Abstract
Over the last decade, the political forces and ideologies opposing and criticizing the process of globalization have gained significant momentum. Political movements and leaders around the world have harnessed popular resentment and grievances directed at the dislocating and marginalizing effects of globalization. The emotional governance of these resentments and grievances has, in part, been crystallized in the form of
Under such circumstances, “globalizing forces” or “globalizing elites” are often presented as threats to the fixed imaginaries of nations, groups, and conceptions of self, where globalization is portrayed as antithetical to self-determination, freedom, group belonging, and authenticity. These imaginations and cultural manifestations, and the promises linked to banishing them, are strongly related to larger socioeconomic disparities associated with globalization, such as long-term socioeconomic deprivation, instability, and social marginalization. They are also intrinsically tied to what has often been referred to as “culture wars” in Western democracies. The socioeconomic maladies and cultural contestations related to globalization can thus be understood as two sides of the same coin, that of ontological (in)security and emotional governance—two structural and psychological concepts discussed and developed below. In this context, deglobalization provides the arena in which ontological (in)securities are negotiated concerning the values, norms, and practices of political systems that uphold the principles of globalization, especially as associated with Western liberal democracy.
The link between liberal democracy and globalization, envisioned in terms of liberal internationalism, is constantly exploited by persuasive emotional governors: far-right parties, autocrats, right-wing populists, and white supremacists. This “democratic backsliding” is widely accepted as one of the more explicit features of the process of deglobalization (see, e.g., Kelemen & Blauberger, 2017; Mudde, 2022), with political leaders from Xi and Putin to Brexiteers and Trump, to Modi, Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, and Orbán pursuing “alternative” (autocratic) political visions. Far-right leaders thus link liberal democracies, and the political actors that support them, to the grievances, resentments, and fantasies experienced by their supporters and society at large. Here, deglobalization is the push, movement, or process articulated against this perceived threat to our societies. In the discourse of the far-right and other antiglobalization actors, deglobalization can be understood as a promise or harbinger of ontological security. In this sense, it operates more as a moral articulation promising to deal with the maladies of globalization, rather than as a tangible political project or a fixed socioeconomic policy process.
In this article, we explore the relationship between deglobalization, ontological insecurity, and the political psychology of white supremacy. In the first section, we address and problematize the relationship between globalization and deglobalization and outline how this can be used for discussing the political psychology of white supremacy and the far-right. In the second section, we discuss how the framework of ontological (in)security, emotional governance, and the (Lacanian) fantasmatic can help us understand how the fantasies that are generated by (and generate) deglobalization intertwine with psychological processes of identity formation, myth creation, and othering. In the third section, we explore the narrative fantasies of the more “extreme” versions of white supremacy, exemplified through a discussion of the “Great Replacement” myth (fantasies of social, economic, and cultural replacement of White people), and the ontological insecurity of whiteness. In this section, we also discuss white supremacy in relation to the sanitized (or normalized) narratives, myths, and practices enacted by white nationalists at the mainstream political level, using the case of Sweden as an illustrative example. Here, we are particularly interested in unboxing the roles and manifestations of fantasy narratives concerning radical white politics in the context of deglobalization and ontological insecurity. Throughout the article, we illustrate these dynamics with empirical illustrations and cases from around the globe.
Globalization and deglobalization: A lens for investigating white supremacy
Deglobalization is a blurry concept that encapsulates a general movement that directly or indirectly opposes or challenges globalization. This blurriness stems from its link to the complex phenomenon of globalization and its vast branches of political, economic, cultural, and psychological interactions with society at large (Kornprobst & Paul, 2021; Scholte, 2005). Here, globalization entails the constant generation and expansion of interactive and interdependent structures and networks that “shrink” or localize the world and the relationships that shape it (Kinnvall & Nesbitt-Larking, 2011; MacGillivray, 2006, pp. 52–53). In this shrunken world, goods, people, information, technologies, and ideologies quickly traverse across borders, generating distinct pressures, incentives, and socioeconomic orders that unevenly affect societies. Deglobalization, in contrast, involves movements and practices that directly oppose the perceived (fantasmatic) maladies and unbalances brought by this world system and liberal values (Abdal & Ferreira, 2021; Kornprobst & Paul, 2021). Deglobalization thus responds to the inevitable and heightened interdependence of complex socioeconomic systems, which is both the strength and weakness of the global economy. For instance, the power of deglobalizing actors and narratives was evident in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 world economic crisis, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic and its related cases of vaccine nationalism (Abdal & Ferreira, 2021; Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022; Kornprobst & Paul, 2021).
While deglobalizing contestations vary widely across the political spectrum, a clear and troublesome manifestation of these is the advance of antiestablishment, right-wing populism in erstwhile global or regional models of democratic governance. Examples are plentiful: the United States, with the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump and the accelerated reactionary turn of the Republican Party; the United Kingdom, with the 2016 victory of the heavily antimigratory and antiliberal Brexit referendum; the 2022 general elections in Sweden, which saw the right-wing bloc —led by the far-right party Sverigedemokraterna [Sweden Democrats]—triumph; and Brazil, with the 2019 presidential election of far-right, antiprogressive, Jair Bolsonaro (Agius et al., 2020; Balsa-Barreiro et al., 2020). In these and many other cases, the liberal institutions and policies created to advance liberal democratic systems, norms, and practices have been repurposed and weaponized to institute ever-encroaching borders that ambiguously respond to calls for “taking back control” (Miller, 2021). In turn, the galvanization of antiglobalist grievances and reclamations by far-right leaders and discourses goes hand-in-hand with the (re)formation of common ethos, sense of identity, and agential practices (Nesbitt-Larking, 2014). These are often enshrined in nationalist, chauvinist, and mythological narratives around an idealised version of a righteous “people” (Kinnvall & Lindén, 2010), and operationalized through mechanisms of
Despite the adverse consequences of unfettered globalization for the world economy and democratic politics, the process of deglobalization should not be understood solely as a reaction or response to globalization, but rather as an intrinsic part of it—a continuum. According to T. V. Paul (2021), the tension and interplay between globalization and deglobalization must be viewed in the context of the expansion and contraction of the (neo)liberal international order. Deglobalization is the inevitable consequence of pushing globalization to its limits, at the economic, political, and institutional levels (p. 1600). Institutional erosion as a consequence and symptom of deglobalization begets a loss in the legitimacy, values, and practices of the liberal international order. T. V. Paul (2021) argues that given the nature of the interdependent global economy and the harmful externalities experienced worldwide over the past decade, the neoliberal globalizing push has, paradoxically, both deteriorated its pillars and facilitated the spread of illiberalism and deglobalization movements.
Kornprobst and Paul (2021) draw inspiration from Barber (1992) and Giddens (1990) to argue that deglobalization is a built-in inevitability of globalization when considering the direct effect of increased internationalism on the rise of nationalism and tribalism (Kornprobst & Paul, 2021, pp. 1307–1308). In this context, the institutional, economic, and political frailties of the liberal project have aided in unearthing the darker side of the continuum of globalization—such as the success of neoliberalism in conjunction with authoritarianism and violation of human rights in Russia, China, and India. While the liberal international order is contested at every level of political life, globalization itself is not stopping or being reversed. Rather, globalization, as Kornprobst and Paul (2021) argue, should be understood as a fluid, complex, multifaceted process that cannot solely be “positive” or “negative.”
The ontological fickleness of globalization points to the rejection of a dichotomous, procedural, and totalizing understanding of its relationship with deglobalization, suggesting instead a more nuanced approach that addresses both processes and movements as different sides of the same coin. Such an approach to (de)globalization allows us to better interpret the oscillations in social, political, economic, and cultural demands (e.g., migratory curbing and harsher border controls) and contexts (e.g., the rise in right-wing populism) that affect the support and resistance to political systems, ideologies, narratives, and myths. In the context of right-wing pushbacks against globalization, these oscillations are formed by and (re)form identities and intersubjectivities. Here, the production of the fickle, yet powerful fantasy of the “people” is intrinsically linked to that of “the other” in a bid to fix meaning for (and towards) discourses, individuals, and groups in a context of sociopolitical strife and economic uncertainty. Within this process of identity negotiations,
One of the clearest manifestations of the recurrent struggle towards attaining ontological security is that of so-called cultural wars—specifically those waged by far-right activists and white supremacists against an incongruous amalgam of enemies of “the people.” Such perceived enemies, or “sides of the border,” include immigrants, minorities, progressives, feminists, liberal elites, and supranational institutions (e.g., the EU and the UN). The prevalence of these “others” is directly associated with the expansion of the liberal international order—that is, “globalization” as conventionally understood. Myths like the “Great Replacement,” “white genocide,” “Make America Great Again (MAGA),” “Stop the Steal,” and “Manifest Destiny” are generated and reproduced to emotionally interpret and “manage” this reality of perceived enemies—a reality that is allegedly averse to whiteness and Western values. In the next section, we delve deeper into the dynamics of white supremacy in relation to struggles for ontological security, emotional governance, and fantasies of lost (and idealized) pasts and antagonistic “others.”
Ontological (in)security and emotional governance: Fantasies of postcolonial and gendered “others”
Much of the literature linking (in)security and emotional governance stems from the field of terrorism studies and is specially focused on the role of the state in situations of societal threat or the aftermath of traumatic events (Eroukhmanoff, 2019; Koschut, 2019; Rendueles, 2017; Richards, 2018; Zembylas, 2022). While this body of research constitutes a valuable theoretical springboard, we elaborate and expand the scope of these debates by analyzing white supremacy and deglobalization as co-constituted psycho-political phenomena at the micro, macro, fantasmatic, temporal, and spatial levels. While white supremacy generates a battery of fantasies reactively directed against liberal globalization and actively towards deglobalization and the reglobalization of white power, deglobalization produces and sustains the structural conditions that allow white supremacist discourses to surreptitiously traverse from ideological fringes into the political mainstream. From a psychoanalytical perspective, we address the relationship between the affective complexities and the structural conditions of deglobalization and white supremacy via the lenses of ontological (in)security, fantasy, and emotional governance. We are specifically interested in how such affective complexities and structural conditions take shape in terms of fantasies of white supremacy as related to postcolonial and gendered power structures.
Ontological (in)security and the fantasy of white supremacy
Even if globalization has assisted in bringing back notions of bounded cultures, ethnic resilience, and the reemergence of powerful nationalistic sentiments, deglobalization grievances cannot be understood only in terms of their global connections. Rather, they pertain as much to symbolic value-laden issues, including cultural domination and humiliation, as to material exploitation through global economic mechanisms. This is where the concept of ontological security—understood as a structural and psychological process focused on feeling secure in a changing world—materializes. In the sociologist Anthony Giddens’ (1991) terminology, ontological security suggests a “security of being” as opposed to a “security of survival.” It is about having a sense of trust and confidence that the world is what it appears to be, and that routines help the individual in feeling secure (Kinnvall, 2004; Mitzen, 2006). The original use of the term is usually attributed to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1965), who refers to ontological security as the ability to experience oneself as “real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person” (p. 39), while ontological insecurity entails the experience of extreme anxiety that threatens the individual’s entire existence. Hence, Laing’s focus is on the individual level, while Giddens brings his analysis to bear on the social level.
However, both Laing (1965) and Giddens (1991) have remained uncertain about a radical decentering of the subject as envisaged in much psychoanalytical and postcolonial thought, and they both end up claiming significant space for agency and autonomy of the individual subject; Laing by criticizing the Freudian model of the subject (ego, id, and superego) in favor of a model of integral selfhood and personal identity, and Giddens by emphasizing individual reflexivity and broad assumptions that social agents are in command of some implicit knowledge and self-understanding regardless of their social and political context (Kinnvall & Mitzen, 2020). In both there is limited incorporation of unconscious processes, with the consequence that multiple subjective identifications, as spelt out in much psychoanalysis in terms of unconscious fantasy and repressed desire, are largely ignored. In response, ontological security scholars have turned to Lacan, whose take on subjectivity begins with the notion of a nonreductionist and sociopolitical conception of subjectivity, expressed through images, fantasies, and desires (see, e.g., Browning, 2019; Cash, 2020; Eberle, 2019; Kinnvall, 2018). Scholars have also resorted to postcolonial and gender analysis to account for how cultural norms, patriarchy, social practices, and other forms of cultural and institutional power are not fully accounted for in either Giddens’ or Laing’s notions of integrated selfhood or reflexive self (Agius et al., 2020; Untalan, 2020; Vieira, 2018). From a psychoanalytical perspective, the focus has been on multiple ways of attachments and unconscious ties related to the formation of self and others, especially as manifest in fantasy and subjective relationships. Meanwhile, postcolonial and feminist perspectives have focused on how such fantasies are intrinsically linked to gendered and postcolonial power structures.
The focus on fantasy and fantasy narratives emphasizes how any search for ontological security is always a story—a fantasy—that can never be fulfilled, regardless of how powerful and real such stories can feel in terms of sense-making. In concrete terms, it means that individuals, groups, and even states respond to ontological insecurity by temporarily closing down categorical identifications. In Stavrakakis’ (1999) terms, it is a form of banal representational fantasy that works to defend against emotional anxieties and traumatic experiences. Imagination, Martin (2016) says, is about seizing desire, and seizing desire is about fantasy or, more concretely, about responding to the question
Fantasies are thus about longing (desire) for something that can never be obtained. In the narratives of the far-right, this desire is filled by the
White supremacy is a vague discourse centered around a fantasy in which White people and culture are intrinsically superior to those of other ethnicities and races. It implies a narrative in which common (fantasmatic) pasts and values are shared, and where White people are entitled to design, operationalize, and ontologically secure (e.g., through traditions, policies, and laws) their survival, safety, and prosperity to the detriment of other genders, ethnicities, and races—often through violent means (Oesteraas, 2022; Vander Zanden, 1959; Wu & Li, 2020). While far-right movements and parties have been established around (and share) some of these core beliefs, they tend to espouse them less explicitly as they traverse into the more “mainstream” political arenas (Mudde, 2017; Wodak, 2020). Hence, white supremacy constitutes a considerably more primordial and narratively visceral ideology or belief system that informs and influences the larger civilizational fantasies of contemporary far-right and white nationalist movements. White supremacy does not necessarily determine the discursive strategies of far-right and white nationalist groups, since such strategies may be deemed detrimental for electoral purposes. Instead, the core pillar of white ethnocentric fantasies represents an overlap between these different strands of far-right ideologies (white supremacy and white nationalism). The stabilization of these fantasies, however, requires the setup of emotional regimes by contesting political actors, involving attempts at establishing “rules of feelings” and acceptable behaviors (Zembylas, 2022)—what we refer to as
Ontological (in)security and emotional governance
Emotional governance denotes the mechanisms by which actors and discourses govern emotions at the individual, group, and societal levels through the manipulation, surveillance, and molding of the “everyday” and “commonplaces” in the public sphere (Richards, 2007, 2018). This governance relies on the generation and stabilization of fantasies as intelligible yet ambiguous signifiers that provide a sense (of self, of identity) and a “footing” into the interpretation, negotiation, and internalization of such “everyday.” Here, the “normal” and the “accepted” are not given but rather heavily disputed spaces, or what Koschut (2019) labels “affective sites of contestation.” To Koschut, it is not enough to think of the state as a political regime to capture the complexities of how power is enacted and performed in affective terms. Instead, Koschut proposes that political actors (within and beyond the state) should also be understood as
Through attempts to demarcate the “normal” and “acceptable” in affective communities (Ahmed, 2014), emotional governors weigh in the formation of individual and group identities and behaviors (Richards, 2018; see also Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022). Building on Hinderliter et al. (2009), Zembylas (2022) elaborates on such attempts at fixing meaning, identity, and behaviors and argues that affective communities (or “communities of sense”) are intrinsically fragile and ephemeral in their ontological togetherness as “shared experience of affective intensities . . . do[es] not necessarily have a lasting coherence” (Zembylas, 2022, p. 27). This dimension of impermanence is also picked up by Eroukhmanoff (2019), who argues that emotional governance has been used for political mobilizations following terror attacks rather than solely in the context of the “everyday.” Eroukhmanoff makes a connection between the ephemeral and the “sensational” (in Deleuze’s terms, the cliché of the “given” in societal commonplaces) in addressing the side-effects of contemporary “reactive” emotional governance. The deployment and normativity of affective technologies (e.g., memes, posts) that afford and operationalize discourses and rhetorics spectacularize and sensationalize emotions in a consumerist fashion rather than enabling affect to engage with larger political projects (Eroukhmanoff, 2019).
This relationship between sensationalism, spectacularization, and emotional governance can be traced to the increased secularization and commodification of social life experienced during the expansion of neoliberal globalization. As an affective and ontological vacuum, it is not only filled with diverse counter-hegemonic discourses (like white supremacy), but also with affective practices and norms for governing reality and community-building. While emotional governance itself is not new, the contemporary political and technosocial context generates affordances for its exploitation by increasingly polarized identitarian projects. The affective complexities that generate, modulate, and perpetuate the manifestations of the white supremacist belief system (e.g., in memes, the Capitol storming, or passing voter suppression laws) can hence be read in relation to deglobalization and emotional governance at individual, group, and societal levels.
Deglobalization as enacted in white supremacist discourses and fantasies is intrinsically tied to fantasmatic postcolonial, postimperial, and patriarchal/gendered power structures. While postcolonial and patriarchal power structures have been widely addressed regarding their harmful effects on minority groups, civil rights, and democratic institutions (Allen, 2001; Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020; Vander Zanden, 1959), white supremacist and far-right discourses repurpose these structures in the rhetoric of what Ruth Wodak (2020) labels “victim–perpetrator reversal.” Under this framework, white supremacists produce a fantasy in which the postcolonial, postimperial, and postpatriarchal “order” (i.e., the international liberal order) robs them of—and increasingly
Postcolonialism and (global) white supremacy
Paradoxically, the broader concept of white supremacy is tightly bound up with the colonial dimension of globalization which, since the 15th century, fostered the imposition of European “whiteness” as the social, aesthetic, cultural, and political norm and civilizational aspiration (Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020). While the conception of white supremacy that we use here is more specifically tied to contemporary white nationalist and far-right discourses—that is, dealing with nativism, nationalism, authoritarianism, and racism—it is nonetheless inextricably linked to the historical process of globalization and colonialism. At its core, white supremacy historically refers to a global system stemming from colonial and imperial structures that benefit Whites and disempowers non-Whites, their cultures, norms, and institutions (Allen, 2001; Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020). This postcolonial structure of global white supremacy is constituted by five dimensions, according to Allen (2001): (a) the racialization of the world in European terms, (b) the construction of civilization as inherently white, (c) the naturalization of the “nation-state” as spaces for the reproduction of white (supremacist) ideals of order, (d) the localized instantiation of whiteness (and white bodies) as the standard for human interaction, and (e) the negation of white supremacy as constitutive of white group membership. We can see the interplay between these dimensions when Vander Zanden (1959, p. 397) quotes white supremacist Henry W. Grady espousing an Anglo-Saxon variant of this belief system incarnated in the “Manifest Destiny” discourse to justify the system of transatlantic slave trade and colonialism in the US. Grady frames the power, superiority, destiny, and righteousness of Anglo-Saxons in the US in terms of
Contemporary postcolonial power can thus be understood as sustained by white supremacy as both a violent system of control and as one of aspiration and justification—a system of emotional governance marked by an ontological (in)security of whiteness directed at both the in-group (Whites, the conquerors, “Us”) and the out-group (non-Whites, the conquered, “the other”). From this perspective, we argue that contemporary white supremacy rages against a specific form of globalization as Western modernity, yet is inextricably linked to and constituted by its historical predecessor and, crucially, by the ontological security of whiteness. An alternative to this antagonized variant of globalization is only achievable through a counter-hegemonic project of “reactionary internationalism” (cf. Apel, 2021). Under this framework, the deglobalization process pursued by white supremacists can be better understood as
Gender roles and patriarchy under white supremacy
The ontological insecurity of whiteness addressed in postcolonial literature is intrinsically tied to the formation of patriarchal gender relations in the discourse of white supremacists, white nationalists, and the far-right. Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre (2020) elaborate on this linkage, arguing that white supremacist and patriarchal projects on gender roles cannot be separated from their relation with race. These relations manifest in an increasingly explicit fashion around the myths of the “Great Replacement” and “White extinction.” White supremacist discourses internalize and reproduce the ontological insecurities related to these conspiracy theories and localize them in the securitized bodies of White women and non-White immigrants (Goetz, 2021). These embodied threats are fantasmatically enacted in the discourses of the “decomposition of the (white) people”: internally, as caused by low rates of White births (targeting White women); and externally, as caused by “infiltration” and immigration waves (targeting non-Whites; Goetz, 2021, p. 70). In Lacanian terms, the anxiety-inducing interplay between these securitized bodies can be read as a theft of
White extinction or
Studying the case of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory in Germany and Austria, Goetz (2021) addresses the issue of gender in white supremacist discourses and their normalization in policymaking. The author argues that while the rhetoric of the “Great Replacement” and “white extinction” are fairly novel, their core content has a long history in Europe. The centrality of the “Great Replacement” has been incarnated into the dog whistle of “agendas of population policy” in the discourse of German far-right “Identitarian” movements as societal issues that mainstream parties or movements do not dare speak of. This quasiparadigmatic appropriation of controversial issues by far-right actors has bolstered and positioned them and their policies as “close to the (White) people”—and thus, we argue, has strengthened their emotional governance over the ontological insecurities of whiteness. In the same vein as Apel (2021) and Bhatt (2021), Goetz (2021) argues that these discursive–rhetoric–policy trifectas of white supremacy on gender roles stem from the fear of White extinction (or Volkstod—“the death of the people”) and replacement (Umvolkung—“ethnicity inversion”) as well as from the internationalization of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (p. 63). The gender dimension of the white supremacist counter-hegemonic project thus rests on the consolidation of white postcolonial power structures (read: reglobalization through deglobalization) since the threat (i.e., the imagined source of ontological insecurity) stems from the entanglement of the “invading” immigrant “other” with the tarnishing and antipatriotic self-determination of white female bodies.
The reglobalization of white power forces us to take seriously its postcolonial and gendered dimensions to fully apprehend its relation with the ontological (in)security of whiteness and the emotional governance that mediates it. Fantasies of empire, natural superiority, patriarchy, and gender roles are deeply enmeshed in this global system of white power and emotional governance. As a system, it works as a “pushback” against what white supremacists label, among other terms, the “Great Replacement,” “white genocide,” and more recently “Stop the Steal.” White supremacy is a symbolic and fantasmatic device of emotional governance that allows for the negotiation of the ontological insecurity of whiteness stemming from the breakage of “empire” and traditional gender relations and roles. This negotiation is manifest in the fantasmatic loss of (male and white) power prevalent in the preceding white power global order. Expanding on Krzyżanowski’s (2020) temporalities of racist imaginaries, we argue that the conspiratorial myths articulated to interpret the postcolonial, postimperial, and postpatriarchal “liberal” systems of the modern international order center on a fantasmatic construct—a temporal
White supremacy and white nationalism: A deglobalizing framework
While white ethnocentrism manifests differently according to the particular interlocutor (e.g., explicit “ethnic displacement” for white supremacists; “controlled migration and citizenship status” for right-wing and far-right parties), it is nevertheless ever-present in the discourses and narratives of these actors. Here, (de)globalization acts as an ideal platform in which the spectrum of white ethnocentric fantasy narratives can be addressed through different dimensions and manifestations. For instance, narratives focused on safeguarding the present and the (fantasmatic) future of White Swedes, as propagated by the Nordic Resistance Movement, act as a direct backlash against the liberal values associated with increased immigration and multiculturalism—values which are seen as fundamental to globalization and as facilitated by local “elite” enablers (i.e., traditional political parties; Askanius, 2019; Oesteraas, 2022). In contrast, in the case of Brexit and its aftermath, we see a more complex “backlash chain,” in which diverse pro-Leave factions explicitly hold diverse (even purportedly “positive”) views on immigration to the UK (Bachmann & Sidaway, 2016; Mădroane, 2021). However, these views inform and overlap with more extreme positions associated with British exceptionalism and ethnocentrism: at the party level (e.g., United Kingdom Independence Party, Reform UK), at the social movement level (e.g., English Defence League, Britain First), and at the individual level (e.g., Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins). Consequently, in this section we ask how, in the context of deglobalization, is white supremacy transposed, sanitized, and eventually normalized (Cammaerts, 2020; Krzyżanowski, 2020; Wodak, 2020) under the contemporary guise of far-right populist parties.
White supremacy and (de)globalization: Sowing the seeds of entropy
The relationship between white supremacy and (de)globalization is inherently paradoxical, acting as a sort of dark mirror of the liberal international order. While the discourse of white supremacists focuses on denouncing maladies and highlighting grievances caused by globalization—both at the economic level, for example, by chronic downturns for working-class sectors; and at cultural levels, for example, by the expansion of multiculturalism and increase in non-White immigration (T. V. Paul, 2021; Soborski, 2020; Swank & Betz, 2003)—their perplexing influence on domestic and international politics is in great part owed to these same processes (Musharbash, 2021). This paradox, enshrined in concepts like “reactionary internationalism” (Apel, 2021), follows the retrotopian cycle of the ontological (in)securitization of whiteness pursued by white supremacy: that of deglobalization and
Globalization has thus allowed white supremacists and far-right parties to gain significant relevance in the public sphere even beyond their home countries (Grumke, 2013; Swank & Betz, 2003). But the “explicit” or reactionary form of white supremacy that we address in this study is also embedded in this postimperial and postcolonial global power system and contemporary neoliberal globalization. A system born of the reverberations of historical white supremacy has thus also provided space for the expansion of other cultural and political legitimacies, found in the contestations of those who claim to be “left behind” (Allen, 2001) in this alleged paradigm shift in world power balances: white supremacists, white nationalists, and far-right parties.
Hence, white supremacist, white nationalist, and far-right fantasies—expressed, for instance, in Viktor Orbán’s discourse on the civilizational threat of a “mixed-race world” and the need to maintain “ethnic homogeneity” (Than, 2022)—are incarnations and
Deglobalization is thus aided by the
A cornerstone narrative of white supremacy is that of defending, upholding, or pushing for a “natural way of life.” This is a relational concept entangled with fantasies of “naturalness” of racially and culturally essentialized “others,” thus providing an immutable sense of ideological and identity cohesion (Vander Zanden, 1959). In the case of white supremacy, such “ways of nature” are intrinsically linked to the alleged superiority of the “White race” in comparison to other intersectional identities, thus generating a justifying system for legitimizing and perpetuating inequalities (Liu, 2017). Political and progressive changes at the domestic level (e.g., the expansion of civil rights) have gradually attempted to shift the borders of these “ways of life,” thus determining which narratives and practices become socially and culturally accepted. In turn, these shifts threaten the perceived status quo that upholds the traditions and structures of white power (Apel, 2021), thus increasing the likelihood that attachments to a greater, more “sinister” and pervasive cluster of actors and agendas emerge. Under the white supremacist narrative of the “ways of life,” deglobalization then becomes a fight against fantasies of the unnatural, the corrupt, and the alien.
The alleged “challenges” to the white “way of life” in the context of globalization have paved the way for the enactment of another core white supremacist fantasy narrative, myth, and conspiracy theory into the public sphere: that of the “Great Replacement,” as discussed earlier. According to this “theory,” globalist, progressive, liberal, and socialist movements and actors have long been surreptitiously conspiring to demographically (read:
White supremacy and white nationalism as reified deglobalization: The case of Sweden
The ontological insecurity stemming from the fear of ethnic replacement or “white genocide” (Charlton, 2019) acts as a powerful motivator and discourse for justifying the fringe system that produces white supremacists (De Oliveira & Dambrun, 2007), as well as their actions against non-White individuals and perceived counter-hegemonic projects (i.e., globalization). This ontological insecurity is emotionally governed by political leaders, experts, and pundits in the more “mainstream” far-right. In their search for quenching the ontological insecurity that the “Great Replacement” theory produces, the more “explicit” violence of white supremacy is subdued in favor of more subtle ways of performing violence against the plethora of globalist-tied minorities and ideologies. The civilizational projects of white nationalists and the far-right—for instance, Richard Spencer’s and the Proud Boys’ proposals to create territories in the US where ethnic homogeneity is enforced (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2022; Stern, 2019)—attempt at distancing themselves from more explicit forms of violence. Instead, they seek to propose somewhat “peaceful” processes of ethnic cleansing in Europe, North America, and elsewhere (Anti-Defamation League, 2019; Bhatt, 2021; Taylor, 2017), thus effectively curbing the multicultural “agenda” of globalization and its supporters.
The rise of a former (neo)-Nazi party in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats (SD), is a paradigmatic illustration of how a white supremacy movement has left the fringes of the political system to enter the corridors of Parliament. The advice given by the Waffen-SS (Schutzstaffel)
These reactionary practices have as their foundation emotional fantasy narratives of perceived erosions of “natural ways of life,” led by globalization. Such ways of life, in line with ontological security practices at the heart of deglobalization, are fought through fantasies of the unnatural, the corrupt, and the alien, and normalized through their entrance into the mainstream. In the Swedish case, this normalization manifests in how SD has significantly affected the agenda of the 2022 center-right government and its focus on punitive measures linked to crime, migration politics, and welfare chauvinism, at the same time as it has been rewarded with crucial committee positions even when not taking an actual seat in government. Through a cluster of affective sites of contestation (Koschut, 2019) and the creation of an “affective mood” (Ross, 2013), SD has thus asserted its emotional governance through constructing linkages between fear of replacement, and that of an affective societal climate characterized by anxieties of the Swedish nation being eroded, suspicions of parliamentary democracy, Europhobia, and perceived increased polarization. In so doing, SD has succeeded in normalizing a white supremacy agenda as part of a global weakening or autocratization of democratic rights (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). SD has thus not only set the agenda for the incoming Swedish government but has repeatedly governed through emotional narratives and ontological security-seeking practices aimed at striking an emotional chord with its electorates.
These deglobalization narratives also point to a common “primordial” idea entangling globalization, white supremacy, and the far-right: that white power incarnates the struggle or fight against the maladies of globalization. In other words, under this opaque framework, white supremacy and its derivates are deglobalization reified. In this context, deglobalization should not be understood as a monolithic process or practice, but rather as responding to specific political enactments, affordances, and discourses ascribed to different white ethnocentric ideologies and movements, as well as to domestic political cultures. Here, the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and its underlying myth of redemptive violence, provide fantasmatic narratives of justification, which in turn inform the practice around the reification of deglobalization and ontological security.
Conclusion
White ethnocentric narratives attempt to essentialize the highly complex process of deglobalization. They do so by effectively intertwining (and thus, emotionally governing) our intersubjectivities and fantasies of belonging. Here, the manifestations of “violence” respond to the nature of the myths and fantasies that underscore these identity negotiations and political struggles. “Globalization” as an intractable social construct that reifies “the other” can thus be understood as the receptacle of this redemptive violence. However, the manifestation and levels of violence traverse from “explicit” (e.g., the murder of Heather Heyer by a white nationalist during the Charlottesville riots), to the “policy-sanitized” (e.g., by advocating for laws that weaken the rights of immigrants in Scandinavia). White supremacists and nationalists thus tend to perform, condone, or support more “explicit” manifestations of violence. As they have gradually entered the political mainstream, far-right parties tend toward performing or advocating for violence in a more subtle or “sanitized” fashion, usually through the implementation of policies and laws, as well as through the “defense of the people” (rather than by attacking non-White minorities). Hence, “violence” traverses from “high” and “explicit” to “low” and “subtle” as far-right and white supremacist discourses become normalized in our societies.
Such a normalization implies an emotional governance in which antagonistic actors are often drawn into the same fantasmatic discursive arena where historical power relations play out in conjunction with deglobalization. In the struggle to provide a sense of ontological security to various groups and individuals, fantasmatic narratives of nationhood, religion, and gender boundaries are not only resorted to by white supremacist movements but by “mainstream” politicians and influential spokespersons across the political spectrum. Consequently, the expansion of emotional governance from white supremacy groups and far-right actors has resulted in the gradual normalization of their discourses, attitudes, and practices through the manipulations of narrative fantasies of wholeness—of (ultimately unattainable) ontological security.
Footnotes
Author Note
Funding
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