Introduction

“Globalization” is undoubtedly one of the most overused words of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. According to its proponents, all things good are the direct consequence of globalization, while its opponents link all things evil to that same phenomenon. Consequently, globalization seems so omnipresent that one struggles to comprehend its meaning. This is not helped by the fact that the term is more easily used than defined. Many academic and nonacademic observations obscure both the meaning and the significance of the phenomenon.

Conceptual precision notwithstanding, political actors clearly perceive globalization as one of the most significant phenomena in European politics of the twenty-first century. It is not surprising that globalization is also linked to the populist radical right, one of the other most debated developments in contemporary European politics. Summarizing very crudely, the two are connected in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, globalization is seen as one of the main causes of the recent electoral success of populist radical right parties in Europe (see chapter 9). On the other hand, populist radical right parties are among the most vocal opponents of globalization. The latter aspect, which so far has received scant attention in the literature (Dechezelles 2004; Leggewie 2003; Simmons 2003), will be addressed in this chapter.