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- Convenors:
-
Natalie Morningstar
(University of Cambridge)
Camille Lardy (University of Cambridge)
Nicholas Lackenby (University College London)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions from across the European region and its periphery to ask: At what scale are disenchanted blocs of the electorate locating blame for the perceived failures of European liberal democratic politics? And to which alternative actors are they turning for solutions?
Long Abstract:
This panel responds to mounting public and academic speculation that we are witnessing a crisis in the legitimacy of European liberal democratic politics. It asks: At what scale are European interlocutors identifying the locus of blame for the perceived failures of liberal democratic institutions and party-political actors? In the wake of which national and international crises? And to what supra-national, national, or intra-national institutions and bodies are disenchanted blocs of the electorate turning for alternatives to the political status quo? Are these institutions and bodies understood as 'outside' of politics, or as interruptions to politics as usual? Why do interlocutors place their faith in these alternative actors, and by what moral and political rubrics are they deemed suitably responsible custodians of public trust? This panel therefore queries whether political movements in the European region often described as reactionary, populist, ethnonationalist, and/or secular might in fact be cracking open space for novel ideological realignments. The aim is to better understand everyday commitments to, and scepticism of, powerful political actors in institutions including, but not limited to, church, state, financial bodies, and the European Union. To that extent, ethnographic contributions are invited from across the European region, and its periphery, to examine emerging judgments regarding what counts as legitimate political power and for whom. Taken together, these cases will be mined for insight regarding what distinctive empirical and theoretical contributions anthropology might offer interdisciplinary debates on the putative crisis of trust in European liberal democracy.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -David Ginsborg (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the critique of liberal politics articulated by a group of Italian football ultras, centred on the analogy between the securitization and commodification of football crowds and the disempowering and alienating effects of liberal representative democracy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper briefly discusses an instance of critique against contemporary liberalism and consumer capitalism centred on drawing analogies across scales between football and representative liberal democracy. My interlocutors, the ultras (hardcore, organized supporters) of Centro Storico Lebowski, a small football club based in Florence, Italy, saw the securitization and commodification of football crowds as structurally analogous with the passivisation, alienation, and limits upon choice imposed on political action by delegation-based representative liberal politics. As a counterpoint, they argued that the self-managed and collectively owned football club they had established could act transformatively on both scales by reappropriating and redistributing responsibility, and thus agency. Viewing the liberal state and the market as repressive and disempowering, in light of their experiences as ultras, my interlocutors re-framed and re-scaled trust and responsibility at a local and strongly personal level through the unlikely medium of a football club, whose workings were analogically understood to prefigure a potential alternative society.
Steven Tran-Creque (City University of New York Graduate Center)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines connections between the American wave of anti-lockdown protests and populist mobilizations seen across Europe with particular attention to the intellectual history of American conservatism and the European new right.
Paper long abstract:
While countries with prior experience with SARS and MERS have generally responded to COVID-19 with robust quarantine and contact tracing measures, both the American and European responses have been comparatively patchwork and incoherent. Soft “shelter in place” and social distancing orders have provoked significant popular resistance and resentment on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, a confluence of libertarians, gun rights activists, “boogaloo bois” and many others have staged spectacular armed protests against policies they see as unconstitutional tyranny. Across Europe, similar protests have emerged, with notable participation from the newly resurgent populist far right.
Why have these movements reacted so militantly to what many scientists and academics generally tend to view as apolitical and mild public health interventions? What should anthropologists make of broadly popular populist conservative and libertarian critiques of the biopolitical state in a state of emergency? Why has scientific knowledge been popularly rendered as utterly incredible in these groups? And, perhaps most importantly, what are the long standing connections between the European new right and the American conservative movement?
Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in the gun rights community—principally in the US but frequently transnational in character—this paper explores the peculiarly American right discourse that consistently reaches beyond the geographic US, in order to make sense of the populist right’s perspectives and reactions to public health interventions in era of the COVID-19 pandemic with particular attention to how this bears on processes of extreme social inequality, race formation, and scientific knowledge claims.
Natalie Morningstar (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how perceptions of state-level mismanagement of the 2008 recession simultaneously fueled a wave of mistrust in national politicians and investors, even as it solidified trust in European integration, and draws a link between this period and the recent popularity of Sinn Féin.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the coexistence of pro-EU and anti-establishment sentiment among young activists in Dublin, Ireland after the 2008 recession and attempts to begin to draw connections between the events of this period and the more recent rise of the pro-unification party, Sinn Féin. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork with activists critical of the state's response to the recession, it endeavours to explain how the same financial crisis could capitulate a rise in anti-establishment politics and an increased faith in both abstract European identity and a practical political dependence on the European Union. Preliminary work on the electoral success of Sinn Féin in the 2020 General Election is then examined to explore how far nationalist party politics can be understood as consistent with European integration in the Republic of Ireland. It unpacks the assumption that the cosmopolitan, pro-EU activist is a political subjectivity incompatible with nationalist sympathies. Engaging critically with the literature on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, it then considers the novelty of the Irish case. An instance of left-wing, welfarist, nationalism, electoral support for Sinn Féin offers us a different vision of European nationalism than that encountered most frequently in the anthropological literature, where nationalism is frequently cast as definitionally right-wing and anti-cosmopolitan. Ultimately, this paper argues that it was precisely the peculiar blend of anti-establishment politics and pro-EU sentiment that simmered in the wake of the 2008 recession that made Sinn Féin's party politics appealing to a young, disenchanted, left-wing electoral base.