Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right

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Drawing on more than three decades of work for the Institute of Race Relations, Liz Fekete exposes the fundamental fault lines of racism an tarianism in contemporary Europe.

Unlike a lot of works for the general public in this area, Fekete's book tries to understand the causes and roots of right wing thought/violence across Europe, making reference to specific local circumstances (the French intelligentsia, such as it is, is a completely different beast to the British media establishment, and as a result has given us a completely different far right movement). Within this, of particular importance is her situating of the need of anti-fascism to provide ‘an understanding of the relationship between fascism, war, militarism and securitisation’ (p. Ascertaining dimensions of the problem is near impossible and is about to become that much more difficult. The most extreme example of increased authoritarianism from the supposedly liberal centre is, of course, the treatment of Greece at the hands of the Troika – the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund – which has reduced the country to a vassal state of the EU, forced into selling off much of its assets. In Europe especially, the extreme right has managed to safely secure its position as an electoral force, participating in government coalitions and dominating many of today’s policy discussions.Likewise, in relation to extremism, a metanarrative has been established that leaves the state, or capital, out of any discussion.

The main drivers of the earthquake risk are older buildings, high earthquake hazard, and urban areas. Due to the concentration of population and economic activity, Istanbul is highly exposed to seismic hazard. These exercises build on the Greece-Cyprus-Egypt and Greece-Cyprus-Israel trilateral military relationships.

the author presents case studies and acts of racism done by extremist groups, their representatives and individuals, but links this with a social and most importantly - societal racist culture, which is not true. Similarly, the post-war dictatorships of southern Europe have left a legacy of nationalism that has been singularly revivified by the economic problems of those countries, leading to the growth of a ‘defensive nationalism’ (p. It is important when analysing such seismic results not to fall into the trap of utilising a hypodermic-needle model that assumes that people are empty vessels, deprived of agency, and simply open to all the worst sorts of propagandising. While we can wholeheartedly support localised forms of resistance and the fight for a vibrant, anti-fascist social climate, the struggle for consent, for which the extreme right is increasingly winning the Gramscian war of position, should not be forgotten .

A significant factor in the setting up of this environment has been the media’s increasing preoccupation with ‘foreigner crime’ (p.

This was implemented via a one-in, one-out system, so that for each refugee deported, one would be let in. The first of these chapters is dedicated to the EU and the nationalist backlash against its uneven development. Instead, attention ought to be paid to how political actors actively create, shape and perform those ‘identity crises’.

over the last few decades and provides the reader with a clear picture of the state of political play in Europe, in particular the extent to which neoliberalism has been a fertile ground for reaction, in a world where the market has gained access to more and more aspects of life, and in so doing provoked the most monstrous reactions. Drawing on years of experience as Director of the Institute of Race Relations, Liz Fekete paints a grim picture of endemic racism and emerging fascism . But explanations rendering this development inevitable are inferior to accounts focusing on the active role the extreme right plays in structuring political identities or the complicity of state structures and traditional parties in facilitating their rise. After Syriza won the election in 2015 on a mandate of debt relief, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, saw no contradiction in telling the world that ‘[e]lections change nothing.The burdensome exercise of clarifying the terms of the debate surrounding the themes of the book is first apt. This index is produced by combining the average annual economic loss and the average annual loss of life calculated from Europe's first openly available seismic risk model of its type, normalised by the GDP per capita to account for the varying levels of resilience across Europe. Along with this, there has been the growth of an industry of anti-extremism; another example of the marketisation of crime and ideology that is woven throughout the volume. She talks about the differing ways in which this approach has seeped through and been implemented, and makes efficacious points regarding the specificities of the countries involved, and how this discourse has been tailored to meet them.