Nostalgia and Hope: Intersections between Politics of Culture, Welfare, and Migration in Europe

Front matter

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IMISCOE Research Series

Contents

Nostalgia and Hope: Narrative Master Frames

Anders Hellström, Ov Cristian Norocel, and Martin Bak Jorgensen

PartI Right-Wing Populist Party Politics Across Europe

Part II Retrogressive Mobilizations Outside the Political Arena Anita Nissen

Endangered Swedish Values: Immigration, Gender Equality,

Emil Edenborg viii Contents

8 Invented Nostalgia: The Search for Identity Katherine Kondor and Mark Littler

9 “Retrotopia” as a Retrogressive Force Andreas Onnerfors

Part II Emancipatory Initiatives Mobilizing Beyond Politics

10 Challenging Misconceptions: Danish Civil Society W Ties OF RISE, ois ten dan ehh eeeese ones ed ene eadew ees Keus 153 Martin Bak Jørgensen and Daniel Rosengren Olsen

11 “Impossible” Activism and the Right to Be Understood: Camilla Haavisto

12 Hope as Master Frame in Feminist Mobilization: Between Liberal NGO-ization Alexandra Ana

13 Latin American Transnational Political Engagement: Steering Civic Movements and Cultural Repertoires Larisa Lara-Guerrero and Maria Vivas-Romero

Part IV Epilogue Carlo Ruzza

About the Editors and Contributors

Editors

Ov Cristian Norocel (Lund University, Sweden, and Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) (DrSocSci in Political Science) is Associate Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies (Sweden) and previously Marie Sktodowska-Curie Fellow in the Institute of Sociology (Belgium). His research is centered on the fields of intersectional analyses of political radicalism and extremism and nationalism and citizenship issues across Europe. He has published in such international journals as Critical Social Policy, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, International Journal of Communication, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Studies, Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, and Problems of Post-Communism. Email: cristian.norocel@ genus.lu.se

Anders Hellström (Malmö University, Sweden) (PhD Political Science) is Senior Lecturer in the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM). Research interests include identity politics, European integration, discourse theory, political philosophy, populism, nationalism, European nationalism, national self-images, politics of multiculturalism, and border-making processes. He has published widely in such academic journals as Government and Opposition, Journal of International Migration and Integration, and Ethnicities. His most recent monograph is Trust Us: Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist parties, published by Berghahn Books in 2016. Email: anders.hellstrom @mau.se

Martin Bak Jørgensen (Aalborg University, Denmark) (PhD in Migration Studies) is Associate Professor affiliated with the research group DEMOS (Democracy, Migration and Movements). His research encompasses the fields of sociology, political sociology, and political science. His topics of focus include welfare, discrimination and inequality, migration, social movements, and new mobilix About the Editors and Contributors zations against fiscal austerity across Scandinavia as well as in Germany and Spain. His most recent publication is co-written with O.G. Agustin: Solidarity and the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe (2019, Palgrave McMillan). Email: martinjo@ hum.aau.dk

Contributors

Alexandra Ana (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy) finished her PhD in Political Science and Sociology in Florence, with a thesis on comparative feminist movements, under the supervision of Donatella della Porta. Her current research interests include gender and sexuality; social movements, particularly the right to housing movement and the feminist movement; labor precarity; and migration. She is currently teaching sociology, with a focus on gender and urban sociology at Sciences Po. Her last article “Precarious Locations: Feminist Co-optation and Strategies of Resistance in the Neoliberal Age,” published in 2018 in Praktyka Teoretyczna, analyzes the process of co-optation of social movements. Email: alexandra.ana@sns.it

Radu Cinpoes (Kingston University London, UK) is Head of the Department of Politics and Associate Professor in Politics, Human Rights, and International Relations. Growing out of his interest in nationalism and the politics of exclusion, his research has recently focused on two complementary directions: migration, mobility, and refugee issues, on the one hand, and issues concerning discrimination and intolerance, on the other. He has published on the extreme right, nationalism, European identity, and Romanian politics. He has published one monograph: Nationalism and Identity in Romania: A History of Extreme Politics from the Birth of the State to EU Accession (1.B. Tauris, 2010). His recent work are chapters included in Post-Communist Romania at 25: Linking Past, Present, and Future (Eds. L. Stan and D. Vancea) (2015, Rowman & Littlefield) and in Transforming the Transformation? The Radical Right in the Political Process in East Central Europe (Ed. M. Minkenberg) (2015, Routledge). His current research project investigates agential reflexive mediation of structural conditionings and the role of social networks in the context of transnational mobility. Email: radu.cinpoes @kingston.ac.uk

Emil Edenborg (Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Sweden) is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Program of Global Politics and Security at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and a Senior Lecturer at Stockholm University. In 2016, he finished his PhD in the Department of Political Science at Lund University on the topic of gender, belonging, and visibility in contemporary Russia. During his doctoral studies, he was a Visiting Researcher at Moscow State University and at UC Berkeley. His research broadly concerns gender and sexual politics, and LGBTQ issues in particular, in relation to nationalism and populism, in the context of Russia and the post-Soviet space, as well as in the Nordic countries. His publications include Politics of Visibility and Belonging: From Russia's “Homosexual

About the Editors and Contributors xi

Propaganda” Laws to the Ukraine War (2017, Routledge) and articles published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Political Geography, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Geopolitics, Postcolonial Studies, Sexuality & Culture, East European Politics, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. Email: emil. edenborg @ui.se

Camilla Haavisto (University of Helsinki, Finland) (DrPolSci) works as University Lecturer in Communication in the Swedish School of Social Science. She has recently finished her Academy of Finland project “Anti-racism Under Pressure: Social Movements, NGOs and Their Mediated Claims-Making in Finland.” Her research interests include antiracist organizing, claims-making of ethnic and cultural minorities, circulation processes in hybrid media systems, and the role of media for conflict resolution. She is also increasingly interested in how datafication processes connect to inequality. She has previously been a Postdoctoral Scholar at McGill University in Montreal and Visiting Scholar at Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare. Her latest publications have been published in Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies and Forum for Development Studies. She has also contributed to the volume Racialization, Racism, and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries (Ed. P. Hervik) (2018, Palgrave McMillan). Email: camila.haavisto@helsinki.fi

Katherine Kondor (University of Huddersfield, UK) is PhD Researcher in Criminology and a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. Her research is focused on far-right social movements, collective action, and online radicalization, with a particular interest in methods of radicalization and pathways to activism. Email: katherine.kondor @ hud.ac.uk

Larisa Lara-Guerrero (University Paris Diderot, France, and University of Liége, Belgium) is PhD Candidate in the field of Migration and Political Sciences, under the joint supervision, and a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations. She studied International Relations at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies as an undergraduate. She completed Master of Sciences in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and Master of Arts in Conflict, Security, and Development from King’s College London. Her research focuses on emigration policies, the role of diasporas in conflict zones, and political transnationalism. She has published in several academic journals and in political analysis magazines in Mexico. Email: larisavlara@ gmail.com

Mark Littler (University of Huddersfield, UK) is Senior Lecturer in Criminology. He was previously a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull and a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of Oxford’s Blackfriars Hall. His research focus is on online radicalization and extremism. He has published in such journals as Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, Journal of xii About the Editors and Contributors

Language and Politics, and The Journal of Political Criminology. Email: m.littler@ hud.ac.uk

Anita Nissen (Aalborg University, Denmark) is PhD Fellow in European Studies and affiliated with the Aalborg Center for European Studies (ACEuS). Her research encompasses the fields of political sociology and political science. Her topics of focus include far-right politics, social movements and political parties, Europeanization, and Euroscepticism, specifically focusing on two transnational far-right coalitions, Fortress Europe and Generation Identity. Email: nissen_anita@ hotmail.com

Daniel Rosengren Olsen (Aalborg University, Denmark) is a PhD Fellow working at the Institute of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University. His research areas include qualitative methods, study environments, social movements, civil society, and political studies. His primary areas of study are Danish CSO activity during the contemporary years of migration, the Danish refugee solidarity movement, learning in social movements, and academic writing practices. Email: rosengren @hum.aau.dk

Selcen Öner (Bahçeşehir University, Turkey) is currently working as Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. She finished her PhD at Marmara University, EU Institute, Department of EU Politics and International Relations. Her research interests are Turkey-EU relations, European identity, populism and radical right in European politics, migration, and asylum policy of the EU. She was a Lecturer at Jean Monnet Module on “Justice Freedom and Security in the EU” (2013-2014) and the Coordinator of this module (2014-2015). She was also a Visiting Professor at LUISS University in Rome in fall semester 2018 and had been a Visiting Scholar at Free University of Brussels (Institute for European Studies), University of Aalborg, Free University of Berlin (The Transformative Power of Europe-FP7 Project), and IBEI, Pompeu Fabra University. She has published Turkey and the European Union: The Question of European Identity (2011, Lexington) and several book chapters and articles. Email: selcen.oner @eas.bau.edu.tr

Andreas Onnerfors (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) is Associate Professor in the History of Sciences and Ideas and has a teaching record in Political Thought and Intellectual History. His research interests are in the rhetoric and semantics of the political discourse of the contemporary European far right as well as enlightenment culture, particularly cosmopolitan sociability, science, and the press and their implications for modernity. He has published articles on PEGIDA, conspiracy theories and secret societies, and their cultural history. He is Author of Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction (2017, Oxford University Press) and Coeditor (together with K. Steiner) of Expressions of Radicalization: Global Politics, Processes and

About the Editors and Contributors xiii

Practices (2018, Palgrave McMillan) and regularly contributes to Swedish media. Email: andreas.onnerfors @lir.gu.se

Gokay Ozerim (Yasar University, Turkey) is a Member of the International Relations Department and Director of the European Union Research Center. His main academic fields are international migration, security, and European integration process. He is graduated from the Department of International Relations at Dokuz Eylul University and has his PhD on European Studies. He was awarded by the Chevening Scholarship of the UK Government in 2010 and carried out a part of his PhD research in the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. In 2014, he has been in the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Marie Curie Visiting Scholar. He has been also working in several European Union-funded projects and delivering trainings on intercultural learning, youth participation, social responsibility, and project management since 2005. He was awarded a Jean Monnet Module in 2016 and Jean Monnet Chair on migration in 2019 by the European Commission. He was Management Committee Member of the COST action “Populist Political Communication in Europe.” Email: gokay.ozerim @ yasar.edu.tr

Katarina Pettersson (University of Helsinki, Finland) (PhD in Social Psychology) is University Lecturer in Social Psychology at the Swedish School of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her main research projects have focused on nationalist and radical right political rhetoric, political hate speech, and political communication and persuasion in the online sphere. Her interests have included how politicians draw upon various social identities (e.g., ethnicity, nationality, gender) in their discourse and what societal implications this discourse may have. In her work, she has combined various discourse analytical and narrative approaches with visual rhetorical methods in order to study the multimodal forms that online (political) communication takes. She has published extensively on these topics in international peer-reviewed journals such as European Journal of Social Psychology, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Discourse & Society, and Qualitative Research in Psychology. Email: katarina.pettersson @ helsinki.fi

Carlo Ruzza (University of Trento, Italy) (PhD Harvard) is Professor of Political Sociology. He teaches courses on European Studies and Political Sociology. He has previously taught at the University of Leicester where he was Professor of Political Sociology until 2012, at the University of Essex, and at the University of Surrey and was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European Institute in Florence. He has written broadly on social movements, civil society organizations, human rights, populism, and right-wing parties. He is especially interested in processes of institutionalization of social movements at EU level and has studied peace movements, environmental movements, ethno-nationalist movements, and EU-level public interest associations. Email: carlo.ruzza@unitn.it xiv About the Editors and Contributors

Mahama Tawat (Higher School of Economics, the Russian Federation, and Malmö University, Sweden) (PhD in Political Science) is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration in the Department of Sociology and Research Associate at the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM). His research focus on Nordic countries’ immigrant cultural policies, EU immigration policy with its multilateral partners, Turkey and the African Union; and new public management. He has published in such peer-reviewed journals as East European Politics, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Governance.

María Vivas-Romero (University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, and University of Liège, Belgium) earned her PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Liège, Belgium. Her PhD dissertation explored the repertoires practices through which Peruvian and Colombian migrant domestic workers in the city of Brussels access global social protection arrangements. Her fieldwork took place in the city of Brussels as well in the cities abroad in which the migrant domestic workers she followed negotiated their access to social protection: Lima-Chimbote (Peru) and Bogota-Medellin (Colombia). Her current research interests are migration and family studies as well as the reproduction of global gender, race, and class inequalities in access to social protection. Her publications in scientific journals reflect her interest in multi-sited ethnographic approaches and intersectional and postcolonial feminist approaches. Email: m.vivasromero @ maastrichtuniversity.nl

Chapter 1 A Nostalgia and Hope: Narrative Master chee Frames Across Contemporary Europe Anders Hellström, Ov Cristian Norocel, and Martin Bak Jørgensen

1.1 Intersections Between Politics of Culture, Welfare, and Migration in Europe

After the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent disbanding of various state socialist regimes across the former Eastern Bloc, which marked the end of the Cold War, there was a certain sense of optimism shared by most European societies concerning a peaceful and prosperous future. Among scholars, while some representatives of traditional approaches to world politics and international relations failed to predict the end of the Cold War, others were enthusiastic about what seemingly was the definitive victory of democracy and the market economy. The situation was paradoxical—both a source of optimism and uncertainty. What was still left to fight for? Had we reached the famous “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), marking the final victory of market capitalism and liberal democracy, and thus, the advent of a post-ideological world order? Soon enough, one such promise—that of enjoying the benefits of free movement from one country to another—was enshrined into the Maastricht Treaty of the European Union.

A. Hellström

Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

e-mail: anders.hellstrom @ mau.se

O. C. Norocel (È) Institut de Sociologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: cristian.norocel @ulb.ac.be

M. B. Jgrgensen Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: martinjo@cgs.aau.dk

© The Author(s) 2020 1 O. C. Norocel et al. (eds.), Nostalgia and Hope: Intersections between Politics

of Culture, Welfare, and Migration in Europe, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41694-2_1

Some three decades later, everything seems radically different: “Europe as an idea, as an identity and as a political project, seems incapable of practices of solidarity and care; in other words, Europe is suffering from a crisis of solidarity.” (Martinsson and Mulinari 2018, p. 159). This has deepened the existing crisis of legitimacy, pushing the EU project of peace, prosperity, and integration farther away from the grim reality on the ground (Agustin and Jørgensen 2018; Trenz et al. 2015; Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2015). The failure to address the forced displacement of millions of people, and above all, the lack of solidarity was too obvious to ignore, or as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked “We are facing the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. Above all, this is not just a crisis of numbers; it is also a crisis of solidarity. [...] We must respond to a monumental crisis with monumental solidarity” (UN 2016). Today, it seems that the initial euphoric optimism has vanished without much of a trace. To grasp this complex situation, we argue that there is an imperious need to sharpen and update the conceptual scaffolding that is generally employed to examine the intersecting politics of culture, welfare, and migration across Europe, which are part of the “liquid modernity” of contemporary late capitalism (Bauman 2012).

1.2 Conceptual Setting

Upon closer look, the apparent triumph of the market economy paved the way for profound changes in the European welfare states. They not only entailed a dramatic transformation of the conditions of, and the means of, access to welfare provision but also involved a retraction of citizenship as well (Schierup et al. 2006). In turn, this triggered an exacerbation of welfare chauvinist appeals, the escalation of securitization fears, and the increased discrimination of migrants (be they regular or irregular) and their offspring (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990; Betz and Johnson 2004; Dikeg 2007; Conversi 2014; Keskinen et al. 2016; Norocel 2017; Ruzza 2009). These developments have been accompanied by the continuous transfer of authority from the national level to transnational bodies like the EU and the increasing dominance of the executive in national politics (Sassen 2006; Trenz et al. 2015; Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2015), which brought closure to established political channels for civil society influence (Standing 2011).

The reaction to these changes manifested in two distinct ways. First, Europe has experienced the growing presence of right-wing populist parties, which were accompanied by a wave of manifestations of extremism and xenophobia. Anchored in the nostalgic longing for an ethnically homogenous past that never quite existed, these retrogressive forces have emphasized the importance of making and policing racialized, classed, and gendered borders as a means to identify and protect the native majority’s allegedly proprietary right to welfare (Bevelander and Wodak 2019; Norocel 2016; Wekker 2016). Secondly, and in contrast to the first reaction, Europe has witnessed the coalescence of transnational and transethnic justice movements across civil society and the forging of new alliances between migrant

1 Nostalgia and Hope: Narrative Master Frames Across Contemporary Europe 3 networks and organizations, NGOs, precarious workers and students, and in some cases, labor unions (Martinsson and Mulinari 2018; Ruzza 2009; Schierup et al. 2017).

To make sense of the complex dynamic between these opposing trends, we suggest approaching it from the perspective of the competing master frames of nostalgia and hope. The chapters compiled in the present volume expand our knowledge on how politics are conducted by investigating political projects which, taken together, “re-imagine and/or change established modes of doing politics” (Zienkowski 2019, p. 132) and thus provide multiple entry points to how these master frames are interpreted in practice.

Illustrating this point is the slow democratic decay across Europe, which accompanied the access to power of right-wing populist and anti-immigration parties, and, in several less consolidated democracies, even the descent into authoritarianism (Bevelander and Wodak 2019, p. 31). Indeed, it seems that “the populist zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004) has attained a position of hegemony across Europe and elsewhere around the world, and even more so today than when Mudde wrote his article. Whereas scholarship in the field has treated right-wing populism as a normal pathology of democratic societies, it has now become a pathological normalcy (see Akkerman et al. 2016; Hellström and Bevelander 2018; Minkenberg 2017; Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017; Rydgren 2018). Indeed, as right-wing populist parties supporting anti-immigration attitudes have made significant inroads into the politics, researchers now argue that this marks no less than a fascitization of the mainstream (Bevelander and Wodak 2019). Examples are not difficult to find across Europe. For instance, the Alliance of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fiatal Demokraták Szovetsége-Magyar Polgári Szövetség, Fidesz) under the leadership of Viktor Orban embarked on a dramatic volte-face, disregarding the founding principles of liberal democracy in order to create their vision of “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. Free and government-critical media, independent and non-politicized judiciary, and autonomous universities that defend critical knowledge have all come under attack with dire consequences. These developments are mirrored by similar power grabs in Poland at the hands of the ruling Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS). Authoritarian reactions are coupled with legislative measures aimed at providing a veneer of social justice narrowly reserved to the native majorities. Similar efforts were undertaken in Italy by the (Northern) League (Lega (Nord), LN) and Matteo Salvini during their brief spell as junior governmental partners in the aftermath of 2018 parliamentary elections. While Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the interior affairs, Salvini pursued hardline measures to abolish essential forms of protection for migrants, which were justified by the imperative to safeguard the Italian way of life. With this in mind, it is easy to become pessimistic.

This notwithstanding, we argue that, while indeed all these retrogressive advances have become more brazen, we are witnessing a concurrent coalescence of the progressive forces. Just to name a few examples, in Greece, the extreme-right anti-immigration party Golden Dawn (Xpvor Avy) lost parliamentary representation in the 2019 national elections after five consecutive elections that resulted in the party sending between 21 and 17 representatives to the Hellenic parliament. By the same measure, the much-discussed ascendency of the Alternative for Germany

(Alternative fiir Deutschland, AfD), which was foreseen after the AfD entered the German federal parliament in 2017 for the first time, failed to materialize. In turn, it was the Greens (Die Griinen) that made substantive gains in the 2019 European parliamentary elections, signaling the emergence of a “green wave” of progressive politics across Europe. Put differently, European societies are not on a dystopian path, at least not unequivocally.

Rather, we argue that politics—understood as the partial fixation of meaning in the antagonistic field of the political (Mouffe 2000, pp. 125—128)—are a site of struggle for competing forces, whose agendas are underpinned by the narrative master frames of nostalgia and hope. Consequently, various forms of political mobilization attempt to alter existing political and social hierarchies, either in a retrogressive or more progressive direction.

Hope for a progressive and enlightened future finds itself in an uneasy coexistence and fragile equilibrium with a strong nostalgic attachment to a time of great things past. If nostalgia often strives to restore the polity in question as it once was, the latter is its polar opposite—it is associated with progressive ideals and optimistic, forward-looking visions. Nostalgia also has a visionary aspect, despite it being oriented in the past rather than the future. Nostalgia provides something to people to cling on to and promises to restore the glory of days past. Nostalgia and hope are experienced on a daily basis, connecting local practices and transnational loyalties. Some people long for essentialist and stereotyped identities as a means to make sense of, and slow down, the all-too-rapid changes in contemporary societies (Berliner 2018, p. 11). In this case, and often finding support in right-wing politics, it is a “restorative nostalgia” after a monocultural, racially homogeneous, and neatly defined collection of separate European societies that appeals (Boym 2001; Wekker 2016). It foretells that one ought to protect “our welfare” and “our (traditional) culture” from outside (“them”) and overly permissive insiders who put the internal cohesion of “our society” at risk. At the other end, putting their hope into a forward-looking vision, people generally embrace a perspective that welcomes increasingly diverse and tolerant European societies, albeit one needs to be aware of the temptation that progress is inevitable (Snyder 2018, p. 7). In other words, hope represents an emotional glue that enables the crystallization of counter-hegemonic agendas among social movements and different organizations and creates the intellectual opening for “understanding that societies and our societal positions are possible to transform and that society as well as individual identities can emerge in a different way” (Martinsson and Mulinari 2018, p. 14).

A telling example is with Greece, where the most severe episode of the economic crisis was shortly followed by the most tangible manifestations of the refugee (reception) crisis (Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos 2018). Indeed, the social mobilization and the everyday practices protesting the draconic fiscal austerity measures dictated by the so-called Troika (the EU Commission; the European Central Bank; and the International Monetary Fund) led to the emergence of Syriza (Lvvaomiopdc¢ Pifoonaotikis Apiotepic) as a political alternative to an incompetent and backward-looking political class. On cultural matters, the Syriza-led government pushed through the legal recognition of same-sex unions and the right to change

1 Nostalgia and Hope: Narrative Master Frames Across Contemporary Europe 5 legal gender despite vehement opposition from the conservative forces led by the Greek Orthodox Church and violence from the extreme right. The same grassroots forces showed solidarity with the plight of those seeking refuge in Europe. This notwithstanding, Syriza’s inability—or unwillingness—to successfully challenge the Troika’s austerity push led to an impasse and can be held up as yet another example of the shortcomings of “movementist” politics in achieving sustainable changes (Badiou 2018). In turn, it paved the way to a return to power of center-right New Democracy (Néa Anpoxpatia), as the party won a majority in the 2019 parliamentary elections. This comes to show that the trajectories of nostalgia and hope are not fixed.

To better articulate the nostalgia and hope dichotomy at a theoretical level, we suggest a closer look at the conceptual construct of heartland (Taggart 2000, pp. 95-98). The concept entails “the positive aspects of everyday life” and is at the same time a construction of an ideal world, one which is constructed retrospectively—a vision derived from the past and projected onto the present. As such, the heartland represents a claim to a common spiritual foundation, which creates a sense of belonging to an allegedly culturally homogeneous population (Betz and Johnson 2004, p. 320; Hellström 2016, p. 66). Importantly, this nostalgia is manifested in a rather vicarious manner (Berliner 2018, pp. 19-20), in the sense that it need not build on personal stories and first-hand experiences but rather crystallizes under the effect of larger narratives of what represents the specificity of our respective communities. Certain narratives that distinguish “our nation” from others are iterated on a daily basis. Appeals to a particular homeland nurture a sense of deep community between “the virtuous people” that share a proprietary right to their lands, which is founded on the belief of a long-lasting and continuous past. These appeals are marked by deep skepticism—or at times, outright opposition—to extending these rights to those who are perceived as “unworthy newcomers”. These narratives may be based for example on such “civic virtues” as gender equality and tolerance, though underpinned by the tacit conviction that these newcomers—particularly Muslims—are not sufficiently accustomed to and full-heartedly embracing “our ways”. Such reasoning is often paired with ideas of unbridgeable differences that separate the “native us” from “migrant them” on the basis of a distinct genealogical ethnic descent. In extremis, this opens for an identitarian logic of “ethnopluralist” difference which recasts the racist distinctions of racial biology into insurmountable cultural distinctiveness, which privileges “our culture” as both separate and, importantly, discreetly better than “their culture”. This logic is intimately connected to the French New Right (nouvelle droite) and the emergence of cultural racism (Taguieff 1990). In our view, nostalgia is a master frame underpinned by these narratives of cultural difference, which are expressed with varying degrees of intensity, as detailed above.

Hope is the opposite master frame, which is often associated with movements that build their identity around progressive narratives that embrace solidarity and diversity. In this context, the solution is an active accommodation to new differences of welcoming the aforementioned “migrant them” rather than disbarring them. New solidarity practices and political alternatives take different forms across

Europe, such as the civil society Venligboerne in Denmark; the feminist and queer collectivity mobilizing against both Greek traditionalist homophobic patriarchy and neoliberal austerity mantra in Athens; or the institutionalization of solidarity in the Refugee Plan in Barcelona (Agustin and Jørgensen 2018; Athanasiou 2018). Southern Europe, and particularly Greece and Spain, have become social laboratories for experimenting with new forms of participation pointing to material manifestations of hope through concrete practices (Agustin and Briziarelli 2018; Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos 2018). What all these have in common is a visionary orientation towards a shared future, which builds on the crystallization of a new societal culture, rather than a consistent political tactics—a future to come that has “meaning (as possibility), but no predetermined direction, for it can end either in hope or disaster” (de Sousa Santos 2004, p. 26). Consequently, in order to locate these gusts of hope, scholarly attention must move beyond mere analyses of political competition among parties and enter the realms of civil society mobilization on local, national, and transnational European, and global levels of community making.

1.3 Interdisciplinary Contributions

The present volume has an interdisciplinary profile, making significant contributions to migration studies as well as scholarship on right-wing populism, extreme-right activism, feminist mobilizations, and other social movements. A point of departure for this volume is the assumption that the narratives constructing our collective identities (i.e. the shared experience of ourselves in contact and contrast to the alterity) are not arbitrary and rarely innocent and consequently shape the process of formulating and implementing the politics of migration of the polity in question. We operationalize these narratives around the master frames of nostalgia and hope. They provide the discursive context wherein societies articulate the manner in which politics are done and who are deemed as legitimate political subjects.

From this perspective, the chapters in this volume expand their attention beyond the institutionalized forms of doing politics, dealing with the political mobilization of civil society actors. The chapters offer a diverse range of empirical contributions, ranging from Sweden and Finland in its northernmost corners of Europe to Poland and Romania in the east and Italy in the south. They critically examine the junction between the politics of culture, welfare, and migration across the continent that are not only embedded in specific national contexts but also transnational in a comparative perspective by examining transnational mobilizations and global cities.