National Populism and Borders. The Politicisation of Cross-Border Mobilisations in Europe [Edward Elgar] 9781802208054, 9781802208047

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National Populism and Borders

NEW HORIZONS IN EUROPEAN POLITICS Series Editor: José M. Magone, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany Founding Series Editor: Julie Smith, Robinson College, Cambridge, UK The New Horizons in European Politics series is an invaluable forum for original research across the spectrum of European politics, promoting innovative cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary issues and debates. Covering a diverse range of topics, the series examines issues such as: the impacts of the severe challenges brought about by the financial crisis; economic issues, including integration and monetary union; the politics of the EU and other governmental and nongovernmental institutions; environmental politics and the ongoing struggle to mitigate climate change; and the politics of trade, energy and security in Europe. Both international and comparative in its approach, this exciting series encompasses theoretical and empirical work from both well-established researchers and the next generation of scholars. Titles in the series include: Awaking Europe in the Triple Global Crisis The Birth Pangs of the Emerging Europe Attila Ágh The Politicisation of Social Europe Conflict Dynamics and Welfare Integration Francesco Corti The Everyday Making of EU Foreign and Security Policy Practices, Socialization and the Management of Dissent Anna Michalski, Niklas Bremberg, August Danielson and Elsa Hedling Party Realignment in Western Europe Electoral Drivers and Global Constraints Magnus Hagevi, Sofie Blombäck, Marie Demker, Jonas Hinnfors and Karl Loxbo EU Policymaking at a Crossroads Negotiating the 2021‒2027 Budget Edited by Hubert Heinelt and Sybille Münch National Populism and Borders The Politicisation of Cross-border Mobilisations in Europe Oscar Mazzoleni, Cecilia Biancalana, Andrea Pilotti, Laurent Bernhard, Grégoire Yerly and Lukas Lauener

National Populism and Borders

The Politicisation of Cross-border Mobilisations in Europe Oscar Mazzoleni Professor of Political Science and Director of the Research Observatory for Regional Politics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Cecilia Biancalana Research Fellow, Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Italy

Andrea Pilotti Senior Lecturer, Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Laurent Bernhard Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, and Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Grégoire Yerly PhD candidate, Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Lukas Lauener Researcher, Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS), and PhD candidate, Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

NEW HORIZONS IN EUROPEAN POLITICS

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Oscar Mazzoleni, Cecilia Biancalana, Andrea Pilotti, Laurent Bernhard, Grégoire Yerly and Lukas Lauener 2023

This is an open access work distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Unported (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0). Users can redistribute the work for non-commercial purposes, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, as detailed in the License. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd must be clearly credited as the rights holder for publication of the original work. Any translation or adaptation of the original content requires the written authorization of Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781802208054 ISBN 978 1 80220 804 7 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80220 805 4 (eBook)

Contents List of figuresvii List of tablesviii Author biographiesx 1

Introduction: national populism and the politicisation of borders in a changing Europe Oscar Mazzoleni

PART I

1

NATIONAL POPULISTS’ CONSTRUCTION OF BORDERS

2

The politicisation of borders in national-populist discourse: Geneva and Ticino during the COVID-19 pandemic Cecilia Biancalana and Grégoire Yerly

17

3

Convergence without conflict? Trans-border national-populist strategies in multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation Cecilia Biancalana and Oscar Mazzoleni

37

4

Framing the people and the elites: two models of national-populist border politicisation. The case of the Geneva and Basel cross-border regions Grégoire Yerly

5

Do bordering preferences affect the populist attitudes of citizens? Laurent Bernhard

PART II

55 78

BORDERS AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

6

What drives elite opinions on European integration? Examining the territorial dimension Lukas Lauener and Laurent Bernhard

7

Breaking down public opinion on European integration: the role of national borders Lukas Lauener v

96

119

vi

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National populism and borders

Direct democracy, border residence and Euroscepticism: evidence from a proposition to terminate the free movement of persons between Switzerland and the European Union Laurent Bernhard and Lukas Lauener

143

PART III CITIZENS’ ATTITUDES IN CROSS-BORDER SPACES OF MOBILISATION 9

Cross-border relations and national-populist politicisation: a citizen perspective Andrea Pilotti and Oscar Mazzoleni

166

10

Between economy and constituency: ambivalent attitudes towards cross-border workers Oscar Mazzoleni and Andrea Pilotti

193

11

Not really a “left-behind” place: national-populist re-bordering in a rich but declining periphery Oscar Mazzoleni and Andrea Pilotti

210

12

Conclusions: multi-scalar national populism and border politicisation229 Cecilia Biancalana and Oscar Mazzoleni

Figures 6.1

Mean level of Euroscepticism for both dependent variables by share of cross-border commuters per municipality

108

7.1

Approval of European integration policies

133

8.1

Marginal effects of the coefficients shown in Model III of Table 8.2 (95 per cent confidence intervals)

156

vii

Tables 2.1

Cross-border workers in Geneva and Ticino, 2002 and 2020

23

2.2

Electoral results of national-populist parties in cantonal election in Geneva and Ticino (per cent)

24

2.3

Number of analysed documents and sources

26

2.4

Most politicised border issues in the Genevan borderland

28

2.5

Most politicised border issues in the Ticino borderland

28

4.1

Inhabitants, cross-border workers and cross-border share of employment on the Swiss side of the Geneva and Basel CBRs

62

4.2

Party manifestos according to the canton’s election year in the two CBRs

64

4.3

Percentage of scales’ distribution for the people and the elites in the Geneva SVP party manifesto

66

4.4

Percentage of scales’ distribution for the people and the elites in the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP party manifestos (i.e. national SVP manifesto)

69

5.1

OLS regression models explaining levels of populist attitudes (multiplicative index)

87

6.1

Mean values of Euroscepticism

109

6.2

Results of ordered logistic regression models

112

7.1

Results of ordered logistic regression models

135

8.1

Bivariate analysis of vote choice

153

8.2

Probit models explaining the acceptance of the limitation initiative155

viii

Tables

ix

9.1

Summary of some institutional, political and economic characteristics of Basel region, Geneva and Ticino

174

9.2

Opinions on de-bordering in the Basel region, Geneva and Ticino (per cent)

178

9.3

Opinions on the re-bordering process in the Basel region, Geneva and Ticino (per cent)

180

9.4

Opinions on cross-border relations and relations with the Swiss Confederation in the Basel region, Geneva and Ticino (per cent)

183

Opinions on cross-border cooperation in the Basel region, Geneva and Ticino (per cent)

185

9.5

10.1 Perceptions of cross-border workers: principal component analysis202 10.2 Factors related to the perception of cross-border workers as an opportunity for the Ticino economy or as a problem for the well-being of Ticino’s citizens (multiple linear regression) 203 10.3 Perceptions of cross-border workers for the Ticino economy and the well-being of Ticino citizens (multinomial logistic regression)

206

11.1 Correlations between indicators of bordering

218

11.2 Bordering attitudes and political, functional and territorial variables220 11.3 Factors of bordering (linear regression models)

223

Author biographies Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science and the director of the Research Observatory for Regional Politics at the University of Lausanne. He has extensively published on party politics, regionalism, nationalism, populism, and Swiss politics in a comparative perspective. His recently co-edited books include The People and the Nation. Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019) and Political Populism. Handbook on Concepts, Questions and Strategies of Research (Nomos 2021). He’s the principal investigator of the international project “The Right-Wing Populist Discourse in European Cross-Border Areas”. Cecilia Biancalana is a non-tenured assistant professor at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin. Her research focuses on political ecology, party change, populism, and the relationship between Internet and politics. Andrea Pilotti is senior lecturer at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is member of the Research Observatory for Regional Politics (OVPR) and the Swiss Elite Observatory (OBELIS). His research mainly focuses on Swiss Parliament (reforms and parliamentary recruitment), Swiss political elites and regional politics. Laurent Bernhard is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne (Switzerland). His main research interests include populism, direct democracy, electoral studies, political communication and asylum policies. Grégoire Yerly is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently working on the SNSF project CROSS-POP. His research explores the link between right-wing populism and the politicisation of borders, focusing on the discourse of right-wing populist parties evolving in the European cross-border regions of Greater Geneva and Eurodistrict Basel. Lukas Lauener is researcher at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. As part of the Political Surveys Team at FORS, he has mainly been involved in the Comparative Candidates x

Author biographies

xi

Survey (CCS), the Swiss Election Study (SELECTS) and several post-vote surveys (VOTO). His research interests lie in the fields of voting behaviour, party systems, and the bilateral relations between the European Union and Switzerland.

1. Introduction: national populism and the politicisation of borders in a changing Europe Oscar Mazzoleni 1. INTRODUCTION While the concepts of national populism and territorial borders are seemingly intertwined, their linkages have seldom been considered in political science and political sociology (Olivas Osuna 2022). In the past few decades, political parties and leaders often labelled as right-wing populist or national populist have had a major impact on elections in European democracies. Their programme, discourse and agenda demand that the nation be defended (because it is supposedly under threat), call for sovereignty, claim for a restrictive view of immigration and are opposed to supranational integration (Eatwell and Goodwin 2018; Albertazzi and  Vampa 2021; Basile and Mazzoleni 2020). Political geographers have pointed out the national-populist frameworks and how these parties take advantage of the persistence and transformation of territorial borders shaped by ever-greater socio-economic interdependence, transnational flows and supranational integration, rising security policies and the restriction of human movements that the pandemic and wars in recent years have only increased (Paasi 2009; Popescu 2012; Agnew and Shin 2019; Casaglia et al. 2020; Richardson 2020; Paasi et al. 2022). With regard to the “supply side”, although many studies have provided relevant insights on the dynamic of the exclusion embedded in right-wing actors’ discourse (Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Rheindorf and Wodak 2018; Lamour and Varga 2020), scholars have rarely provided systematic empirical research to answer the question of how national-populist discourse deals with territorial borders and the meanings that are given to them. On the “demand side”, despite the recent rediscovery of geography in electoral studies (Ford and Jennings 2020, 307), the literature addressing the transformation of political cleavages in party competition and voting behaviour in Western Europe or opposition to EU integration rarely focuses directly on territorial dimensions, 1

2

National populism and borders

including borders (e.g. Kriesi et al. 2008; Hooghe and Marks 2018; De Wilde et al. 2019; Leruth et al. 2018). By bridging the concepts of national populism and borders, this book aims to reconsider the contemporary politicisation of borders in Western Europe. Joining separate scholarly traditions and the necessity of an interdisciplinary dialogue (Newman 2006; Scott 2020), we will consider some “classic” topics in political science and political sociology, such as parties’ strategies, representatives’ attitudes and citizens’ opinions and voting behaviour concerning border issues, border narratives and borders as spaces of mobilisation. Since there are only a few empirical contributions available on these topics, especially in the context of European integration, we will provide a series of case studies pertaining to Switzerland, a European context whose borders have been variously politicised in the past few decades. In this introduction, we will briefly discuss the concepts of national populism and borders as they are used in the book. Subsequently, we will sketch our framework to grasp the national-populist politicisation of borders in Europe. Next, we will present our case study, the Swiss borderlands, by stressing its heuristic interest from a context-oriented perspective. Finally, we will present each of the chapters in the book.

2.

NATIONAL POPULISM AND TERRITORIAL BORDERS

Our rationale starts from the concepts of populism and nationalism, as they have been widely adopted to deal with the transformation of political conflict within European democracies in recent decades. The concept of national populism is a synthesis of populism and nationalism as a bridge between two traditions. Academic interest in populism is growing. Many researchers in political science and the related disciplines use this notion extensively to describe and explain political actors’ narratives, party strategies and patterns of people’s opinions and electoral support (Bonikowski 2017; Stanley 2011; Bonikowski et al. 2019; Singh 2021). Populism has been defined as a discourse, an ideology, a strategy or a logic of political contention. However, even though there is not a broad consensus on its nature, scholars agree that populism relates to claims over the primacy of the people and the denigration of the elites (Canovan 2005). Nationalism is also widely discussed in political science, political sociology and history, and, to some extent, it is a more established notion than populism. At the same time, as is the case for populism, nationalism remains a controversial concept, with scholars emphasising its structural features (Deutsch 1966; Gellner 1983; Breuilly 1994), ethnics roots (Smith 1991) constructivist components (Hobsbawm 1990), or its nature of strategic resource handled by

Introduction

3

political actors against the so-called “de-territorialization” of contemporary nation-states (Badie 2020). What the recent literature on nationalism underlines is the “great disentangling” between territory as territorialities: There is a structural uncertainty between, on the one hand, the weakening capacity of nation-states to build a coherent national identity shaped by territorially bounded belongings and, on the other hand, the spreading of a plural and multi-layered construction of territorial identities as a by-product of changing institutional arrangements and socio-cultural transformations underlying processes of globalisation (Sassen 1996; 2008). It is in this challenging context that the debates around populism and nationalism and their linkages take on new meaning. Regarding populism and nationalism, there are currently two streams in research in political science. The first stream tends to separate – explicitly and, more often, implicitly – populism from nationalism. Although this separation appears as a by-product of two distinct sub-fields of research (in distinct journals and book series), many scholars seem to exclude the need to discuss the linkage between the two notions or consider them to be theoretically or/ and empirically distinct (see, for instance, Stanley 2011). The second stream of literature emphasises the need to link the two distinct but related traditions of research, as scholars recognise that populism and nationalism are more or less intertwined (De Cleen 2017). Within this stream, the main focus is on the nationally bounded features of populism. For example, De Cleen and Stavrakakis (2017, 342) underscore nationalism as a discourse based around the “nation” as “a limited and sovereign community that exists through time and is tied to a certain space, and that is constructed through an in/out opposition between the nation and its out-groups”. Elgenius and Rydgren (2019) highlight the need to combine ethno-nationalism and anti-political establishment populism in order to understand the success of European right-wing parties, which provided a discourse characterised by anti-immigrant claims and a nostalgia for the past. However, in national populism, two dimensions are at stake: “articulating populism and nationalism implies bringing together the down/up orientation of populism and the in/out orientation of nationalism” (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017, 314). While one might stress national populism primarily on the in/ out axis (nation vs. immigrants or non-natives), some scholars, like Brubaker (2020), also include the down/up axis (the nation of the people vs. the elites). On the one hand, the combination of populism and nationalism stresses the vertical relation between the people as underdog determined by national belonging and proudness, namely as an injured “imagined community” (Anderson 1983), and the elites, presented as threats to the people because of corruption and collusion with transnational or global interests. On the other

4

National populism and borders

hand, the exclusion of other groups or communities is regarded as a threat to the “true” people from a cultural, political or economic point of view. Although the link between national populism and the left-right axis is controversial, we can argue that while current left-wing populism tends to stress the vertical dimension more, first and foremost against the globalist elites and powers (but see Custodi 2021), right-wing populism is related to both axes: down/up and in/out. In this vein, right-wing populism represents a “full-blown” national populism (see also Caiani and Kröll 2017). In this book, national populism refers to a set of discourses, values and logics framing the opposition with threatened entities, namely foreigners and the elites, and a call to restore territorial sovereignty that is allegedly being undermined. The concept of national populism tends to be used in the literature as a demand made in the name of a people considered as a nationally rooted entity (Taguieff 1997). According to Eatwell and Goodwin, “National populism is an ideology which prioritizes the culture and interests of the nation, and which promises to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites” (2018, 50; see also Martinelli 2018). Implicitly, this definition asserts that the nation is not the same as the state. In fact, from our perspective, national populism is not just a nationwide demand to restore nation-state sovereignty but refers to different (regional, national and supranational) identities that characterise national territories and nation building (Herb and Kaplan 2016). However, a possible shortcoming of this approach is that it considers nationalism and populism as an exclusively ideological stance based on a view of people as a single homogenous entity. Populism is also a performative style (Moffitt 2016; Cox 2021) held by voting-seeking politicians targeting heterogeneous constituencies (Canovan 1981; Wodak 2021). While the populist discursive strategy has to deal with the multi-cultural shift of contemporary democracies and the complexity of citizenship, it also needs to consider the opportunities and constraints of rescaling processes and multi-scalar identity building. The call for territorially bounded communities can address different scales, including forms of “regional nationalism” where regional sovereignty and autonomy are at stake (e.g. Toubeau 2011). As the process of the construction of a national identity implies an articulation of “nested” identities (aggregating local, family belongings or any other magnitude) and as identities take more fluid forms (Kaplan 2018), such as in the context of globalisation and supranational integration, national-populist politicisation, which seeks national re-bordering in the name of the people, might also combine different scales’ identity and belonging (Mazzoleni and Ruzza 2019; Lamour 2020; Lamour and Varga 2020).

Introduction

3.

5

DE-BORDERING AND RE-BORDERING

The national-populist opposition against supranational powers and the appeal to restore people’s sovereignty is strongly connected with a dialectic between territorial de-bordering and re-bordering (Popescu 2012). “For both nationalists and populists, it is the people who are or should be sovereign. That being so, the criteria for inclusion or exclusion of the nation/people, and the symbolic boundaries that define and reproduce them, constitute the main points of struggle around which the politics of nationalism and populism coalesce” (Cox 2021, 111, my emphasis). In other words, a defence of the nation of the people involves a defence of the territorial borders in which they live and that define what they are. Claims for people’s sovereignty entail the construction and reproduction of borders that shape territories at different scales (Basile and Mazzoleni 2020). Territorial borders are not just juridical lines or geographic limits (Wastl-Walter 2012; Nugent 2018; Scott 2020). “Borders are at the heart of territorial sovereignty, and anything associated with a state border or the crossing thereof is subject to potential politicisation” (Scott 2020, 6). Borders’ politicisation – that is, the process through which borders become part of political conflicts – has attracted increasing attention in the literature in recent years: as an issue in national referenda on EU membership, such as the Brexit referendum (Outhwaite 2017; Boyle et al. 2020), as borderlands’ place in which political struggle occurred and as a controversial tool of policymaking (Ochoa Espejo 2019; Schain 2019). Borders are part of contemporary political conflicts in which populism plays a crucial role. However, although there has been some academic interest, at least in connection with populism (e.g. Lamour 2020), borders have seldom been discussed with regard to national populism. In the same vein, in research on parties and electoral behaviour, the analysis of sociological and cultural cleavages – for instance, opposing “communitarianism” and “cosmopolitanism” – tends to avoid any relevance of territorial borders as such. The opposition between “nationalised” and “de-nationalised” trends is seen exclusively from the perspective of opinion studies (see De Wilde et al. 2019, among others). By contrast, in this book, we argue that territorial borders as practices, forms of identification and structures, discourses and meanings, as well as resource strategies, are necessarily a component of political conflict in contemporary democracies (Guichonnet and Raffestin 1974; Lefebvre 1991; Paasi 1999; Paasi et al. 2022). At the same time, territorial borders are not simply nationwide but also multi-scalar. Authors discussing nationalism and populism usually stress the nation as a bounded community formed by a collective identification

6

National populism and borders

that is distinct from the state (see again De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017), while others insist on the strict separation between the nation and the state (Heiskanen 2021). However, within or without the state, this debate is mainly defined exclusively on a nationwide scale, thus avoiding the fact that bounded communities are territorially rooted and that those territorial belongings are multi-scalar phenomena in contemporary democracies (e.g. Herod 2011). While the nationwide scale remains the dominant reference and underlies the structural persistence of nation-state powers, national-populist mobilisation also takes other forms (from transnational to regional and local) with respect to rising trends shaped by multi-level governance and globalisation (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Heinisch et al. 2020).

4.

NARRATIVES, ISSUES, SPACES

By addressing the question of how national populism politicises borders, this book distinguishes between borders as issues, narratives and territorial spaces of mobilisation. While issues are related to policies, narratives imply the symbolic (re-)construction of boundaries, and territorial bounded spaces specify where politicisation occurs. Borders as issues (e.g. immigration) are related to processes framed by political actors and citizens (e.g. de-bordering as promoting the growth of economic flows and exchanges; re-bordering as calls for national sovereignty against foreign powers and immigrants) and against supranational integration. Borders can also refer directly or indirectly to issues: In the first case, opinions and attitudes are about territorial borders as such (e.g. the need to build a wall dividing two territories); in the latter case, borders are at stake when an international agreement or a flow of persons or immigrants is stressed. Borders are narratives and symbolic constructions that can be related to the national-populist call for dichotomic entities opposing “us” (nation) against “others” on both horizontal and vertical axes. As already mentioned, borders are not only barriers (or walls) but also filters and areas of interaction (Guichonnet and Raffestin 1974; Ratti 1993). Thus, borders can take the shape of a conflict but also of ambivalence, where collusion, cooperation and hybridity can emerge, helped by the fluidity of the concept of the people deployed by populists (Canovan 1981; Taggart 2000). Moreover, there is not a unique and consistent narrative on borders in national-populist politicisation. In contemporary democracies shaped by globalisation and multi-level governance, the transformation of citizenship and cross-border integration, national-populist actors (e.g. political parties) should adapt their narrative strategies to deal with a multi-scalar environment. Borders are also territorial spaces of mobilisation, that is, territorially bounded spaces forming the context in which national populism, border issues

Introduction

7

and narratives develop. Spaces of mobilisation are a network of places where citizens inhabit and move around and where they shape their belonging, collective attitudes and political preferences. Meanwhile, spaces of mobilisation include party competition and cooperation among actors. Spaces of mobilisation are multiple. They can be central or peripheral regions within a nation-state, as well as neighbouring spaces close to state borders and cross-border areas.

5.

A MULTI-SCALAR CONTEXTUAL-ORIENTED APPROACH

Given the crucial relevance of territorial spaces of mobilisation in our study, the context is not just a background where political mobilisation occurs. A serious context-oriented approach deals with a complex configuration of social, economic, institutional and political features. The context is not unidimensional but embraces multi-scaling territorially bounded spaces. This kind of space implies its inherently multi-layered nature with subnational, national, regional cross-border, international and supranational components. The context is historically moulded as its traits change and follow a peculiar path. Thus, a context-oriented analysis assumes that each space is virtually distinct. Following this rationale, in this book, we focus on the experience of a “single” country that corresponds to manifold spaces of mobilisation. Our focus on national, regional and cross-border dimensions highlighted as a context-oriented analysis is far from a “nationalist methodology” perspective. While the latter assumes, more or less implicitly, the uniqueness of a country within these institutions, cultures and nationwide bounded spaces, it also considers empirical generalisation as a matter of single nationwide countries. Our approach opens a different and more complex heuristic way. Unlike the belief that just adding data from other single countries increases knowledge about populist politicisation in European borderlands, we argue that a context-oriented analysis provides better heuristic strength when we combine diverse data and indicators dealing with the multi-faced spaces. Context-oriented studies mean there is a focus on diverse and interrelated spaces as a unity of research, with a variety of borders and bordering. This approach fits with European countries moulded by European integration, where a nationwide scale has been challenged throughout the simultaneous empowerment and re-articulation of subnational and supranational borders and scales that embody both institutions and spaces of mobilisation (see Eder 2006). Of course, each country embodies a different institutional legacy and political culture, as well as party systems and patterns of government. Moreover, every European country deals differently with the European

8

National populism and borders

Union, since it enters a specific phase of European integration, integrates some institutional agreements (common currency, free movement of persons), and might even abandon the EU, as the UK did. However, all European countries are confronted with issues related to changing patterns of institutional and socio-economic powers, like European integration, processes of globalisation and a redefinition of territorial borders, all of which are strongly intertwined. Consequently, from an epistemological point of view, we argue that a territorial space is never completely coherent as it shares, at least in part, features with other contexts, especially those that have similar or convergent historical experiences, as in Western Europe. According to many observers, Switzerland represents a specific case in Western Europe that is different from an emblematic European country. Switzerland’s uniqueness, often underlined by national narratives, historiography and political science, is essentially based on its neutral stance during the Second World War, its solitary way in foreign policy during the Cold War and, above all, its peculiar institutional framework shaped by a mixture of federalism, referenda and grand coalition governance. Above all, unlike most of the rest of the continent, Switzerland is not a member of the EU and has only limited integration with the union. However, each country is unique, and national narratives tend to legitimise this uniqueness. Moreover, national politics remains crucial in the party mobilisation of EU countries, despite supranational policymaking. Each country also adapts to the EU according to its history and cultural legacies. In this sense, any case selection in studying borders’ politicisation has a limited capacity for generalisation across Europe. Why do we concentrate our study on one “single” case? In reality, Switzerland embodies many features shared by many other West European countries. To some extent, the Swiss case is emblematic of the complexity of the multi-scaling of borders in Europe. Switzerland is particularly interesting because of its persistent cross-border dynamics and its distinct relation with European integration. Through the lens of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003), Switzerland is just a nation-state with linear geographical borders. From our perspective, this nation-state is a borderland – a set of bounded multi-scalar territories. One-half of the 26 Swiss cantons border a foreign country, be it Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Italy or France. However, it is also worth mentioning that, on the one hand, Switzerland is not a member of the EU and, consequently, it is not formally involved in a process of institutional supranational integration. On the other hand, Switzerland is increasingly part of the European integration process. EU laws have gradually been adopted by the Swiss national law system and, more importantly in terms of politicisation, between Switzerland and the EU, there are more than 100 agreements, including the Schengen and Dublin treaties and

Introduction

9

the agreement on the free movement of persons. The complexity of Swiss–EU relations is also a result of high economic interdependence. Switzerland has a high global and competitive economy and is located in the heart of Western Europe, with its main neighbouring countries (and main commercial partners) all being EU member states (except for Liechtenstein). Because of strong socio-economic integration with the three big Western European economies (i.e. Germany, France and Italy), cross-regional borders are also very relevant. Meanwhile, as a federal state, Switzerland grants broad autonomy to border regions, namely the cantons, to organise cross-border regional relations. Along with Luxembourg, Switzerland is the European country most affected by cross-border exchanges such as the influx of workers living in neighbouring countries. Thus, some regions are more dependent on cross-border workers, which also reflects diverging degrees of socio-economic interdependence and different kinds of cross-border relations at the regional scale. Shaped by the tensions between prosperity and socio-economic uncertainties, between sovereignty and supranational integration, the relations between Switzerland, its neighbouring regions and nation-states and, above all, between Switzerland and the EU have been strongly politicised in Swiss politics in the past few decades and boosted by the relevance of national-populist stances, including their regionalist forms and the frequent use of referenda about European integration issues (e.g. Dardanelli and Mazzoleni 2021). A crucial role has been played by one of the most relevant radical right parties in Europe, the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP, with a vote share of 25.6 per cent in the most recent national elections), but also by some regionalist parties like the Mouvement Citoyens Genevois (Geneva Citizens’ Movement, MCG), and the Lega dei Ticinesi (Ticino League, LdT) (see Bernhard 2017; Mazzoleni 2017). Meanwhile, how national-populist politicisation links with borders conceived as issues, narratives and spaces of mobilisation, considering both “supply-side” and “demand-side” perspectives largely remains an open question with little available empirical research. At the same time, the complex position and arrangement that Switzerland faces allows for interesting analytical opportunities to contribute to the study of this phenomenon in a European context. To some extent, as a non-member country, Switzerland is confronted with EU internal borders but also deals with EU external borders because of its high level of European integration. Moreover, Switzerland is an interesting case because of its multi-faceted linkage with the EU.

6.

THE CHAPTERS

The focus on territorial borders, taken as issues, narratives and spaces of mobilisation, allows for a better understanding of national-populist politicisation,

10

National populism and borders

such as votes and disputes revolving around immigration flows and referenda on supranational integration. This encourages both “supply-side” and “demand-side” perspectives: on the one hand, strategies, discourses, opinions by the party, party leaders, candidates and representatives; on the other hand, citizens’ and voters’ attitudes and behaviours. Concerning our framework, the chapters included in the volume embrace three main domains: The first part concerns the national-populist construction of borders, the second part concentrates on European integration, and the third part emphasises the regional and cross-regional dimensions. The analysis is based on different qualitative and quantitative data: newspapers, party manifestos, the Candidate Survey of the Swiss Election Study (Selects), an innovative representative survey of about 5,000 Swiss citizens carried out in September 2020, and two regional surveys carried out by the Research Observatory of Regional politics of the University of Lausanne in 2016 and 2019. The first section of the book is devoted to the populist construction of borders. In Chapter 2, Biancalana and Yerly highlight how national-populist discourse deals with territorial borders. Their main questions posed by the chapter are: Do national populists treat borders as physical devices that connect or divide two nation-states, or do they imagine them as symbolic identity tools? How does the context influence the definition of borders? And which kinds of border issues are mobilised by the national-populist and regional parties located in two of Switzerland’s borderland areas? The analysis covers the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic and considers party discourses of four political parties located in the Swiss–French and Swiss–Italian regions. In Chapter 3, Biancalana and Mazzoleni examine a tricky dilemma: How can national populists who defend national borders avoid conflict with their ideological counterparts on the other side of the national border? Using the concept of scale-jumping strategy, the chapter shows the role of political opportunities allowed by a multi-scalar space of mobilisation in the context of European integration and globalisation. To illustrate the argument, they focus on two parties operating in the borderland between Switzerland and Italy, the Swiss Lega dei Ticinesi and the Italian Lega, and in particular on how these parties dealt with each other in a period of crisis since 2008, from the financial crisis to the COVID-19 outbreak. In Chapter 4, Grégoire Yerly tries to understand how the sub-state branches of national-populist parties in cross-border regions contribute to symbolically politicising borders with a multi-scalar discourse framing the people and the elites. The analysis compares two highly integrated cross-border regions, with a focus on the Swiss–French and Swiss–German borderlands of Geneva and Basel, respectively, and two branches of the same national-populist party (the

Introduction

11

SVP). Inspired by the discourse-historical approach, the analysis concentrates on the party manifestos adopted in the recent subnational elections. Chapter 5 by Laurent Bernhard focuses on the relationship between populist attitudes and borders’ perceptions from a demand-side approach. An increasing number of scholars view the rise of national populism as a criticism of globalisation by voters concerned with the opening up of borders. However, there is little evidence so far of the impact of borders on populist attitudes. The main goal of the analysis is to show to what extent attitudes about re-bordering explain voting behaviour and, in particular, support for national-populist parties. The second section focuses on European integration and the role taken by ordinary citizens’ preferences about borders and their practices. In Chapter 6, Lauener and Bernhard show the multi-faceted traits of European integration by examining how political elites politicise borders. While the literature tends to limit the extent of the critical perception of the EU, the chapter examines how a multi-faceted Euroscepticism draws on EU policy issues and EU membership and the extent to which these aspects are linked to territorial dimensions – in particular, the impact of the concentration of cross-border commuters and the belonging of different linguistic regions. The analysis looks at the candidates for the 2019 national elections. In Chapter 7, Lukas Lauener investigates whether and to what extent ordinary citizens’ attitudes and practices relating to national borders (i.e. re-bordering and de-bordering attitudes) can explain different perceptions of European integration and orientations towards integration policies. The main empirical goal is to verify how great an impact people’s preferences regarding borders have on support for or opposition to the EU, irrespective of their support for national-populist parties. In Chapter 8, Bernhard and Lauener stress the role played by territorial dimensions as a factor explaining referendum voting on immigration. The focus is on a popular initiative launched by national populists that aimed to scrap the agreement relating to the free movement of persons with the EU. Along with the usual cultural, social and political dimensions, the analysis is particularly attentive to verifying whether and how citizens living closer to the national borders are more or less supportive of restrictions on immigration. The third section is dedicated to the regional and cross-regional spaces of mobilisation from the perspective of public opinion. In Chapter 9, Pilotti and Mazzoleni focus on the diversity of cross-border relations dealing with the tension between cooperation and conflict. While the literature has mostly highlighted the role of authorities and political parties, the analysis shows that the opinions of the country’s citizens are crucial since they themselves legitimise cooperative-oriented cross-border decision making and conflictual patterns. The argument is illustrated with a comparison between three urban border

12

National populism and borders

regions (Basel, Geneva and Ticino) concerning territorial attachment and the perception of cross-border relations. Chapter 10 by Mazzoleni and Pilotti concerns public attitudes towards cross-border workers. The interest is not only how citizens perceive cross-border workers regarding regional socio-economic conditions but also to what extent attitudes are not just polarised but also potentially ambivalent. National populism stresses border walls as symbols of national belonging and defence, but it should also develop its strategies with the increasing complexity and diversity of this belonging in urban or cross-border constituencies. Moreover, we might expect that in strongly integrated borderlands, where cross-border workers contribute to prosperity, there is some ambivalence among residents. Finally, Chapter 11 by Mazzoleni and Pilotti addresses the question of the extent to which national-populist politicisation explains ordinary citizens’ demands for re-bordering by pointing to the roles of the “losers” and the “left-behind” places. So far, the analysis considers the impact of functional and territorial dimensions in a context where long-term prosperity faces a present-day decline. This book is part of a project entitled “CROSS-POP: The Right-Wing Populist Discourse in European Cross-Border Areas. A comparison between Switzerland and Luxembourg”, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Luxembourg National Research Fund. Previous versions of the chapters were presented at the workshop “Borders, Politicisation and National Populism” held at the University of Lausanne on 12‒13 October 2021.

REFERENCES Agnew J. and Shin, M. (2019) Mapping populism: Taking politics to the people. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Albertazzi, D. and Vampa, D. (2021) Populism and new patterns of political competition in Western Europe. London and New York: Routledge. Anderson, A. (1983) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Badie, B. (2020) Rethinking international relations. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Basile, L. and Mazzoleni, O. (2020) Sovereignist wine in populist bottles? An introduction. European Politics and Society, 21(2), 151‒162. Bernhard, L. (2017) Three faces of populism in current Switzerland: Comparing the populist communication of the Swiss People’s Party, the Ticino League, and the Geneva Citizens’ Movement. Swiss Political Science Review, 23(4), 509‒525. Bonikowski, B. (2017) Ethno-nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment. The British Journal of Sociology, 68, 181–213.

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13

Bonikowski, B., Halikiopoulou, D., Kaufmann, E. and Rooduijn, M. (2019) Populism and nationalism in a comparative perspective: A scholarly exchange. Nations and Nationalism, 25(1), 58‒81. Boyle, M., Paddison, R. and Shirlow, P. (eds) (2020) Brexit geographies. London–New York: Routledge. Breuilly J. (1994) Nationalism and the state. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brubaker, R. (2020) Populism and nationalism. Nations and Nationalism, 26(1), 44‒66. Caiani, M. and Kröll, P. (2017) Nationalism and populism in radical right discourses in Italy and Germany. Javnost – The Public, 24(4), 336‒354. Canovan, M. (1981) Populism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Canovan, M. (2005) The people. London: Polity. Casaglia, A., Coletti, R., Lizotte, C., Agnew, J., Mamadouh, V. and Minca, C. (2020). Interventions on European nationalist populism and bordering in time of emergencies. Political Geography, 82, 1‒9. Cox, L. (2021) Nationalism. Themes, theories, and controversies. London: Palgrave. Custodi, J. (2021) Nationalism and populism on the left: The case of Podemos. Nations and Nationalism, 27(3), 705‒720. Dardanelli, P. and Mazzoleni, O. (eds) (2021) Switzerland–EU Relations. Lessons for the UK after Brexit? London–New York: Routledge. De Cleen, B. (2017) Populism and nationalism. In: Rovira Kaltwasser, C., Taggart, P., Ochoa Espejo, P. and Ostiguy, P. (eds) The Oxford handbook of populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 342‒362. De Cleen, B. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2017) Distinctions and articulations: A discourse theoretical framework for the study of populism and nationalism. Javnost – The Public, 24(4), 301‒319. De Wilde, P., Koopmans, R., Merkel, W., Strijbis, O. and Zürn, M. (2019) The struggle over borders. Cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deutsch, K. W. (1966) Nationalism and social communication. Cambridge: MIT Press. Eatwell, R. and Goodwin M. (2018) National populism: The revolt against liberal democracy. Melbourne: Pelican Books. Eder, K. (2006) Europe’s borders: The narrative construction of the boundaries of Europe. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 255‒271. Elgenius, G. and Rydgren, J. (2019) Frames of nostalgia and belonging: The resurgence of ethno-nationalism in Sweden. European Societies, 21(4), 583‒602. Ford, R. and Jennings, W. (2020) The changing cleavage politics of Western Europe. Annual Review of Political Science, 23, 295‒314. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Guichonnet, P. and Raffestin, C. (1974) Géographie des frontières. Paris: PUF. Heinisch, R., Massetti, M. and Mazzoleni, O. (2020) The people and the nation. Populism and ethno-territorial politics in Europe. London: Routledge. Heiskanen, J. (2021) The nationalism-populism matrix. Journal of Political Ideologies, 26(3), 335‒355. Herb, H. G. and Kaplan, H. D. (2016) Scaling identities. Nationalism and territoriality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Herod, A. (2011) Scale. London–New York: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990) Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2001) Multi-level governance and European integration. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2018) Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage. Journal of European Public Policy, 25(1), 109‒135. Kaplan, D. G. (2018) National identity and scalar processes. In: Herb, H. G. and Kaplan, H. D. (eds) Scaling identity. Nationalism and identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 31‒47. Kriesi, H., Grande, E., Lachat, R., Dolezal, M., Bornschier, S and Frei, T. (2008) West European politics in the age of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamour, C. (2020) The league of leagues: Meta-populism and the “chain of equivalence” in a cross-border Alpine area. Political Geography, 81, 102207. Lamour, C. and Varga, R. (2020) The border as a resource in right-wing populist discourse: Viktor Orbán and the diasporas in a multi-scalar Europe. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 35(3), 335‒350. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Leruth, B., Startin, N. and Usherwood, S. (eds) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Euroscepticism. London: Routledge. Martinelli, A. (2018) National populism and the European Union. Populism, 1(1), 59‒71. Mazzoleni, O. (2017) Les défis du régionalisme politique en Suisse. Le Tessin et ses relations avec Berne. Geneva: Slatkine. Mazzoleni, O. and Ruzza, C. (2019) Combining regionalism and nationalism: The Lega in Italy and the Lega dei Ticinesi in Switzerland. Comparative European Politics, 16(6), 976‒992. Moffitt, B. (2016) The global rise of populism. Performance, political style, and representation. Redwood: Stanford University Press. Newman, D. (2006) Borders and bordering: Towards an interdisciplinary dialogue. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2),171‒186. Nugent, P. (2018) Border studies. Temporality, space, and scale. In: Middell, M. (ed.) The Routledge handbook of transregional studies. London–New York: Routledge. Ochoa Espejo, P. (2019) The border wall as a populist challenge. Critical Review, 31(3‒4), 420‒439. Olivas Osuna, J. (2022) Populism and borders: Tools for constructing “the people” and legitimizing exclusion. Journal of Borderlands Studies, first online DOI: 10.1080/0 8865655.2022.2085140. Outhwaite, W. (2017) Brexit: Sociological responses. London: Anthem Press. Paasi, A. (1999) Boundaries as social practice and discourse: The Finnish–Russian border. Regional Studies, 33(7), 669‒680. Paasi, A. (2009) Bounded spaces in a “borderless world”: Border studies, power and the anatomy of territory. Journal of Power, 2(2), 213‒234. Paasi, A., Ferdoush M. A., Jones R., Murphy A. B., Agnew J., Ochoa Espejo P., Fall J. J. and Peterle G. (2022) Locating the territoriality of territory in border studies. Political Geography, online first. Popescu, G. (2012) Bordering and ordering the twenty-first century: Understanding borders. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ratti R. (1993) Strategies to overcome barriers: From theory to practice. In: Ratti, R. and Reichman, S. (eds) Theory and practice in transborder cooperation. Basel– Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 241‒268. Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001) Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism. London–New York: Routledge.

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15

Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2018) Borders, fences, and limits: Protecting Austria from refugees: Metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1‒2), 15‒38. Richardson, P. (2020) Rescaling the border: National populism, sovereignty, and civilizationism. In: Scott, J. W. (ed.) A research agenda for border studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 43‒54. Sassen, S. (1996) Losing control? Sovereignty in the age of globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Sassen, S. (2008) Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schain, A. M. (2019) The border: Policy and politics in Europe and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, J. (2020) A research agenda for border studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Singh, P. (2021) Populism, Nationalism, and Nationalist Populism. Studies in Comparative International Development, 56, 250–269. Smith A. (1991) The ethnic origins of nations. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Stanley, B. (2011) Populism, nationalism, or national populism? An analysis of Slovak voting behaviour at the 2010 parliamentary election. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 44(4), 257‒270. Taggart, P. (2000) Populism. London: Open University Press. Taguieff, P.-A. (1997) Populism and political science: From conceptual illusions to real problems. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 56, 4‒33. Toubeau S. (2011) Regional nationalist parties and constitutional change in parliamentary democracies: A framework for analysis. Regional & Federal Studies, 21(4‒5), 427‒446, Wastl-Walter D. (2012) The Routledge research companion to border studies. London– New York: Routledge. Wimmer, A. and Schiller, N. G. (2003) Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology. The International Migration Review, 37(3), 576‒561. Wodak, R. (2021) The politics of fear: The shameless normalization of far-right discourse. Second edition. London: Sage.

PART I

National populists’ construction of borders

2. The politicisation of borders in national-populist discourse: Geneva and Ticino during the COVID-19 pandemic Cecilia Biancalana and Grégoire Yerly 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past few years, border policy has played an increasingly important role while also becoming more politicised and divisive. In both the US and Europe, there has been a “growing movement toward the reassertion of borders and border control” (Schain 2019, 1). Donald Trump’s statements on the proposed building of a wall between the US and Mexico, along with similar claims by government officials in Hungary and Austria in the wake of the migratory crisis, are prime examples. Recently, the coronavirus outbreak and the conflict in Ukraine brought borders back to the fore (Bobba and Hubé 2021; Radil et al. 2021). Although the reassertion of borders is one of the main features of the past decade, another relevant phenomenon is inextricably linked to it, namely the rise and success – in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere – of national-populist parties and movements. National-populist actors often promote tougher border policies to counter the alleged threat to national sovereignty. It has been argued that the border is an important resource in populist discourse (Lamour and Varga 2020). However, scholars have rarely provided systematic empirical research to answer the question of how national-populist discourse deals with territorial borders and which meanings are given to them most often. Do national populists treat borders as physical devices that connect or divide two nation-states, or do they imagine them as symbolic identity tools? How does the context influence the definition of borders? To fill this gap, we will ask how a set of national-populist parties politicise borders and, in particular, which kinds of border issues are at stake in the discourses of parties operating in two borderland areas in Switzerland: Ticino and Geneva. As “the border is better described as a discursive landscape composed 17

18

National populism and borders

by a normative dimension and everyday experience” (Casaglia 2020, 30), national-populist parties operating in borderland areas represent an interesting case study for understanding the politicisation of border issues. In these regions, people deal every day with the cross-border mobility (of people, goods, capital and services) resulting from the proximity with state borders (Jensen and Richardson 2004; Lamour 2014). The physical proximity with the border could lead to a greater politicisation of issues related to national and regional identity, which are part of an everyday process of social and cultural bordering (Scott 2020a). In addition, this proximity creates new political rationales that emerge from the specific symbolisation of the border (Laine 2016). The national-populist parties in the two areas that will be covered by our analysis are the cantonal branches of the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP) in Geneva and Ticino (named the Union démocratique du centre and the Unione democratica di centro, UDC); the Mouvement Citoyens Genevois (Geneva Citizens’ Movement, MCG), and the Lega dei Ticinesi (Ticino League, LdT). To analyse the national-populist parties’ politicisation of border issues, we will use the context of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. With the partial closure of state borders and the reinforcement of border controls during the first phase of the crisis, the pandemic deeply influenced the politicisation of borders, representing an opportunity for national-populist parties to denounce external threats and reinforce spatial aspects of identity (Casaglia et al. 2020; Bobba and Hubé 2021). In addition, as a crisis, the pandemic context brought instabilities regarding economic, political, social and cultural issues (on crises, see Hay 1999), which the populists exploited. Thus, we will explore to what extent the pandemic context provided new opportunities for right-wing populist parties regarding the politicisation of border issues. Crises usually create an opportunity for populist parties (Moffitt 2015), and the COVID-19 pandemic has been no exception. On the one hand, the pandemic generated a different and new context that populist parties tried to adapt to. On the other hand, the suddenness of the crisis, as well as its external and global nature, produced different outcomes for populists depending on whether they were in power or opposition and also depending on the phase of the pandemic. National populists’ responses to the pandemic have not been the same everywhere, and contextual variations proved to be important (Katsambekis and Stavrakakis 2020; Biancalana et al. 2021). Nevertheless, this crisis was clearly an opportunity for national-populist parties to use borders as rhetorical resources to support their claims – not only to advocate them as a tool of protection to external threats but also to respond symbolically to transnational flows, underline eroded sovereignty and the limits of supranational powers and dramatise outside threats (Brubaker 2017; Casaglia et al. 2020).

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

19

Against this backdrop, the chapter will be structured as follows: Section 2 will provide a conceptual framework linking national-populist discourse with borders and defining the border issues. Section 3 will deal with the context of the research. As populist discourse is context-dependent, it is important to identify the historical and immediate background in which actors’ discourse is produced. In section 4, we will give insights into the design of the research and the methodology. In section 5, we will show which kinds of border issues the selected actors politicised during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and we will present our findings on how such a discourse was developed. We will also take into consideration the similarities and differences between the two contexts. Finally, in section 6, we will make some concluding remarks and offer perspectives for future research.

2.

NATIONAL POPULISM, BORDERS AND BORDER ISSUES

The current academic literature on critical border studies widely accepts that borders should not be considered mere objective lines on the ground but rather as devices shaped, transformed and competed for by various actors at different levels and in different places (Scott 2020b). This stream of literature acknowledges the need to escape from what has been called the “territorial trap” – that is, the reification and essentialisation of nation-states and national borders – in a state-centred perspective (Agnew 1994; 2008). Processes like globalisation and the role of transnational fluxes have profoundly changed this state-centred perspective (Sassen 2006) and led to one that is multi-scalar (on multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation, see Chapters 3 and 4 in this book). In a constructivist framework, borders should be considered not as objective facts but as social constructs performed by discursive processes (Paasi 1999; Diener and Hagen 2017; Sohn and Scott 2020). At the same time, the social construction of borders is influenced by the context in which they are embedded (Berger and Luckmann 1966). These discursive processes consist in what Scott (2015, 31) conceptualises as bordering, that is, “the everyday construction of a border, for example through political discourses and institutions, media representations, school textbooks, stereotypes and everyday forms of transnationalism”. The concept of bordering relates to two different narratives used in the political discourses of national-populist parties: re-bordering and de-bordering (see the introduction of this book; Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017; Lamour and Varga 2020). The former stresses the re-emergence of borders as barriers (Häkli 2008), for example with narratives articulated around the reinforcement of border controls or the symbolisation of the border as a protection tool, while the latter emphasises the loss of the structuring capacity of

20

National populism and borders

state borders (Paasi 2002) for example with narratives articulated around the benefits of border permeability and cross-border exchanges. Even if some academic work in recent years has linked national populism with borders (see Ochoa Espejo 2019; Lamour and Varga 2020; Olivas Osuna 2020), the literature has seldom focused on the politicisation of borders by national-populist parties. Nevertheless, borders can be considered malleable political devices used by these actors to pursue specific goals, such as highlighting, contextualising and legitimising a variety of issues and themes, at a discursive level. For instance, they can be used by national-populist parties as a symbolisation of the protection of national sovereignty against alleged dangers (Wodak 2015; Casaglia 2020). National-populist actors do so by essentialising the nation-state as an imagined community (Anderson 2006), and with the symbolic construction of national borders linked to a specific space of identity. Thus, besides being actors potentially involved in policymaking on the issue, national-populists represent relevant actors in the process of giving socio-political meaning to the border (Anderson and O’Dowd 1999; Brambilla 2015; Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). This is also due to the “elective affinity” between national-populist discourse and the symbolic construction of borders, among others. We know that national-populists depict the world in a Manichean way by essentialising an idealised “us” – dependent on historical, national and socio-political factors – and contrasting it with dangerous “others” who encompass a variety of different categories: migrants, political elites, supranational entities and so on (Taggart 2000; Pelinka 2013; Manucci and Weber 2017). This essentialisation can also be intertwined with a spatialised notion of sovereignty: In this way, borders become loci for national-populist parties to practically and symbolically take back control (Casaglia et al. 2020). By producing discourses on borders, such parties could essentialise them as a tool for taking back sovereignty, resulting in a strong normative justification of borders as a tool of defence (Olivas Osuna 2020). Thus, borders represent an essential tool for national-populist parties to deal, in both the policymaking arena and their discursive production, with issues such as securitisation and the alleged dangers of immigration (Schain 2019). However, it is important to stress that borders can appear in populists’ discourse in different ways and at different levels. For instance, some populist actors proclaim loudly and clearly that they want to build physical borders to protect their country (e.g. Trump and in Austria; for the Austrian case, see Rheindorf and Wodak 2018). In this case, as in the case of the discourse on border control, the border is evoked directly as a concrete entity. But borders can also stand for – and, thus, represent – the defence of national or regional identities against the threats of immigration. In this case, borders are symbolic devices used to talk about something else. Borders indirectly represent the

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

21

division between us and them. Therefore, while there is generally an “elective affinity” between national-populist discourse and borders, a conceptualisation and an empirical analysis of how they use borders in their discourse and of the specific issues that national-populists politicise when they deal with them are still lacking. To fill this gap, we start by defining what a “border issue” is. An issue can be broadly defined as a point, matter or problem requiring public attention, and public discussion can lead to a decision (Sheppard-Sellam 2019). Neveu (2015) defines “public problems” as the conversion of social facts into an object of concern and debate and even of public action. This conversion occurs by constructing an issue or problem as something worthy of public attention. The construction of a public problem usually happens with the help of “entrepreneurs” who have some kind of interest at stake and push to bring the problem to the attention of the public. Border issues can be considered public problems related to the border that need to be addressed by officeholders and for which citizens demand solutions, and national-populist actors as being among the multiple entrepreneurs who can construct them. We have seen that borders can be intended in different ways, especially by national-populist actors. Thus, we can identify two main categories of border issues. They can be defined as issues that deal, directly or indirectly, with the border. Therefore, border issues are not only issues that deal directly with the border intended as a physical device to divide or connect two nation-states, as in the case of border control and patrolling (direct border issue), but also as a symbolic and identity device. In this sense, we can consider immigration and European integration as indirect border issues when they involve a transfer of sovereignty that entails consequences for the flow of people and goods or the identity of the country. Following this definition, our goal will be to understand how border issues are politicised in the discourse of some national-populist actors during a crisis in borderland areas and how the context influences the definition of border issues. The next section will deal with the characterisation of such a context.

3.

SWISS BORDERLAND AREAS: HISTORICAL AND IMMEDIATE CONTEXT

Borders are important for Switzerland, but not only because half of the 26 Swiss cantons border a foreign country. Since the First World War, Switzerland has endorsed strict and constraining immigration policies based on the rhetoric of Überfremdung, meaning that foreigners are perceived as damaging and threatening to Swiss identity and values and that the national culture and interests must be of primary concern (Riaño and Wastl-Walter 2006). Despite the more open immigration policies following the application of the 2002 Agreement

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National populism and borders

on the Free Movement of Persons (AFMP) and Switzerland’s entry into the Schengen Area in 2008, the rhetoric of Überfremdung is regularly used by national-populist parties to position themselves against immigrants and the EU, which the country is not a part of, although it is more and more involved in the integration process (see the introduction of this book). The enduring salience of this issue in Switzerland is demonstrated by the fact that, in 2020, the populist SVP launched a campaign for a popular initiative entitled the “limitation” initiative, which sought to cancel the AFMP1 by making a point about the sovereignty of Switzerland against the EU regarding the management of immigration. Unsurprisingly, the initiative was supported by the MCG and the LdT in Geneva and Ticino. The initiative was initially scheduled to be voted on in the spring of 2020 but was eventually postponed to September due to the coronavirus outbreak, and the campaign coincided with the first wave of the pandemic. Owing to the pandemic in Switzerland, as in most other countries, the borders were partially closed between 13 March and 15 June 2020: State borders were closed for everyone, except for people with a work permit in Switzerland (like cross-border workers). Moreover, because of the proximity with Italy and, in particular, with Lombardy, the epicentre of the pandemic outbreak in Europe in early 2020, Ticino was the first canton to record a COVID-19 infection on 25 February 2020. Geneva was also one of the first cantons to register a COVID-19 infection, probably due to the high trans-border mobility of the cross-border region. In general, the two cross-border regions were particularly affected by the first COVID-19 wave compared with other Swiss cantons. On 27  September  2020, the limitation initiative was rejected by 61.7 per cent of Swiss voters. Interestingly, it was strongly rejected in the canton of Geneva (69 per cent, about 7 points higher than the mean), while it was accepted in the canton of Ticino (by 53.1 per cent). This demonstrates the differences between the two cantons: The result in Geneva confirms the canton’s Europhile attitude, as well as the strong and functional form of cross-border interdependence (Sohn et al. 2009), while in Ticino, the results underline the difficulties in managing cross-border issues and the canton’s negative attitude towards the EU (see Chapter 9 in this volume). Ticino and Geneva are part of two broader borderland areas: the Regio Insubrica, which includes the Swiss canton of Ticino and five Italian provinces of Lombardy and Piedmont, and the Grand Genève region, centred on the Swiss canton of Geneva and including the nearby Swiss district of Nyon, as well as the French area of the Ain and Haute-Savoie departments. The two borderlands are characterised by high economic integration and the presence of cross-border workers but also have some differences between them based on the level of their functional and economic integration, political culture and relationship with the centre. Both borderland areas are characterised by

23

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

Table 2.1

Cross-border workers in Geneva and Ticino, 2002 and 2020

 

Geneva

Ticino

2002

35,079

32,792

2020

91,867 (+ 162 per cent)

69,966 (+ 113 per cent)

Source:

Federal Statistical Office.

strong socio-economic interdependence. The higher wages in Geneva and Ticino – compared with those on the other side of the national border – attract many French and Italian cross-border workers (see Table 2.1). The majority of cross-border workers are employed in Geneva (27 per cent of the Swiss flux of cross-border workers), while the Ticino canton ranks second (20 per cent). A process of cross-border cooperation has been enforced in Grand Genève since 1973. The political governance of the conurbation went into effect in 2004 with the creation of a regional association. The territory of this cross-border cooperation covers 2,000 km2 and a total of 212 municipalities. This cross-border cooperation is characterised by a strong and functional form of cross-border interdependence (Sohn et al. 2009). In Ticino, a cross-border policy with northern Italy was developed in the 1990s. The Regio Insubrica was set up in 1995, much later than its Genevan counterpart, and represents an association under private law between Ticino and the provinces of Como, Varese and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola (see Chapter 9 in this book). The cross-border cooperation between Italy and Ticino has been more difficult to implement than in Geneva, and the Regio Insubrica has been unable to manage some controversial topics relating to financial and cross-border workers’ issues (Torricelli and Stephani 2009; Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). Moreover, the two areas are characterised by the presence of different national-populist parties on either side of the border (see Chapter 3 in this book). In this research, we focused on the Swiss side and considered four parties: the cantonal branch of the SVP in Geneva and Ticino; the MCG on the Swiss side of the Grand Genève region and the LdT in Ticino. Although all parties can be classified under the broad umbrella of national-populist parties, these actors also present some differences. The SVP is one of the most relevant national-populist parties in Western Europe (Betz 1994; Albertazzi 2008; Mazzoleni 2008). Since the beginning of the 2000s, it has become the most successful Swiss party in the national elections and has, in the past few decades, been continuously represented in the federal government, apart from a brief hiatus in 2008. While the SVP is present in all Swiss cantons, the cantonal branches represent partially autonomous organisations compared with the federal ones because of the federal nature of the Swiss confederation. Its cantonal branches in Geneva and Ticino are

24

National populism and borders

Table 2.2

Electoral results of national-populist parties in cantonal election in Geneva and Ticino (per cent)

 

Geneva

Ticino

2013

2018

MCG

19.2

9.4

SVP/UDC

10.3

7.3

5.8

6.8

LdT

 

 

24.2

19.9

Source:

2015  

2019  

Federal Statistical Office.

called the Union démocratique du centre and the Unione democratica di centro (UDC), respectively. By contrast, the MCG and the LdT are parties rooted only in the cantons of Geneva and Ticino, respectively, and can be considered region-wide national-populist parties. The LdT (Albertazzi 2006) was founded in 1991 by entrepreneur Giuliano Bignasca in the context of the economic crisis that had struck the country and the canton of Ticino in particular. It managed to politicise the issue of Ticino’s peripherality with respect to the “centre” of the country while mobilising Eurosceptic orientations (Mazzoleni 2005) and found strong and durable electoral success within the canton. More recently, the LdT has taken advantage of the political opportunities offered by the free movement of persons within the EU (Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). The MCG is a populist Eurosceptic party founded in 2005 in the Geneva region. It opposes the political class, campaigns against French cross-border workers and calls for the priority allocation of jobs to Swiss residents (Bernhard 2017). Regarding parties’ electoral strength (see Table 2.2), the MCG and the Genevan SVP saw their vote share decrease between the two cantonal elections of 2013 and 2018. While the MCG and the Genevan SVP were strong in 2013, they faced a radical failure in 2018, which benefitted the socialists and the greens. In Ticino, by contrast, the electoral results have been more stable. While the Ticino SVP has always represented a minor party in the canton, the LdT continued to be the second-most influential party over time within the cantonal parliament between 2015 and 2019. In Ticino, the stability of the LdT shows that cross-border issues are still supported by the electorate. Conversely, in Geneva, the regression of national populism could be explained by the fact that the cantonal preference (one of the flagship issues highlighted by the MCG since the party’s founding) has become a mainstream issue for all political parties. In addition, the creation of a new party – Genève en Marche (Geneva on the Move, GeM) – led by the former founder of the MCG, Eric Stauffer, represented a challenge for the MCG, as Stauffer is still considered an influential and charismatic figure in the

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

25

party (Bernhard 2017).2 The split put the internal divisions of the MCG in the spotlight.

4.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

For this chapter, we focused on parties’ discourses. We collected data from 1 January to 31 August 2020 – that is, during the first phases of the pandemic until just before the beginning of the second wave. It was during this first period that the dimension of the crisis unfolded to the highest degree. Also, with regard to border-related issues, it is in this first phase that the country’s national borders were sealed as tightly as possible to contain the contagion. This factor deeply influenced the politicisation of borders. As we aim to analyse party discourses, we decided to use the four parties’ direct communication channels, such as official Facebook posts and articles taken by the official newspapers, as a source for our analysis (see Table 2.3). However, we do not analyse the differences between parties located in the same region. Instead, we focus on the contextual differences between the two Swiss borderland areas. For this timespan, we selected texts that politicised the COVID-19 issue; among them, only texts with a direct or indirect reference to the border were included in the sample. By politicisation, we mean the inclusion of COVID-19 in the political debate and the structuring of contentious narratives over it. Regarding border issues, in line with our multi-faceted definition of borders, we intend not only questions related to border control but also broader issues relating to the free movement of persons or European integration. Thus, in these discourses, the border is mobilised not only as the physical one but also as a symbolic device that divides “us” from “the others”. With these criteria, a total of 123 texts were selected (see Table 2.3). Our analysis was carried out by adopting the approach of critical discourse analysis. Within the CDA approach, discourse is considered social practice: Scholars believe that there is a dialectical relationship between discourses and the situations, institutions and social structures in which they are embedded. The situational, institutional and social context shape and affect the discourse and, in turn, the discourse influences the social and political reality. In other words, discourse helps constitute social reality and is constituted by it. The aim of CDA is then to unmask those relations and the structures of power behind them, thus linking linguistic-discursive practices and extra-linguistic social structures. In particular, in this contribution we aimed to investigate how parties’ discourse is organised around topics. Topics summarise the most important themes in the discourse and define what is discussed in a text in a semantic macro-structure (Van Dijk 1991; Reisigl and Wodak 2001).

26

National populism and borders

Table 2.3 Region

Number of analysed documents and sources Party

Source

LdT

Il Mattino della Domenica (daily party

Number of documents 29

newspaper)

Regio Insubrica SVP Ticino (UDC)

Il Paese (weekly party newspaper)

22

SVP Geneva (UDC)

Edition spéciale de l’UDC Genève

59

(party newspaper) (7); Facebook posts (UDC Genève) (52) Grand Genève

MCG

Official website articles (www​.mcge​

13

.ch) (3); MCG press blog (www​.tdg​.ch/​ les​-blogs) (7); Facebook posts (MCG Officiel) (3)

The selected texts were coded and analysed with the help of the MAXQDA software program. We coded text relating to border issues that were intended as concrete problems to be addressed by parties and dealing, directly or indirectly, with the border: not only issues such as border control and patrolling but also immigration and European integration, when it involves either a transfer of sovereignty that entails consequences on the flow of people and goods or the identity of the country. As our analysis is focused on discourses, the units of analysis are not single words but segments, which correspond to the sequences of utterances and sentences, distinct propositions, topics or communicative functions in a text (Upton and Cohen 2009). Within this broad framework, the material was first coded inductively to create a codebook, which was sharpened and improved after a pilot analysis of our data. As the documents were coded by two different coders, issues of intercoder reliability have been also considered (O’Connor and Joffe 2020). To ensure the coherence of the coding, after a first coding of the material by one coder, 25 per cent of the documents were coded by the other coder. The results were discussed among the coders and the codebook changed accordingly.

5.

THE POLITICISATION OF BORDER ISSUES IN NATIONAL-POPULIST DISCOURSE

Border issues constitute rhetorical resources available to national-populist actors to support their claims. They can be used to contextualise, highlight and legitimise a variety of other issues and themes. As we have seen, through border issues, national-populist parties can not only mobilise the border directly but also symbolically represent and reinforce the division between the in-group and the out-group. The meaning given to the border can be linked to

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

27

a large field of various socio-political struggles, connected to immigration, economy, globalisation. As they can serve to evoke symbolic and concrete walls, border issues are indeed part of the toolbox of populist discourse. In this section, we will see which kinds of border issues are mobilised by the national-populist and regional parties located in two borderland areas, how their discourse on border unfolds, and whether there are differences between the two cases. First, we expect that national-populist parties located in borderlands will not mobilise the border only in a direct way (using direct border issues) but will use it in connection with other themes to support their claims (indirect border issues). Second, since the populist discourse is context-dependent, we hypothesise that there will be some differences between the two borderland areas. These differences could pertain to the difference in electoral strength of the national-populist parties in the local political system, the difference between the social and economic structures of the two cantons and in the kind of cross-border cooperation, as well as the divergent impact of the pandemic. Because of the long-standing success of the LdT in Ticino and of the controversies on cross-border integration, national-populist parties in Ticino could be more susceptible to perceive the border as a concrete and physically proximate entity. By contrast, national-populist parties in Geneva may be less likely to mobilise direct border issues as the cross-border region represents a model of strong functional integration, and cross-border issues are less important in the electoral game. Finally, because of its proximity to Italy, the first European country hit by the pandemic, the national-populist parties in Ticino could be more likely to mobilise health-related border issues and to perceive the border as an objective tool of protection. Tables 2.4 and 2.5 show the most politicised border issues in the two contexts. Each border issue is presented together with the number of coded segments and the percentage of coded segments, calculated based on the total of the national populists’ documents in each region.3 The border issues common to the two areas are indicated in bold. In the last column, we classified the issue as direct and indirect. Direct border issues refer to the border as a concrete artefact – for instance in the case of border controls. In these cases, the border is a concrete entity in citizens’ lives, can be seen and is physically near. Indirect border issues, by contrast, refer to the border indirectly: For instance, they are issues related to the loss of political sovereignty and economic power, following the processes of de-bordering. What are the similarities and differences between the discourse of the parties located in the two borderlands? Can we see a similar pattern in how parties in the two areas deal with the border? As for the similarities, in both cases, the European Union ranks among the most politicised border issues. Criticism towards the EU forms a strong part of

28

National populism and borders

Table 2.4

Most politicised border issues in the Genevan borderland

Code

N. coded

% coded segments

segments

Type of border issue

European Union

56

13.27

Indirect

Unemployment

44

10.43

Indirect

Limitation initiative

36

8.53

Indirect

Economic crisis following the

28

6.64

Indirect

Hiring of local workers

23

5.45

Indirect

Migration as a threat to economy

21

4.98

Indirect

Welfare state

20

4.74

Indirect

Border control

19

4.50

Direct

Criminality

13

3.08

Indirect

National sovereignty

13

3.08

Indirect

pandemic

Note:

The border issues common to the two areas are indicated in bold.

Table 2.5

Most politicised border issues in the Ticino borderland

Code

N. coded

% coded segments

segments

Type of border issue

European Union

39

9.65

Indirect

Closing the borders

34

8.42

Direct

Having open borders

32

7.92

Direct

Economic crisis following the

26

6.44

Indirect

Origin of the virus: open borders

25

6.19

Direct

Origin of the virus: Lombardy

22

5.45

Direct

Hiring of local workers

18

4.46

Indirect

Migration as a threat to health

14

3.47

Indirect

Limitation initiative

12

2.97

Indirect

Unemployment

12

2.97

Indirect

pandemic

Note:

The border issues common to the two areas are indicated in bold.

the national-populist rhetoric on the alleged dangers of immigration – regarding unemployment, the loss of sovereignty and cultural heritage – resulting from the AFMP. Other common border issues are: unemployment, the economic crisis following the pandemic, the demand to hire local workers instead of foreign ones and issues linked to the limitation initiative. Broadly, we can

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

29

say that those issues are closely linked to the criticism towards the EU and the free movement of persons. Indeed, the issue of the European Union is closely linked to the free movement of persons. Free circulation and the parties promoting it are seen as the cause of the canton’s healthcare and economic problems. According to those who oppose it, the solution is to limit immigration – both cross-border and more generally – and to hire local workers. These are themes that have long been present in the discourse of the parties we are analysing. The crisis created by the pandemic is, for them, a sort of affirmation of their positions and a way to reinforce their claims. The COVID-19 crisis and the resulting layoffs just remind us to what extent the economic situation is changing. The number of unemployed people is exploding in Switzerland and the European Union. It means that there are more job seekers for fewer jobs. In this respect, Geneva holds the sad Swiss record of a 5.2 per cent unemployment rate. It is the only canton that exceeds the 5 per cent limit. Under these conditions, we believe, once again, that it is appropriate to favour the indigenous workforce rather than being the gutter of EU employment (…). The limitation initiative will defend the interests of our country’s workers and restrict the external workforce. When the time comes to choose, we have to ask ourselves the following question: “Can an EU worker replace me?” If the answer is yes, it is also the answer to put in the ballot box. (Genevan SVP, Facebook post, 28 August 2020) We have been through a unique health crisis (…). The over-competition of cross-border workers and the wage-dumping suffered by SMEs remain our main concerns and compel us to intervene as strongly as possible. (MCG, Press blog, 29 August 2020) The question is no longer whether we are facing a global recession but what the extent of the economic slowdown will be. Two countries bordering Switzerland, France and Italy, are particularly affected. But unemployment and a lack of prospects are also growing in other countries – almost as rapidly as the coronavirus. The consequence of this economic crisis will be that an even greater number of people will flock to our country and that this mass immigration cannot be stopped due to the agreement on the free movement of persons. (Il Paese, 1 May 2020) In the looming crisis, indigenous preference is a vital necessity. It is time for Switzerland to start serving the interests of its citizens instead of always serving those of foreigners (…). It is precisely the Chinese virus pandemic that has shown us that EU countries, in case of need, don’t give a damn about agreements and regulations but do what they want. And we, who are not members of the European Union, should we tolerate being invaded by foreign workers when unemployment skyrockets among our fellow citizens? NO! (Il Mattino della Domenica, 23 August 2020)

As for the differences, in the first place, we note that direct border issues in Ticino are more politicised by national-populist parties than in Geneva. In Ticino, the most mobilised issues include a demand to close the border, the threat of open borders, the fact that the origins of the virus are tied to the

30

National populism and borders

politics of having open borders and, in particular, the physical proximity with Lombardy. The proximity to the border and globalisation, as well as the EU and the free movement of persons, are directly blamed for the arrival of the virus in Ticino. This kind of discourse, typical of the LdT, is absent from the context in Geneva. It seems that in Ticino, the border is perceived as more of a real and concrete entity than in the other case. This can be explained by the proximity of the canton of Ticino to Italy’s northern provinces and the city of Bergamo as their epicentre. In this regard, the border is materially conceived as a tool protecting an organic territorial body from “the real or imagined contamination of alien bodies” (Minca et al. 2018, 87) in an immunitarian perspective by portraying immigrants as vectors of the disease. Viruses, with or without a crown [in Italian, corona means crown], do not come by themselves. It is the human who carries them around. Hence: less globalisation, less free movement of persons, less immigration, fewer open borders, less dependence on foreign labour. (Il Mattino della Domenica, 8 March 2020)

In a broader perspective, however, this speaks to the more pronounced relevance of a party like the LdT, whose priority is to defend Ticino from an alleged “invasion” of cross-border workers. And, in a wider sense, this can be linked to a more difficult process of cross-border integration. National-populist parties in Ticino also emphasise health-related issues more often than in Geneva, as exemplified by two border issues: While in Ticino, migration is considered a threat to health, in Geneva, migration is primarily considered a threat to the economy. In Ticino, both cross-border workers and immigration are seen as the cause of the contagion. However, in Geneva, the topic of border control as a direct issue – the only one – is related to migration being considered as a threat to the economy; the so-called invasion of foreign workers is viewed as a threat in the context of the sharp rise of unemployment in Switzerland, and foreign workers are seen as potentially overwhelming social assistance. In this sense, stricter border control is meant to give back to Switzerland its sovereignty by restraining an uncontrollable influx of immigrants. “Thanks” to the re-opening of the borders decided by the federal government, in Switzerland, infections from the Chinese virus are starting to rise again in a worrying way. In our country, foreigners make up 25 per cent of the population; in Ticino almost a third. If we then add the “Swiss” with a red passport still fresh off the presses… The consequences of this situation are also manifested in the field of infections. Many foreigners went on vacation to their country of origin as soon as the borders opened. Then they returned infected with the coronavirus. And, in fact, the new outbreaks are imported. “Immigration equals wealth”, or immigration equals contagion? (Il Mattino della Domenica, 5 July 2020)

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

31

Would it not be more appropriate, instead of a new lockdown, to eliminate some clearly imported risk factors or at least reduce them (limit, if necessary, the number of foreign workers, in the sense of the UDC initiative for limitation, rigorously control borders every day, reject further useless “refugees” at risk etc.)? (Il Paese, 10 July 2020) The SVP is calling for stricter border controls. Even in prosperous economic times, 1 million people – mostly from the EU – have come over 13 years to work or benefit from the social system in our small country. As a result of the sharp rise in unemployment in all neighbouring countries, Switzerland will inevitably experience a further unstoppable influx of immigrants because of the free movement of persons – even though tens of thousands of Swiss are unemployed. In addition, poverty and social security contributions are expected to increase. (Genevan SVP, Facebook post, 28 May 2020) The MCG has never been against foreigners but believes that border controls are needed to protect the residents (Swiss citizens and foreigners). Through controlled immigration, the limitation initiative will allow full employment. (MCG, Official website article, 6 July 2020)

We have seen that, unlike Ticino, Geneva presents a strong and functional form of interdependence (Sohn et al. 2009), as well as a more Europhile profile. This context provides political and contextual constraints for national-populist parties to politicise the border through direct border issues. That is why national-populist parties in Geneva mostly use indirect border issues, such as criminality or national sovereignty, which are closely linked to the direct border issue of border controls. For example, the issue of criminality is used to underline how stricter border controls would diminish cross-border criminality, while the issue of sovereignty is used to show how stronger sovereignty would protect Swiss workers against EU labour forces.

6. CONCLUSION Despite the growing relevance of the topic, scholars have rarely provided systematic empirical research to answer the question of how national-populist discourse deals with territorial borders. This chapter’s goal was to fill this gap by asking how a set of national-populist parties politicise borders and, in particular, which kinds of border issues are at stake in the discourse of parties acting in borderland areas at a time of a crisis. To analyse the politicisation of border issues by national-populist parties, we used the context of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in two Swiss borderland areas and asked how national-populists acted as “entrepreneurs” by using border issues as rhetorical resources to support their claims. As discourse is closely intertwined with

32

National populism and borders

contextual factors, we also looked for similarities and differences between the two borderlands. First, we defined border issues as issues that deal, directly or indirectly, with the border. Thus, border issues not only deal directly with the border intended as a physical device to divide two nation-states, as in the case of border control and patrolling, but can also function as a symbolic and identity device that essentialises the nation-state as an imagined community linked to specific identities and protects it against alleged dangers (Anderson 2006; Wodak 2015; Casaglia 2020). Second, we analysed and compared the discourse of some parties acting in two borderlands sharing similarities and differences. The two borderland areas are similar to the high influx of cross-border workers and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, they show some differences regarding the success of national-populist parties and the patterns of cross-border integration: While the canton Geneva is characterised by a strong and functional cross-border interdependence and is more Europhile, the canton of Ticino manages cross-border issues in a more difficult way, especially due to its strong rejection of the EU. National-populist parties, and in particular the LdT, are stronger in Ticino than in Geneva. The results show that national-populist parties politicise borders directly and indirectly. They advocate the border as a concrete tool of defence against “the other” through re-bordering narratives. Moreover, with the use of indirect issues, national-populist parties discursively politicise the border to position themselves on issues that go beyond the border as a concrete entity, ranging from immigration to the agreement on the free movement of persons with the EU. National-populist parties in both regions are strongly politicising the relation to the EU as a threat and promoted the limitation initiative as a solution to fight the rising unemployment rates of local workers induced by the pandemic. In line with our expectations, national-populist parties in the canton of Ticino are more likely to politicise the border as a direct issue. Owing to the physical proximity of Ticino to Lombardy, infamous for being the epicentre of the pandemic in March 2020, the border is perceived as an objective territorial line providing defence against contagious alien bodies. We can also see this in the perception of immigration as a threat to health. The border is considered an immunitarian imperative (Minca et al. 2018): Alien bodies are used as scapegoats to legitimise the closure of state borders through direct border issues (Radil et al. 2021). The border is perceived as a wall against contagious intruders. However, the politicisation of direct border issues can also be linked to long-term characteristics of the area, such as the success of the LdT and the difficulty of cross-border integration. By contrast, national-populist parties in the canton of Geneva politicise the border as a concrete artefact to a lesser extent. They only do so by promoting

The politicisation of borders in national populist discourse

33

stricter border control to restore sovereignty in the management of immigration, fight unemployment, protect the welfare state and diminish cross-border criminality. In this case, the border is perceived as a filter against foreign intruders: In Geneva, the focus is on indirect border issues and the understanding of immigration as a threat to the economy. We could assume that, as cross-border cooperation in Geneva is highly integrated, the politicisation of the border occurs throughout indirect border issues. Parties in Geneva have had to manage the constraints induced by the strong interdependent context and could not promote a strong re-bordering discourse based on direct border issues to fit their constituency. This is why the only direct border issue relates to border controls. In conclusion, this study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between national populism and borders in two ways. On the one hand, it conceptualises direct and indirect border issues and proves that – in the case considered – national-populist parties politicise the border in both direct and indirect ways, seeing it as a tool of symbolic and concrete defence against external threats. On the other hand, we see that the emergence of the pandemic crisis fits into the long-term integration processes of Swiss and European borderland areas. These processes took various formats in different contexts and had an impact on the different ways in which the national-populist parties politicised the borders in the two regions. Indeed, the pandemic context proved to be a breeding ground for the reinforcement of the positions of national-populist parties on issues that have long been present in their discourse (European Union, unemployment, economic crisis, hiring of local workers) and for the legitimation of a re-bordering discourse based on the symbolisation of the border either as a wall or as a filter. Our results point out that national-populist parties advocate the border mainly as a symbolical or concrete tool of defence against “the other”. However, we know that borders should not be conceived only as tools of separation but can be also intended as spaces of contact and convergent interests (Raffestin 1992). Further studies will be needed to assess whether and under which circumstances this is also the case with national-populist parties (see Chapter 3 in this book).

NOTES 1. 2.

The initiative demanded that if it passed and no agreement can be negotiated between the Swiss national government and the EU within 12 months, the AFMP must be abolished. However, the party obtained a vote share of only 4.1 per cent in the last cantonal elections. Consequently, it did not gain any seats in the cantonal parliament.

34

National populism and borders

3.

The percentage of coded segments in Geneva was calculated by analysing the documents of the local SVP and MCG; for Ticino, the documents of the local SVP and LdT were used.

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Hay, C. (1999) Crisis and the structural transformation of the state: Interrogating the process of change. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 1(3), 317‒344. Jensen, O. B. and Richardson, T. (2004) Making European space: Mobility, power and territorial identity. London–New York: Routledge. Katsambekis, G. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2020) Populism and the pandemic: A collaborative report. Populismus Interventions, no. 7. Laine, J. P. (2016) The multiscalar production of borders. Geopolitics, 21(3), 465‒482. Lamour, C. (2014) Territorial reputation beyond state borders? Metropolitan images in European borderlands. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 10(1), 19‒31. Lamour, C. and Varga, R. (2020) The border as a resource in right-wing populist discourse: Viktor Orbán and the diasporas in a multi-scalar Europe. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 35(3), 335‒350. Manucci, L. and Weber, E. (2017) Why the big picture matters: Political and media populism in Western Europe since the 1970s. Swiss Political Science Review, 23(4), 313‒334. Mazzoleni, O. (2005) Multilevel populism and centre–periphery cleavage in Switzerland. The case of the Lega dei Ticinesi. In: Mény, Y. and Caramani, D. (eds) Challenges to consensual politics: Democracy, identity, and populist protest in the Alpine region. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 209‒227. Mazzoleni, O. (2008) Nationalisme et populisme en Suisse: la radicalisation de la “nouvelle” UDC. Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes. Mazzoleni, O. and Mueller, S. (2017) Cross-border integration through contestation? Political parties and media in the Swiss–Italiano borderland. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 32(2), 173‒192. Minca, C., Rijke, A., Brighenti, A. M. and Kärrholm, M. (2018) Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative. In: Brighenti, A. M. and Kärrholm, M. (eds) Urban walls: Political and cultural meanings of vertical structures and surfaces. London– New York: Routledge, 79‒93. Moffitt, B. (2015) How to perform crisis: A model for understanding the key role of crisis in contemporary populism. Government and Opposition, 50(2), 189‒217. Neveu, E. (2015) Sociologie politique des problèmes publics. Paris: Armand Colin. O’Connor, C. and Joffe, H. (2020) Intercoder reliability in qualitative research: Debates and practical guidelines. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19, 1‒13. Ochoa Espejo, P. (2019) The border wall as a populist challenge. Critical Review, 31(3‒4), 420‒439. Olivas Osuna, J. (2020) Populism and borders: Tools for building the people and legitimising exclusion, paper presented at the ESA midterm conference, 30‒31 October. Paasi, A. (1999) Boundaries as social practice and discourse: The Finnish–Russian border. Regional Studies, 33(7), 669‒680. Paasi, A. (2002) Regional transformation in the European context: Notes on regions, boundaries and identity. Space and Polity, 6(2), 197–201. Pelinka, A. (2013) Right-wing populism: Concept and typology. In: Wodak, R., KhosraviNik, M. and Mral, B. (eds) Right-wing populism in Europe: Politics and discourse. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1‒22. Radil, S. M., Castan Pinos, J. and Ptak, T. (2021) Borders resurgent: Towards a post-COVID-19 global border regime? Space and Polity, 25(1), 132–140. Raffestin, C. (1992) Autour de la fonction sociale de la frontière. Espaces et Sociétés, 70/71, 157–164.

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Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001) Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism. London–New York: Routledge. Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2018) Borders, fences, and limits: Protecting Austria from refugees: Metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1‒2), 15‒38. Riaño, Y. and Wastl-Walter, D. (2006) Immigration policies, state discourses on foreigners, and the politics of identity in Switzerland. Environment and Planning A, 38(9), 1693‒1713. Sassen, S. (2006) Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schain, M. A. (2019) The border: Policy and politics in Europe and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, J. W. (2015) Bordering, border politics and cross-border cooperation in Europe. In: Celata, F. and Coletti, R. (eds) Neighbourhood policy and the construction of the European external borders. New York: Springer, 27‒44. Scott, J. W. (2020a) Introduction to a research agenda for border studies. In: Scott, J. W. (ed.) A research agenda for border studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 3‒26. Scott, J. W. (ed.) (2020b) A research agenda for border studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Sheppard-Sellam, E. (2019) Problème public. In: Boussaget, L., Jacquot, S. and Ravinet, P. (eds) Dictionnaire des politiques publiques. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 504‒509. Sohn, C. and Scott, J. W. (2020) Ghost in the Genevan borderscape! On the symbolic significance of an “invisible” border. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(1), 18‒32. Sohn, C., Reitel, B. and Walther, O. (2009) Cross-border metropolitan integration in Europe: The case of Luxembourg, Basel, and Geneva. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 27(5), 922‒939. Taggart, P. A. (2000) Populism. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press. Torricelli, G. P. and Stephani, E. (2009) La cooperazione transfrontaliera in Svizzera. Mendrisio-Berna: Università della Svizzera Italiana. Upton, T. A. and Cohen, M. A. (2009) An approach to corpus-based discourse analysis: The move analysis as example. Discourse Studies, 11(5), 585‒605. Van Dijk, T. A. (1991) Racism and the press. London–New York: Routledge. Wodak, R. (2015) The politics of fear. London: Sage.

3. Convergence without conflict? Trans-border national-populist strategies in multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation Cecilia Biancalana and Oscar Mazzoleni 1. INTRODUCTION National populists often present themselves as defenders of their country’s national borders. One might easily assume that they oppose any collaboration with the defenders of other countries’ national borders, in particular when there is a conflict of interest between the parties. However, this rationale presumes that borders are merely a tool of separation and overlooks the possibility of conceiving them as a “space of contact” and of convergent interests (Raffestin and Guichonnet 1974; Raffestin 1992; Sohn and Scott 2018). Against this backdrop, this contribution aims to answer the following question: How is it possible for national populists to defend national borders while simultaneously avoiding conflict with their ideological counterparts on the other side of the border? National-populist parties face this dilemma. While they defend their own people – and this might explain why formal agreements between them may be difficult (Chiru and Wunsch 2021) – they have, at times, needed to deal directly with neighbouring populist parties that, in turn, are defending their own people. This happens, for instance, when Marine Le Pen demands stronger border controls between France and Italy but also has to cooperate with the Italian leader of the Lega when it comes to the EU elections. This also occurs inside the European Parliament, since right-wing MPs face a trade-off when they have to collaborate to influence supranational decision making and, at the same time, wish to defend their respective national interests. The dilemma is particularly relevant in critical situations when the politicisation of border issues reaches its apex. Examples of such moments in recent European history include the financial crisis, the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is probably the biggest crisis since the Second World War in 37

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terms of the increasing relevance of national and subnational borders, in contrast with the previous trend towards a borderless territory insofar as EU integration was concerned (Radil et al. 2021). Given the strategies adopted during the pandemic (Bobba and Hubé 2021), one might simply emphasise the opportunistic nature of national-populist actors (see Mudde 2004). According to this view, such actors would develop any possible strategy to reach their electoral goals. However, an exclusively “moral” approach does not help to understand how new different strategies arise nor how they contribute to achieving different goals. We argue that, for parties with a strong national-populist discourse, the dilemma between defending their “nation” and dealing with fellow parties is both a challenge and an opportunity for handling conflict without open antagonism in what we will call trans-border national-populist strategy. Managing apparently contradictory interests is not only a challenge for national-populist parties but also for all parties dealing with multi-dimensional spaces of mobilisation that enable them to blur policy orientations (Rovny 2013; Koedam 2021). In this respect, borderland areas present additional complexities because they also include cross-border scales (Perkmann and Sum 2002). What is specific to populists is the inherent ambivalence of their discourse, which allows parties and leaders to combine contrasting arguments and to play in a heterogeneous set of constituencies and scales (Canovan 1981; Biancalana and Mazzoleni 2020). This strategic ambivalence can be played not only within a single constituency by addressing supporters’ and voters’ heterogeneous interests but also across bounded constituencies, thereby helping to create original forms of alliances among parties and representatives with a trans-border populist strategy. There is a growing relevance of multi-scalar and cross-constituency spaces of mobilisation in contemporary democracies as political actors increasingly deal with issues related to different and interrelated scales. European integration is steadily putting transnational issues at the top of regional and national agendas. In the European Parliament, MPs of different countries, including populists, collaborate to reach common goals (McDonnell and Werner 2020). Thus, each party has to tackle and combine its agenda and issues within and across constituencies. On the one hand, they are helped by their constitutive ambivalence, but on the other hand, for national-populist parties, a trans-border strategy might be more complicated to achieve than for other parties, as their discourse usually emphasises national sovereignty against supranational powers. In certain circumstances, national-populist parties must also frame the interest of their constituencies against the interest of the constituencies defended by another populist party in a neighbouring country. In these cases, one might expect open

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conflict between the parties, but often this is not what happens – at least, not publicly. The scope of this contribution is to address this puzzle. We hypothesise that the possibility of cooperating to avoid open conflict, what we call a national-populist trans-border strategy, results not only from the ductility of populist discourse but also from the political opportunities of a multi-scalar space of mobilisation shaped by European integration and processes of globalisation. Creating convergences and avoiding open conflicts between national-populist parties in different countries is possible when we assume that parties run in a multi-scalar space of mobilisation, where they might adopt a “scale-jumping strategy” to define their in-group and out-group. To illustrate our argument, we focus on the borderland between Switzerland and Italy – an area where there has been significant cooperation, but also conflict, among national-populist parties in the past few decades. The chapter will be structured as follows. In section 2, we will discuss the concepts of transnational populism and international populism that have been used to study cross-national-populist collaboration; we will then outline the limits of these views and propose our conception of trans-border populism, based on its ambivalence and its adaptation to a multi-scalar space of mobilisation. In the empirical part, we will focus on the discourses of two parties located on either side of the Swiss–Italian border: the Swiss Lega dei Ticinesi (Ticino League, LdT) and a local branch of the Italian Lega (League),1 the one located in the province of Como, at the border with Switzerland. After summarising the historical relations of the two parties (section 3) and explaining our research design (section 4), we will analyse the discursive construction of the in-group and the out-group of the two parties in the first phase of the coronavirus outbreak (early to mid-2020). The coronavirus outbreak was one of the biggest crises of the past decade and involved the politicisation of border issues (see Chapter 2 in this book), as well as an opportunity to test the mutual relationship between neighbouring populist parties. Finally, we will summarise and discuss our findings (section 5).

2.

POPULISM IN A MULTI-SCALAR SPACE OF MOBILISATION

National-populist parties are increasingly successful and relevant in Europe, the US and other regions around the world. However, despite the growing scholarly interest in populism, research has tended to be confined to the national arena: Studies that consider the relationship between populist actors located in different countries, or scales different from the national one, are relatively rare. And yet, there are forms of populism beyond national boundaries.

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Two main perspectives have recently been suggested by scholars in political science: international populism and transnational populism. According to Moffitt (2017), who draws on the work of De Cleen (2017), international populism can be defined as international cooperation and coordination between national-populist parties or movements. When international populism occurs, internationalism is always secondary to nationalism. This is because international populism involves the creation of international ties between populist actors representing nation-based conceptions of the people rather than the construction of a transnational one. International populism happens, for instance, in the case of groupings of populist parties inside the European Parliament (McDonnell and Werner 2020). This is an increasingly relevant phenomenon. While populist parties, owing to their conflicting nationalist agendas, were previoulsy either dispersed into small and short-lived groups to secure funding or isolated among the non-attached members, McDonnell and Werner show that radical right populists are cooperating internationally more and more. International connections between radical right populists are increasing in both quantity and quality: In the 2014‒2019 European Parliament, more radical right populists were in parliamentary groups than ever before. This kind of international connection is favoured by some factors – for instance, the perception of the chief concern of radical right populists, immigration, as a European issue, especially after the 2015 refugee crisis. However, tight cooperation may also become a source for potential conflict among right-wing populist parties: for instance, in discussions regarding the distribution of refugees. However, despite the shared antipathy for the EU, national governments or migrants, national-populist parties usually aim to represent a nationally bounded constituency. But what happens when, besides the international cooperation and coordination, party leaders depict themselves not only as the saviours of their respective national “peoples” against elites and “others” but also as the saviours of a European people from the dangers posed by Islam? Here, their people are not merely national but transnational. According to De Cleen (2017), transnational populism is an attempt to discursively construct “the people” beyond national borders in opposition to national, international or transnational elites. Transnational populism constructs “a transnational people-as-underdog as a political subject that supersedes the boundaries of the nation-state, rather than merely linking up national people-as-underdogs” (ibid., 355). In transnational populism, people are spread over several different national contexts or at a level beyond the nation-state, and populist actors appeal to a transnational rather than a nationally bounded people. Yet, the current literature on international populism and transnational populism presents some limitations. The first is inherent in the definition of populism, which is assumed to be a stable and coherent discursive strategy. On

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the contrary, according to scholars such as Canovan (1981) and Wodak (2015), the two main characteristics of populism are ambivalence and ambiguity. According to Wodak, a typical trait of right-wing populism’s rhetoric is the “calculated ambivalence” of its discourse. Calculated ambivalence is defined as the phenomenon that one utterance carries at least two more or less contradictory meanings oriented towards at least two different audiences. This not only serves to simultaneously address multiple and contradictory audiences but also enables the speaker or writer to deny any responsibility for the content of their discourse (on populism and ambiguity, see Biancalana and Mazzoleni 2020). In this respect, to understand and unmask this strategy, a discursive and an extra-discursive dimension should be taken into consideration and disentangled. The second limitation of the current views on international and transnational populism is the underestimation of how complex the context of opportunities and constraints is in which populist actors perform their discourse. However, current political parties run not only on a single institutional scale (e.g. the national or the European one) but also in a multi-level environment (Detterbeck 2012; Braun and Schmitt 2020). Accordingly, we can argue that European parties have to compete and cooperate in a multi-scalar space of competition (MSC). But scales involve more than just institutional spaces. MSCs represent both bounded constituencies in which parties organise and compete for electoral consensus and the symbolic space in which their discourse displays and performs (Agnew 1997; Delaney 1997). The emergence of MSCs is the outcome of some structural transformations that European democracies are undergoing, such as urban changes and cross-border or transnational integration. MSCs result from the emergence of a multi-level kind of governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001), as well as globalisation processes and de-bordering/re-bordering logics (Popescu 2012; Schain 2019). Moreover, scales are not given and essentialised entities: Political parties can shape them with and through their own agenda and issues, disseminate their ideas and form alliances. For instance, parties can compete in a regional election but develop their own discursive strategies to deal with EU issues. Or they use local issues when campaigning for EU elections. MSCs involve an interplay between institutions, identities and interests, but they also favour multi-scalar discursive strategies. MSCs define new constraints and opportunities for both citizens and institutions, and national-populist parties gain growing opportunities to capitalise on citizens’ uncertainty and frustration in this multi-scalar environment. The combination of the chameleon-like features of populist discourse and a complex multi-scalar environment allows national-populists to shift from one scale to another without worrying about the consistency of their discourse. They jump between different scales and continuously redefine their constituency, favour-

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ing the emergence of a trans-border strategy. This strategy serves to avoid open contrast with neighbouring allies when conflicts arise. When this does happen, party leaders and representatives might easily jump to an alternative scale, constructing the people or blaming enemies at a regional, national or supranational scale. Accordingly, neighbouring national-populist parties can avoid antagonism if they recognise a common interest at a different scale. National-populists’ trans-border strategy is possible because MSCs help to minimise the contrasts between actors running in different but neighbouring constituencies. At the same time, the configuration of constraints and opportunities, as well as the relevance of each MSC, is territorially dependent. MSCs have peculiar features in cross-border regions where socio-economic integration is particularly high and cross-border interactions transform the meaning of national borders. In these kinds of regions, divergent interests (e.g. in terms of competition and uneven well-being) are always, to some extent, counterbalanced by dependences and shared interests across constituencies. National-populist parties located in European borderlands primarily compete in their specific constituencies, which are regional or national. At the same time, their representatives and leaders use various communication channels to embrace a larger set of scales, as they address not only regional and national issues but also cross-border, cross-national and international issues characterised by a divergence of interests with a multi-level set of in-groups and out-groups.

3.

TWO LEAGUES ACROSS THE BORDER

In this contribution, we focus on the European borderland that both divides and connects Switzerland and Italy. This cross-border area consists of the Ticino canton in southern Switzerland and some provinces of the northern Italian regions of Piemonte and Lombardy. The Italian–Swiss borderland is one of the most integrated regions in Western Europe. Italy and southern Switzerland share a common language, and more than 70,000 Italian workers cross the border daily. What is also crucial is that two successful regionalist parties with populist and nationalist stances (Mazzoleni and Ruzza 2018) are firmly rooted on both sides of the Swiss–Italian border: the Italian Lega and the Swiss Lega dei Ticinesi (LdT). The two parties have developed a complex net of interactions over the past 30 years. The Lega was founded (as Lega Nord, Northern League) in 1989, and the LdT in 1991. Both have proved an enduring capacity to mobilise voters and perform well in elections (Biorcio 2010; Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). We can distinguish three periods in their relationship. The first phase of their relationship (1991‒1993) is characterised by a unidirectional influence from the Lega to the LdT. The latter was born in the wake of the success of the Lega and adopted a similar language and style (Albertazzi

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2006). However, some differences also emerged, as the LdT defended not only regional interests but also Switzerland’s national sovereignty against European integration; at the same time, the ethno-regionalist Lega was in favour of the European Union and against the central national power (Rome). During this period, direct contacts between the two parties were sporadic. The second phase (1993‒2005) was characterised by distance: As a member of the national coalition inside the Berlusconi governments, the Lega was more oriented towards the “centre”, while the LdT was more oriented towards the north, that is Bern, the national political centre, and mainly mobilised on federal referendums on Swiss‒EU relations and centre‒periphery issues. In this second phase, the relevance of the cross-regional border scale was limited as each party’s agenda was concentrated on issues within the national borders. The third phase (2005‒present) is characterised by closeness between the two parties. Two structural changes explain this increasing closeness. The first is related to a change in Italian electoral rules. For the first time, in 2006, Italian residents in Ticino (about 100,000 out of 320,000 residents) could vote in a foreign country without going to Italy, and some candidates for the Italian parliament started competing in the newly created foreign constituency. This shift brought Italian party leaders, including those of the Lega, to Switzerland (in particular, to Ticino) for the electoral campaign. The second structural change was the strong de-bordering trend taking place due to the implementation of the bilateral agreement between Switzerland and the EU. In 2002, the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons (AFMP) between Switzerland and the European Union entered into force, boosting the economic competition in the labour market of the Swiss‒Italian border. Since then, Italian workers have been increasingly attracted by higher Swiss wages, while residents in southern Switzerland have faced the issue of wage dumping. In this context of greater cross-border integration, the links between Lega and LdT intensified, and leaders started to meet. For example, in March 2005, around 500 Lega members from the neighbouring Italian provinces met their leader, Umberto Bossi, and two Lega ministers in Lugano; they were welcomed by the highest authorities of the city and the canton of Ticino, as well as the LdT’s leader, Giuliano Bignasca.2 Both parties have also been confronted with polarising political issues across the Swiss–Italian border. The most important controversy occurred in 2009‒2010. Italy exerted strong pressure against the Swiss financial system, in particular with regard to bank secrecy. The city of Lugano, in Ticino, was the centre of financial flows from Italy. During that period, the Italian government was particularly active in the fight against tax evasion. In response, the LdT, which formed part of the cantonal government, opposed the agreement between the Italian and Swiss national governments that allows tax revenues of Italian cross-border workers employed in Switzerland to reach Italy. The

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agreement, which had been signed in the 1970s, required Swiss authorities to annually send a share of the taxes coming from the Italian cross-border workers’ wages to Italy (Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). In financial controversies, the Lega and the LdT seemed to have opposing stances, defending the respective constituencies and minimising at the same time their reciprocal contrasts. During the controversies, however, the Lega played a seemingly contradictory role: It defended Italian cross-border workers in Switzerland while also entertaining friendly relations with the LdT. Although the Lega participated in the Italian government, on this particular issue it did not criticise the LdT, arguing that the Swiss–Italian agreement was less a financial gain for the northern Italian regions than an illegitimate benefit for central bureaucracy in Rome. The same occurred for the LdT, as it asked for reprisal against the Italian government, while it continued to publicly show its closeness to the Lega (Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). For instance, the leaders of the two parties met in Lugano in February 2010 to discuss the future of their territories and the controversies regarding financial issues. They concluded the meeting by agreeing that good relations across regional borders take priority over the interests of either country’s national capital.3 Blaming their respective central governments for their anti-regional policies, the Lega and LdT were able to manage their “contradictory” posture when communicating with their supporters (Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017, 181). A similar scale-jumping strategy is also provided when both target the EU aiming to defend national sovereignty as a condition for regional autonomy (Mazzoleni and Ruzza 2018), as the Lega has done in recent years. During the refugee crisis of 2015‒2016, the Swiss–Italian border became the space for new controversial issues. The LdT regularly sought to suspend, at least temporarily, the Schengen and Dublin treaties, thereby aiming to stop the flow of refugees from Italy. The party’s leader and member of the cantonal government of Ticino, Norman Gobbi, said, “If the influx of migrants continues at this pace, we will have to close the border temporarily. Only in this way will we be able to exert pressure on countries that are not doing their duty”.4 The implicit reference was to Italy, which for months had refused to scrupulously register the applicants as required by the Dublin agreement, and to France, which effectively sealed the border at Ventimiglia. However, when Gobbi met the leader of the Lega, Matteo Salvini, in Milan in 2017, neither of them discussed the contrast around the Swiss–Italian border but did agree that a relevant problem in Europe is “illegal immigration”. Both criticised the EU’s role in external border control.5 How was it possible for the two parties to defend their interests while avoiding conflict with neighbouring fellow parties? Overall, what is worth underlining is that the closer relationship between the two leagues has not

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implied antagonism thus far, not even in critical moments when each party had to defend contrasting interests (Lamour 2020). Does this configuration also apply to the most recent crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic? This moment represents one of the biggest crises of the past decade and involved the politicisation of border issues (see Chapter 2). It also served as a testing ground for the mutual relationship between neighbouring national-populist parties. To avoid an explicit contrast with neighbouring allies, we hypothesise that, once again, national-populist parties made use of a trans-border strategy to jump between different scales, construct the people or blame enemies at regional, national or supranational scales.

4.

RESEARCH DESIGN

For this contribution, we decided to focus especially on the first stage of the pandemic. In the first months of 2020, the spread of the coronavirus led to the closure of borders between Italy and Switzerland, as in many other European countries (Radil et al. 2021). The borders between the two countries were closed for everyone except those with a work permit in Switzerland (like cross-border workers). Moreover, because of the proximity with Italy and, in particular, with Lombardy, the epicentre of the pandemic in Europe in early 2020, Ticino was the first canton to record a COVID-19 infection on 25 February 2020. Consequently, a debate over the “Italian” origins of the virus and the consequences of cross-border integration on the economy and public health of Switzerland and Italy arose, involving representatives of the two parties (see Chapter 2 in this book). For the empirical part of this research, we will use the discourse-historical approach (DHA) developed by Ruth Wodak. While, generally speaking, in the critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, discourse is considered social practice (i.e. the institutional and social context is believed to shape and affect discourse, and to be in turn influenced by it), in the DHA, the historical dimension of discourse is particularly considered in order to integrate as much available information as possible regarding the historical background in which the discourses are embedded (Wodak et al. 2009). The focus on the extra-discursive elements will help us to contextualise the discourse and evaluate how national-populist parties use it to avoid the antagonism that is present at the level of the concrete political struggle. Our source is the two parties’ direct communication. For the Lega dei Ticinesi, we used the party’s newspaper, Il Mattino della Domenica, as the source of information. By contrast, regarding the Italian Lega, we used the Facebook page of the Lega of the province of Como, a province located at the border with Switzerland, where the Lega is particularly strong. We collected data covering the period from 1 January 2020 to 31 August 2020 – in other

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words, the first phases of the pandemic, just before the beginning of the second wave. During this period, we selected texts with two main criteria: the politicisation of the COVID-19 issue and a direct or indirect reference to the border. By politicisation, we mean the inclusion of the COVID-19 issue in the political debate and the structuring of contentious narratives over it. Regarding the border, we mean not only questions related to border control but also broader issues related to the free movement of persons or European integration (see Chapter 2). In these discourses, the border is mobilised not only as a physical artefact but also as a symbolic device that divides “us” from “the others”. With these criteria, 65 documents were selected: 29 from Il Mattino della Domenica and 36 from the Facebook page of the Lega of the province of Como. The selected texts were coded and analysed with the help of the software MAXQDA. In the studies on populism carried out with the CDA approach (Wodak 2015), the main aim of our coding was to identify how “the people” (the in-group) and “the enemies of the people” (the out-group) were constructed and labelled in the parties’ discourse. As our analysis focuses on discourses, the units of analysis are not single words but segments that correspond to the sequences of utterances and sentences, distinct propositions, topics or communicative functions in a text (Upton and Cohen 2009).

5.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE IN-GROUP AND OUT-GROUP AND THE SCALE-JUMPING STRATEGY

We know that populist discourse “divides the world into good and bad, into ‘us’ and ‘them’, insiders and outsiders, by constructing simplistic dichotomies and by positive self- and negative other-presentation” (Wodak 2015, 67). Therefore, our aim in the first place is to present the categories that have been used most often to define each party’s in-group and out-group and to show whether and how we can detect a scale-jumping strategy in the two parties’ discourse. Concerning the LdT, the oft-mentioned in-groups are: (1) the regional and (2) national communities of both Ticino and Switzerland. Other mentioned in-groups are (3) local workers and (4) local/small businesses. Against the backdrop of the economic crisis and rising immigration, along with the number of cross-border workers, these economic actors are seen as being at a disadvantage in the context of the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic. Finally, (5) Austria is presented positively as a country that quickly closed its border with Italy during the first phase of the pandemic. In the discourse of the Italian Lega, the in-group is represented by: (1) the national community (Italy and the Italians), (2) cross-border workers, (3) the party itself (i.e. both on the national level and in local and regional institu-

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tions). Finally, (4) the people and (5) businesses of Como are also evoked as the in-group in the party’s discourse. The identification of the national community as the main positive pole of the discourse is in line with the recent transformation of the Lega from a regionalist party rooted in the north of the country to a national actor (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). Nevertheless, as it is a local branch of the party, the local people are also mentioned. Cross-border workers are mentioned as the in-group in the Lega’s discourse. This is an important point that differentiates the Italian actor from its Swiss counterpart, as in this case, cross-border workers are part of the constituency that has to be defended and perceived as part of the people. This also poses a dilemma for the Lega, a party that used to demand the closing of borders (and still does so in relation to migrants coming from the global south) but, in this case, wants Italy’s border – at least, its border with Switzerland – to be open, thereby offering support to Italian workers. With regard to the out-group, the most oft-mentioned categories in the discourse of the Swiss party are: (1) the federal government, (2) cross-border workers, (3) politicians and parties, (4) the Italian government and (5) the European Union. In the discourse of the Lega, the most mentioned enemy is (1) the Italian government, followed by (2) illegal migrants, (3) criminals, (4) COVID-19 positive migrants and (5) the European Union. The Italian government is blamed for not doing enough to protect the interests of cross-border workers, who, as we have seen, are included in the in-group by the Italian party, and for failing to halt immigration during the pandemic. We see a commonality between the two parties in that each one blames its national government and the EU. Therefore, we hypothesise that the scale-jumping strategy, in this case, worked as follows: During the pandemic, the main scale of conflict for the two parties was cross-border in nature: The Lega considered cross-border workers an in-group, while the Lega dei Ticinesi viewed them as an out-group. This is due to both the long-term social and economic issues related to the high integration, as discussed above, and to the “Italian” origin of the virus as Lombardy was the first European region to be seriously affected by the pandemic. However, in their discourse, the two parties did not mention the other party; instead, they blamed their respective national governments and the European Union for the situation or shifted their focus to migrants from the global south. In the next section, we will see concretely how the parties did so. 5.1

Cross-Border Scale as a Space of Conflict

During the pandemic, the cross-border scale became a scale of conflict for the two parties. On the one hand, owing to the initial outbreak of the pandemic in Lombardy, the LdT urged that the border be closed. Although this subse-

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quently happened, people with a work permit (i.e. cross-border workers) were still allowed to enter the country. The narrative of the virus “imported” from Lombardy would long continue in the party’s discourse. The feared coronavirus is spreading in Lombardy. The number of reported cases continues to grow. Several Italian municipalities, a stone’s throw from us, have already been placed “in isolation”. The closure of schools and shops has been decreed. Events are prohibited for one week. Since Ticino is invaded every day by 70,000 cross-border workers and several thousand independent workers (padroncini), some questions arise spontaneously. For example, how many of these workers come from the areas where the epidemic is spreading? (Il Mattino della Domenica, 23 February 2020) Perhaps someone has already forgotten that Ticino has been INFECTED due to the open borders with Lombardy, the West’s main coronavirus outbreak. Borders that the federal government and the Europhile parties have hysterically refused to close in time. (Il Mattino della Domenica, 14 June 2020)

In the first example, the party blames cross-border workers for both the alleged economic disaster of the canton and the spread of the virus in Switzerland. However, in the second one, we see that the Swiss government and parties in favour of European integration are blamed for the situation – rhetoric that will be repeated in the excerpt below. On the other side of the border, and in parallel, the Italian Lega expressed concern for cross-border workers’ safety and work conditions, criticising Switzerland both during the first phase of the pandemic and when activities resumed. The Lega avoided speaking about the role of the LdT in the government of Ticino. The LdT is the dominant party in the canton, and one of its representatives (Norman Gobbi), is in charge of the border security policies in the cantonal government. Unfortunately, we must highlight how the measures taken yesterday by Switzerland are completely inadequate to deal with a global pandemic. The decision to keep open, albeit with some limitations, most commercial activities, bars, restaurants, discos and meeting places not only represents an unjustifiable risk in the light of the enormous risks of expanding the contagion on the European territory but also seriously puts at risk the safety and health of the thousands of Italian cross-border workers who make up the majority of the workforce employed in the border territories. (Lega provinciale di Como, Facebook post, 14 March 2020) The situation that our cross-border workers working in Switzerland are facing these days is truly unsustainable. The resumption of numerous economic and professional activities in the Swiss cantons, while keeping minor crossings closed and strengthening customs controls, creates a funnel effect that forces thousands of Italian workers into impressive queues every day, in many cases even hours, despite the distances of only a few kilometres that they have to travel. Cross-border workers

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feel abandoned by the government. (Lega provincial di como, Facebook post, 29 April 2020)

However, in the case of the Italian Lega, although Switzerland is mentioned, it is the national government that is blamed for the situation. How do the two parties avoid potential conflict regarding the cross-border area? 5.2

Avoiding Conflict by Blaming National and Global Enemies

While in the case of the in-group, the discourses of the two parties seem to be in conflict, the scale-jumping strategy appears in the definition of the out-group. We see that both parties blame their respective national governments and political classes. National governments are considered guilty of cross-border problems. For instance, the Swiss federal government is said to have allowed Italian cross-border workers to cross the border during the pandemic. The “policy of open borders” – rather than the cross-border workers themselves – is the cause of the arrival of the pandemic in Ticino. The government is blamed for not having closed the border with Italy and for having re-opened it too soon, for being dominated by Europe and for showing weakness vis-à-vis Italy. When the whole of Europe is finally opening its eyes to the seriousness of the coronavirus situation, the EU waiters in the Federal Council continue not to care about the health of the people of Ticino and, consequently, of all other Swiss citizens. For them, the devastating free movement of persons comes before public health emergencies! It is clear that in Bern, someone, despite (verbal) assurances to the contrary, in order not to close the borders with Italy, is imagining isolating Ticino from the rest of Switzerland. (Il Mattino della Domenica, 15 March 2020) Given that the re-opening of the Schengen area’s internal borders was scheduled for 6 July, and given that countries like Austria are not thinking about opening their borders with Italy at all, it is clear that, once again, Bern, anticipating the times, surrendered in front of Italy. It should be remembered that Italy unilaterally opened its borders without consulting with anyone and only for its own interests. After that, it immediately began to put pressure on the Swiss, expecting that they would do the same. The Swiss resistance did not last very long. (Il Mattino della Domenica, 7 June 2020)

This is also true for the party in Italy. According to the Italian Lega, the Italian government is to blame for having abandoned the country’s cross-border workers (as we have seen in the previous paragraph). But in the discourse of the local party, we find a critique of the government also with regard to other migration-related issues. Migrants are indeed viewed as being part of the out-group, also because they are perceived as a vehicle for contagion. While the health of cross-border workers who have to cross the border with Switzerland has to be protected (as they could be infected in the foreign country), the health

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of Italian citizens must be protected from an external threat, just as the health of the people of Ticino is endangered by cross-border workers. The government and the Minister of the Interior must not dare to transfer other illegal immigrants to Lombardy and the province of Como. (…) There are irresponsible people in the government who have underestimated the immigration problem, which is now a real social and health bomb ready to explode in local communities. Migrants’ arrivals have increased dramatically, almost 14,000 since the beginning of the year, and over 6,000 in July alone. These data are alarming. The number of migrant centres in Sicily are rising sharply, and the government has decided to distribute illegal immigrants, in some cases who have tested positive for COVID-19, around Italy, creating unease and tension with mayors and local communities. The Lega will continue to oppose these irresponsible and unfortunate choices and decisions by all means. (Lega provinciale di Como, Facebook post, 1 August 2020)

However, with respect to the issue of the closing of the borders during the first phase of the pandemic and the re-opening of borders after the lockdown, the Swiss LdT also sees Italy’s government as the enemy. The LdT blames Italy for demanding that cross-border workers be allowed to continue to work, while Swiss people cannot go to Italy. At a later stage, LdT blamed Italy for having re-opened the border too quickly. Switzerland, by contrast, is not seen as part of the out-group by the Italian party, nor by the LdT, the main promoter of closing the borders with Italy. Italy has unilaterally decided to open its borders on 3 June, even though the health situation in Lombardy is anything but under control and despite what is happening in the Schengen area, where there is talk of gradual re-openings starting in mid-June, depending on how the situation evolves. The Italian goal is clear: to attract a few tourists for the benefit of its economy. It was already in bad shape before the coronavirus, and now Italy no longer even has eyes to cry. (…). Understandably, Italy does its own business. After all, each country must be free to decide when to open and when to close its borders. But if you try to impose your decisions on us, we won’t like it at all. Instead, this is exactly what happens. Because Italy expects that we will open borders too. (Il Mattino della Domenica, 24 May 2020)

Interestingly, the two parties point out the problems that living across the regional border pose to citizens and workers. Both the Lega and LdT blame the Italian government – the Italians because of the closing of the crossings (even though here it would be Switzerland, and in particular the LdT, to blame, as we have seen), and the Swiss because Italy wants Italian cross-border workers to enter the country while closing the border to Swiss citizens. The government had forgotten the existence of cross-border workers and the problems that the COVID emergency has created for those who have their loved ones on the other side of a border, be it national or regional. Our League MPs had

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to intervene (…) to ensure that these issues were addressed in the parliament room. (Lega provinciale di Como, 15 May 2020) The Italians expect us to open the crossings, from the first to the last, to allow all cross-border workers to enter. Instead, Italy does not let a pin in. Those who have relatives on the other side of the border cannot go and visit them. (Lega provinciale di Como, 10 May 2020)

We have seen that the first scale-jumping strategy involves blaming and shifting attention to the national scale – in particular, blaming national governments. But in line with the populist traits of the two parties, another common enemy at a “greater” scale is the European Union, which further embeds their Euroscepticism (Mazzoleni and Ruzza 2018): We continue to ask for the precautionary suspension of the Schengen agreement and the closure of all non-essential establishments on our territory; in the same way, it is essential that the government monitor and intervene to protect the safety of Italians in neighbouring countries as well. Only in this way can we build brick by brick, from below, a European safe zone that Brussels has failed to prepare from the top of its bureaucracies. (Lega provinciale di Como, 14 March 2020) Brussels uses the excuse of the virus to take away even more power from individual states by saying that “coordinated measures” are needed, and they say without shame that “more of Europe” is needed against the coronavirus. Officers not elected by anyone grab power by taking it away from citizens. This is a scandalous tactic to undermine national sovereignty. Because then, once the competences for some reason have moved to Brussels, they never go back. (Il Mattino della Domenica, 1 March 2020)

6.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A TRANS-BORDER NATIONAL POPULISM?

This contribution sought a better understanding of the relationship between two national-populist parties located on either side of a national border in a highly integrated area by analysing their discourse. With a single case study, we examined how national populists can defend national borders while simultaneously avoiding conflict with neighbouring fellow parties. The case of the Swiss–Italian cross-border region, where a long-term relationship exists between two regionalist parties with rather opposite constituencies, represents an interesting case study. We have shown that, to date, the relationship between the Italian Lega and the Swiss Lega of Ticinesi has not implied antagonism – not even during critical moments when each party had to defend contrasting interests, like the fiscal controversies of 2009‒2010 and the refugee crisis. The parties have managed to cooperate and create convergences while avoiding open conflict because of the ductility of populist discourse and

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the political opportunities of a multi-scalar space of mobilisation shaped by European integration and processes of globalisation. Multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation facilitate the parties’ scale-jumping strategies in the definition of the in-group and out-group. These kinds of jumping strategies make it possible to avoid any open conflict between national-populist parties on different sides of the border, neutralising potentially antagonistic positions and policies of the neighbouring party and aiming to maintain a trustful reciprocal relation by identifying common supranational enemies. Our study of the coronavirus crisis in 2020 confirmed the existence of this strategy. The scale-jumping strategy in the case considered worked as follows: Owing to long-term economic issues and the “Italian” origin of the virus, the main scale of conflict for the two parties is the cross-border one. However, in their discourse, the two parties blame their own national governments, the European Union or shift the focus to migrants from the global south. In the case of the coronavirus outbreak, this strategy allows the two parties to blame actors located at different scales – the governments, on the national scale, and the EU, on the supranational scale – instead of accusing their counterpart on the other side of the border. Through this case study, we have seen how national-populist parties mobilise their constituencies by using different scales, developing at the same time cross-border relationships with neighbouring national-populist actors in the name of anti-establishment and Eurosceptic claims. Ambivalent scale-jumping strategies tend to legitimise a sort of trans-border national-populism: a defence of national sovereignty, a criticism of supranational powers and, simultaneously, the possibility of collaboration across the borders. As these kinds of opportunities and constraints involve all parties, scale-jumping strategies are not specific to populism. However, the chameleon-like features of populism and the ambiguity of populist discourse in defining the in-group and the out-group help national-populist parties, more than others, to manage convergent strategies and divergent interests. The ambiguity inherent in populism makes it possible to understand the relations between national populists but also the reasons for this kind of non-antagonistic strategy.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

Note that until 2017 the party was called Lega Nord (Northern League, LN). For the sake of clarity, in this contribution we will refer to this party as Lega, even when dealing with events that occured during the period before the name change. Le camicie Verdi Marciano su Lugano, Swissinfo, 6 March 2005 https://​www​ .swissinfo​.ch/​ita/​le​-​-camicie​-verdi​-​-marciano​-su​-lugano/​4395664. Incontro a Lugano tra Bossi e Bignasca. I leader delle due leghe hanno discusso della questione fiscale e dei rapporti tra il Canton Ticino e le province

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4. 5.

53

confinanti, Varese News, 2 February 2010, http://​www3​.varesenews​.it/​insubria/​ articolo​.php​?id​=​163112; Ministro Bossi in visita leghista in Svizzera, Swissinfo, 29 March 2009, https://​www​.swissinfo​.ch/​ita/​ministro​-bossi​-in​-visita​-leghista​-in​ -svizzera/​7303566. Tessin stellt Schliessung der Grenze in Aussicht, NZZ, 21 June 2015, https://​ www​.nzz​ . ch/​ n zzas/​ n zz​ -am​ -sonntag/​ tessin​-stellt​-schliessung​-der​-grenze ​-in​ -aussicht​-1​.18566493​?reduced​=​true. Salvini: “In Italia è in atto una sostituzione etnica”, TvSvizzera, 15 February 2017, https://​www​.tvsvizzera​.it/​tvs/​immigrazione​-clandestina​_salvini​-in​-italia​-è​ -in​-atto​-una​-sostituzione​-etnica/​42961900.

REFERENCES Agnew, J. (1997) The dramaturgy of horizons: Geographical scale in the “Reconstruction of Italy” by the new Italian political parties, 1992‒1995. Political Geography, 16(2), 99‒121. Albertazzi, D. (2006) The Lega dei Ticinesi: The embodiment of populism. Politics, 26(2), 133‒139. Biancalana, C. and Mazzoleni, O. (2020) Unifying and multiplying the people: The strategy of ambiguity in national-populist discourse within a cross-border area. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 26(3), 279‒298. Biorcio R. (2010) La rivincita del Nord. La Lega dalla contestazione al governo. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Bobba, G. and Hubé, N. (eds) (2021) Populism and the politicization of the COVID-19 crisis in Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Braun, D. and Schmitt, H. (2020) Different emphases, same positions? The election manifestos of political parties in the EU multilevel electoral system compared. Party Politics, 26(5), 640‒650. Canovan, M. (1981) Populism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. Chiru, M. and Wunsch, N. (2021) Democratic backsliding as a catalyst for polity-based contestation? Populist radical right cooperation in the European Parliament. Journal of European Public Policy, online first. De Cleen, B. (2017) Populism and nationalism. In: Kaltwasser, C. R., Taggart, P. A., Espejo, P. O. and Ostiguy, P. (eds) The Oxford handbook of populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 342‒362. Delaney D. (1997) The political construction of scale. Political Geography, 16(2), 93‒97. Detterbeck K. (2012) Multi-level party politics in Western Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2001) Multi-level governance and European integration. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Koedam, J. (2021) Avoidance, ambiguity, alternation: Position blurring strategies in multidimensional party competition. European Union Politics, online first. Lamour, C. (2020) The league of leagues: Meta-populism and the “chain of equivalence” in a cross-border Alpine area. Political Geography, 81, 102207. Mazzoleni, O. and Mueller, S. (2017) Cross-border integration through contestation? Political parties and media in the Swiss–Italian borderland. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 32(2), 173‒192.

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Mazzoleni, O. and Ruzza, C. (2018) Combining regionalism and nationalism: The Lega in Italy and the Lega dei Ticinesi in Switzerland. Comparative European Politics, 16(6), 976‒992. McDonnell, D. and Werner, A. (2020) International populism: The radical right in the European Parliament. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moffitt, B. (2017) Transnational populism? Representative claims, media and the difficulty of constructing a transnational “people”. Javnost – The Public, 24(4), 409‒425. Mudde, C. (2004) The populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541‒563. Passarelli, G. and Tuorto, D. (2018) La Lega di Salvini. Bologna: Il Mulino. Perkmann, M. and Sum, N. (2002) Globalization, regionalization and cross-border regions: Scales, discourses and governance. In: Perkmann, M. and Sum, N. (eds) Globalization, regionalization, and cross-border regions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 3‒21. Popescu, G. (2012) Bordering and ordering the twenty-first century: Understanding Borders. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Radil M. S., Castan Pinos, J. and Ptak, T. (2021) Borders resurgent: towards a post-COVID-19 global border regime? Space and Polity, 25(1), 132‒140. Raffestin, C. (1992) Autour de la fonction sociale de la frontière. Espaces et Sociétés, 70/71, 157‒164. Raffestin, C. and Guichonnet, P. (1974) Géographie des frontières. Paris: PUF. Rovny, J. (2013) Where do radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition. European Political Science Review, 5(1), 1‒26. Schain, M. A. (2019) The border: Policy and politics in Europe and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sohn, C. and Scott, J. (2018) The symbolic role of an invisible border in the Genevan borderscape. In: Scott, J. W. (ed.) Cross-border review: Yearbook 2018. Budapest: Central European Institute of Cross-Border Studies, 67‒92. Upton, T. A., and Cohen, M. A. (2009) An approach to corpus-based discourse analysis: The move analysis as example. Discourse Studies, 11(5), 585‒605. Wodak, R. (2015) The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (2009) The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

4. Framing the people and the elites: two models of national-populist border politicisation. The case of the Geneva and Basel cross-border regions Grégoire Yerly 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past few decades, globalisation has led to some territorial reconfigurations. An important example is European integration, which has profoundly changed the understanding of territorial borders because of the increased mobility of people, goods, capital and services (Anderson and O’Dowd 1999; Brenner 2004; Jensen and Richardson 2004; Lamour 2014). Accordingly, territorial borders should not be considered merely as static manifestations or territorial dividing lines but as complex, multi-scalar, multi-dimensional and dynamic entities constantly being (re)negotiated by different actors at different levels and in different contexts and locations (Andersen and Klatt 2016; Scott 2020). In this context, political dynamics are no longer contained by national borders, as they are built around multiple scales through a logic of spatial rescaling induced by global transnational fluxes that crisscross state territories (Laine 2016; Casaglia 2020). Understanding borders as multi-scalar entities breaks away from the taken-for-granted state-centricity approach of territorial borders as objective facts, first, by reconceptualising them as realities dependent on perceptions, experiences and negotiations (Rumford 2012), and second, by exploring them as entities that are evolving and changing because of globalisation processes (Balibar 2002; Perrier Bruslé 2013). This changing perspective has fostered a territorial restructuring of politics by revitalising sub-state political arenas in which political parties play a relevant role, as they nurture regional political mobilisations (Hepburn 2009; Detterbeck 2012; Keating 2014; Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). Political parties are operating in multi-level electoral systems and have to deal with multiple – from regional to national and supranational – political arenas 55

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(Deschouwer 2003). As argued by Hepburn (2014) and Amat et al. (2020), territorial mobilisation is closely interlinked with party organisational structures. Thus, the decentralisation of party organisations stimulates the politicisation of regional policy outcomes. This also affects national-populist parties, which have to adapt their ideological supply to regional characteristics in order to reach their constituency (Detterbeck and Hepburn 2010; Heinisch et al. 2020). The ideological supply defines the core positions that parties provide on specific issues during election campaigns in their party platforms (Braun and Schmitt 2020; Gross and Jankowski 2020). While national-populist parties can be considered as actors participating in the (re)production and given meaning of borders (Brambilla 2015; see also Chapter 2 in this book), the intertwined relation between populism and borders have only recently been addressed, albeit rarely (Casaglia et al. 2020; Scott 2020). Academic research provides few empirical studies on how national-populist parties deal with territorial borders according to their ideological supply. However, the changing understanding of territorial borders and the restructuring of politics have favoured national-populist parties evolving in European cross-border regions (CBRs) to discursively politicise borders. CBRs demonstrate an increasing socio-economic interdependence in which there are new structures of opportunities for political action (Perkmann and Sum 2002): CBRs are more and more embedded in transnational territorial logics in which economic and symbolic resources are shared across territorial borders (Perkmann 2007; Sohn 2016; Varol and Soylemez 2018). In this sense, CBRs represent peculiar multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation where political parties need to adapt and respond to several loci of decision making at different territorial levels (Sassen 2006; Perrier Bruslé 2013; Laine 2016; Mazzoleni 2017). National-populist parties evolving in CBRs have to address multiple scales in order to take into consideration the identities and belongings of territorially bounded communities (see the introduction of this book). Against this background, this chapter aims to understand how sub-state branches of national-populist parties in CBRs contribute to symbolically politicising borders through multiple scales according to their ideological supply. To explore this issue, I analyse how national-populist sub-state parties discursively frame the people and the elites. Indeed, they construct a Manichean division between the people and the elites, or the establishment, as scapegoats pursuing their own interests and dealing with transnational and global institutions (Pelinka 2013; Wodak 2017). By framing the “true” people in opposition to corrupt elites, national-populist parties discursively legitimise a symbolic border between “us” and “them”. Consequently, they contribute to symbolically politicise borders by reproducing territorial logics through in-group and out-group membership categorisation (Wodak 2015; Basile and Mazzoleni 2020; Casaglia et al. 2020). In this chapter, I show that two models

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of border politicisation arise, depending on the contextual socio-political and territorial settings. The analysis focuses on the two CBRs of Geneva and Basel, which are considered to be among the most functionally integrated in Europe (Durand et al. 2020). Furthermore, the analysis examines sub-state cantonal branches of the national-populist Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP): the Geneva SVP, the Basel-City SVP and the Basel-Country SVP. The corpus includes the party manifestos of the aforementioned sub-state cantonal parties during the most recent cantonal elections. These sub-state party manifestos are a compelling and reliable source that can be used to understand the ideological supply provided by political parties at the regional level (Braun and Schmitt 2020; Gross and Jankowski 2020). The analysis is carried out by using the discourse historical approach (DHA). The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 shows the intertwined relation between decentralised party organisational structures and sub-state political mobilisation. It also considers two distinct models of national-populist border politicisation. Section 3 provides contextual information about the Geneva and Basel CBRs, as well as the SVP sub-state cantonal parties. Section 4 introduces the study’s methodology and research design. Section 5 empirically explores how national-populist sub-state parties contribute to symbolically politicising borders through multiple scales by presenting two distinct models of national-populist border politicisation. The concluding section summarises the results and gives some perspectives for future research.

2.

TWO MODELS OF NATIONAL-POPULIST BORDER POLITICISATION?

Globalisation has led to (re)configurations in territoriality emerging from new patterns of mobility, communication and regulation through the increased mobility of people, goods, capital and services (Anderson and O’Dowd 1999; Brenner 2004; Jensen and Richardson 2004; Lamour 2014). In this context, a territorial restructuring of politics and society has taken place, while supranational integration such as the European integration process has provided new opportunities for transnational configurations (Perkmann and Sum 2002). The nation-state cannot be merely considered the primary level for territorial politics. Instead, territorial politics has been decentralised across several territorial levels (Swenden and Maddens 2008; Keating 2021). In addition, the weakening of national barriers has generated a rescaling of political mobilisation through different scales:1 regional, national, interstate, international, European and cross-border (Sassen 2006; Mazzoleni 2017). Thus, political parties are operating in multi-layered democratic settings in which regional and local

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territories have to be considered (Hough and Jeffery 2006; Detterbeck 2012; Heinisch et al. 2020). The next section aims to emphasise how sub-state political mobilisation is closely interlinked with party organisational structures. 2.1

National-Populist Parties’ Organisational Structures: Between Centralisation and Decentralisation

As territorial restructuring has led to a revitalisation of sub-state political arenas, political parties have a greater incentive to nurture regional political mobilisation (Hepburn 2009; Detterbeck 2012; Keating 2014; Mazzoleni and Mueller 2017). This is crucial for state-wide parties, for which decentralisation at the regional level stimulates a politicisation of regional policy outcomes (Hepburn 2014; Amat et al. 2020). Consequently, parties’ organisational structures depend on exogenous multi-level configurations, and state-wide parties evolving in multi-level political systems must adapt to regional characteristics to foster their interests (Detterbeck and Hepburn 2010; Heinisch et al. 2020). This is especially relevant for state-wide parties in federal states. As they are evolving in multi-level electoral systems, they compete for regional elections in which their ideological supply must be adapted to the regional context to reach their constituency (Fabre 2008; Müller 2013; Hepburn 2014). In a Western European comparative perspective, Heinisch and Mazzoleni (2016, 227‒232) differentiate between various state-wide national-populist parties’ organisational structures according to their institutional traditions and legacies. While some state-wide parties such as the Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN) in France, the Lega (League) in Italy, the Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party, FrP) in Norway, the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest, VB) in Belgium and the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats, SD) are strongly centralised and structured at the national level, other state-wide parties such as the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ) and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP) can be labelled as decentralised according to the significant autonomy given to sub-state branches at the regional level. Against this Western European backdrop, two opposite tendencies seem to arise (see Amat et al. 2020): on the one hand, the predominance of state-wide parties that are strongly centralised at the national level, which are more inclined to provide a discourse centred on defending national interests; on the other hand, and to a lesser extent, according to the substantial autonomy given to sub-state branches at a regional level, decentralised state-wide parties have a greater inclination to provide a discourse centred on defending regional interests.

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Notably, decentralised state-wide national-populist parties such as the FPÖ and the SVP, which grant significant autonomy to their sub-state branches, are evolving in federalist states. In federalist political systems, regions represent distinct political spaces where a strong autonomy of sub-state arenas occur and the focus is on regional issues (Detterbeck 2012). In such configurations, sub-state branches of state-wide parties can strengthen regional empowerment and defend the needs and identity of the regional territory against potential external threats (Hepburn 2010). Conversely, empirical case studies highlight how centralised state-wide national-populist parties nurture national concerns. For example, while the RN tries to foster regional interests in order to address subnational cultural and economic cleavages, the party’s ideological supply remains embedded at the national level (Ivaldi and Dutozia 2018). Likewise, the ideological supply of the Lega strongly focuses on national issues (Mazzoleni and Ruzza 2018). The following section aims to emphasise how national-populist parties can symbolically contribute to politicising borders by presenting two distinct models of national-populist border politicisation. 2.2

Framing the People and the Elites through Multiple Scales

While core definitions are hotly debated in the literature, there is a consensus that populism expresses the restoration of power to the “true” people (seen as a positive entity) in opposition to corrupt elites or the establishment (considered negatively as a threat) (Wodak 2017). Here, populism is conceptualised as a discursive framework. It means that populist parties can discursively shape in-groups and out-groups through a Manichean perspective and, thus, create flexible and situationally influenced political imaginaries (Laclau 2005; Aslanidis 2016). As discourse can be defined as a socially constituted and constitutive semiotic practice that can create, reproduce or change social reality (Reisigl 2017), populist parties can use the discourse to construct symbolic, ideological, political and social meanings (Berger and Luckmann 1991). National-populist parties frame nativist and conservative values according to an exclusionary vision of the nation (see Betz 1994; Skenderovic 2007; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2019). Thus, the people are represented as an imagined community (Anderson 2006) – that is, a homogeneous group based on a nativist conception of the nation in a Manichean outlook – by making a clear cut between an idealised “us” and the dangerous “others” (Deiwiks 2009; Wodak 2015; Ernst et al. 2017; Manucci and Weber 2017). The dangerous “others” can be vertically defined as the elites, or the establishment, consisting of political, cultural, economic and intellectual elites who are blamed by national-populist parties for being responsible for Europeanisation and mass migration, that is, as being in favour of foreign influence and for-

60

National populism and borders

eigners (Canovan 2002; Pelinka 2013; Aslanidis 2016; Brubaker 2017; Wodak 2017; Basile and Mazzoleni 2020). However, it is important to stress that some differences can arise depending on the context in which national-populist parties evolve (McAdam et al. 1996; Pirro et al. 2018; Heinisch et al. 2020). Indeed, national-populist parties are operating in different territorial spaces dependent on exogenous conditions, that is, specific socio-political factors leading to different political opportunities and constraints (Wirth et al. 2016; Scott 2020; Heinisch et al. 2021). Accordingly, and as populism is considered chameleon-like (Taggart 2000; Heinisch and Mazzoleni 2021), national-populist parties can strategically shift the meaning of the people and the elites at different scales. In so doing, they produce a multi-level populism in response to the multiplication of political action loci (Mazzoleni 2017; Heinisch et al. 2021). National-populist parties operating at the sub-state level can shift the meaning of the people at the level of the regionally bounded community and, thus, frame a regional heartland to be protected. In this case, the dichotomy between the people and the elites can be equated with the region as a territorial entity (Heinisch et al. 2020). By endorsing a multi-level populism, national populists frame the people and the elites through multiple scales. Consequently, by framing “us” and “them” through exclusionary rhetoric, national-populist parties play a role in symbolically politicising borders by reproducing territorial logics through the in-group and out-group membership categorisation (Wodak 2015; Basile and Mazzoleni 2020; Casaglia et al. 2020). This symbolical politicisation of borders takes place through different territorial levels, depending on national-populist political opportunities and constraints. Indeed, territorial borders are constantly (re)defined through social and political negotiations of space by different actors at different scales (Laine 2016). Against the background of this theoretical framework, I hypothesise that two models of border politicisation arise. On the one hand, national-populist parties that are strongly centralised are more inclined to provide a cross-national border politicisation by discursively framing the people and the elites in relation to the nation as the territorial entity. On the other hand, national-populist parties that are decentralised are more inclined to provide a cross-regional border politicisation by discursively framing the people and the elites in relation to the region. This chapter analyses the party manifestos of SVP sub-state cantonal parties in CBRs. As the SVP organisational structure can be labelled as both centralised and decentralised because it oscillates between state-wide centralisation and sub-state autonomy (see also the next section), there can be tension around either regional or national issues. I show in this chapter how the two distinct models of national-populist border politicisation can fit with the Geneva and

Framing the people and the elites

61

Basel CBRs during sub-state cantonal elections, depending on socio-political and territorial settings.

3.

THE GENEVA AND BASEL CROSS-BORDER REGIONS: EXPLORING THE CONTEXTS

The Geneva and Basel CBRs represent peculiar contexts because of their strong functional socio-economic integration. On the Swiss side, the canton of Geneva and the region of Basel (the cantons of Basel-City and Basel-Country) can both be described as middle-sized metropolitan centres with a high level of internationalisation. They both endorse strong socio-economic interactions with the countries on the other side of the territorial state border. However, cross-border cooperation in Geneva appears to be less institutionalised than in Basel: “In Basel, the integration of the peripheries seems to serve the economic influence of the urban core, whereas in Geneva the integration of the French suburban area has resulted in a negotiation to rebalance the functions between the centre and its periphery” (Sohn et al. 2009, 933). The application of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons between Switzerland and the EU in 2002 and Switzerland’s entry into the Schengen Area in 2008 made it easier for EU citizens to live and work in Switzerland. This is especially relevant for the canton of Geneva and the region of Basel, whose higher wages (compared with those on the other side of the border) attract many cross-border workers. In addition, Switzerland lacks an indigenous workforce, which strengthens the employability of cross-border workers and offers strong diversity in the labour market (Dubois 2019). The canton of Geneva has the highest number of cross-border workers in Switzerland (27 per cent of the total influx), while the Basel region holds the third position with 17 per cent of the total, although it has a higher share of cross-border employment in comparison with the canton of Geneva (see Table 4.1). At the end of 2020, most of the cross-border workers were employed in the tertiary sector. Regarding the Geneva context, the territory of the Greater Geneva CBR covers 2,000 km2 and consists of a total of 212 municipalities. Since 1973, a process of cross-border cooperation has been in force between the canton of Geneva, the two neighbouring French departments (Ain and Haute-Savoie) and the canton of Vaud. Political governance of the conurbation went into effect in 2004 with the creation of a regional association. Regarding the Basel context, the territory of the Trinational Eurodistrict Basel CBR has been developed between the Swiss cantons of Basel-City, Basel-Country, the neighbouring French department of Haut-Rhin and the neighbouring German Land of Baden-Württemberg. The Basel region has developed several cross-border structures since the 1960s. In 1963, the first cross-border cooperation project – the Regio Basiliensis – was established,

62

National populism and borders

Table 4.1

Territory

Inhabitants, cross-border workers and cross-border share of employment on the Swiss side of the Geneva and Basel CBRs Inhabitants

Cross-border workers

Cross-border share of employment (per cent)

Canton of Geneva

504,000

91,800

24.0

Basel region

485,000

57,500

32.4

Source:

Federal Statistical Office.

which still acts to promote regional cross-border development. In 1990, the European cross-border INTERREG programme offered new tools to support and develop cross-border development by reinforcing the territorial planning systems between the different neighbouring countries. In 2002, a construction agency emerged – the Trinational Agglomeration and Eurodistrict Basel – which is involved in construction, region planning and sustainable development (Dubois 2019; Walther and Reitel 2013). The national-populist SVP operates on the Swiss side of the functionally integrated Geneva and Basel CBRs. This party, considered successful in contemporary Western Europe (Bernhard 2017), was created in 1971 based on issues like peasantry, militarism, anti-socialism and anti-internationalism. In the 1990s, it shifted towards radical right-wing populism and started to mobilise against immigration and European integration and promote a liberal pro-business agenda and the protection of national integrity (Mazzoleni 2008). In the 2019 national elections, the SVP was the strongest party in Switzerland with 25.6 per cent of the total vote share. Given the party’s organisational structure, the SVP can be labelled as both centralised and decentralised. Although there has been a process to centralise the party at the national level in the 1990s, the sub-state cantonal branches still enjoy significant autonomy, for instance, regarding the representation of the party’s interests at the regional level (Mazzoleni and Rossini 2016). Regarding the SVP sub-state cantonal branches running in the two CBRs, the Geneva SVP was founded in 1987 and won its first seats in Geneva’s cantonal parliament in 2001. The Basel-City SVP was founded in 1991 as a result of the national SVP’s radicalisation in the 1990s and won its first seats in the cantonal parliament in 1992. By contrast, the Basel-Country SVP was founded in 1971 and was historically embedded in a long-standing agrarian legacy. It won its first seats in the cantonal parliament in the same year. Concerning sub-state cantonal party manifestos, the Geneva SVP focuses on making immigration controls stricter and prioritising local employment. Furthermore, it blames the rise in social costs, rent and the high unemployment rate on the canton’s growing number of immigrants. By contrast, the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP do not provide any proper party manifesto

Framing the people and the elites

63

but rely on the national one. This appears striking when considering that the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP are the only two SVP sub-state cantonal branches not to provide specific sub-state cantonal party manifestos in the country, and when considering that the Basel region presents a higher percentage of cross-border share of employment than the canton of Geneva (see Table 4.1). In this chapter, I focus on the most recent cantonal elections in the canton of Geneva and the Basel region. In the 2018 cantonal elections, the Geneva SVP obtained 7.3 per cent (down from 10.6 per cent in the 2013 cantonal elections). The Basel-City SVP obtained 10.6 per cent of the total vote share in the 2020 cantonal elections (down from 13.8 per cent in the 2016 cantonal elections), while the Basel-Country SVP obtained 14 per cent of the total vote share in the 2019 cantonal elections (down from 16.4 per cent in the 2015 cantonal elections, which had made it the most influential party within the cantonal government). Accordingly, while the SVP’s strength in the canton of Basel-City has proved to be weak, it is strong in the canton of Basel-Country, where it is the second-most influential within the cantonal parliament. The SVP’s strength in the canton of Geneva is also weak. Contrary to the Basel region, the Geneva SVP is in a position to increase its political strength by occasionally allying with an autonomous right-wing populist party from Geneva, The Mouvement Citoyens Genevois (Geneva Citizens’ Movement, MCG).

4.

METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH DESIGN

For the aim of this chapter, I use the methodology of the discourse historical approach (DHA). This approach considers discourse through its historical and political dimensions. In this regard, discourse is viewed as a socially constituted and constitutive semiotic practice that can create, reproduce or change social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1991). The DHA makes it possible to see how reality is constructed in various context-dependent social fields, spaces and genres by emphasising “the practice-related quality of discourses, the context dependence of discourses, and the constructed as well as the constitutive character of discourse” (Reisigl 2017, 49). This approach aims to study situated socio-political and historical contextualities (Rheindorf and Wodak 2018). Within the framework of the DHA, Wodak (2001, 72‒73) developed several tools to explore linguistic and rhetorical means and study the discrimination of people. Reisigl and Wodak (2001) used this framework to analyse how people are discriminated based on their ethnicity or race, and those tools help to explore the political discursive framing of in-groups and out-groups in political texts (Forchtner and Wodak 2018). Here, I explore those linguistic and rhe-

64

Table 4.2

National populism and borders

Party manifestos according to the canton’s election year in the two CBRs

Cross-border region Canton Canton’s election year Manifesto

Greater Geneva

Trinational Eurodistrict Basel

Geneva

Basel-City

Basel-Country

2018

2020

2019

Geneva SVP party

Swiss SVP party

Swiss SVP party

manifesto (2018‒2023)

manifesto (2019‒2023)

manifesto (2019‒2023)

torical means by analysing the referential/nomination discursive strategy. This strategy is used to construct in-groups and out-groups through membership categorisation. Furthermore, I analyse the scales used for the categorisation of in-groups and out-groups to understand how national-populist sub-state parties evolving in CBRs contribute to symbolically politicising borders through multiple scales. The corpus of data includes the manifestos of the SVP sub-state cantonal parties. Party manifestos seem to be a compelling basis for exploring the discourse of national-populist parties because they provide the ideological supply or positions that parties focus on regarding specific issues during electoral campaigns (Braun and Schmitt 2020). Besides, sub-state party manifestos are increasingly meaningful and valuable sources to understand the ideological supply provided by political parties evolving in multi-level political systems regarding regional policy outcomes (Gross and Jankowski 2020). Table 4.2 shows the corpus of data collected for each SVP sub-state cantonal party during the most recent cantonal elections in the two CBRs. To analyse the party manifestos, I used the MAXQDA software, which is a tool for qualitative and mixed-methods research. It allows for the coding of text segments, which is particularly useful in the study of political discourses to explore the relations between different codes or code frequencies (Leimbigler 2021). For this chapter, I differentiated between three dominant codes: (1) the people (which categories of people are framed?), (2) the elites (which categories of elites are framed?), and (3) the scales (through which scales are the people and the elites framed?). The coding was run inductively: To capture as many details as possible, the segments were coded without pre-formatted schemes from the literature. The scales code represents an essential analytical tool for this chapter. Consequently, I differentiated five sub-categories in relation to the national-populist border politicisation in the party manifestos: the state-bordered region, the cross-border region and the national, European and global scales. According to those sub-categories, each segment of discourse was coded with its relating scales based on the territorial levels at which the people and the elites were framed.2

Framing the people and the elites

5.

65

FRAMING THE PEOPLE AND THE ELITES: TWO MODELS OF NATIONAL-POPULIST BORDER POLITICISATION

This section aims to analyse how national-populist sub-state parties contribute to symbolically politicising borders through multiple scales when they frame the people and the elites through their ideological supply. As stated, CBRs face more and more socio-economic interdependence, which helps to produce multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation where political parties need to adapt and respond to the proliferation of political action loci through various scales (Mazzoleni 2017; Heinisch et al. 2021). Tables 4.3 and 4.4 show how the people and the elites are framed through multiple scales by the Geneva, the Basel-City and the Basel-Country branches of the SVP. For a representative output of the coding, I chose to report the categories of the people by presenting the five highest numbers of coded segments and the categories of the elites by presenting the three highest numbers of coded segments. This difference depends on the number of categories in relation to the codes of the people and the elites. Accordingly, the number of codes representing the people was considerably higher than the number of codes representing the elites. Those results are in line with the national-populist strategy of ambivalence (Biancalana and Mazzoleni 2020). Indeed, national-populist parties tend to increase the categories of the people by adapting their discourse to the complexity of contemporary societies in order to reach the widest possible constituency. 5.1

The Geneva Cross-Border Region

According to the empirical findings in Table 4.3, the Geneva SVP frames the people with extensive categories such as the population/people, citizens, inhabitants or young people through multiple scales ranging from the state-bordered region to cross-border region, national, European and global scales. Example 1 shows how the Geneva SVP frames the population/people by combining the state-bordered region and global scales. This example outlines how the party symbolically politicises the border by defending the population/ people against criminals coming from abroad. Example 1 Geneva must ensure the safety of its population and not attract all the criminals of the world with permissiveness, light sentences and an aversion to deportation. Other political parties have turned Geneva into an international prison hub (Geneva SVP party manifesto, 2018‒2023).

6 6 6

Citizens

Women

Families

4.3

4.3

4.3

4.3

25 17 3

 

 

Cantonal government

Other political parties

Federal public offices

6

34

50

 

(per cent)

Share of total

6

Young people

5.7

coded segments

8

Genevans

6.4

8.6

Coded

9

Population/people

10.7

segments

12

Children

Code

15

Inhabitants

 

(per cent)

coded segments

segments  

Share of total

Coded

region

75

58

-

14

10

Cross-border

64

-

9

-

-

-

-

5

4

National

25

-

5

National

Scale’s distribution for each code

region

Elites

-

-

21

18

18

8

5

State-bordered

86

55

43

55

73

75

60

12

region

57

Cross-border

region

Scale’s distribution for each code

State-bordered

People

-

7

8

European

14

9

7

9

-

-

5

4

European

-

21

13

Global

-

27

29

18

9

17

25

23

Global

Percentage of scales’ distribution for the people and the elites in the Geneva SVP party manifesto

 

Code

Table 4.3

100

100

100

Total

 

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Total

 

66 National populism and borders

Framing the people and the elites

67

Interestingly, the party strongly frames the category of Genevans, which underscores the regional anchorage of the Geneva SVP. Furthermore, and according to its traditional ideology, the party mostly frames the categories of families, children and women as those needing to be protected against the threat of asylum seekers and the woes caused by the influx of migrants and the free movement of persons. Example 2 shows how the Geneva SVP frames the inhabitants together with the women and children by combining the state-bordered region and global scales. This example outlines how the party symbolically contributes to politicising the border by aiming to protect those categories of people against refugees. Example 2 Current events [the building of refugee centres] show that we need to be cautious. The safety of our inhabitants, especially women and children, is our priority (Geneva SVP party manifesto, 2018‒2023).

To the same extent as for the category of the people, the Geneva SVP frames the elites through multiple scales, ranging from state-bordered to cross-border regions, national, European and global scales. Example 3 shows how the party frames the cantonal government by combining the state-bordered region and European scales. This example outlines how the Geneva SVP symbolically contributes to politicising the border by criticising the cantonal government for being responsible for the surge in European net migration in the canton. Example 4 shows how the party frames other political parties (see also Example 1) by combining the state-bordered region, cross-border region and European scales. The example also outlines how the Geneva SVP symbolically politicises the border by blaming other political parties for the canton’s immigration woes. Example 3 For the SVP, both the bilateral agreements and the deliberate will of the cantonal government to not correctly apply the Foreign Nationals Act are responsible for the surge in net migration. This surge leads to catastrophic effects regarding housing measures (Geneva SVP party manifesto, 2018‒2023). Example 4 What do we owe to other parties? Self-service immigration, illegal immigrants’ laundering, cross-border crime, the surge in rents under migratory pressure, overcrowding in the canton, saturated infrastructures and a lawless area (Geneva SVP party manifesto, 2018‒2023).

68

National populism and borders

Following those empirical findings, it is worth highlighting that the meaningful scale for the Geneva SVP is the state-bordered region. This shows how the party’s contribution to the symbolic politicisation of borders through the framing of the people and the elites can be characterised as a national-populist cross-regional politicisation. The dichotomy between the people and the elites is organised around the territorial entity of the region as a heartland to be protected. 5.2

The Basel Cross-Border Region

The Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP do not frame the people and the elites through the state-bordered region and cross-border region scales. Instead, both parties rely on the national SVP party manifesto. Accordingly, the parties frame the category of the Swiss people as a homogeneous entity. Nevertheless, the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP also frame the people with extensive categories such as the citizens, population/people or young people through multiple scales ranging from the national, European and global scales. Example 5 shows how the parties frame the population/people by combining national and European scales. This example outlines how the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP symbolically contribute to politicising the border by aiming to defend the opinion of the population/people regarding the autonomous management of immigration against economic workers coming from the EU. Example 5 The uncontrolled influx of foreigners coming from the EU threatens the jobs of older workers. Instead of qualified workers, it is mainly cheap workers and their families who are invading Switzerland. The people’s decision to regain autonomy over the management of immigration must prevail (Swiss SVP party manifesto, 2019‒2023).

According to their traditional ideology, the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP frame the category of families and SMEs as the ones requiring protection because of the costs they have to bear following the agreements made with the EU. Furthermore, the parties frame other categories of people such as taxpayers, consumers or employers. Example 6 shows how the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP frame the taxpayers by combining national and global scales. This example outlines how the SVP symbolically contributes to polit-

20

19

14

14

14

13

13

13

Families

Population/people

Young people

Consumers

SMEs

Taxpayers

Employers

Swiss people

 

96

23

12

 

National government

European Union

Left-wing parties

Coded segments

40

Citizens

Code

 

Coded segments

6.7

12.9

53.9

 

segments (per cent)

Share of total coded

3.8

3.8

3.8

4.1

4.1

4.1

5.6

5.9

11.8

 

segments (per cent)

Share of total coded

region

-

-

-

-

-

Cross-border

-

66

82

62

74

82

82

79

80

63

National

63

42

71

National

Scale’s distribution for each code

region

Elites

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

State-bordered

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

region

-

Cross-border

region

Scale’s distribution for each code State-bordered

People

11

42

12

European

17

6

14

16

6

12

17

8

17

European

26

16

17

Global

17

12

24

10

12

6

4

12

20

Global

100

100

100

Total

 

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Total

 

Percentage of scales’ distribution for the people and the elites in the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP party manifestos (i.e. national SVP manifesto)

 

Code

Table 4.4

Framing the people and the elites 69

70

National populism and borders

icising the border by aiming to defend the taxpayers against the costs induced by refugees. Example 6 By completely financing the stay of economic refugees with taxpayers’ contributions, the national government is actually encouraging these people to pretend to be ‘refugees’ and, thus, is behaving unfairly towards those people who respect our immigration laws (Swiss SVP party manifesto, 2019‒2023).

To the same extent as for the category of the people, the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP frame the elites through multiple scales ranging from the national to the European and global ones. The parties frame the elites with categories such as the national government, the EU or left-wing parties. Example 7 shows how the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP frame the European Union by combining national and European scales. This example outlines how the parties symbolically contribute to politicising the border by criticising the EU for undermining Swiss sovereignty. In the same vein, Example 8 shows how the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP frame the national government by combining national and global scales. This example outlines how the parties symbolically contribute to politicising the border by criticising the national government for undermining people’s determination by relying on international law. Example 7 The SVP is committed to protecting an independent and neutral Switzerland. The political elites’ selling out of Swiss sovereignty must cease. We must prevent the annexation of our country to international structures such as the EU (Swiss SVP party manifesto, 2019‒2023). Example 8 The national government wants to take away citizens’ [ability to have the] final say in political decisions. To achieve it and invalidate popular decisions, they have discovered a miracle recipe: international law (Swiss SVP party manifesto, 2019‒2023).

Following those empirical findings, the meaningful scale for the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP is the national scale. As the parties are relying on the national party manifesto, they do not frame the people and the elites through the state-bordered region and cross-border region scales. Those findings show how the contribution of the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP towards the symbolical politicisation of borders can be characterised as a national-populist

Framing the people and the elites

71

cross-national politicisation. The dichotomy between the people and the elites is organised around the territorial entity of the nation as a heartland to be protected.

6. CONCLUSION This chapter aimed to understand the role of national-populist parties’ sub-state branches in CBRs in symbolically politicising borders through multiple scales. To this end, I analysed how SVP sub-state cantonal parties discursively framed the people and the elites in their party manifestos during the most recent cantonal elections. Academic research provides few empirical studies focusing on the political discourse of national-populist parties evolving in European CBRs and on how national-populist parties deal with territorial borders according to their ideological supply. However, under the aegis of globalisation, CBRs are showing an increasing socio-economic interdependence that enables new structures of opportunities (Perkmann and Sum 2002). In this context, CBRs emerge as multi-scalar spaces of mobilisation where political parties need to adapt and respond to several loci of decision making at different territorial levels (Sassen 2006; Perrier Bruslé 2013; Laine 2016; Mazzoleni 2017). Accordingly, national-populist parties evolving in CBRs act as important actors by contributing to the symbolical politicisation of borders (Brambilla 2015). This is the case when they discursively frame the people against the elites by legitimising a symbolic border between “us” and “them” and, thus, reproduce territorial logics through the in-group and out-group membership categorisation (Wodak 2015; Basile and Mazzoleni 2020; Casaglia et al. 2020). The SVP sub-state cantonal parties evolving in the Geneva and Basel CBRs contribute to politicising borders by framing the people and the elites through multiple scales (see also Chapter 3 in this book). By defending the people against the elites, national-populist sub-state parties reproduce territorial logics as they frame bounded territories as containers that must be protected (Paasi 2013; Casaglia et al. 2020). In this sense, national-populist sub-state parties symbolically reconfigure the border as a marker of sovereignty and a filter of protection in relation to an endangered heartland, where elites are scapegoated for allowing a whole range of outside threats the very existence of the “true” people is under threat (Taggart 2000; Pelinka 2013; Wodak 2015; Varga 2016). The empirical findings show that two distinct national-populist models of border politicisation arise. On the one hand, by providing a cantonal party manifesto, the Geneva SVP fosters a national-populist cross-regional politicisation of the border by defending a regional bounded community (among others, Genevans). On the other hand, by relying on the SVP national party manifesto, the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP foster a national-populist

72

National populism and borders

cross-national politicisation of the border by defending a national bounded community (among others, the Swiss people). Those results show the tension around either regional or national issues in both centralised and decentralised national-populist parties such as the SVP. The two models of border politicisation depend on the political opportunities and constraints relating to socio-political and territorial settings. While the Basel CBR has a strong legacy of regional institutionalisation and is considered, in this sense, an example of best practices among European borderland regions, the Geneva CBR has moderate regional institutionalisation, where the collective perception of the border as a resource among the population puts some asymmetries under stress (Sohn et al. 2009; Dubois 2019; Durand et al. 2020; see also Chapter 9 in this book). Accordingly, the strong regional institutionalisation in the Basel CBR can robustly lock in social and economic interest. Thus, there is no opportunity for the Basel-City and Basel-Country SVP to focus on the territorial entity of the region through a national-populist cross-regional border politicisation. Consequently, as there are no issues to distinguish the sub-state cantonal parties from the national level, they provide a national-populist cross-national border politicisation: The sub-state cantonal parties defend the Basel region as part of the nation against foreign elites such as the EU and not as an autonomous region. By contrast, the weak points emerging from the moderate regional institutionalisation in the Geneva CBR allow the Geneva SVP to frame the people and the elites through the territorial entity of the region. Thus, the party provides a national-populist cross-regional politicisation by defending the region as a heartland to be autonomously protected. Moreover, the existence of the MCG (a regionalist right-wing populist party) in Geneva’s political landscape could enable the Geneva SVP to focus on regional issues when competing in the cantonal elections (see Hepburn 2014 on multi-level party competition). This contribution sought to fill gaps in the literature by deepening empirical studies focused on national-populist parties in CBRs and on how national-populist parties deal with territorial borders according to their ideological supply. It also aimed to deepen knowledge on how national-populist parties adapt their discourse according to socio-political and territorial settings in multi-level electoral systems, which has so far been underdeveloped at the academic level (Braun and Schmitt 2020). Finally, the scope of this empirical contribution was to stress how national-populist parties “produce particular understandings of territory and sovereignty that can transform or even radically overturn the status quo from the local to the global” (Casaglia et al. 2020, 2). As this study showed the intertwined relation between party organisational structure, ideological supply and border politicisation, further comparative and empirical research is needed to determine whether the two models of

Framing the people and the elites

73

national-populist border politicisation also apply to other multi-level electoral CBRs.

NOTES 1.

2.

In political geography, the concept of scale is used as “a shorthand reference to social, environmental, economic, and political processes having some sort of spatial expression” (Jonas 2015, 26) to represent the ways in which political processes are spatially operating and (re)negotiated. For example, if a segment politicises a specific elite (e.g. the cantonal government) for freely allowing European economic migrants into the canton of Geneva, this segment is coded with the state-bordered region and the European scales.

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Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019) Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paasi, A. (2013) Borders and border-crossings. In: Johnson, N., Schein, R. and Winders, J. (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell companion to cultural geography. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 478‒493. Pelinka, A. (2013) Right-wing populism: Concept and typology. In: Wodak R., KhosraviNik, M. and Mral, B. (eds) Right-wing populism in Europe: Politics and discourse. London: Bloomsbury, 1‒22. Perkmann, M. (2007) Policy entrepreneurship and multilevel governance: A comparative study of European cross-border regions. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 25(6), 861‒879. Perkmann, M. and Sum, N. (2002) Globalization, regionalization and cross-border regions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Perrier Bruslé, L. (2013) The border as a marker of territoriality: Multi-scalar perspectives and multi-agent processes in a South American borderland region. Geopolitics, 18(3), 584‒611. Pirro, A., Taggart, P. and van Kessel, S. (2018) The populist politics of Euroscepticism in times of crisis: Comparative conclusions. Politics, 38(3), 378‒390. Reisigl, M. (2017) The discourse-historical approach. In: Flowerdew, J. and Richardson, J. (eds) The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies. London–New York: Routledge, 44‒59. Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001) Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism. London–New York: Routledge. Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2018) Borders, fences, and limits. Protecting Austria from refugees: Metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1‒2), 15‒38. Rumford, C. (2012) Towards a multiperspectival study of borders. Geopolitics, 17(4), 887–902. Sassen, S. (2006) Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scott, J. W. (ed.) (2020) A research agenda for border studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Skenderovic, D. (2007) Immigration and the radical right in Switzerland: Ideology, discourse and opportunities. Patterns of Prejudice, 41(2), 155‒176. Sohn, C. (2016) Navigating borders’ multiplicity: The critical potential of assemblage. Area, 48(2), 183‒189. Sohn, C., Reitel, B. and Walther, O. (2009) Cross-border metropolitan integration in Europe: The case of Luxembourg, Basel, and Geneva. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 27(5), 922‒939. Swenden, W. and Maddens, B. (eds) (2008) Territorial party politics in Western Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taggart, P. (2000) Populism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Varga, R. (2016) Construction du mythe de l’ennemi et du héros dans le discours de Viktor Orbán. In: Corcuera, J. F., Gaspar, A., Djian, M., Vincente, J. and Bernal, C. (eds) Les discours politiques, Regards croisés. Paris: L’Harmattan, 314‒323. Varol, C. and Soylemez, E. (2018). Border permeability and socio-spatial interaction in Turkish and the EU border regions. Regional Science Policy & Practice, 10(4), 283‒297. Walther, O. and Reitel, B. (2013) Cross-border policy networks in the Basel region: The effect of national borders and brokerage roles. Space and Polity, 17(2), 217‒236.

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5. Do bordering preferences affect the populist attitudes of citizens? Laurent Bernhard 1. INTRODUCTION The voluminous literature on populism has above all looked at the political supply side so far. In recent years, however, scholars have increasingly focused on the political demand side by empirically studying the populist attitudes of citizens. Current research highlights the usefulness of examining populist attitudes, which have not only been found to be widespread in many democracies but also to form consistent and distinctive scales. In addition, empirical studies have shown that populist attitudes are a strong predictor of vote choice in favour of populist parties. Yet despite a growing number of empirical contributions, scholars still lack deep knowledge about the determinants of populist attitudes. This chapter proposes to break new ground by focusing on individual border preferences. As Olivas Osuna (2020) has recently pointed out, the interdisciplinary literatures on populism and borders have thus far taken on largely separate paths. This chapter seeks to advance the academic work by bringing together these two fields, since it considers the role played by borders when it comes to explaining levels of individual populist attitudes. More specifically, the present empirical analysis is mainly devoted to the so far neglected attitudinal dimension toward bordering, that is, policies of boundary-making and -management (Popescu 2012). The so-called “re-bordering hypothesis” is at the centre of this chapter. As a direct consequence of national-populist mobilisations against globalisation (Steger 2019), it is argued that the citizens’ levels of populist attitudes positively depend on their preferences in favour of measures of boundary closure and retrenchment. The empirical analysis draws on data from a representative survey of Swiss citizens. By relying on a minimal definition of populism that is at the core of the so-called “ideational approach”, this chapter innovatively makes use of a multiplicative aggregation of the three populist key elements that are available in this survey (i.e. popular sovereignty, antagonism between people and 78

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elites as well as anti-elitism). It is shown that individuals hold higher levels of populist attitudes the more they are supportive of re-bordering policies. This proves to be in line with the hypothesis investigated here. Apart from that, the results regarding the socio-demographic and political determinants basically turn out to be in line with previous work on the determinants of populist attitudes (Rovira Kaltwasser and van Hauwaert 2020). The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 is devoted to the conceptualisation and definition of populism. Thereafter, a review of the state of the art on demand side populism with a focus on populist attitudes is provided in section 3. Subsequently, section 4 develops the so-called “re-bordering hypothesis”. After an overview of the research design in section 5, the results of the empirical analysis are presented (section 6). Finally, the conclusion reviews the major findings of this study as well as its implications (section 7).

2.

WHAT IS POPULISM AGAIN?

Populism is currently one of the most intensively researched areas in the social sciences. Motivated by the emergence of various successful populist actors and parties in many democracies around the world, the study of populism has received unprecedented academic attention in recent years. Yet populism has long been regarded as a highly contested concept. Divergences over its usefulness and its essence have greatly complicated the emergence of a widely accepted definition. Amongst others, the literature conceives of populism as a discourse (Laclau 1977), an ideology (Mudde 2007), a (communication) style (Jagers and Walgrave 2007; Moffit 2016) and a political strategy (Weyland 2001). While it is certainly premature to state that scholars have reached a consensus, most of them seem nevertheless to agree on three basic features. First, there is a common understanding that populism of any stripe refers to a fundamental opposition between the “people” and the “elite” (Canovan 1981, 294). Second, scholars agree on the fact that the dichotomy of these two groups is characterised by Manicheism, given that populism “assigns a moral dimension to everything, no matter how technical and interprets it as part of a struggle between Good and Evil. Good is identified with the unified will of the people and Evil with the conspiring elite” (Hawkins 2010, 35). Third, there is consensus that populism can take various forms. Mény and Surel (2002, 6) have compared populism to an empty shell that can be filled and made meaningful by whatever is poured into it. In addition to specific contextual peculiarities, the manifestation of the “people” and the “elite” to a large extent depends on the ideological orientation of political actors. Broadly speaking, the academic literature distinguishes between left and right

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variants. According to Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013), the former tends to be inclusionary in nature, while the latter follows an exclusionary logic. This disparity can be traced back to varying notions of the people. Populists from the left usually conceive of the people as a socio-economic category by emphasizing the moral opposition between the virtuous working class on the one hand and the oppressive representatives of capital on the other hand (March 2007). In contrast, populists from the right define people in ethnic terms. They typically share an emphasis on nativism through myths about the distant past (Betz 2017), thereby seeking to strengthen the nation against political and cultural elites (see the outline of national populism in Chapter 1). Nowadays, the so-called “ideational approach” is probably most widely used by scholars (Mudde 2017; Hawkins et al. 2019). This approach builds on Mudde’s influential minimal definition (2004, 543) that views populism as a thin-centred ideology “that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” Stanley (2008, 102) maintains that this conceptualisation of populism contains four distinct but interrelated elements: (1) the existence of two homogeneous units of analysis: the people and the elite, (2) the antagonistic relationship between the people and the elite, (3) the idea of popular sovereignty and (4) the positive valorisation of the people and the denigration of the elite.

3.

STATE OF THE ART ON POPULIST ATTITUDES

The surge of populism has triggered numerous scholarly contributions over the course of the last years. When trying to review this voluminous literature, it turns out that most studies have focused on the political supply side thus far by looking at the mobilisation strategies of elite actors, their discourses and communication styles as well as at their organisations. Yet research on populism has increasingly dealt with the political demand side for a good ten years now. Several scholars have developed the notion of individual populist attitudes (e.g. Stanley 2011; Hawkins et al. 2012; Akkerman et al. 2014), thereby arguing that populist attitudes can be measured directly at the micro level. This work has notably demonstrated that populist attitudes form a scale that is distinctive from both pluralist and elitist attitudes. A basic distinction can be drawn between studies that have focused on the determinants of populist attitudes and those that have been interested in their consequences. As to the latter, scholars have been mainly interested in the predictive power of populist attitudes of vote choice. Most studies conclude that voters with higher levels of populist attitudes are more likely to support populist parties (e.g. Ford et al. 2012; Akkerman et al. 2014; van Hauwaert and

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van Kessel 2018). Besides that, political scientists have looked at the relationship between populist attitudes and support for direct democracy. Two recent studies have consistently established a positive association in Western Europe (Jacobs et al. 2018; Mohrenberg et al. 2021). In contrast, the former category of studies (i.e. those that have focused on the determinants of populist attitudes) has proven to be much more diverse. Indeed, scholars have considered a variety of factors that shape the level of populist attitudes. At a glance, their main interest has been devoted to socio-demographic, political and psychological determinants. For the United States, an early study by Hawkins et al. (2012) showed that the extent of populist attitudes was related to lower education levels, third party identification, and ideological radicalism. In the framework of the Greek national elections of January 2015, the empirical analysis by Tsatsanis et al. (2018) found above all that populist attitudes are (1) most prevalent among leftist voters, (2) negatively related to household income and (3) driven by Euroscepticism and anti-immigrant attitudes. Marcos-Marne et al. (2018) concluded in the cases of Spain and France that radical-minded individuals display higher levels of populist attitudes. Yet a noteworthy difference occurred between these two countries. In France, individuals located at the extreme right on the cultural dimension tended to show stronger populist attitudes than those located at the far left. By contrast, individuals located at the extreme left of the economic and cultural dimensions displayed stronger populist attitudes in Spain than those at the far right of these two dimensions. With regard to the more psychologically oriented contributions, Elchardus and Spruyt (2016) revealed in the case of Flanders that dissatisfaction with personal life or feelings of anomie foster populist attitudes. In a related study, Spruyt et al. (2016) concluded that very different feelings of economic, cultural, and political vulnerability come together when it comes to holding populist views. In a similar vein, the investigation by Rico and Anduiza (2019) in nine European countries in the wake of the Great Recession concluded that the main explanation for populist attitudes was neither the vulnerability nor the economic hardship suffered by citizens, but rather the perceptions they had about the economic situation in their respective country. The analysis by Rico et al. (2017), for its part, focuses on the role played by emotions. The main finding that emerged from a three-wave panel survey of Spanish citizens was that anger over the economic crisis was positively related to levels of populist attitudes. Despite this compelling work, the state of the art on populist attitudes is still underdeveloped, all the more so when considering the abounding literature on the political supply side. In light of the current importance of populism in public and academic debates, scholars thus still know comparatively little about its roots on the demand side (Hawkins et al. 2012; Elchardus and Spruyt

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2016). This chapter seeks to advance the existing literature by focusing on the role played by preferences toward re-bordering policies.

4.

THE RE-BORDERING HYPOTHESIS

This section develops the so-called “re-bordering hypothesis”, which is at the heart of this chapter. As a direct consequence of national-populist mobilisations against globalisation, it will be argued that levels of populist attitudes positively depend on individual preferences in favour of re-bordering, that is, policies of boundary closure or retrenchment as well as increases in (central) boundary control and in boundary congruence (Popescu 2012, 69‒72). Several scholars regard economic, cultural and political processes of globalisation as crucial determinants of the current surge of populism (Betz 1990; Mény and Surel 2000; Kriesi et al. 2008; Kübler and Kriesi 2017; Steger 2019). According to this line of reasoning, the populist challenge to mainstream politics comes about due to increased international economic competition (such as increased division of labour, neoliberal reforms at the domestic level, and liberalisation of financial markets), growing cultural diversity (mainly due to growing levels of immigration from ever more distant places) and the supranationalisation of politics (notably the European integration process). Taking a Rokkanean perspective, Kriesi et al. (2008) posited that globalisation can be regarded as a critical juncture that opens up potentials for populist mobilisation in Western Europe. More specifically, the hegemony of neoliberal and multicultural globalisation has led to a decisive de-bordering over the last decades. The erosion and disappearance of borders has increasingly met with sharp opposition by national populists, however (Steger 2019; Steger and James 2019). The view according to which populism is to a large extent attributable to a rejection of de-bordering policies through national-populist mobilisations against globalisation has gained much currency in academic debates. Among populism scholars, Steger (2019) has probably gone furthest by coining the term “anti-globalist populism”. According to Casaglia et al. (2020), national-populist mobilisations are typically directed against the perceived threats posed to a supposedly homogeneous national community (“the people”) by the forces of globalisation, which are pushed forward by cosmopolitan and neoliberal elites. Rhetorically, national populism is typically performed in a sovereigntist manner by putting emphasis on “taking back control” of national borders (Kallis 2018) in order to reclaim a “lost” territory that has slipped into the hands of multinational companies and foreign capital in economic terms, cosmopolitan elites in cultural terms and supranational institutions in political terms. In this context, Olivas

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Osuna (2020) has argued that borders and bordering practices are central elements of the populist worldview and its manifestations. It is thus consistent that an increasing number of scholarly contributions view the rise of national populism as a rebellion against globalisation by voters whose situation has deteriorated as a direct consequence of the opening up of borders (e.g. Ford and Goodwin 2014, Hobolt 2016, Santana and Rama 2018). In a similar vein, Spruyt et al. (2016) have argued that the sharp distinction between the ordinary people and established elites renders populism in Western Europe a typical attitude of individuals who suffer from being overwhelmed and disoriented by these changes, particularly those who have been placed in a weak and vulnerable (economic) position, as they feel their voice does not matter anymore in the realm of politics. This disenchantment with the effects of economic globalisation, immigration and supranational organisations translates itself into popular demands for “re-bordering” policies. Based on these theoretical considerations, the “re-bordering hypothesis” goes as follows: Hypothesis: The more individuals favour re-bordering policies the higher their levels of populist attitudes.

5.

RESEARCH DESIGN

The empirical analysis focuses on the Swiss context by drawing on data from a web survey. This survey on the topics of borders and migration was conducted in the framework of CROSS-POP, a research project based at the University of Lausanne and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research on right-wing populist discourse in European cross-border areas.1 The fieldwork started on 28 September 2020 and ended eleven days later. The 4,920 respondents were recruited from the online panel of LINK, a recognised pollster from Lucerne (Switzerland). With regard to its structure, the survey contains a representative sample of the Swiss citizenry as to gender, age (from 18 to a maximum of 79 years) and place of residence (cantonal affiliation). In addition to the 3,088 respondents from the representative sample, there is a booster for three subnational contexts: Basel, Geneva and Ticino. The aim of the overrepresentation of the border cantons of Basel-City and Basel-Country (n=613), Geneva (n=610) as well as Ticino (n=609) is to allow for separate analyses of each of these contexts (see Chapter 8 of this book). The dependent variable refers to the respondents’ degree of populist attitudes. When it comes to the measurement of populism, scholars have thus far basically relied on composite measures by adding the scores of key populist elements such as people-centrism and anti-elitism. Yet this kind of operationalisation can be considered at odds with most conceptualisations of populism

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(Wuttke et al. 2020). This is because the measurement of populist attitudes by means of simple summary indices implies that high scores on one key element can compensate for the absence on another. By contrast, Mudde’s influential definition suggests that all key elements need to co-occur for a given political actor to qualify as a populist. In their article, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) explicitly addressed this important conceptual question by stating that the core concepts represent the sufficient and necessary criteria for defining populism: all of them must be present in order to categorise a phenomenon as populist. Hence, actors that do not support anti-elitist rhetoric should not be categorized as populist. At the same time, discourses that defend the principle of popular sovereignty and the will of the people are not necessarily instances of populism. (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, 151)

In a similar vein, Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser (2019, 13) maintained that the “peculiarity of the populist set of ideas lies precisely in the combination of these elements”. Following these considerations and the ideational approach to populism, this chapter proposes to aggregate the three key populist elements that are available in the survey used here by innovatively relying on a multiplicative index. This operationalisation ensures that the aggregated measure of populism amounts to 0 as soon as at least a populist key element is not present. Here are the translated wordings of the three items. Item 1: Referendums express the will of the people, and their results always have to be respected; Item 2: The most important political decisions should be made by the people and not by politicians; Item 3: Politicians talk too much and do not act enough. The first item captures the demand for unconditional popular sovereignty. To that end, it has been formulated in the context of direct democracy so that it speaks to Swiss citizens. The second item captures the antagonistic relationship between the people and elites. The third item, for its part, refers to anti-elitist attitudes. Respondents were invited to indicate their levels of agreement with each of these three statements on a seven-point Likert scale that was recoded from 0 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). The multiplicative index thus ranges from 0 (in case at least a 0 is available among the answers to the populist items used here) to 216 (if a given respondent strongly agrees with each of these statements). The arithmetic average of the dependent variable amounts to 27.9 with a standard deviation of 40.3. The measurement of border attitudes, the independent variable of the present empirical analysis, is based on a principal factor analysis of eight items. This factor refers to the conflict between de-bordering and re-bordering policies in the context of the conflict over globalisation that has been highlighted in the previous section of this chapter. Four items make positive statements about

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open borders in economic, cultural and political terms: (1) Open borders enrich the encounter of cultures and people in Switzerland; (2) Open borders with neighbouring countries are advantageous for Switzerland; (3) Open borders are necessary to increase Switzerland’s competitiveness and economic well-being; (4) Today, Switzerland’s sovereignty can only be safeguarded through international cooperation. By contrast, the four remaining items demand a reinforcement of national borders: (1) National borders are necessary to safeguard the Swiss identity; (2) Switzerland’s borders have to be strengthened to limit access to foreigners; (3) It is necessary to introduce more capital and trade controls at the Swiss borders to protect the well-being of our country; (4) To defend its national sovereignty, Switzerland has to strengthen its borders. A single factor was obtained (Eigenvalue > 1) with consistent loadings regarding the orientation of the eight selected items (i.e. negative signs for the de-bordering items and positive signs for the re-bordering items). The values of this indicator range from -1.656 to 2.280. In light of previous work on the determinants of populist attitudes, the influence of a series of variables is controlled for. Gender is accounted for by distinguishing between women (1) and men (2). In addition, formal education is taken into consideration. To that end, a question about the highest completed education level is used. This indicator is measured using a 10-level classification that ranges from 1 (primary school not completed) to 10 (PhD degree). The respondents’ age in years is also included. Besides that, employment status is controlled for by relying on a dichotomous indicator (code 1 for unemployed respondents, 0 for the remaining ones). As to political factors, ideology and party identification are included into the statistical analysis. I rely on a single indicator by using the respondents’ positioning on a left-right scale that ranges from 0 (completely left) to 10 (completely right). In addition, I control for ideological extremity by calculating the amount difference to 5, the middle category on the left-right scale. Hence, the minimum value of this indicator is 0 (for centrist citizens) and the maximum value 5 (for those who consider themselves to be either completely on the left or completely on the right). With respect to partisan preferences, I account for the respondents’ party identification by drawing a distinction between eight categories: sympathisers of the six largest parties of the country (i.e. Schweizerische Volkspartei, Swiss People’s Party, SVP; Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz, Social Democrats, SP; FDP.Die Liberalen, Liberals, FDP; Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei der Schweiz, Christian Democrats, CVP; GRÜNE Schweiz, Greens, GPS; Grünliberale Partei der Schweiz, Green Liberals, GLP), sympathisers of another party (“others”) as well as “independents” for those who do not identify with any Swiss party.

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National populism and borders

Finally, two types of geographical indicators are taken into account: border residence status (1 for citizens who live in a municipality at the external border of Switzerland, 0 for the others) and language region affiliation as far as the nationwide analysis is concerned. Regarding the latter, a distinction between German-, French-, and Italian-speaking parts is made, with the few respondents from the Romansh-speaking areas entering the first-mentioned category.

6.

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Before turning to the multivariate analysis, I briefly outline the results of bivariate F-tests in order to gain a first impression of the empirical validity of the re-bordering hypothesis. It turns out that the statistical associations are highly significant and in line with the theoretical expectation for both the whole sample with cantonal design weights (F=36.84, p=0.000) and the smaller representative sample without the subnational booster (F=29.49, p=0.000). Table 5.1 presents the results of two ordinary least squares (OLS) regression estimations that explain the level of individual populist attitudes. Model I takes into account all surveyed citizens (i.e. including those that are part of the booster of the three border regions). To ensure representativeness for Switzerland, a design weight was applied that adjusts for the overrepresentation of respondents from Basel, Geneva and Ticino. By contrast, Model II limits itself to the smaller representative sample of Swiss citizens. In accordance with the findings of the bivariate analysis, populist attitudes are found to highly depend on individual preferences toward re-bordering policies. There is evidence of a positive association between the according factor loadings and the multiplicative index of populist attitudes. This statistical relationship proves to be significant at the 0.1 per cent error level for both samples analysed here. As to the magnitude of these effects, the populist attitude index increases by 6 units on average for both models when moving from 0 (mean score) to 1 on the factor loadings of the re-bordering indicator. Taken together, the present empirical analysis thus lends strong support for the re-bordering hypothesis. With respect to the socio-economic control variables, there are a number of significant results. As far as gender is concerned, it turns out that women hold lower levels of populist attitudes than men in general. Similar findings have been reported by Elchardus and Spruyt (2016) in the case of Flanders, while other studies on the determinants of populist attitudes did not detect any systematic gender gaps. By contrast to some previous studies in European countries (Rico et al. 2017; Tsatsanis et al. 2018), age does not appear to be positively correlated with populist attitudes in any model, even though the 5 per cent error level is almost reached for the according coefficient in Model I. Besides that, populist attitudes tend to be clearly negatively associated with

87

Do bordering preferences affect the populist attitudes of citizens?

Table 5.1

OLS regression models explaining levels of populist attitudes (multiplicative index)

  In favour of re-bordering policies  

Model (1)

Model (2)

6.345***

6.020***

(4.78)

(5.00)

-6.765***

-6.232***

 

(-4.22)

(-3.63)

Age

0.089

0.067

 

(1.77)

(1.28)

-1.872***

-1.492**

Female

Education level  

(-3.58)

(-3.26)

Unemployed

10.179

10.241

 

(1.49)

(1.87)

Left-right

-1.097

-1.150

 

(1.55)

(-1.96)

Ideological extremity

2.182

2.226** (3.11)

**

 

(2.86)

Liberals (FDP)

4.433

4.406

 

(1.36)

(1.36)

Christian Democrats (CVP)

4.734

6.597 (1.65)

 

(1.17)

Green Liberals (GLP)

-0.091

0.468

 

(-0.03)

(0.12)

Social Democrats (SP)

6.445

7.934 (1.96)

 

(1.62)

Greens (GPS)

2.560

3.385

 

(0.61)

(0.78)

Other parties

1.077

3.748

 

(0.29)

(1.00)

Independents

1.351

1.780

 

(0.37)

(0.48)

Border residence

5.406*

3.038

 

(2.18)

(1.18)

-6.003***

-5.652**

 

(-3.35)

(-2.89)

Italian-speaking part

-6.594*

-4.500

 

(-2.53)

(-1.45)

French-speaking part

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National populism and borders

 

Model (1)

Model (2)

Constant

33.155***

31.471*** (5.00)

 

(5.02)

N

3544

2214

R2

0.048

0.042

Notes: T-values in brackets. * p