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How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe
Ferruh YilmazWriting in the beginning of the 1980s, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe explored possibilities for a new socialist strategy to capitalize on the period's fragmented political and social conditions. Two and a half decades later, Ferruh Yilmaz acknowledges that the populist Far Right—not the socialist movement—has demonstrated greater facility in adopting successful hegemonic strategies along new structural lines Laclau and Mouffe imagined. Right-wing hegemonic strategy, Yilmaz argues, has led to the reconfiguration of internal fault lines in European societies.
Yilmaz's primary case study is Danish immigration discourse, but his argument contextualizes his study in terms of questions of current concern across Europe, where right-wing groups that were long on the fringes of "legitimate" politics have managed to make significant gains with populations traditionally aligned with the Left. Specifically, Yilmaz argues that sociopolitical space has been transformed in the last three decades such that group classification has been destabilized to emphasize cultural rather than economic attributes.
According to this point-of-view, traditional European social and political splits are jettisoned for new "cultural" alliances pulling the political spectrum to the right, against the "corrosive" presence of Muslim immigrants, whose own social and political variety is flattened into an illusion of alien sameness.
Yilmaz's primary case study is Danish immigration discourse, but his argument contextualizes his study in terms of questions of current concern across Europe, where right-wing groups that were long on the fringes of "legitimate" politics have managed to make significant gains with populations traditionally aligned with the Left. Specifically, Yilmaz argues that sociopolitical space has been transformed in the last three decades such that group classification has been destabilized to emphasize cultural rather than economic attributes.
According to this point-of-view, traditional European social and political splits are jettisoned for new "cultural" alliances pulling the political spectrum to the right, against the "corrosive" presence of Muslim immigrants, whose own social and political variety is flattened into an illusion of alien sameness.
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Cover
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Title
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Copyright
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Dedication
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Contents
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Introduction
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Far-Right Hegemony
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A Short History of Immigration to Denmark
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Theoretical Framework: Heterogeneity of the Social and Empty Signifiers
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Rhetorical Texture of Society: Discourse and Heterogeneity
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Culturalization, Culture, and Identity
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Race, Racism, and Islamophobia
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Hegemony
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Moral Panics and Crises
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Data and Analysis
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Chapters
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Chapter 1. Discourse and Hegemony
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Empty Signifier: Common Sense
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Heterogeneity and Culturalized Discourse
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Chapter 2. Crisis and Hegemonic Displacement
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The Mid-1980s: A Turning Point
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Crisis and Political Intervention
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Moral Panics
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The Political Landscape and Immigration Discourse Prior to and around 1984
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Beginnings of a Moral Panic: 1984
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Constructing Refugees as a Threat to Social Cohesion
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The Media
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The Discrepancy between Editorials and News Coverage
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Culture and Immigration in 1984
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Intensification of the Moral Panic around Refugees
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Letters to the Editor: Distance between the Elite and the “People”
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Populist Intervention
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Populism and the Far Right
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Chapter 3. Rhetoric of the Hegemonic Intervention
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September 21, 1986: A Rhetorical Intervention
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Right Time, “Wrong Target,” and Appropriate Rhetoric: Gaining Access to Discourse
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Rhetorical Strategies
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Après the Intervention: Culturalization and the Political Mobilization of the Far Right
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The Far-Right Symbiosis
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The Long-Term Effects of Krarup’s Intervention
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The Focus Moves from Refugees (Victims) to Immigrants (Cultural Aliens)
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A New Round of Crisis around Immigrants
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Chapter 4. Culture, Ethnicity, and New Hegemony
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Crises around Muslims, 1987‒2001
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Centrality of Culture in Immigration Discourse
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Centrality of Immigration and Cultural Identity to Social Imaginary
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Reimagining the Past
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The Present: The Populist Right’s Vision Is the New Common Sense
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2001: The Populist Vision Moves into the Center of Political Discourse
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Gender and Sexuality as Core Danish Values
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“Cohesive Force of Society” and Democracy
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The Transformation of the Political Parties
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The Crisis of the Center-Left
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The Transformation of Immigrant Organizations: From Worker to Muslim
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The Hegemonic Effect: Imagining the Future
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Conclusion: “I Can’t Breathe”
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The Hegemonic Displacement Is a Pan-European Phenomenon
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Populism, Neoliberalism, and Democracy
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Appendix 1: Declaration of Integration and Active Residency in Danish Society
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Appendix 2: Krarup’s First Advertisement, Jyllands-Posten, September 21, 1986
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Appendix 3: Krarup’s Second Advertisement, Jyllands-Posten, September 28, 1986
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Notes
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References
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Index
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Citable Link
Published: 2016
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-12178-6 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-05308-7 (paper)
- 978-0-472-07308-5 (hardcover)