Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS
Volume 43, Issue -, Pages 74-86Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2014.08.014
Keywords
Critical junctures
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Populist Right-Wing Parties (PRWPs) have made a remarkable comeback since the 1980s, especially in Western Europe. In this paper we argue that in order to explain such successes we need to understand the creative way in which PRWP leaders frame the collective past, present and future. We examined speeches of PRWP leaders in France, The Netherlands, and Belgium and examined in each of these unique contexts how these leaders instill collective nostalgia and perceptions of discontinuity between past and present to justify a tougher stance on immigration, asylum-seeking and multiculturalism. We found that these PRWP leaders use temporal narratives about history and identity to persuade their audience that (a) our past is glorious, our future is bleak, (b) we know who brought the country down, (c) we were once glorious because we were tough, (d) we need to be tough once more, and (e) we are the only party prepared to take on the enemy. We conclude that PRWP leaders not only feed collective angst and fear of losing collective roots, they also provide (potential) followers with a historicized justification for harsher treatment of migrants and minorities, arguing that history has shown that the nation's survival depends on its ability to be unflinching. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available