Description
Abstract
Both Right and centre-Left parties address Muslim radicalization as a security threat. While we have abundant literature about Right-wing anti-Islamic posture, the securitization by progressive, social-democratic and socialist parties has received less attention. To what extent does the centre-Left imitate the nativism, authoritarianism, and populism of the Radical Right? The paper contributes to securitization theories by analysing how Centre-Left parties distinctly securitize Muslims according to their partisan ideologies. When conservative and progressive parties evoke the “Muslim otherness”, they have in mind different referent objects (white and Christian Europe for the Right, secular and liberal-progressive Europe for the centre-Left). However, both political sides govern Islam through a rationality of hierarchical control. To understand how securitization travels across parties, I use the intra-linguistic version of “translation”, defined as ideological, collective, and contextual transfer of meaning. Translation modifies but does not erase the Right-Left cleavage because each party has to ideologically adjust security into its core values and to negotiate with internal audiences, who might dissent with the translation and call to de-securitize Islam.
Although the securitarian turn of the centre-Left is visible in many Western European countries, the paper selects France as case study of translated securitization from the Radical Right (National Rally) to the centre-Left (Socialist Party). I argue that the SP (in the Government between 2012-17) has translated some Right-wing policies (removal of citizenship, state of exception) and discourses (Muslims as culturally incompatible), without translating Right-wing ethno-religious and populist semantics.
The paper is structured as follows. The first section spells out the theoretical framework. Securitization theories have dedicated less attention to partisan ideologies, which are significant to understand how religion is uniquely translated. This holds especially true for the securitization of Islam, assembled through signifiers such as “radicalization” and “terrorism” that are highly politicized and contested. The section also clarifies the meaning and relevance of translation to grasp how securitization travels across parties.
The second section privileges a genealogical approach to explore how securitization of Islam crept into the French SP. Genealogy discloses how the party came to consider security as a human right since the Eighties, while the anti-Islamic discourses are historically rooted in the French Left’s ideological attachment to assertive secularism.
The third section maintains that recent critical junctures – jihadist terrorism, Mediterranean refugee crisis - explain why the Left-wing securitization resonates with a context marked by polarizing debates about Islam. In this respect, the jihadist attacks against France prompted SP President Hollande to enact two policies - the state of emergency and the removal of citizenship – that had been so far proposed by the Right. Yet, the SP has kept the emphasis on its ideological referent objects of securitization - laïcité, civic nationalism, and gender equality. The fourth section reflects on how translation of securitization has generated opposite reactions into the SP. the so-called Islamogauchism (Islamo-Leftism) as rhetorical artifact translated from Right to Left to silence the SP dissident voices and factions who protest against the Right-wing turn of the Hollande Presidency.
