The neo‐nationalist ascendency: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed

Abstract

March 2020. On the borders of EU Europe, with the Covid pandemic threatening human lives, sociality and welfare everywhere, Syrian refugees on the ‘Balkan Route’, bombed out of Idlib, are being beaten in the forests with wooden clubs by Romanian border guards before they are thrown back onto Serbian territory for further humiliations.1 Romanian return migrants, fleeing the Italian and Spanish Corona lockdowns en masse, are being told over the social networks that they should never have come back, contagious as they are imagined to be and a danger for a woefully underfunded public health system for which they have not paid taxes. Further South, the Mediterranean is once again a heavily policed cemetery for migrants and refugees from the civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa – collateral damage of Western imperial delirium and hubris – as Greece is being hailed by the European President for being the ‘shield’ behind which Europe can feel safe from the supposedly associated criminality. Viktor Orbàn, meanwhile, has secured his corrupt autocracy in Hungary for another indefinite stretch of years after the parliament gave him powers to singlehandedly fight the Covid pandemic and its long‐ run economic after‐ effects in the name of the Magyars and in the face of never subsiding threats from the outside to the nation. Orbàn will also continue, even more powerfully so now, to fight immigrants, gypsies, gays, feminists, cultural Marxists, NGOs, George Soros, population decline, the EU, and everyone else who might be in his way. Critique from the EU is in Budapest rejected as being ‘motivated by politics’. Vladimir Putin, too, has just been asked by the Russian parliament to stay on indefinitely in his regal position, so as to safeguard Russia’s uncertain national future. Erdogan of Turkey is sure to be inspired and will not renege from his ongoing and unprecedentedly brutal crackdown on domestic dissent and ‘traitors to the nation’ while his armies are in Syria and Libya. Turkish prisons will continue to overflow. All these, and manifold other events not mentioned here, are part of processes in the European East that have been continuous (as in ‘continuous history versus discontinuous history’) for at least a decade, all with a surprisingly steadfast direction. They