What About the ‘E’ in PEGIDA? Analysing European Identities in the Context of East German Far-Right Populism

The proposed paper examines identity politics in the context of contemporary east German far-right populism, using the recent protest movement ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident’ (acronym: PEGIDA) as a case study. In particular, the paper explores the European counter-identity propagated in the movement’s discourse and performance. Having emerged in Dresden in late 2014, the far-right PEGIDA movement acquired transnational features over the following months and years, culminating in the founding of the transnational far-right alliance ‘Fortress Europe’ in early 2016. Even though Eurosceptic and finally aiming to disintegrate the European Union (EU), PEGIDA nonetheless strongly identifies as European. Indeed, the movement proposes a counter-narrative for European integration, which it discursively constructs as diametrically opposed to current EU (identity) politics. This narrative propagates a community of sovereign European nation states imagined as a ‘community of common destiny’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) due to a shared history, culture and civilization. PEGIDA’s self-assigned role is to ‘protect’ this imagined community of ‘Christian’ and ‘enlightened’ Europeans from allegedly harming influences such as Islam, represented by Muslim immigrants, and liberal values as inherent in cosmopolitanism and the so-called gender ideology, amongst others. The paper draws on political and sociological approaches to collective identity as discursive construction to fully grasp the fluidity and malleability of the identity concept. Moreover, it proposes the lens of populist style (after Moffitt) to capture the close entanglement between discourse, performance and aesthetics in contemporary (far-right) populist politics. Using a varied set of novel primary sources such as digital texts, images, photographs and videos posted on social media and activists’ webpages, the paper carries out a contextualized critical discourse analysis. It reveals the many discursive, performative and aesthetic strategies, which PEGIDA employs to discursively construct and practically implement its proposed counter-identity. Discursive strategies rely, amongst other things, on repeated allusions and references to European cultural heritage in terms of architecture and high culture. Performative strategies contribute to the materialization of the narrative by, for instance, staging protest events simultaneously in several European cities. Aesthetic strategies visually support PEGIDA’s construction of Europe through the staging of protest events in front of or in proximity to European cultural and religious heritage sites, as well as the theatrical imitation of crucial moments in European history such as the Christian Reformation or the European Enlightenment. This paper’s original contribution consists of conceptualizing populist identity politics in east Germany as an expression of delayed transformational fatigue in the aftermath of the political transition to liberal democracy, thus shedding new light on the controversial issue of central and eastern European populism.