ABSTRACT
Currently, we are experiencing a re/nationalization in spite of (or perhaps because of) multiple globalizing tendencies. Heated political debates across Europe, about borders and walls (body‐politics), citizenship, and the construction of the migrant as ‘the post‐modern stranger’, coincide with the global financial crisis since 2008, the refugee movement since 2014/15, on‐going wars in the Middle East (since 2003), and the crisis of the welfare state (Bauman, 2017; Rheindorf and Wodak, 2018). Such debates are reinforced and reproduced by far-right populist parties such as the Austrian Freedom Party, the French Front National/Rassemblement National, the Hungarian Fidesz, and the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP) in election campaigns and in everyday politics (Wodak, 2015a, 2020); the success of these parties is influencing mainstream parties ever more in a shift to the ‘right’: a normalization of exclusionary rhetoric (and related policies) can be observed alongside the simultaneous mediatization and commodification of such politics, frequently staged as performance or even spectacle (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017).
