Ghosts of a Tortured Past: Europe's Right Turn
Wolin, Richard
ARTICLES Ghosts of a Tortured Past Europe's Right Turn RICHARD WOLIN In the annals of European politics, the elections of spring 2010 will undoubtedly be viewed as a watershed. Under the twin...
...The far-right parties threaten to take European politics in a very different direction: one that harbors affinities with the authoritarian national-populist trends that predominated during the 1930s, W.H...
...In the 2009 European parliamentary elections, the FPO gained a mere 13 percent...
...On June 12, 2010, Belgium's ever-precarious political existence took a turn for the worse as Bart de Wever's avowedly separatist New Flemish Alliance (NVA) won a decisive plurality with 30 percent of the vote...
...The avowedly racist British National Party, which for decades had subsisted weakly on the political margins, achieved an electoral breakthrough by winning two seats and is now represented in Strasbourg for the first time...
...It would be ill-advised to blow these developments out of proportion...
...Social democratic parties are not merely out of office...
...The potential for unwholesome new alliances between European mainstream and far-right parties—a temptation that, historically, European centrists have rejected as morally unacceptable—might be the most dramatic development of the 2010 electoral season...
...For the most part, these longings remain unsatisfied by the existing pan-European structures of governance...
...the revolutionaries of 1793 probably didn't kill enough people...
...The more vigorous and dynamic the Netherlands' Muslim enclaves became, the more successful the overall integration process would prove and the more likely the disruptions of radical Islam could be avoided...
...This is the moment that the Left should have been waiting for...
...Following the April elections, the SNS characterized the nation's Hungarian minority as a "cancer" and warned of an impending invasion by Hungarian "Mongols...
...The Hungarian Socialist Party, which ruled from 2002-2009, discredited itself with a series of corruption scandals...
...Moreover, there are some additional unsavory political trends brewing behind the scenes, as several mainstream European conservative parties have come to appreciate the electoral advantages of adopting xenophobic themes that were previously monopolized by the ultra-right...
...Thus, in the view of many right-leaning intellectuals, fascism—or an idealized version thereof—was politically attractive insofar as it favored the creation of new elites: a new political and spiritual aristocracy that would be capable of restoring hierarchy, order, and meaning to a bourgeois world in which values were in free fall...
...Yet, he has not hesitated to express his desire for Belgium's "evaporation" as a nation-state...
...At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, to be an intellectual meant standing up for principle rather than servile loyalty to a specific political cause...
...In Central Europe, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) remains a force to be reckoned with despite leader Jorg Haider's death in a 2008 auto accident...
...In the event of a divorce between Flemings and Walloons, the fate of Brussels, the EU's seat of government, is radically uncertain: it lies in Flanders, but its inhabitants are predominantly French speakers...
...One of the trademarks of these parties has been a willingness to disrupt Europe's reigning, if timorous, democratic-humanitarian political consensus...
...Following the 2007 parliamentary elections, it took nine months for the Fleming and Walloon factions to agree to a governing coalition...
...The fact that, for the foreseeable future, the far Right is unlikely to accede to power doesn't mean that it poses no immediate threat...
...Europe's authoritarian national populist parties have rushed in to fill this void...
...In exchange for supporting the stringent budget cuts desired by Rutte's Liberals, Wilders has received a promise that immigration will be reduced by half and that foreigners who refuse integration measures will be subject to strict penalties...
...It is now firmly ensconced as the Netherlands' third largest political party...
...Counterintuitive though it may seem, many of them did so in the name of preserving Culture against its perceived debasement by the leveling tendencies of mass society...
...The list, which I hereby reproduce, reads like a veritable who's who of twentieth-century European literati: Gabriele d'Annunzio, Gottfried Benn, Robert Brasillach, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Mircea Eliade, Giovanni Gentile, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, Wyndham Lewis, Henri de Man, Paul de Man, Filippo Marinetti, Ezra Pound, Carl Schmitt, and W. B. Yeats...
...In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty defended the Moscow purge trials as a necessary wager on "reason in history...
...As recently as six years ago, the NVA possessed only one parliamentary representative...
...It is striking that three leading representatives of twentieth-century Existenzphilosophie—Heidegger, Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—at various points became willing apologists for totalitarianism...
...European voters have instead placed their confidence in Europe's conservative parties, whom they view as risk-averse and associate with fiscal responsibility...
...In the October 2010 Vienna city elections, however, it attained an alarming 27 percent...
...They excel at playing on the cultural and economic anxieties of average citizens, especially those of the lower middle classes who have been unable to keep pace with the demands of a globalized, information-based economy and whose employment prospects have grown correspondingly precarious...
...At the time, EU member states expressed themselves forcefully and in concert, insisting that they would not tolerate a political situation redolent of Europe's fascist past...
...As a secular Jew, he was immensely popular among Muslims, who make up 6 percent of the population...
...One of the Swedish Democrats' television ads featured a mob of unruly, burka-clad Muslim women storming a local welfare office at the expense of a helpless, elderly Swede...
...Cohen rapidly climbed to the top of the opinion polls...
...However, in retrospect, the outcry over Austria's political excesses seems to have been effective in preventing a potentially explosive situation from veering out of control...
...Ironically, one of the few encouraging portents of European political stability has been Germany, where, after a shaky period following reunification (1990), the two leading far-right parties—the Republikaner and the Deutsche Volksunion— have played a relatively insignificant role...
...He has renounced the prime ministership, largely on tactical grounds...
...Insofar as he champions the welfare state as well as the idea of "old Netherlands" versus the fashionable concept of a "Europe without borders," he has upended the conventional fault lines of Dutch politics, Wilders also upholds the libertarian spirit of the 1960s vis-a-vis Islam, which he has described as a "totalitarian ideology...
...Whither Europe...
...More recently, Sarkozy has proposed legislation to strip citizenship from immigrants who directly challenge the authority of the police or the French state...
...This return is incompatible with universal norms embodied in Europe's democratic constitutions...
...Instead, following Putnam, Cohen concluded that successful integration would best be achieved by enhancing the well-being of Holland's Muslim communities...
...During the 2007 election campaign, one of Sarkozy's central themes was "insecurity"—a situation Sarkozy himself had more or less provoked two years earlier as a result of his insulting remarks...
...Time and again, the far right parties have had a disconcerting ability to shift the political debate in their direction...
...As we have seen, the far Right harbors the capacity to shift the terms of political debate in ways that are injurious to democracy's fragile, basic humanitarian core— as occurred in France last summer when Sarkozy began brazenly deporting plane loads of Roma immigrants back to their native Romania...
...Few European nations have escaped...
...Fascism, which flaunted an emblem-atics of virility in what was viewed as an age of advanced cultural decline, seemed to offer redemption from the perils of social leveling endemic to modern democracy...
...On the other hand, the electoral breakthroughs of the far Right serve as a constant reminder that Europe has yet to resolve many of the underlying political problems that led to the conflagration of 19391945...
...The citizenship law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2011, the date that Budapest is slated to accede to the presidency the European Council...
...Hegel's Philosophy of History, which preached the maxim Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht (world history is world judgment) and which believed that history had justly culminated in the Prussian state of his day, ultimately degenerated into theodicy—a philosophical legitimation of history's injustices...
...Jobbik's leaders sport regalia of a banned paramilitary organization that proudly evoke the interwar, fascist Arrow Cross...
...Right-wing commentators protested that EU officials were improperly interfering with the results of a fair, democratic election...
...A recent opinion poll showed an alarming 60 percent of the respondents agreeing with Sarrazin's basic thesis...
...In October, Wilders's Freedom Party joined the reigning Dutch coalition along with Mark Rutte's Liberal Party (the leading vote-getter, with thirty-two seats) and the Christian Democrats...
...The Travails of Social Democracy One of the major stories of last year's European elections concerned the faltering performance of the continent's social democratic parties—historically, the driving force behind the creation of the postwar European welfare state...
...One of the major developments of contemporary European politics concerns the relative eclipse of social democracy...
...As Sheri Berman noted in these pages, "The ideas and policies trumpeted by the neoliberal Right since the 1970s are blamed for the mess we are currently in...
...By blaming the Other—Muslims, immigrants, Roma, or untrustworthy foreign elements—the favored group deflects attention from its own responsibility for its precarious social status...
...On the Responsibility of Intellectuals In an earlier study, I compiled an inventory of European intellectuals who expressly lent their support to the previous century's various fascist movements...
...Even though, with the exception of Britain, the economic crisis transpired under the watch of Europe's center-right parties, voters are not holding these parties accountable...
...European political culture must stress and nurture these values in order to offset the seductions and temptations of the new illiberalism of the ethnopopulist credo...
...Hungary's alarming right turn has its historical origins in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, as a result of which the nation, as part of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, lost two-thirds of its territory...
...But as things now stand, enfeebled and shorn of real political power, they are unable to pose an effective political counterweight to the Right...
...By the same token, Thilo Sarrazin's anti-Muslim screed, Germany Does Away with Itself, which argues that the nation's racial stock is degenerating as a result of lax immigration policies, has become a runaway bestseller, with more than one million copies sold...
...In the German case, the traditional collective bargaining agreement between unions and management, along with some astute government directives (such as subsidizing wages for the duration of the crisis in order to forestall massive layoffs), have gone far toward ameliorating the short-term effects of the economic downturn...
...After serving in government as deputy minister of education during the 1990s, he was appointed mayor of Amsterdam in 2001...
...it is always possible to get out of a prison...
...Time and again, the far Right has sought to elevate considerations of ethnos—its preferred ideological idiom—above those of demos...
...Like all demagogues, he thrives on a siege mentality...
...They are battling deep internal divisions in nations where they have been historically predominant, such as France, Italy, Germany, and Britain...
...The governing Christian Democrats fell to a mere twenty-one parliamentary seats...
...With the benefit of hindsight, we now know how oppressively dystopian that future in almost every case turned out to be...
...In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, which seemed to be in retreat in recent years, is now rebounding under the leadership of Le Pen's daughter, Marine...
...Following the sound defeat of Labour in the May 2010 British elections, social democratic parties now hold the reins of power in only two major European nations: Spain and Portugal...
...Thus, it is not hard to fathom why, following the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in 1973, there arose a robust anti-totalitarian sensibility that had a defining impact on European intellectual and political life...
...It's a sad evening for social democracy in Europe," remarked Martin Schulz, a leading Social Democrat, on election night...
...Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...
...A serious movement would have been ready with well-considered plans not simply to get the economy going again but to rewrite the rules of capitalist political economies in a progressive manner...
...In fall 2005, the future French president, then minister of the interior, helped to ignite a series of riots by dismissively referring to French immigrant suburban youth as "racaille" or "scum...
...Severely reduced tax revenues as a result of the current financial downturn suggest that the classical postwar redistributionist model has become "historical...
...Given the current religious and ethnic tensions—which Wilders has been only too eager to stoke—the Freedom Party standard bearer must now wear a bulletproof vest for all public appearances...
...The political situation in neighboring Slovakia is in many respects a mirror image of the one in Hungary...
...Not to be outdone, Hegedus's wife, Eniko, sponsored a showing of the notorious Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss...
...Equally troubling was the fact that the far-right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) garnered 12.5 percent...
...By the same token, these appeals have played extremely well among frustrated middle-class Hollanders, who feel that that Dutch multicul-turalism—an official government policy— bends over backward to placate Muslim immigrants, who reap the benefits of state largesse but then refuse to integrate, remaining ensconced in their own insular communities...
...It thereby implies that certain ethnicities or races are superior or privileged...
...The Freedom Party's surging political fortunes illustrate the extent to which the Dutch political spectrum has shifted since the country was shocked by two sensational political murders earlier in the decade: that of politician Pym Fortyn by an animal rights activist in 2002, and that of Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fundamentalist in 2004...
...When it came to addressing such questions, in the eyes of many intellectuals, both right and left, liberal democracy's responses seemed ambivalent and slack...
...A good, if troubling, case in point is the German Social Democrats, whose electoral totals fell to 21 percent, their worst showing in a national election since the Second World War...
...In June 2009, these parties were in almost every case bested by their rivals on the center-right...
...The calculation worked perfectly, and Sarkozy was able to attract enough Le Pen supporters to best his Socialist opponents...
...In postwar Europe, these developments are nearly unprecedented...
...In the April elections, it lost two-thirds of its deputies...
...On the one hand, remembrance of the hecatombs of the Second World War, in which an estimated fifty million persons lost their lives in the European theater alone, have helped (with some notable exceptions, such as the Yugoslav civil war) to inoculate Europe against the threat of a bellicist, anti-democratic relapse...
...Although Cohen firmly believes that Muslim immigrants should learn Dutch and familiarize themselves with Dutch cultural and political traditions, he has resisted suggestions that the solution to the immigration dilemma lies in aggressively assimilating Muslims: compelling them to break with their religious and ethnic traditions and become "Dutch...
...Foremost among these are structural unemployment that consistently hovers around 10 percent and the failure, so far, to create a meaningful European identity that transcends both the antagonisms of regional difference and the arrogance of national sovereignty...
...First, questions pertaining to a new, common European self-understanding have largely been avoided by the EU's leading political architects...
...In the spring 2009 European parliamentary elections, the political fortunes of authoritarian national-populist candidates from a wide variety of nations—Slovakia, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, France, and Italy—surged...
...To his credit, Cohen's urbanity and his urgent pleas for toleration— an estimable Dutch tradition dating back to the seventeenth century—were effectively able to break Wilders's political momentum...
...This situation provides ample grist for the mill of the unabashedly racist and revanchist Jobbik Party, which garnered an unprecedented 17 percent of the vote and forty-six deputies in the April 2010 parliamentary elections...
...Twice, journalists succeeded in tripping him up with trick questions—for example, he faltered when asked about current mortgage rates— thereby providing the opening that Liberal Party standard bearer Rutte was able to exploit, resulting in the Netherlands' first conservative government in over a century...
...In the September elections Swedish Social Democrats made their worst showing since the First World War...
...The question of how best to respond politically to the electoral gains by far-right parties cannot be answered easily...
...It departs from the idea of universal equality, which is the foundational precept of the rule of law, in favor of the idea of ethnic and racial hierarchy...
...A vociferous foe of Islam and a consummate demagogue, Wilders favors banning the Koran as well as the construction of new mosques—although he undoubtedly knows that both proposals would be disallowed by the European Court of Justice...
...On June 9, the Dutch experienced an analogous political shock when the Freedom Party, led by anti-immigrant extremist Geert Wilders, unexpectedly won twenty-four seats, almost tripling its previous total (nine seats...
...To judge by current economic trends, the level of postwar affluence that sustained the classical welfare state is unlikely to return anytime soon...
...Perhaps the most impressive point one can make on behalf of Cohen is that, despite persistent tensions, since Van Gogh's murder six years ago Amsterdam has been a model of ethnic harmony and multicultural stability...
...Cohen's presence immediately galvanized the Dutch political scene...
...Under the twin pressures of the global financial slowdown and the Greek economic crisis, far-right parties made significant and worrisome electoral gains in Hungary, Belgium, and the Netherlands...
...Auden's aptly named "low, dishonest decade...
...In Scandinavia, the Progress (Norway) and People's (Denmark) parties continue to attract significant support, thereby keeping the mainstream parties off balance...
...But the rub lies in this very "persistence...
...This was also the issue that brought the reigning Labor Party-Christian Democratic coalition to grief...
...It meant speaking truth to power, rather than bending truth opportunistically for the sake of a radiant utopian future...
...lamentation about "Gypsy criminals" is another of its standard refrains...
...With the recent electoral breakthroughs of the far-right parties, this avoidance has returned to haunt Europe...
...Conversely, the rival Christian Democrats garnered a robust 37 percent...
...Adding to the general political embarrassment is the fact that Wilders is currently facing prosecution for having compared Islam to Nazism...
...The question of why so many intellectuals succumbed to the totalitarian temptation is one of the most haunting historical conundrums of our time...
...Today, the prophetic intellectual who claims to possess privileged insight into the direction of history or secret access to the mysteries of Being is obsolete...
...The majority center-right Fidesz Party, which holds 263 out of 383 parliamentary seats and is headed by the current prime minister Viktor Orban, has further stoked the flames of irredentism by provocatively offering dual citizenship (albeit, without social benefits or voting rights) to ethnic Hungarians in adjacent lands, thereby infuriating Hungary's neighbors—in particular, Slovakia, which is home to some 500,000 ethnic Hungarians...
...For two key reasons, the ideological discourse of Europe's far-right parties is often constructed around questions of identity...
...The governing coalition includes the extreme right Slovak National Party (SNS...
...Cohen, a Dutch Jew whose grandparents died in Bergen-Belson, is the anti-Wilders...
...The far-right parties contrive artificial mechanisms by means of which people who believe themselves at risk can regain a modicum of political control...
...As one can see from such episodes, it would be misleading to view Europe's right-wing authoritarian populist parties as a phenomenon confined to the political margins, with little or no effect on the center...
...Ironically, this situation has occurred as Europe endures its worst economic crisis since the Second World War...
...Should such legislation be approved, it would be the first time since the Vichy regime (1940-1944) that a French government possessed the power to invalidate citizenship retroactively...
...Of course, European social democrats will continue to play an important role in the cultural and political life of their respective nations...
...A former academic, Cohen was inspired in his rapprochement strategy by the "social capital" approach of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone...
...This approach was an integral part of Nicholas Sarkozy's strategy in the 2007 French presidential election...
...Of course, a register of those on the political Left who compromised their integrity by allying themselves with equally despotic Marxist regimes—a list that would include the names of Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, George Lukacs, and Jean-Paul Sartre— would be similarly voluminous...
...Since the construction of social identity usually occurs via a process of opposition and differentiation, discourses of identity are as much concerned with negative characterizations of out-groups as with the positive characterization of the favored group...
...Hence voters can realize their anti-immigrant preferences by casting their ballots for parties with a better chance of electoral success...
...But social democracy's long-term political prospects remain grim...
...Ironically, Belgium, whose existence is once again in doubt, is scheduled to assume the presidency of the European Council, a body preoccupied with the task of uniting the disparate array of countries that make up the European Union...
...For most of the year, Dutch opinion polls had shown Wilders's Freedom Party leading...
...Jobbik openly embraces anti-Semitism and hatred of Roma...
...Or, at least, they claim to represent the interests of groups that feel vulnerable and exposed...
...but that spirit of acceptance has eroded since the murders...
...Consequently, among the denizens of modern democratic societies, there exists a pervasive longing for orientation, direction, and meaning...
...He has balanced his familiar polemics against Muslim immigration with more mainstream and politically respectable appeals on behalf of freedom of speech, gay rights, and women's rights...
...From a social democratic standpoint, the real tragedy of the Dutch election is that the Labor Party, led by Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, fell one vote short of a plurality...
...Traditionally, Sweden was the one Scandinavian country immune to political xenophobia...
...However, to reconceptualize democracy's meaning in ethno-populist terms violates the fundamental norms of democratic citizenship...
...There is currently no effective counterweight to the reigning Fidesz-Jobbik bloc...
...In order to show that they meant business, they cobbled together a series of sanctions aimed at putting Austrian voters and politicians on notice...
...De Wever's singular political achievement is to have provided the secessionist Flemish right with a respectable veneer—the better to attract voters and the better to turn the dream of Flemish separatism into a reality...
...His judgments (and they were, in most cases, men) have proved erroneous on too many occasions...
...With Hegel, negative historical experiences became mere grist for the dialectical mill...
...Instead, the electorate seems to mistrust social democratic economic policies—the perceived over-reliance on deficit financing as well as the inclination to "pamper" public sector workers with lifetime employment and generous benefits...
...Although the Swedish Democrats' preelection rallies were frequently disrupted by anti-fascist activists, such disturbances often backfired by kindling public sympathy for the "persecuted" far-right party...
...Its leaders rail against the influence of "Jewish capital...
...Like other European far-right politicians in recent years, Wilders, despite his occasional flirtation with extremist positions, has been adept at presenting an acceptable facade and thereby succeeding in expanding his political base...
...Otherwise, most governing coalitions consist of alliances between center-right and so-called "liberal" parties...
...Of course, nothing like that is available' (Dissent, Summer 2010, emphasis added...
...Schulz's remarks are a gross understatement...
...As National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen once expressed his "concentric circle" approach to politics: "I like my daughters better than my cousins, my cousins better than my neighbors, my neighbors better than strangers, and strangers better than foes...
...But in the weeks prior to the election, Cohen stumbled badly on several occasions...
...His new book, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s, has just appeared with Princeton University Press...
...For the most part, such excesses have been tolerated or even encouraged by the governing Smer Party, led by Prime Minister Robert Fico...
...At the same time, inaction is unacceptable, as it means tacitly accepting policies that strike at core European values...
...Cohen entered the Dutch parliamentary fray belatedly, in March 2010, after Labor Party leader Wouter Bos abruptly resigned in protest over the Netherlands' continued military presence in Afghanistan...
...Such an approach implies a return to the darkest hour of twentieth-century European history: the hour of the ethnocentric or "racial state...
...Consider an interesting precursor of recent developments: the electoral success of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party in 2000, when, as Austria's second largest political party, the FPO entered into a coalition with the center-right People's Party...
...Unlike Heidegger and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty at least had the temerity to pen a lengthy self-criticism in Adventures of the Dialectic [1955], which concludes with a ruthless polemic against his former compagnon de route, Sartre...
...The picture elsewhere in Europe is far from sanguine...
...No longer...
...Since the 1980s, the presence of xenophobic, right-wing populist parties has been a persistent blot on the European political landscape...
...This was precisely the sort of strong-arm tactic that plays extremely well with National Front voters...
...Both men were virulent critics of Islam...
...On these grounds, he has been banned from entering Great Britain...
...For years the Netherlands has been a model of multicultural integration and political tolerance, especially vis-a-vis its 2.5 million Muslim immigrants (out of a total population of 16.5 million...
...The party's spiritual adviser, Pastor Lorant Hegedus, is known for his anti-Semitic diatribes and has publicly feted convicted Holocaust denier David Irving...
...De Wever, the self-styled "new lion of Flanders," has sought to calm fears of an immediate rupture between Flanders and Wallonia...
...Following the attacks in the United States of September 11, 2001, he made the improvement of relations with the Netherlands' Muslim immigrants an urgent priority...
...In other words, although the political circumstances seem ripe for a social democratic resurgence, European voters have displayed a marked lack of confidence in the social democrats' ability to lead the continent out of the crisis and govern effectively...
...As late as 1972, following years of craven fellow-traveling, Sartre could still opine that the French Revolution had miscarried because the Jacobin dictatorship had failed to kill enough people: "A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it and I see no other means for this than death...
...Yet, de facto, they are nearly the only groups willing to address identity-related themes that are meaningful to a wide array of individuals threatened by global social and political developments...
...Today approximately 3.5 million Hungarian nationals are scattered among the neighboring states of Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, and Ukraine...
...Recently, Austrian voters, to their credit, defeated a transparently reactionary candidate for the ceremonial office of president, Barbara Rosenkranz of the FPO, whose campaign invoked the slogan, "Without Courage, No Values—a Strong Woman for Austria...
...Second, with the rise of globalization, the EU, and a post-Fordist, flexible, response economy, the certainties and assurances of national belonging have been jeopardized as never before...
...The ethical foundation of the New Europe is the idea of human rights as it has developed in opposition to the totalitarian temptation in both its left- and right-wing variants...
...In September 2010, the far-right, anti-immigrant Swedish Democrats, led by Jimmie Akesson, scored an electoral breakthrough, surpassing the 4 percent parliamentary threshold for the first time and throwing the reigning coalition into chaos...
...That consensus is predicated on respect for the values of human rights, constitutionalism, and the rule of law...
...In neglecting this heritage, contemporary European intellectuals and politicians have deprived themselves of the ideational resources that are necessary to combat the new intolerance and xenophobia emanating from a resurgent far Right...
...The Other is characterized as the pathogen infecting the social body that must be excised for a return to health...
...In retaliation for the recent upsurge of Hungarian nationalism on both sides of the fragile border separating the two nations, the ruling coalition has sought to place legal restrictions on where Hungarian can be spoken publicly...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
