ASTK12292U CANCELLED: Course: Contemporary Far-Right discourses and Discrimination: Western and Eastern Europe

Volume 2014/2015
Education
Bachelorlevel: 10 ECTS
Masterlevel: 7,5 ECTS
Content

The European Parliamentary Elections that took place in 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis demonstrated clearly that the far-right is on rise in Europe. For the first time, far-right parties made gains by winning parliamentary seats simultaneously in 14 member states of the EU (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Romania and the UK). The EP elections in 2014 ended with similar results. The far-right has strengthened in non-EU member states of Europe as well. On the one hand, far-right parties (also characterized as ‘radical right’, ‘extreme right’, ‘right wing extremist/populist’ parties in the international literature) attract voters with similar agendas and rhetorics in different countries. European far-right parties commonly oppose in hostile terms the national communities they believe to represent (‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’) to ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. On the other hand, there exist important differences between the characters and actual programs of far right-parties. Our course mostly focuses on East-West divisions.

The Western European far-right presents immigrants as the major threatening ‘others’. In post-communist Eastern Europe, the Roma minority population is the main target of the far-right. Unlike their Eastern counterparts, far-right political actors in the West generally refrain from expressing antisemitism and explicit pro-Nazi sympathies. Homophobia is more central in the rhetorics of the Eastern than the Western far-right. Parties in Eastern and Western Europe may also construct global ‘others’ (i.e., foreign states, civilizations like China) in fundamentally different ways. Despite all these distinctions in various national contexts, discourses of far-right parties are structured by very similar linguistic and rhetorical patterns. The course identifies and critically analyzes the discursive elements which serve as tools of discrimination in the rhetorics of European far-right parties and movements.

 

Course structure:

1. Theorizing the far-right: terminological diversity, approaches and debates in the literature.

2. Background and programs of far-right parties in Western and Northern Europe.

3. Background and programs of far-right parties in Eastern and Southern Europe.

4. Analyzing far-right discourses. Perspectives, methods and research strategies.

6. Identifying the other: derogatory labels in far-right discourses.   

7. Pronominal forms of opposition (e.g., ‘we’/‘us’/‘our’ versus ‘they’/‘them’/‘their’) as discursive tools of ‘othering’.

8. ‘Disaster’, ‘parasitism’, ‘contamination’, ‘invasion’, ‘colonialization’: metaphors and frames in far-right discourses.  

9. Reinforcing or creating the sense of fear: the topoi of ‘threat’ and ‘danger’.   

10. The constructions of Jews in the discourse of Eastern and Western European far-right parties. The discourse of antisemitism.

11. The Roma minority in the rhetorics of the Eastern European far-right.     

12. The representation of immigrants by Western and Northern European far-right parties.

13. Global players in the eyes of far-right parties in the East and West: the case of China.   

14. Summary of the course. 

 

Competency description

After completing the class students will be able to identify and critically analyze the discursive tools of discriminatory reasoning. In addition, the course could also be a training opportunity for those who are interested in political communication, since the methodology utilized in this class can be applied and expanded for the creation and analysis of politically and socially relevant speech and text. The course is also useful for students who aim to work with non-governmental organizations.     

Learning Outcome

- Compare and contrast the background, ideologies and rhetorics of Eastern and Western European far-right parties.

- Present the main approaches in the discursive study of ‘othering’.

- Critically review and evaluate the relevant literature, highlighting potential conceptual and methodological shortcomings.

- Describe the linguistic and rhetorical concepts of pronominal form, reference, frame, metaphor, argumentation scheme.

- Identify key discursive components of far-right rhetorics in actual texts.

- Conduct independent analysis of far-right discourses.

- Demonstrate how to apply the methods obtained in this class for the study of political speech and text in other contexts.

Atton, Chris. 2006. Far-right Media on the Internet: Culture, Discourse and Power. New Media & Society, vol. 8, 573-587.

Beauzamy, Brigitte. 2013. Continuities of Fascist Discourses, Discontinuities of Extreme-Right Political Actors? Overt and Covert Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary French Radical Right. In Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.), Analysing Fascist Discourse, European Fascism in Talk and Text. New York: Routledge, 163-180.

Boreus, Kristina. 2013. Nationalism and Discursive Discrimination against Immigrants in Austria, Denmark and Sweden, In Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik, Brigitte Mal (eds.), Right Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 293-307.

Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analyzing Political Discourse. Theory and Practice. London, New York: Routledge. 

Edwards, Geraint O. 2012. A Comparative Discourse Analysis of the Construction of ‘In-Groups’ in the 2005 and 2010 Manifestos of the British National Party. Discourse and Society, 23(3), 245-258.

Johnson, Mark and George Lakoff. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kovács, András and Anna Szilágyi. 2013. Variations on a Theme: the Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Antisemitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011. In Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.), Analysing Fascist Discourse, European Fascism in Talk and Text. New York: Routledge, 203-227.

Kovács, András. The Post-Communist Extreme Right: the Jobbik Party in Hungary. In Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik, Brigitte Mal (eds.), Right Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 223-233.

Krzyzanowski, Michal. 2013. From Anti-Immigration and Nationalist Revisionism to Islamophobia: Continuities and Shifts in Recent Discourses and Patterns of Political Communication of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO). In Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik, Brigitte Mal (eds.), Right Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 293-308.

Kuisma, Mikko. 2013. “Good” and “Bad” Immigrants: The Economic Nationalism of the True Finns’ Immigration Discourse. In Umut Korkut, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Aidan McGarry, Jonas Hinnfors, Helen Drake (eds.), Discourses and Politics of Migration in Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 93-108.

Minkenberg, Michael. 2011. “The Radical Right in Europe Today: Trends and Patterns in East and West.” In Nora Langenbacher, and Britta Schellenberg (eds.), Is Europe on the “Right” Path? Right-Wing Extremism andRight-Wing Populism in Europe, 37-55. Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak (eds). 2001. Discourse and Discrimination, Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London and New York: Routledge.

Richardson, John E. and Monica Colombo. 2013. Continuity and Change in Anti-Immigrant Discourse in Italy: an Analysis of the Visual Propaganda of the Lega Nord. In Monica Colombo (ed.), Discourse and Politics of Migration in Italy: The Production and Reproduction of Ethnic Dominance and Exclusion. Special issue of Journal of Language and Politics, 12(2), 180-202.

Richardson, John E. 2011. Race and Racial Difference: the Surface and Depth of BNP Ideology. In Nigel Copsey, and Graham Macklin (eds.), British National Party – Contemporary perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, 38-61.

Rudling, Per Anders. 2013. The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda. In Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.), Analyzing Fascist Discourse, European Fascism in Talk and Text. New York: Routledge, 228-255.

Shekhovtsov, Anton. From Para-Militarism to Radical Right-Wing Populism: the Rise of the Ukrainian Far-Right Party Svoboda. In Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik, Brigitte Mal (eds.), Right Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 249-263.

Szilágyi, Anna. (2015, forthcoming). Threatening Other or Role-Model Brother? China in the Eyes of the British and Hungarian Far-Right. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict.

... see Absalon for the full list

 

The course combines lectures, videos, student’s presentations and discussions, discourse analysis exercises as well as written assignments based on independent research.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Class Instruction
  • 28
  • Course Preparation
  • 110
  • Exam
  • 1
  • Exam Preparation
  • 20
  • Exercises
  • 30
  • Preparation
  • 17
  • Total
  • 206
Credit
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Oral examination
Oral exam
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
External censorship
Criteria for exam assesment
  • Grade 12 is given for an outstanding performance: the student lives up to the course's goal description in an independent and convincing manner with no or few and minor shortcomings
  • Grade 7 is given for a good performance: the student is confidently able to live up to the goal description, albeit with several shortcomings
  • Grade 02 is given for an adequate performance: the minimum acceptable performance in which the student is only able to live up to the goal description in an insecure and incomplete manner