Abstract
In recent years, Europe has experienced a rise in politics based on antagonism, often discussed from the perspectives of populism and the mainstreaming of the ideologies of the radical right. In this study, we argue that there is a need for an interdisciplinary, theoretically broader and more empirically focused approach that fosters understanding of these developments. To explore the causal factors, we focus on the enemy images that are constructed and diffused by politicians, and their specific historical and structural contexts. The paper thus has two main components: First, we review what political theory, research on populism and on the extreme right and social psychology say about the functions of the use and development of enemy images. Second, we highlight the contextual factors that we consider make the success of a politics based on enemy images more likely in Central and Eastern Europe.
Highlights
In recent years, Europe has experienced the rise of a politics based on antagonism
In the last few years, there has been an increase in the use of ‘enemy images’ in Central and Eastern European politics
In this paper we have put forward an answer to the question ‘what stands behind these developments?’ We argued that, to understand this process of enmification, we need to use an interdisciplinary approach and explore the contextual factors that create the favorable conditions for such a politics
Summary
Europe has experienced the rise of a politics based on antagonism. Right-wing populist parties have won national elections in Hungary and Poland, there has been an intense ‘blame game’ between Germany and Greece in relation to the debt crisis (Mylonas, 2012; Wodak and Angouri, 2014), antiimmigration discourse has been on the rise since mid-2015, Central and Eastern European immigrants have been blamed for taking British jobs (Fitzgerald and Smoczynski, 2015), and Central and Eastern Europeans tend to blame Middle Eastern refugees who are fleeing war for spreading terror (Tremlett and Messing, 2015; Győri, 2016; Klaus, 2017). We intend to support our claim that ‘the enemy’ still has an important role in political theory, but that 1) this issue should be empirically examined more broadly than just in relation to populism and the extreme right, and 2) this examination should go beyond the political process approach by including more sociological, and even social psychological, aspects. This approach would clarify how structural conditions lead to group processes and to a social psychological state in which politics based on enemy-making seems more likely. We suggest that the changes in the media and the mediated public sphere play a decisive role in intensifying the use of enemies as a main platform for public discourse
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