Description
This intervention examines scapegoating as a crucial shared practice by the European and global far right. Drawing on works in social and political theory, I define scapegoating as a form of Othering by which a figure or group – typically those seen foreign, i.e. in-between a community and its outside – is made to bear the failures and undesirable traits of the whole Self/community using a demonisation-idealisation logic. The far right typically demonise its Others as either too ‘Oriental’ (e.g. backward, overly religious, patriarchal) or too ‘Occidental’ (e.g. woke, globalist, unpatriotic). Using scapegoating as theoretical prism, I show the intrinsic link between these two sets of enemy frames and how they idealise the far right itself as protector of both ‘good Oriental’ values like authenticity, patriotism, loyalty and community, and ‘good Occidental’ values like Christianity, rationality and technological progress. I suggest that the scapegoating of internal ‘Orients’ and ‘Occidents’ is a key discourse-practice shared and networked by far right actors. Not only does scapegoating make up the backbone of reactionary far right identity projects in various localities; these shared scapegoating practices also work to reconfigure the West/Rest binary in international politics in (more) reactionary form – keeping the assumption of Occidental superiority nurtured in the ‘old’ West while privileging new actors and spaces as representing the ‘new’ or ‘true’ West, from MAGA and Silicon Valley to Orban to Putin.
