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Longing for Communal Purity: Countryside, (Far-Right) Nationalism and the (Im)possibility of Progressive Politics of Nostalgia

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The Commonalities of Global Crises

Abstract

Bernhard Forchtner analyses the discourse on environmental crises by the British National Party. While both environmental crises, as well as the rise of the farright, have been extensively discussed, academic and public debates have seldom asked how the environment is appropriated by contemporary far-right actors, for example, through nostalgically constructing rural harmony and communal purity in facilitating attacks on commodification and the logic of the market.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The dichotomy was not without relevance for the emerging working class either. Peter Gould (1988) illustrates that ‘lower classes’ too associated nature with community and brotherhood—while also being involved in class-related conflicts over access to property/land.

  2. 2.

    This phrase was taken up by the BNP in its 2009 Manifesto for the European Elections (BNP 2009: 8). Furthermore, Polanyi (2001: 102) has an entire section, captioned ‘Satanic Mill’, which uses the phrase at various points as a cipher for the effects of capitalist industrialisation, and refers to Blake explicitly.

  3. 3.

    The latest figure I am aware of puts the number of BNP members at 500 (Ramsey 2015).

  4. 4.

    While comedy is more flexible than romance, in that oppositions are ultimately overcome without crushing the opponent, it resembles romance in featuring a happy ending. For matters of practicality, I thus only focus on the modes of romance, tragedy and irony.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Bernhard Forchtner

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  1. Bernhard Forchtner
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, Nottingham , United Kingdom

    Christian Karner

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Bernhard Weicht

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Forchtner, B. (2016). Longing for Communal Purity: Countryside, (Far-Right) Nationalism and the (Im)possibility of Progressive Politics of Nostalgia. In: Karner, C., Weicht, B. (eds) The Commonalities of Global Crises. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50273-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50273-5_11

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