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To what extent are immigration and asylum policies the main reason for the growthin electoral support for extreme right parties?

At the start of the twenty firstcentury, immigration has become a byword for right wing political sentiment;the central building block upon which traditional conservative party policiesare constructed. This association with the desire to purify a country'sautonomous lands by curtailing the numbers of foreigners that live within itsborders goes back to the 1930's and the heyday of fascism in Europe, whichculminated in authoritarianism and a brand of political nationalism thatultimately led the world to war. It is therefore of the utmost importance todivorce contemporary right wing European models from their historicalforbearers. The current trend to cut down the number of immigrants enteringEurope by right wing parties is seen as a matter of cultural necessity, notpolitical theory, and should certainly not read as a route to segregation orgenocide.

For the purposes of the followingstudy, a comparative approach must be adopted that attempts to examine thereasons for the growth in electoral support for parties of the extreme right inEurope while ascertaining to what extent immigration issues form the backboneof this political resurgence.

Almost every major Western Europeancountry has had the issues of immigration and asylum thrust to the forefront ofthe national agenda within the past ten years. A broadening of the economic andpolitical umbrella of the European Union has ensured that contemporary bordersare more relaxed than they have been since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) andthe formulation of the concept of the nation state. Furthermore, as Van Brabant(1999: introduction xvii) ascertains, the protracted breakup of the SovietUnion and the transition of these former socialist states to the free marketeconomy is an ongoing process that has no 'quickfix' solution. .

The gradual transformation of theerstwhile statesocialist economies of the eastern part of Europe intopluralistic democracies firmly anchored to market based resource allocation wasfrom the outset bound to be complicated and divisive - a very longterm policytask whose terminal point is not yet in sight.

Many conservative politicians andpeoples alike feel as if the change in national borders has come about tooquickly, with a lack of a sustainable social safety net in place in manycountries in order to catch the fall of the unemployed that results from asylum.This sense of trepidation is exacerbated by a lack of faith in the EU, asLeonard (2000:226) suggests.

Although there is a fairlygeneralised appreciation (which is stronger in the original six member statesthan in the others) of the economic benefits that the Union has brought, thereis little feeling that the EU affects citizens in their everyday life.

The ensuing influx of largelyEastern European people has necessarily provided political problems as theuneasy truce between immigrants and local people can only be sustained for aslong as the economy is working in tandem with the rate of influx of foreigners,so that resentment cannot become the residue of multiculturalism. Theevacuation of manufacturing and industry from the historical Western Europeanpowerhouses of France, Germany and Britain has therefore posed a serious threatto the uneasy cultural and social truce between immigrants and votersfrustrated at lack of employment and social mobility opportunities. Jackman andVolpert (1996:508) claim that high unemployment rates reveal mediocre economicperformance that provides an especially propitious context for politicalcrusades of the form favoured by the extreme right, whose electoral support weexpect to increase with unemployment.

Extreme right parties have thusseized upon the global economic climate of concern to highlight the fact that immigrantshave taken jobs away from the domestic populations, in addition to swellingalready overcrowded cities and welfare systems. The significance of theimmigration issue to the growth in their electoral support is underscored bythe lack of attention paid to the other reasons for the rise in poverty acrossEurope, namely urban degeneration and domestic income inequality. In thissense, the contemporary extreme rights' attachment to the problem of immigrationis indeed a distant relative of 1930's fascism that was born in part due to theeconomic disaster of 1929. Economics and political extremism have always gonehand in glove.

However, to simply state that theright has always been a champion of antiimmigration ideology and a benefactorof fiscal ineptitude is to miss the point entirely. The recent increase inelectoral support for extreme right parties is also due to the context of thepolitical climate in Europe of the 1990's, which witnessed the triumph ofliberal democracy in France, Britain, Germany and Italy. At the same time,conservative right ideology was seen as representing the worst excesses of thepostCold War European capitalist structure, as Henderson (2001:30) explains.

Free markets and capitalism areseen as embodying and furthering environmental destruction, male dominance,class oppression, racial intolerance, imperialist coercion and colonialistexploitation.

More concerning still for membersof parties of the right was the way in which traditional parties of the lefthad shifted towards the centre, thus consuming much of the electoral support ofthe historical right, including the majority of Europe's middle classes. TheSocial Democrats in Germany, for instance, no longer represented the socialistleft doctrine of German politics that they had hitherto mirrored; rather theyhad become a centrist party that straddled the moderate facets of both the leftand the right in order to appeal to the broadest possible base of voters. Theright and extreme right therefore had to find a common policy to latch onto,one that was not only a key part of their historical ideology and politicalphilosophy but which was also outside of the bounds of left and centreleft Europeanparty politics. Immigration was consequently viewed as the most likely means ofattracting mass electoral support while maintaining a historical slant to theideals of the right: a political marriage of convenience. Immigration thus oughtto be seen as a measure of political expediency every bit as much as a matterof political policy when taken in the context of the contemporary Europeanpolitical scene.

Conclusion

There is little doubt thatimmigration, in tandem with economic decline, has been a vital factor in therise in electoral support for parties of the right in nine European nations inthe past decade. Elections in Austria (1995), Belgium (1995), Denmark (1994),Finland (1995), France (1997), Germany (1994), Spain (1993) and the UK (1997)all reported increases in extreme right support, although a lack of empiricalevidence that differentiates between foreignborn immigrants and émigréshampers attempts at a definitive conclusion as to why these increases werewitnessed.

More recently, the effects ofSeptember 11 and the subsequent 'war on terror' have made Europeans moresusceptible to right wing propaganda, especially the kind aimed againstMuslims. In this sense, future seeds of support for extreme right parties maybe based upon antiIslamist sentiment, though that too will be inspired by asylumfrom war torn nations as opposed to the immigration that took place in thesecond half of the twentieth century. What is certain is that the trend set byAustria in the mid1990's has been followed by many Western European countriesto the extent that the UN has estimated that at least a 20 per cent of France'selectorate is prone to vote for extreme parties of the right (UN ChronicleOnline Edition: first viewed 09/01/06). For as long as global tensions remain,particularly the burgeoning EastWest divide, a reversal of this trend appearsmost unlikely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henderson, D. (2001) Antiliberalism2000: the rise of the New Millennium Collectivism London: Institute forEconomic Affairs

Ignazi, P. (2004) Extreme Right Parties in Western EuropeOxford: Oxford University Press

Klandermans, B. (2005) Extreme Right Activists in EuropeLondon: Routledge

Leonard, D. (2000) The Economist Guide to the EuropeanUnion London: Profile

Mudde, C. (1999) The Ideology ofthe Extreme Right Manchester: Manchester University Press

Van Brabant, J.M. (1999) Remaking Europe: the EuropeanUnion and the Transition Economies Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield

Selected Articles

Van Brabant, J.M. (1999) Transitions and their Impacts onEuropean Integration, quoted in, Van Brabant, J.M.Remaking Europe: theEuropean Union and the Transition Economies Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield

Journals

Jackson, R. and Volpert, K. (1996) Conditionsfavouring Parties of the Extreme Right in Western Europe, quoted in, BritishJournal of Political Science, Volume 26, Issue 1

Websites

Ford, Glen Racism and Xenophobiain Europe: Stemming the Rising Tide, quoted in, UN Chronicle OnlineEdition; http://www.un.org/pubs/chronicle/2000/issue4/0404p32.html

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