Blomqvist's article holds that nationalism in the socialist labour movement did not suddenly manifest itself as Europe went to war in 1914. In Sweden, patriotic ideas from the French Revolution and radical liberalism heavily influenced the early labour movement and contributed to the development of a socialist patriotism. As a twin of socialist internationalism, this left-wing working-class nationalism centred on the question Who is the nation?' The answer was not simply the working people', but penetrated further into the questionin this age of nationalization of the massesof who those working people' were. With few intellectual resources of its own in its early years, the young socialist movement in Sweden had to rely on popular liberal education. Accordingly, knowledge from the modern natural sciences and anthropology was imported with its ideas of human races as kernels of nationality. Academics who subsequently joined the socialist movement tried to interpret racial science and eugenics to the advantage of the working class and for the sake of social reform. Together with socialist patriotism, this attempt developed into a racialized message on the anthropological value of Swedish workers as opposed to both the bourgeois elites and foreign low-paid workers and strikebreakers. In its more extreme versionas represented by a leading Swedish social democratit turned older stereotypes of Jews into a racist antisemitic discourse against those who were believed to be the enemies of Swedish labour. The combination of socialist patriotism, racism and antisemitism, however, was challenged by other interpretations and experiences.
In this article, Bojanic, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer present a synthetic overview of the five country cases included in the special issue that analyse the emergence of cultures of rejection since 2015. In general, they discuss the conceptual framework of ‘Cultures of Rejection’, elaborated throughout the issue as a more encompassing approach that is sensitive to the values, norms and affects that underlie different or similar patterns of exclusion and rejection in different contexts. These cultures are located in the everyday lives of people. The article, therefore, first identifies contexts, objects of rejection—often migrants and racialized Others, but also ‘the political’ or state institutions—narratives and components of cultures of rejection that we label reflexivity, affect, nostalgia and moralistic judgement. The contrasting reading of the five cases shows that people struggle for agency under precarious and insecure conditions, and fight against imagined enemies. As Bojanić, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer conclude, cultures of rejection mirror ongoing processes of neoliberal dispossession, authoritarization and depolitization that culminate in a wish for agency and resovereignization. Second, and based on this overview, trends in cultures of rejection are detected against different national contexts as well as against common trends of social and economic transformations and crises, such as, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic. This results, finally, in a discussion of ways of challenging the cultures of rejection towards more democratic and solidaristic societies. One starting point might be the ‘re-embedding’ of the economy in society, that is, a more equal distribution of resources and future perspectives.
Heinrich Himmler created the Waffen-SS in part as a multinational force, willing to fight for a New Europe based on Germanic blood. After the war, many international Waffen-SS units formed veterans' associations (VAs). Like other VAs, these provided veterans with the chance to engage in ‘memory work’ and to keep alive a sense of comradeship and of valiant sacrifice, as well as an emotional commitment to the fallen. Waffen-SS veterans were, however, alone in celebrating their ‘sacrifices’. Others shunned them for their participation in atrocities. To defend themselves, they developed a counter-hegemonic Second World War narrative that presented the Waffen-SS as uniquely heroic ‘European’ volunteers' against Bolshevism. This counter-narrative, however, only gained resonance with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After 1989, in fact, veterans could seek out and establish sites of public commemoration, not in Western but in Eastern Europe. Hurd and Werther use veterans' journals and books to explore the redeployment of SS ideology in a revisionist version of history. They examine the resurrection of a mass Waffen-SS graveyard in East Ukraine as a telling case history, discussing, not least, the implications of a ‘reconciliation’ of the former German soldiers with both Ukrainian villagers and Red Army veterans. Finally, they explore the significance of the veterans' ‘European’ counter-history for a younger generation of neo-Nazis.
In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna's former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei osterreichs (FPo), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a strict father' and nurtured by a self-sacrificing mother', vis-a-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.
While many countries were locking down due to the spread of COVID-19, Sweden remained open with few restrictions, as authorities relied predominantly on a civil sense of responsibility and collective compliance with government recommendations. Drawing on interviews conducted with workers in retail and logistics in 2020–21, ethnographic work in digital environments as well as in public spaces and demonstrations, this article analyses discourses of everyday life and discourses of rejection, exploring how rejections were shaped in reaction to how the government and the Public Health Agency of Sweden handled the pandemic. Ortega Soto's article uses the concept of cultures of rejection—emphasizing a complex compound of values, norms and affects that reject different phenomena in different contexts—to analyse how working and living conditions, political opinions, social views and media habits informed workers' disagreements with and reactions to the official handling of the pandemic, as well as how this may have led to a growing loss of trust in government. Ortega Soto further investigates how the expression of cultures of rejection differs across generations by looking closely into the ways that nostalgia and a sense of loss enhance such responses among various social groups. The article contributes to a wider understanding of the political shifts and cultural changes that were manifested in the context of the pandemic in Sweden.