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While Disney is often characterized as the embodiment of American culture, other narratives intersect and thrive within the Disney universe. This is particularly true when it comes to Europe, a place from which many of the Disney legends were originally derived. This work explores the physical interactions between Disney and Europe to be found at Orlando’s Walt Disney World. I propose that Disney challenges our idea of Europe by extracting traditional European tropes and resituating them in highly unorthodox contexts. Simultaneously, Disney has embedded itself within European space in a way that brings into question numerous facets of Europe’s authenticity via both pathways, the verisimilitude between the real and imagined Europe bears the potential of fundamentally altering our understanding of Europe itself. This work seeks to problematize Disney/Europe and interrogate how perceptions of Europe from beyond its borders inform Europe’s identity and might even have a bearing on its cultural evoluti...

Minority regulation in the EU has come under attack as ineffective and problematic. With the rise of nationalism, racism and xenophobia in Europe and the challenged role of Europeanization, minority/majority relations in the EU may become increasingly problematic. This article argues an inherent incompatibility between what is held as a European standard of minority rights and the dynamics of integration. On the basis of a historical and discursive analysis of the EU minority regime and its normative relationship to integration this article demonstrates how a reifying, state-centric, security-bound conceptualization of national minorities deeply influenced by the theory and practice of nationalism reinforces the logic of nationalism from within the European project. It suggests that a lack of imagination in the study and practice of national minority regulation has prevented the conception of minority policies compatible with the unique normative context of integration as supranational governance ...

This article focuses on the party of Jobbik (‘The Better’) and places its rhetoric and activism within the context of the Hungarian political system and its internal pathologies. A deeper and broader insight of nationalism's socio-psychological appeal in Hungarian politics and society will help the reader understand better why and how the economic crisis has been a watershed for Jobbik's popularity among certain segments of the Hungarian electorate. This piece of work has primarily relied on a qualitative and discourse analysis of Jobbik's speeches, official statements and the party's political programme. Sources such as opinion polls and public surveys have also been of complementary importance. The research embeds this information in scholarly and theoretical literature in the thematic areas of Political Psychology and Nationalism. What this article demonstrates is that Jobbik has been particularly efficient in coordinating its socio-psychological campaign and mobilizing a series of social grievances fo...

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the dangerous, indeed poisonous, nature of the current debates on immigration and multiculturalism in today's ‘omniphobic’ Europe, plagued not only by a severe economic crisis, but also a more general normative crisis, a ‘crisis of values’ so to speak, which has been consistently overlooked or manipulated by politicians and academics alike, or reduced to an epiphenomenon bound to disappear when financial balances are restored. I will argue in this context that nationalism (in some cases even outright racism) is key to understanding this crisis, a catalyst acting either as a cause or a symptom, and almost always as a profound source of legitimacy. Following a brief critique of the literature on the purported ‘death’ of multiculturalism—the academic side of the same coin—the article concludes by sketching the normative contours of an alternative model of multiculturalism, one that stresses the importance of the ideas of recognition, redistribution and particip...

This article discusses the three factors that lay behind democratic revolutions by adding two new facilitators, social populism and nationalism (in addition to election fraud), to our understanding of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Most scholarly studies of this seminal event in contemporary Ukrainian history have focused on protests against election fraud while ignoring these two important factors. Scholars who have placed the struggle for democratic rights in post-communist states in the forefront of their analysis within a ‘transitology paradigm’ have argued that a ‘fourth wave’ of democratisation in the post-communist world took place in two stages, 1989–1991 and from 1996–2004. This article argues that placing Ukraine together with other Central-Eastern countries in the second stage ignores the different role played by social populism and nationalism in mobilizing protestors in Ukraine, two factors that played a far smaller or non-existent role in Central-Eastern Europe.

This article aims to explore the landscape appropriation process in the affirmation of the Portuguese region of Leiria. National and foreign leaders cultivated the landscape as a metaphor of the nation. Like other European countries, in the nineteenth century, the landscape was fundamental to understanding the building process of the Portuguese national community. Nowadays aside from the nation, the regional communities also seek cultural affirmation both in the national space as well in the global space. So, local and regional leaders claim the landscape particularities to affirm their regions in the global space.

The Turkish Republic that emerged from the collapsing Ottoman Empire offers an instructive example of a self-conscious deployment of history by political elites to build a nation fitting the new state. The purpose of official history has been to tie the population to the land and the State, and to the project of ‘modernization’ (meaning, mostly, Europeanization). It encompasses many apparent contradictions that nevertheless have had to be reconciled in the historical narratives presented to schoolchildren and what has been omitted from those narratives, such as the role of Europeans as wartime enemies versus the new Republic's European orientation. In order to explain how Turkish republican official history selectively synthesized and mobilized disparate potential historical sources of a modernizing national identity, I analyze history textbooks and curricular materials from the 1930s through the 1950s, applying a four-way analysis drawn from Nietzsche. Following the schema presented in his early essay ‘H...

This article seeks to achieve three goals:(1) clarification of ‘extremism's’ conceptual boundaries and problematic relationship with democracy; (2) articulation of a framework for locating incumbency among a range of strategic responses to political extremists; and (3) systematic cross-national comparison of incumbency's consequences for right-populist/nationalist politicians and parties. In particular, the study addresses a fundamental question in the study of political extremism—how accurate (and how generalisable) is the argument that participation in government will ultimately serve to moderate ‘extreme’ parties and politicians? The subsidiary question is whether denying power to electorally successful extremist parties is in the interest of—or antithetical to—democracy. Pursuit of answers to these questions should advance our understanding of the fates of extremist parties under democratic political rules.

Based on fieldwork in young right extremist street milieus in East Berlin, this article aims to advance debates on the European far right by approaching my subjects as intricately embedded within German society and within a broader ethnicization of political identities. The politics of young right extremists, I argue, hinge upon senses of place and sensualities of otherness that weave ethnic stereotypifications into geographies of difference in the multi-ethnic city. Particularly, right extremist subjectivities rely upon the figure of an ethnicized collectivity of ‘Turks and Arabs’. In turn, the quotidian right extremist negotiation of a racist nationalism and a multi-ethnic landscape reveals itself to mimic far broader European debates on immigration and cultural toleration, breaching the presumed boundaries that ostensibly define right extremism as a distinct political domain. The ethnographic purview shows how ultra-nationalists live out rather than resolve the contradictions of a situated bigoted poli...