engleski

Re-Reading R.D. Kaplan’s Coming Anarchy: Neo- Malthusianism and the Defensive Geopolitical Discourse in the Election Programs of the AfD and the Lega

The main purpose of the paper is to find the “geopolitical” in the selected, European populist parties’ political programs that we have analysed here, with a specific focus on Neo-Malthusianism and “invasion threat” scenarios, described in R. D. Kaplan's famous paper The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War (1994). Indulged by the rising tide of right-wing populist parties in most European countries, which has especially been visible since the full scale of the migrant crisis that exploded in 2015, we decided to find the similarities between the excerpts of the programs that refer to the situation in Northern Africa and Central Africa (Sahel), and Kaplan’s afore-mentioned paper, which has been mostly regarded as Neo- Malthusianist by its character and increasingly defensive by its posture, hence it introduces the birth rates of African countries and the projections about the population increase in the coming decades as a threat to the developed world and a fuel to the illegal, primarily towards Europe- oriented migration, combined with chaos, poverty and anarchy in the societies of the African Sahel, concomitantly combining these with the recommendation for the “defence” of the developed world against the rising tide of illegal migrants, infectious diseases etc. To these dangers, from today’s perspective, we could add radical Islamist terrorism, which has widely spread geographically and increased its intensity in the last two decades, and perfectly fits into “endangerment” scenarios, enabling a wide- spread geopolitical discourse and practice of securitization. A logical question also comes up: Did Kaplan’s famous work inspire the rise of the modern right-with populism in Europe (and in the U.S.A., Brasil etc.) fuelled by Neo-Malthusianism which he advocates, and are the conditions in Africa and the Middle East to partially blame for that? We have analysed the Alternative for Germany (die Alternative für Deutschland – AfD) and the League (Lega, former Lega Nord) programs in the original respective languages, by using critical discourse analysis in order to find the exact citations that are Neo- Malthusianist by their character and/or defensive by posture, and compare these with the ones found in Kaplan’s work.

Coming Anarchy, Neo-Malthusianism, defence, immigration, populism, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Lega

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