In the wake of xenophobia: the new racism in Europe

UN Chronicle, Sept, 2007 by Glyn Ford

Europe was torn apart by fascism in the 1930s, and when the Second World War ended in 1945, remnants of extreme right parties re-emerged on the margins of politics. By the 1980s, when the forgetting had started, some began to pick up protest votes as immigrants became an issue, driven by tabloid journalists looking for a cheap story.

In the new millennium, there is a step change with new political racism in Europe. For one, Jewish conspiracy and Holocaust denial have given way to the clash of civilizations and Islamic fundamentalism. Secondly, traditionally fascist right-wing parties have chosen to dilute their message and their membership to "fascist light". No longer pure fascist parties, they have become right-wing populist parties, who embrace a broad church membership that stretches from ideological fascists to racists, xenophobes and the alienated working-class whites. They now use a language of nation and tradition, sovereignty and community, rather than eugenics, extermination and fatherland. Thirdly, they are deliberately narrowing the gap between themselves and traditional democratic parties as they dress down their rhetoric, and traditional parties steal these sound bites for electoral advantage as the new racist language leaks into the mainstream. Aided and abetted by Europe's Eastern widening, which has not proved a tool for tolerance, prejudices suppressed for decades by communist regimes have re-emerged to underpin new quirky racist, xenophobic and bigoted politicians and parties.

One example of the success of these new strategies in Europe is the introduction of new legislation to enforce tolerance, where it was once given freely. Another is that the extreme right has now the numbers and self-confidence to come out officially as a European political group. The establishment in 2007 of the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS) group within the European Parliament saw the extreme right and racist parties from Austria, Belgium, France and Italy, as well as Bulgaria and Romania--the two most recent accession countries--link up, along with an orphan Member of the European Parliament (MEP), who was expelled from the United Kingdom Independence Party not for his views but because of allegations of benefit fraud.

A reflection of current trends is that there are more racist politicians among the current 785 MEPs than members representing the 15 million ethnic minorities and third-country nationals living in European Union (EU) countries, making them the Union's eighth largest country out of 27. The 19 members of the ITS group include leading lights of extreme right-wing parties across Europe and, despite the rhetoric, their real views are not hard to find. The ITS leader is French MEP Bruno Gollinisch, Deputy Leader of Jean Marie Le Pen's Front National, who was charged in January 2007 with Holocaust denial. Andreas Moelzer was the brains behind the success of Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party, the same Haider who refused to condemn a terrorist bombing that killed four Roma. Frank Vanhecke is a leader of the Flemish Vlaams Belang party, which demands that immigrants must totally assimilate into Western culture or be repatriated. Yet all three are trying to reposition the ITS, claiming they are within the mainstream of European politics. One sign of this rebranding is the rejection of the "Europe of the Fatherlands" name for the group, with its echoes of Hitler and the Nazis, despite its earlier use for the joint newsletter of the majority of its current membership.

The rebranding had been driven by the success of far-right parties in Austria, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands, where toning down public intolerance has paid dividends in the ballot box and in their acceptability as coalition partners for mainstream parties. At the European level, two have been so successful in escaping their neo-fascist history and roots, that they have joined the more acceptable and less controversial Union for a Europe of Nations in the Parliament. UEN is an incoherent mix of hard-right and moderate right-wing parties in a marriage of convenience, trading respectability for influence. The group includes the former neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) Party, founded by Giorgio Almirante, former Chief of Cabinet for the Minister of Propaganda in the infamous Salo Republic, relabelled as Alleanza Nazionale, alongside the deeply homophobic Liga Polskich Rodzin (LPR) or League of Polish Families, the anti-immigration party Dansk Folkeparti (the Danish Peoples Party) and Ireland's Fianna Fail.

Europe is a reflection of domestic success. In 2002, Le Pen, who believes the Nazi occupation of France was "essentially benign" despite the deaths of 70,000 French Jews in concentration camps, came second in the presidential election. In the 2007 election, his support was nearly halved, not because of his failure but because of his success in 2002. The other candidates stole his rhetoric and his voters, and were tough on immigration and crime, but not on its causes, while signalling in their opposition to Turkish membership in the EU that the future limits of Europe were to be religious rather than geographical.