Irrational Representation

Editorial

Including: Pit Schultz and Boris Groendahl on hacking, Lisa Haskel on Swansong TV, Mikkel Bolt on Counterrevolutionary times in Denmark, Florian Schneider on the No Border Network, Brian Holmes on art in the age of the flexible personality and virtual class, Andrew Goffey on the politics of immunology + Beyond Good and Evil, Hari Kunzru on morality in child sci-fi and The Dark Dividend, JJ King on why David Lynch must shoot Philip K. Dick

Nearly a week after the murder of Rotterdam’s political darling Pim ‘the Prof’ Fortuyn, the reverberations of Europe’s swing to the right are just starting to gain momentum. In the European press, the populism that Fortuyn’s political rise and impending ‘martyrdom’ represent has met with a stunned response. Coming so soon after the French presidential elections, the intensity of efforts to understand Fortuyn’s spectacular rise has started to outdo even that of the collective soul-searching that followed the Front National’s symbolic victory. With the far right now enjoying power in Austria and Denmark and also increasing levels of representation in Italy, Belgium, Spain and the UK, there can be little doubt that the Dutch and French episodes describe a general tendency rather than some singular irrational blip.

Yet predictably, it is a reductive tale of popular emotions that many politicians have turned to in order to explain the support for Fortuyn and Le Pen. Political commentators could be relied upon to do the same: a young Dutch journalist invited to comment on the BBC2’s Newsnight programme was eager to compare the people’s politician (Fortuyn) with the people’s princess (Diana), and attributed their power to a mutual habit of breaking taboos and talking straight; in his eyes, it was their ‘common touch’ that posed the biggest threat to the elitist closed shop that is your average Euro-democracy.

In terms of how their emotional address fits the bigger picture, France’s ‘protest vote’ for Le Pen and Holland’s ‘honest’ endorsement of Fortuyn have been filtered through a set of propositions regarding European representative democracies, immigration and multiculturalism. Replicating virally across the strata of media opinion, these essentially distinct set of issues have been placed one in front of the other to imply causal relationships where there are none. Roughly, this ABC of Euro-politics states that French levels of corruption and Dutch modes of pragmatism and consensus (together taken to be emblematic of the EU) were themselves responsible for nurturing the type of popular alienation – and thus negative will – that simply had to explode in such ‘irrational’ ways. Further that, by not dealing clearly and forcefully with the ‘problem’ of immigration and multiculturalism, France and Holland (and Austria and Denmark before them) warned of electoral dangers that all European liberal democracies now face. As the Vice President of the European Commission and former leader of the British Labour Party Neil Kinnock put it, the levels of support granted the extreme-right threw ‘a great dirty rock into the European political pool.’ Following on from these, the logical extension of the argument has been that not only do politicians need to develop a better ear for the ‘real’ needs and feelings of the electorate, but that it is the duty of the public to engage with current forms of representative democracy to derail the new nationalist right.

The explanatory memes that surface over and over again mask the fact that it is the contradictory ways in which European democracies occupy, and have occupied, the world stage that sits at the root of the ‘problem’. Echoing history, expansionism, a zealous trading impulse and an entrenched protectionism still sit side by side. In terms of the negative will that is presumed to have burst forth in response to crowded cities, job insecurity, crime and overburdened ‘national’ cultures, the elisions being made between these and immigration issues are racist and misleading. The part that Europe’s various shades of market ideology have played in disenfranchising large sectors of society is rarely mentioned, for example. The same goes for the fact that an on-off, hot and cold approach to European labour shortages first actively encouraged immigration and then rearticulated economic migration as a burden on the state.

What has been proposed in response to Europe’s oversimplified ABC is that it diminishes the economic leverage that immigration has granted European democracies. More than a year ago, The Economist magazine published a special issue on migration. In its farcically ‘objective’ tone of analysis, it at least conceded that when it comes to the agriculture and service industries European economies are utterly dependent on the cheap labour markets which high-flow migration has helped build and maintain. But this is only half the picture: other examples of Europe’s dependence on migratory models have been highlighted in the knowledge industries, where the VISAs the UK and Germany grant to IT-skilled ‘immigrants’ demonstrate the true criteria for entry. ‘Knocking Holes in Fortress Europe’ (p. 34), Florian Schneider’s article on anti-border activism, touches on this phenomenon. And in ‘Unleashing the collective phantom’, Brian Holmes asks whether the flexible personality that this landscape demands can also resist its networked individualism (p. 25).

Attempts to create more accurate and integrated accounts of European economic development are important, but they do not do justice to its position in an increasingly globalised world. As the invisible borders in this famously ‘open’ terrain come starkly back into view, the battle is as much about new ideologies as it is economics. In this world, British Christians side with American and Italian right-wingers against a principally Islamic ‘axis of evil’ one day only to parade as model multiculturalists against European fascists the next. A simple political cosmology of inside and outside, friend and foe is clearly insufficient – even for those holding the reins of power. Andrew Goffey’s article on the science of immunology ‘Mens sana in corpore sano, or keep taking the tablets’ (p. 48), makes clear that our conception of the immune system suffers from a similar binary oversimplification. Unbeknownst to themselves I’m sure, our senior politicians are in fact in line with the latest scientific thinking.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman <pauline@metamute.com >