Have you heard the one that the European Parliament elections were held on 6 to 9 June 2024, and none of the citizens of the 27 EU Member States bothered to come and vote?
Writing this editorial in March – one week before the Christian festival of Easter – and with only three months to go, it is remarkable that we hardly see any political statements of European parties or hear about the politicians standing for the European Parliament elections. Or do we? Only Cyprus, Greece and Luxembourg do have a compulsory voting system, all other countries leave it to their citizens to cast a vote. Certainly, living in the UK/ NI means not having a say in this, post-Brexit anyway.
As far as far right-wing European governments are concerned, we saw a change back towards the political centre in Poland, October 2023, when Donald Tusk won the national elections. It seems, however, we got used to the far-right Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, in power since 2022. Apparently, Meloni is a success story as some other EU countries are schmoozing her, not least the current president of the European commission, Ursula von der Leyen. Von der Leyen is spearheading this normalising tendency of mainstreaming far-right racist attitudes towards migrants and refugees.
Whereas the UK’s Rwanda’s deportation scheme was stopped due to legal interventions and public outcry, the ‘illegal migration bill’ passed parliament in 2023,Footnote1 and the so-called ‘Safety Rwanda Bill’ is on its way. The Melonisation of EU asylum policy seems to go ahead, too, with some even claiming it to be an attempt to halt the rise of the far-right.Footnote2
The question is, was there a political alternative to the (far) right-wing shift within the scope of European Union normative and parliamentary orientations, before?
Back in 2019, when the previous European Parliament elections were held, the Dutch and Social Democrat Frans Timmermans was running for presidency. He was a socialist, who was vice-president before but then blocked by a significant number of centre and far right parties (mainly Eastern European)Footnote3 of the EU. The German politician, Ursula von der Leyen of the Christian Democratic Union, was supported by the ‘eurosceptic ECR, dominated by Poland’s PiS party’.Footnote4
In 2024, and five years later we have lived through the pandemic (2020–2022) and most societies went back to ‘their normal’, it seems. That said, we need to think critically about European global positions against the continuing war in Ukraine and Israel’s military (war) response to the Hamas’ massacre of 1200 civilians in Israel and hostage taking of 240, on 7 October 2023. By now, in March 2024, the death toll in Gaza (predominantly, women and children) reached the 32.000.
I am not going here into the controversial debate on what has been denounced as anti-Semitic when critiquing ruthless state power but wish to highlight that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Den Hague, in January 2024, ‘ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide as it wages war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip but stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire’.Footnote5 This ICJ order is legally binding. But the killing did not stop.
The dismissal of international academics, for example Prof Ghassan HageFootnote6 in Germany, who dared to speak out and critique the Israeli government, seems to suggest a new level of institutional silencing of critical voices. At the same time, we see huge demonstrations taken place in Europe, for example in London and Dublin. Silencing critical voices indicates a shift to a more authoritarian style of governmentality. It is undermining debate and compassion towards human beings trapped in (as was stated years ago) a big ‘open air prison’, with Hamas in power since 2007.Footnote7
As an international editorial team, with colleagues living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Finland, and the UK/NI, we might have differing views on the Gaza war as far as we can comprehend what is happening in front of our eyes and transmitted in social media and traditional (national) media outlets. The national lens brings to the fore the ideological and emotional divisions on this topic, let’s say between Germany and France, on the one hand, and Ireland and Spain, on the other. Jonathan Glazer, receiving the Oscar for his film (German-Polish production) ‘Zone of Interest’, denounced the silence on the genocide/ ethnic cleansing in Gaza; his speech was not even mentioned in the main German broadcaster (ARD) news that night. Censorship is embedded in normative trajectories, what the majority might accept and should hear (or see), but it is just a tiny element of a larger jigsaw. With different wars taking place, the military machine has become normalised – the consensus in strong defence forces and the common enemy to the East – which means we are not allowed to interrogate the sense of militaristic counter-defence, any longer, it seems. Even the pope was condemned for posing the question whether Ukrainians were willing to raise the white flag and starting negotiations with Russia to end their war.
One thing is for sure, Max Horkheimer’s (Citation1939/Citation1988) famous sentence, ‘Wer aber vom Kapitalismus nicht reden will sollte auch vom Faschismus schweigen’ – (‘who does not want to talk about capitalism should be silent on fascism.’) is still timely, and puts a provocative request on the table that we need to link the contemporary conditions of capitalist societies and our reflection on what causes authoritarianism, if not fascisms. Industrial capitalistic (trans/national) companies, for example Rheinmetall, are profiting from ongoing wars and weaponised conflicts, such as in Gaza and Ukraine. Rheinmetall joined the DAX/stock exchange in 2023 and saw revenues just below 7.2 billion Euros, already.
Though our eyes are now on Gaza, we do not even hear that much any longer about other ongoing and unresolved militaristic conflicts such as in Syria or in Sudan.
There is something deeply troubling going on, what Achille Mbembe (Citation2019) calls ‘Necropolitics’. The politics of death refers to a culture – of those at the core of power – deciding who is disposable and who is not. What is the worth of a (poor) life?
The undercurrent of ‘Black Lives Matter’ as political activists’ responses to institutional racism as well as worldwide protests and solidarity statements with Palestinian women and children – victims of ongoing military massacres – challenge necropolitics, unfolding in front of our eyes. What can we do as citizens of the world or as EU citizens to stop authoritarian politics and the blatant return to toxic masculinity? In the past, the Christian festival Easter was the symbolic occasion for Germans – initiated by the peace movement in the late 1950s – to demonstrate (Ostermaersche) for peace and against military violence. We will see what happens this year, on Easter, and across the world.
In this issue, we have papers from different European countries lined up shedding light, for example on notions of citizenship and youth activism, solidarity with migrants, and policy making in the EU.
Giacoma Lampredi, problematises how ‘migration’, and ergo the very category of migrants, has been presented and loaded with emotional attributes, most often negatively associated with fear, anger and parochial feelings of ‘us’ against ‘them’. The article reflects on the role of emotional glue when exploring how and why solidarity work(s). As a case study – an ethnographic account – Turin and Florence were chosen as those cities where Italian citizens enact solidarity with international migrants. Against a nativist or populist boundary drawing Lampredi finds affective citizenship on the ground. Acts of solidarity transform the imagined boundary of exclusion/ inclusion along the lines of formal and legal citizenship and disrupt the familiar notion of belonging. When being confronted with views, uttered by parents, or loved ones, who are irritated about these acts of solidarity with strangers, the activist citizens redraw the map of normative inclusion.
Ricardo Campos in his contribution reminds us that the prejudice towards young people not engaging that much with (traditional) politics and political parties dismisses the counter-spaces and places where young people’s protest and civic interventions take place. While focusing on what Campos calls ‘Artivism’, ‘artistic creation and civic intervention’, youth artivism speaks to identity themes as well as to societal and global political issues such as climate, human rights, or social justice. Through digital devices and new forms of bodily and sounds based interventions young activist in Portugal challenge established notions of political citizenship and illustrate art as a ‘powerful instrument of personal and collective transformation’ (Campos, this issue).
Fabrizio Battistelli investigates different political positions and ideological framings of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy measures to deal with its consequences. He distinguishes three positions, a right-conservative one, a left-progressive one, and third one where ‘extremes meet’ or what with Marx may be called ‘critical criticism’. Battistelli further emphasises the political dichotomy between collective and individualist approaches. His discussion of framing includes different rationalities that inform the framing of ‘objective’ data and facts, in particular in different ways of perceiving and assessing forms of ‘harm’. These should, however, be understood from specific subjective positions of distinctive actors, such as policymakers or the citizens.
Menno Hurenkamp, Paul Dekker, and Evelien Tonkens discuss winners and losers of globalisation in their contribution. Utilising focus groups in the Netherlands, the authors engage with lower educated employees’ views and narratives of globalisation, contributing to the debate on the differential effects of globalisation on different groups in society. This differential impact allegedly informs a new cleavage in politics, that between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘communitarians’. The claim is that employees do not necessarily reject globalisation but feel abandoned by political actors in the form of government and representatives.
In Hanna Rautajoki’s contribution, she investigates discursive strategies in international policymaking. Her focus is on argumentative practices in the context of policy negotiation in the European Union in the form of the legal initiative Single European Sky, a programme aimed at harmonising European air space and air traffic management, launched by the European Commission in 2004. Rautajoki utilised neo-institutionalist or discursive institutionalist approaches, stressing the role of cultural factors in politics. Hers is an attempt contributing to a thicker description of the ‘politics of policymaking’. Her article stresses the rhetorical implications of parallel normative frameworks that are co-existent in the EU policy-making and legislative arena. The concept ‘relational scaffolding’ is introduced refers to the deployment of identifications and normative interrelations in political persuasion. The article makes a persuasive case for the perspective of interrelational devices in processes of political justification. These processes are not standing on their own but are clearly part of specific contexts and institutional settings.
In the book reviews for this issue, Małgorzata Kolankowska discusses Central European Culture Wars (Barša et al., Citation2021), which contains six case studies of Central European countries. Editors and authors argue that the rise of culture wars between liberals and conservatives in Central Europe in the 2010s marks a departure from the post-communist politics of the previous two decades, which can’t be adequately grasped by the concept of populism. Each case study analyses culture wars at three fronts: the politics of memory, identity and morality. Kolankowska highlights in her review the unified ‘theoretical framework and innovative methodology of the study [which] should be taken into consideration for future studies of political polarization’. Morality is not only central to culture wars but also to social movements. This is at least the claim of The Power of Morality in Movements (Sevelsted & Toubøl, Citation2022), an edited volume assembling contributions from a wide range of theoretical and methodological positions, which our reviewer Runya Qiaoan welcomes as a much-needed corrective to the materialist ‘instrumental analysis’ dominating the field of social movement studies. Her only concern is the ‘somewhat unsatisfying […] treatment of “culture” in this volume,’ which is often ‘conflated with […] emotion, morality, value’. Similarly, our last reviewer, Sonya Darrow, is disappointed by the abrupt ending of the Research Handbook on Public Sociology (Bifulco & Borghi, Citation2023), which gathers dozens of authors in the emerging field, but whose editors do not offer ‘any conclusions’ nor ‘an outlook towards future research paths’. Furthermore, the book is rather ‘exploratory’ than ‘explanatory’, shying away from providing an ‘exact answer to “what is public sociology” or “how to practice public sociology”.’ Nonetheless, Darrow, who finds merit in the conceptual introduction as well in individual contributions, does not shy away from recommending the book to anyone interested in public sociology, not just sociologists and anthropologists, but also to scholars of ‘migration, cultural geography, and urban planning.’
Notes
3 Central Europe celebrates von der Leyen and Michel’s candidacies – POLITICO.
4 Ursula von der Leyen – A Rocky Start, But Brighter Prospects – Intereconomics.
5 World Court says Israel must take steps to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza | Reuters.
References
- Barša, P., Hesová, Z., & Slačálek, O. (Eds.). (2021). Central European culture wars: Beyond post-communism and populism. Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy.
- Bifulco, L., & Borghi, V. (Eds.). (2023). Research handbook on public sociology. Edgar Elgar Publishing.
- Horkheimer, M. (1988). Die Juden und Europa. In M. Horkheimer (Ed.), Studies in philosophy and social science (Band 8, p. 115). The Institute for Social Research. (Original work published 1939).
- Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
- Sevelsted, A., & Toubøl, J. (Eds.). (2022). The power of morality in movements: Civic engagement in climate justice, human rights, and democracy. Springer.