Suchergebnisse

The rejection of the European Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005 has brought about an unprecedented crisis for European integration, with strong risks of regression into nationalism and xenophobia. However, in a paradoxical way, that crisis has not prevented the building of a political Europe - even a federal Europe - because it has hampered intergovernmental negotiations more than the functioning of European institutions. Moreover, social polarisation means that Europhiles in the élites have been able to press for institutional solutions culminating in the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, a landmark in the consolidation of the European Union.

Since 1978 and the return to democracy, Spain's three main peripheral spaces from a linguistic, cultural point of view (Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia) have been constantly trying to get more and more autonomy from the central Spanish state. As regiones históricas ("historical regions"), they claim more competences than those enjoyed by other comunidades autónomas. That is particularly spectacular in the case of the Basque Country and Catalonia. From that perspective, belonging to the European Union was long perceived as an essential element in order to act without the Spanish state's permission in the field of public policies. Therefore it was seen as a clearly beneficial political commitment. At a time when identities often clash in new ways, it is necessary to wonder whether those Spanish peripheral spaces go on playing such a role of catalysts of European integration.

In his book Histoire de l'extrême droite en France (A history of the extreme right in France), the French historian Michel Winock shows how difficult it is to give a simple, accurate definition of the extreme right, which he presents as 'a hard political tendency but a soft concept'. However, one of the characteristics which are common to most extreme right-wing parties is that they tend to inscribe their discourse on identity (not only from a political point of view but also from a cultural or even biological point of view) inside a marginal space and even a space of marginality, a domain for marginal personalities.We shall see that those organisations choose to place themselves deliberately into the margins of the political landscape and that they do it in both senses of the term: first because their discourses sound scandalous to democratic parties and secondly because those speeches often reflect their will to exclude themselves from the political game. Indeed, extreme right-wing theorists and politicians frequently refuse to exercise power because they consider that such an activity is almost inevitably tainted with compromise and corruption. So they prefer resorting to verbal – or even physical – violence in order to attract voters eager to protest against the supposed unfairness of the establishment. That is why extreme right-wing factions have to face a difficult situation in which they need to be marginal and scandalous to exist, but in which democratic, governmental parties can easily use their marginal character to turn them into political scarecrows and ensure their own dominance in an even surer way.