Abstract
Manuela Caiani and Elena Pavan chose an exploratory approach towards what can be described as “inconvenient solidarities”. They start from the finding that, in spite of increasing interest in how information and communication technologies entwine with collective participation dynamics, the ways in which their relational and communicational potential is exploited by extreme-right organisations remain overlooked. On this basis, they aim to move research in the field forward by focusing on how extreme-right organisations and groups employ digital communications to sustain the construction of “inconvenient solidarities”, i.e. systems of relations among actors that oppose and distort current efforts aimed at promoting transnational democratisation, particularly at the European level. By focusing on the websites of extreme-right organisations in six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) and combining digital research tools and social network analysis, Caiani and Pavan explore how these organisations use information and communication technologies strategically to connect in the online space, as well as to construct and distribute materials criticising and envisaging reforms of the current projects of European integration. Their results suggest that information and communication technologies sustain the construction of inconvenient solidarities in heterogeneous ways, supporting different modes of online conversation that, in turn, affect extreme-right actors’ capacity to propose shared and unified frames of opposition to and reform of the EU.
Leaders of far-right and outsider parties across Europe have been celebrating Britain’s decision to leave the EU, with some demanding their own voteson whether to leave the bloc.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France, said British people had given Europe and the world “a dazzling lesson in democracy”.
In Germany, Beatrix von Storch, a member of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which takes an anti-Eurozone and anti-immigration stance, told national broadcasters she “cried for joy” at the news of the result. Party leader Frauke Petry wrote on Twitter: “The time is ripe for a new Europe” (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-eu-referendum-latest-far-right-celebrations-news-marine-le-pen-a7101371.html).
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Notes
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Although the use of social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) is increasing among radical right-wing groups in Europe (see Bartlett et al. 2011), in this study we focus on organisations’ websites as we are principally interested in the meso-organisational level of the use of Internet for propaganda and the organisation of the extreme right. The organisations considered in this study constitute a subset of the “dark side collection” (Caiani and Parenti 2013), which maps extreme-right organisations with websites in the six countries using a snowball technique. More specifically, in this study we consider the websites of the “dark collection” that remained active throughout the period in which the research was undertaken (July–September 2015). For a list of URLs used as a departure point for each country, see Appendix 1.
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Mapping hyperlinks through IC rather than manually as was the case in the “dark side collection” allows us to trace links between sites more systematically and to reduce possible researcher inferences during the mapping and coding procedure. In each case, it should be noted that IC is not able to process pages containing Javascript nor can it navigate within social platforms. The maps produced using IC do not therefore represent the totality of online hyperlink structures. They do, however, constitute a good starting point to explore “who speaks to whom” in the online public sphere (Pavan and Diani 2016).
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To evaluate the level of homogeneity of the central nuclei of online networks, we consider each site as representative of a determined extreme-right group or organisation following a classification used in previous work—in particular in Caiani and Parenti (2013).
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The keywords used to uncover frames critical of the EU are “Eurocracy”, “Troika”, “Eurocrats”, Brussels bureaucrats”, “European dictatorship”, “Brussels politicians”, “Brussels technocrats” and “Totalitarian super state”. The keywords used to uncover reformist frames are “Europe of the peoples”, “Europe of sovereign states”, “Europe of nations” and “United States of Europe”.
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Caiani, M., Pavan, E. (2017). “Inconvenient Solidarities”: Extreme-Right Online Networks and the Construction of a Critical Frame Against Europe. In: Grimmel, A., Giang, S. (eds) Solidarity in the European Union. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57036-5_11
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