It is the aim with the thesis to answer the following research question:
How and why did the European far right extra-parliamentary actors Fortress Europe and Generation Identity Europeanize their contention during the 2015-2017 ’refugee crisis’?
In order to begin filling the above outlined research gaps, the thesis sets out to explore the various Europeanization paths and forms of the European far right at the extra-parliamentary level, i.e. in terms of protest politics (Hutter 2014a). As it is the aim to focus on the more strategical side of their contention, the research considers the meso-level of the various organizations, rather than e.g. the micromeso-level, which often involves the subjective accounts of individual activists (such as e.g. done by della Porta &
Caiani 2009). It is thus the aim to explore how the leaders and spokespeople rationalize and justify their groups’ European endeavours, plus which strategies they make use of in order to attain their goals. This entails the acquirement of more knowledge about the groups’ protest repertoires, resources, and strategies, plus their (pan-)European networking and cooperation, and whether and how these activities take place in or around the European institutions, plus the effect it has on the actors’
collective identities. In order to explore these facets, the study will draw on social movement and Europeanization theories, plus the scholarly output about the far right.
One of the main theoretical approaches employed to examine social movements’ and other extra-parliamentary actors’ Europeanization paths is the role of political opportunities (see e.g. Caiani & Graziano 2018; Marks & McAdam 1996; Imig &
Tarrow 2001a; della Porta & Caiani 2009). Scholars use the approach to analyse the opportunities for mobilization in terms of the ‘open-’ or ‘closedness’ of the domestic and EU political systems (Kriesi 2004), in order to explain the groups’ choices in terms of mobilization. With time, scholars have also begun emphasising the significance of discursive openings at both the political and public levels, which influence the mobilizing frames’ resonances (McCammon 2013). This study also employs the political and discursive opportunity structure approaches (POS and DOS), which both work from the assumption that a national extra-parliamentary
9 The term ‘refugee crisis’ (also referred to as ‘migrant crisis’) is highly contested. In this thesis, it refers to the European ‘crisis’ that erupted in the summer of 2015, where the arrival of an unprecedented number of refugees led to “an administrative melt‐down in several European countries and a breakdown of the European asylum registration system as a whole” (Gerhards et al. 2018: 23).
group will choose its Europeanization path based on an evaluation of the best decision-making body to approach for achieving claim success, or at least resonance (Kriesi 2004). At the same time, many scholars also agree upon the importance of resources for extra-parliamentary actors, in terms of successful mobilization (see e.g.
McCarthy & Zald 1977). These resources can be of various sizes and types, and there is much scholarly debate about what exactly constitutes a resource (see e.g. McCauley 2011). Yet, financial, human, organizational, and structural resources are frequently mentioned as being amongst the most important, just as cultural, political, and informational resources all have been found to be conducive to a social movement’s progress (see e.g. Bandy & Smith 2005). The level of resources also matter highly in terms of a group’s Europeanization strategy. Research has thus found that particularly an extra-parliamentary group’s symbolic and material resources influence its options for gaining access to the EU-powerholders (see e.g. della Porta & Caiani 2009).
Hence, these two aspects (POS/DOS and resource mobilization) are expected to act as independent variables, which influence the groups’ distinct mobilization strategies in terms of Europeanization (dependent variable), both in terms of networking and collective action (Monforte 2014). Due to the rather varied domestic POS and DOS across the European continent, the analysis should also shed more light on the cross-contextual responses to the refugee crisis, and how and why the distinct groups decided to instigate cooperation with actors from abroad.
As stated above, we already know that there is a lot of transnational cooperation and networking taking place on the far right (see e.g. Berntzen 2018a; Caiani & Kröll 2015). Yet, it is no easy task to sample the most appropriate research objects to examine such developments. The far right political spectrum consists of a multitude of different actors, both in terms of ideology and organizational forms (see e.g. Fielitz
& Laloire 2016; Minkenberg 2018), making it hard to explore the entirety of the actors in one study. However, as we still do not know much about the transnationalization process as such, i.e. the rationales and steps involved in the initiation of transnational cooperation, plus how it develops over time, from the outset, I decided to focus the research on already established transnational far right coalitions. I have thus decided to delimit the focus of the investigation on the national groups that participated in two transnational coalitions,10 which were both highly active in the ‘refugee crisis’ period, namely Fortress Europe (FE) and Generation Identity (GI). Fortress Europe is a coalition consisting of both European political parties and protest groups with various
10 Based on social movement literature, I define a transnational coalition as a more or less densely connected and means-oriented alliance between nationally based groups and actors (who may derive from both the non- and institutional level), who pool (certain) resources, in order to target a shared opponent at the transnational level. Besides from the instrumentality of the cooperation, they do not necessarily share any closer identity-based affinities (see Chapter 3 for conceptualization).
political viewpoints (rather akin to the Counter-Jihad Movement (CJM)11), while Generation Identity is a coalition of similar-minded groupuscules (Griffin 2003), which used the French Géneration Identitaire (created in 2012) as their blueprint for contention. This choice of sample is a rather unorthodox approach in terms of the existing Europeanization literature. Most of the research either focuses more broadly on the Europeanization of national protests in general (Imig & Tarrow 2001a;
Chabanet 2011; Uba & Uggla 2011) or on national case studies (e.g. Rucht 2002 (Germany); Císař & Vráblíková 2010 (Czech Republic); Andretta & Caiani 2005 (Italy); della Porta & Caiani 2006 (Italy)). Some do compare a number of EU MS (e.g.
Reising 1999 (Germany, France, and Belgium); della Porta & Caiani 2009 (6 MS);
Monforte 2014 (France and Germany)), yet, so far, only a few have ventured to focus the research around an already established transnational coalition. In fact, della Porta and Caiani’s (2009) research on the Global Social Forum, and Agustín’s (2017) article on Diem25 and PlanB practically stand alone in this endeavour. With this choice, I thus wish to propose a more innovative framework that considers far right transnational networking in depth, while still maintaining a focus on the national context, in order to deduce the role of the domestic context for far right Europeanization and collective action more generally.
One could argue that to obtain a better understanding of the far right in its complexity, it would be more beneficial to consider the far right actors in one to two national settings, in order to deduce the different Europeanization paths, depending on the type of organization and its resources (such as e.g. Monforte (2014) has done). Yet, as it is the pre-defined aim to consider how exactly the far right networking takes place amongst the different national actors, plus to explore their forms and rationales for transnational collective action, I deemed this approach to be the most suitable.
Focusing on the organizational meso-level, it is thus the aim to consider how the organizers and/or leaders of the groups making up the two coalitions (GI and FE) rationalize their participation in the transnational coalitions, and the activities pursued in order to maintain the cooperation. At the same time, this case selection also makes it possible to consider (certain of) the groups in their domestic settings, and explore their collective action strategies, and reasons for setting up and/or joining the coalitions. As a delimitation, I have decided to focus solely on the collective action of the extra-parliamentary groups that make up the two coalitions (for more on this choice, see Ch. 2).
As mentioned above, far right collective action is a rather understudied research area, including explorations of the protest actions at the European level, both surrounding the EU, but also more general transnational collective action on the far right (for exceptions, see e.g. Hutter 2014a; Zúquete 2015). To begin closing these research
11 The CJM included both protest groups, single activists, political associations, and political parties (such as Vlaams Belang and the Sweden Democrats), which found common ground in their anti-Islam stances (see e.g. Berntzen 2018a; Meleagrou-Hitchens & Brun 2013 for more).
gaps, this thesis wishes to both explore the action repertoires and strategies of the different groups more broadly, and to investigate the ways in which they (potentially) include the EU in their protests, either by targeting the institutions, protesting about EU-policy related issues, or approaching the institutions in other ways. This is done by both analysing all the extra-parliamentary groups’ actions together, and their various mobilization paths and strategies, but also by focusing in on some of the different groups’ national contexts and their (potential) influence on the groups’
Europeanization of collective action. The analysis will thus examine the groups’
political and discursive opportunities at both the domestic and European level, together with particularly their material resources, as a means to explain the chosen strategies. This also entails a study of the role attributed to the EU by the different groups, in order to understand the groups’ manoeuvring in the 2015-2017 period, and the rationale behind their strategies, which may, or may not, involve contention directed at the EU. Moreover, by choosing two transnational coalitions from the outset, we already know that Europeanization of networks has taken place. Yet, in order to investigate the extent of this collaboration further in terms of street mobilization, the research will explore the scope of the participants at each protest event, in order to deduce the extent of the cooperation. All of these aspects will be considered through a protest event analysis (see e.g. Hutter 2014b), based on data drawn from the national groups’ own sources, to ensure as encompassing a data set as possible.
The networking-section of the thesis will particularly draw on (transnational) coalition-building theories, both developed in relation to the EU-level (Europeanization literature), but also deriving from the broader social movement coalition literature (involving scholars such as Van Dyke (2003); Levi & Murphy 2006; Tarrow 2005; etc.). These theoretical findings are employed to develop a conceptual framework, which guides the analysis of the groups’ networking endeavours, both in terms of the initiation, maintenance, and (possible) survival of the coalition. It is expected that the groups will begin coalescing, when they deem that the political and discursive opportunities are open at either the EU- or the European level as such. Moreover, the framework also relies on theoretical expectations drawn from scholarship on the far right, particularly concerning the initiation of the coalitions, and the groups’ deliberations in terms of joining forces with actors from abroad. This is not only due to possible respectability and legitimacy concerns (Ahrne et al. 2005), but also due to the differences and feuds between certain Eastern and Western European far right nationalists (e.g. the Czech and Polish far right, and their animosities towards Germany). In a similar vein, it is also the aim to continue the work of Berntzen (2018) and examine the extent to which the ‘refugee crisis’ led to a further bridging of the Western and Eastern European far right, also at the offline level.
The framing perspective has been a prominent feature of several more recent explorations of social movement Europeanization (see e.g. Monforte 2014; della Porta
& Caiani 2009), and it is also included in this thesis. However, unlike the aforementioned works, it is not the direct aim here to explore the effect of Europeanization on a movement’s frames (i.e. if said frames change due to the new political realities brought by the EU, for instance due to the change in the target of mobilization (see e.g. Monforte 2014 for such an approach)). Instead, the study employs frame analysis for two main purposes. On the one hand, to investigate the issues around which the various groups instigate collective action (as a means to explain the group’s Europeanization strategies in terms of collective action). On the other, to explore the extent to which the groups that make up the two respective transnational coalitions develop ‘Europeanized’ and shared collective identities.
Hence, the analysis includes an exploration of the distinct national groups’ political viewpoints and alignment of identities with their European counterparts in relation to their transnational cooperation. This entails the exploration of the groups’ collective action frames and collective identity frames (Snow & Benford 1988; Benford & Snow 2000). The collective action frames involve a collective actor’s diagnosis (what is the problem and who is to blame), prognosis (how it should be solved), and motivational frames (why should one act). In order to examine whether the coalition-members develop joint transnational collective identities, the research considers their (potential) creation of a joint, European, protagonist ‘us,’ which must act united against the antagonist ‘them’. This will be done by exploring how the distinct groups construct protagonist identities to define themselves and their supporters, and the juxtaposed internal and external antagonists, who are blamed for the perceived problems (see e.g.
Weiβ 2017).