Europe's Right Wing Swing and the Lie of the Liberal Project

In her autobiography, Black Panther Assata Shakur wrote, "As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary."

"When times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges," Shakur wrote of self-identifying liberals among the white middle class.

"Crisis," in geopolitical or economic contexts, consistently actually means "crisis for white middle class people" — for poor and marginalized communities, the baseline is already crisis. So, as Shakur sees it, in times of crisis, there are no liberals.

Looking at the results of this weekend's European Parliament elections, Shakur's analysis of liberalism, albeit sweeping, seems spot on. If the European Union is, at base, a liberal project, then the Eurozone crisis is both its legacy and its death knell. Far right and euroskeptical parties made sweeping gains in an election with a relatively high turnout, at 43 percent. The success of parties like France's extreme-right Front National, which will receive 24 of France's 74 seats in the European Parliament — and have strong anti-immigrant, anti-EU and extreme nationalist platforms — reflects something rotten in the states of Europe. While the right wing swing may not spell dramatic shifts in the workings of the European government, the shift certainly presents itself as a referendum on the sort of liberalism undergirding the idea of a united Europe.

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But what exactly is this liberalism that is under threat in Europe? Are we talking about capital-L Liberalism — that very specific program, born in the Enlightenment, of free trade and open markets? Or are we talking lowercase-l liberalism — that all-too general term, loosely applied to some vaguely leftish well-meaning orientation which barters in ideas of "equality?”

In looking at the European election results, we can look at both readings of "liberal" —Liberal and liberal — and we see that both are on the outs in Europe. The far-right shift combined a rejection of globalization and open markets— considered the cause of the Eurozone crisis — as well as a pernicious racism and xenophobia. The European Union was envisaged as a liberal bastion in both the formal and quotidian sense of "liberal." In reality, there was little more than a liberal mask — times got hard, money got tight and, indeed, it feels like we're talking to Hitler.

It is not the demise of liberalism that is truly concerning here. To bemoan the collapse of the liberal project would be to present a false dichotomy of liberalism and fascism. These political frameworks neither exhaust the field nor stand in fundamental opposition. Lest we forget, the globalized finance entailed in a liberal, united Europe laid the ground for the Eurozone crisis and attendant mass unemployment. This crisis has turned fantasies of liberalism to dust, while stabilizing fascist realities.

The consequences on a national level will likely prove putrid for immigrants, the scapegoats in this story. If, for example, the Front National makes similar gains in France's 2017 election, we could see the empowerment of their leader Marine Le Pen, whose desires include cutting migration into France to 1/20 of current rates, and the elimination of dual nationality for French individuals with other passports from outside the EU.

Political analysts are opining now on whether to read the European election results as a referendum on the European Union or as an expression of combined rage and racism. This suggests that Euroskepticism and xenophobia only go hand in hand as a matter of incidence, and should thus be analyzed separately. And, to be sure, such analysis is useful in locating the underpinnings of the rightward swing. It seems that racism, more than anti-EU sentiment, was the locomotive here. But insofar as the EU is the liberal project par excellence, there is a structural link between current Euroskepticism and a rise in the extreme right's popularity. Liberalism is not collapsing in Europe because fascism is winning. Liberalism is showing its true colors: an ideological mask that slips in times of crisis, revealing something terrible beneath.

Follow Natasha Lennard on Twitter: @natashalennard

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