Module Title: Mainstreaming neonationalism
Module Leader: Dr Mike Finn
Module Description:
Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 neonationalist rhetoric has reshaped much of mainstream political discourse in Europe and the United States and has, in specific cases, endangered constitutional settlements. Represented most starkly by the 6th January insurrection in the United States, the rise of political movements emphasising an aestheticisation of politics anchored in neonationalist tropes has destabilised polities and political institutions across the Atlantic. This phenomenon – variously described as right-wing populism, the rise of the radical right, even the ‘return’ of fascism – is here interrogated through a specific focus on the ways in which neonationalist ideas and tropes have come to shape ‘mainstream’ politics in the UK and the US.
With a particular focus on, but not limited to, UK and US politics, this course examines in comparative perspective how neonationalist political framings became ‘mainstream’, both through the rise and increasing social acceptability of far-right political parties (such as the Alternativ für Deutschland) and through the adoption and promotion of neonationalist ideas by figures within ‘mainstream’ conservative parties such as the Republican Party in the United States and the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom.
It draws on an interdisciplinary literature to examine the process of ‘mainstreaming’ (Stocker, 2017; Mondon, 2022), including theoretical approaches derived from history and cultural studies to explore the development of popular neonationalist narratives in ‘reactionary democracies’ (Mondon and Winter, 2020), and the implications for the future of representative democracies.
This course uses texts and case studies from the UK and the US to examine how the boundaries of political vocabulary have shifted to enable the mainstreaming of such neonationalist concepts and tropes, and the extent to which these processes share common features and across different legislative environments. Dr Mike Finn