The Management of Hate as in/effective praxis of externalisation

Abstract

In this article, I shed light on the limits of the Management of Hate (Shoshan 2016). This governmental technique is intended to ensure the outsourcing of 'bad' nationalisms – those deemed close to National Socialism - to the fringes of society. The aim is to represent Germany as a democratic society that is both free from the evils of the past and resistant to them. However, the image of what is considered 'too far on the right' does not correlate with the rise of new right-wing groups in Germany since 2015. Thus, new classifications are required, which I conceptualize here as  Perspective of Continuity and Perspective of Reaction. From the Perspective of Continuity, new right-wing groups and actors represent a new edition of well-known 'bad' nationalisms that need to be outsourced and combated. The Perspective of Reaction locates the same phenomena as a necessary corrective to a social development perceived as 'too left' or 'too liberal' - and thus legitimizes them as not 'too far on the right'. Despite the contrasting classifications, these perspectives share a number of similarities that ultimately shed light on the pitfalls in the practices of externalization of the Management of Hate: the outsourcing of the undesirable from one's own and the associated difficulty in addressing discrimination mechanisms as structural social phenomena and not just as ideological elements within the extreme right.