Tag Archives: EU

Blog, Right-wing Populism

Alex de Jong: Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition

Far-right political leader Geert Wilders was convicted of inciting hatred against Moroccans when he called them “scum” at an election rally in 2016. [GETTY]

Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his Islamophobia, and demands for, among other thing, the closing of all mosques in The Netherlands.

Crucial to his victory is the radicalisation of former supporters of the mainstream conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. As Dutch news satire website De Speld explained, VVD’s new leader Dilan Yesilgöz had run an excellent campaign…for Wilders.

Rutte had triggered the fall of his own coalition-government by demanding further restrictions on refugee rights that were unacceptable for part of his coalition. The VVD hoped the elections would be dominated by migration, and not other urgent issues such as the country’s housing crisis and the rising cost of living.

During the campaign, Yesilgöz exaggerated the supposed ease with which refugees enter the Netherlands. The main beneficiary of this tactic ended up being the PVV, the political force that for a decade-and-half built its political profile on hostility towards migrants.

The VVD lost 10 seats, leaving them with 24. Of the new PVV voters, one out of four previously voted for VVD.

Like many of his voters, Wilders is a product of the right-wing establishment. In the early nineties he worked for the VVD and in 1998 he represented the party in parliament. He also wrote speeches for the future European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, a pioneer in the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric regarding the West and Muslim societies in Dutch politics.

Wilders eventually left the VVD in 2004, partly because they would not categorically oppose Turkey joining the European Union.

Since founding the PVV in 2006, Wilders gathered a loyal base; almost 80% of those who voted for him in the previous national elections, did so again last month. Whilst the PVV largely rallied support as an opposition to Rutte, it is important to highlight that Wilders is not a political newcomer. Voters showed up for a seasoned politician who for years has remained consistent in his main policies. His popularity therefore shows how mainstream Islamophobia has become in The Netherlands.

Indeed, the PVV’s manifesto presented the racist and authoritarian positions that characterise the party. Pledges ranged from the petty revoking of the government’s apologies for the role played by the Dutch state in slavery, to the deportation of criminals with double nationality, to the deployment of the army against ‘street scum’, and the closing of borders for refugees and preventive arrests of ‘jihadist sympathisers’. Particularly drastic was Wilders’ long-standing insistence on ‘no Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques’.

However, it is not only racist and xenophobic politics that has attracted voters to the PVV. Wilders was originally an explicit supporter of neoliberal economic policies but for the past decade, his party increasingly posed as defenders of the welfare state. The PVV programme contained seemingly progressive positions, such as raising the minimum wage, lowering healthcare costs, and returning the retirement age from 67 to 65.

Though such rhetoric is contradicted by the party’s actions.

In his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), Wilders described the role of the PVV as supporting the austerity plans of Rutte’s first cabinet in return for measures to ‘restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and insist on the integration of immigrants’. In parliament, the PVV introduced a proposal to make collective bargaining agreements no longer binding, and supported further restrictions to access to social security.

Not to mention, today the PVV seeks to form a government with the VVD – the party that for the last decade headed the government’s implementation of neoliberal measures that they claim to oppose.

Whilst a substantial number of Wilders’ voters are certainly committed to far-right politics, part of his appeal is that he has been able to pose as an opposition force to an establishment that included the left-wing parties like the Labour Party.

In an attempt to present itself as a legitimate party that could govern, Labour entered a coalition headed by Rutte back in 2012 after they had won close to 25% of votes. They remained despite the deeply unpopular harsh austerity measures that were implemented, and even ran a former minister in the government as the candidate on a joint Labour/Greens ticket.

The result was a modest advance mostly through votes coming from the centre and other left-wing parties, but it hardly attracted new voters. In the elections last month Labour/Greens won 25 seats, and became the second largest party, but finished far behind Wilders.

Another error made by parts of the Dutch left is that anti-racism and migrants rights are considered secondary to social-economic issues. However, as the recent election dramatically showed, these are incredibly decisive issues in Dutch politics.

When Wilders’ electoral victory was announced, hastily organised protests took place in some cities. A coalition of progressive groups called a national demonstration in defence of civil liberties, freedom of religion and human rights. Such protests are of course not only important, but urgent because they make visible the opposition to Wilders’ agenda and show solidarity with groups that are threatened, especially Muslims.

After all, the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy shows what can happen when the far-right is in power; it may moderate some of its rhetoric, but it will not abandon its authoritarian and nativist project.

But protests alone are not enough. For years, Wilders pushed the mainstream to the right, pulling voters to his side. The Dutch left can learn something from this; instead of pandering the right, it needs to pressure them. As for rebuilding a left that can effectively pressure the centre and win new supporters, this will need to be a long term project.

What is needed now more than ever is a left that sees itself not as a government-in-waiting but as an opposition force.

Originally published in The New Arab. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/geert-wilders-left-needs-be-real-opposition

Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam, Netherlands and editor of the Dutch socialist website Grenzeloos.org.

Cite as: de Jong, Alex 2023 “Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition” Focaalblog 18 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/18/alex-de-jong-geert-wilders-election-victory-the-left-must-concern-itself-with-being-a-real-opposition/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: War: New Times

It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington D.C originally expected – or ten weeks, as the pessimists thought. It may well extend to ten months and possibly morph into another ‘forever war’ (both hot and cold).

We are therefore turning our original FocaalBlog discussion, launched in the very first days of the war, into a rolling Feature that is open for any genre of submission: ethnographical, historical, theoretical, global.

So, this is an open call: we invite further contributions.

However, given the sprawling passions around this topic and the massive ideology production and propaganda on all sides, we emphasize that at FocaalBlog we continue to honor the elementary distinctions between description, explanation, historical contextualization, and moral justification. We are not in the business of the latter, and none of our authors engages in it.

A white man wearing a gray beanie and black tracksuit, with a cigarette in his mouth, carries a small dog and a grocery sack down a pathway surrounded by trash and rubble. A larger dog walks behind him and others follow in the distance.
Image 1: Bucha after Russian invasion, photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak

We remain deeply and intimately interested not only in what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, and with Ukrainian and Russian citizens of all sorts – including the young and better educated current refugees into the EU as well as the older vulnerable people who remain behind in the war torn villages and suburbs without food or water – but also in the critique of war, militarism, imperialism, violence, primitive accumulation, ideology, nationalism, fascism, racism, and the shifting power fields of the ever less liberal global order in which this war is embedded, into which it feeds, and which it may accelerate.

This involves any type of critique of all the main actors in this cruel and utterly dangerous drama started by Putin. There is no doubt, this is Putin’s war. While this is so in a juridical sense, we should carefully consider that the very possibility of this war, with the exact same stated reasons and objectives from the side of Russia (minus the ethno-essentialism), was already discussed between US Secretary of State James Baker and (former) President Gorbachev in 1992, long before Putin came on stage (Sarotte 2021). Thus, the critique also continues to include prominently the US, the EU, and NATO.

There are loud and self-advertised NATO anthropologists around these days who imagine that NATO can save us from the abys and must have been the solution all along. They should never forget this: while NATO was steadily expanding in Eastward direction towards Russian borders (CEE, Georgia, Ukraine), it was simultaneously waging war for one and a half decade in the Middle East, invading, occupying, and destroying countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, at the cost of close to a million official deaths (on Yemen, a proxy war, we keep counting). The US and the UK had acted on transparent lies and treacherous accusations, had blatantly ignored the United Nations, and pushed aside the principled objections against their aggression within NATO/the West. The unprecedented and globe spanning anti-war demonstrations of early 2003 made no impression whatsoever. Russia, not averse to superpower aspirations of its own, duly took note (as did China): this is apparently allowed. We as anthropologists and citizens (mostly) of the Western world do not have the moral luxury to forget this. This is ‘hard’ knowledge, and it is an anthropological sine qua non for understanding the contemporary world order.

We are writing almost two months into the violence (19 April 2022). The UN has openly acknowledged that a majority of the more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees will probably never actually ‘go home’ again. In the centers of war planning, it is also now gradually accepted that the expected but failed Russian blitz into Ukraine, which in Russia itself was not allowed to be called a war, is sliding unstoppably into a ‘proxy war’ between Russia and NATO, with heavy and advanced weapons deployed on both sides and both military colossuses determined not to lose. Ukrainians continue to heroically play their part and to actively imagine, and being made to imagine, that it is a war for their ‘sovereignty and freedom’. At some point, the distance between these abstract and lofty desires and the raw reality of death, destruction, and mass out-migration will for some begin to feel alienating. After the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser on 16 April even TV commentators in Moscow, in emotional outbursts, are now allowed to call this a war. Patriarch Kiril of the Russian Orthodox church continues to defend the holy war of Mother Russia against the sinful West of the LGBT’s and the gay parades. Meanwhile, in a militarily surrounded and levelled Mariupol, the hard Right Azov Brigade, or what is left of it, refuses to give up its arms and has retreated into the underground tunnel complexes of the giant Azov Steel complex. They are betting that the massive soviet heritage of industrial labor they had so ardently wished to erase ideologically during the ‘de-communization’ campaigns and memory wars after the 2014 Maidan revolution, might in the end offer them some paradoxical protection. President Zelensky, chosen in 2019 on a platform that resolutely rejected the polarizing identarian logic of the nationalist-civilizational cleavages of Ukraine’s antagonistic governmental elites (‘European Ukraine’ versus ‘Russian’), saw his program quickly collapse in the face of determined right wing nationalist opposition, such as from the members and supporters of the Azov Brigade. The Minsk 2 peace process then all but stalled. Zelensky has now announced that if these circa 2000 national heroes of Ukraine get killed in the Azov Steel tunnels, there cannot be any peace negotiations and Ukraine must fight for final victory. All the actors are overwhelmed by the logic of war.  

Outside of the immediate theatre, much of the Global South and all the BRICS have refused to support the Western condemnation and isolation of Russia, which they find sanctimonious. The spiking inflation in the prices of energy and food probably mean that, after the massive build-up of pandemic related debt, many of these postcolonial nations are going to face simultaneous famine and debt-defaults by the end of the year, with likely resounding political consequences. The West, meanwhile, bootstrapping itself out of the embarrassing Afghanistan debacle of just half a year ago, and finding itself viscerally surprised about its own sudden unity, has accepted President Zelensky as the brave contemporary embodiment of its own historical ideals of liberty and freedom, so under siege lately by domestic ‘populism’. It has launched unprecedented financial punishment on Russia – deploying its continued exclusive control over financial circuits and values – and is seeking to isolate and cut down Russia for the long term by banning its oil and gas while claiming to speed up its own green transition. China, clearly, is far from ready to impose a Bismarckian moment (the Berlin conference of 1885 that carved up the world for colonialism) and seems willing to remain modestly supportive of the Russian side – indeed, Putin started his war directly after meeting privately with Xi. There is no doubt that the US is waging its proxy war also with an eye on teaching China what can happen if it does not abide by Western rules. Western Central Banks, meanwhile, faced with the highest inflation in four decades, revert to an earlier monetary normal, and are beginning to push up the interest rates, loosely talking about ‘a repeat of stagflation’ (a misplaced comparison with the 1970s), a possible ‘Volcker moment’, and a ‘necessary economic recession’. Global South and other big debtors are forewarned. Donald Trump is waiting rather quietly in the wings, as is Marine Le Pen, both (former?) admirers and clients of Vladimir Putin.

The palimpsest is utterly scary, full of actual and potential future violence, extremely volatile and dynamic, and full of powerful contradictions. We need to think, discover, describe, and analyze. On the ground and off the ground. New Times.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Editor at Large of Focaal Journal and FocaalBlog.

References

Sarotte, M.E. 2021. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. New Haven: Yale U.P

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2022. ‟War: New Times.‟ FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Covid19 is producing a crisis – both sanitary and economic – of global structural proportions, threatening the very existence of society as we know it. All precarious segments of society have become more precarious. But even before now, a growing precariat, eating into larger and larger segments of the middle classes, was emerging. Isolation, alienation, precaritization are not a novelty. Looking at the PrecAnthro/Easa survey (Fotta, Ivancheva, Pernes, 2020), one can see that the transformations of the academic system are an integral part of the process of middle class precaritization that started long before the current crisis.

I am an unemployed anthropologist (and have been so for more than two years). I am also a member of the PrecAnthro collective/union. At the EASA conference of 2018 I had the pleasure to be part of Alice Tilche’s initiative to bring together junior and senior anthropologists (precarious and otherwise) to reflect critically on the implications of the current trend of funding academic research through “big projects” (see Tilche and Loperfido, 2019). Before then, I had been a “privileged” (Matos, 2019) precarious researcher, employed as a postdoc in one of those big projects. For four years, I enjoyed the chance to participate in a solidly funded team under the expert coordination of a senior researcher who was also able to embed our collective research among her high level contacts in global anthropology. Despite fundamentally benefitting from having been part of a “big project”, I would like to use my space here to express a critical stance on what seems to have become one of the hegemonic mechanisms of research funding in the European and global arena.

The “big project” trend relates directly to the occupational transformations within social anthropology highlighted by the survey: precaritization, constant competition over funding, growing separation between research and teaching, vertical polarisation of academic hierarchies, de-professionalization of academic labor through multiple contracts, the imperatives of – often restless – international mobility, to cite but a few.

In the 1990s, the extension of New Public Management policies to the university system enforced the managerialization of administrations, introduced performance requirements, and set up unbridled competition. What emerged was a new trans-nationalized educational arena, in which “excellence” and “competition” became not only fundamental key words and real-world access keys to tenured careers. As an effect, an increasing number of tenured positions were proletarianized as a collective body, “and the number of short term or part time contracts at major institutions increased (with the concomitant participation of a handful of highly paid stars)”, as a worried Bill Readings had already stated 25 years ago (Readings 1996: 1). He noted how the university was beginning to be spoken of in the idiom of “excellence” rather than of “culture”. His explanation was that “the university no longer has to safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation-state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself” (Readings 1996:13).

About ten years later, the establishment of the European Research Council was saluted as “a European Champions League” (Winnacker 2008: 126), and the new way of funding research through big grants was established as part of the EU’s 7th framework program. Here again, “individual excellence” and “competition as the prerequisite for the formation of excellence” were becoming key principles in overcoming the “startling parochialism fostered in Europe by the reality of Nation States” (Winnacker: 124-25).

In much less enthusiastic terms, PrecAnthro’s action has focused on those very processes of increased internationalisation, escalating competition, and the new global imperative of “excellence”. With the above-mentioned event at the EASA conference 2018, we wanted to problematize the ways in which the international academic arena has been transformed into a market, where “scholars who are able to secure large grants have become football stars openly traded in the academic league” (Tilche, Loperfido, 2019:111).  A “Champions League”, indeed. Yet, on the dark side of that seemingly glamorous moon, a less visible academic precariat silently took shap; and became exposed to all the profound challenges and hardships in academic careers and personal life that the EASA/PrecAnthro report brings to light for the EASA membership community.

From all the above, I can only infer a general decline in the perception of the value of public institutions as something being endowed with more than just ‘competition’, such as social equality and cultural reproduction. Certainly, we all love excellent scholarship. Yet, there is a difference between a public action that promotes academic excellence so that it helps everybody to improve their scholarship, and an excellence that comes as a single-minded competition mechanism where only those that already have the label of excellence will benefit. 

Personally, I did benefit from the opportunities offered by participation in a big international grant. But we should refuse to assess collective problems on the grounds of our personal interests only. If we are to do something about “the current tragedy of anthropology as a discipline” (Kapferer, 2018) – and these are, once again, words from a time before the current pandemic – it is important ask, from a political and economic angle, where the public money that I benefitted from did not go. How many more non-tenured positions, how many more fixed-term research contracts and how many part-time teaching contracts does each €2,5 million grant produce? Who shoulders the costs of those grants? The PrecAnthro survey offers important answers to these questions. Now, what happens if we put together the scary picture portrayed by that survey prior to the current pandemic with the projections we have on the impact of Covid19 on the global economy and precarity in the academy in particular? There is enough evidence now for an honest and serious discussion on social justice; and to question where the current organisation of “big grant” transnational research funding fits into the escalating inequality in academia.

Giacomo Loperfido is an independent researcher, member of PrecAnthro. He is currently working on his first monograph, A Birth of Neo-fascism: Cultural Identities, the State, and the Politics of Marginality in Italy, thanks to the generous help of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, CH.

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Ivancheva, Mariya, Pernes, Raluca. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Kapferer, Bruce. 2018. “The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 9 July. www.focaalblog.com/2018/07/09/bruce-kapferer-the-hau-complicity-an-event-in-the-crisis-of-anthropology.

Matos, Patricia, 2019. “Precarious Privilege. Confronting Material and Moral Dispossession”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117.

Readings, Bill, 1996, The University in Ruins. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Tilche, Alice, Loperfido, Giacomo, 2019. “The Return of Armchair Anthropology? Debating the Ethics and Politics of Big Projects”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117

Winnacker, Ernst-Ludwig, 2008. “On Excellence Through Competition”, European Educational Research Journal, 7:2, 124-30.

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2021. “On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/giacomo-loperfido-on-excellence-precarity-and-the-uses-of-public-money/

Anthropologists on the EU at 60, Features

Cris Shore: What is a European?: Solidarity, symbols, and the politics of exclusion

This post is part of a feature on anthropologists on the EU at 60, moderated and edited by Don Kalb (Central European University and University of Bergen).

Earlier this year, a curious incident occurred in Auckland that ignited a heated debate over the meaning of the term “European.” A new student club calling itself the Auckland University European Students Association announced it was withdrawing its applications to affiliate to the university on the eve of the new semester’s orientation week. The withdrawal came after members of the club were threated with violence and accused by people both on and off campus of racism. This controversy erupted because of the images posted on the group’s website, including Celtic symbols used by US white supremacists and paintings depicting the unification of Germany. The group’s Facebook page included an image of Captain Cook and the motto “our pride is our honour and loyalty,” a phrase reminiscent of the Nazi SS slogan, “my honour is called loyalty.”

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Anthropologists on the EU at 60, Features

Michal Buchowski: Our coveted Europe

This post is part of a feature on anthropologists on the EU at 60, moderated and edited by Don Kalb (Central European University and University of Bergen).

Today’s political map of the world, and of Europe in particular, is not the same as in the recent past. Until only a hundred years ago, most states that we now take for granted did not exist. In Central and Eastern Europe, where I happen to come from, the four great empires of Russia, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans dominated. By the beginning of World War I, only the Ottoman Empire was in recession. A veritable revolution of the political map of Europe came about as a result of WWI when new nation-states were established in Central and Eastern Europe. World War II moved some states westward. The collapse of the Soviet bloc led to the emergence of several new polities. In the newly emerged space of postsocialist Europe, the number of nation-states rose from 9 to 20, including the European part of Kazakhstan. East Germany was the only polity that integrated with another state to form a bigger country. Five countries remained untouched: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The creation and expansion of the hybrid political body of the European Union represents in this perspective a counter-project to the ongoing political fragmentation that took place in this part of the continent over the past hundred years.

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Anthropologists on the EU at 60, Features

Don Kalb: The EU at 60: the Treaty of Rome is a smoke screen

This post is part of a feature on anthropologists on the EU at 60, moderated and edited by Don Kalb (Central European University and University of Bergen).

The EU commemorates its 60th birthday today (25 March 2017), at a time when the institution is more contested than ever. The 1957 Treaty of Rome was an indisputable step toward undergirding the Western part of the continent of Europe with a set of international institutions that would help to secure peace, prosperity, and shared social citizenship—the sort of internationalism that had been urged by the likes of Keynes and Monnet long before the war. This happened against a historical background of half a century of deep, recurrent crisis, escalating class conflict, rivalry, and revenge that had unleashed industrialized destruction on an unprecedented scale. Without any irony, therefore, two loud cheers, please, for the Treaty of Rome and what it sought to secure. This is the basis of what majorities on the continent still like to imagine, defend, and wish to become part of, as their common and cherished symbolic home.

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Anthropologists on the EU at 60, Features

Chris Hann: Beleaguered pseudo-continent: Happy birthday, Europe!

This post is part of a feature on anthropologists on the EU at 60, moderated and edited by Don Kalb (Central European University and University of Bergen).

Sixty this month, the European Union is almost as old as I am. Should we, in March 2017, celebrate a beacon of liberal-democratic sanity between the populists of Washington and London to the West and those of Ankara and Moscow to the East? Or is it time to pension off the construction launched with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, since it has come to violate basic desiderata of economic efficiency and equity, as well as democratic legitimacy?

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Anthropologists on the EU at 60, Features

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Norway and the transformation of the EU

This post is part of a feature on anthropologists on the EU at 60, moderated and edited by Don Kalb (Central European University and University of Bergen).

In Norway, the second referendum over EU membership in 1994 resulted in almost the exact same figures as the first one, back in 1972. The proposal to join the European Union—backed by the two largest parties (Labour and Conservatives), the main newspapers, and the private sector—was defeated, admittedly by a narrow margin—52 percent against 48 percent—but defeated nonetheless. I found myself in a tiny minority, as a left-of-center intellectual favorable to membership in the union, losing a few friends in the process. In Norway, leftist movements have been staunch nationalists for decades, and the very term “union” had unfortunate connotations in that it recalled the unpopular, enforced union with Sweden that lasted from 1814 to 1905. A widespread view also held that the EU was mainly an economic union whose sole beneficiaries were the already rich and powerful.

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Blog

Bruce Kapferer: Brexit and Remain: A pox on all their houses

A crisis is always good for humor. The English satirical magazine Private Eye caught the spirit of uncertainty and the possible tragedy of Brexit—that many of those who voted for it may have intensified their abjection as a result. One spoof comment for The Daily Turkeygraph (a composite of the conservative Daily Mail and Telegraph papers) written by Jeremy Paxo (a reference to the news commentator Jeremy Paxman, also a brand of stuffing mix) was headlined “TURKEYS VOTE FOR CHRISTMAS IN REFERENDUM CLIFFHANGE.R. Another for The Indepandent (sic, The Independent, a liberal/conservative paper) headlined “BRITAIN VOTES TO LEAVE FRYING PAN AND JUMP INTO FIRE.”
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