Nativism and Nostalgia in the Netherlands1

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the employment of temporality in nativist discourse. Looking at nostalgia in the context of contemporary nativism reveals that the operative temporality is not limited to just the past. The perception of “threat,” central to nativism, does not only inform historical claims made by nostalgic nativists, but also refers to the present and to the future in which this threat is to be overcome. After defining nativism, the article focuses on nostalgic invocations of the national past. To what (imagined) times do nativists refer when they speak about the “good old days”? What exactly is perceived as attractive about those days? The next section deals with the dystopian and utopian invocations of the future. As for the empirical scope of this article, we focus on the two most influential representatives of the Dutch radical right: Partij voor de Vrijheid and Forum voor Democratie. We conducted a discourse analysis of textual and verbal material from the period between 2006 and 2021. By analyzing the entanglements of past, present, and the future in nativist discourses, this article seeks to enrich our understanding of the role temporality plays in the dominant debates about national belonging.