Identity Politics Past and Present

Political Discourses from Post-War Austria to the Covid Crisis

By (author) Ruth Wodak, Markus Rheindorf

Publication date:

15 March 2022

Publisher

University of Exeter Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781905816804

This book traces the re-emergence of nationalism in the media, popular culture and politics, and the normalization of far-right nativist ideologies and attitudes in Austria between 1995 and 2015, within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies. In doing so, it brings together a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to identity politics, contemporary popular culture, far-right populism and commemoration.

While contradictory yet intertwined tendencies towards renationalization and transnationalization have often framed debates about European identities, the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 intensified and polarized these debates. The COVID-19 pandemic, as another major crisis, saw nation-states react by closing borders, while symbols of banal nationalism proliferated.

The data under discussion here, drawn from a variety of empirical studies, suggest that changes in memory politics—the way past events are collectively remembered and tied into current political discourses—are also linked to the dynamics of migration; the influence of financial and climate crises; changing gender politics; and a new transnational European politics of the past. Accordingly, the authors assess current challenges to liberal democracies, as well as fundamental human and constitutional rights, in relation to new trends of renationalization across Europe and beyond.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Nationalisms old and new
Ruth Wodak and Markus Rheindorf

1. Discourses about Nationalism
Ruth Wodak

2. The Discourse-Historical Approach: Methodological innovation and Triangulation
Markus Rheindorf

3. Negotiations of a Shared Past and National Identity 1995-2015
Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak

4. Whose story? – Narratives of persecution, flight and survival told by the children of Austrian Holocaust survivors
Ruth Wodak and Markus Rheindorf

5. Disciplining the Unwilling: Normalization of (Demands for) Punitive Measures against Immigrants in Austrian Populist Discourse
Markus Rheindorf

6. Nativist gender and body politics
Ruth Wodak and Markus Rheindorf

7. Entering the Post-Shame Era. The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, Populism and Neo-Authoritarianism in Europe. The case of the turquoise-blue government in Austria 2017/2018
Ruth Wodak

8. Borders, Fences and Limits: Protecting Austria from Refugees. Metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis
Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak

9. Re/inventing nationalism: Crisis Communication and Crisis Management during COVID-19 in Austria
Ruth Wodak

This major book, bringing together unpublished material and chapters published recently in a very wide range of journals and books, documents a quarter-century's path-breaking work on national identity, nationalism and related topics. Grounded in sociolinguistics, but drawing on psychology, history, political theory and many other areas of scholarship, what Wodak and Rheindorf present here as the Discourse-Historical Approach in critical discourse studies illuminates a wide range of topics, from memory politics in Austria to the political responses, here and elsewhere in Europe, to the perceived migration crisis and the all-too-real Covid crisis.