The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia
Reflections: Extreme Geographies
The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the
French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia
HENK VAN HOUTUM AND RODRIGO BUENO LACY
van Houtum, Henk & Rodrigo Bueno Lacy (2017). The political extreme
as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency
and Dutch Islamophobia. Fennia 195: 1, pp. 85–101. ISSN 1798-5617.
In this article we carry out a geopolitical analysis of the turbulent breeze
driving the EU into uncharted extremes. To do this we zoom in on three
cases that we deem both a response to political extremism and a source
of political extremism in themselves: France’s state of emergency, Brexit
and the pyrrhic victory over the far-right in the Dutch elections of 2017 .
Our analysis suggests that even though the political forces behind these
events have praised their policies or electoral victories as bulwarks to
keep extremism in check, the sort of extremism that they try to keep at
bay is not as worrying as the counter-productive realpolitik of the
traditional establishment they represent. By surreptitiously adopting
precisely the kind of extremist political preferences that they claim to set
themselves against, these politics show how the establishment in the EU
is normalising the extreme geopolitics of exclusion that are structurally
undermining the very principles of rule of law, liberal democracy and
overall openness on which the EU is based. The result: what used to be
easily dismissed as irrational or evil has become the everyday normal.
The extremism we so much fear has become the new normality.
Keywords: state of emergency, far-right extrememism, terrorism, Brexit,
borders, migration
Henk van Houtum, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud University,
Thomas van Aquinostraat 3, P.O. Box 9108, 6500 HK Nijmegen, the
Netherlands and University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 111, FI-80101
Joensuu, Finland, E-mail: h.vanhoutum@fm.ru.nl
Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud
University, Thomas van Aquinostraat 3, P.O. Box 9108, 6500 HK Nijmegen,
the Netherlands, E-mail: rodrigo.bueno.lacy@gmail.com
Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it. – Simone Weil
Introduction
A specter that seemed burried under the ruins of the Second World War has returned to haunt
Europe once again: the specter of fear itself. Across the EU, a bulging concert of political forces is
normalising a politics of fear while ever more assertively promoting an essentially monocultural,
unapologetically dominant and nationally homogeneous community which they imagine Europe once
© 2017 by the author. This open access article is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa64568
DOI: 10.11143/fennia.64568
86 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
was. They find their inspiration in the purity of a Europe they construct with cherry-picked distortions
of an idealized past – whose troubling chapters have been erased or simply omitted. These purified
imaginations are then contrasted with the threatening representations of besiegement, infiltration,
pollution and extermination on which their message draws its political force: doctored images,
exaggerated statistics and panic-striking narratives portraying the EU as being overrun by ‘terrorist
fighters’, ‘fortune seekers’ and other unassimilable immigrants. Call it ‘great-again politics’: this
anachronic glorification of a racially homogenous past traces a more or less implicit connection
between Europe’s recent multicultural societies and whatever challenges the EU is facing today–
immigration, terrorism, asylum, climate change, economic and political instability, military threats and
a reorganization of power around the world. Great-again politics is wishing a painful past away while
focusing on its good things, the equivalent of narrative morphine injected into history: ‘We used to be
great. Never mind the blemishes. Focus on the big picture: we were great, let’s focus on that.’ The
implications of these evocations are of course grim: they conjure up a lost glory that was predicated
on the subjugation of what were considered lesser races and which not only led to the brutality of
imperialism, colonization and slavery but whose culmination was the self-inflicted civilisational suicide
of the Second World War and its Holocaust (Bauman 1989). Although on this paper we focus on the
EU, this great-again politics is shaping politics not only here but also in places like Trump’s US, Putin’s
Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey. Overtones of imperial high-handedness, racialized colonial
hierarchization and nationalist hubris that seemed confined to the safe boundaries of history books
are being tootled again by European politicians, not to warn us from the past but as nostalgia for a
future worth striving for.
Unthinkable some years ago, the policies and rhetoric of great-again political parties have become
ever more extreme across the EU: the dog-whistle anti-Semitism of the French National Front;1 the
police harassment of Muslims normalised by France’s prolonged state of emergency (Safdar 2016);
the virulent Islamophobia of the Dutch Freedom Party of Wilders (Darroch 2016); the stark racism
behind eastern European Member States’ refusals to admit non-Christian asylum seekers (BBC 2015;
Cienski 2017); the fanatic isolationism and delusional imperial nostalgia evoked by the rhetoric and
policies favoured by British Eurosceptics – who want to cut ties with the EU against the wishes of half
their population and defying the judgement of an army of experts warning against it (Olusonga 2017);
the immoral bordering regime of the EU, dependant on refugee deals that outsource EU’s international
responsibilities to regimes known for their poor record on human rights (van Houtum 2010). Examples
of extreme and isolationist politics abound and are quickly multiplying.
Even as they keep failing to get hold of public office in most EU Member States, these phobic voices
have been gaining influence in the political debate and policymaking across the EU for over a decade.
A crucial component of their success – and this is the central argument of our paper – is that the
establishment of traditional political parties and coalitions that has been preventing xenophobes
from seizing power, either through strategic electoral alliances or by refusing to enter into coalitions
with them, has unwittingly become a valuable convenience in their political strategy and propaganda.
First, by increasingly normalising and co-opting their phobic policies, a significant portion of
establishment parties have not only allowed populists to effectively set the agenda but they have also
shielded them from the accountability of its implementation and consequences. Second, the
xenophobes’ detachment from government has allowed them to keep branding themselves as
political outsiders challenging the establishment.2 The populists’ consistent underdog status has
rendered credibility to the conspiratorial nature of their rhetoric: they fancy themselves as champions
of a free speech stifled by political correctness, speaking out for an aggravated ‘silent majority’ – ‘the
people’ – whose political preferences the so-called establishment keeps betraying. Ironically, the
establishment that is considered the best hope against their radical politics has been able to keep
xenophobes at bay not by opposing but by mimicking their rhetoric and by implementing their
preferred policies.3
And so we argue that the most extreme political geographies threatening the EU are not found in
the menacing openness denounced by phobic Eurosceptics or in the lands and cultures beyond the
borders of either the EU or its Member States. Rather, we locate the most extreme geographies
threatening the EU within Europe itself and, particularly, within the politicians who, having the power
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 87Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
to counter the imaginations fuelling Euroscepticism, nationalism and xenophobia, have been
normalising, internalising and hence further enabling them instead. They do not reduce the fear in
society, but capitalise on it and further legitimise it under the pretense of ‘normality’.4
This is what Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘the banality of evil’: humanity’s greatest tragedies are
patiently shaped neither mainly nor mostly by grandiose displays of monstrosity but by a thousand
everyday rituals of mundane acquiescence with evil (Arendt 1963). Although the recent victories of
seemingly moderate parties in the Netherlands and France have been hailed for putting a stop to the
ominous romanticism of Eurosceptic nationalists, it would not be prudent to get too complacent. If
their victories have sparked so much relief is only because they have averted a relapse into the
catastrophical politics from whose catharsis today’s European prosperity first arose. Hence, it would
not be good judgement to take lightly the foreboding sight of the French National Front – an anti-
Semitic, Holocaust-denialist political party with links to the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime – and
the Dutch Freedom Party – which has called for the indiscriminate expulsion of a racially-defined
social group – competing on equal footing with centrist parties. There is little to celebrate in seeing the
politics of racial authoritarianism and nationalist bigotry competing as acceptable contenders against
the politics of liberal democracy and openness. It is worth keeping in mind that even though the
French National Front and the Dutch Freedom party lost the elections, their respective electoral
shares have never been bulkier and, most disturbingly, their formerly ostracised message has been
rehabilitated: previously relegated to the fringes of the political spectrum, today it has become an
acceptable political alternative.
In what follows, we will first provide a discussion on the meaning of ‘extreme political geographies’.
And we will discuss the tensions between normality and liberal democracy. Then we will offer an
analysis of three case studies in three western European countries that show how the European
establishment’s policies and normalisation responses reinforce the very extreme politics they attempt
to tame. Our first case is France. The Paris attacks of November 2015 heightened the fear of insecurity
in France and the EU, yet the French state responded with a state of emergency that has opened the
door to a more systematic and widespread insecurity perpetrated not by terrorist attacks but by abuses
of the state. Our second case is Brexit. Even though the UK’s departure from the EU was motivated by
both an anxiety over loss of prosperity and by a nostalgia for former imperial greatness, the prospect
of Brexit now threatens to leave the UK poorer, perhaps disintegrated, more isolated and geopolitically
less relevant. Our last case is the ‘normality politics’ in the Netherlands. The recent victory of the Dutch
People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) over the Eurosceptic and Islamophobic Freedom
Party (PVV) in the Dutch general elections of March 2017 was praised as timely obstruction to the rise
of xenophobic Eurosceptics. And yet, the VVD’s victory was a pyrrhic one: it was achieved by promoting
a platform that embraces the xenophobia of the party it succeeded in keeping away from power.
The autocratic construction of normality
Who defines what is ‘normal’, on which grounds and with which legitimacy? In a democracy, this is and
should be an open question. For, unlike laws, which are enforced by the state, the enforcement of
norms derives from an (inter)subjective internalisation of their inherent value. What is considered to
be the norm and thus ‘normal’ is crucially dependent on the notion of normality and thus on the
incompatibility against which normality necessarily defines itself. Making pleas for normality
presupposes an assumption about the opposites that define it: the extremes of abnormality. To be
sure, there are very basic, commonsensical, perhaps universal norms whose intrinsic value could
hardly be disputed regardless of context, such as those promoting good will or preventing harm
among people. Yet, we should hear some alarms ringing whenever governments of liberal democracies
start to advocate normality. Unlike liberal laws, which derive from principles that assume universal
preference – for example, murder is illegal because presumably pretty much everyone detests getting
killed and freedom of speech is enshrined as a sacrosanct principle because presumably everyone
enjoys speaking up their mind –, norms stem not from an assumption of universal individual
preference – the main referent of liberal philosophies – but are the expression of collective convention:
the tyranny of the majority that liberal democracies try to prevent.
88 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
This is where the tension between pleas for normality and liberal values lies: collective conventions
of what is normal have been traditionally used to oppress rather than to emancipate the individual.
Accusations of abnormality have been the basis to discriminate against minorities, disadvantaged
groups and political opponents. Hence, whenever the government of a liberal democracy starts
making appeals to normality, it might be subverting the very principles of its political regime by asking
people to conform not to laws drafted through mechanisms that ensure the respect for minorities
and political liberties and which ultimately have an abstract best interest in mind but to the subjective
social expectations of either an oppressive majority or an authoritarian minority. Such a government
might be dismissing legality in favour of the tyranny of tradition such as religion or Romantic political
myths like nationalism. For a society to define and enforce ‘normality’ is hence principally illiberal.
Taken to its extreme consequence, absolute normality presupposes absolute subjugation: only
totalitarian dictatorships can enforce a complete homogenization of preferences, thoughts and
actions or, in other words: a total normality.5
One could anticipate this claim (i.e., that total normality leads to totalitarianism) to be dismissed as
a paranoid exaggeration. Surely, a critical mind could plausibly counter, the appeals to normality from
today’s moderate political parties across the EU need to be contextualized as a reaction against the
resurrection of national socialism across the EU.6 Thus, appeals to normality within the EU’s current
geopolitical context are not aimed at a homogenization of preferences or at the promotion of an
illiberal autocracy but rather the opposite: a return to the moderation and liberal values that national
socialist parties shun. This counterargument would be persuasive if the rhetoric and policy-making
did not contradict it so blatantly. Although establishment parties across the EU are making appeals to
normality while seemingly rejecting populist rhetoric, a closer look into their words and policies
reveals that they are not rejecting the national socialist approach but merely sugar-coating it, making
it politically acceptable, morally digestible or, in other words: normal. Against this deceitfully reassuring
aspiration for normality, it is however worth remembering that throughout most of history those who
have been considered abnormal are precisely those whose protection liberal democracies consider
their most ennobling historical triumphs: the formerly stigmatized as ‘sexually deviant’, ‘racially
corrupted’, ‘morally aberrant’ (Foucault 1965). That is why it should awaken some suspicion to see
self-styled moderate and liberal political parties across the EU making pleas for normality, when it is
precisely in the defense of diversity – and what is diversity if not a collection of abnormalities? – that
liberal democracies have philosophically and historically cut their teeth (e.g. Mill 1859, 89). This is one
of the most defining characteristics of the post-war project of European integration: a cautiousness
about the slippery slope of allowing power to define what is normal and what is not on the basis of
phenotypical and cultural ideals. Hence, the ‘normalisation-of-the-extreme’ agenda that we are seeing
in today’s EU politics is arguably no less than perhaps the most self-harming political movement since
the Second World War. To illustrate our argument, in the following sections we train our eyes to
perceive the hidden radicalisation behind three cases of normalisation of the extreme in France, the
UK and the Netherlands.
The French state of emergency as the new normal
The EU’s political centre has shifted so sharply to an illiberal right that seeing a socialist president,
Francois Hollande, implementing policies otherwise evocative of far-right right political inclinations, was
considered an appropriate response to the terrorist attacks on Paris in November of 2015. The French
president ordered the bombing of Raqqa, a city four thousand kilometres away, a state of emergency to
justify searches without warrants, and a reinstatement of France’s border controls. All this to avenge
crimes committed by mostly French and Belgian gunmen. We should be alarmed to see such illogical
measures finding widespread support and unquestioned imitation across the EU (Der Spiegel 2015;
Sparrow 2015), for the geopolitical reasoning that justifies them is morally nefarious: the policies it
advocates are dislocated from the geography that caused the problems they are intended to address.
The significance of the French response is that it was by no means atypical. Like France, the EU as
a whole has been basically following France in its response to terrorist crimes. The mechanism of this
response typically follows the following faulty yet recurrent reasoning. First, the attack is grounded on
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 89Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
an essential ideological and cultural incompatibility: as an assault on ‘our values’ and ‘us’, which in turn
leads to the perception of terrorists not merely as individual criminals or as militants of a terrorist
network but rather as the undifferentiated members of a civilisational clash (Huntington 1996). The
hardening of the borders between ‘us’ and ‘the terrorists’, who are assumed to be ‘Muslims’ in terms
of both identity and motivations, in turn justifies the scapegoating and harassment of the already
stigmatized Muslim minority in the EU (Roy 2006, 2017). Second, although most terrorists are the EU’s
own citizens, the response aims at avenging victims at home by carrying out military attacks that
inevitably end murdering more innocent people in the Middle East – for there is no such thing as
“surgical bombings” – and sowing the suffering that legitimises the grievances fuelling Islamist terrorist
attacks against the EU (Bueno Lacy et al. 2016). Third, the biopolitical response of the EU implies
tightening its borders through a harder border management. This border reconfiguration is premised
upon the structural breach of the EU’s international obligations to protect refugees and thus threatens
the very foundations of the EU by promoting policies that run against both the humanism that the EU
is supposed to take its inspiration from and the liberal principles it is supposed to champion. In the
discourse about the causes of Islamist terrorism in France or the EU, there is an absolute lack of
awareness about France or the EU’s own responsibility. To the contrary: EU Member States together
with the US are targeting Muslims, closing their borders to refugees and bombing ISIS in Syria as if
that would put an end to what is at least partially a secular home-grown threat.
A telling contrast is found in the way the EU deals with extreme-nationalist terrorists, whose crimes
are not only treated as individual crimes rather than as structural threats but whose ideologies find in
the xenophobic and autocratic discourses and policies of the EU increasing legitimisation and
motivation (EUROPOL 2016, 5). In the case of extreme-nationalist terrorism, often no ideology is
exposed and problematised. In order to grasp the absurdity of the different approaches to Islamist
and extreme-nationalist terrorism, it is useful to imagine, as a counterfactual exercise, the EU
implementing the same policies to address nationalist extremism as it uses to address islamist
terrorism. Imagine EU Member States dropping bombs on the terrorists’ ‘hometowns’ and afterwards
dismissing the many murdered civilians as mere ‘collateral casualties’. Imagine media outlets and
political leaders across the EU demanding Christians, their churches and religious communities to
expressly distance themselves from the right-wing extremists that claim Christianity as a source of
either inspiration or concern. Imagine police forces across the EU breaking into the homes of Christian
families without warrants to harass and intimidate them on grounds of national security. Imagine EU
Member States demanding that the borders be selectively closed to all Christian refugees. It sounds
as sensible as using a butcher’s knife to heal a broken bone.
As argued above, the absurdity of the EU’s geopolitical narrative about Islamic terrorism also lies
exposed in the striking mismatch between the geography of the crimes carried out in Paris and the
geography charted by the French president’s response. “La France est en guerre”, François Hollande
ventured in the aftermath of the attacks. Yet, the perpetrators were by no stretch of the definition an
“army” but a handful of mostly EU citizens. By framing these attacks as threats stemming from outside
of France and from outside of Europe, Hollande – like George W. Bush before him – justified the
unjustifiable to give support for airstrikes bound to kill innocent people outside their own country in
order to avenge compatriots killed by other compatriots.
Hollande further speculated that the attacks were directed “against the values we defend”. This is
questionable. The ‘against-our-values’ rhetoric implies that Muslims, for ISIS pretends to embody the
purest version of Islam and the French and Belgian gunmen of Paris claimed to be acting in its name,
in general rather than ISIS in particular endorse such violence. Plus, what we see happening is the
targeting of places where the highest number of French people can be killed. The idea seems to be to
kill random numbers of people in order to spread fear, not attack values per se. To turn this into a
conflict between antagonistic value systems, which in the debate on islamist terrorism are always
assumed but never specified, is only fuelling the unnecessary fear that justifies Islamophobia and
hence the dividing of EU societies along ethno-religious lines, which is precisely the aim of the psycho-
political strategy of islamist terrorists.
What is more, the terrorist attacks, Hollande advanced, were directed “against who we are”. This is
even more unsound: as far as we know, the terrorists were all EU citizens; people who grew up in
90 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
France or Belgium and spoke fluent French or Flemish. We should be aware that Islamic terrorism in
the EU is not a foreign import but a homemade recipe. Contrary to what the mainstream narrative
suggests, Islamic terrorism is not set against “the West” but it is by and large a product of the West
itself. The terrorists that carried out the Paris attacks should not be seen as either a product of Islam
or as isolated incidents, but rather as the most violent manifestation of a structural problem: the kind
of Westernisation that takes place through the spatial, economic and socio-political marginalisation of
entire ethnic groups with a migratory background in the EU and through the European-assisted
bombing that has fashioned the relentlessly violent tragedy of the Middle East over the past decades.
In this vein, the terrorist attacks on Paris can also be seen as part of a longstanding tit-for-tat: ISIS’
response to France’s Opération Chammal, the French government’s military operation against ISIS
(Graham 2015). It is understandable that Hollande was wary to admit such a link and thus that the
terrorist attacks in Paris were the price France paid for his government’s foreign policy in the Middle
East, which could confront him with the critique that he may have used military intervention in the
past less to foster French strategic interests than to boost his plummeting popularity. The “against-
our-values and against who we are” rationale seems to imply not merely a troubling prejudice but a
convenient excuse for the fallout of failed imperial recklessness. EU Member States’ military
adventurism in Africa and the Middle East is thus coming back to the EU in the form of Islamist
terrorism. And this in turn is tapping on the resentment that some EU citizens with a migratory
background have for a longstanding orientalist segregation in Europe’s neighbourhoods as well as in
its educational and labour markets – a discrimination worsened by memories of colonialism and the
islamophobia unleashed since ‘the war on terror’ was declared in 2001. ISIS is targeting European
Muslims’ resentment by inserting their personal struggles into a greater epic of Muslim martyrdom.
What is more, we need to reflect upon the role that the memories of colonialism might play in the
contexts of stigmatisation experienced by the French of Maghrebi descent and how Islamic terrorism
offers them a tool to express their dissatisfaction. After all, terrorism was a tool of national liberation
in Algeria and the marginalisation faced by French of Algerian descent in the land of their parents’
former colonial oppressor could beguile some of them – the most frustrated, the most unstable, the
most aggravated – to compare their situation with their parents’ and dignify terrorism as a time-
honoured roar of defiance against their own oppression. It is not a mere coincidence that the Front
National, a political family clan founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen – a blatant anti-Semite, Holocaust-denier
and former torturer during the war of Algeria (Beaugé 2012) – has gained so much in popularity in a
time when France is threatened by the Islamic terrorism committed by its youth of Maghrebi descent.
So rather than a civilisational clash (à la Huntington) between “the West” and “the Islamic World”, what
seems to be more helpful in explaining the conflict is a longstanding and unresolved clash between
France and its former Maghrebi colonies as well as within France itself.
All this means that neither continuous military operations in the Middle East nor more soldiers
patrolling the streets of Europe will address any of Islamist terrorism’s structural causes. Indeed,
militarization might only create a bigger problem, for whenever the next terrorist attack strikes among
soldier-patrolled streets, both people and politicians might call for ever stronger measures: more
militarization, more profiling and more repression, which will lead to a more closed, more fearful,
more authoritarian and less free society. To prevent this from unfolding it is urgent to question the
geography that Hollande and the EU are making accountable for Islamist terrorist attacks. The people
they point to as culprits as well as the places they want to bomb and the culture they frame as
threatening have the goal to convince their electorates about the wisdom of their policies against
terrorism. Yet, there is no wisdom but petty recklessness behind them. The debate has turned into a
well-rehearsed circus of banal representations of a civilisational war between Islam and the West.
Misrepresentations have taken most of the political foreground and pushed alternative, more truthful
representations, to the background. It is the same foolish response as the “war on terror” that was
conceived by George W. Bush’s administration. George Bush’s “war on terror” was supposed to make
‘us’ safer. Instead, this geopolitical rhetoric and the devastation it has inspired over the last 16 years
has been intimately linked to the worst 16 years of Islamic terrorism that Europe has ever seen.
The new normality is creating a Ban-opticon: the disciplining of normality and the expelling or
banishment of what is seen as ‘deviant’. It is the kind of governmentality that has been dominating
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 91Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
geopolitical thinking around big swathes of the world, particularly the US and Europe, since the attacks
on New York in 2001 (Bigo 2006a). The policies related to this new normality share two main
characteristics: normalisation of a permanent state of emergency and violence on the one hand and
practices of exceptionalism (Agamben 2003), profiling practices and containing foreigners on the
other. The concern is that there is “an Orwellian society in the making, through a ‘liberal’ agenda” (Bigo
2006b, 46). Although a literary work of political fiction, Orwell’s 1984 prescient description of the
function that permanent war served to preserve the power of the dystopian totalitarian government
he imagined is a useful analysis of how today’s violent normality operates (Orwell 1949, 243): “It does
not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not
matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”
Migrants, asylum seekers, and political dissidents have been conflated with terrorists while the
ceaseless outcries denouncing the erosion of the rights of marginalized and vulnerable groups as well
as of the institutions intended to uphold them have been drowned in a sea of hysteria about terrorism.
Political speech and policies which long ago would have been immediately lambasted as inconceivably
authoritarian are leading to the securitization and militarization of life across the EU. Procedures of
exclusion that seemed to have been relegated to the darkest and ever faintest memories of the
European psyche are making a grand return to the fore of European politics and allowing us to
envision the advent of a dystopian future.
We should not be shy to ask: how is bombing the Middle East a sensible answer to Islamic terrorism
when military intervention is responsible for the creation of ISIS in the first place? How are EU citizens
becoming safer by states of emergency that allow the further stigmatisation of Muslim minorities in
Europe while legitimising fears against Syrian refugees and intra-communitarian EU migrants? How
is killing indiscriminate numbers of Muslims going to quench the hatred and determination that
keeps fuelling Islamist terrorism in the EU and beyond? How would stricter border controls have
helped prevent French and Belgian citizens from entering their own countries and causing the
mayhem they did?
Brexit and the extreme geographies of imperial nostalgia
Our second case in point here regarding the normalisation of the extreme is Brexit: the process
spanning the decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership to the EU to the UK’s formal
notification to leave the EU until today. So far, Brexit is perhaps the most dramatic consequence of the
nostalgia for normality that Europe is experiencing. Like France, where the new normal is a state of
emergency and a state increasingly alienated from parts of its own citizenry, the case of Brexit
constitutes an enlightening case study to cast light upon the extreme imaginary geographies being
charted by the establishment. The same as France’s course, the British is leading to equally dramatic
destinations. At the core of the Brexit narrative we can find the same extraordinary rarity that has
been fuelling populist insurgencies all across liberal democracies: a curious blend of postcolonial
grievance and imperial nostalgia.
The post-colonial grievance was recurrently evoked through the repetitive discourse of political
emancipation. Nigel Farage – perhaps the UK’s most famous exponent of xenophobia and
Euroscepticism – and Boris Johnson – London’s previous major turned prominent Eurosceptic –
referred to the referendum’s date as ‘our independence day’ (BBC 2016; Stone 2016). This is an
unexpected metaphor. Narratives of unjust oppression redressed through independence constitute
the central trope of former colonies’ national mythologies as well as the historical outrage fuelling
decolonial theories (see e.g. Fanon 1961; Mignolo 1992). Hence, it is surprising to find the same
postcolonial grievances in the mainstream discourse of a country that is perhaps the epitome of
European imperialism.7
The British discourse of emancipation from the EU’s ‘oppression’ is, in turn, based on the two
accusations most recurrently denounced by the figureheads of the UK’s campaign to leave the EU:
freeing the UK from Brussels’ dictates and “taking back control of our borders” (Ross 2016). Although
it goes without saying that the UK joined and can leave the EU voluntarily, what gives this discourse
– and any other – its strength to shape people’s minds and actions is its repetition and thus its ability
92 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
to contest or silence alternatives. Although misguided – for neither is the EU a dictatorship nor is the
UK by any stretch of the definition its colony – the domination that these discourses acquired through
their sustained replication endowed them with the status of plausible claims to truth: they portrayed
the project of European integration that has achieved the most opulent prosperity Europe has ever
seen as a dictatorship and the open borders that have allowed such prosperity as its main threat.
The deleterious effects of the EU’s open borders were evoked by Theresa May’s insistence on the
UK leaving both The European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Justice (Ashtana
& Mason 2016). She denounced the European Convention on Human Rights as a threat to British
security because it prevented the deportation of terrorists. These denunciations not only exaggerated
the Islamist threat (for they did not prevent the UK from punishing terrorists) but they conflated
islamist terrorism with migration from Muslim countries. Overall, the anxieties about the ECHR and
the ECJ uttered by May suggest that the particular kind of immigrant that Brexiteers have as their
concern is, more than any abstract immigrant, ‘the Muslim immigrant’.
This cuts to the core of Brexit: not only has it been a process obsessed with immigration but
particularly preoccupied with Muslim immigration in particular (Jeory 2016; Wadsworth 2017). The
famous UKIP poster reading “BREAKING POINT” showed this strikingly: in its visual composition, the
main slogan championed by the campaign for the UK to leave the EU, “To take back control of our
borders”, is reinforced by an image picturing a thick long line of dark-skinned refugees (Fig. 1; Stewart
& Mason 2016).
Several media outlets pointed out that the image of this poster is a reminiscent of Nazi propaganda
film warning about the Jewish threat (Fig. 2; Stewart & Mason 2016). The poster of Farage’s party UKIP
promotes anxiety not only about immigrants but, by contextual association with the refugee crisis
that has been grabbing headlines since the summer of 2015, also for the many asylum seekers from
Muslim-majority countries that have been seeking refuge in the EU ever since.
The discursive thread of subjugation to a project of self-destructive miscegenation unscrupulously
imposed by a treacherous elite is a common trope traditionally found in the discourses of the
European and American far right (Ferber & Kimmel 2000). For example, Anders Breivik’s manifesto,
Fig. 1. Nigel Farage, one of the main advocates for the UK to leave the EU, posing in front of a poster
whose visual composition conflates high numbers of refugees from Muslim countries with the EU’s
failure to its Member States. This poster was part of the campaign aimed at persuading British voters
to cast their ballots in favour of the proposal for the UK to renounce its EU membership ahead of the
referendum that decided this question.
Fig. 2. Comparison of the poster ‘Breaking Point’, used by the campaign aimed at persuading the
British electorate to vote in favour of the UK to leave the EU, and a Nazi propaganda film picturing
large streams of Jewish refugees as a threat (source: Indy100).
https://www.indy100.com/article/people-are-calling-out-ukips-new-antieu-poster-for-resembling-outright-nazi-propaganda--WkTYUB18EW
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 93Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
2083: A European declaration of independence, espouses the emancipation from this yoke as its title
and motivation: “More than 90% of the EU and national parliamentarians and more than 95% of
journalists are supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing
Islamic colonisation of Europe; yet, they DO NOT have the permission of the European peoples to
implement these doctrines” (Breivik 2011, 4). Through this narrative wizardry, the project of political
integration that has created unseen prosperity in Europe is turned into betrayal, while Muslim
immigrants and refugees are turned into colonizers. This is not only historically nonsensical but
morally devious: by turning the vulnerable into the powerful and the powerful into the vulnerable, this
misrepresentation of power relations legitimizes the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Brexiteers
have adopted this very apocryphal narrative, an affinity that has revealed yet another thing (Williams
& Law 2012): it is not so much immigration Brexiteers are against, but rather a certain kind of
immigration; theirs is a selective xenophobia, an Islamophobic and illiberal phobia, a fear of a Muslim
geography that cannot be fended off using the tools of liberal legal frameworks, for it is the liberal
principles of the rule of law, equality before the law, non-discrimination and respect for human rights
that prevents taking the necessary measures to exclude ‘the Muslim’’.
“We are back to being a normal country, in charge of our own laws and able to start making our own
relationships with the rest of the world. Maybe even reengaging with the Commonwealth”, was the
statement uttered by Nigel Farage the day after the referendum on Brexit. Although much of the
enthusiasm for the UK’s drive to leave the EU was the desire to curb immigration, Brexiteers have
consistently expressed an odd enthusiasm for an open-borders agreement with the Commonwealth
after leaving the EU. This project is known as the Canzuk Union (Bennett 2016): a confederation of
Commonwealth countries – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain – allowing free trade, the free
movement of people and mutual defence. The rough brushstroke of this grand scheme paints not so
much an aversion for open borders as an aversion for the kind of open borders that the EU stands for.
In contrast to the EU, this ‘Empire 2.0’ envisions a mostly white union of English-speaking peoples
based on the symbolic legacy of the British Empire, a structure in which the UK acquires the privileged
association with ‘the motherland’. What the discourses and allusions surrounding the references to the
Commonwealth suggest is that it might not have been open borders and immigration what angered
British voters as much as an anxiety over a notion of diluting English-speaking whiteness, which
reminded them of homogeneity and dominance they had lost. The anxiety over open borders
expressed by the proponents of Brexit might be understood as a fear to be mixed with the very subjects
Fig. 2. Comparison of the poster ‘Breaking Point’, used by the campaign aimed at persuading the
British electorate to vote in favour of the UK to leave the EU, and a Nazi propaganda film picturing
large streams of Jewish refugees as a threat (source: Indy100).
https://www.indy100.com/article/people-are-calling-out-ukips-new-antieu-poster-for-resembling-outright-nazi-propaganda--WkTYUB18EW
94 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
that the British empire colonized mixed with a desire to recover the British empire’s unapologetical
domination over its former subjects in order to overcome the burthensome constraints of the rule of
law and simply get rid of them. It is imperialism coated with the politically correct nuance of anti-
colonialism. It is a perversion of history, geography and language. It is newspeak. Under this light,
Brexit may appear to be a quixotic attempt to revive British imperialism. And yet, like we have seen in
the case of France, it is not the extremists of UKIP or the English Defence League who are carrying out
Brexit but the elites of the British conservative establishment. Theresa May’s government approach to
Brexit as business as usual and a normal political course disguises an uncomfortable truth: the
establishment Tories are not only the true radicals but very efficient ones, for they are able to take
traditional politics by assault while sailing under the flag of normality. They are the Trojan horse that a
certain kind of mild authoritarianism is employing to infiltrate liberal democracies, whose gullible
electorates are receiving it as the gift it purports to be rather than as the threat it may turn out to be.
The nostalgia for the ‘normality’ associated to the Commonwealth constitutes a fascinating
geographical imagination revolving around the debate on Brexit. Mentions of the Commonwealth
have been plentiful in the debate surrounding Brexit, as if this reminiscence of the British Empire hid
the key for its resurgence (Tomlinson & Dorling 2016). So much of this geopolitical imagination points
to a desire to go back to the unequal power relation of empire, where the UK got “to have its cake and
eat it” (Elgot & Rankin 2016). As Theresa May put it (Batchelor 2017), “We want to make sure that we
are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and that we are able to control movement
of people coming from the EU,” a desire that taken together with the nostalgia for the Commonwealth
suggests that the loss of empire may have misled the British to soften and refrain from dealing with
the non-native with the force or violence they would otherwise deserve; as if the EU was emasculating
for repressing the British Empire’s virtuous sense of righteous violence.
Moreover, it is important to remember that it was not fringe politicians like UKIP’s Nigel Farage who
set in motion the process that has led to Britain’s exit from the EU. The referendum was started by
David Cameron, a liberal pro-EU prime minister who, by his own choice, decided to put the UK’s EU
membership to a referendum whose validity he did not even take the care of condition to either a
representative voter turnout or a qualified majority. Cameron’s promises to reduce immigration and
to hold a referendum on the UK’s permanence in the EU were his ways of appeasing populist
xenophobes as well as Eurosceptics within his own party.
David Cameron should have known – as well as May must know – that that the promise of more
border controls and a better future is at best dubious. Brexit is like a “leap of faith” attempting to
bridge an abyss of warnings so wide that no rational government would be expected to have even
considered it. Not only does the economic outlook loom devastating but the integrity and even the
peace of the country are at peril. Spain has acquired a veto over Brexit negotiations due to the British
enclave of Gibraltar; the conflict in Northern Ireland could break out again or Northern Ireland could
break away and join Ireland; and Scotland seems in course to push for a new referendum of
independence. Whatever this normality might bring, it seems that it will be anything but the easiness
and comfort it that its proponents promised. Instead, it looks as if a rather extreme path littered with
perils and uncertainties lied ahead. How is that taking back control? And at what price for the UK and
the EU? The disconnection between policy and interests in the strategy pursued by the British
governments that have led to Brexit and are in charge of its negotiation with the EU should make us
rethink the way we speak about traditional European parties. Perhaps, rather than conceptualising
them as establishment parties, it would be more analytically useful to regard them as not so different
from the radical, deeply ideological and irrational political parties of the fringes or perhaps even as
dangerous extremists.
‘Act normal or go away’: Extreme Dutch normality
Perhaps no other political discourse condenses the hypocrisy of the political centre’s pleas for
normality as roundly as that of the biggest party in the recent Dutch election, the Dutch VVD (the
People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) (Wittenberg 2017). Ahead of the elections of 2017, the
VVD’s political programme charted a geographical imagination of a threatening ‘outside’ that matched
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 95Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
the tone of the populist rhetoric of the stridently xenophobe and islamophobe party of Wilders, the
PVV (Wijnberg 2016). In short, the VVD´s programme depicts the Dutch as a peace-loving people “who
simply want to get along with everyone”; helpful people “who will give each other a hand in case of
need”. The contrast are the destitute immigrants taking away the comfort of the well-natured, hard-
working Dutch, threatening the prosperity of “Dutchmen who worry about the international misery
they see replicated in their own neighbourhood”, migrants who are also insinuated to be irrationally
unfriendly and violent, unlike the people which the VVD stands for: “people who want to live a
comfortable life. People who find it logical that you have to do your best to achieve it”.8
In a letter9 printed in the national newspapers that openly flirted with the Islamophobic right, Mark
Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, in a thinly veiled attempt at political opportunism, crafted the slogan
“Normaal. Doen.” (Act.Normal.) His message was “Doe normaal of ga weg” (Act normal or go away).
The subtext is clear: those who do not behave according to what he assumes as the norm. Those
deviating from the norm clearly did not presuppose misbehaved white, unhyphenated Dutch, but
rather Muslims and immigrants overall: those with an insecure footing on Dutch society, the ones
holding two nationalities or the naturalized Dutch, the immigrants and their ‘half-Dutch’ children, the
refugees. This subtext becomes evident if one is familiar with the Dutch context, where criminality has
long been wrongly associated with Moroccan immigrants and their offspring (Driessen et al. 2014),
and thus where the formulation ‘act normal or go away’ carries the unambiguous prejudice about
Moroccans’ overrepresentation in criminality as well as a veiled threat of expulsion from Dutch society
predicated on their implicit second-class citizenship: ‘act normal or go away’ within the Dutch political
context is equivalent to ‘Act Dutch or go back to your country’. Neither a very reassuringly liberal
message nor a policy that could reasonably be applied without breaking the Dutch rule of law. How
would it be possible to expel Dutch-Moroccan citizens otherwise?
These few words ‘Act normal or go away’ perhaps best capture the political strategy that not only
the VVD but all the centre political parties in Europe have been following over the past years. The ‘act-
normal’ politics has become the new extreme. It is the conservative and centre parties who have
shifted to the right: a right that not so long ago would most definitely have been considered extreme,
yet is now seen as the new normal. Illustratively, a wave of international relief flooded international
news outlets after the VVD – and not the PVV – came out as the biggest party in the Dutch elections of
March 2017 (Henley 2017). The headlines the next day were a parade of renewed confidence in
normality. In his victory speech, Rutte declared that the Netherlands had put a stop to the rise of
populism (e.g. Henley 2017; Wildman 2017). Most of the press closely followed his enthusiasm. After
Trump’s victory, Brexit and a year of looming populist victories in the Dutch and French elections,
these were good news.
However, the enthusiasm seems to be unjustified. An analysis made by the “Nederlandse Orde van
Advocaten’’ (Dutch Order of Barristers) published before the Dutch elections of March of 2017
assessed how the different political programmes of the Dutch political parties might fall into three
categories: 1) improve the rule of law; 2) be potentially in conflict with the rule of law or; 3) endanger
the rule of law. According to this classification, after the PVV – the Dutch far-right party of the
islamophobic Geert Wilders – the VVD, which declared itself as defender of normality and the party of
law and order, was evaluated as the party whose programme most endangered the Dutch rule of law
as well as international treaties and human rights. This reveals the gravity that the autoimmune
disorder in the EU has reached: one of the most egalitarian and liberal countries in the EU has adopted
the rhetoric and policies of the very far-right party it is now been praised for having kept at bay. The
new freedom across the EU is being framed in narrow, exclusionary terms: the freedom to close
borders and put locks to keep away those we irrationally dislike.
Conclusion
Over the last years, political discourse in the EU has painted a picture of openness ever more defaced
by increasing outside threats. Yet, what this painting fails to show is that the reality inside the EU is
more threatening to the EU than the outside threat we are supposed to fear. The EU is suffering from
a politics of autoimmunity. The EU’s policies to address Islamic terrorism are doing more harm than
96 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
terrorism itself. States of exception are encroaching on the liberties of the EU’s vulnerable Muslim
minority. The bombing of ISIS is causing the murder of innocent people and thus breeding further
Islamist radicalisation (Roberts 2017). Letting military forces patrol European metropoles and thus
paving the way for the militarization of civilian life and the establishment of ever more permanent
states of emergency is doing more to undermine EU citizens rights than the threat of terrorism. The
ever more paranoid borderism (van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2015) and inhumane biopolitical practices
to keep refugees from trespassing the EU’s borders is legitimising the overall closing of internal EU
borders and thus threatening Schengen and the openness on which the EU fundamentally depends.
The cooperation with authoritarian countries characterised by a disregard for life in order to keep
terrorists and refugees at bay is doing more to radicalise Islamist and right-wing extremists than any
ideologue could. Yet, instead of addressing the prosaic roots of the problem, the EU has made it
normal to address the perceptions of the problem. In consequence, the EU’s responses are not
capable of solving the problem which they are supposed to mend; rather, they are merely intended to
assuage people’s fears by giving them the impression they address their concerns.
Our thesis here is that, by increasingly allying themselves with the forces of xenophobic national
socialism, the centre parties that used to dominate the EU’s political landscape have sold out their
liberal and social democratic principles – principles which have led every single EU Member State to
top the Human Development Index’s rankings and to experience the longest, most prosperous lapse
of peace Europeans have ever seen. The depth of radicalisation among traditional EU political parties
is of such magnitude that the problem is not even an ideological contest between the merits of either
socialism or liberalism or between conservative and progressive ideologies.
We tend to focus on the most inflaming speeches, the most impressive acts and the most
entertaining circus through which media and politicians keep mutually constituting one another and
making each other mutually relevant. People like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Boris Johnson and
Nigel Farage in Europe – and further afield autocratic and narcissistic leaders like Putin, Erdogan and
Trump – are nothing but the most recent refinement, the grotesque excess of a political theatre put
in place and normalised by the establishment itself. We are too focused on all their theatrical
grandiloquent gestures, apocalyptical depictions, impressive military operations, handshakes and
overacting. The unmeasured amount of attention that both media and the political debate overall
give to the antics of our political parties is precisely what makes them relevant regardless of the
senselessness of either their statements or policies. The irrationality of their policies is beside the
point, what counts is the aesthetic appeal of their words and policies and the ability that these give
them to reach the news and remain a constant topic of discussion in social media. The banality of
irrational repetition creates purely discursive, non-existent realities that nonetheless exist by the
mere act of being ceaselessly repeated and thus normalised. Politics thus becomes a daily reality
show of aesthetically impressive dramas, in which politicians themselves are the key scriptwriters as
well as their main acts and performers (Wijnberg 2017). Furthermore, our obsession with the most
melodramatic extremists might be clouding our sight, preventing us to see that the main threat to
freedom and liberal democracy are not necessarily them, but us, who sustain them by either
supporting the political parties that surreptitiously imitate them or by resisting too little the small but
cumulative and thus significant steps leading towards more surveillance, fear and exclusion. A society
that not only allows this normality to be acceptable but successful and which encumbers their
advocates to the leading positions of its political apparatuses has no one else to blame for its
problems but itself.
The low-key banality of evil is at work: it is the moderate middle classes voting for self-fashioned
centrist parties what is dismantling the system on which the prosperity of these very middle classes
depends. In spite of all their theatrically impressive spectacles, it is not the neonazis or the islamic
terrorists who we should be most concerned about. They are terrible symptoms of a much larger,
much more structural problem. They are the excuses. The ones with the power to change the system
and the ones indeed steering the system to the right are the middle classes; the voters so obsessed
with luxury, celebrity and so unconcerned with inequality, climate change, and the violence promoted
by massive military apparatuses which operate with impunity and unaccountability at the border and
all around them. Perhaps the epitome of the moral hypocrisy upon which this extreme normality has
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 97Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
been built is manifested in the deals between Turkey, Libya and other autocratic states that the EU
has been reaching out to in order to contain refugees. As if there was no other way for the richest
countries, some of the most efficient bureaucracies and some of the most educated liberal democracies
in the world to deal with refugees and migration than to act like thugs, abetting torture, death, rape,
mass graves and the worst kind of racism (Dearden 2017).
The sophistication of the EU’s border system lies in its ability to endow all the abuses that it directly
or indirectly causes (rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, robbery, enslavement, etc.) with the
appearance of morality. We want to believe it is others who abuse them or cause their demise. We
want to believe it is them who are reckless or stupid enough to cross the Mediterranean and kill
themselves. We want to believe that the EU exists in a geopolitical void where its historical and
contemporary responsibility in the dramas of Africa and the Middle East in no way affect politics and
life in Europe.
This is the banality of evil of our time: those who define themselves as the normal legitimise the
manufacturing of an abundance of geographical imaginations that present the outside, the beyond
Europe as a threatening geopolitical geography – terrorists, hordes of destitute and culturally
incompatible migrants – to promote what ultimately are their egoistic interests. The problem with
these extreme geographies is not only that they hide the true people, places and cultures that are
responsible for the threats that afflict European societies, but by blaming the wrong geographies this
inaccurate ‘cartography’ keeps in place policies that sustain these threats through a vicious circle,
always blaming the consequences without ever being aware of the causes. It is the establishment, the
EU institutions and the center political parties who are yielding ground to all those who threaten the
EU, its peace and its prosperity. At least populists are either honest or obvious about their dislike for
liberalism, human rights, equality and open borders. That is what makes the deception of mainstream
parties the most troubling: they present themselves as the standard bearers of morality, common
sense, practicality, level headedness and yet they are the ones cunningly undermining the system.
Their political programmes make pleas to return to normality, and yet, once one examines what this
normality implies, one notices that it is perhaps them who constitute the biggest threat to the very
normality they claim to want to preserve.
After the respite provided by the results of the French and Dutch elections of 2017, Emmanuel
Macron and Angela Merkel are being urged to take the staff of liberal democracy and preserve what
is left of a ‘free world’ and an EU that seem to be crumbling (The Economist 2017a). However, if they
are to be successful their efforts will demand more than cosmetic changes or a different tune of
gestures and speech (The Economist 2017b). It will require addressing the structural causes that are
increasingly and relentlessly legitimizing the circular violence that keeps turning both the EU’s territory
and its surrounding neighbourhood into ever more insecure geographies. This includes stopping the
shameful deaths in the Mediterranean once and for all (Bueno Lacy & van Houtum 2013; Ferrer-
Gallardo & van Houtum 2014; van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2016; UNHCR 2016), which in turn requires
legal pathways to the EU and a comprehensive EU-wide asylum system. And it requires the EU’s taking
responsibility for its commitments not only to international refugee law but also to the very ethos
enshrined in its foundational documents and thus no more deals with authoritarian states to
outsource the asylum procedures and the EU’s border controls (EC 2006; Bialasiewicz 2012). These
extreme measures sold under the pretense of normality are creating dangers far bigger than the
extremism they are trying to mend.
We need self-reflection. We cannot fall into the easy anthropocentric trap of believing that those
who attack us hate ‘our values and who we are’ even though they grow up in the same countries as
we do and live among us. It is EU Member States and EU societies which are producing people that
feel alienated from society and discriminated to such a degree that they can be persuaded to kill in
order to exact their vengeance or let out their frustration.
This episode in the history of the EU is perhaps the most serious threat the EU has ever faced, not
because of terrorism but because EU leaders seem readier to deface the very ethos upon which the
EU has been built than confront how EU member states’ bigotry towards its Muslims as well as their
unscrupulous foreign policies in the Middle East are as responsible for terrorism as ISIS. Surely,
criminal and terrorist acts need to be properly addressed by the police, but that will not be enough.
98 FENNIA 195: 1 (2017)Reflections: Extreme Geographies
Europe can only defeat ISIS with an equally appealing counter-narrative. The EU needs to provide its
citizens of Arab-Muslim heritage with a narrative that allows them to simultaneously identify as both
Muslims and Europeans. Such narrative should allow them to claim a proud historical place in
European history that they can use to claim the space that xenophobic ethno-nationalists try to deny
them whenever they talk about a Europe that is essentially Christian, white or an anti-Muslim. As long
as western values keep including the indiscriminate marginalisation and stigmatisation of European
Muslims and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in the Middle East, the EU should not be surprised
to find some of that hate knocking at its door at some point or another. Moreover, the EU should also
address terrorism by avoiding taking part in military invasions in Africa and the Middle East; by
dismantling their ethnically segregated neighbourhoods, educational systems and labour markets; by
creating a historiography of Europe and a symbolism of the EU that gives both a geographical,
historical, political and emotional recognition to an almost entire millennium of Arab-Muslim
influences that paved the way for Europe’s Renaissance (Brotton 2002); and by promoting more
compassionate, rational and sustainable policies for the reception and integration of Muslim migrants
and asylum seekers through the creation of a border management adapted to the unavoidable
mobility of today’s globalized world.
A specter is haunting Europe, the ghost of Europe’s own shadow, leading to panicked reactions that
are seriously self-inflicting. There is nothing normal about that.
NOTES
1 Although formally the National Front has renounced the overt anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le
Pen, telling disclosures by Marine Le Pen suggest that this is a mere electoral convenience and
politically-correct formality (McAuley 2017).
2 Geert Wilders has been a representative in the Dutch Lower Chamber since 1998 and Marine
Le Pen grew up involved in the politics of her father’s party (of which she has been an active
member since 1986).
3 For an insight into this phenomenon, which can been categorized under the umbrella term of
Euroscepticism, see Brack and Startin (2015).
4 To illustrate, the prime-minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, gave an interview in which he
stated that normality should be the new norm. Later, in the election campaign of 2017, his
party VVD, focused its entire campaign on normality. Their main slogan was: Doe. Normal. VVD
(‘’Act. Normal. VVD’’). Likewise in his plea for a Brexit, Nigel Farage repeatedly argued that Britain
should be a normal, independent country again. Similarly, in France, after the terror attacks in
2016, the state of emergency, which is an exceptional measure, has become the new normal.
5 Arrow’s impossibility theorem postulates that individual preferences can be all the same only
when they are enforced by a dictator to be so.
6 Although the nomenclature for national socialist parties across the EU has prefered the term
‘populist’, ‘Eurosceptic’ or ‘nationalist’, calling them national socialist is far from a hysteria.
Today’s insurgent parties across the EU are reviving the nationalist symbols of ethnic and racial
homogeneity while promoting socialist policies as the privileges of ‘the people’ contained within
their racialized boundaries.
7 See Stuart Laycock (2012) All the countries we've ever invaded: and the few we never got round
to. Although a rather sensationalist account based on a liberal definition of invasion (it claims
Britain has invaded the territories of 171 out of 193 UN member states), its larger point is
revealing: an overwhelming proportion of the world has been touched by British imperialism in
one way or another.
8 The quote in the original reads: “We weten voor wie we het doen: optimistische en nuchtere
Nederlanders die van aanpakken weten en waarde hechten aan onze typisch Nederlandse
manier van leven. Nederlanders die zich zorgen maken over de internationale ellende die ze
terugzien in hun eigen buurt. Nederlanders die gewoon goed contact willen hebben met
iedereen, maar de Nederlandse gewoonten niet willen inleveren. Wij staan voor al die mensen
die een prettig leven willen leiden. Mensen die het logisch vinden dat je daar zelf je best voor
moet doen. Mensen die dat ook van anderen verwachten. En mensen die elkaar een handje
helpen als het niet lukt ” (VVD 2017, 7).
9
https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/
FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 99Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy
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