Islamophobia in Europe: the radical right and the mainstream.

• Author: Kallis, Aristotle
• Position: COMMENTARY

The radical right has been flashing brighter and brighter on the international political radar. As a party family, it is enjoying impressive electoral success in a wide range of countries well beyond its traditional strongholds. In some cases, its parties have managed to become coalition partners or brokers, not only gaining access to power but also exerting influence on state policy. Elsewhere, the radical right remains a potent repository for the growing wave of protest voting even when (and perhaps also because) mainstream political forces have categorically ruled out any prospect of cooperating with them. Beyond organized parties, movements with a populist, hyper-nationalist, nativist ideological profile have become more active in recent years, both on the streets and on the internet, mobilizing support for their divisive and exclusionary political agendas.

The ideology of the international radical right may be extremely hard to pin down and classify, ranging from extreme social conservatism to 'soft' populism, often with liberal hues, to violent activism; and from seemingly respectable, suave agents of parliamentary democracy to groups with para-military characteristics or even clandestine terrorist links. The agents of the radical right seem to always disagree on at least as many issues and strategies as those that they profess to share. Yet, in the last decade, strong points of ideological and political convergence have started to crystallize, turning the radical right into a truly transnational European and occasionally trans-Atlantic force with an ever-stronger presence and impact. The topicality of a new range of issues, such as immigration, international terrorism, national sovereignty, globalization, and the effects of the worldwide economic crisis, have created a political milieu that has allowed the radical right not only to thrive but also to unite its otherwise disparate and fragmented forces. It is telling that, after years of trial and error, a radical right group in the European Parliament finally came into existence in the summer of 2015--with significant absences, to be sure, but also featuring the most formidable political stars of the party. (1)

A visceral opposition to, and demonization of Islam lies at the epicenter of the contemporary radical right's ideological profile and political message. (2) It is on this issue that a sequence of the right's other political priorities intersect: these include putting a brake on growing migration inflows from north Africa and Asia, the post-9/11 paranoia about al-Qaeda and more recently ISIL (the so-called Islamic State), visceral opposition to multiculturalism, fears of (national and 'European') identity dilution, calls for a 'fortress Europe' and the scrapping of the EU's Schengen border zone, as well as concerns about unemployment and falling living standards after the 2008 financial crisis. Islamophobia, a socially constructed and reproduced prejudice against Islam as a religion, culture, and way of life, has deep roots in European societies that, in different forms, go back decades or even centuries. Such roots have also traditionally spanned national and political boundaries. What, however, had been originally linked to a form of xenophobia, racism, and primarily religious intolerance, has been transformed into a profound and acute security concern--fed, radicalized, diffused, and 'normalized' by a widening range of contemporary existential anxieties. The role of the European radical right in refracting public debate about 'Islam' and 'Europe' through a securitization prism is central to this discussion; however, it should not detract from the ways in which the dominant, 'mainstream' culture has increasingly embraced positions openly hostile to Islam and Muslim communities. The recent unprecedented Islamophobic outburst of the (currently) frontrunner Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the USA, going as far as urging a blanket ban on all Muslims who attempt to enter the country, should serve as a stark reminder that a novel form of (in)security-obsessed Islamophobia has firmly shifted to the political and social mainstream in many western societies. (3)

The Radical Right and Islamophobia: (Some) Good and (Much) Not-so-good News

The radical right has a long history of visceral opposition to Islam and demonization of Muslims. In the 1980s and 1990s, rising stars of the radical right such as Filip Dewinter of the then Flemish Block (VNV), Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French Front National, and Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, used the ideological trope of 'ethno-pluralism' (4) in order to attack Islam as allegedly alien, inassimilable, and dangerous to 'European' liberal culture. The idea that cultures are geographically-bound and that citizenship should be restricted to a narrow, culturally/ethnically homogeneous group, became the bedrock of the new radical right's critique of liberal multiculturalism and immigration, with the added benefit that ethno-pluralism's emphasis on culture and identity appeared to jettison the old, discredited idea of racial inequality. In 2005, Dewinter rejected the accusation that the radical right is either racist or xenophobic, but had no problem declaring 'Islamophobia' as a legitimate ideological feature of the VNV. (5) Four years later, Dewinter again described Islamophobia as 'a duty' for European citizens, calling 'moderate' Islam 'a multicultural illusion.'6 The Islamophobic rhetoric of radical right parties has predictably grown ever since--with every terrorist incident perpetrated in the name of Islam, with every wave of immigration, with every negative data about unemployment and pressure on social services, with every...