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MADRID (Reuters 17/10/98) - Spainish Judge, Baltasar Garzon broadened
his arrest warrant for Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet Monday
to charges of genocide, torture and terrorism involving 94 people of different
nationalities. Garzon, who has created diplomatic waves with his successful
request for Pinochet's arrest in London, made the addendum to his previous
arrest warrant as he worked on a formal argument for the ex-strongman's
extradition to Spain.
"This widens the request for provisional, unconditional imprisonment of
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte for the reasons described in this resolution...on
crimes of genocide, terrorism and torture,'' said the document, which was
sent to British authorities who detained Pinochet last Friday night.
Garzon had previously accused Pinochet of being involved in the torture
and murder of 79 people. The broader warrant clarified that the victims
were not only Spanish citizens but were also fromArgentina, Chile, the
United States and Britain.
SUGGESTED MORAL: LIKE THE CAR IN THE PICTURE; WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND--
PREPARE AN ORAL REPORT FOR CREDIT
REMEMBER BOSNIA, KOSOVO, RUANDA, ZAIRE,....REMEMBER.
or, LEST WE FORGET...
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Thought
Provocation:
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The Following text has been used in class for a reading comprehension exercise, and to stimulate discussion and writing. The book discussed below is available in the library.
What do you think?
SOCIAL CRISIS, POLITICAL STALEMATE
Europe's new fascist order
_________________________________________________________________
The far right has never entirely disappeared from the scene in Europe,
witness current developments in Austria (see article by Paul Pasteur).
Some movements, excluded from the electoral system as in Scandinavia
or the United Kingdom for example, turn to terrorism, others exploit
the blurring of distinctions between right and left which makes a
nonsense of political representation. Thus the problem is not so much
the resurgence of 'fascism' as the numbing effect on democracy of
political and economic consensus.
by JEAN-YVES CAMUS *
_________________________________________________________________
The collapse of the far right parties in the European elections on 13
June 1999 and the split in the French Front National suggested that
they might be going into decline but the results of more recent
ballots belie this prediction. On 3 October 1999 the Freedom Party
under Jörg Haider came second in the Austrian elections, with 26.91%
of the vote, and on 24 October the Swiss People's Party led by
Christoph Blocher shared first place with the socialists, with 22.5%
of the vote. In Germany, the German People's Union made its debut in
various Land assemblies in the East, and in Norway the Progress Party
made further gains in the municipal elections on 14 September 1999,
with 13.4% of the vote (up by 1.4%).
The persistence and electoral success of xenophobic parties in Western
Europe are associated with the increasing prevalence of ultraliberal
economic and social ideas and a distinct tendency among political
leaders and captains of industry to regard the nation-state as a thing
of the past. Thus the far right in Europe has acquired a base in
society and now relies on the ballot box rather than militant activism
to make its voice heard.
Militant activism still gives cause for concern, however, in countries
where there is no electoral outlet for extreme ideas, either because
the voting system is antipathetic to minority parties - as with the
ferocious first-past-the-post system in the United Kingdom - or
because the social pressure against unconventional views is very
strong - as in Sweden. Divisions in the organisation and a lack of
charismatic leadership may also prevent movements from crystallising.
In the past few years, various small, violent and overtly neo-nazi and
racist groups have emerged, alongside or even within the mainstream
parties (some militants belong to both). As political observers
Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg explain (1), these groups have
adopted the modus operandi of American terrorist groups such as The
Order and Aryan Nations. They operate in the same way and have
acquired a certain flair for action on the grand scale, witness the
campaign of violence in Sweden.
These dangerous movements, like some skinheads, have not however had
any political or social repercussions - except among young people in
the East German Länder. In countries where they are active, they
explicitly claim affinity with national socialist or fascist ideology,
with all the symbolic paraphernalia, even if means breaking the law.
This far right family is in the minority at the moment.
Far right parties with a genuine constituency were confined to Italy
and the southern European dictatorships between 1945 and the 1980s.
Now, with widespread and increasing poverty and the advent of
multi-culturalism, they are active in most Western democracies.
Immigration has brought waves of naturalisation and regularisation,
accompanied in many countries by the granting of political rights and
citizenship, and a policy of according legal recognition to the rights
of minority languages and cultures.
The far right's centre of gravity, located in the industrialising
countries in the sixties and seventies, has now shifted to central and
northern Europe. The Italian Socialist Movement, beacon of the far
right in those early days, was superseded in the 1980s and 1990s by
the French Front National.
It in turn was a model for many movements in other countries which had
varying degrees of success, at least in Western Europe: real but
short-lived (Belgian Front National under Daniel Féret); considerable
but not quite enough to get any members elected (Swedish Democrats);
completely marginal in most cases (National Democracy in Spain,
Italian National Front). But Jean-Marie Le Pen's party, split and
doing badly in the polls, is no longer the perfect paradigm it once
was.
A third wave
There is now a more promising third wave, represented by the populist
movements north and south of the Alps (Jörg Haider's and Christoph
Blocher's parties, Umberto Bossi's Northern League, and the Union of
Ticino) and in Scandinavia (Carl Hagen's Progress Party in Norway and
Pia Kjaersgaard's Danish People's Party) (2). These parties (except in
the person of Jörg Haider himself) have no links with fascism or
nazism. They believe in minimum state intervention, they are
xenophobic but - at least in their official pronouncements - reject
racial discrimination and anti-Semitism, they will not consider
cooperating with bodies such as the Front National and the Flemish
Bloc, which they regard as extremist, but they are willing to form
coalition governments with parties of the right.
These parties are not fascist in the traditional sense and their
success cannot really be explained in essentialist terms (failure to
denazify in Austria; deep-rooted xenophobia in Switzerland. Such
factors do not even explain the success of hybrids such as the Front
National in France or the Flemish Bloc in Belgium, far right parties
that pick up on the protest vote. The Flemish Bloc is often described
as the natural heir to the pro-nazi fringe of the Flemish movement
before the war. But political commentator Marc Swyngedouw has pointed
out that only 4% to 5% of its supporters are Flemish nationalists,
compared with 17% of those who vote for the People's Union.
So, as in the Front National, there appears to be a basic split
between the leadership, which is still very much in line with the
traditional far right in its convictions and its militant mindset, and
the rank and file, which have no such political affiliations and may
even once have had left-wing leanings. In Flanders 21% of the young
people who voted socialist in 1991 later switched to the Flemish Bloc.
In Austria the Freedom Party captured 213,000 votes from the Social
Democrats in the 1999 general election. In Denmark 10% of those who
supported the People's Party in 1998 had previously voted for the
Social Democrats.
It is also worth noting that the leaders of these parties often showed
no sign of extremism in the past. Mogens Camre of the Danish People's
Party was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats; Thomas
Prinzhorn, a rising star in the Austrian Freedom Party, like Christoph
Blocher, was a perfectly ordinary industrialist with nothing extreme
about him. They are very different in this respect from Bruno Mégret
and his republican Front National-Mouvement National and this may
partly explain his failure to gain more support among members of the
traditional right.
Thus there are two conflicting concepts of the political struggle:
backward-looking, generally in a counter-revolutionary, fundamentalist
or nostalgic frame of mind, and looking to the future, accepting
modernisation in order to gain power. Parties that have not redefined
their position are shrinking and becoming marginalised. In Italy, the
Social Movement of the Tricolour Flame, consisting largely of those
who refused to accept the reforms imposed by Gianfranco Fini in 1995,
now has only 1.6% of the vote. Parties whose only programme was to
represent and defend authoritarian regimes (Spain, Portugal and
Greece) have more or less disappeared (3).
Xenophobic populist movements are making particularly spectacular
gains among sections of the population where social status and jobs
are most at risk. The situation in France is no exception: the Front
National took 30% of the vote in some constituencies in the 1997
elections. There is also very marked support for these movements among
young people (35% of the under-30s in Austria), people with no
religious affiliation and non-voters.
Various explanations have been advanced. According to some theories,
economic or symbolic interests are the key. Sections of the population
affected by the economic crisis see foreign labour as a threat and
tend to vote for xenophobic parties. Thus, in Belgium the Flemish Bloc
draws most of its support from unskilled labour and in the 1999
elections in Austria 48% of blue-collar workers voted for the Freedom
Party putting it ahead of all other parties as the representative of
that section of the electorate.
In Germany, political commentator Patrick Moreau puts working class
support for the Republican Party at 17% in the 1996 regional
elections. He suggests that there is a close correlation between
support for extremist movements and low levels of trade union
membership, experience of unemployment, large families, dependence on
social security and poor education.
However, in Denmark and Norway, where the far right has 9.8% and 15.3%
of the vote respectively, there is no discernible link with
unemployment. Support for the far right in these countries comes from
self-employed businessmen and, increasingly, from workers. In both
countries, the Progress Parties are the leading workers' parties,
ahead of the Social Democrats. A possible explanation is that in
countries where the welfare state has done equally well under
bourgeois or Social Democrat governments, working class loyalty to
the left tends to be eroded. The authoritarian element that is part of
the labour tradition takes over and turns to the new right as the only
possible outlet.
So we have a paradox. An electorate that is essentially of the people
is voting for post-industrial far right parties, which have all to a
greater or lesser extent adopted national and neoliberal programmes.
They are, in short, free traders.
Thus the Austrian Freedom Party's economic programme calls for
complete deregulation of the Austrian economy to guarantee
competitiveness and prosperity, and create jobs. The Swiss People's
Party programme condemns social security fraud and calls for flexible
wages and working hours and an end to various state benefits, to be
accompanied naturally by tax arrangements that will be good for
business. The Scandinavian parties grew out of protests against
taxation and a desire to curb the powers of the welfare state, themes
that find an echo in Belgium in the programme of the minority liberal
wing of the Flemish Bloc led by MP Alexandra Colen.
The Northern League in Italy is a more complicated case. It can be
read as the response of the rising middle classes and small
businessmen in northern Italy to a situation where modernisation of
capitalism and a veritable explosion of micro-business undertakings
has not been accompanied by an equally rapid modernisation of the
institutional and political framework. This is the situation - this
and the gap on the right caused by the collapse of the Christian
Democrats - that allowed the Northern League to emerge, with its
hatred of foreigners and southern Italians, protests against taxation,
and claims to independence based on a fictitious identity and history
(there never was an Independent Republic of Padania or a Padanian
people).
Herbert Kitschelt (4) thinks the reason for this popular support for
neoliberalism is to be found in globalisation. In his view,
globalisation prevents the introduction of egalitarian policies based
on state intervention and leads the poorest voters to believe that
social justice can be achieved by giving the market free play - or, as
the populists and ultraliberals would have it, helping people to climb
the social ladder by releasing creative energy, encouraging individual
initiative, and keeping state intervention to a minimum.
Parochial liberalism
This may even partly explain the xenophobic element in the populist
vote. Those who feel threatened by foreign competition in the labour
market accept the populist parties' liberal programme simply because
it proposes to bar immigrants from social security benefits and even
jobs. Ultraliberalism seems to them to be tolerable if it is tempered
with national preference. In France, however, the Front National - to
a much greater extent than other parties of the far right - turned its
back on liberalism after the social turning-point in the autumn of
1995. It is now inclined to admit that there should be some public
services and social security provisions as well, though only for
French citizens. The thesis is that politicians and civil servants are
corrupt and inefficient, symbols of the failure of the system of state
handouts - hence the insistent calls for security and order - the
crushing burden of taxation caused by the dead weight of useless
unproductive people as compared with the wealth creators (small
businessmen, professionals, craftsmen, farmers and even workers).
There may be no automatic correlation between the presence of
foreigners and the far right vote but opposition to immigration is
undoubtedly a major factor. It is clear from a 1997 Eurobaromčtre
survey that French Front National, Belgian Flemish Bloc and German
Republican Party voters are absolutely against immigration and reject
any form of multi-culturalism - these parties' racial discrimination
is based on the spectre of interbreeding. Adherents of other
movements, such as the populist groups in Scandinavia, the National
Alliance and the Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party in
Austria, are not so racist. Their opposition to immigration is based
on a sense of cultural differences clearly expressed in Jörg Haider's
programme. This holds that awareness of the special qualities of one's
own people is inseparable from the desire to respect those of others,
a formula largely borrowed from the ethnic differentialism of the new
right.
There is further evidence of the correlation between ultraliberal
globalisation and the rise of the far right. According to the same
survey, 87.5% of Republican Party supporters, 68.4% of Front National
voters and 45.7% of those who support the Freedom Party think European
union is a bad idea. Fewer Flemish Bloc supporters take that view -
40.8%, barely more than the socialists at 38.9%. This is probably
because the idea of a multi-ethnic Europe is popular in the Flemish
movement as offering the best antidote to the nation-state beloved of
German, Austrian and French populists. This anti-European streak is
also detectable in Scandinavia and Switzerland.
The parties of the far right appear in fact to favour a kind of
parochial liberalism, liberalism without free trade, confined within
national borders and accompanied by a dismantling of social security
provisions and state control. There has nevertheless been some
movement. Thus the French Front National and several other like-minded
bodies campaigned against the World Trade Organisation, though
Christoph Blocher has nothing against it, while Jörg Haider supported
Austria's bid to join Nato.
Finally, the dead hand of the old party systems has undoubtedly played
a decisive role in the emergence of the far right in Europe. In
Scandinavia, Switzerland, Austria - before the 1999 elections - and
Belgium, the political scene was marked either by a permanent
coalition (the Social-Democratic Party and the People's Party in
Austria, Social Democrats and Conservatives, the magic Swiss formula
ensuring stable distribution of seats in the Federal Council between
the main parties) or by the regular alternation of social-democrat and
right-wing liberal regimes, distinguishable only by the recipes they
recommended for regulating or deregulating the market.
The cronyism of the main parties and their incestuous relations with
the state prevented any fundamental reform of the institutions and
froze the electoral system. So wholesale rejection of politicians as a
class was decisive in swinging votes to the Front National in France,
the Flemish Bloc, in Belgium, the Freedom Party in Austria and the
Northern League in Italy. Supporters of the Italian National Alliance
were exceptional in accepting the rules of the democratic game and the
power structures, which it joined. The only real exceptions were
Luxembourg and the Netherlands, where there was a very strong
consensus but even there the National Movement and the Centre
Democrats failed.
Apart from their undeniably authoritarian and xenophobic character,
the radical parties of the right have undoubtedly benefited enormously
from the blurring of the distinction between left and right and the
very broad consensus in favour of bringing the social democrats into
the new centre. In this sense, the fact that they represent the main
dissenting voice - in societies where the clash of ideas is reduced to
a debate on ways and means of managing the liberal model - brings the
left face to face with its inadequacies and betrayals and the
conservative right with its blindness and cowardice.
It is difficult to predict what these parties could or would offer,
once in power. The example of Italy suggests that the extreme right
may be open to influence, up to a point. The opportunism of some
leaders such as Jörg Haider supports this conjecture. When they get
off their soap-boxes, they may fall into the shifting mould of liberal
democracy. For the time being at any rate, we have to reckon with
parties that will exert authoritarian pressure on the public
authorities and bring back into public life values that are alien to
democracy and that may be used to justify a degree of xenophobic
violence.
_________________________________________________________________
* Political commentator, author of "Les Extrémistes en Europe", the
annual report of the Centre européen de recherche et d'action sur le
racisme et l'antisémitisme (CERA), Editions de l'Aube, Paris, 1998,
and "Front National: eine Gefahr für die französische Demokratie?",
Bouvier Verlag, Bonn, 1998.
(1)Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, Fade to black: the Emergence
of a Euro-American Radical Right, Rutgers University Press,
Piscataway, New Jersey, 1998.
(2) On neo-nazism in Sweden, see Démokratins förgörare (collected
essays), Statens Offentliga Utredningar, Stockholm, 1999; on the new
right in Denmark, see Johannes Andersen and others, Valelgere med
omtanke. En analyse af folketingsvalget 1998, Forlaget Systime, Arhus,
1999.
(3) The five phalangist or radical parties that ran in the European
elections in June 1999 won 61,522 votes. In Portugal the
neo-Salazarist National Alliance did not put up any candidates; in
Greece two anti-Semitic parties, Front Line and Centre Union, together
won 1.57% of the vote (101,044 votes).
(4) Herbert Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe, University
of Michigan Press, 1995.
Glossary of parties referred to in the text
Austria
Freedom Party - Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs FPÖ
Social-Democratic Party of Austria - Sozialdemokratische Partei
Österreichs SPÖ
Belgium and Luxembourg
Front National FN
Flemish Bloc - Vlaams Bloc VB
National Movement - Nationalbewegong
Denmark
Danish People's Party - Dansk Folkeparti
Progress Party - Fremskridtspartiet
France
National Front - Front National FN
National Front-National Movement - Front National-Mouvement National
FN-MN
Germany
German People's Union - Deutsche Volksunion DVU
Republican Party - Die Republikaner
Greece
Front Line - Proti Grammi
Centre Union - Enosis Kentrou
Italy
National Alliance - Alleanza Nazionale AN
National Front - Fronte Nazionale
Northern League - Lega Nord
Social Movement of the Tricolour Flame - Movimento Sociale Fiamma
Tricolore
Italian Socialist Movement - Movimento Sociale Italiano MSI
Netherlands
Centre Democrats - Centrumdemokraten CD
Norway
Progress Party - Fremskrittspartiet FP
Portugal
National Alliance - Aliança Nacional
Spain
National Democracy - Democracia nacional
Sweden
Swedish Democrats - Sverigedemokraterna
Switzerland
Swiss People's Party - Union démocratique du centre UDC
Union of Ticino - Lega dei Ticinesi
Translated by Barbara Wilson
_________________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2000 Le Monde diplomatique
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