Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right

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In Europe, this adds them to a list that comprises France, Belgium and Austria; moreover, partial bans that prohibit the wearing of either or both garments in certain circumstances, including, but not limited to, the judiciary, schools, hospitals and public transport are in place in the Netherlands and Turkey. Racism, for Liz Fekete, is the breeding ground of fascism, and her struggle to combat both—on the ground and in her writings—has earned her the reputation of being an intrepid organiser, an inspirational speaker and an organic intellectual. It might indeed be argued that its shift from the margins of society into the political mainstream has been the defining feature of global politics in the previous decade. Greece is also obliged to defend Cyprus from any attack by Turkey, as formalised in the 1993 Greece-Cyprus joint proclamation of Single Area Defence Doctrine. We can take issue with these kinds of explanations since they re-introduce a mechanical point of view concerning developments within society, almost rendering them inevitable.

A. Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race RelationsLiz Fekete is Director of the Institute of Race Relations, where she has worked for over thirty years.

Racism, for Liz Fekete, is the breeding ground of fascism, and her struggle to combat both--on the ground and in her writings--has earned her the reputation of being an intrepid organiser, an inspirational speaker and an organic intellectual. Throughout the last two decades, headlines from that newspaper have given editorial support to a variety of political campaigns premised on the stigmatisation of migrant offenders. Nevertheless, Fekete has written an informed, vigorous and compelling book, even if for me its main effect was to compel me to seek reasons to doubt her analysis. Examples of places with high earthquake risk are in urban areas, such as the cities of Istanbul and Izmir in Turkey, Catania and Naples in Italy, Bucharest in Romania, and Athens in Greece, many of which have a history of damaging earthquakes. What appear to be “blind spots” about far-right extremism on the part of the state are shown to constitute collusion—as police, intelligence agencies and the military embark on practices of covert policing that bring them into direct or indirect contact with the far right, in ways that bring to mind the darkest days of Europe’s authoritarian past.

The perspective I take in this book … eschews a boxed-in, academic study of fascism, which almost invariably divorces the study of the far right from a simultaneous study of the state, and the study of fascism itself from popular and state racism. In Britain, this battle is playing out via the media inches given to centrist politicians who wish to suggest that Labour’s Brexit policy is the same as the Tories’ or UKIP’s, and via the ongoing campaign to present Labour as having a specific problem with anti-Semitism. The burdensome exercise of clarifying the terms of the debate surrounding the themes of the book is first apt. This was examined in more detail by the EU-funded project SYNER-G, which developed an open-source software tool to analyse vulnerability and work out the social and economic impacts of earthquakes in specific urban areas, like the port of Thessaloniki in Greece, by the time it finished in 2013.

The hotspots near Brussels, Budapest and Lisbon are because a number of earthquakes have happened in the past, while the hotspot in the western Pyrenees is because of the geological make-up of the area, the project said. If you donate and also register with the drb you will enjoy permanent free access to our archive of several thousand essays on reaching €100 in donations. and above on the Richter scale which occurred since the year 1000, as shown in the smaller map in this feature. In Europe's Fault Lines, Liz Fekete has not only written an excellent study of how racism is once again being normalised but how, in turn, it is acting as cloak under which fascism is resurgent. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists.

This pattern is not repeated in every country, but it is strongly enough marked to merit further investigation. Turkey regards France’s deepening involvement in the eastern Mediterranean as further provocation near its shores. As it turned out, he had no reason whatsoever to believe that the video was doctored and after public outrage had to enter early retirement. This book sadly reads as an overly ideological and subjective analysis on the rise of the right, rather than offering any substantial insights into why the far right is gaining support across Europe. Ankara’s escalation drew strong opposition from Brussels, resulting in unequivocal EU condemnation and the activation of a limited sanctions mechanism.But explanations rendering this development inevitable are inferior to accounts focusing on the active role the extreme right plays in structuring political identities or the complicity of state structures and traditional parties in facilitating their rise. This is a somewhat ironic belief given that ‘Germany’s attempt to impose its model on the whole of Europe has been a major cause of the fractures that threaten the EU’ in the first place (p. Of course, the book’s aim is not to discuss in detail where the left is today in Europe, but the lack of any sense of Brexit as contested and a complex of factors is perhaps the only weak point in it. There is a disappointing tendency in some left wing circles, including this author, to construct a narrative around imperialism, racism and white supremacy to explain a large diverse range of movements from Trump to Le Pen.

All the information was combined on a single map that shows thick purple zones running through the areas of south-east Europe where earthquakes are more likely, and where they can cause the greatest damage to society. Seismic hazard data collected for this model consisted of records from more than 30,000 earthquakes with a magnitude of 3. The most extreme example of increased authoritarianism from the supposedly liberal centre is, of course, the treatment of Greece at the hands of the Troika – the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund – which has reduced the country to a vassal state of the EU, forced into selling off much of its assets. A strong thread throughout the book is the confluence of positions taken on crime and punishment by the centre and the extreme right. along with suggesting that campaigners for refugees are the contemporary equivalent of the last century’s conscientious objectors.This is the main difference with the ‘far right’, which does not speak out against violence and has, for example, a larger shared background with a particular countries’ fascist past. The first of these chapters is dedicated to the EU and the nationalist backlash against its uneven development. Of course, in various parts of the EU, the extreme right is in power at a local or national level: Front National mayors in France; Jobbik mayors in Hungary; the Sweden Democrats in southern parts of the country (they are currently polling 18.