From Crisis to Nationalism?: The Conditioned Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis on Neo-nationalism in Europe

Abstract

Will nationalism thrive in times of crisis? A broad segment of scholarly literature has found that a crisis often leads to the resurgence of nationalism. When the coronavirus started to spread rapidly in Europe, individual European nation states unilaterally closed their borders, hoarded critical medical supplies, and played blame games. The early period of the pandemic crisis revealed some hybrid form of medical nationalism, economic nationalism, and everyday nationalism. However, the common crisis has also heightened the importance of regional solidarity, and reinforces a strengthening of cross-national cooperation and multilateral institutions. Based on empirical discussions, this research offers an analytical framework to establish the hypothetic mechanisms of understanding this mixed phenomenon. Delving into the interaction between crisis and nationalism, this article argues that the causation from one to the other is not a linear, one-way process. There are competing mechanisms through which both nationalists and liberalists can use the crisis to push for their political agenda. Whether there will be a new wave of neo-nationalism in Europe is largely contingent on the responses the EU and the member states adopt in handling domestic and regional challenges in the post-pandemic era. Therefore, instead of simply exploring the causal relation between crisis and nationalism, more-nuanced questions can be examined in the future concerning the conditions under which and the mechanisms through which a crisis is more/less likely to provoke neo-nationalism.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Europe; Far-right parties; Nationalism.

Fig. 1

The expression of solidarity among the EU member states and the EU during the coronavirus pandemic

Fig. 2

The causal links from crisis to neo-nationalism

Fig. 3

How coronavirus has changed people’s attitudes towards the EU