The Nation Strikes Back

IT’S NOT THAT a new spectre is haunting Europe. The initial fear after the elections to the European Parliament made it look so. It’s just that the centre, kept intact for so long by the liberals, has collapsed in Europe’s two major powers in a radical rightwing wave. The spectacular performance of National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, in France frightened Emmanuel Macron, Europe’s ultimate centrist who has taken the preservation of the continent’s liberal soul as his political responsibility, so much so that he has called for a snap parliamentary election. In Germany, the ruling Social Democrats fared badly compared to Alternative for Germany (AfD). Minor rightwing gains elsewhere apart, Europe has not given in entirely to the radical right. Not yet. Still the popular choice from the heart of the continent brings out the fragility of the liberal order—and its failure in reading resentment.

The heirs of Le Pen, the original über nationalist of modern France, triumphing over Macron’s centrist Renaissance cracks open the idyll maintained by lofty liberalism—and reveals the simmering sentiments of the ‘natives’ holding on to a shaky nation. In Germany, the radical right is a counterpoint to the taboo-nation institutionalised by the post-Nazi politics of guilt. Refusing to share the guilt is not, for the radical right, an endorsement of the Führer; it’s a return to the nation without the baggage of hate borrowed from a cruel history.

With Hungary and Poland already in thrall to the reborn nationalists, the liberal anxiety is as pervasive as the rightwing fury. Its most obvious explanation, coming from the rattled liberals and centrists, puts the blame on that elastic term in the current glossary of defeatism: populism. It’s deployed against politicians who emerged from the debris of ideologies and, feeding on the fears of a people abandoned by the entrenched elitism of the exhausted left and right, built a new messianism about national redemption.

What the Western liberals tend to reject is the fact that they are the co-authors of the sociology that propelled the so-called populist surge. As class resurfaced as political dispute in the post-ideological world, resentment against the elite became inevitable. The elites, no matter from left or right, were too entrenched in power to feel the telluric force against the permanent establishment. The revenge of the native had its moment when Brexit exposed the vulnerability of the united Europe. When England returned to the familiar comfort of being English, it was not a rejection of Europe in terms of ideas and culture; it was a rejoinder to the Brussels-based politburo. Later, Donald Trump would add to the legend of the angry nation rising from below.

The European nationalists have already normalised the politics of grievance and pride. Once in power, as in Hungary and Poland, two post-communist societies that did not equate freedom with liberalism-as-usual, the radical nationalist made politics a cultural pursuit. And wherever their struggle was against power, they played the defenders of the nation let down by the liberal elite, as in France and Germany. And one issue that continues to expand their constituency is immigration. As an argument and ideal, as a threat to the nation and as an indebtedness to a historical memory, unchecked immigration is the singular topic that can make or unmake political fortunes—left, liberal or conservative—in the West today. In the elections to the European Parliament, what the radical right sought from liberals and centrists was an explanation for immigration, illegal or otherwise.

It’s the return of the old question: Who are we? Coming with such vengeance from the radical right, the question makes everything that turns the liberal order into a cosy consensus worthy of a reassessment. If the cultural making of the West cannot be understood without the saga of immigration, its acceptance of multiculturalism is seen as confidence in its own culture. Today, this liberal idealism is being challenged by the nation reborn in the radicalism of the right. Home is a non-negotiable cultural statement, and it is out there in the arena.

It is an urgency for the conservatives, too. After all, to be a liberal is not necessarily a leftist or progressive position alone. The possibility of a Trump second coming in November and a Sunak washout in July tells the conservative story of our time with two entirely different perspectives. On one side of the Atlantic, the right listens to the whispers from far below; on the other, conservatives have mastered the art of squandering the mandate, which was renewed most audaciously in the Brexit vote.

Still, it’s the liberals, stuck in the centre, who need to learn talking to the nation, instead of turning away from its nervousness. They have nothing to lose but an increasingly inauthentic argument.

democracyEuropean UnionideologynationspersepctivespoliticsWestern liberals