe’ etc” (p31).
The NPA not only argues that “the term and concept of ‘populism’ do not in any way explain the political behaviour of a party like the FN” (p177) - a reasoned position that it backs up with an intricate empirical history of the FN’s twists and turns. But it also makes the far more general and contentious claim that “the use of the term ‘populism’ smacks of confusion rather than political explanation and it should be left to bourgeois commentators, who are content with simplistic labels rather than analysing the dynamic of things” (pp177-78), which presumably means that it endorses Löwy’s thesis in relation to Europe as a whole, not just France.
However, in sharp contradiction to this unequivocal rejection of the term ‘populism’, two chapters in this book endorsed by the FI via the International Institute for Research and Education employ the term in their titles: Tobias Alm’s ‘Rightwing populism and the Danish People’s Party’; and Alex de Jong’s ‘National populism in the Netherlands’. Moreover, whilst the ‘Notes on contributors’ give the impression that Alm may be an independent left known for his anti-fascist activism and journalism, Alex de Jong is clearly identified as a member of the Dutch section of the FI.
In short not only is there no consensus about ‘populism’ amongst the contributors as a whole, but, more significantly, there is no consensus even amongst those with a clear identification with the FI itself. SR’s Phil Hearse seems to hedge his bets slightly, using ‘populism’ in quotation marks on p52 and without on p58, while frequently employing the term ‘ultra-Thatcherism’ as his main way of describing Ukip - his chapter is called ‘Ukip and the politics of ultra-Thatcherism’. As somebody who has employed the term ‘populism’ in my own writings on Italian politics, despite my awareness of the dangers of the amalgam rightly referred to by Löwy, I am inclined to think that what I take to be the majority position of the FI in this controversy is far too dogmatic.
Germs of fascism
Nonetheless, I think that the NPA has done us all a service in showing that the FN is not a French equivalent of Ukip, but “a political formation carrying within itself the germs of fascism” (p178) and in effect showing that the belated revival of the party’s organisational structures (which had been very badly damaged by the split of 1998-99, when Bruno Mégret took most of the leading cadres with him) under the new leadership of Marine Le Pen makes it more dangerous, not less. This is despite the superficial drive for respectability, which largely consists of dropping any open anti-Semitism and association with holocaust denial - a drive that ultimately left Le Pen with no choice but to expel her own father, who stubbornly persisted in raising these themes.
The FN’s move away from neoliberalism to protectionism and anti-globalisation (including an anti- Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership stance) may have lost it some of the petty bourgeois elements who once formed the mass base of Poujadism. However, what the NPA calls “a ‘national-social’ discourse” (p177) adopted in the 1990s has facilitated its inroads into the French working class. The NPA argues that this turn was a conscious decision in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the FN intellectuals arguing that the Marxist left was finished, so that they could present themselves as the only serious opposition to the system.
Whilst Antonini’s chapter on Italy makes some good points, he probably underestimates the electoral potential of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) and he barely mentions the Lega Nord, which in the last few years, under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, has abandoned its old regionalist emphasis in favour of an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s FN at the European level and which is in a (perhaps temporary) alliance with the FdI on the national level.
Hearse’ s chapter on Ukip is very thoroughly researched, as well as being clearly argued, and correctly avoids the moralistic and rather liberal variant of anti-racism that we so often get from the SWP and Socialist Action in their responses to Ukip. Hearse righty emphasises that “subjective anti-racist feelings cannot provide a barrier unless the racist anti-immigrant discourse is replaced in popular consciousness with an alternative narrative about the nature of the economic and social crisis through which Europe is passing” (p61).
Given the far right’s intense ultra-nationalism, it is always dangerous to draw too close a parallel between extreme rightists in different countries. Whilst Geert Wilders’ Dutch PVV, a party broadly similar to Ukip, has ended up in alliance with the FN at the European level, as Alex de Jong points out, one suspects that Farage is too shrewd an operator to associate himself with continental fascism - he knows only too well why the British National Party’s electoral surge was so short-lived. Perhaps if one is going to draw any parallel, it would be with the Danish People’s Party, so ably discussed by Tobias Alm.
Be that as it may, there is much we can all learn from this wide-ranging transnational survey, despite the reservations expressed earlier. However, if there is ever to be a second edition, I would suggest that the SR comrades pay more attention to proofreading. Whilst there are rather a lot of typographical errors throughout the book, one might have expected somebody to have spotted the one on p315, when a couple of lines about Jobbik in Hungary appear in the Swedish chapter. And there is a discrepancy between the back cover’s claim that the book surveys “seven countries of Europe” and the contents, which actually cover eight countries in detail!
Toby Abse
Notes
1. The SR members whose names have appeared in statements on the Ukraine do not include the named contributors to this book - Fred Leplat and Phil Hearse, so I make no presumption one way or the other as to whether these two comrades share the stance of those who present themselves as SR’s experts on that country.
2. Kellner makes some attempt to discuss the AfD on pp16-19 of his introduction. Nevertheless, it is a bit surprising, given his role in the Internationale Sozialistische Linke, one of the FI’s two organisations in Germany, that he was not encouraged to expand his useful comments into a full-scale chapter on Germany.
3. The author, Adam Fabry, seems connected to the Socialist Workers Party rather than the FI. He has contributed not just to International Socialism, but also to Socialist Worker and prefers phrases like “neoliberal restructuring” in reference to the changes after 1989, when to non-Cliffites the blunter ‘capitalist restoration’ would seem more appropriate.