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He presently resides in East Berlin.
Paul Hockenos, the Central and European correspondent for In These Times, has written a pioneering and readable account of the rise of the extreme right in. free to hate: the rise of the right in post-communist eastern europe and radical right-wing movements that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of .
Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Combining first-hand reporting, original documentation, and political analysis, Free to Hate is the first major work in English to investigate the rise of the ultra-nationalist and radical right-wing movements that have been sweeping Central and Eastern Europe since In this powerful volume, Paul Hockenos provides an account of the emergence and contemporary relevance of far right movements in countries including Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Poland.
In addition, he discusses neo-Nazi youth subculture, anti-Semitism, racism, minority issues, and the revision of history in the post-communist states. Read more Read less. Review Paul Hockenos, the Central and European correspondent for In These Times , has written a pioneering and readable account of the rise of the extreme right in contemporary Eastern Europe. Routledge; 1 edition September 10, Language: Start reading Free to Hate on your Kindle in under a minute.
Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 3 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Euroskeptic views bridge many East-West differences. The bloc was short-lived, however, when significant tensions erupted between the Italian and Romanian radical right. Once the Romanian representatives left, the bloc was dissolved because it did not have the twenty required members.
The French and Dutch radical right parties lead the current bloc, called the European Alliance for Freedom, which relies on three weak members from p. After the EU Eastern Europe enlargement, Euroskeptic attitudes have become powerful predictors of radical right voting across Western and Eastern Europe. Yet it is not a fear of technocrats from Brussels and their investigations of fraud in disbursing European funds that fuels radical right support, but irritation with EU reports that criticize violations of Roma rights, demand the expansion of minority language rights and praise gender equality in the workplace.
Until , the East European radical right never effectively mobilized against new minorities arriving from non-European countries. This suggests that issues of immigration and mobilization against Islam due to the refugee crisis and to terrorist attacks in Paris in and Brussels in could unify Eastern and Western radical right movements more than Euroskepticism. However, it is not clear whether the fear of Islamic refugees and terrorism will benefit radicalized mainstream parties, radical right parties, or both. If the threat to national sovereignty is perceived as so severe that only a large party can restore security, by embracing a more hawkish position mainstream parties might subdue radical right parties because they are seen as more competent to deal with the issue Meguid In , the Slovak government filed a lawsuit against the European Union at the European Court of Justice because it feared a new EU mandatory quota system to allocate asylum seekers.
Fear of Muslim asylum seekers led to mass demonstrations in Eastern Europe, despite the fact that there are almost no migrant communities from the Middle East. The proposed EU quotas on how many asylum seekers each of the East European countries was expected to absorb were tiny relative to the size of the population, and few of the migrants actually wanted to go to Eastern Europe even before they knew how unwelcome they were. Similar sentiments against Muslim refugees were echoed in Estonia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Eastern Europe is an interesting laboratory in which political parties experiment with three core strategies to tackle the radical right: Andrea Pirro and Bartek Pytlas have shown that in Eastern Europe, strategies of inclusion and exclusion yield mixed results, and no single strategy can be identified to suppress the radical right party vote.
Recent elections in Poland in and Slovakia in reflect this schism. In Poland, the radicalized mainstream p. In Slovakia, elections were marked by the implosion of mainstream parties and strengthened both the radical right which received 8. Although the refugee crisis was not the sole focus of the electoral campaigns, both the Slovak and Polish mainstream parties used it to stir up nationalistic sentiment before the elections.
The strategy badly backfired and made the task of forming a durable governing coalition after the elections a challenge. In Poland, by contrast, the nationalist sentiment gave PiS an unprecedented majority in the parliament that has allowed it to weaken core institutions of democratic governance such as the Constitutional Court and free media. This suggests that rhetorical radicalization of the mainstream parties is a double-edged sword for the mainstream parties.
The third common aspect of radical right mobilization is the presence of radicalized mainstream parties. They are typically left-leaning on the economy and advocate greater involvement of states in the economy.
Some originated in anti-communist movements prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in Although many West European mainstream parties embrace tough policies on immigration and home-grown terrorist networks, East European mainstream parties are, comparatively speaking, much more comfortable with their radical right cousins.
Radical right parties thus operate in a much more permissive environment and are often incorporated into governing coalitions. Far right parties have been successful in steadily attracting some voter support since the early s in Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In these countries, the far right was able to attract between 5 percent and 40 percent of the popular vote at various points in time.
Furthermore, in Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia, far right parties have been present in governing coalitions since the founding elections and have significantly shaped minority policies. The weakening of the radical right can be perhaps attributed to the wide presence of radicalized mainstream parties that siphon away their true electoral potential. On the surface, radical right parties in the East are a rare phenomenon Bustikova and on average are less electorally successful than their Western counterparts.
Paradoxically, the historical legacies of authoritarian fascist interwar regimes are more relevant after more than twenty-five years of democratic consolidation than they were in , because radicalized mainstream politicians are now looking for new forms to organize political systems. The nostalgic association with past glory ultimately benefits both the radical right and the radicalized mainstream right, since both claim to be the political successors of previous nationalistic movements, often associated with state independence and territorial unity.
Voters and politicians have begun to contemplate possible substitutes to replace liberal democracy. Eastern Europe is experiencing democratic fatigue, low levels of trust in deliberative institutions, and dissatisfaction with democratic governance BTI Unlike in , when democracy was the only game in town, there is no agreement on how the alternative form of governance might look like this time around.
Liberal democracy, with its appeal to inclusiveness, has its opponents. Since the Communist Parties that preceded the democratic experiment have been discredited as well, some voters and some parties are looking to the distant past of the interwar period and resurrecting nationalistic heroes with dubious democratic credentials. Hence the explosion of T-shirts featuring the image of the Polish interwar authoritarian statesman Pilsudski, who unified Poland and protected minorities ; of the controversial interwar leader of the Ukrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera; and of the similarly controversial leader of the Romanian Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu.
A newly elected member of the Slovak parliament, Marian Kotleba, occasionally wears symbols of the Hlinka guard, associated with the clerofascist Slovak state during World War II. The narrative that rejects both communist rule, which diminished national sovereignty, and botched democratic rule, which increased the power of ethnic and social minorities at the expense of the titular nationality, is compelling because fascism is an alternative to democracy and was also antagonistic toward communism.
Countries with a nationalist legacy of communist rule are in a unique position. Mainstream or extreme political mobilization can evoke interwar authoritarianism and, to a certain extent, fascism Bustikova and Kitschelt If there is a reversal in liberal democratic governance in Eastern Europe, it will most likely be initiated not by a small radical right party but by a large radicalized mainstream party that will move the country into new and uncharted territory. Whether the presence of a radical right party will facilitate such a turn, by introducing new issues and ideas into the mainstream, or will block democratic sidelining, by offering an alternative channel for discontent, needs to be explored p.
Most of the research on Eastern Europe has treated post radical right parties as a Western equivalent of pathological normalcy. But if radical right parties contribute to the dismantling of democratic governance by undermining constitutional checks and balances, such an approach would be imprudent.
First published online Inside the Radical Right: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Available online at https: Comparative Perspectives on Legacies and Party Competition. Immigration and Conflict in Europe. University of Michigan Press.
Voting Radical Right in Western Europe. The Politics of Antidiscriminatory Policy in Europe. The Electoral Consequences of Fiscal Reforms. Populism in Eastern Europe: Racism, Nationalism, and Society. Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash. Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives.
The Radical Right in Western Europe: Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe. Party Competition Between Unequals. Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. A Long Time in the Making. Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market. Patronage Politics and Democratic Development.
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Democratization and Minority Rights Democratization in Eastern Europe had empowered minorities and politicized the protection of minority rights. Preview — Free to Hate by Paul Hockenos. Due to these distortions, it is more difficult to capture exposure to risk associated with educational levels or self-declared levels of income. Noah marked it as to-read Jun 07, A notable exception was the Romanian radical right party led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a celebrated poet, associated with post- communist nostalgia.
Combining first-hand reporting, original documentation, and political analysis, Free to Hate is the first major work in English to investigate the rise of the ultra-nationalist and radical right-wing movements that have been sweeping Central and Eastern Europe since In this powerful volume, Paul Hockenos provides an account of the emergence and contemporary relevance Combining first-hand reporting, original documentation, and political analysis, Free to Hate is the first major work in English to investigate the rise of the ultra-nationalist and radical right-wing movements that have been sweeping Central and Eastern Europe since In this powerful volume, Paul Hockenos provides an account of the emergence and contemporary relevance of far right movements in countries including Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Poland.
In addition, he discusses neo-Nazi youth subculture, anti-Semitism, racism, minority issues, and the revision of history in the post-communist states. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Free to Hate , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 03, Tom rated it it was amazing. The author has done a very good job of researching the various far right, nationalist and populist groups that emerged after the fall of communism.
He details the rise of such groups within the historical perspective of each country and details their cultural and political links. The chapters on East Germany and Romania are particularly good.