‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party

In this article I will analyse the role of antisemitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in‐group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). The analysis will show that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right‐wing parties in Europe, utilises various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimise political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimising strategies used by the FPÖ when criticised involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent antisemitism and forms of post‐Nazi antisemitism. I will focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalisation of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry.     

The ideological work of the daily visual representations of nations

This paper explores the ideological work performed by the inconspicuous flagging of the nation across four locations: Bucharest (Romania), Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Calgary (Canada) and Madrid (Spain). Using data collected between 2012 and 2016, the paper maps the use of the nation in outdoor signage across different urban landscapes. This mundane flagging of diverse nations performs a triple function: it reproduces the nation as a universal epistemic category, it entrenches mobility within the imaginary of contemporary urban life and it sanitises select mobilities and the power dynamics producing them. The ongoing use of the nation by different objects in our urban surroundings participates in the naturalisation of nationalism, furthering existing trends in the commercialisation of the nation and its reinvention as an innocuous brand addressing a global marketplace.     

Non-Cosmopolitan Universalism: On Armitage's Foundations of International Political Thought

Summary

In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage provides a genealogy of the multiple foundations of international political thought. But he also enables political theorists to reflect on the nature of the pluralisation of our concepts: that is, the way various components come together (or apart) in particular circumstances to form a concept that either becomes dominant or is rendered to the margins. Armitage claims that concepts can ‘never entirely escape their origins’. In this paper I explore this claim from the perspective of contemporary debates about the nature of cosmopolitan political thought.     

Entangled Memories: How to Study Europe’s Cultural Heritage

A fruitful direction for research on the European cultural heritage is to adopt a transnational approach. Rather than see cultural heritage as predominantly expressed in national contexts, it could be seen as primarily transnational and as plural. Such a view would also suggest a conception of national histories as themselves products of transnational encounters. In this perspective, the European dimension is not then necessarily something over and above nations, but part of their heritage. Moreover, as fundamentally transnational, the European heritage is not exclusively confined to Europe. Cultural heritage is not something that is fixed or based on an essence; it is produced and reinterpreted by social actors in different but overlapping contexts. This is also an interpretative approach that draws attention to the entangled nature of memories and especially the cultural logic by which new conceptions and narratives of heritage emerge from the encounter and entanglement of different memories. Such an approach offers new opportunities for comparative research on the European heritage as an entangled mosaic of histories and memories. This approach thus rejects not only particularistic but also universalistic ones such as alternative Eurocentric accounts.