Through the Balkans to Christchurch: Southeast Europe and global white nationalist historical mythology

Baker, Catherine

Abstract

The chapter explores Southeast Europe’s part in global white nationalist historical mythology through the March 2019 Christchurch massacre and what it revealed about how both recent and distant histories of intercommunal violence in Southeast Europe have been appropriated in the transnational digital culture of the increasingly globally networked contemporary far right, leading to the Christchurch perpetrator playing and livestreaming a song composed to honour Radovan Karadžić during the Yugoslav Wars on the way to the attacks. This incident of what Hariz Halilovich terms ‘genocide triumphalism’ brought into troubling focus how narratives of the region’s history have been racialised in the global far-right imagination and incorporated into the historical mythology of the ‘Great Replacement’, a commonplace of twenty-first century white nationalist and identitarian discourse, and how so-called ‘antemurale Christianitatis’ (‘bulwark of Christianity/Europe’) myths of nations standing against an imagined existential threat of Islamic invasion have been foundational to attempts to fix the ambiguously racialised, peripheralised region of Southeast Europe, or nations within it, as ‘white’. An intertwined nature of ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ politics in this relationship risks being missed when the Yugoslav Wars and the Bosnian Genocide are explained through local patterns of ethnic polarisation and violence rather than as globally entwined matters of ‘race’.

Citation

Baker, C. (2024). Through the Balkans to Christchurch: Southeast Europe and global white nationalist historical mythology. In C. Baker, B. C. Iacob, A. Imre, & J. Mark (Eds.), Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race (328-347). Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526172211.00023

• Online Publication Date: May 28, 2024
• Publication Date: May 28, 2024
• Deposit Date: Aug 9, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 22, 2024
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Pages: 328-347
• Series Title: Racism, Resistance and Social Change
• Book Title: Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race
• Chapter Number: 16
• ISBN: 9781526172204
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526172211.00023
• Keywords: Bosnian Genocide; Christchurch massacre; digital culture; global white nationalism; Great Replacement; historical mythology; Islamophobia; race; whiteness; Yugoslav Wars
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4354330
• Publisher URL: https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526172211/9781526172211.00023.xml?rskey=Kr4FiX&result=1
• Contract Date: Aug 9, 2023