anti-European Sentiment Research Articles

Early Biblical Fundamentalism’s Xenophobic Rejection of the Subject in European Philosophy: How Rejecting the Knowing Subject Formed Fundamentalism’s Way of Thinking

This article is part of a wider project that addresses gaps in the scholarly knowledge of the philosophical and theological foundations of the Biblical Fundamentalism that originated in North America. Through exploring the relevant literature, including primary sources from within Fundamentalism, the article examines the anti-European sentiment in early Fundamentalism and how this sentiment led to a rejection of philosophical values associated with Europe, especially with Germany. The article will show that anti-European, especially anti-German, sentiment bolstered Fundamentalism’s rejection of subjectivity in thinking, and even its rejection of human subjects themselves. In the place of subjectivity associated with European philosophy, Fundamentalism embraced an extreme objectivity that claimed the heritage of Reid and Bacon but eliminated subjectivity from the Fundamentalist horizon. This article thus shows how Fundamentalism radically opposes God and human beings, and faith and philosophy, with the resulting way of thinking that can be characterised as “naïve realism”, an approach to thinking that excludes the active thinking subject and does not allow for critical judgement or personal understanding.

Reality Amidst Rhetoric: Implementation of ECtHR Judgments in the UK

Abstract This article concerns the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the United Kingdom. The rhetoric of politicians who object to the Court and raise problems with the implementation of its judgments is contrasted with the reality of implementation. It is shown that the UK is a good international citizen which takes its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights seriously. Problems with implementation, such as those raised by the prisoner voting judgment, Hirst (No 2), are useful tools for politicians seeking to provoke anti-European sentiment. However, with this judgment now implemented, this strategy is no longer as successful as it once was.

A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty

Reviewed by: A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty Cane West A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 159. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0790-6.) In the mid-nineteenth century, as Americans looked westward across the continent, many white U.S. southerners also pursued expansion projects southward into Central and South America. Southern commentators such as Matthew Fontaine Maury felt that the future of the slaveholding U.S. South rested on the success of this sectional expansion into Latin America. Claire M. Wolnisty highlights "multiple southern expansionistic ideologies" pursued by filibusterers, commercial expansionists, and southern emigrants who developed increasingly hemispheric formulations of manifest destiny (p. xiv). She argues that these southern expansionists created political and economic networks between the U.S. South and South America through which the U.S. South could serve as the model for an "expansionistic, proslavery, and modern power poised to dominate the Western Hemisphere" (p. xiii). A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America builds [End Page 382] on recent scholarship by historians such as Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brian Schoen, and Matthew Karp emphasizing southern slaveholders' engagement with other nineteenth-century slaveholding societies in the Western Hemisphere. Wolnisty's study into the various nation-state and non-nation-state formulations of power in Central and South America demonstrates the possibility of "far more fluid spatial concepts" of an independent South than the eventual Confederacy (p. xv). The book's three chapters follow distinct groups of southern expansionists, primarily between the 1850s and 1870s, as they responded to European imperial projects in the hemisphere and domestic tensions over slavery. Chapter 1 focuses on the shifting rhetoric among military filibusterers in Nicaragua. Wolnisty draws from the writings of leading filibusterers, particularly William Walker, who first appealed to widespread anti-European sentiment before shifting to explicitly proslavery arguments that drew more sectional support. In chapter 2, her strongest chapter, she discusses the "economic infiltration" of commercial expansionists in Brazil (p. 37). She draws on letters and business ledgers from Americans in Brazil who created nonterritorial economic networks as an alternative to more high-profile military-backed territorial annexations. In chapter 3, Wolnisty follows newspapers and diaries of former Confederates who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. She argues that these immigrant communities carried their proslavery southern identity beyond the borders of the United States by adopting prewar southern expansion models. Readers of the Journal of Southern History will be drawn to the implications of a much more geographically fluid southern identity. Wolnisty's border-transcending southerners "became proslavery, modern economists within southern–South American networks" (p. xvii). Whether in Brazil or Nicaragua, these southern expansionists tied their identity to the promise of modern slave labor societies and settler-colonial communities modeled after the U.S. South. Wolnisty's conclusions also decenter cotton as the source of U.S. southerners' power. Cotton rarely appears in the text as Wolnisty focuses on themes of anti-European sentiment, slavery-driven capitalism, and geographic mobility. Though the study ostensibly covers the time frame of 1808 to 1877, to examine nearly a century of southerners looking toward South America, the study is largely focused on the years 1850–1877. This narrower time frame leaves readers with a limited understanding of how "expansionistic visions adapted to the shifting hemispheric environments" of the nineteenth century, with the notable exception of the post–Civil War emigrants to Brazil (p. xv). Material fluctuations in the volume of U.S.-Brazilian trade or the number of postwar southern emigrants to Brazil might provide some understanding of changes in hemispheric relations, but much of this evidence is listed only in the endnotes. A Different Manifest Destiny is helpful for scholars interested in the international dimensions of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and hemispheric case studies of southern, proslavery manifest destiny. The forms of non-state expansion show how southerners sought to develop global trade networks in the nineteenth century, and the attempted settler-colonies in Nicaragua...

The Effects of Political Cynicism and National Siege Mentality on the Internalization of an Anti-European Sentiment

<p>This paper aims to provide an insight into the political-psychological understanding of an attitudinal construct labeled anti-European sentiment. A structural equation model for prediction was developed and evaluated by using full information mximum likelihood estimates obtained from LISREL 8.52 computer program. Assumption was that both political cynicism and national siege mentality would have an effect on anti-European sentiment. The data reported here were obtained by standard survey methods on the sample of adult population in Croatia (N=533). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to explore factorial and construct validity of the measures used in this research. CFA yielded unidimensional construct measurements with acceptable fit indices. Structural model indicated that exogenous variables (political cynicism, national siege mentality) have significant effects on the anti-European sentiment used as an endogenous (dependent) variable. Goodness-of-fit indices suggested acceptable fit of the model (RMSEA=0.07, CFI=0.97, NNFI=0.97, SRMR=0.05). Given the amount of variance of anti-European sentiment, it was showen that political cynicism and national siege mentality have strong predictive validity for anti-European sentiment (43 percent of the variance was explained by the structural model). In order to explain the interactions among the variables investigated, the author proposed the distrust-threat model of political hostility.</p>

Direct Democracy and Scapegoats: The Five Star Movement and Europe

Italy is one the most europhile countries in the European Union. Nevertheless, as surveys show, over the last few years anti-European sentiments have increasingly surfaced among Italian citizens. Furthermore, there is now an important novelty regarding the relation between Italy and Europe: the Movimento 5 Stelle (The Five Star Movement), a new party that expresses a peculiar and contradictory position towards Europe. Its leader, Beppe Grillo, sometimes advocates more, not less, unification, but he also proposes a referendum on Italian membership of the euro. Moreover, Grillo’s blog frequently lends its voice to the choir of openly anti-European sentiment. Indeed, Grillo’s call for direct democracy is plebiscitarian and his positions contribute to the weakening of a European project that is already facing grave difficulties of its own.

Far Across the Channel : A Study of the Effects of Pro- and Anti-European Sentiment in Government and Parliament and the Importance of Trade on the Europeanisation of Judicial Discourses, with Respect to Statutory Interpretative Techniques in the UK and Ireland, from 1970-2010

This paper aims to explore and explain the variation observed in the use of continental style statutory interpretative techniques by judges in the UK and Ireland in the period between 1970 and 2010. This phenomenon will be explained by the view of the parliament and government towards the European Project, and by the amount of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of which International trade is a share. Its focus is the change in attitude of judges in Ireland and the UK from 1970-2010, away from a position where any statute before them would be, in general, interpreted literally, according to the letter of the law, unless that would cause ‘mischief’ or ‘manifest absurdity’, to the position we have today whereby judges have a greater propensity to ask themselves, in a manner similar to that of continental judges, a number of questions of the statute in front of them. These include; are the measures outlined in a certain law suitable to achieve its stated aim (Proportionality)?; what type of law exactly did the parliamentarians have in mind when creating the law they did (Purposive Interpretation/Construction)?; and does the claimant have a right to legitimately expect a legal protection in some regard (Legitimate Expectation)?

The discursive construction of anti-European sentiment in the times.co.uk texts

The critical study of language has payed particular attention to the discursive construction of concepts such as national identity, ideology or hegemony. In this paper we applied Fairclough's three-dimensional model of CDA to the presentation of European matters in the online texts of The Times, a mass medium noted for its traditional alliance with the British political and economic establishment, analysing the discursive strategies used by text producers in the headlines, leads and stories of 84 reports, opinion articles and editorials in an attempt to identify the ideological components imbued by the text producers and, thus, establish the degree of impartiality towards the European issue and whether the discourse used by this mass medium is an example of the traditional British resistance towards EU integration.

A Louisiana Swamp Doctoris Diagnosis: Romantic Fatality and the Frontier Roots of Realism

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, scientists, social theorists, and artists tended to dichotomize all facets of physical and social life. In his study of nineteenth-century medical practices and social attitudes regarding medicine and practitioners, Martin S. Pernick points out: Social iconography divided the world into two separate and distinct spheres--Head vs. Heart, Reason vs. Sentiment, World vs. Home, Art vs. Nature--all seen as relations of the great division between Masculine and Feminine. But although these were two antithetical worlds, the existence of each depended on the existence of its opposite ... Between romanticism and antiromanticism existed a profound dialectic. (119) Assumptions regarding race and class were also characterized according to this ideological taxonomy, including notions regarding the physical body in terms of sensitivity to pain and illness. Pernick notes that the most respected scientists of the day believed that all living things might be arranged in a hierarchy of sensitivity, a great chain of feeling. Brute animals, savages, purebred nonwhites, the poor and oppressed, the inebriated, and the old, constituted the lower orders. The most sensitive included women, the rich, civilized, educated, and sophisticated. (157) As a medical apprentice, student, and practicing physician, Henry Clay Lewis was trained to view the physical and social body in terms of this configuration. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, strong challenges to the conventions of sentimentality and cultural romanticism were beginning to appear in scientific and literary journals because many male intellectuals believed that the growing influence of women writers, educators, and, importantly, readers were leading to over-sensitivity and weakening the masculine virtues of the young republic. In her book The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas asserts that during the 1820s, 1830s, and early 1840s, men ruled the political and social domain, but that during the 1840s, 1850s, and early 1860s, women became increasingly important as arbiters of literary and cultural taste (100). Rumblings critiquing cultural and literary romanticism, also associated with an anti-European sentiment, were beginning to appear in periodicals by mid-century. In Facing Facts, David Shi notes that one of the earliest critical acknowledgements of a shift in American literary principles, from the romantic tradition toward realism, occurs in an 1854 article in Putnam's titled Novels: Their Meaning and Mission. The anonymous author comments on the growing predilection for the real and the practical, explaining that an emerging literary movement seeks to present what is true. In this essay, I will demonstrate that Henry Clay Lewis participated actively in this early movement toward realism with his collection of sketches Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor, published in 1850, with several sketches appearing earlier in William T. Porter's sporting paper, Spirit of the Times. Lewis asserts a decidedly anti-romantic stance by creating a work of art in which he rejects the practice of using art to provide a model for idealized life in favor of revealing life as it is for a swamp doctor in the bayous of Louisiana. The anti-romantic nature of Odd Leaves is not simply an inversion of romanticism by way of mere satire or critique, but a complex study of romantic ideology and the ways in which it affects an individual's epistemology. Lewis illustrates throughout the sketches that the dichotomization of class, race, and gender is misleading and fraught with inaccuracies, and, further, that cultural romanticism leads to discontent with reality, which fosters unrealistic notions and goals. Furthermore, Lewis suggests that cultural romanticism is a form of intoxication that befuddles reality. Indeed, the work might be considered a manifesto for temperance, cautioning against the dangers of excesses such as drink, religion, ambition, competition, love, and refinement. …

Contrasting attitudinal bases to Euroscepticism amongst the French electorate

This article examines the different attitudinal bases which potentially contribute to Euroscepticism amongst the electorates of Extreme Left-wing and Right-wing parties in France, and in particular of the Communist Party and the Front National. Controlling for other explanations of anti-European sentiment, Left–Right economic and ethnocentric attitudes are found to be strong predictors of pro-, anti- and indifferent stances on the European issue. Moreover, despite the existence of an important electoral pool on the Extreme Right, which possesses both Left-wing economic and Right-wing ethnocentric attitudinal bases to its Eurosceptic position, the nature of the economic issues on which these voters hold a Left-wing position reveals a perspective in many ways more compatible with the Extreme Right than with any Left-wing conceptualisation of economic policy. Electorally, this divergence in mass ideological demand would seem to rule out any future long-term partisan realignment around the European issue.