Neoliberal Europe: Enabling Ethno-Cultural Neutrality or Fueling Neo-Nationalist Sentiment?

Ideologically committed to the neoclassical notion of "market discipline," the neoliberal regime is argued to promote principles of ethno-cultural neutrality and to create a level-playing field for all individuals regardless of race, class, gender, or other marker of minority status. However, in practice, neoliberal policies have increased the incidence of economic marginalization among lower and middle socio-economic classes in Europe, and have contributed to growing tensions between cultural majorities and ethnic minority groups. While similar sentiments associated with the rise of nationalism in nineteenth century Europe clearly predate the neoliberal era, in this paper I argue that neoliberal policies, backed by European Union institutions, have created material conditions which have exposed and widened structural incompatibilities between the notions of state and nation. Since the 1990s, these incompatibilities have legitimized the resurgence of radical nationalist sentiment within European nation-states, creating a favorable terrain for the populist rise of far-right factions. In lieu of promoting ethno-cultural neutrality, neoliberal policies have weakened liberal and social principles of inclusion, and have eroded welfare state provisioning systems in European democracies. They have fueled what Thorstein Veblen (1923, 28) referred to as "unreasoning habits of national conceit, fear, hate, contempt, and servility."