Invoking urgency

Abstract

Since the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, notions of urgency and emergency have dominated the vocabulary of Austrian and German populist politics and media, informing not only political debates but also legislations. These discourses create the impression that the influx of refugees is equivalent with a loss of sovereignty over the national territory and the state. In effect, it is argued that the state cannot fulfil its security promise; it is not sovereign anymore, unless extraordinary measures will be employed. Following Agamben (and Schmitt), sovereignty relates to the power to decide the instauration of state of exception and to act outside of the law; only the sovereign can “speak” exception. While the “state of exception” as a political strategy has been subject to much research and discussion, the role of emotions has overall been undertheorised in that context. This chapter contributes to the understanding of anti-elitist populism by linking the invocation of urgency and the “state of exception” to the study of emotions. It argues that invoking and declaring “urgency” to prevent or end the “state of exception” is a performative practice that makes a lasting impression on social actors, with far-reaching effects for democratic political culture. While the state of exception describes a crisis in the present, the notion of urgency holds projections of an apocalyptic future. It is a practice in the securitisation of refugees and migrants that legitimises extreme measures entailing the suspension of legal rights and basic freedoms while claiming to restore safety and security in the future with reference to an imagined past. Yet, urgency is not only a temporal notion, it functions as a “controlling process” (Nader) that also informs emotional practices. As such, it is an important part of affective populist politics that presents democratic politics and elected politicians as distant and detached from “the people”, unwilling and incapable of dealing with crises and threat scenarios. Thereby, trust in democratic conceptions of the state and the society is undermined in favour of anti-elitist populism which positions itself as the “true” sovereign.