1
Grounds of Belonging

Introduction

This is not a safe time to be a secular liberal or foreigner in many European countries, and for that matter, in other democracies such as the US, Turkey, India and Brazil, upended by nativist nationalism. After enduring long periods of austerity, rising inequality and welfare austerity, majorities in the old and new democracies are sensing a moving cast of subjects as the enemies of the nation, a threat to collective wellbeing, identity and autonomy. Persuaded by swashbuckling nativists such as Trump, Orbán, Erdoğan, Meloni, Le Pen and Bolsonaro to be the deserving ‘somewheres’ whose future has been stolen by deracinated ‘anywheres’, majorities feeling left behind are seeking salvation in the return of the homely and indigenous nation protected by the autarchic state. They have been convinced by nationalists that the removal of the discrepant is required to preserve self and community, its meaning kept conveniently malleable to include immigration, cultural pluralism, international federation, liberalism, experts, elites and even germs as the true sources of national problems such as poverty and inequality, social and regional division, cultural disunity and political weakness. The simple repetition of the associations seems to suffice as proof, straight out of the playbook of past ethno-nationalist attacks on particular subjects and cultural orientations. Like them, nativists and their publics find themselves busily justifying the ‘unpleasantness’ of xenophobia, border controls and identity checks as an imperative of national salvation returning sovereignty to a neglected people. By sleight of hand many unsubstantiated connections are being made, with devastating consequences for those identified as threats, from migrants and minorities to liberals and cosmopolitans.

This story of recovered sovereignty is proving popular to disgruntled citizens because it promises a political settlement working directly for the ‘people’, cleared – in some understandings – of the impediments of liberal democracy, including the parliamentary process, an independent judiciary, a critical press and free debate. It offers the charm of a popular democracy of direct communion between a historical population and a post-political cadre of rough, tough, charismatic individuals fired by patriotic fervour. The bitter irony is that in the name of popular democracy is proposed a demagoguery tearing into representative politics, legal and expert authority and democratic discussion, and into a raft of subjects and citizens tarnished as threats and misfits. It is true that the tonalities and intensities of nativist nationalism in Europe and beyond are far from uniform. Its reach into the political life of different countries is varied, as is the strength of its commitment to illiberalism and its incorporation into government. But it is disturbingly uniform in its aversion to migrants, refugees and minorities, with public and political discourse in the democracies obsessing about migration numbers, the motives and rights of refugees and the loyalties of migrants and minorities, quick to declare limits to national carrying capacity and the mixture of identities and cultures. It is uniform in its nostalgia for a mighty and mythic past free of non-indigenous peoples and traditions, and its contempt for the modern in its various guises, including science and expertise, liberal and deliberative democracy, legal, constitutional and bureaucratic conventions, the educated, professional and cosmopolitan sections of society, and elites, financiers and ‘big business’ accused of siphoning off riches and opportunities. It is uniform in its commitment to a politics of wild fabrications, moral outrage and violence towards those people and precepts that stand in the way of strongarm nationalism, its shock troops ready to tear down the ways of liberal democracy.

These are some of the common threads between otherwise distinctive forms of nationalist rebirth with their particular grievances, declared enemies and invocations of lost legacies of greatness. In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s populist momentum preyed on anger against a past of metropolitan bias, slum and countryside poverty, socialist leanings and government and industrial corruption, while Trump’s megaphone of Making America Great Again finds ears among the disenchanted working classes, upcountry evangelists and old settlers told to have been betrayed by open borders, the liberal establishment and the erosion of White power. In Poland and Hungary, the far right, firmly ensconced in government, makes a virtue of illiberal democracy, quick to impose curbs on free speech, the law and constitutional freedoms won after the collapse of state socialism, endorsed by a hard-done-by population promised the greatness and security of past times of resistance against the invasions of conquerors, communists, non-Christians and market modernizers. In a spectacular reversal of India’s post-independence commitment to secular democracy and the plural nation, the Modi government and its Hindu nationalist cadres, spread in every nook of the state apparatus, public sphere and civil society, have shifted popular understanding of belonging as a battle between rightful Hindus and wronging Muslims, the deserving poor and usurping elites and intellectuals, and precolonial wisdoms and Western corruptions. The turnaround has won the support of hundreds of millions of Hindu slumdwellers, rural poor, manual workers, urban middle classes and businesses seeing new opportunities in the cleansed nation. In France, the republican nationalism of Le Pen has gradually grown into a nationwide movement supported by a substantial proportion of the electorate demanding immigration controls, freedom from the EU, a better deal for the white working class and derecognition of Islam and France’s Muslim heritage. The aggressive nationalism of Salvini and Meloni in Italy is no different, expect perhaps in its more veiled defence of republicanism to appease the Catholic population and in its recourse to a fiction of national greatness anticipated by Mussolini’s fascists. In the UK, the nativism unlocked by the Brexit referendum is driven by an English nationalism feeding on colonial fantasies of grandeur, island isolationism and disenchantment among many communities left behind by exclusions of work, welfare, income and voice in recent decades, interpreted by the Right as the product of the unregulated economy, EU membership, immigration and elite power.

These nativist campaigns draw on distinctive histories of grievance and redemption, yet after their growing collaborations and shared international platforms (Shroufi, 2015), their rants against liberal democracy and the open society and their versions of strongarm nationalism and popular sovereignty increasingly look the same. They project the same image of the sequestered and cohesive nation and they share an oiled machinery of hate and nostalgia to build popular momentum behind their cause (Mishra, 2017). They act as though behind them blow the winds of change through democracies troubled by globalization, austerity and inequality. Into this century, they have secured considerable electoral success and traction in popular political culture, unruffled by moments of electoral defeat, whether Le Pen’s in France, Trump’s in the US or Bolsonaro’s in Brazil. Echoing past campaigns turning mass disaffection into hope through loose and caustic associations, aggrieved majorities are seeing nativism as the bearer of prosperity and wellbeing, casting social democracy, liberalism and cosmopolitanism as the sources of social misery and national decline (Connolly, 2017; Hochschild, 2018). In or out of power, nativist nationalism has found its momentum, telling people who believe themselves to be hard-done-by indigenes that their identity and sovereignty has been stolen by migrants, minorities and cosmopolitans, in enacting a national drama staging majorities as victims and these others as perpetrators and then promising unity and stability through the bonds of tradition, cultural homogeneity and homeland welfare. It has returned the politics of imagined community to the centre of national conversations on almost everything, ranging from questions of identity, cohesion and belonging, to those relating to the political economy of prosperity and security, and the character of state sovereignty and the democratic society. The tones of national identity have become the passing point of public discussion on the big matters of statehood, citizenship and wellbeing.

In this discussion, noticeably absent has been the offer of a counter-narrative of belonging that offers compelling reasons to protect the open, deliberative and cosmopolitan society, or indeed, any other alternative to the nativist imaginary of nation. Blinded by the thymotic rage and wild claims of nativism, paralysed by the surge of popular support for it, and reticent to enter a public discussion of national identity so dominated by ethno-nationalists, progressives have tended to shy away from this terrain. Their reaction to the predicaments of the left-behind and disaffected, and to the drumbeat of homeland protectionism and cultural preservation, has been to look to take the sting out of nationalism by improving the material circumstances of communities drawn to it. They have tended to turn to a politics of social inclusion and national cohesion based on public investment and community empowerment programmes, improved income and welfare support for those less well-off and at a disadvantage, and...