Abstract
The Introduction begins with a description of the Democracy Index’s classification of political systems. Six European countries are discussed in this volume, but only two, the UK and Germany, are considered full democracies. Italy, France, Poland, and Hungary are considered flawed democracies, as is the US. After detailing how this volume came about, we offer a succinct history of right-wing extremism in Europe during the postwar years up to and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We review how political theorists and other scholars have studied these movements before turning to the anthropological literature. We argue that the “Anthropological Eye” is often lacking in such analyses, and that close ethnographic observation of these movements is most necessary. We conclude with a brief summary of each chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Throughout its recorded history, European areas were repeatedly invaded, conquered, and involved in international trade. Occasionally, an entire ethnic or religious group, such as Jews or Huguenots, would be exiled and forced to establish residence elsewhere. The guild system also fostered cultural and ethnic diversity since journeymen were required to leave their native towns to expand their knowledge of the specific trade in other parts of Europe, some of whom remained there.
- 3.
Nitzan Shoshan (2016) has given us a detailed examination of recent right-wing extremism in East Berlin, including campaign methods used by the extreme-right National Democratic Party (NPD) of Germany, and efforts on the part of the German government to counteract them.
- 4.
Such events would include the 1960s student and anti-Vietnam protests as well as terror tactics of extreme left groups. Economic declines such as the oil crises of the 1970s and rising unemployment in the 1980s as a result of globalization and outsourcing also were destabilizing.
- 5.
These parties had already suffered from the conservative victories in the late 1970s and early 1980s of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl.
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Gerhard Schröder, who won re-election as German Chancellor in 2002 by opposing George W. Bush and Bush’s policies, was instrumental in pushing through the 2003 Hartz reforms that “reduced and capped unemployment benefits . . . . (and) turned federal and local employment agencies . . . into service providers” while weakening German unions in a number of significant ways (Spitz-Oener 2017, 1). The direct impact on union membership is especially difficult to determine in the Federal Republic of Germany, since post-reunification measures resulted in the almost complete demise of the manufacturing sector in the former East Germany, whose workers would otherwise have been union members. Nevertheless, while unions in Germany have experienced a steady, decades-long decline in membership, 18% of the German working population belongs to unions as opposed to 10.7% in the US.
- 7.
While a few East European countries have moved into “Hybrid Regimes,” such as the Ukraine, Moldova, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, no East European EU members have yet done so (Economist Intelligence Unit 2017).
- 8.
See, for instance, Kürti and Skalnik (2011).
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Heck, P.R., Donahue, K.C. (2019). Introduction. In: Donahue, K., Heck, P. (eds) Cycles of Hatred and Rage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14416-6_1
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