Europeanisation of far-right collective action? Generation Identity’s mobilisation during the ‘refugee crisis’

Recent years have seen an increase in analyses investigating progressive social movements’ Europeanisation across Europe, demonstrating that social movements prevalently mobilise at the domestic levels, frequently in the form of domestication strategies. While this research continuously expands, we still lack research on far-right extra-parliamentary mobilisation. At the same time, despite a strong academic focus on institutional forms of far-right expressions, we still do not know much about how the far-right fares at the European non-institutional, protest, level. Hence, drawing on social movement Europeanisation literature, this paper explores the extent to which far right collective actors Europeanise their contention. Using the ‘refugee crisis’ (2015-2017) as a promising period due to its pan-European policy nature, the paper explores the Europeanisation strategies of Generation Identity, a transnational new right-inspired far right coalition. Focusing on seven national GI groups, the paper shows that there is a discrepancy in the distinct groups’: 1) mobilisation frequencies; 2) protest repertoires, 3) explicit protest issues, 4) targeting of the EU, and 5) issue scopes, largely explainable by the groups’ diverging political opportunity structures and material resources. Yet, all the GI-groups predominantly domesticate their contention, in alignment with the general literature. The analysis thus further underlines the need for more research that employs social movement theories to far right mobilisation, just as the increased politicisation of ‘Europe’ and the EU requires more consideration of far-right Europeanisation trajectories in general.