“Threatening other” or “role-model brother”?

In the late 2000s far-right parties made significant gains in numerous countries of the European Union. Sharing the same agenda and discourse of discrimination, many of these parties collaborate today at the European level as well. Yet, it is unclear whether the contemporary European far-right is indeed homogenous in terms of ideology. This project in critical discourse analysis shows that the far-right in the EU is actually characterized by ideological diversity. The paper compares and contrasts how China, an emerging great power with a booming economy, has been portrayed in the early 2010s by far-right parties in the UK and Hungary. By identifying major references, metaphors, frames and argumentation schemes, the article concludes that despite belonging to the same party family, and being actual political allies, the British National Party (BNP) and the Jobbik party in Hungary construct fundamentally different images of the “Chinese Other”. The far-right in the UK, a major Western power, presents China clearly in hostile terms, mainly as a “dangerous, threatening intruder” into the British market. Additionally, in the discourse of the British far-right China is primarily identified as a communist dictatorship and used as a metaphor of oppression in the domestic UK context. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe and a relatively recent member of the European Union, an opposite picture of China is constructed by the far-right. Here, China serves as a tool to distance Hungary from the West. China is positioned by the Hungarian far-right as a state where communism has lost its significance. By stressing the Asian origin of Hungarians, brotherhood is claimed among Hungarians and Chinese and China is presented as a “role model country” which successfully resisted “Western dominance”.

Published online: 02 October 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.3.1.07szi