The European Radical Right and Xenophobia in West and East: Trends, Patterns and Challenges. Country Analysis Ukraine (original) (raw)
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Vol. 419 Far Right Extremist Movements Fighting in Ukraine Implications for Post conflict Europe
Commentaries, 2023
The participation of far-right groups in the war in Ukraine has been highly publicized and raises questions about how those groups will evolve after the war, especially vis-à-vis the spread of their ideology. Reviewing their ideological and political direction in the post-conflict environment is the aim of this study. The authors investigate the Ukrainian far right phenomenon: what kind of movements there are, where they come from, and what their role in the conflict has been. This is followed by an assessment of what threat this poses in the broader strategic context of the war and after it will be over. The analysis brings forward two key points. First, groups like these are a product and exponent of political warfare by state actors, featuring as tools for covert action. Second, by incorporating such militias into the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Ukrainian government makes their radical attitudes diminish. Nationalism, even in the extreme spectrum of political ideology, could be a product of the war. Meeting the criteria for integration into the European Union is an important factor stimulating rule-based order and deradicalization processes. Although there are some potentially worrying implications stemming from the prestige gained by their combat record, the far right will therefore likely continue to remain a fringe phenomenon with small political impact.
Forthcoming: Lenka Bustikova. " The Radical Right in Eastern Europe, " in: Jens Rydgren (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right. New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Abstract The radical right in Eastern Europe is similar to its Western European cousins in its emphasis on mobilization against minorities. Until recently, that mobilization was exclusively against minorities with electoral rights who have been settled in for centuries. The million plus influx of refugees in Europe from Syria expanded the portfolio of minorities to rally against and, paradoxically, westernized the Eastern European radical right in its opposition to Islam and migrants with non-European backgrounds. However, I argue that the radical right in Eastern Europe has three unique characteristics that distinguish it from its older Western European cousins: (1) left leaning positions on the economy, (2) linkages between identity and political opening, which leads to the association of minority policies with democratization and (3) the coexistence of radical right parties with radicalized mainstream parties. The contemporary radical right in Eastern Europe is a relatively new phenomenon, but has been steadily gaining in prominence. Although many radical right movements today embrace the legacy of the fascist movements of the inter-war period, their novelty lies in their adherence to the rules of electoral competition and-at least on the surface-their rejection of outright violence as a solution to internal political conflicts. Given the range of East European countries, in term of ethnic heterogeneity, economic performance and cultural legacies, it should not be surprising that radical right parties reflect this diversity. In some countries, such as Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia and Latvia, ethnicity and language create cleavages that structure radical right politics. In more ethnically homogeneous countries, such as Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland, the ethnic cleavage is less pronounced and radical right politics are focused either on mobilization against Roma or on social and religious issues that map onto particular party systems. Despite the new-fangled radical right in Eastern Europe, historical legacies cast a long shadow on contemporary events, due to the elevated sense that liberal democracy is not compatible with a vision of societies ruled exclusively by titular majorities. Since the dawn of East European democracies in the early 1990s, scholars have expressed pessimism about their prospects. The new political and economic regimes, it was argued, were expected to create a large impoverished underclass and a politically unsophisticated electorate,
Right-Wing Extremism in Ukraine: The Phenomenon of 'Svoboda'
This paper focuses on the phenomenon of the All-Ukrainian Union "Svoboda" ("Freedom"). "Svoboda" is Ukrainian National Radical Right extremistic political party which has gained a dramatical succеss on the parliament elections-2012. The report discusses the causes of the growing popularity of this political forse in the modern Ukrainian social context. The author makes a special emphasis on the anti-Semitic content of the "Svoboda" ideology. The rhetoric of its leaders and activists, including newly elected MPs, is analised in detail. The growing popularity of the political party which sistematically uses xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and welcomes the street violence against the political opponents, is of great concern in Ukrainian civil society and international community.
Far-right Extremism as a Threat to Ukrainian Democracy
Human Rights Documents Online
Photo by Aleksandr Volchanskiy Vyacheslav Likhachev Kyiv-based expert on right-wing groups in Ukraine and Russia • Far-right political forces present a real threat to the democratic development of Ukrainian society. This brief seeks to provide an overview of the nature and extent of their activities, without overstating the threat they pose. To this end, the brief differentiates between radical groups, which by and large express their ideas through peaceful participation in democratic processes, and extremist groups, which use physical violence as a means to influence society. • For the first 20 years of Ukrainian independence, far-right groups had been undisputedly marginal elements in society. But over the last few years, the situation has changed. After Ukraine' s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution and Russia' s subsequent aggression, extreme nationalist views and groups, along with their preachers and propagandists, have been granted significant legitimacy by the wider society. • Nevertheless, current polling data indicates that the far right has no real chance of being elected in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections in 2019. Similarly, despite the fact that several of these groups have real life combat experience, paramilitary structures, and even access to arms, they are not ready or able to challenge the state. • Extremist groups are, however, aggressively trying to impose their agenda on Ukrainian society, including by using force against those with opposite political and cultural views. They are a real physical threat to left-wing, feminist, liberal, and LGBT activists, human rights defenders, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. • In the last few months, extremist groups have become increasingly active. The most disturbing element of their recent show of force is that so far it has gone fully unpunished by the authorities. Their activities challenge the legitimacy of the state, undermine its democratic institutions, and discredit the country' s law enforcement agencies. • Given the increasingly worrying situation, Ukrainian society, law enforcement agencies, and other state bodies as well as the international community should take effective measures to counter far-right extremism in Ukraine.
tended to change radically, with more and more groups and theoreticians referring in some way to the Western model and borrowing from it organizational methods or narratives. This rapprochement with the West is based on a common civilizationist reading that contrasts a "white world" in danger of demographic and cultural disappearance with the overly numerous "peoples of color" and with migration flows that are gradually transforming the host countries, Western europe, the united States, and russia. 4 after recalling the partly outmoded schema of anti-Westernism of the russian far right, this article focuses on the changing enemy, the rethinking of relations with the West, and the integration of new ideological notions that occurred in the 2000s among the main russian radical nationalist groups. It aims to initiate debate about the growing europeanization of the russian far right and the need to undertake more comparative research.