Description
Anti-Muslim racism keeps spreading across Europe. While several studies addressed the securitization of Islam, what these approaches miss is the movement and adaptation of anti-Islamic narratives across parties. Both Right and centre-Left parties see Islam as a source of potential insecurity, but they have in mind different “referent objects” of securitization (ethno-religious for the Right, socio-liberal for the centre-Left). The article contributes to securitization theories by analysing how specific manifestations of anti-Islamic securitization cannot be understood without engaging with Right and Left partisan ideologies. I argue that we need the intra-linguistic meaning of “translation” to answer the question: How do securitization tropes travels across parties? I define translation as an active, collective, and contextual transfer of meaning. Both Right and Left securitize Islam because of shared historical context marked by orientalism and Islamophobia. They actively adjust external tropes into a version fitting their ideological legacy, which is necessary to collectively negotiate securitization with intra-party audiences. I show that while the Radical Right translated liberal-progressive rhetoric into a chauvinist version, the bulk of the translation occurs from Right to Left. Particularly, the centre-Left has translated from the Right rhetoric and policies that frame Muslims as a threat to national security. The paper provides empirically illustrations of its conceptual statements through the case study of Italy, that instantiates how centre-Left parties translate securitization of Islam from electorally rising Radical Right parties – namely a broader trend happening across Western Europe.
