The results of Sunday’s general elections in France have brought some relief to Europeans anxious about another far-right government being formed within the European Union. But this is by far not the end of the story.
As debates rage about what the response should be to the far-right surge in Europe, it is important to explore why it is happening in the first place. Beyond the usual explanations, the deeper reasons for the rise of the far right are to be found in the rise of China, India and the Global South.
Let us start by addressing some of the traditional explanations for this phenomenon. A decade ago, “populism” became a buzzword in the Western media. So-called populist parties were booming – from the Five Star Movement in Italy to Podemos in Spain. The Brexit populists pulled the United Kingdom out of the EU in 2016.
One of the most widespread explanations for the rise of left and right-wing populism centred on the economy: Europe was in the middle of a debt crisis accompanied by self-defeating austerity measures. Budgets were cut, economies were in recession, and unemployment was skyrocketing. No wonder voters were turning to the extremes, many argued.
This thesis has much less explanatory power today. While inflation has certainly reduced purchasing power, Europe is currently experiencing record-high employment. The European economy is surely not booming, but neither is it contracting. And there is little austerity: on the contrary, European countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine with significant public investment.
A twist to this answer is to point to the greenlash – or the reaction from some quarters to Europe’s climate policies. Think taxes on petrol, reduction of agriculture subsidies, or higher energy costs.
True, farmers’ protests played a key role in propelling far-right leader Geert Wilders to first place in the Dutch parliamentary elections. At the same time, however, the transition to renewable energy is bringing tangible benefits in the form of a reduction of energy costs. Italians went on a house improvement spree thanks to 200 billion euros ($218bn) of government-sponsored subsidies for energy efficiency – if there is a greenlash in Italy, it has solar panels on its roofs.
Many analysts also turn to the issue of migration when trying to explain the far right. Voters, they argue, are reacting to the continuous influx of migrants into Europe and to the loss of a homogeneous culture. There is certainly racism in Europe, and building a multicultural society doesn’t come cost-free. And yet, this is an equally insufficient explanation.
The locations where migrants represent a truly significant part of the population –cosmopolitan cities like London, Paris, or Milan – are those where the far-right scores the lowest in elections. It is where migrants are barely seen – the countryside and provincial towns, and most of Eastern Europe – that it does well.
It is true that migrants compete with locals for access to scarce public services, and yet, with unemployment near record lows, the narrative of “migrants stealing jobs” is nowhere to be heard. Instead, faced with demographic decline, even right-wing governments are listening to industry’s demands for more migrants. For example, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing prime minister, recently increased the number of work visas for foreign workers.
Each of these three explanations has some truth to it. And yet none goes to the heart of the matter. To understand what is going on we must change our language and approach. We are not witnessing the rise of the far-right, but the rise of nationalism.
This comes at a time when Europe is hit by relative decline compared with the rest of the world. As celebrated philosopher and analyst of European fascism Hannah Arendt pointed out in her writings, Europe’s imperial projection served to reconcile inequalities at home.
Put simply, pauperised French workers and decadent industrialists had one thing in common: they were French and not from the colonies. They considered themselves to be superior to the peoples their country ruled over.
Even in more recent times, well after the supposed end of colonialism, an insurmountable psychological gap separated the “first” and the “third” world. A European, however poor, had access to opportunities, technologies and freedoms that few from other parts of the world could aspire to. The sense of privilege provided a powerful tool for social cohesion. The material reality of that privilege provided governments with enough wealth to co-opt the population with rising welfare expenditure.
But today Europe is increasingly marginalised. It is technologically backwards in key sectors of the global economy – think Chinese electrical vehicles replacing German ones. It is geopolitically disoriented and militarily weak – think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its small nation states, too proud and short-sighted to truly unite, see their global rankings drop year after year. This has profound, if understudied, psychological effects.
It is this sense of decline and disorientation that the nationalist right thrives on. The proud “nation” is brandished as the place of refuge, where cohesion, unity, familiarity and a sense of shared purpose can be rebuilt. Europe’s contemporary nationalism is not the expansionist, juvenile kind of 20th-century fascism. It is the nationalism of the provincialised, the demoted, and the exhausted.
If migrants and minorities are the preferred target of the far right this is not for any reason other than the old strategy of constructing a community through the identification of those who do not belong to it. By defining as “not-migrant”, “not-gay”, or “not-woke”, a sense of unity is forged. Europe, in its quest for internal social cohesion, has swapped the colonial wars for the culture wars.
Reading this from outside of Europe, one may be excused to feel a sense of schadenfreude, that feeling of pleasure when something bad happens to someone else. And yet, before celebrating this as an instance of postcolonial justice, we must be aware that nationalism is on the rise across the globe: in India and China in the east, all the way to Brazil and the United States in the west.
Disorientation, fear and anxiety are the cipher of our time. They are the common contemporary human condition that nationalism provides a false but persuasive answer to. Today’s great technological, social, and geopolitical transformations are triggering the rise of my-country-first attitudes everywhere across the globe. Europe is no longer special. It is just one, fearful part of a fearful world facing an uncharted and uncertain future.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.