Antisemitism in the global populist international
| Author | Jelena Subotic |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211066970 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211066970
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(3) 458 –474
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481211066970
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Antisemitism in the global
populist international
Jelena Subotic
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and international politics, specifically
the potent role that antisemitism plays in the development and maintenance of the global populist
international. After briefly sketching the history of modern transnational antisemitism, I make two
principal arguments for why antisemitism should be of more direct concern for the scholarship
of International Relations. First, antisemitism serves as a powerful interpretive framework for
contemporary far-right populist movements that are challenging the current international order.
Second, antisemitism is shaping the formation of new international alliances. The strategic use
of antisemitism in far-right populist foreign policy has changed, as evidenced in the increasing
decoupling of attitudes towards Israel from antisemitism against diaspora Jews and a rise in
pro-Israel policies of far-right antisemitic parties and movements. I conclude by reasserting that
International Relations should understand antisemitism as one of the interpretive foundations of
the global illiberal resurgence.
Keywords
antisemitism, far-right, international order, international relations, populism, transnationalism
On 6 January 2021, one of the men storming the US Capitol in an insurrection attempt
incited by then US President Donald Trump was pictured wearing a T-shirt that read
‘Camp Auschwitz’. Under this, the words ‘Work Brings Freedom’ were printed, a clumsy
translation of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, the slogan hung at the entrance to the Auschwitz death
camp complex. Another rioter brandished a flag with a swastika (Adkins and Burack,
2021). A systematic analysis of the US Capitol insurrectionists who identified as Christian
nationalists or QAnon cult supporters also showed a very strong tie to antisemitism
(Djupe and Dennen, 2021). Across the Atlantic, during the 2020 presidential election in
Poland, state television and leading politicians from the ruling Peace and Justice (PiS)
party accused the main opposition candidate, then mayor of Warsaw, of being an ‘agent
of a powerful foreign lobby’ trying to ‘satisfy Jewish claims’ because of his support for
restitution of property stolen from Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust (Inotai and
Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Corresponding author:
Jelena Subotic, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, 29 Peachtree Center Ave, Atlanta,
GA 30302-3965, USA.
Email: jsubotic@gsu.edu
1066970BPI0010.1177/13691481211066970The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsSubotic
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
Subotic 459
Ciobanu, 2020). And on and on. Across Europe, East and West, in the United States, in
Brazil, and everywhere in-between.
Far-right populist leaders, parties, and movements in different countries have different
priorities, specific agendas, a diverse set of grievances and resentments (Mexican immi-
grants, gays and lesbians, Muslim refugees, Eastern European plumbers, big cites, uni-
versities, transgender bathrooms, Syrian asylum-seekers, international bankers, feminists,
the list is endless). These grievances are not always aligned – the Brexit populists railed
against Polish migrant workers in the United Kingdom and against ‘EU bureaucracy’,
while Polish populists were obsessed with ‘gender ideology’ and the LGBTQ movement
which did not seem to bother the Brexiteers much. But they often end up converging on
one dimension – antisemitism. It can be crude as Trump’s Holocaust denying supporters,
or the Lithuanian politician who claimed on Holocaust Remembrance Day that ‘Jews
shared the blame for the Holocaust’ (Liphshiz, 2021), or it can be expressed in dog-
whistles as when Neil Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party as well as
Brexit Party, wrote of ‘unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives based on secret
recommendations from the big banks’ (Walker, 2020). All these forms, however, lead to
the same place – the power, attraction, and use of antisemitism in otherwise diverse popu-
list movements.
While there was a moment in the scholarship of radical right populism that considered
antisemitism to be largely removed from its political repertoire, even referring to it as a
‘dead prejudice’ mostly replaced by Islamophobia and anti-Romism (for a review, see
Wodak, 2018), this is clearly not the case. Antisemitism is alive and well, even thriving,
but it manifests itself in different new mutations that reflect contemporary international
realignments, strategies, and desires in the 21st century.
Defining antisemitism is particularly difficult and precarious as the very problems of
definition often lie at the core of various antisemitic arguments (Waxman et al., 2021). Is
antisemitism a ‘hatred’ of Jews, or of Judaism (or is it, instead, fear), is it the same senti-
ment from antiquity through the Enlightenment, the long 19th century, the Nazi era until
today? Is it ‘eternal’, the longest hatred, or is it fundamentally modern and historically
contextualised? How does it relate to anti-Zionism and – most problematically in our
contemporary moment – how does it relate to attitudes towards Israel and its policies? It
is important for the purposes of this article that the scope of what is being analysed is
clear. I use Helen Fein’s classic definition of antisemitism:
a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collectivity manifested in
individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore, and imagery, and in actions
– social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against Jews, and collective or state
violence – which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews
(Fein, 1987: 67, emphasis in original).
The question this article explores is the relationship between antisemitism and con-
temporary international politics. For reasons of theoretical scope, I focus here only on
far-right antisemitism. There is a vibrant (and often very contested) scholarly discussion
about the extent to which there exists a distinct antisemitism on the left, which is focussed
on its opposition to many of Israel’s policies, especially its occupation of Palestinians.
While this strain of antisemitism has led to some very ugly reckoning within major left
parties, most recently the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-Israel/pro-
Palestinian debate is outside the scope of the immediate interest of my article.
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