National populists of the world, unite? Supranational and transnational dimensions of far-right alliances in post-Brexit Britain

While its ideological status is subject to debate, the narrative at the core of national populism is explicit: it posits a nation in crisis, betrayed by its leaders; internal decay aggravated by pernicious global conspiracies and ever-present external threats. The constituency that national populists speak to is also unambiguous albeit broad to the point of vacuity. They are the ordinary people treated with contempt by the establishment and undermined by swamping immigration and its concomitants imposed by destructive multiculturalism: criminality, competition for jobs and welfare parasitism. However, while national populists ostensibly resist the globalizing world where place-bound identities are eroded by flows of ideas and people, they also benefit from its technological advances and the international alliances that it facilitates. To navigate this ambivalence, an ideological shift has materialized concerning the membership of the ethnocratic community national populists purport to represent. While its traditional forms were unequivocally nationalist, national populism today increasingly aspires to speak on behalf of groups defined in supranational, religious or civilizational, terms – as in “ethnic” Europeans vs. non-European migrants and global elites. This supranational reorientation resonates also in transnational spaces where national populists now attempt to appeal to selected migrant and minority communities. A case in point is discussed in this paper which focuses on British far-right parties/groups engaging with Poles living in Britain. Examples include UKIP, which had Polish candidates standing for it in local elections, the English Defence League, with a Polish Division and a leader who regularly reported from the annual far-right Independence March in Warsaw, and Britain First, whose leadership engaged directly with Polish nationals while also attending far-right events in Poland. The paper applies critical discourse analysis to a range of primary sources to examine the political messaging from British populists targeting Poles as well as the ideological patterns discernible in the discourses of Polish nationalist groups operating in Britain. It explores the use of Polish nationalist mythology by both sides and the emerging narrative positing Poles as historical defenders of Christianity and heroic fighters for Britain – both against the Nazis during WW2 and against Islam today – who are now unquestionably deserving to be represented and protected on a par with their British fellows. While the engagement of populist parties with minority groups is discussed with respect to political expediency and in terms of ideological evolution – i.e., degree of conceptual change within the groups’ arguments and narratives – the motifs of Polish migrants and minority members are considered through the prism of the integration-through-racism strategy that they pursue in order to position themselves as close as possible to those they perceive as being in power – namely, the White British. The paper challenges methodological nationalism in both migration and far-right scholarship - namely, the tendency to reproduce dichotomies placing immigrants in a straightforward opposition to natives, and an excessive focus on national case studies without considering the fact that national populists are transnationally connected.