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We discuss the latest Journal of Language and Politics Special Issue (23:3), Radical Right-Wing Populism and Borders, with Christian Lamour who guest-edited the volume with Oscar Mazzoleni. He tells us about the motivations behind it, key messages and where he's going next in his research.
The securitization of the territorial state border is immediately what comes to mind when one thinks about the political leitmotiv of the radical right in terms of space. Nevertheless, the securitized state border as a strong policy element defining the radical-right discourse is only the tip of an iceberg
Why did you decide to propose this Special Issue?
Prof. Oscar Mazzoleni of the University of Lausanne and I had coordinated a research project between 2019 and 2023 examining the right-wing populist discourse in European cross-border regions: the CROSS-POP project, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Luxembourg National Research Fund. The scope was to rescale the investigation of populist discourse from the key bordered and institutionalized territories securing the political legitimacy of parties and leaders (the nation state and also the region in some countries, such as Switzerland), to the more fluid European regions structured by cross-state interdependences, related notably to the economy and the flux of cross-border workers. Through our different publications focused on this discourse and its representation by the mass media, we wanted to show that the European region beyond state borders could constitute a spatial frame to better understand the chameleonic attitude of right-wing populist parties and leaders. This work convinced us that there was an opportunity for a special issue in the Journal of Language and Politics to address the connection between radical right-wing populism and the spaces of power within and across state borders.
What are the key takeaways?
The radical right has been defined as a political family combining multiple ideologies, including nativism, populism and authoritarianism. The mobilization of these ideological sets of ideas has implied reference to spatial objects, such as territories, networks, places and scales, as frames of struggles between a threatened and oppressed in-group of ‘natives’ and good-natured ‘people’, and a dominant and oppressive outgroup of incompetent/illegitimate ‘liberal elites’ and ‘proselyte others’, for example, minority groups and migrants. The securitization of the territorial state border is immediately what comes to mind when one thinks about the political leitmotiv of the radical right in terms of space. Nevertheless, the securitized state border as a strong policy element defining the radical-right discourse is only the tip of an iceberg—a material, symbolic and marketed spatial containment within more complex claimed and existing ‘power geometries’, to use the expression coined by Doreen Massey. The ‘power geometries’ involve the control of multiple flows of people, goods, capital and ideas, and demanding the existence of relational spaces, such as locations in which struggles occur over the management of flux at multiple scales. The radical right is an active participant in the late modern definition of power geometries due to the support of the citizenry. The different articles in the special issue present the state border as a spatial object, to grasp how the radical right participates in these redefined power geometries. First, the articles show the importance of events (for example, borderlands incidents and borderlands commemorations) to enact the distinctiveness of the radical right in relational places of power, such as political assemblies, but also cities with regard to the management of flux at a broader scale (see the works of José Javier Olivas Osuna and Christian Lamour). Second, they reveal the willingness of the radical right to reposition the power struggle for the management of flux beyond the relational space of human beings. This political family can be keen to promote a naturalized world, implying the animalization of unwanted outgroups, or the common dissolution of the human in-group and outgroup into a fragile environmental space becoming, de facto, a space of survival (see the works of Sonja Pietiläinen and Massimiliano Demata). Third, they signal that the involvement of the radical right in late modern power geometries is about circulating a populist message and offering an illiberal massage. The radical right do so by representing an ontological insecurity in space with a permanent threat to the ‘people’ requiring the progressive replacement of liberal democracy by an illiberal alternative to reach a momentary period of relief (see the works of András Szalai and James Wesley Scott).
Where do you plan to go next in your research?
My future research will involve examining the sense of place circulated by the Western radical right and the normalization of this sense of place in the public sphere covered by the mass media. Using the experience of her locality of Kilburn in London, Doreen Massey defined the concept of ‘global sense of place’. This concept was used to better understand the intertwined relationship between the global and local, constituting the building of places. It was also used to reposition the centrality of place as a location in which political changes concerning the globalization of flows and the regulation of space can be determined. Over the last decade, the radical right has been the most vocal, but also ambivalent opponent of globalization. It has circulated its own ‘global sense of place’ by presenting the centre-periphery organization of space powered by global metropolitan places, experienced negatively by left-behind urban and rural places and requiring a new global regulation powered by sovereign nation states for the benefit of these left-behind places and their ‘people’. Global metropolitan places can in parallel be the location to internationally market the radical right hegemony through public events, videoed urban violence and branded policies. However, there has been limited research on the ‘global sense of place’ formulated in the discourse of the radical right claiming executive power or justifying policies when it is in charge of executive powers of nation states or specific places. Furthermore, the ability of the radical right to become a central political force has led to a series of works on the structural normalization of this political family in the media-covered public sphere. It is nevertheless still not known how the global sense of place promoted by the radical right can constitute a new normative approach to spatial management, accepted by other political parties and becoming dominant in political publicity through the established mass media. The replacement of Western liberal democracies by illiberal ones powered by the electorally-successful radical right, as seen over the past decade in Hungary, is based on the progressive collapse of the rule of law, the disappearance of media freedom, the rejection of cultural otherness and the cancellation of minority views. It is also determined by the capacity of the radical right to impose its global sense of place as a normalized approach to the multi-scalar regulation of space, inducing control and punishment within and across state borders. Hence the importance of research on the subject.
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