Not ‘stuck in the past’: nostalgia, future orientations, and temporality of the Dutch nativist radical right

Abstract

The Netherlands is no exception to the rise of radical right political parties with a nativist ideology at their core: two successful cases are the PVV and FVD. In this article, the central point of departure is that the literature on nativism, as far as the aspect of time is discussed, has a one-sided focus on nostalgia and the past. We argue that this leads to a disregard of the role that the future plays in nativist narratives. This analysis of nativist discourses of these two Dutch radical right parties shows that their nativism does in fact contain a future orientation. Past, present, and future are entangled in what we can call a ‘temporality’. What links past and future together, we suggest, is a discursive allusion to a Dutch spirit, woven through temporal conceptions like a common thread. References to the past are most often ambiguous because either the period or the suggested characteristic attributed to the past remains unelaborated or under-elaborated. Nonetheless, an ‘essence’ to Dutchness is believed to have persisted and to be maintained throughout time. It depends on the temporal context how this purported Dutch spirit is realised in people’s narratives. It seems, then, that the goal of Dutch radical right parties is to reawaken a ‘Dutch spirit’, of which the manifestations are temporally specific.