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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34932 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Far-right parties on the rise across Europe.

That's a headline we've all read many times in the past decade, is now really different? There are many clips around the internet of the race riots in France, with this Reddit thread showing a compilation of some. It's hard to gauge how serious the riots are, or if it's relatively isolated to a few blocks in a couple cities and these compilations make the situation appear worse than it actually is. The words of Eric Zemmour paint a dire picture:

We are in the early stages of a civil war. It’s an ethnic war. We can see clearly that it’s a race war. We see what forces are involved. We need someone determined and firm. … The problem, above all, is the number [of immigrants].

The reason I think the BBC article is noteworthy, most of all, is because it observes that contrary to the previous bouts of nationalistic populism that inspired Brexit and Euroskepticism, this surge in far-right political support seems to be dovetailing with support for the EU:

While at the same time, a number of far-right parties in Europe have intentionally moved more towards the political centre, hoping to entice more centrist voters.

Mark Leonard cites far-right relations with the EU as another example of their 'centrification'.

You may remember, after the UK's Brexit vote in 2016 that Brussels feared a domino effect - Frexit (France leaving the EU), Dexit (Denmark leaving the EU), Italexit (Italy leaving the EU) and more.

Many European countries had deeply Eurosceptic populist parties doing well at the time but over the years those parties have felt obliged to stop agitating to leave the EU or even its euro currency.

That seemed too radical for a lot of European voters...

Polls suggest the EU is more popular amongst Europeans at the moment than it has been for years.

And so far right parties now speak about reforming the EU, rather than leaving it. And they're predicted to perform strongly in next year's elections for the European parliament.

Paris-based Director of Institut Montaigne's Europe Programme Georgina Wright told me she believes the far-right renaissance in Europe is largely down to dissatisfaction with the political mainstream. Currently in Germany, 1 in 5 voters say they're unhappy with their coalition government, for example.

Wright said many voters in Europe are attracted by the outspokenness of parties on the far-right and there's tangible frustration that traditional politicians don't appear to have clear answers in 3 key areas of life:

  1. Issues linked to identity - a fear of open borders and an erosion of national identity and traditional values
  1. Economics - a rejection of globalisation and resentment that children and grandchildren aren't assured a better future
  1. Social justice - a feeling that national governments are not in control of the rules that govern the lives of citizens

I do not agree with Mark Leonard that far-right relations with the EU are an example of the centrification of the far-right, it rather represents a change in strategy.

I've seen it asked here, what would be the pathway for political or cultural victory of the radical right? This is it- these energies being transformed into a positive and ambitious political project that surfs the wave of globalization and European integration. In hindsight it seems like such a bad strategy for the far right to advocate stepping away from a project like this, and the failure of Brexit to produce any meaningful change is, along with Trumpism, proof of the failure of petty nationalistic populism. If you blame the EU for immigration you don't leave the EU, you go for European parliament.

Journalists have spent many years hand-wringing over the Euroskepticism being influenced by right-wing politics, but I think they will find the prospect of the EU being reformed by a pro-EU radical right to be much more worrisome- and effective at bringing real change.

Edit: Police Unions are also describing the situation as dire:

Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm doesn’t go far enough. It must be imposed.

Re-establishing order in the republic and putting those arrested somewhere they can do no harm must be the only political signals to send out.

Our colleagues, like the majority of the public, can no longer have the law laid down to them by a violent minority.

This is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these ‘vermin’. To submit, to capitulate, and to give them pleasure by laying down weapons are not solutions, given the gravity of the situation.

They said: “Today, police officers are at the frontline because we are at war.” And they warned the government that, unless officers are given yet greater legal protections and more resources in the future, “tomorrow, we will be in resistance”.

Frankly, I'm deeply pessimistic on the migration question. Yes, the overton window has moved to the right in the sense that it is now possible to harshly criticize mass migration in public now, but anything that would actually solve it is still completely politically impossible. What would be the bare minimum a serious program intending to stop Europe's demographic shift look like? Step 1 would obviously be to stop new arrivals, i.e a complete halt of non-EU migration, or at the very least African and Middle Eastern migration.

The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore. Even if a far-right party can take power in any given European country, and even if they sincerely want to halt migration, there is an entire European judiciary that has decided that the right of muslims to come here en masse is a human right, but Europeans not having their cities being made unlivable by them and their progeny is not a human right. As such, any serious attempt to stop migration is stillborn. To actually solve the issue, you would need either a very throughout rework or abolition of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. But even admitting this out loud is still completely outside of the overton window. It is a political impossibility.

It is tragic, but the well-intended reaction to world war 2 will prove to be Western Europe's doom.

The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore.

Not true. Denmark's Social Democrats, of all people, pulled it off.

Talk about channeling Nixon going to China.

Have they though? I know the socdems there have been making a lot of noise about halting mass migration, but to which extent have the actually succeeded? Mind, I'm not trying to say you're wrong here, I'm genuinely curious. if this site is to be believed, the Denmark's net migration rate has barely budged since 2019, but net migration rate isn't the stat I'm interested in as it includes inter-EU migration.

If they've succeeded, what's been their secret sauce? How have they managed to get out of getting flooded with refugees without getting slapped down by some EU court? Is what they've been doing scalable to the rest of the EU, or are they basically just pushing the problem to other EU countries?

I've spent some time now looking for the data, and it's quite a lot harder to parse than I expected. There's undeniably been a huge drop in the asylum flow, but the effects of the 2019 socdem crackdown are obscured by the natural drop from the absurd mid-2010s highs, Covid, and now Ukraine. Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.

As for the secret sauce... my pet theory is that when the socdem's focus shifted leading up to 2019, they were uniquely positioned as having neither the ideology nor the monetary incentives (socdems are generally not liked in the circles that benefit from cheap labor) propping up the migration-friendly stance of their government.

Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.

Apparently most Ukrainians are not even applying for asylum: "as of 25 March 28 000 people have arrived from Ukraine and registered in Denmark. 2 000 of these have applied for asylum and are now accommodated in asylum centres". It seems like this is the result of a special law which grants them work, schooling and welfare rights without the need to gain citizenship through the asylum process.

Indeed, IIRC lots of euro countries declared that they would allow Ukrainians to move to their countries, no questions asked, and that they didn’t need to apply for asylum.

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