Nikola Vukobratović: The Rise of a Nationalist Europe?: A Balkans Perspective

Seminar: "Nationalism, Populism, and the New Right"
MAZ, Hatzova 16, Zagreb, 19.11.2017., 11h
Moderator: Marko Kostanić

Nikola Vukobratović: The Rise of a Nationalist Europe?: A Balkans Perspective

In the early 1990s, the Balkans and especially former Yugoslavia have often been presented as a hotbed of ethnic nationalism and the far-right. As the rest of the continent was seemingly moving towards cosmopolitan unity, abandoning ethnic and national selfishness, as well as the false promises of ideology, the Balkans looked like an exception from the rule. The fall of Yugoslavia and the wars of its succession were interpreted as petty bickering of local tribes not yet fully integrated in the post-nationalist World. The solution was therefore sought in humanitarian interventions and (sometimes) forced processes of "Europeisation". However, even before these processes were fully completed, nationalism started to look less as an atavism in the least developed parts of the continent, and more as a real danger in the very heart of Europe. Not just in the "more successful" post-socialist countries (Central Europe), but even in "Old Europe", it was noticed that nationalism was once again taking center-stage. This new context presents a challenge of reinterpreting the role of nationalism in Europe, and especially in the periphery of the EU and the Balkans. What are the similarities and differences between nationalist politics and tendencies in the Balkans, Central Europe and the West? To which systemic contradictions are they trying to produce an answer to? And what are the possible democratic and socialist answers to it? These will be some of the questions raised in the presentation.

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Nationalism, Populism, and the New Right

The political landscape of Europe (and beyond) in the years since the financial and economic crisis of 2007/2008 has been marked by the rise of right-wing forces. Public debates around astronomic public rescue packages for private financial institutions and the austerity measures accompanying them did, counter to what many on the left may have expected, not shift public opinion significantly towards left positions. Rather, it was often the populist right that proved increasingly successful in articulating economic and social anxieties into a discourse of conceptually vague anti-elitism combined with xenophobia, aggressive social chauvinism and – especially in the eastern parts of Europe – the reassertion of regressive social norms regarding women's rights and the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities. The outbreak of the so-called "refugee crisis" strengthened this trend, effectively turning the crisis narrative into one of besieged national and cultural identities, threatened by the influx of foreign – predominantly Muslim – populations. The electoral successes of parties such as Front Nacional in France and AfD in Germany signify the increasing normalization of formerly fringe political options within the parliaments of central core countries of the EU.

Many on the left have interpreted these phenomena as symptoms of the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. But even if we accept this as a broad diagnosis, the question remains as to why these reactions so often take such reactionary forms. Much like the rise of fascism in the interwar period, the current rise of right-wing forces presents a significant challenge to Marxist (or more broadly – materialist) approaches, insofar as these assert the explanatory centrality of class for social and political processes. Current political developments seem to once again drive home the fact that theoretical invocations of class as unifying social category do not necessarily correlate to a unifying experience of class subjects. The fact that the class experience of the crisis and its reverberations has proven to be fractured along "identitarian" fault lines or, at the very least, allowed its political articulation in divisive and deeply regressive terms presents both a theoretical and political challenge the left cannot afford to ignore. The challenge to theoretically come to terms with the rise of a new, aggressive right, entails the challenge of critically reassessing the explanatory instruments of the left, above all the question of the complex relation between structural factors, lived experience and political articulation.

Programme of Centre for Labour Studies is financed by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe