Identitäre Bewegung

This paper is about the Identitarian Movement in Austria. It focuses on the group with the assumption that the ideology of the New Right has an apparent ramifications in their actions. The New Right and its history of ideas is essential for understanding both the Identitarian Movement and their subsequent support. The Identitarian Movement came into being at a point in time where an Islamic threat was an already established theme in the mainstream discourse by right-wing forces. Emerged only in 2012, they since focused on activist actions and the intellectual training of their followers. By taking on some examples of their material culture used to attract new adherents and to spread their ideas, this paper wishes to put them in one line with other social movements, that share the need to accumulate support. The approach of combining two strands of social science that are social movements and material culture is a young one that has not yet been much attention as if yet. This paper in this sense serves as a testing ground, as a prototype of such a nexus of strands.

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird anhand von Selbstdarstellungen der Identitären Bewegung Österreich in sozialen Netzwerken (Homepage, Youtube-Videos (Vlogs) und Facebook-Postings) diskursanalytisch untersucht, inwiefern die angewandten sprachlichen Mittel und Strategien der rechtspopulistischen bzw. rechtsextremen Rhetorik der „Politik der Angst“ entsprechen. Es wird gezeigt, wie durch scheinbar harmlose Begriffe und komplexe, strategische sprachliche Handlungen Bedrohungen konstruiert, eine krisenhafte Stimmung produziert und exkludierende Handlungen legitimiert werden.

Historically, the family and, more generally, gender policies have been a central issue in both nationalist and far-right rhetoric. This holds particularly for Germany, where the so-called male-breadwinner model and the rhetoric of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) have a long tradition. At the same time, Germany's National Socialist past confers a negative connotation on notions of the family as a continuation of the nation. In this article, Fangen and Lichtenberg examine the family policies and views on gender roles, as well as the views on Muslims, of politicians from two German far-right parties and their youth organizations, as well as one German anti-immigrant social movement organization. Their study, based on press releases, party programmes and social media posts, adds to the growing literature on the importance of gender in nationalist and far-right politics in general, and in far-right critiques of Islam in particular. Their specific contribution is a detailed focus on the similarities and differences in various organizations on the German far right, as well as an analysis that draws on concepts such as femonationalism and, in a similar vein, Rogers Brubaker's notion of civilizationism.