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Political Identification in Europe

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Political Identification in Europe: Community in Crisis?

Edited by

Amanda Machin

University of Witten-Herdecke, Germany

And

Nadine Meidert

Zeppelin University, Germany

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2021

Editorial matter and selection copyright © 2021 Amanda Machin and Nadine Meidert.

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

About the Contributors

Benjamin Abrams is a Fellow of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and an affiliated Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. At University College London, he is the Principal Investigator on the ‘Responses to Populism’ project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project explores how modern societies respond to the rise of populist regimes. He is the Editor in Chief of Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest.

Monika Gabriela Bartoszewicz, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, specialises in non-linear and cross-sectoral threats to security in the emerging Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), especially in the context of securitised migration. She has conducted research and worked in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic. More details are on her website www.bartoszewicz.mg.

Sebastian Büttner is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Sociology, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). From October 2020 to March 2021, he is a guest professor in the field of macrosociology at the Institute of Sociology, Free University Berlin. From 2017 to 2019, he also served as acting professor for comparative and transnational sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In his research, he has focus on current topics of transnationalization and Europeanization. One major research topic is the study of expertise in political contexts and its wider socio-political implications. He is author of the book Mobilizing Regions, Mobilizing Europe: Expert knowledge and scientific planning in European regional development (2012) as well as numerous journal articles on EU public policy.

Myriam Fotou is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leicester, UK, teaching on the ethics and securitisation of migration. Her research aims to create a distinctive ethics of hospitality, which functions as a way of thinking about the relationship between representation and humanisation, and of responding to the ‘missing’ other in ethical and political theory and in migration management. She is currently writing on the criminalisation of migration, migrant-smuggling and the migration security-industrial complex.

Fani Giannousi is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Political Science Department, Aristotle University, Greece. She has a background in Philosophy, Political Science and Communication Studies. Her research interests depart from the theoretical foundations of critical theory and philosophy of affect and relate to the study of politics and public discourses.

Tim Kucharzewski is a PhD candidate in the field of War and Conflict Studies at the University of Potsdam, where he also received his MA. He holds a BA in History and Anglistics from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn. He has published on the topics of war, video games and PTSD.

Amanda Machin is acting Professor of International Political Studies at the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany. Her research focuses upon the topics and interconnections between democracy, citizenship, nationalism, environment and embodiment. Her books include Society and Climate: Transformations and Challenges (with Nico Stehr, World Scientific 2019), Against Political Compromise: Sustaining Democratic Debate (with Alexander Ruser, Routledge 2017) Nations and Democracy: New Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (Zed Books, 2013).

Nadine Meidert is a Post-doctoral Researcher and the Head of the Simulation Game Lab at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen in Germany. Her main research interest is political sociology with a focus on political participation, attitudes, and identity. Here, she dedicates her work especially to the question of how institutions and political processes impact attitudes and identities on the individual level. Another research field she is interested in concerns trust in administrative and political organisations. Among others, her work has appeared in the Journal of Common Market Studies and Public Personnel Management.

Maximilian Nagel is a Research Fellow at the Chair of Administrative Sciences and Modernization at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, Germany. His research and teaching activities focus on the fields of comparative public administration, administrative culture, urban governance, public policy analysis and public management.

Silvia Nicola is pursuing a PhD in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. In her work as a research associate and political consultant, she studies different types of conflicts. She has conducted several studies into the Afghan diaspora in Germany and co-edited the book Conflict Veterans Discourses and Living Contexts of an Emerging Social Group.

William Outhwaite, FAcSS, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University, UK, taught at the University of Sussex from 1973 to 2007 and at Newcastle from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of European Society (2008), Critical Theory and Contemporary Europe (2012), Europe Since 1989: Transitions and Transformations (2016), Contemporary Europe (2017) and Transregional Europe (2020) and (with Larry Ray), Social Theory and Postcommunism (2005). He edited Brexit: Sociological Responses (2017) and (with Stephen P. Turner), The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology (2018).

B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of Government at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and founding President of the International Public Policy Association. He is also an Editor of the International Review of Public Policy and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. His most recent books are Policy Problems and Policy Design (2018), Institutional Theory in Political Science (4th ed., 2019), Governance, Politics and the State (2nd ed., with Jon Pierre 2020), and Administrative Traditions: Understanding the Roots of Contemporary Administrative Behavior (2021).

Nora Sophie Schröder, is a PhD student at the chair of political science, peace and conflict studies at the university of Augsburg in Germany. Her research interests are political identification processes in Europe, social movement studies and conflict theory. For her PhD research, she conducted interviews with Anti-TTIP activists in twenty EU countries that she traversed with her camper. The data generated in this fieldwork as well as the theoretical consideration informed this article.

Ove Skarpenes is a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. Dr.polit. 2005 in sociology, University of Bergen. His research focusses on education and knowledge, class and culture. He has published in numerous international journals including International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy and Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research and his most recent monograph, co-authored with Rune Sakslind and Roger Hesthold is Middelklassekulturen i Norge published in 2018 with Sap forlag.

Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science in Athens and discourse analysis at Essex, where he completed his PhD. He has worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham and is currently a Professor of Political Discourse Analysis at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the author of Lacan and the Political (Routledge, 1999), The Lacanian Left (SUNY Press, 2007), and Populism: Myths, Stereotypes and Reorientations (Hellenic Open University Press, 2019). He is also editor of many works including the newly published Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (2020). He has served as vice-president of the Hellenic Political Science Association and has been Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University of London (2014–2015) and Visiting Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence (2019). He was one of the founding co-conveners of the Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association (UK), and since 2014 he has been directing the POPULISMUS Observatory: www.populismus.gr

Evrim Tan is a Post-doctoral Researcher in Public Governance Institute at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research focusses on different fields under political and social sciences including decentralisation, local governments, public governance, and e-government. He is also the author of Decentralization and Governance Capacity: The Case of Turkey’ by Palgrave Macmillan.

Preface

Yannis Stavrakakis

This collective volume comes at a crucial conjuncture. Both the European Union and our national and local communities seem to have entered a very delicate and bumpy phase with no obvious resolution in sight. It follows a series of consecutive crises (from the global economic crisis of 2008 to the global pandemic of 2020, just to mention the most recent ones) and persistent dynamics (such as increasing inequality and the erosion of democratic decision-making) that undermine any effective and timely response to the aforementioned crises. Brexit may be the most visible symptom, but the malaise goes far deeper. How can we assess the historical trajectory and the current predicament of Europe and its people(s) in this moment?

The title of this book alone challenges certain intuitions, because extraordinary times demand challenging displacements and reorientations in our conceptual and analytical frameworks. Mere complacency and the continuous reproduction of obsolete perspectives and stereotypes will not do. Let me provide a few examples that demonstrate the innovative profile of the volume that Machin and Meidert have put together.

First, why talk about ‘identification’ and not ‘identity’, as is usually the case? Arguably, in pre-modern societies identity issues did not emerge in the same way as in ours, simply because it was largely taken for granted. Identity was usually seen as determined by a rigid social topography guaranteed by mythical dynamics and religious forces. Identity, in other words, was something assigned by what the community defined and obeyed as its undisputed unifying principle. Modernity, in contrast, by proclaiming the ‘death of God’ and by advancing individualisation and capitalism, radically disrupted this long-term stability. It involved a multitude of dislocations of traditional practices and types of behaviour, and initiated a period of constant disruption and change. If, as a result of social transformations taking place in modernity, identity is not considered as given any more, then it can only be seen as the result of social processes of construction and sedimentation. Hence the expression ‘social identity’. Furthermore, if identity is understood as the result of social processes then this also opens up the possibility of a political contestation and re-articulation of identity. Hence the expression ‘political identity’. This was the secondary radical implication put forward by the establishment of the modern horizon.

And this was not limited within the field of social and political reflection. Crucially, it extended into political action. As a result of this transformation, a multitude of groups began to question their traditionally established ‘identities’. Women, for example, contested their location within patriarchal representations of the social, which had been previously taken as given, and they entered the political arena in Western democracies and then globally.1 Furthermore, this contestation, initially unsettling the hierarchy between the sexes, ultimately generated a self-critical questioning of the idea of the two sexes themselves, on the basis of a queer sensibility.

This process has allowed both the development of a reflexive intellectual ethos and the continuous radicalisation of democracy through the extension of rights, redressing inequalities, etc. But it is a process of intellectual enlightenment that has been stalled. A political radicalisation that has been arrested. Our intellectual horizon increasingly suffers from the re-emergence and sedimentation of biased orthodoxies. In our post-democratic public spheres and institutional settings as well, with the firm establishment of ideological horizons like the ‘end of history’ or the so-called TINA (There Is No Alternative) dogma, no alternative identifications can flourish while power asymmetries lead to what can only be described as a political short-circuit. Here, beyond Brexit, the way that European institutions dealt with the Syriza experiment in Greece is rather instructive. No wonder that, given the crisis-ridden framing of our lives, we seem to be experiencing what Gramsci described as the interregnum: crisis partly ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 276).

This is because our institutions (both intellectual and political) have declared war on the new, on the heterodox. Thus, when new perspectives and political identifications emerge they are immediately treated with suspicion and summarily discredited. And this is not only a political issue, but also something plaguing the social-scientific domain. On both levels, Europe has become the name of a malaise and a cul-de-sac. Intellectual projects like the one represented by this book demand our attention, because the rigorous investigation of the current – and often conflicting – meaning(s) of class, citizenship, the people, the nation and the EU itself could reveal the different dynamics and the multiple possibilities at play.

Of course, the problem affecting our (late) modern intellectual horizon is far from new and has been documented long ago. Going back to debates within German sociology in mid-twentieth century, we could give it a Blumenbergian emphasis: it concerns the legitimacy of modernity.2 In short, has modernity been worthy of its name and promise? Or has it eventually reoccupied pre-modern patterns of questioning – around ultimate foundations – that undermine its potential and trap its development within secularised political and economic theologies? Here, the fragment by Walter Benjamin on the operation of capitalism itself as a religion acquires an eerie relevance (notice, in this respect, the marginalisation of critical economics). To use Bruno Latour’s well-known formulation, what if ‘we have never been modern’ enough (Latour, 1993)? What if we have managed to develop and sanctify new orthodoxies that severely limit the scope for true intellectual and academic fermentation and disallow the mapping of new alternatives when these are most needed, at times of crisis? The ongoing pandemic provides a good example:

Economic orthodoxy supports the narrative that this pandemic is a unique disaster no one could have prepared for, and with no wider lessons for economics and politics. This story suits some of the world’s billionaires, but it’s not true. There is an alternative: the pandemic provides further evidence that to tackle the climate emergency, inequality and any emerging crises, we must re-think our economics from the bottom up. (Aldred, 2020)3

If this is the case, then the politicisation (and pluralisation) of identity cannot take place any more; it cannot acquire any (or even partial) permanence or long-term efficacy. In order for the political character of identity to emerge, the obviousness of social identities (which replaced religious foundations, replicating their constraints and reintroducing aristocratic privilege in the guise of meritocracy, technocracy, etc.) has to be called into question. This radical questioning is surely one of the defining characteristics of democratic societies which a contemporary move to post-democracy seems to threaten. In societies that cannot ultimately rely on any kind of naturalist, theological or essentialist social foundation, the construction and continuous reconstruction of identity can only be acknowledged as a radical institution, an institution constitutive of social practices; in other words a truly political institution. The political dimension of identity becomes fully visible only when it is recognised that there is no such a thing as a natural, essential or intrinsic social identity, when neoliberal capitalism and its intellectual apologists are not recognised as the ultimate limit of what is sayable and doable.

What would have been the crucial conceptual implication of embracing our modernity, in fact our ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2000)? How would it affect our intellectual horizon? Let us assume then that identities are socially and politically constructed, that they are not guaranteed by any essential ground. Here the collapse of any essentialist grounding would make possible the radical questioning of any identity. Yet doesn’t this entail that identity itself – as a fully guaranteed order, an order established beyond contestation – becomes impossible? The answer can only be affirmative in the sense that the continuous political construction of social identities never results in a closed, self-contained and absolute identity (no matter where this totalisation would rest; on left or right-wing utopia). Identity, at both the personal and political levels, is only the name of what we desire but can never fully attain.

Such a conclusion is obviously disorienting, but not detrimental for human subjects and social life – it involves a certain loss of certainty, an absence of guarantees, but it is what renders possible disagreement, argument and the gradual emergence of the new under conditions of reflexive deliberation, hegemonic struggle and democratic debate. Living with it certainly requires a shift of perspective: from end-points to practices; from blueprint and eschatological utopias to co-existing (post-fantasmatic) radical projects registering their ontological limits.4 Indeed, what is the name of this practice which, although it always fails to produce a full identity, plays a crucial role in structuring our lives? The name of this practice is identification.

The paradoxical nature of identity revealed in the role of identification is something constitutive of our subjective and political predicament: ‘Life without the drive to identity is an impossibility but the claim to a natural or true identity is always an exaggeration’ (Connolly, 1991, p. 67). In addition, it has become gradually evident that identity cannot be defined without reference to what stands outside its field. What creates my identity, what defines sameness, is that I differ from the identities of others. Identities are relational and differential.5 As William Connolly has cogently put it, ‘difference requires identity and identity difference’ (Connolly, 1991, p. ix). Alas, our contemporary intellectual horizon marginalises such views. It is a crucial accomplishment of this collection that it enlists the conceptual apparatus to bring back to the limelight such a refreshing rationale.

Yet, as we have already seen, this is not merely an epistemological or theoretical issue: it is, crucially, a political issue as well. During recent decades, however, the ideological hegemony of the neoliberal consensus has attempted to naturalise the fiction – the empty grand narrative – of a non-antagonistic ‘third way’, beyond left and right. Both conservative and social-democratic forces have followed this course, which has undermined the agonistic registering of division entailed in democratic institutions. It is in this meta-political orientation that one encounters the roots of the emerging post-democratic imaginary. Indeed, post-democracy is founded on an attempt to exclude the awareness of lack, contingency and negativity from the political domain, which leads to a political order that retains the token institutions of liberal democracy but neutralises the centrality of political antagonism. Jacques Rancière is among to the political theorists who have utilised this term:

From an allegedly defunct Marxism, the supposedly reigning liberalism borrows the theme of objective necessity, identified with the constraints and caprices of the world market. Marx’s once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact on which ‘liberals’ and ‘socialists’ agree. The absolute identification of politics with the management of capital is no longer the shameful secret hidden behind the ‘forms’ of democracy; it is the openly declared truth by which our governments acquire legitimacy. (Rancière, 1998, p. 113)

Difference as antagonism is banished and political alternatives proscribed. The first casualty here is the value of dissent. In addition, unable to understand and reluctant to legitimise the centrality of antagonism in democratic politics, the post-political, post-democratic Zeitgeist forces the expression of this dissent – when it manages to articulate itself – through channels bound to fuel a spiral of increasingly uncontrolled violence. Whereas a recognition of the adversarial nature of the political permits the transformation of antagonism into agonism, the taming of raw violence, a post-political approach by contrast leads to violent expressions of polarisation and hatred which, upon entering the depoliticised public sphere, can only be identified and opposed in moral or cultural (and eventually military) terms. Indeed, as Chantal Mouffe has put it, when opponents are defined in an ‘extrapolitical’ manner,

they cannot be envisaged as ‘adversary’ but only as ‘enemy’. With the ‘evil them’ no agonistic debate is possible, they must be eradicated. Moreover, as they are often considered to be the expression of some kind of ‘moral disease,’ one should not even try to provide an explanation for their emergence and success. (Mouffe, 2005, p. 76)

Notice how the re-emergence of populist movements and the concomitant development of a whole field of populism research – another crucial topic debated in this volume – demonstrate the dual malaise we have already indicated. Isn’t it astonishing that both mainstream politics and institutions as well as mainstream socio-political research share the same instinctual anti-populism (irrespective, in fact, of the particular movements and ideologies under examination)? On both levels, then, contemporary Europe emerges as the name of a dangerous pre-modern regression – politically, as a failure to openly and democratically reflect on its aristocratic, post-democratic mutation and to honour its enlightenment commitment to registering heterogeneity through popular sovereignty; and intellectually, as a failure to move beyond anti-democratic stereotypes that underlie an a priori pejorative take on any kind of popular demand, movement and government (summarily denounced as evil populism).

Indeed, a multitude of heterogeneous and even antithetical phenomena are currently being discussed under the rubric of populism: from the European Far Right in France, Austria and the Netherlands, and illiberal governments in Hungary and Poland, on the one hand; to Bernie Sanders, the so-called Pink Tide of left-wing populist governments in Latin America and inclusionary populisms in the European South triggered by the brutal ordoliberal management of the European crisis, on the other. Very often, the movements, parties, leaders and discourses under examination seem to have nothing or very little in common as they range from the radical left to the radical right of the political spectrum and from egalitarian to authoritarian orientations. Yet, one thing is obviously certain. They seem to cause surprise. Mainstream media, established political forces and academics are quick to denounce their scandalous nature: all of a sudden, the unthinkable seems to be happening. Populism is seen as violating or transgressing an established order of how politics is properly, rationally and professionally done. It emerges where it should not when it should not; it disrupts a supposed ‘normal’ course of events and could only be the index of an anomaly.6

However, there should be no cause for surprise here. It is already many decades since the historian Comer Vann Woodward summarised the lessons from the long and bloody debate on American populism between the 1950s and the 1970s: ‘The study of populism is instructive about the consequences of condescension, arrogance, and ignorance on the part of elites and intellectuals’ (Vann Woodward, 1981, p. 32). In fact, our understanding of ‘populism’ as an incarnation of whatever violates the (naturalised) established order of things has been shared by political and academic elites and popularised through mainstream media since the 1950s. During this period, commencing with the publication of the true diachronic matrix of academic anti-populism, namely Richard Hofstadter’s revisionist attack on the US People’s Party (Hofstadter, 1995), normality was generally embodied by a unidirectional, universal modernisation process supposed to embody and materialise the only version of modernity feasible and desirable (the one associated with the USA and the Western paradigm, blending capitalism with representative government in the form of so-called Democratic Elitism). Populism, by contrast, was often seen as an indication of ‘asynchronism’, of its local exceptions/anomalies. In particular, it was, more or less, denounced as an abnormal political formation articulated by abnormal leaders and addressed to abnormal constituencies.

Such grand narratives and stereotypes continue to influence, if not dominate, public debate in a variety of contexts. Of course, the disciplinary, normalising function of modernisation has been taken over largely by narratives concerning the ‘end of history’ and ‘globalisation’. In this sense, modernisation can be seen as the matrix of what later came to be known as the TINA dogma (There Is No Alternative).

By un-reflexively adopting an exclusively pejorative definition of populism, a large part of populism research has also adopted the normative, if not axiomatic and stereotypical fallacies of Hofstadter, and has, by default, placed itself in the service of a normalising, disciplinary technology of domination defending at all cost the post-democratic mutations of the established order (Crouch, 2004; Habermas, 2013), against all challengers irrespective of their ideological belonging, democratic credentials, discursive genealogies and political agendas. In a bid to justify these choices, arrogance and ignorance have become, once more, defining characteristics of Euro-centric approaches to populism. Sometimes the picture painted is of something so irrational, unthinkable, abnormal, even monstrous, that it could not possibly be appealing to real people.

This does not mean, of course, that populism research should not encompass situations in which ‘the people’ itself is invested with a reified mystique in the style of political theology, or that it should not examine the ambivalent relationship between populism and nationalism (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017). Yet the first step forward for contemporary populism research would be to move beyond obsolete pejorative stereotypes and try to approach populism anew, beyond any demonisation or idealisation, escaping the tight grip of the galloping (a priori anti-populist) economics and politics of privilege – even when the latter utilise a populist grammar and/or imaginary. Only then does it become possible to examine in detail a variety of challenging issues that highlight different facets of populism revealing important points about politics and identification more generally –emotion, memory, security, communication – as discussed in many chapters of the book.

More broadly, especially given that populism is not the only theme of this collection, the need to restore critical reflection within the social sciences and the potential of dissent and the value of the alternative within politics, to be able to assess the different risks and possibilities every contingency brings to us (whether we call it a ‘crisis’ or not), may be the foremost challenge of our age. The chapters in this daring volume encircle and highlight this challenge in a thoroughly productive way, conceptually – thematically – politically!