Search results for ""Author Professor Dr Uwe Backes""

The Free State of Saxony is often regarded as a stronghold of right-wing extremism and right-wing populism with outstanding results from right-wing parties, pronounced xenophobic violence and lively right-wing street protests. The authors of the volume examine the thesis of the "stronghold of Saxony" at all levels (attitudes, voting behavior, protest cultures, militant scenes, discourses and ideologies) by making interregional comparisons with eastern and western countries. In doing so, they investigate possible causes for any Saxon peculiarities. In this way, the volume creates a multifaceted picture of right-wing extremism and right-wing populism in Saxony.

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How can the mobilizing power of the "right-wing populist" parties represented in the European Parliament be explained and how can they be effectively countered? This study aims to contribute to this by analyzing the ideological-programmatic aspects of these parties. The most popular among them provide "modernization services" that distinguish them from the old extreme right. They propagate anti-anti-Semitism, reject biological racism and orientate themselves on the model of a coexistence of separated ethno-cultural communities.

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The present work deals not only with the well-organized right extremism in modern Europe as well as with its function in proper political parties, but equally includes two additional, broader approaches: the militant branches and subcultures that exist, including some paramilitary phenomena in Eastern Europe; and the broad realm of their political ideas and cultural trends and the influence they exert on European political culture.

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The focus of the volume is on the negative factors for the establishment and consolidation of democratic constitutional states resulting from previous autocratic regimes with totalitarian features. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the one-party regimes in Central and Eastern Europe favored democratic developments in many countries. But they went different ways, and some of them abandoned the path of democratic transformation that had been taken initially after a short time. The great differences in the eastern transformations raise the question of why, at first glance, very similar starting conditions led to very different results. What role did the totalitarian hereditary burden of "actually existing socialism" play in this?

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