Bonding or Bridging: Far Right Parties' vs Precarious Activists' Transnational Discourse about Migration in Europe

• In Event: 524 - Regular Session. Anti and Pro-Immigration Discourses and the Crisis of the European Project

Abstract

With the growing importance of social media, visual images represent an increasingly attractive media used by political actors to mobilize supporters in Europe’s multilingual national and transnational network publics. While social movement scholars have emphasized the cosmopolitan visions of citizenship in the European Union so created in transnational publics by European social movements, we know little on right-wing political actors’ circulation of posters in European electoral campaigns across multilingual national and transnational public spaces. To fill this lacuna, the paper will explore an intriguing empirical coincidence: Inspired by radically different ideologies, both right wing and left-wing political actors construct solidarity among ethno-nationalist or cosmopolitan supporters in different European countries alongside the symbolic figure of the migrant. However, while ethno-nationalist bonding at the European level simply transposes racist boundaries to the European level, cosmopolitan boundary bridging creates ambiguous images of Europeans as migrants and of migrants as Europeans. My analysis proceeds in two steps. In a first step I trace the cross-cultural translation and trans-national diffusion of a campaign poster created by a single right wing party in Switzerland. I will show that right wing parties transpose ethno-nationalist images of solidarity to the European level by visually constructing migrants as criminals while bridging linguistic boundaries among their support groups in different national contexts. In a second step, I explore how left-libertarian social movements try to break racist stereotypes of migrants.

Author

• Nicole Doerr, Mount Holyoke College